Probing Duterte’s drug war

Probing Duterte’s drug war | Daily Tribune

Politics certainly informs the House’s ongoing reckoning with the previous regime’s brutal anti-illegal drugs war.

Obviously, House lawmakers couldn’t have found their newfound spunk in decisively confronting Duterte’s bloody drug war without the Marcos-Duterte political alliance of convenience sinking into oblivion.

In contrast to the House’s pluckiness, we can’t say where the Senate is at, since of late the Upper Chamber seems markedly sheepish about the Duterte drug war.

At any rate, the bitter split in the political Right has all but assured the knocking down of Duterte and his cohorts from the dreadful pedestal upon which they once perched.

This was a state of affairs demonstrated last week by the spectacle of a retired police colonel — reputedly very “close” to Duterte and who once inspired terror — bursting into tears after lawmakers detained her indefinitely for evasiveness in answering questions.

Still, despite last week’s hypocritical personal drama and recent explosive revelations of senior police officers’ involvement in the bloody drug war, we can only guess what will be written about it in the history books years from now.

Pain and shame are the feelings we harbor with regard to the ongoing House inquiries. Fear is slowly becoming less and less an immediate concern.

If one man and his determined cohorts once ignited collective passions, they have since lost their fearsome grip on the masses, with the lawmakers presently in the process of holding them accountable for their political, moral and other cruelties.

If there is anything that can summarily characterize the cruelties of the early years of Duterte’s drug war, it is what French writer Albert Camus once called “the replacement of real man by political man.”

Many Filipinos were introduced willingly or forcibly into politics during the early phases of the Duterte drug war, wherein “what counts is no longer respecting or sparing a mother’s suffering, what counts is securing the victory of” the Duterte doctrine of dismissing human rights.

This turn of affairs was stunningly illustrated by an allegation against retired police colonel Royina Garma during the House Quad Committee’s 12 September hearing on extrajudicial killings.

(Formed last August, the House’s four-panel inquiry committee is looking into the connections between the illegal drug trade, Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators and extrajudicial killings in the drug war during the Duterte regime, with the 12 September hearing primarily focused on identifying the most responsible police officials involved in alleged criminal atrocities.)

Kristina Conti, a lawyer for Raquel Lopez whose son Rabby was among the thousands killed in Duterte’s brutal drug war, painted a horrifying picture of teary-eyed Garma when she headed Cebu police.

Garma reportedly “was enraged” and angrily shouted at the deceased young man’s family during his wake, Conti said.

“She was yelling, ‘Why is there only one dead? There are many of them here!’” the human rights lawyer told the lawmakers, quoting from Lopez’s sworn statement of 28 June about how her son was killed on 4 October 2018 in a “one-time, big-time” operation launched by Cebu police.

Cell phone technician Rabby was shot dead by police inside his room and his bedsheet-wrapped body was summarily thrown out “like a slaughtered pig,” the distraught Raquel Lopez said.

When a lawmaker asked Garma if she remembered the particular incident, she stone-faced replied: “I cannot recall it, Mr. Chair.”

At any rate, the Lopez case, as perhaps many other similar cases, didn’t gain much public traction then as they occurred at the height of the violent drug war where scores of Filipinos preferred to shut their eyes to all the violence in order to keep their peace of mind.

House lawmakers prying open the public’s eyes once again to those brutal days and trying their best “to know the truth about what really went on in the drug war,” therefore, is an encouraging development even this so late in the day. And, who knows, the House may yet aid the ICC investigation against Duterte et al.