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 April 13th, 2012
PAC-3 land-to-air missiles units at the Defense Ministry in Tokyo after reports of North Korea's rocket launch [Reuters]

TOKYO, JAPAN - And just like that, it's over.  Before anyone outside of Pyongyang’s inner circle could even figure out what was going on.

At 22:39 GMT on Thursday, 7:39am local time on Friday in the Korean Peninsula and Japan, the North Koreans launched a rocket despite strong international opposition.  Or rather, it tried to launch a rocket.  

Within 30 minutes, the US was calling it a "failure", saying it had reports that the North Korean rocket broke apart almost immediately after lift-off.  It didn’t even make it past South Korean waters.

Compared to its allies the United States and South Korea, Japan took much longer to react to developments. A reality that has not gone down too well with many in Japan.

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on April 12th, 2012
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un waves during the Fourth Conference of the Workers' Party of Korea [Reuters]

Tick-tock. The wait has begun. The North Korean rocket launch is expected anytime in the morning from today through Monday. At least, that’s what's been announced - April 12 to 16.

Northeast and southeast Asia are on tenterhooks as the rocket is expected to cut a path between China and Japan as it heads towards the Philippines.

But North Korea isn't really known for sticking to its word, so the US and its Pacific allies are watching developments closely. 

North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is celebrating the birth centenary of its founding leader, Kim Il-sung.

And as the climax, it's fuelled-up a three-stage rocket - ostensibly to send a satellite into space to monitor North Korea’s crops and weather.

But the US and its allies see this as a smoke-screen, concerned that the small, secretive, nuclear-armed nation is actually testing its long-range ballistic missile capabilities in defiance of a UN ban.

By Marga Ortigas in Americas on April 5th, 2012

It shimmers shyly in the Western Pacific like an unpolished diamond in a nest of sparkling opals.  Its size belying its strategic geographical importance. 

Saipan is the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands which are strewn like gems from a broken bracelet across the Pacific corridor that links east and west – between Asia and the United States.  

It has played vital roles throughout history for European colonisers in the middle ages to imperialist armies in World War 1 and World War 2.

Now, Saipan prides itself in sitting at the intersection of the modern world’s three largest economies – China, Japan, and the outer fringes of the United States.  

By Marga Ortigas in Asia on January 22nd, 2012
File 58501
Al Jazeera/Marga Ortigas

The nightmare hadn’t changed much in a month. 

The main roads had been cleared as much as they could be, but everything else was still drenched in mud, dusted in debris, and dotted by mangled logs.

Everywhere you looked people were shovelling dislocated earth and salvaging what they could from the wreckage around them.

The above photo is of Iligan city after flash floods triggered by a tropical storm in December cascaded down denuded mountains and swelled silted rivers.

Thousands of homes were swept away in the middle of the night - and countless lives were destroyed.

File 58296
Al Jazeera/Marga Ortigas 
By Marga Ortigas in Asia on December 22nd, 2011


I wanted to write something for the blogs from the devastation in the southern Philippines this week ... But I can't seem to find the words... 
 
Looking through old journals though, I found an entry written in China while on assignment there right after the earthquake in 2008.  

I find it's exactly what I'd like to share now - something I first learned in Gaza ... and Baghdad ... and it was reiterated years later in China, and more recently in Japan.
 
It echoes again here in the flood-ravaged areas of northern Mindanao.
 
23, May 2008
Chengdu, China 
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.

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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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