The Philippines is in the midst of a brutal war on drugs
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Otherwise, the important context to have is that while 1,800 alleged drug dealers have been killed by police and vigilantes in the 7 weeks that Duterte has been in power (roughly 1,200 people were killed last year by police in the U.S. though that doesn't count for all in-custody deaths [0]) -- the Filipino citizens are, by most accounts, supportive of the killing campaign:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/world/asia/philippines-rod...
> Richard Javad Heydarian, who teaches political science at De La Salle University in Manila, said many members of the public were giving Mr. Duterte wide leeway to deliver on his promise to suppress the drug scourge within three to six months. Mr. Duterte’s “shock and awe” approach reflects not only his commitment to eradicating drugs, Mr. Heydarian said, but also extremely high public expectations.
> “The more fundamental question at this point is, why the seemingly unprecedented support for the new president despite global criticism of his uncompromising approach?” he said. “I think it largely has to do with dissipated public trust in existing judicial institutions, a sense that the normal democratic processes are not coping with the magnitude of the crisis.”
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/0...
Oh please not this crap again! People outside the Philippines are greatly misinformed by the media. Duterte did not order to kill everyone on drugs. That's bullshit! 600K+ that surrendered are proof of that. The problem is it seems all homicide and murders are now Duterte's fault which is what the news emphasized.
If you want to know what's really going on come to the Philippines. Don't judge based on what the news says.
Also, take into account that there's politics involve here. Oligarchs who have been controlling the country for decades hates Duterte because he wants Philippines to become Federal -- no monopoly anymore.
If Duterte did not won, we are in status quo right now. You will not hear this kind of crap in the news until we are a full-pledge narco state.
Care to share some additional background to bend the narrative in a different direction than we may usually hear?
Did anyone of you know that during the past administration of President Aquino the crime rate increased to 350%? Yeah not kidding and nobody talks about this. Did all of you know that there were 1,819 killed in 2010 and 2,089 in 2011 by "riding-in-tandem" (crimes perpetrated by more than one person, usually two men, on a motorcycle)? Well nobody gives a shit back then, not the Human Rights or the Media. There were no "kill list".
There is nothing to negotiate: you give these people money and they will just want more. You give in to their demands, or ignore them, and you become a part of the problem. A war suddenly becomes a lot more tempting to wage...
When people do drugs for at least 6 months, their brains don't function well that they could rape young children, sell all their stuffs in exchange for drugs, kill the taxi drivers and all the crimes that can come in your imagination. They will do whatever they want (which includes killings) for their own needs since they're already retarded addict and since a lot of people do drugs the crime rate gets to increase rapidly. Look now, the crime rate just got lowered except for the drug related crimes that is happening now since drug lords would kill all the people they do not trust and do everything just to avoid the consequence that could happen when they got caught. There's no joke about the actions of the current government.
"If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their parents to do it would be too painful."
You literally sound like Trump supporters who bash the 'media' because they take his 'words out of context', when he does in fact, say those things clear as day.
Yes the media can be biased, but in this case, he was quoted word for word (and he's basing his platform on that, so you can't just say the media is misrepresenting him)
Anyway regardless, I don't want to get to an extended discussion with you, as you seem deeply entrenched with your views.
> And he has warned drug dealers in particular: "Do not destroy my country, because I will kill you."
This is a strong message. And he used the media to spread this message. I'm not jiving with the idea that the media is wrong and yet the president was using the media as a channel for this message.
I also live in the Philippines, but I'm a foreigner and I'm not taking a side on this. My boots on the ground observation is that people have been shot under mysterious circumstances before the new president took office and the same is happening now after, but maybe at a greater rate. But I don't fear for my life here. It isn't the wild west with guns blazing on the street.
There's a documentary video where the head PDEA (Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency) said that are ordered not to arrest drug pushers even if they know who and where they are. Obviously the order came from the top.
Any links to this video?
I get that drugs are a problem, but why the support for extrajudicial killings when you have the resources to arrest, prosecute, and document?
Apparently you have power to get someone voted into office that can then make pretty big moves within the political apparatus of the country. Could you expand on the idea of "no power" here? You literally have no legislative body? Mass murder or complete political gridlock are the only two options?
> The problem is the media and human rights made it to look that way.
So you're saying that there hasn't been a big bump in homicide rates at the same time as the new president has been saying he's going to kill a bunch of people? I mean, maybe the media is warping the picture. But how do you account for that pile of dead bodies over there?
I'm just not clear of your argument here. Oligarchs control the media so these dead bodies are fakes, and to hell with due process because the public only has the power of a gun?
During the previous Aquino administration crime rate increase to 350% but that did not made news. Most of these crimes are drug related. Information were being controlled by our local media.
Due process are given to those who surrendered. In front of a drug suspect holding a gun, what do you want to police to do talk them to death?
I'm not sure that the people inside the country are any better informed. For one thing, I'm curious as to how you were presented with the "600K+ surrendered" figure. That number sounds very high to me. Where are all these people now?
All details aside, sorry, but whereas once your country was on my 'to visit' list, it's been crossed off now. This situation must be costing a bucket of tourist dollars.
I don't see how the current situation is any better. I can certainly see how it would look like Duterte did more than the other presidents, though.
You say this like we're such a beautiful country whose drinking water doesn't make people in rich countries sick. And no, they aren't likely to come here with all the violence and the supportiveness of people like you. We'll probably get a travel ban by other countries and have a crashing tourism industry.
Last I checked, oligarchs are still in control. PLDT has a monopoly on telephone lines. Meralco has a monopoly on electricity. The Lopezes are dominating TV entertainment. The Ayalas own the business districts and have the top real estate projects and banks in the country. And you, you're still where you were before Duterte became president. Arroyo got away with corruption. Peter Lim fled the country despite accusations on pushing drugs. People are still poor, hungry, unschooled.
Nothing's changed. You just worship Duterte too much.
If you can't see changes today then you have problem. And really, you expect everything to change upside down in just 2 months? Are you on drugs?
If he was, would you murder him?
This is part of the reaction against globalism, and centralisation of power. Le Pen, Trump, Brexit, Duerte. People, and collections of people have a right to choose to do things differently from what the rest of the world considers normal and acceptable.
Those viewing Duerte as a figure who is centralising power in the Philippines into himself are viewing things upside down. This is a revolt against the United Nations, against "human rights agreements" between countries, against focusing on appearance of being good to the rest of the world. This is the pendulum swinging from globalism back to nationalism. This is a nation whose people is choosing the method to solve it's own problems, ignoring what we think of it, and we have no right to intervene.
Countries must be allowed to make their own choices. Their nationalistic tendencies must be protected. Things must exist separately, before they can be together. Without this separateness, and expecting every country to become globalised and be governed in the same way, like food in a giant blender, it's called narcissism.
Stop viewing things from your own lens.
Stop trying to look good to yourself. Cast political correctness away. Focus on the actual underlying reality.
Rights of the collective do not trump rights of individuals.
If mob rule is sufficient, then yes, mob rule by a larger mob would be right. If mob rule is insufficient, then the behavior of the Phillipines isn't justified, and so yes, can be corrected by other outside groups. In either case: the Phillipines' behavior is unjustified.
That maybe so, but intervention of other groups cannot be justified, if Philippine's behaviour to intervene in the unjustified behaviour of drug dealers is itself unjustified. If mob rule is unjustified, then using a larger mob would be even more unjustified, no?
It isn't justified by virtue of its size, but that doesn't mean it's unjustified. It may be justified for other reasons—humanitarian aid, for instance.
Pretty straightforward logic, actually. If the entirety of my oppression of you is preventing you from oppressing someone else, that is the right and proper kind of oppression. There's direct analogy here with the use of violence in self-defense: violence initiated by the attacker is bad, violence used by the victim or a third party in defense of the victim is good.
In reality, it's often not so simple, but you can still rank the parties on who is "more right", and whose oppression is more justified, so to speak.
So yeah, sometimes you need the majority to oppress the hell out of some smaller majority to make them behave. Good examples include US Civil War, WW2, and the use of National Guard in US to impose federal desegregation laws during the Civil Rights Era. A good example of a failure to do so, and its moral consequences, is the Rwandan genocide.
Now, this all was a hypothetical - I'm not saying that an invasion of the Philippines would be justified on these grounds. Of course not! But what they're doing certainly justifies, at the very least, a condemnation - and it would be immoral to not judge. Same exact kind of immoral as turning away and muttering "not my business" or "she might deserve it anyway" when your neighbor is beating his wife.
I think that is our moral difference and if you would judge me for it, I will accept it graciously.
Another point that I'd like to make, is that you talk about communities. But, who draws the lines? There's a community of Filipinos, true - but who decides who is the member, and does being a member of that community automatically excludes one from other communities? I would dare say that it does not; and if so, why should that other membership be ignored? I mean, ultimately, we are all members of one community called "people", spanning the entire globe; everything else is a subdivision of that. So, if it's common membership that you believe to give the moral justification to judge, and possibly intervene, then it is membership in that community that I will claim as my justification to do so.
I hold no judgement on what's happening in Philippines, just as I cannot think of intervening in U.S., or judge U.S. citizens, where prisons where millions, a significant fraction of them innocent, are incarcerated in horrific conditions I could never imagine myself to be in.
Rule of law is an invention, sometimes it has force, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it changes.
That is my moral framework.
I'm guessing that a lot of these killings are sort of cover for other issues. This person is a drug user, but also owes the wrong people a lot of money. It's just an expansion of targets for people who were already employed in the industry. Business is getting good.
I don't know if there is any real strategy here since the president was already doing this as mayor of Davao and this sort of became a platform to run on. Another platform was to fight corruption, a major problem in the Philippines.
As you can see from the list, there are a lot of public officials allegedly involved in the drug trade. Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption. You work to seriously constrain the availability of drugs due to fear among dealers and users and that cuts off the supply of money to the top. At the same time you hit the top through your intelligence sources. Drug related corruption gets squeezed from both sides. As this is the more brutal stage, the fear of being involved in corruption spreads to non-drug related corruption.
That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
> The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the national office. And this was already happening throughout the country
I've read the former many times, but never the latter.
> Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption.
I don't see how murder, a refusal to punish murderers, and the effective elimination of rule of law and the judiciary is going to stop corruption. It's the worst possible corruption, and it's a fantasy that the person perpetrating this policy is somehow going to be otherwise honest, or that society, without these critical institutions, will be better able to deal with corruption.
It's ok to kill people, just don't embezzle any money?
There's also the minor problem of the complete disregard for individual life and liberty, which is harming a huge number of people.
> That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there something to back that up?
That's about $215 US, for the record. From the time I spent in Davao back when Duterte was mayor: no one I met was afraid of any crime, certainly not some weird public assassination market. The only people that you'd ever have to worry about were police, and that was only if you were a criminal yourself.
That being said, that was back when he was a somewhat crazy mayor and not President. So maybe there's been a shift in the politics and perception of these things? I can say the city was tremendously livable and while there was some anxiety about him and the extrajudicial killings, it was offset by dramatically reduced worries about normal crime for everyone I spoke to about it (which says a lot, I think -- WHAT it says is a bit more complicated).
There are many white people that feel this way about police violence against black people in the US. "Well, they were black so they were probably up to no good; therefore the police only do bad things to bad people."
Who says who is a criminal? Are Filipino police somehow far more gifted than those elsewhere and are completely non-corrupt (never using their powers for other than justice), and never arrest the wrong person?
It's safe as long as you are not the one getting killed. Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin offered similar security.
Did you not read the "open secret" part? While it may or may not be true, you're going to have a hard time finding an "official" source for that kind of open secret.
Maybe a fraction of this wave of violence's victims were guilty of bona fide crimes. But most were politically-convenient targets. I don't know of a single country, in history, that recovered from a similar event inside two generations.
Revolution would have been more productive.
The institutions have been growing stronger for decades, I think. It's a slow process, but democracy only began 30 years ago and has been progressing since then.