Film Shows the Brutality of Duterte’s Murderous Drug War

[humble3d]

Film Shows the Brutality of Duterte’s Murderous Drug War

President Donald Trump attracted bipartisan criticism in April for enthusiastically endorsing one of the world’s most brazen human rights catastrophes: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous anti-drug campaign.

Since Duterte took office last June, police and vigilante death squads have killed more than 7,000 people, and devastated poor in communities in cities across the country.

 

Now, a new film shows the human toll of Duterte’s campaign. “Duterte’s Hell,” by Aaron Goodman and Luis Liwanag and produced with the documentary unit Field of Vision, shows graphic images of Philippine police examining and carting off dead bodies, and grieving communities struggling to cope with the government-sanctioned murders.

 

In 2016, Duterte campaigned on a policy of mass extermination for anyone involved in the drug trade — not only drug traffickers, but addicts as well. “Hitler massacred three million Jews,” Duterte said in September.

 

“Now there is three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

 

In April, Trump stunned observers of the crisis by placing what his aides described as a “very friendly” call to Duterte, inviting the Philipine president to the White House.

 

Weeks later, The Intercept, in partnership with the Philipine news site Rappler, obtained and published a transcript of that call, showing that Trump heaping praise on the drug campaign.

 

“I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem,” he told Duterte.

 

Human rights groups have documented how small groups of plainclothes police or vigilante assassins will gun down subjects on the street or burst into the roadside shacks in urban slums.

 

Uniformed police frequently show up later and routinely plant drugs or guns on the corpses to justify the killings.

 

“I swear on my family, my son is not a pusher, my son had no gun,” one mother wails, turning to the camera. “Please! Tell [this] to the whole world.

 

Please help me! He’s not a dog, my son. He’s not a dog or a pig to kill like them.”

Set in Manila, Field of Vision’s film demonstrates the impact the war has had on urban slums — an effect so disproportionate it lead Amnesty International to label the campaign a “murderous war on poor.”

 

“Duterte’s Hell” intimately portrays crowds gathering around grieving mothers in the slums, watching as police load the corpses into trucks and cart them off.

 

Duterte has an answer for why his killing campaign has overwhelmingly focused on cities’ slums, not affluent drug users: Duterte once explained to anti-poverty groups that he can’t go after rich drug users because they fly around on private jets and he “cannot afford the fighter planes,” according to a profile in the New Yorker.

 

Duterte was infamous for extrajudicial killings long before he became president.

 

As early as 1996, as mayor of Davao city, a port city on the southern island of Mindanao where he is still wildly popular, Duterte relied on several-hundred member death squad to kill criminals and suppress opposition.

 Multiple former members of the group have come forward and said Duterte personally ordered the assassinations, and the now-president has even bragged about killing people himself from the back of a motorcycle.

 

In many ways, Duterte is a product of political environment he grew up in. He is the first Philippine president from the island of Mindanao, which has a long and troubled colonial history.

 

For hundreds of years, the Muslim community in the south of the island resisted the Spanish, who had conquered the northern part of the island and tried to spread Catholicism.

 

After the Spanish-American war, thousands died under U.S. military rule as the result of a “pacification” campaign in Mindanao.

 

The legacy of that history is that Mindanao has been the home to several armed rebel and terrorist groups over the years, as well as mafia-like criminal organizations.

 

It was Duterte’s bloody approach to fighting back against those organizations that earned him a nickname he still embraces: “the death squad mayor.”

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/duterte-hell-philippines-drug-war-goodman-liwanag-field-of-vision/

 

[dufus]

Drugs, Duterte & The Nature of Imperialism

https://journal-neo.org/2016/05/26/drugs-duterte-the-nature-of-imperialism/

duerte was voted in by people doing what he said

 

[Phantomboxe]

On 9/7/2017 at 10:00 AM, dufus said:

Drugs, Duterte & The Nature of Imperialism

https://journal-neo.org/2016/05/26/drugs-duterte-the-nature-of-imperialism/

duerte was voted in by people doing what he said

 

guess who's behind all the chaos in the middle east including drugs, George Soros should be exterminated.

 

[knowledge-Spammer]

Duterte  is like boss

[knowledge-Spammer]

usa made him mad again

like a  boss

 

[Phantomboxe]

1 hour ago, knowledge said:

usa made him mad again

like a  boss

Duterte was exhausted by these people.

The EU, UN, Human Rights, NATO, CIA SOROS and NSA, you name it, they are nothing but a bunch of corporate slut!

and then they armed the ISIS, they armed the ISRAEL that killed Palestinians by a thousands. They never express a strong disapproval.

[tao]

Australia-Philippines pack an antiterror punch

 

The two sides have drawn closer to fight Islamic State, a strategic shift that aims to rebuild broken strategic bridges between Manila and the West

 

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte toured an Australian Navy warship docked this week in Manila, the latest sign of the two sides’ growing strategic cooperation in combating the rising threat of Islamic terrorism in the region.

 

Australia was among the first regional powers to ring alarm bells over the threat posed by Islamic State to the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. The warning came weeks before local and foreign militants first laid siege to the city of Marawi on May 22, a four-month-old urban warfare battle Manila is still struggling to finish.

 

“We’re coping … we also hope [the Marawi battle] will be finished in about one week,” declared Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte aboard Australia’s largest warship, the HMAS Adelaide, during a goodwill mission to Manila on October 10.

 

 

Since September, a fleet of six Australian Navy ships carrying as many as 1,200 Australian Defense Force Personnel has toured the region under the Indo-Pacific Endeavor 2017 – a muscular expression of Australia’s growing naval presence in adjacent waterways.

 

The Canberra-class amphibious warship HMAS Adelaide serves as the flagship vessel for the high-profile mission, with the participation of five other frigates, namely the HMAS Toowoomba, HMAS Parramatta HMAS Darwin, HMAS Melbourne, and the newly-upgraded HMAS Sirius, floating alongside.

 

In light of new strategic challenges in the region, ranging from the Trump administration’s prevarications on its commitment to the region’s security to China’s rising maritime assertiveness, Australia is eager to project its naval prowess to preserve a semblance of regional order.

 

The Australian ships’ visit to Manila, however, carried special strategic significance, underscoring a recent marked upswing in bilateral ties.

 

Duterte’s tour of Australia’s flagship vessel marked one of the few occasions when the tough-talking president cordially welcomed a Western military delegation and expressed his interest in stronger defense cooperation against common threats, ranging from the specter of Islamic State terrorism to North Korea’s nuclear provocations.

 

Previously the Filipino leader only expressed interest in visiting warships from non-Western countries, especially Russia and China – the two powers that have vigourously courted Duterte’s favor in the past year. After touring a Chinese warship on a good will visit to his hometown of Davao earlier this year, Duterte publicly demurred an invitation extended by US President Donald Trump to visit the White House.

 

In recent months, however, the Filipino president has gradually warmed to the West, especially Australia, as global terrorism arrives in fierce form in the Philippines. His policy recalibration is borne out of new strategic exigencies, particularly the prospect of terror contagion in Mindanao, as well as recently improved bilateral diplomatic rapport between Manila and Western interlocutors.

 

Over the past year, the Duterte administration has often been at loggerheads with Western capitals over human rights concerns. Traditional allies, including the United States and the European Union, have roundly criticized the Filipino president’s brutal crackdown on illegal drugs that has killed thousands of alleged drug suspects.

 

Australia, on the other hand, has pursued a more nuanced position by emphasizing areas of common interest and concern. Canberra is particularly perturbed by the possible establishment of an Islamic State stronghold, or caliphate, nearby in the southern Philippines.

 

The imperative of countering transnational terrorism close to home seems to have forced Canberra’s hand. As Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull put it last month, his country has “a vital, vested interest in that [Islamic State] insurgency being defeated.”

 

Relishing Australia’s quiet diplomacy, Duterte has accordingly adopted a more cordial line towards Canberra. Duterte has claimed that he has rarely discussed human rights concerns with the West since the start of the Marawi operations, where Philippine forces have waged a months-long campaign against IS-affiliated militants with Western logistical and surveillance support.

 

From Duterte’s perspective, traditional allies, especially Australia, are beginning to engage him on his own terms. In August, the Philippine government enthusiastically released a ‘highly unusual’ photo which showed the Filipino president and Nick Warner, the highly reclusive Australian spy chief, cordially posing with a signature ‘Duterte fist.’

 

During the meeting, the two sides discussed the prospects of expanded counterterrorism cooperation in Mindanao. Since the beginning of the battle of Marawi, Australia has provided high-grade intelligence via state-of-the-art surveillance aircrafts. More intelligence, training and equipment assistance, officials say, are on the way.

 

Australia, which has a Status of Forces Agreement with the Philippines, is now considering the deployment of Special Forces to Mindanao to aid Philippine forces and deny transnational terror groups access to nearby Southeast Asian countries.

 

Given its geographical proximity – including to strategic military bases at Darwin – and deepening concerns over radicalization at home, Australia has been at the forefront of operations against IS both in the Middle East and now in Southeast Asia.

 

While Washington still has complicated relations with Duterte over rights, rhetoric and a clear shift towards China, Australia is now arguably the Philippines’ new closest defense partner.

 

Australia is expected to host Duterte at a special summit between Canberra and Southeast Asian leaders early next year. The event, if held as planned, will mark Duterte’s first official visit to a major Western capital and serve as a bridge between the Philippines and Western alliance now hard-focused on uprooting Islamic State’s infiltration in the region.

 

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[Reefa]

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