When Rodrigo Duterte warned people, “don’t vote for
me because it will be bloody”, he won the Philippine presidency by a landslide
with 16.6 million votes. He had tapped into public anger, fear and helplessness
against rising crime.
After two months in office, Duterte’s drug war has
resulted in 1,900 deaths – 750 of them caused by policemen who said they acted
in “self-defence” during “buy and bust” operations. The rest of the dead,
murdered by unidentified men, are considered “deaths under investigation”,
Police Director General Ronald de la Rosa told a Senate probe this week.
Government critics say “DUIs” are extrajudicial or vigilante killings.
These unexplained killings
have been laid at Duterte’s doorstep, since he has repeatedly encouraged
killings as a way to solve nagging problems. Two years ago, while mayor of
Davao City, he told rice smugglers to stop or “I will really kill you, I’m not
joking.”
On August 18, he told citizens
who were being made to go back and forth by government officials for processing
their papers, “shoot them. I’ll take care of you, really”.
Now he seems to be turning the
gun on China. A week later, giving his strongest statement yet against the
country, which claims nearly all of the South China Sea, he warned that an
invasion by China would “be
bloody and we will not give it to them easily”.
Before this, he had called
China’s Xi Jinping (習近平) “a great president”.
Murder and death are two
themes that run through Duterte’s administration.
To employers who continue to
practice “contractualisation”, or firing workers after five months to avoid
making them permanent staff, Duterte said: “You choose: Stop contractualisation
or I will kill you. I am the president.” Duterte’s office means he is immune
from any legal suit.
Apparently seeing the shock
register on the faces of the audience, Duterte added: “Ah, that’s just
hyperbole.”
Taking a cue from the
president, his new customs commissioner, ex-marine officer Nicanor Faeldon,
told the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry last
month what he would do with corrupt customs personnel who were costing the
bureau 300 million pesos in taxes daily. “If I cannot touch them legally,” he
said, “I will have to start shooting them one by one.”
Duterte was the first local
politician to make killings a key campaign platform.
During his campaign sorties,
the 71-year-old veteran politician repeatedly promised, to ecstatic
standing-room-only crowds, that the fish in Manila Bay would grow fat from
feeding on criminal corpses.
Although he told his former
law school classmates after getting elected that he didn’t mind retiring with
“the reputation of Idi Amin” – who was accused of murdering up to half a
million people in Uganda – Duterte bristled when an international human rights
group warned his “drug war” could turn into genocide. “Genocide is when you
kill people for no reason at all,” he fumed.
He became furious when Agnes
Callamard, UN rapporteur on summary executions, criticised
last week Duterte’s bounty offer for “dead or alive” drug dealers
and his shoot-to-kill order against politicians involved.
“My order is shoot to kill,”
Duterte said. “I don’t care about human rights. Believe me. I don’t give a s**t
about what they will say.”
Callamard said: “Directives of
this nature are irresponsible in the extreme and amount to incitement to
violence and killing, a crime under international law.”
Apparently Duterte did care
about what the UN thought.
Two days later, during a 3am
press conference, he blasted the UN and threatened to
pull the country from it and form a new group that might include
China. Anyway, he said, the UN was useless. It had not ended wars and “had not
done any good for the Philippines”.
Foreign Secretary Perfecto
Yasay had to give an
assurance that the pull-out would not happen. Yasay excused the
president’s outburst saying: “The president was tired, disappointed, hungry
when he made the statement.” Duterte then contradicted Yasay by saying he was
just joking.
Duterte reserved his special
venom for Senator Leila de Lima who had insisted on conducting a probe into
extrajudicial killings this week and who had linked him to “Davao Death Squads”
in 2009.
Duterte branded De Lima
“immoral” for having an affair with her driver-bodyguard, whom he claimed was
her conduit for pay-offs from jailed drug traffickers while she was still
secretary of justice. On August 24, Duterte gleefully told reporters that De
Lima – a legally separated woman – had found a new lover. Duterte named him
even though he said this man was not involved in drug dealing.
De Lima admitted that she and
her former driver-bodyguard were once close but strongly denied any drug links.
There is a case for believing
the administration has been intent all along on death as a policy. The
government has made no provision for accommodating the flood of drug addicts
who, terrified by Duterte’s threats, have turned themselves in. Some sources
say as many as half a million have already surrendered. Rather than be put in
rehabilitation centres the addicts who surrendered were ordered to go back
home, after their names and addresses were noted.
Duterte, his aides and
supporters look at the growing body count and don’t see a massacre. They see
progress. DUIs are simply collateral damage in the attainment of a good thing,
which is to eradicate crime, give every Filipino a comfortable and safe life
and bring economic progress to the nation.
This week, as a Senate probe
on “extrajudicial killings” got underway and the police finally gave official
statistics on the kill rate, Duterte said: “We are 104 million [population],
you [care] about – how many? – 1,600 being killed. You’re not even sure how
many died in police encounters, how many committed suicide, how many were
killed out of anger by others?”
His rage was understandable.
He had promised to transform the nation into a booming Davao City, a pocket of
peace in the country’s troubled south, where foreign investors flocked. Few
residents there questioned Duterte’s extreme approach while he was mayor for
more than 21 years.
Ernesto Pernia, former lead
economist at the Asian Development Bank and now Duterte’s economic planning
secretary, called the killings “a necessary evil” on the path to development.
Pernia blamed the media for
giving foreign investors a biased, negative view of the administration’s war on
drugs.
He said: “The problem is the
only ones interviewed by media are those ... whose husband or child has been
killed...we should also try to get the view of others who approve of what’s
happening and see it as really, see it as you know, maybe a necessary evil that
has to happen in the pursuit of greater good.”
He further said: “It’s better
that there are no killings. And also, we have to realise that our justice
system is dysfunctional. I think that should also be made known ... the Supreme
Court should know that. They have to shape up before we can really, you know,
follow due process.”
Just how dysfunctional the
country’s justice system is, President Duterte knows all too intimately. During
his press conference on August 21, he disclosed that while he worked as a city
prosecutor in Davao City, “we planted evidence”.
Duterte is an unabashed
admirer of the country’s late strongman Ferdinand Marcos, whom he calls “the
best president ever” despite massive human rights violations during Marcos’
14-year dictatorship.
Duterte’s father Vicente
worked for Marcos right inside Malacanang Palace after a stint as governor of
Davao province.
But he died a broken man when
he was accused in court of wrongdoing.
Duterte has said in various
interviews that his father’s sudden death caused him to straighten out his own
life. He has admitted being a problem child who was twice expelled from school
and often punished by his mother because he got into various scrapes and
fights.
Jesus Dureza, his former
classmate, recalled that Duterte had been expelled from the Jesuit-run Ateneo
de Davao for throwing paper aeroplanes and for smearing a priest’s cassock with
ink.
Dureza, now the presidential
peace adviser, fondly calls Duterte “the Punisher”. He told of how Duterte once
confronted a street hoodlum who was staging rumbles just outside their all
boys’ school.
“We climbed over the barbed
wire fence of the school in the dead of night and he looked all over for the
guy whom he found in a bar. He simply went over to the guy, told him to stop it
and punched him. Then we ran away while the gang pursued us,” Dureza told This
Week in Asia.
“We had nothing to do with the
rumble. We did not even know the guy. He [Duterte] simply punched him. He had
the mindset of a punisher even when he was that young,” Dureza recalled.
It was only in December last
year that Duterte disclosed why he was a troubled youth. He said, when he was
14 or 15, an American priest had sexually abused him. “It was a case of
fondling – you know what – which he did during confession, that’s how we lost
our innocence… It happened during our generation, two years ahead of us and two
years following us.”
“It was a sort of sexual awakening for each of
us,” said Duterte, whose endless womanising had ended his 15-year marriage to
Elizabeth Zimmerman.
Court records of the
“declaration of nullity” of their marriage, due to Duterte’s psychological
incapacity, cited a psychologist’s report saying that Duterte suffered from
“Antisocial Narcissistic Personality Disorder”.
The report claimed that
Duterte had the “inability for loyalty and commitment, gross indifference to
others’ needs and feelings, heightened by a lack of capacity for remorse and
guilt.”
The report also described
Duterte as “a highly impulsive individual who has difficulty controlling his
urges and emotions. He is unable to reflect on the consequences of his
actions.”
Duterte himself has said he is
“bipolar”.
A psychology professor – who
agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity for fear of what might
befall him if he spoke out – said he had not seen a copy of the psychological
report.
But he said that based on
Duterte’s actions, such as threatening to pull out of the UN, Duterte “has
elements of immaturity, when he gets frustrated he is easily provoked. He has
poor impulse control”.
“He also has a very large ego,
so much so that you cannot cross him, you cannot imply he might be wrong,” he
added.
Such traits are possibly
affecting presidential decisions, the psychologist added.
“For instance, his anger
against drugs: how well thought-out are his ideas? He acts on his ideas without
thinking through the consequences.”
The psychologist said that one
positive effect of such traits was “the boldness of his actions and some of
them seem to be right. What is worrisome is, they don’t seem to come from deep
reflection”.
How does one deal with such a
personality? The psychologist has this advice: “I think he would respond to
flattery.”
South
China Morning Post
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