Marga Ortigas

Marga Ortigas's picture
Marga Ortigas
Correspondent | Philippines
Biography

Marga Ortigas, based in the Philippines, has been a broadcast journalist for more than 20 years. She's covered stories from across Asia for Al Jazeera - including in South Korea, Laos, China, Japan and the military stand-off between Cambodia and Thailand.

Marga has reported on Southeast Asia's two longest insurgencies extensively, gaining access to both the Muslim separatists and the Communist fighters battling the Philippine government, and the victims trapped within the conflict. She speaks three languages and has a Masters Degree in Literature and Criticism.

Latest posts by Marga Ortigas

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on November 20th, 2011
Former President Arroyo seen with a 3kg halo brace which was screwed to the base of her skull in this undated photo. [Reuters]

The roller-coaster ride began on Tuesday.  

Late in the afternoon, the Supreme Court spokesman was live across both television and radio announcing that a temporary restraining order had just been issued on a government travel ban against former president Gloria Arroyo.

The justices had voted eight to five to allow her to go abroad for medical treatment. Arroyo has a bone disease complicated by hyperparathyroidism, and has been in and out of hospital for months.  

Shortly after the Supreme Court announcement, Arroyo appointed a legal representative to handle any matters in her absence, and paid the nearly $40,000 bond that were two of three conditions for her departure.  

The third was that she check-in with the Philippine embassy at her destination. 

The travel ban was first put in place by the justice department pending investigations into allegations of corruption and electoral fraud during her presidency.

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on November 13th, 2011
Photo by Reuters

The colourful and vociferous Philippine media called it everything from a “bloodbath” to an “ambush”.  Accusations were traded and fingers were pointed in all directions immediately after. But that was nearly a month ago. Now, the story has been relegated to the back pages of the broadsheets, if on the pages at all. 

Less passionately, it is now simply referred to as “the Al Barka incident”, after the locale in which it took place on the small southern island of Basilan in Mindanao. 

The “incident” nearly ruined an already tenuous truce between Philippine government troops and Muslim insurgents – who, by the way, no longer want to be called that. But they aren’t “rebels” either. Nor is it right, they say, to call them “separatists”. For the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), this is a battle to reclaim Muslim independence.  

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on July 20th, 2011
AFP photo

I was not having a particularly good day.  To be honest, I can’t even recall why.  All I know is that my head was pounding, and I wasn’t sure how long I would be able to stay focused and carry on working.

We were driving several hours north of Manila to meet a chap named Norman Surplus - and it was the only time he had to spare. I was sure glad he did.

His energy was infectious from the start; his smile enough to brighten any day. This was clearly a person drunk on life - and rightly so.  His was an extraordinary journey, and we were lucky enough to be there to witness it.

“I’ve been extremely fortunate,” he said. The statement meant so much coming from a man who was told in 2003 that he had a 40 per cent chance of surviving another year with cancer. But he did survive, and how.

Here was Norman Surplus now - eight years later - flying around the world in an attempt to make aviation history in an odd little machine called a gyrocopter.

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on June 17th, 2011
Reuters

In a cramped 18th floor flat overlooking the part of Sendai that wasn't damaged by the March 11 quake and tsunami, a frail-looking, light-energied 62-year old grandmother waits for the phone to ring.

She's surrounded by knickknacks, and papers, and photos, and owls. Small, stuffed toy owls. Cartoon owl stickers on the walls. Sketches of owls on parchment. Owl figurines. Owls. Everywhere.

Owls.

In Japanese, she tells us, a play on words can lead from "owl" to "no hardship".

And that's what Sachiko Tanaka’s mission now is: to help others survive through difficulty.

Her own son committed suicide six years earlier, she shares.

He was only 34. You could see her pain at the loss, but what seemed to hurt her more was that he must've been in such despair and a state of powerlessness to feel that his only option was to choose to die.

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on April 29th, 2011

He was newly-washed and freshly-dressed when we met him. His clothes -- clean, and not ill-fitting. Which wasn't usual by "street" standards.

Smooth-faced but bleary-eyed, he was awkward too. Like any young teen might be. But there was a weariness about him that belied his 14 years.

He kept his head down and was unable to look us in the face.

"It's early" – we were told – "he won't be too-far-gone yet". What do you mean? I asked the older man-about-town who was serving us our guide: "High. He won't be so high yet… you may still be able to get some coherent answers out of him…"

But we didn't. The young boy was, well, at least not completely incomprehensible. His answers were short: yes, no, I don't know. It wasn't clear it he was reticent because of shyness… or shame. Even his being inarticulate didn't hide the fact that he seemed deeply ashamed of who he was. Almost like he wasn't sure he should be occupying any physical space in the world at all.

Tags: All Anak
By Marga Ortigas in Asia on April 28th, 2011

There’s no soft, spectacular sunset over Sabah this afternoon. No wisps of crimson, or feathery touches of pink.

Dusk is settling like a heavy orange yolk suffocating what’s already been an oppressive day. 

The mackerel-coloured sea is choppy, leading the small boats moored around the harbour in a syncopated dance. Their lights begin to come on…looking like fallen stars twinkling on the bobbing cobalt ocean.

The boardwalk is now dipped in colourful neon, and the stalls in the waterfront market begin to raise their rainbow tents. They look like the large colourful sails of the traditional vintas from Zamboanga in the southern Philippines. It’s where many of the vendors originate from. No surprise then that’s it now known as the "Filipino market".

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on April 9th, 2011

"Seeing video of an actual quake makes you think you can imagine what one really feels like," a colleague with us here in Japan said after the magnitude 7.1 quake rocked the northeast coast the other night, "but boy was I wrong!", he finished. 

And he was right.

There have been many aftershocks since the big one on March 11... but they were all "just" in the high 5s or low 6s on the scale. It had gotten so that you became so used to the ground intermittently moving underneath you that you just kept right on doing what you were doing throughout the shaking. Sleeping. Eating. Trying to walk. Whatever. We had all by now developed "sea-legs". Or so we thought.

That's because we'd as yet felt nothing as powerful as the one on Thursday night. (It's been two days since, and my knees are still wobbly!)

Tags: Japan
By Marga Ortigas in Asia on February 16th, 2011

They cut through the jungle to the small clearing like a swarm of bees with their leader at their core. The only sound was the swish of their feet slicing through the unkempt grass. At least two hundred of them – heavily armed. Most wearing black shirts that proclaimed "BIFF of the MILF" – and in that one instance clarifying the primary question on people’s minds: this renegade "splinter group" still considered itself a part of the separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front.

According to their leader Ameril Umbrakato – one of the Philippines' most wanted men – he put together the Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (or B.I.F.F.) because he was left with little choice. 

"When they had a ceasefire, the government and the MILF – they didn’t include me – they put me aside, rejected me," Umbrakato told Al Jazeera in an exclusive interview.  

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on February 11th, 2011
Photo by EPA

"They say so much… and accomplish nothing ..."

The almost-whispered words of the weary 24-year-old warrior reverberated in the sweltering heat of the marshland morning. Its' hollow echo like ghosts of all the fallen in this scarred land ... striking in their silence.

He looked away, but his words hung in the air like flies around a corpse.

As a Muslim, Norodin feels he was born into this war in the southern Philippines. His father was a separatist fighter before him, so he too joined the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF. 

He knew little else. 

Many others share his story.

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on November 23rd, 2010



It was the fist just barely peeking out of the freshly-dug soil.

That’s the image I can't forget. 

And we saw it in-person, without the seeming “protection”, or distance, of a filtered reality depicted through a camera lens.

It was the day after it happened, and investigators were still looking for bodies. 

A digger was parked by the remains of several crushed vehicles. Bullet-ridden corpses were strewn on the ground like broken bottles after a street fight. The banana leaves on top of them the only available concession to propriety. 

The pockmarked Maguindanao mountain we were on looked as if a giant manic mole had burrowed furiously multiple times trying to find itself the right home.

Al Jazeera Live

Biography

Marga Ortigas's picture
Marga Ortigas
Correspondent
Marga Ortigas, based in the Philippines, has been a broadcast journalist for almost 20 years.

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