The news making the rounds this week is the reign of vigilante enablement in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. He's been in power 3 months and in that time he's unleashed vigilantes to go and hunt and kill drug addicts and pushers.
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, won an electoral landslide in May after pledging to fill funeral parlours with drug dealers. He told Filipinos on the day of his inauguration last month: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”
Since 10 May – the day Duterte was announced the winner of the presidential poll– at least 704 people have been killed because they were suspected to have been involved with drugs, according to monitoring by journalists at ABS CBN News, a Filipino news network.
One influential Philippine senator has called for an investigation into the killings. In a speech before the senate, Leila de Lima, a former justice minister, said: “We cannot wage the war against drugs with blood. We will only be trading drug addiction with another more malevolent kind of addiction. This is the compulsion for more killing.”
De Lima, who has also headed the Philippines’ national human rights body, said police were summarily killing even innocent people, using the anti-drugs campaign as an excuse.
A statement issued last week by the citizens’ council for human rights accused Duterte and his officials of abandoning due process and human rights in their zeal to fight the war on drugs. “Units of the Philippine national police, under the command of his close associate General Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa, have turned many low-income neighbourhoods in the country into free-fire zones,” it said.
“The bloody encounters taking place daily have polarised the country between those who support the president’s quick and dirty methods of dealing with drugs and crime, and those who regard them as illegal, immoral, and self-defeating.”
The killings appear to have been carried out by police, who attribute the violence to suspects who “resisted arrest and shot at police officers”, and vigilante groups emboldened by Duterte’s promises of impunity.
That's some seriously fucked up shit right there. It's like something straight out of 'Judge Dredd' where the 'Judges' are also jury and executioner. Except that was meant to be a satirical comic book. The Philippines is a real country, so the freak out is real. The murder-spree by state and vigilantes is way beyond the fascist dreams of the most right wing crazies in most developed countries. It's the kind of thing you would expect in the 'developing' world. The question being, what the hell is it developing into?
The reductio ad absurdum of the 'zero tolerance' approach may well be this policy of unleashing police as judge jury and executioner, the rule of law be damned. I imagine he'd argue that it's not worth the state spending money housing drug pushers in prison - it's cheaper to just shoot them. The mathematics of it don't lie but, dude... human rights? It's weird how this crude populism crosses over into the classic asiatic barbarism of utter disrespect for life. You expect this kind of stuff from say, communist China, not a democratic Philippines. Still, he seems like the man on a mission:
Before he was elected president, Duterte was a lawyer who earned a reputation as an authoritarian figure while he mayor of the southern city of Davao. His campaign pledges included the reintroduction of the death penalty by hanging, as well as offering bounties for the bodies of drug dealers.
During the campaign, Duterte said 100,000 people would die in his crackdown, with so many dead bodies dumped in Manila Bay that fish there would grow fat from feeding on them. After his election win, Duterte also launched a seemingly unprovoked attack against the UN.
“Fuck you UN, you can’t even solve the Middle East carnage ... couldn’t even lift a finger in Africa [with the] butchering [of] the black people. Shut up all of you,” he said.
And we're worried Kevin Rudd might fuck up the world as UN Secretary General. The world is laughable sometimes.
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