IF you think about it
objectively, it is astonishing.
There is massive
approval of President Duterte’s war against illegal drugs, a level of support
that has never occurred for any other major government initiative ever. This is
despite Filipinos’ perception that the campaign has involved “extra-judicial killings,”
or executions by the police of those suspected to be involved in illegal
drugs—even before they are arrested and brought before the courts.
A harsh, even terrible
reality that may be, but that is the national consensus, going by opinion
polls. *
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| President Rodrigo Roa Duterte showing the Narco list (photo credit to gmanetwork.com) |
Eighty-four percent of
Filipinos support it, according to the September poll of PulseAsia, while for
Social Weather Stations, 77 percent. The person almost solely responsible for
launching that war, executing it, and therefore identified with it—President
Duterte—has approval ratings of 80 percent (PulseAsia) and trust ratings of 73
percent (Social Weather Stations)
The polls also provide
evidence that there indeed has been a nationwide anti-drug campaign—in contrast
to being just a PR operation—and that it was largely successful.
According to PulseAsia,
77 percent of its respondents reported that there were anti-illegal drug
operations by the police in their barangay, and 95 percent claimed there were
arrests, injured, surrenderees, and killed. Some 71 percent of Filipinos,
according to the SWS, have concluded that the number of drug addicts in their
locality has been reduced.
There has been such
immense backing for the war against illegal drugs and for Duterte despite the
fact that the Yellows and the Catholic Church have worked overtime to demonize
it on grounds that the “extra-judicial killings” that occurred in the course of
this campaign are unconscionable.
Two of the biggest
broadsheets, the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Philippine Star, the two TV
networks ABS-CBN and GMA7, and the foreign-funded Rappler website have been
especially relentless in portraying Metro Manila as having been turned into a
killing field of the innocents. The PCIJ, purportedly devoted to investigative
journalism, hurriedly published a supposed children’s book – a children’s book,
for god’s sake – on EJK victim the teen-ager Kian de los Santos, obviously in
hopes of raising outrage against the war against drugs. *
Yellows’ efforts
Three months after
Duterte assumed power and immediately launched his anti-drug campaign, Rappler
in September fabricated a figure—7, 080—that it claimed was the number of EJKs,
which naturally horrified the West. Worse, the anti-Duterte propagandists then
erroneously extrapolated that invented number of EJKs, so that they claimed
that by March there were 14,000 EJKs, a figure reported even by a colleague in
his column in this newspaper.
With the Yellows’
efforts, I suspect especially with the help of a Filipino-American New
York-based billionaire, mainstream US and European media almost turned the
alleged EJKs into their crusade to expose. Rappler’s sister company the
US-based The Intercept called Duterte a killer whom President Trump shouldn’t
even have talked to over the phone; the Filipino female dean of a Columbia
University journalism unit melodramatically labeled this presidency as
“drenched in blood.”
Yet based on both the
Pulse Asia and SWS surveys, Filipinos have decided to tell mainstream media,
both here and abroad, the Catholic Church, and the Yellows: Go to hell.
Significant is the
finding that 73 percent of Filipinos, according to PulseAsia, believe that EJKs
have occurred in the course of the war vs drugs. The SWS even claimed (in a
June survey) that 73 percent are “worried that they or someone they know” would
be victims of EJKs. *
If you think about it,
it is rather astonishing. Most Filipinos are supportive of Duterte’s war
against illegal drugs, yet they believe it has resulted in extra-judicial
killings, and are even worried that they would be victims? How do we explain
this?
Highfalutin jargon
One explanation is that
most Filipinos do not really understand the meaning of the term extra-judicial
killing, defined in most legal dictionaries as “the killing of a person by
governmental authorities without the sanction of any judicial proceeding.”
It is highfalutin jargon
that I don’t think most Filipinos can wrap their minds around. This is
especially because we no longer even have “judicial killings,” i.e., capital
punishment meted out by a court. The term we used during martial law, was
simply “summary executions,” which evoked ruthlessness and arbitrariness.
Do you think a
respondent of the SWS in an urban slum would have understood its question:
“Gaano po kayo nangangamba na kayo o sino mang kilala niyo ay maging biktima ng
“extrajudicial killing or EJK”? For all we know, the SWS respondent would have
heard only “killing,” and sure enough he would say he’d be worried or else he’d
think, he’s challenging the fates.
If the term
extra-judicial killing wasn’t really understood by the pollsters’ respondents,
then their reports on Filipinos’ awareness of—and worry over EJKs—are therefore
useless. *
The second explanation
though would bring us to a hard reality: Filipinos have been so fed up with the
proliferation of illegal drugs—how it has made the streets so unsafe, how it
has made men so crazy as to do horrible things as rape and murder, how it has
ruined families, how its main victims are the poor—that they support the
executions of suspected drug dealers by the police.
Anyone who really knows
the situation in our urban slums, or our rural hinterlands would know that
Filipinos are so convinced that our legal processes aren’t working, that if the
police stick to the judicial process, the war against illegal drugs will never
be won. In the subdivision where I live, the security personnel a few years
back were so worried that several resigned and vanished when they learned that
two drug pushers that they had caught and turned over to the police were freed
on bail, and had threatened to get back at them.
I know, I know. There
would be that storm of arguments, “the end cannot justify the means”; “we
cannot give up our humanity”; “that would make us uncivilized.”
I wish somebody could
give us a workable, real solution, not just some abstract blah-blah about human
rights. After all, we are talking about the future of 100 million Filipinos and
their millions of descendants. Or perhaps, based on those polls, there is
already a national consensus we just have to follow. *
The article was written
by Mr. Rigoberto D. Tiglao of the Manila Times titled “A national consensus:
Support for Duterte’s war vs illegal drugs even with EJKs” which was published
October 20, 2017.
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