Almost one year has elapsed since former President Rodrigo R. Duterte was kidnapped and flown to The Hague on a chartered jet and handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC). 

Promptly, as he stepped into the court, a charge sheet was read to him. He is to be tried for crimes against humanity for the deaths of 43 people in the course of his campaign against drugs during his six-year term as President. 

His arrest was patently unjust, for it did not follow due process from the very start. Philippine courts were blatantly ignored since those who carried out the abduction were all in the apogee of power. 

The agonizing year in detention would have broken any frail 80-year-old man. But he is no ordinary inmate. He was the president of a nation who was adored by his countrymen the world over.  He was loved because he fought the crime syndicates in a country where the leadership before and after him were too weak to fight them. 

He confronted them all:  kidnap-for-ransom gangs, hitmen riding in tandem, the vicious Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed force — the New People’s Army, the separatist movement in Mindanao alongside the Islamist terrorists, and the drug syndicates that had freely established drug laboratories all over the country. 

President Duterte had vowed to address them all as he did when he was mayor of Davao City.  “I do not care if I fry in hell for as long as my people will live in peace,” he had declared.  

In his full six-year term, he fulfilled his promise. The CPP/NPA was neutralized, and nearly every nook and cranny of the country was declared insurgent-free. The dingy streets of Metro Manila, once the playground of hoodlums, were rid of criminal elements and became safe places to promenade at night. 

In Mindanao, the once belligerent separatist movements became the government’s partners in addressing crime. The foreign terrorists who attempted to sow panic were promptly neutralized. 

The drug syndicates that had been peddling their wares were dismantled along with their laboratories. Millions of addicts were rehabilitated, including, maybe, a wayward priest who is now at the forefront of attacking Duterte for what he did. 

Of course, there were innocent victims who straddled the battle scenes who were killed in the process.  Nobody knows whether the bullets that did them in were from the law enforcers or from the enemy, but even then, the policemen involved were charged and convicted. This fact does not matter, however, among the anti-Duterte politicians and their black propagandists, including the ICC. 

Some quarters, like the incumbent administration, think dealing with the drug syndicates is kid stuff. 

“Hindi kailangan pumatay ng tao para masugpo ang droga” (You don’t need to kill people to stop drugs). These ignoramuses have not encountered the armed drug gangs because when they inherited the government, the country had been cleared of crime syndicates by the Duterte administration. 

What they are really boasting about is the interception of drug shipments into the country, but not the arrest of the syndicate members.  It’s a hollow and impertinent claim of achievement.  

(To be continued)