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Not even six weeks into his first term, the rising toll of firebrand Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs is even worse than expected, and threatens to grow worse still, as the numbers of corpses and arrests accumulates while the prospects for renewing peace talks with communist guerrilla rebels grow dimmer by the day.
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Scores of civil servants — 27 mayors and 31 police officers — surrendered Monday following the realease by the Duterte’s administration of a “name and shame” list linking 160 public figures to to the drug trade. The officials are the latest among some 115,000 people who have turned themselves in since the president took office on June 30, according to national police logs reported by the New York Times.
That extraordinary number is only part of the emerging portrait of a tough-on-crime president who has already earned the popular moniker "Duterte Harry" among Filipinos. More than 400 people have been killed by police since his inaguration – an average of 10 a day – and estimates suggest that there have been another 400 killed by vigilantes spurred on by Duterte's scalding rhetoric. The Reuters news agency reported that number could be even higher.
In the interregnum between his May 9th election and June 30th inaguration, the country experienced a spike in the number of police and vigilante killing, from roughly two per week to one-per-day. Duterte has not moderated his stance at all.
“I don't care about human rights, believe me,” Duterte declared in a televised national address address on Sunday, reiterating his unwavering commitment to a violent crackdown on drug trafficking with a “shoot to kill” mandate for police.
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“My mouth has no due process,” he added after listing the dozens of alleged “narco-officials” accused of connections to illegal drug activity. The incendiary politician has promised police officers cash rewards for taking out criminals and also encouraged vigilante murders with an offer to hand out medals to citizen killers of suspected drug kingpins.
The iron-fisted former seven-term mayor of Davao City, Duterte has long been associated with death squads and extrajudicial killings. Moreover, his presidential campaign was based on a law-and-order platform and so his disregard for human rights hardly comes as a surprise. But the scope of the state-sanctioned violence is far beyond what anyone expected.
Last week, nearly 300 Philippine and international human rights organizations signed a letter questioning the wave of extrajudicial killings and calling on the United Nations to “urgently take action” and for an immediate stop to the slayings.
The president’s populist rhetoric promised to bring more economic equality to the Philippines, where at least one quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, according to 2014 statistics. But Duterte’s extreme positions on executing criminals and justifying journalists as potential targets of assassination have sparked widespread alarm harkening back to the country’s authoritarian past under martial law.
Indeed, Duterte has also come under fire for giving the greenlight to a so-called “hero’s burial” for former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the Libingan ng mga Bayani national cemetery in Taguig City outside Manila, known as the Heroes’ Cemetery, the Philippine Star reported. Marcos ruled with martial law from 1972 until 1981, gagging the media and heading widespread repression against political opponents.
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Meanwhile, Duterte’s promises to spearhead the peace process with communist guerilla forces has also sparked tensions. The president said Monday that peace negotiations could move forward even without the group’s exiled leader Jose Maria Sison, but threatened to call off the plan if the rebel army doesn’t stop using landmines, Xinhua reported.
The Communist Party of the Philippines, on the other hand, slammed Duterte’s ultimatum against the National People’s Army, the armed wing of the Communist Party, saying it “smacks of a poorly-crafted deflectionary tactic with the aim of blaming the revolutionary forces for the repeated postponement of peace talks,” the weekly online magazine Bulatlat reported. The party warned that Duterte is becoming “more and more cantankerous” and stalling the negotiations.
There is currently no ceasefire on the table between the government and rebel fighters after Duterte withdrew a unilateral ceasefire his government claims the guerilla army failed to reciprocate. The rebels, on other hand, have expressed willingness to launch a separate ceasefire.
With an estimated 4,000 members, the National People’s Army is one of Asia’s longest standing insurgencies. The group has been fighting the government since 1969, with on-and-off peace talks failing to bring an end to the conflict since the mid-1980’s.
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