PRESIDENT Arroyo has ordered the Foreign Affairs Department to help 13,000 Filipino World War II veterans claim their lump-sum benefits from the $198-million fund approved by the US Congress Friday.

?We expect the [department] to coordinate with the US Embassy to facilitate the claims of our war veterans here who will receive $9,000 in lump-sum benefits,? Press Secretary Cerge Remonde said yesterday.

He said the US Embassy in Manila had committed to set up desks to help Philippine-based war veterans with their claim.

More than 250,000 Filipinos served alongside US soldiers to defend the Philippines from the 1941 Japanese invasion and resist subsequent Japanese occupation.

Some 13,000 of them are still alive in the Philippines, who are to receive $9,000 each. Another 8,000 are American citizens living in the US, and they are scheduled to receive $15,000 each.

The small provision for lump-sum payments is tucked deep in the nearly 1,100-pages of the $787-billion stimulus bill, and it has deep meaning for thousands of Filipino-Americans in the Bay Area and across the United States.

It?s the concluding episode of a decades-long civil rights struggle to rectify a 63-year-old injustice, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

?I will be happy to receive that,? said San Francisco resident Filemon Mordeno, 88, who battled Japanese attackers through the dense Philippine jungle at the behest of the US government.

But Mordeno expressed the urgency that pervades the quest for justice. He is one of a fast-shrinking group of about 16,000 survivors of the original 470,000 Filipino men who served in the US military.

?I hope they pay up as early as possible,? he told the San Francisco Chronicle, ?before we pass away.?

The money is less than the roughly $900-a-month military pension afforded other low-income veterans, advocates say, but after years of congressional inaction, it was the best they thought they could get.

The stimulus bill doesn?t include new money, but rather authorizes Congress to spend $198 million that was appropriated last year but blocked in the Senate.

?There was a lot of worry that it was going to be cut from the stimulus bill,? said Eric Lachica, the son of a Filipino World War II veteran and the former director of the American Coalition for Filipino Veterans, based in Virginia.

?It has been a long, drawn-out battle.?

In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called soldiers in the Philippines, which was then a US possession, into the service of the US Armed Forces of the Far East. The Filipinos swore allegiance to the United States and risked their lives fighting the Japanese.

But after the war, President Harry S. Truman signed the Rescission Act of 1946, which said that the service of Filipinos did not count as US military service. Filipino veterans and their advocates have been fighting to overturn the law ever since.

Little by little during the past decade, they persuaded Congress to grant Supplemental Security Income, burial benefits, Veterans Administration medical care and other veterans benefits.

?We?re elated,? said Rudy Asercion, a member of the American Legion War Memorial Commission in San Francisco who has long supported equity for the Filipino vets.

?It?s not really the money that is important; what is important is restoring the dignity and honor of these men.? Joyce Pangco Pa?ares