ORMOC City – The Bells of Balangiga will be back to their place of origin on Dec. 15 in time for the start of the Christmas tradition of holding dawn masses for nine days, Defense secretary Delfin Lorenzana announced Monday.
All three bells will arrive at the Villamor Air Base on Dec. 11 with a simple military ceremony, Lorenzana said.
“We will look at the availability of President (Rodrigo) Duterte (for the ceremony) but the target is to bring the bells back to Balangiga town (Eastern Samar) by Dec. 15 in time for the Misa de Gallo,” he said.
Lorenzana was in this city to meet with Eastern Visayas regional councils on development, disaster management, and peace and order.
Misa de Gallo is a devotional nine-day series of masses practiced by Roman Catholics in the Philippines in anticipation of Christmas.
Lorenzana said he got a call from the office of United States Defense Secretary James Mattis about the schedule of the bells’ return to the Philippines.
The bells have been refurbished and were being readied for transit to the Philippines, said the local Defense official.
“This is my good news to you,” Lorenzana said. “After 117 years, the bells will come where they should belong.”
Some veterans and officials in the US oppose returning the Bells of Balangiga, calling them memorials to American war dead. But Filipinos revere the bells as symbols of national pride.
Philippine presidents including current President Rodrigo Duterte have repeatedly called for the bells’ return.
“History reminds us that all wars end. In returning the Bells of Balangiga to our ally and our friend, the Philippines, we pick up our generation’s responsibility to deepen the respect between our peoples,” Mattis said in a ceremony at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming where two of the bells were placed. The third bells was with the United States Army in South Korea.
On Sept. 28, 1901 Balangiga residents led by Valeriano Abanador killed 54 American soldiers using bolos – the biggest defeat of the foreign troops during the Philippine-American war. The ringing of the town church’s bells signaled the attack of the villagers.
But the US forces killed around 2,500 Filipinos in a retaliatory attack and took the Bells of Balangiga as war trophy.
Balangiga, a fourth-class municipality in Eastern Samar with a population of 14,085, is about 98 kilometers east of Tacloban City. (With a report from Philippine News Agency/PN)
