The problem with the International Criminal Court (ICC) which is set to try former President Rodrigo Duterte, and its issuance of a warrant of arrest for Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, is that from the very start, it accepted as biblical truth the claim that thousands perished in extrajudicial killings by the Davao Death Squad.  Even legal luminary and former senator Franklin Drilon cites “thousands” killed by EJK and DDS. 

The ICC Justices, by their public statements and body language, are determined to convict President Duterte on the basis of fabricated information and fiction to establish crimes against humanity.  At this point, I hope I am wrong.

The charges were read to Duterte as he faced the ICC Prosecutors after he was literally kidnapped and flown by private jet to The Hague and turned over to the ICC. 

The accusation was and still is a classic absurdity. The ICC accused him of crimes against humanity for the killing of 43 persons over a period of 11 years. That is about four suspects killed every year in what was creatively described as a “war on drugs and by EJK.”

The prosecutors and the ICC Justices must have found themselves in a legal fix. Instead of dismissing the case, they resorted to inviting more complainants and gathering additional pieces of evidence, even giving credence to the preposterous claim of Rappler’s Maria Ressa that, in totality, there were about 30,000 EJK victims.  

The court also swallowed a perjury by a character named Edgar Matobato who claimed that thousands of victims of the Davao Death Squad were buried in an abandoned quarry in Davao City.  The prevarication actually started with then-Commission on Human Rights Chairperson Leila de Lima, who in 2009 conducted a probe of the EJK allegedly carried out by the DDS, which she claimed was organized by Duterte.  

Here is where and when, in the narrative of President Duterte’s fabled case of crimes against humanity, the charges against Senator Bato dela Rosa’s participation were interpolated.  It is at this time that the ICC warrant of arrest becomes superfluous. The probe conducted by the CHR failed to yield a single piece of evidence despite the number of diggings they did in the abandoned quarry for months in 2009 and until today. De Lima had been yakking about it, she is now boring.  

Why are the ICC Justices bound to fall into a judicial trap?  By all indications, they believe that: The Davao Death Squad exists and has warm bodies. The fact is it is a myth. The DDS is  a phantom force, psychological warfare, conceptualized in 1984 by Davao Police Regional Commander Col. Dionisio Tan-gatue Jr. to scare the Communist Party of the Philippines New People’s Army liquidation squad known as the “Sparrows.”

The 30,000 EJK victims conjured up by panhandling human rights organizations and spread by Maria Ressa and De Lima are as farcical as the DDS. They cannot even come up with the name of a single victim. Ressa even appeared on international TV and told her audience that “the Philippines is worse than any war zone.” She holds American citizenship but it’s quite odd that she opted to live in the Philippines. That argues against her audacious statement that the country is unsafe to live in. 

The Justices were also made to believe that “Operation Tokhang” was an order to kill drug traffickers and addicts. In fact, “tokhang” is a conjuncted word derived from the words “toktok” which means “knock” as in “knock on the door” and “hangyo” meaning to plead. 

Operation Tokhang was a police strategy carried out with village officials of knocking on the door  of a suspect’s home to plead with him to stop peddling drugs. In Davao City, if the suspect was a user he was told to stop and to submit to rehabilitation, which the local government provided.

I am personally apprehensive the ICC Justices would arrive at a dangerous verdict against former President Duterte given the fact that even the Nobel Prize institution had given a prestigious award to Ressa, obviously believing her ridiculous optics of what she believes is the state of war in the Philippines and her 30,000 death toll guesstimate carried out by the DDS, a phantom force. 

I am sorry for Senator Bato for whatever fate awaits him. As I write this piece, the Senate is literally under siege with police and NBI forces armed with assault rifles. We are in a state of uncertainty in our own native land.