There were 17 of them, all gray-haired and wrinkled but no less dignified. Nearing the twilight of their lives, they staged a rally in front of the Philippine Supreme Court in protest of the decision that denied them legal remedy for the atrocities they suffered in the hands of Japanese soldiers during World War 2. The decision was penned almost three months ago, April 28, 2010, and was supposedly the High Court’s final say on the matter. The issue faded from public arena, but was recently revived following charges of plagiarism against Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo, who penned the unanimous decision.

Inspired by the South Korean women who publicly came out to admit they were victims of Japanese atrocity, over 90 women organized themselves into the Malaya Lolas in 1996, more than half a century after the horror now known as the Mapanique Siege.  At the early hours of November 23, 1944, some 800 soldiers of the Geki Heidan-14th Area group of the Japanese Imperial Army descended into Mapanique, a remote little town in Pampanga, Philippines and proceeded to gather all the men and women.

Atty. Harry Roque, the legal counsel of the Malaya Lolas, narrated how the men, even little boys, were first castrated en masse. They were then forced to hold their severed organs in their mouths before being burned alive.    

The women, on the other hand, were ordered to march towards the Bahay na Pula (Scarlet House) in San Ildenfonso, Bulacan while carrying the loot of the Japanese soldiers. Bulacan is a province to the southeast of Pampanga.

The Bahay na Pula is where the Japanese committed their nefarious acts against Filipino women. There, the women were raped repeatedly and en masse. The victims who survived came to be called “comfort women”.

Roque explains that: “The magnitude of the Japanese cruelty witnessed by the remote town of Mapanique was because the town was known to be hotbed of resistance to Japanese rule. It was in Central Luzon where the guerilla movement, HUKBALAHAP, was formed only months before he siege of Mapanique. One of its most respected leaders was a woman, Commander Dayang Dayang, who was herself a native of Mapanique.

“This, plus the desperation of the Japanese troops who already knew that they had lost the war, would explain the unparalleled cruelty that accompanied the war crimes committed by the Japanese troops against the civilian population of the town.”

The Supreme Court’s decision that denied the Malaya Lolas reparations instead upheld the position of the Executive Department that the claims had already been “dealt with in the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 and the bilateral Reparations Agreement of 1956.”

But Roque rejected this position, explaining that the petition of the Malaya Lolas were not private claims because these arose from war crimes that are “subject to erga omnes obligations under International law.”

The Philippine Foreign Affairs secretary, Alberto Romulo, has refused to take up the claims of the Malaya Lolas for fear of disrupting relations with Japan.