Special to WorldTribune.com

By Donald Kirk, East-Asia-Intel.com

TACLOBAN, Philippines — The Korea Disaster Relief Team keeps a gruesome body count in the search for ever more victims of Typhoon Haiyan, aka Yolanda. “Every day we retrieve cadavers,” says Lee In-Sun, coordinator for the 42 Koreans sent here in the wake of the world’s worst storm. “Until today the number was 108. Today we found 12 cadavers. We have two search teams — one in a rubber boat, the other on land.”

Lee says the Korean team winds up its mission Saturday, but the search goes on as more bodies turn up in devastated villages surrounding Tacloban, provincial capital of Leyte in the central Philippines, hit by winds of nearly 200mph and the tsunami-like wave that wiped out the coastal area.

Foreign aid-givers, the Koreans and teams from a score of other countries, including U.S. Marines and Air Force people, U.N. experts and NGO’s, are visible everywhere. You wonder, though, why so few Filipinos.

At City Hall, at the top of a rise overlooking the harbor, the mayor, Alfred Romualdez, wonders too. Specifically, he wants to know why Philippine soldiers aren’t all over the city, joining in the search for bodies, cleaning up the trash and aiding in reconstruction.

“The national government is rather short in addressing the issues,” he says, carefully picking his words. “They lack manpoquino, Leyte, wer. They say we don’t have a war here.”

The problem, though, is a problem within a problem. Romualdez, successor to his father as mayor, is a member of the family of Imelda Marcos, widow of Ferdinand Marcos, overthrown in the People Power Revolution of 1986.

The woman who took over from Marcos was the late Corazon Aquino, widow of Benigno Aquino Jr., gunned down as he returned to the Philippines from the U.S. in August 1983 to challenge the Marcos dictatorship. Their son, Benigno Aquino III, now president, nurses the family wounds.

The broader problem is how or whether the Philippines can endure without foreign intervention — military and economic. Beside the loss of homes, work places and sources of food, much of the fertile rice-growing region of the central Visayas, as the region is known, is lost for this season and maybe longer.

“Most of the crop in Leyte, especially the eastern part, has been totally destroyed,” Antonio Gerundio, regional director of the government’s department of agriculture, tells me.

“Most of the farmers can no longer concentrate on farming. They have to first reconstruct their homes.” The problem is especially perilous considering that the Philippines has to import rice to feed a population approaching 100 million.

Bags full of rice donations are piled up at the Tacloban airport, heavily damaged by the wind and wave of early November, but no one thinks the donations will last more than a few more weeks, at least in large quantities. Some donations, moreover, are showing up on the black market, in impromptu eateries catering to those few with the cash to pay for bowls of rice but far beyond the resources of poor people lining up for handouts as filtered through local agencies.

Around the city, the abiding impression is that of a snail-like recovery in which drinkable water is not running, electrical power comes only from private generators, trash is piled up everywhere, and wrecked buildings are common sights amid occasional concrete structures that endured almost unblemished except perhaps for missing roofs.

Workers are paid 500 pesos, or $12, a day to help in the clean-up, but trash trucks are few and tankers spouting water for thirsty people carrying bottles and buckets are only occasionally visible.

Incredibly, three weeks after the typhoon, bodies are still piling up. On one corner, I saw six bodies covered with cloth and canvas as volunteers were about to carry them away.

On another, I saw four more bodies, including two children, covered with cloth as traffic sputtered by. The death toll, now above 5,000, is likely to crest at 7,000, including many who are missing.

Lee In-sun, talking in a tent pitched by the Korean team near City Hall, says the Filipinos did not have a rubber boat needed for the search for bodies off the coast. The Korean team has had three C-130 transport planes ferrying in supplies for the two weeks — a tiny portion of the all the foreign aid coming in.

On the edge of a city, hundreds of bodies lie in a mass grave in a village where the water had risen well above the motley cluster of one-story structures. Only two people died from the village, says the man in charge of the burial ground. Most had had time to look for higher ground on a hillside, now bare of trees. But, he says, “We haven’t seen any food here” — not since the storm.

Columnist Donald Kirk is author of “Looted: The Philippines After the Bases.” He’s at kirkdon@yahoo.com.

  Alfred Romualdez, Benigno Aquino III, Foreigners to the rescue in the Philippines; but where are the Filipinos?, Lee In-Sun, Tacloban