Duterte’s arresting arrest

Stunning were the speed and efficiency by which former strongman Rodrigo Duterte was arrested for alleged crimes against humanity and sent packing to The Hague in the Netherlands.

“That was swift,” as a surprised Secretary General of Amnesty International and Duterte critic Agnes Callamard quipped on Tuesday’s extraordinary events.

By now, all the details of Duterte’s historic arrest and journey to The Hague should be familiar, including all the drama, rumors, and visuals attending it.

But it was the “surgical precision and efficiency” that stood out, particularly since, as one astute political commentator noted, “many had thought this would be impossible to achieve in our shambolic republic.”

Which now leaves us with the impression that this administration possesses the political chops and discipline to demolish political rivals once it sets its mind to it.

For one, it does take a great degree of political perspicacity and boldness for an administration to reveal publicly beforehand how it would carry out Duterte’s arrest. And then doing it without anyone the wiser, including Duterte himself.

Here I refer to the fact that in the months prior to Duterte’s arrest, administration officials, including the President himself, often openly said they would not hinder the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) from arresting Filipinos with outstanding warrants from the ICC.

That it all came to pass in last Tuesday’s events when the administration “surrendered” Duterte to the Interpol, insisting that they were legally obligated, even under a domestic law, to do so.

Which all but caught the Duterte clique flat-footed that its frail patriarch was laid so low he had no choice but to board the chartered jet bound for the Netherlands.

Interestingly, the senior police official who executed the Interpol request, Maj. Gen. Nicolas Torre III, made it clear to Duterte that he was “deputized” by the Philippine Center on Transnational Crime, which works closely with Interpol, to implement a “secret” ICC arrest warrant.

As a result, as one news analysis put it, “President Marcos now appears to have moved deftly to neutralize his main political rival.”

Still, matters are only starting to get interesting. The Dutertes haven’t been totally neutralized and we can surmise that they may yet be able to mobilize and mount protests amid the doomed effort to bring the strongman back home.

Protests which they utterly failed to muster, much less galvanize, in the immediate aftermath of the arrest, were a marked failure which one observer acidly said comes from the fact that the elder Duterte’s “rise to national power was accompanied by his being framed as an anti-protest, anti-people power leader.”

So much so that the swift turn of events had his lawyers do a buzzer-beating scramble to the Supreme Court and his family was left protesting that the arrest had no legal basis, complaining about Duterte’s frail health and claiming a “state kidnapping.” But it was all in vain.

Nonetheless, sorting out all the legal, political, and social implications of Duterte’s arrest and ICC appearance will preoccupy our attention in the days ahead.

But the implications are still being hotly debated — often emotionally attended by wild and sordid speculations as well as the distortion and manipulation of facts — that it momentarily brings confusion and prevents sober assessment.

As such, we are at a loss on how to properly assess the fate of two ambitious, power-hungry political dynasties and how it affects domestic politics.

Worse, it risks losing sight of the essential fact that the ICC case is all about powerless EJK victims bravely seeking justice and closure.

Politically speaking, however, for the moment in our elitist politics one dynasty is clearly severely wounded while the other seems to have found its footing.