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1World News --- Philippines: Inside Duterte's killer drug war
occurence
DIR By: Dblessed One
Date: September 10, 2016, 4:45 am
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More than 2,500 people have been killed during President
Duterte's war, but can he win?
Manila, Philippines - Eric Sison was still alive after he fell
three storeys from the roof opposite Maria's* house, snagged his
shorts on her neighbours' awning, and, in his underwear, crawled
underneath her bed.
When the police drew back the yellow curtain that partitions her
shanty home from Pasay City's F Munoz street, Maria faced their
gun barrels. "I shouted, 'Have mercy on us, don't fire, we don't
know who this guy is,'" she told Al Jazeera through an
interpreter.
The police told Maria and her family to leave their house. She
heard Sison plead for his life. And then she heard the gunshots.
Sison is one of more than 2,500 people to have been killed
between July 1 and September 5 during President Duterte's bloody
war on drugs, which has had a death rate of about 38 people per
day.
His death is also one of a growing number of killings during
police operations in which witness reports contradict police
versions of events.
While the police report states that Sison shot at officers and
was killed when they returned fire, video recorded on a
neighbour's mobile phone showed him attempting to surrender
while still on the roof.
Scene-of-crime officers who visited Maria's house reported
finding two sachets of shabu - the local name for
methamphetamine - sachets of marijuana, a glass tube containing
marijuana leaves, and the .38 calibre revolver with which Sison
allegedly opened fire as police conducted routine
"anti-criminality operations".
"The police insist that he has a gun and he uses drugs but my
husband is not like that," Rachelle Bermoy, Sison's live-in
partner, said through an interpreter. "He fell from the roof and
his clothes got tangled on something, so he was already
half-naked. If he had a gun it would have fallen.The police
brought the gun," she said.
Dead bodies, piling up
In the run-up to the Philippines' 2016 presidential elections,
Rodrigo Duterte promised to suppress crime, drugs and corruption
in government within the first three to six months of his
tenure, and to fatten the fish in Manila Bay with the bodies of
100,000 criminals.
Watch - Rodrigo Duterte: Guns, Goons and the Presidency
At a party to celebrate his election victory in Davao City,
where he had been mayor for more than 20 years, the
president-elect urged armed citizens to kill drug dealers. "Do
it yourselves if you have guns, you have my support," he told
them.
After his inaugural speech Duterte again urged citizens to go
ahead and kill drug addicts because "getting their parents to do
it would be too painful", and said that he didn't care about
human rights or due process.
"We will not stop until the last drug lord, the last financier
and the last pusher have surrendered or [been] put behind bars
or below the ground," he said in his first state of the nation
address.
Duterte's war against drugs is being waged from the streets to
the senate, but its casualties are almost exclusively small
timers in shanty streets like F Munoz. Here, the victims die
wearing flip-flops and often with a sachet of methamphetamines -
shabu - about their person.
Extrajudicial killings are not new to the Philippines: It has
been reported that Amnesty International estimates 3,240 were
carried out under dictator Ferdinand Marcos before the People
Power Revolution of 1986. However, the intensity of the deaths
under Duterte - who has called Marcos the "best president" and
pressed for his burial in the country's Heroes' Cemetery - is
unprecedented.
According to a national police report obtained by Al Jazeera,
from July 1 to September 5, 2016, some 1,027 suspects were
killed during police operations. A further 15,055 suspects were
arrested and more than 686,000 "surrendered voluntarily" to
police. The death toll constitutes a more than fifteen-fold jump
over the 68 police killings recorded between January 1 and June
15, a period of more than five months.
There were at least 1,500 further cases listed as "found dead
body under investigation" during the same period, according to
PNP records.
Such bodies - which have appeared throughout the slums, above
ground at Malabon City Cemetery, and even splayed across EDSA,
the congested arterial highway through the city's heart - are
mostly attributed to vigilantes, or to drug syndicate
infighting.
Sometimes the heads of those killed are found bound in duct
tape; often bodies are strewn with cardboard signs with slogans
reading "I'm a drug pusher, don't be like me".
Whether from police operations, the result of syndicates
"cleaning house", or perpetrated by "death squads", the killings
show no sign of abating. "I will retire with the reputation of
Idi Amin," said President Duterte, whose term is scheduled for
six years.
Fear taking over
At around midnight two Wednesdays ago, residents of Tramo
gathered for Sison's wake. Friends drank beer from plastic cups
and played a card game in which the winnings went to the family.
Some peered through the Perspex lid of the casket where Sison
lay, his wispy moustache showing through the make-up at the
corners of his mouth.
Sison's partner Bermoy kept vigil, watching a white chick on top
of the Perspex of the coffin lid hopping among grain flecks.
"The chick is a symbol of justice," she said. "So that the death
pecks at the conscience of his killers."
The release of video confirming Sison's surrender prompted the
opening of a National Bureau of Investigation file on the three
police officers involved and their precinct commander, who have
been suspended from active duty.
But justice is not the only concern for Sison's friends and
neighbours. A 20-year-old friend, who asked to be identified as
Boy Negro, showed his smart phone to Al Jazeera and scrolled
through backlit threats he had received. One read in Filipino:
"Bro, just wait, you'll be next".
Boy Negro dragged from his cigarette and scanned the street
where open-air arcade machines jangled under tarpaulin covers
and dogs barked over the glug of the canal. Recently, he said,
he had noticed a tall man around their neighbourhood carrying
out surveillance.
"We're not sure whether the threats are from the police or
vigilantes but we're afraid," he said through an interpreter.
"Almost all the neighbourhoods in Pasay have had killings to set
an example, but now they're coming to our area."
War on a 'national scale'
While fear and muted anger grip neighbourhoods such as Boy
Negro's, elsewhere in the Philippines the war on drugs garners
widespread support.
According to a survey conducted by Pulse Asia, 91 percent of
Filipinos had a "high degree of trust" in their new leader. In
July Jennelyn Olaires - subject of a viral image cradling her
slain husband Michael Siaron - told Reuters that he had voted
for the president.
Senator Leila de Lima, a former secretary of the Philippine
Department of Justice, has been a long-time critic of Duterte's
approach to criminal justice. De Lima, who investigated the then
Davao City mayor's alleged connection with vigilante death
squads as chairman of the Commission on Human Rights in 2009,
told Al Jazeera: "This was my frustration when I was
investigating the Davao Death Squad: the results were welcomed
by the public because they think that it's good for peace and
order.
"We now have death squads on a national scale, but I'm not
seeing public outrage."
Rita*, a woman in her 30s who wanted to remain anonymous, is one
of the millions who voted for Duterte. She grew up in Davao City
where her father owns a seafood wholesale company. She told Al
Jazeera of a childhood experience that typifies some of the fear
and insecurity the public felt leading up to Duterte's election.
When she was playing outside as a child, she remembers, armed
men held her at gunpoint while they robbed her parents' house.
Although Rita is disturbed by the current wave of killings and
believes police should abide by the rule of law, she credits
Duterte with improving Davao's public services and making the
city safer.
Yet, safety is a relative term. In the run-up to the elections,
Davao was often cited as one of, or even as the world's safest
city, an achievement credited to Duterte-enforced discipline.
The assertion was based on data furnished from an online survey
site called Numbeo, which relied on fewer than 500 self-selected
observers to rank Davao.
From 2010 to 2015, Davao City, which has a population of about
1.5 million people, had 1,032 killings, more than any other city
in the country. Quezon City, a suburb of Manila with a
population of 2.7 million, was second, with 961 killings during
the same period.
Crimes declined
-Robbery 11,106 to 6,630
-Physical injury incidents 4,168 to 2,847
-Rape 879 to 838
-Property crime 11,106 to 6,630
-Theft 7,168 to 4,230
-Cattle rustling 72 to 47
But
-Muders rose from 755 to 1271
-Homicides increased from 197 to 214
Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and others have cited Philippine
National Police incidents of falling crime this July - to 50,817
in the first month of Duterte's presidency from 56,339 in the
same period last year - as evidence that the war on drugs is
working on a national scale.
Crime did fall, but not across the board. Reported incidents of
robbery, rape, assault, theft and other crimes declined
significantly. However, murders rose by 68 percent to 1,271 in
July from 755 last year. Homicides - differentiated from murder
by the level of intent - also increased to 214 from 197. [See
table]
The premise that the Philippines is so lawless that it requires
a strongman president to circumvent the rule of law is shaky at
best, argue some observers.
Prevalence of crime compared
Country / Crime / Population
Philippines/232,685 assaults/98mn
UK/375,000 assaults/64mn
Philippines/10,294/98mn
UK/30,000 rapes/64mn
Sweden/6,294 rapes/9.5mn
In August, journalist Rishi Iyengar published an article showing
that the Philippines is not a particularly crime-ridden country
per capita, as compared with other countries such as the UK,
Belgium, and other countries. [See table]
The prevalence of drugs
Although methamphetamines are a serious problem in the
Philippines, which has the highest usage rate in East Asia,
there is disagreement on how pervasive drugs actually are.
The most recent official survey, conducted in 2015 by the
Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB), found that about 1.8 million
Filipinos use illegal drugs.
However, in his state of the nation address, Duterte said that,
based on data from the Philippines Drug Enforcement Agency,
there were "three million drug addicts " in the country two or
three years ago, and possibly 3.7 million now. In an interview
last Thursday, Senator Alan Cayetano, a Duterte backer, said:
"We have three to seven million Filipinos who are hooked on
drugs."
The phrases "pandemic" and "narco state" have been bandied
around, but some statistics actually point to a decline in
illegal drug use. Back in 2004, the DDB calculated that there
were 6.7 million illegal drug users. This would represent a
gross reduction of 4.9 million users, or 73 percent from 2004 to
2015.
"The president, successfully I think, pulled off a kind of wag
the dog effect," Senator Risa Hontiveros, a political opponent
of Duterte, told Al Jazeera. "He did a judo move so that
suddenly the historically most important issue of poverty was no
longer the most important. Suddenly, it was this drugs and crime
menace."
In Congress last month, Duterte announced plans to cut the
budgets for key sectors for poverty alleviation such as
agriculture, labour and employment.
Hearings and testimony
The killing of people such as Sison, Bangayan and Caliclic at
the hands of police prompted Senator De Lima to convene a
hearing on extrajudicial killings.
On August 22 and 23 witnesses wearing ski masks, hoodies and
sunglasses to protect their identities testified to a packed
senate on national television.
Harra Kazuo, 26, told the senate that her partner, Jaypee
Bertes, and his father, Renato Bertes, were both killed in
police custody after officers raided their shanty home on July
7.
Both men used shabu, she admitted, and Jaypee sold it in small
amounts - in 2015 local police took a 10,000 Philippine pesos
($214) bribe to turn a blind eye.
Pasay police claimed that the father and son were killed because
they tried to grab a cop's gun, but forensic examinations
revealed that both men had been incapacitated by beatings before
they were shot: Jaypee had a broken arm.
A second witness, 23-year-old Mary Rose Aquino, told the hearing
that police routinely delivered illegal drugs for "repacking" to
her father Rodelio Campos at their house in Antipolo.
Campos was a police "asset" until they killed him on June 20,
Aquino said. Rosalie Campos, Rodelio's wife, was found dead the
following day.
Fear for personal safety, lack of access to legal counsel, and a
dearth of forensic pathologists mean that few such witnesses
come forward, according to De Lima, who plans to continue
contesting extrajudicial killings.
Such findings are important even at this early stage in the
process. "It exposes the reality that in certain localities -
and I've always believed this - the drug problem would not have
proliferated if there was not the protection or involvement of
the police," De Lima said.
The practice of "recycling" whereby corrupt law enforcement
officials resell drugs they have confiscated during operations
or, as in the case of Rodelio Campos, turn small-time dealers
into personal "assets", has been going on since the 1990s, a
source in intelligence told Al Jazeera. He suggested that
recycling was widespread and police might kill assets to prevent
exposure.
At the Senate hearing, PNP Chief Ronald dela Rosa confirmed that
in a recent internal cleanout drive, 130 police tested positive
for drug use, 20 had been arrested, six administratively
charged, and seven faced criminal charges. Dela Rosa said that a
total of 284 PNP personnel believed to be involved in illegal
drugs had been transferred to new assignments.
In the aftermath of De Lima's hearing on extrajudicial killings,
Duterte released a "drug matrix" which described her as
connected to drug lords through a driver she had allegedly had
"sex escapades" with and who allegedly collected bribes on her
behalf.
The "drug matrix" is the latest in a series of bizarre personal
attacks by Duterte on De Lima; he has previously demanded she
"eat" a CD recording of her linking him to the Davao Death
Squad, told press she was "finished", and advised her to resign
and hang herself.
Other politicians have used the focus on law and order to
advance hard-line policy proposals. Bills currently under
consideration in congress include one to bring back the death
penalty, and another to reduce the age of criminal
responsibility from 15 to nine.
#Post#: 1800--------------------------------------------------
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