The Killing Time: Inside Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs
Rishi Iyengar / Manila
Aug 25, 2016
Just hours earlier, the Philippines’ new President, 71-year-old Rodrigo Duterte, had given his inaugural State of the Nation address, in which he repeated the vow that saw him elected by a landslide in early May.
“We will not stop until the last drug lord ... and the last pusher have surrendered or are put either behind bars or below the ground, if they so wish,” said Duterte.
The director general of the Philippine National Police (PNP), Ronald dela Rosa, told a Senate hearing on Aug. 22 that 712 people had been killed in police operations in the seven weeks since the crackdown began, and that another 1,067 had died at the hands of vigilantes. By one account, there is official pride in the death toll.
Nobody can claim to be surprised. The carnage is exactly what Duterte promised. “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you,” he said before his election, in April. A month later, when he was President-elect, Duterte offered medals and cash rewards for citizens that shot dealers dead.
“Do your duty, and if in the process you kill 1,000 persons because you were doing your duty, I will protect you,” he told police officers on July 1, the day after his inauguration. He was speaking at a ceremony installing dela Rosa, his loyal henchman, as the nation's top cop.
“If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful,” he was quoted as saying to another crowd that day.
And so the killing time began.
The Philippines is hardly alone. Executing people for drug-related offenses, judicially or otherwise, is characteristic of the region. According to a report last year by drug policy NGO Harm Reduction International, the only countries other than Iran and Saudi Arabia known to have executed drug traffickers since 2010 are all Asian: China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia.
Thailand conducted its own war on drugs in 2003 under then Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and the events then — more than 13,000 arrests, over 36,000 cases of people surrendering to police, and nearly 1,200 deaths in its first month — will feel eerily familiar to Filipinos.
Two decades earlier, a wave of extrajudicial executions took place in Indonesia under its autocratic leader Suharto. They came to be known as the petrus killings after the Indonesian acronym for penembak misterius (mysterious gunmen) and had as their supposed aim a reduction in crime. Thousands were murdered in the period between 1983 and 1985.
Now, it’s the Philippines’ turn, and Duterte's war may turn out to be the most ferocious yet. “This fight against drugs will continue to the last day of my term,” he said.
That day is six years away.
“I don’t care about human rights, believe me”
Duterte got elected because he promised to be tough on crime. But how bad is crime in the Philippines, and is reducing it worth the summary massacre that is now taking place?
The Philippines is not listed in all columns of this U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) survey of global reported crimes from 2003 to '14. But comparisons can be made using figures from a 2015 report issued by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
There were 232,685 cases of crimes against persons involving physical injury reported in the Philippines in 2014, for a population of 98 million. By comparison, the UNODC says there were, in the same year, nearly 375,000 cases of assault in the U.K., which, with a population of 64 million, has far fewer people.
In 2014, there were 10,294 reported cases of rape in the Philippines. But there were more than 30,000 cases in the U.K.; 12,157 in France (which has a roughly similar population to the U.K. at 66 million); and 6,294 in Sweden, for a population of just 9.5 million.
That same year, there were 52,798 reported robbery cases in the Philippines. That's about as many as there were in Costa Rica (52,126 cases) but Costa Rica, with 4.7 million people, has less than a 20th of the population of the Philippines, so the Philippine rate is much lower. The total is also far fewer than the 171,686 cases reported in Belgium (population 11.2 million).
Neither is firearm ownership high in the Philippines. According to the University of Sydney's School of Public Health, which researches the number of privately owned firearms worldwide, there are 4.7 guns per 100,000 people in the Philippines, putting it at a lowly 105th place in a list of 179 countries. Finland has 45.3 guns per 100,000 people, Canada has 30, and Australia has 15.
Unsurprisingly, while the Philippines can be a deadly place, it is not especially so. According to World Bank data, the Philippine rate of 9 intentional homicides per 100,000 people in 2013 makes it only slightly more dangerous than Lithuania (7) or Mongolia (7), and puts it on a par with Russia (9). The U.S. figure is 4.
In the five years from 2010 to '15, PNP figures show that total murders across the nation's top 15 cities averaged 1,202 a year. But many more people have already died in the first seven weeks of Duterte's drug war.
Duterte once vowed to kill his own children, if he caught them using drugs. Now he sanctions the killing of other people's children, on the grounds that drug use is unforgivable moral laxity, robbing men and women of their rectitude, and the country of its silver. The overlords of the Philippine drug trade, he claims, are all in China — the ultimate destination, allegedly, of the grubby funds that furtively change hands on street corners across the land.
But how bad is the Philippine drug problem? According to UNODC data, the highest ever recorded figure for the prevalence of amphetamine use (expressed as a percentage of the population aged 15 to 64) in the Philippines is 2.35. That is a high figure, but then the equivalent figure for the U.S. is 2.20, and the world's real amphetamine crisis is among Australian males, where the prevalence is 2.90.
When it comes to illicit opioid use, the Philippine prevalence rate is just 0.05, compared to 5.41 in the U.S., and 3.30 in Australia. For cocaine, the Philippine figure is only 0.03. In the U.K., it is 2.40, in Australia 2.10 and in the U.S. also 2.10.
In other words, the statistics show what any visitor to the country may easily see: Filipinos are not degenerates, who need to be protected from themselves, but are mostly a nation of decent, sober, law-abiding and God-fearing people. The most revealing Philippine statistic is this: 37% of Filipinos attend church on a weekly basis. Less than 20% of Americans do.
Nonetheless, Duterte has succeeded in convincing large numbers of his people that drug use constitutes such an emergency that the very existence of the nation is threatened, and that only his rule can save the Philippines. It's the oldest autocratic trick in the book.
“We’re on a slippery slope towards tyranny,” Philippine Senator Leila de Lima tells TIME.
A week after he took office, a poll conducted by Philippine research firm Pulse Asia showed that an astonishing 91% of Filipinos had a “high degree of trust” in Duterte. Among them are people like Ray Antonio Nadiera, a 33-year-old maintenance worker in the country’s second largest city Cebu, who says that by the time Duterte's campaign is over, “all the addicts will be straightened out.” In
Manila's Pasig Line district, local resident Jamie Co says, “The people killed are the dirt of society. What Duterte’s doing, his war on illegal drugs, is right. It’s good.”
“In the opinion of many Filipinos, law and order is a major issue and previous administrations weren't effective or dedicated in addressing it,” Richard Javad Heydarian, a professor of political science at Manila’s De La Salle University, tells TIME in an email. Duterte, he says, “has a lot of political capital to dispense with.”
But that was before the bodies began to pile up. Now, less than two months later, many others are appalled at the forces that have been unleashed. There is also deep shock at the drug war's financial implications: Duterte has given huge funding boosts to the police and military by slashing the country's health budget by 25%, and reducing expenditure on critical sectors like agriculture, labor, employment and foreign affairs. On the other hand, the budget for the presidential office has increased tenfold, and now includes a provision of $150 million for “representation and entertainment.”
“Whether it’s state-sanctioned or not, I would say at the very least all of these killings are state-inspired,” says de Lima.
Structure of the Lead:
WHERE Philippine
WHAT The Killing Time:Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte's War on Drugs
WHEN when he was President-elect
WHY drug use is unforgivable moral laxity, robbing men and women of their rectitude, and the country of its silver.
WHO all the people who took drugs
HOW not given
Keyword:
1.drug lord 毒梟
2.vigilantes 治安維持者
3.inauguration 就職典禮
4.firearm ownership火器(槍枝)所有權
5.prevalence rate 流行率
6. on the grounds 以...為理由
on the grounds of + N/ on the grounds that + S + V
The new president is regarded as a cruel killer among other countries' critic. However,what Duterte did was out of good concept. He wanted to eliminate those who commit drug in his ruler area. Though the way he did is lack of emotion, the citizens still express gratitude towards him.
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