World View: Philippines president’s ‘war on drugs’ unleashes wave of killings

New leader Rodrigo Duterte has made good on his election campaign promises

Jaypee Bertes was bruised and battered, his arm broken. He had three bullets in him. He asked for a doctor. “He was leaning on the bars and had a hard time standing,” his widow Harra Kazuo told the senators of her husband and his father at the police station. “He had a difficult time speaking. That was the last time I saw them alive.”

Bertes, a small-time drug dealer, and his father are now just two of a grim statistic – two of the 1,916 who have died in the Philippines police's "war on drugs", unleashed barely eight weeks ago, as new hard man president Rodrigo Duterte had promised during his election campaign

“Shoot him and I’ll give you a medal,” Duterte had told police of dealing with the drug lords, suggesting the public get involved too. And they have taken his injunction to heart. Of the total dead, 756 were suspects killed by the unleashed police and 1,160 were killed “outside police operations”, many by vigilantes. How many were involved in drug pushing is unclear and there was undoubtedly some score settling by drug pushers too.

According to the government, faced by a barrage of international and domestic criticism, the new tough policy is paying dividends – 600,000 plus of the country 3.7 million users have reportedly surrendered themselves to the police to avoid arrest.

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To little avail in Bertes’s case, as the seven-month-pregnant Kazuo this week told a committee of the senate to inquire into the killings.

Wearing large sunglasses and partly covering her face with a shawl to protect her identity, she claimed he had been preparing to surrender to the police because he was afraid he would be killed. The police had beaten and threatened to shoot him if he did not hand over his drugs, but he had nothing to give them. They strip-searched their two-year- old daughter looking for drugs.

‘We can shoot you all’

When his father Renato Bertes arrived and demanded to see a warrant he was told simply by one officer “If you want, we can shoot you all here.” He too would die.

Duterte, a controversial former mayor and prosecutor who rose to power after a landslide election victory in May, brought his local police chief Ronald dela Rosa with him from Davao to Manila to head the national force.

In Davao, the Philippines’s second city, he had previously waged a similar “successful” campaign. Hundreds died.

“We are not butchers,” dela Rosa told the sceptical senators.

Duterte, a thin-skinned, Trump-like demagogue – though he hates the comparison and leans politically to the left – has lashed out at critics. In response to UN concerns Duterte threatened to pull the Philippines out of the international body.

He has threatened to shut down the legislature if it hinders his plans and possible martial law. He warned Supreme Court chief justice Maria Lourdes Sereno not to create “conflict” after she urged members of the judiciary linked by him to illegal drugs not to surrender without a warrant. Journalists have been told they are not protected from assassination

Bitter attack

And he has launched a bitter attack on former justice secretary, senator Leila de Lima, who instigated the senate hearings, accusing her while minister of having an affair with her driver/ bodyguard, who allegedly collected money from drug lords detained in Manila’s New Bilibid prison. She vigorously denies the charges.

And, apparently aping Turkey’s Recep Erdogan, Duterte has now turned his fire on public servants, promising in his “campaign against corruption” to fire every official appointed by a previous president.

Many weary Filipinos see in Duterte’s over-reach a replaying of their political system’s sorry history of autocratic and corrupt rulers.

“To Filipinos, it’s just politics as usual – the manipulations of a game of thrones, so to speak,” says author Miguel Syjuco. He writes of a “deeply entrenched culture of impunity”.

He recalls Ferdinand Marcos whose brutal and deeply corrupt legacy Duterte is seeking to revive with reburial of the dictator's body with full honours . And former president Gloria Arroyo, who, despite facing charges of graft, has recently been named deputy speaker of congress, and former members of whose cabinet now comprise the majority of Duterte's inner circle.

It is likely that only international pressure will stay his hand. But the EU, for example, which in 2014 granted the Philippines, alone among Asean member-states, tariff- free access, is not taking a view yet.

Franz Jessen, the head of the EU delegation, says: “Right now, we are looking at the developments. We are not making any conclusion about what would happen later on. We have to wait and see.”

Last year EU exports to the Philippines rose 18 per cent to €6.8 billion.