PHILIPPINE President Rodrigo Duterte is rapidly losing friends with intemperate language which has astonished and disturbed many in his own country to say nothing of the international community.
He won office in a campaign that made no secret of his plans to launch a brutal crackdown on drug-traffickers. So far, under his rule, there have been an estimated 3,000 victims of extrajudicial killings. Duterte pledged to repeat his uncompromising policies introduced when he was mayor of Davao, which earned him the popular nickname “The Punisher”. His targets, then as now, have not simply been the drugs trade. Rapists and petty criminals, he has said, should also be killed out of hand.
There is no doubt that Filipinos are fed up with criminality. But every country needs a criminal justice system where the facts can be weighed and the guilt of the accused decided. For Duterte to call for vigilante justice ignores the courts and in so doing ultimately undermines the authority of the state. It also, and this is most important, actually encourages one crime — murder — to eradicate another.
It also takes away the position of the designated civil authorities, particularly the police, to be the only legal enforcers of laws and protectors of citizens. The concern has to be that Duterte, far from cleaning up the streets, has actually launched his country on a steep downhill path toward anarchy where the violence will rule and innocent victims will have no protection from the courts and can only avenge themselves through more violence.
It is this, as much as the extra-judicial killings themselves, that has caused the international community to express deep misgivings. Duterte has not, however, sought to address these concerns, beyond repeating his calls for more rough justice. Instead he has rounded on those who have questioned his administration’s behavior.
He astonished observers when he called President Barack Obama “the son of a whore”. Obama canceled a planned meeting with Duterte despite a rapid apology. A few days later Duterte called UN Secretary-General a “fool” for worrying about the killings. He also called the US ambassador to the Philippines a “gay son of a whore” and told him not to visit him any more. This again was followed by an apology. Now he has rounded on the EU after its parliament condemned his brutal crackdown on crime.
The one Duterte outburst with which many would agree was when he said that Donald Trump was a bigot, whereas he was not. But Duterte’s motor mouth has much in common with Trump’s. His use of deeply offensive language to anyone who questions him is not only outrageous, it does his country no favors. It is not hard to see the Philippines drift into political isolation while potential foreign investors, which the struggling economy needs, decide against putting money into the country while existing overseas firms think of pulling out of the country for fear of a growing tide of lawlessness.
The irony is that it is not just street crime that concerns ordinary Filipinos. Their greatest anger is reserved for the country’s elite whose corruption and graft has disfigured its economic performance and increased the social divide between the few extremely rich and the many extremely poor. But no one expects Duterte to advocate vigilante killings of any economic criminals.
