Selecting the worst from Rodrigo Duterte’s vast canon of despicable comments is a task that slips away from you the second you think you have grasped it. Was it when he called the Pope a “son of a whore”? When he “joked” about wanting to rape an Australian missionary? Or was it when he said journalists should be killed? Perhaps it was the comment: “Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there are three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them”?
I’d put near the top of this list the sanctimonious comments that he made after he was arrested on Tuesday on a warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Duterte is accused of crimes against humanity for his drug war nationwide and in Davao City, where he was mayor before becoming president in 2016. As many as 30,000 people were killed, many extrajudicially by the police.
“What is the law and what is the crime that I committed? I was brought here not of my own volition, it is somebody else’s. You have to answer now for the deprivation of liberty,” he apparently said in a video filmed by one of his daughters just after his arrest.
Somehow I find the tears struggling to come. I know that Duterte’s said more horrific things than that, but these remarks give one a taste of the man’s unrepentant self-pity. Just a few months ago, he challenged the ICC to “hurry up.” “It’s taking a long time… I might be dead before they’re able to investigate me,” declared the self-confessed murderer, who turned whimperer as soon as the cuffs went on.
What crime? In October, Duterte stood up in the Senate and declared that he had “no apologies, no excuses” for his drug war. “For all its successes and its shortcomings, I, and I alone, take full legal responsibility for everything that they have done pursuant to my orders,” he said. Granted, he claimed that he hadn’t ordered national police chiefs to carry out extrajudicial killings, but I ask: What’s the chances that someone who (confessedly) oversaw extrajudicial murders when mayor of Davao City could then become president and have nothing to do with the nationwide extrajudicial killings of at least 30,000 people that began just after he was inaugurated? Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the same person said just days before being elected, “If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I’d kill you.” Fortunately, ICC prosecutors will have plenty of hard evidence, not coincidence, at hand once the trial begins.
And what’s the law? Well, international law, the same one he knowingly tried to avoid when he withdrew the Philippines from the Rome Statute during his presidency. Alas, the same body of law also permits Duterte a team of expensive defense lawyers, probably a fancy hotel room, and the procedure and decorum of an international courtroom – all luxuries he denied to the men gunned down for reportedly $300-$14,000 per head (the bonus a police officer could earn for each scalp).
And as for being deprived of his liberty – Abraham Lincoln once defined a hypocrite as a man who murdered his parents and then pleaded for mercy on the grounds that he was an orphan. A good second definition would be Duterte’s wail. But who weeps for the hangman but himself? Once in The Hague, Duterte probably won’t regret the criminal decisions, nor the hubris and arrogance, that led him there; he’s not the ruminative type. But his logorrhoea (“verbal diarrhea” to the uncouth) was a big part of why he became president in the first place, why he remained popular throughout, and why he’ll likely be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
Duterte is invariably known as the “Trump of the Philippines” (better to call Trump the “American Duterte,” since Americans didn’t invent despotic populists). It’s a stark reminder of how paths can diverge: the “American Duterte” may get a Nobel Peace Prize by buttressing Russian and Israeli colonialists; the actual Duterte should count himself lucky to get a clean shower and three square meals a day.
The only people who come out of this saga with any honor are the courageous activists who fought hard for justice for many years, many at great personal risk. Other than them, Duterte looks like the criminal he is; his family looks just as despicable, as do those still shilling for him; and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., a friend of the Dutertes when it suited him, looks cowardly for only accepting the ICC warrant now that his rift with Vice President Sara Duterte, Rodrigo’s daughter, is no longer an electoral risk – and Duterte’s arrest possibly an electoral gain. Yes this is politics, but good decisions are degraded by being made only when convenient.
And neither do most Filipinos come out of this looking good. Say what you like about Duterte’s war on drugs – “criminal,” “illegal,” “barbaric,” “inhumane,” “unsuccessful” are some of the adjectives that leap to mind – you cannot say it was unpopular. Between 2017 and 2022, pollster after pollster asked Filipinos what they thought, and the majority didn’t seem to have a problem with the barbarism. Duterte left office as the most popular departing president.
You cannot claim that most Filipinos didn’t know what he would do once they put him in the Malacañang Palace. The one thing that everyone knew about Duterte was that he murdered people. In 2016, he publicly confessed, “In Davao, I used to do it personally. Just to show to the [police officers] that if I can do it, why can’t you.” His whole presidential campaign was based on the premise that, if elected, he’d kill again, only this time nationwide. And he got around 17 million votes, nearly double his rivals.
In such a Catholic society, it isn’t surprising that some have already started to portray Duterte as a martyr, of what exactly I’m not too sure. Nor am I sure whether the sacral analogy makes Marcos Pontius Pilate or Judas. I cannot recall Jesus Christ lamenting about arriving too late to join in the rape of a woman or him calling the Sanhedrin “sons of bitches.” Maybe it’s in one of the non-canonical gospels where Jesus boasts about murdering people with his own hands.
Duterte’s arrest is a victory for common decency. Yet some things ought to be regretted. Foremost, it would have been better had Duterte stood trial in the Philippines. Duterte apologists will claim that any trial lacks legitimacy, and Marcos will have been advised that a local hearing would have been politically risky — better to have justice done over there than to allow a trial to descend into mudslinging over here. We can ignore the trite gobbets from the likes of Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky claiming that international justice is justice only for the losers, not for the powerful (I’d like to see what “loser’s justice” resembles). But there is a vicariousness to international justice, like someone else delivering the final chop that fells a tree you spent years chipping away at.
Then again, most of the Philippines’ courageous who have battled to get any sort of justice would be happy for a rendezvous with Duterte in The Hague.
