MANILA
For the police here to now say there have not been any extrajudicial killings (EJKs) committed in the country since President Rodrigo Duterte took office is unmitigated gall. To have the audacity to say that shows they’re overconfident they can fool us.
There is documentary evidence — videos, witness statements — that show police gunning down crime or drug suspects even when they’re already pleading for their lives. There’s video footage that show police barging into people’s homes where people are sleeping and then later suddenly being dead.
Just recently a Reuters documentary showed that three unarmed people were killed after police cleared the area of potential witnesses. Police director-general Ronald dela Rosa has literally cried in public asking for forgiveness over the deaths of suspects in police operations.
And yet now Dela Rosa is trying to revise the narrative, that those who died did so because they tried to shoot it out with the police, that not a single EJK has occurred.
This is pure nerve, a boldness that indicates that now the strategy is to tough things out even in the face of documentary evidence. It means that now the police will push back against criticism that the “war” on drugs has been brutal and coldblooded.
The shift in strategy started just before the recent summit of the Association of Southeast-Asian Nations (ASEAN). President Duterte started the ball rolling when he denied that the thousands of summary killings of drug suspects were state-sponsored. Duterte wanted to soften up his strongman image before the ASEAN heads of state started arriving for the summit.
Mr. Duterte’s statement that he never ordered the EJKs flies in the face of his earlier repeated pronouncements that he would fatten the fish in Manila Bay with dead people’s bodies, that police should give crime suspects a gun so they, the police, can say that the suspects had fired back at police, or that he would match Adolf Hitler’s record of murdering millions of Jews and other minorities. If that isn’t inducing police to kill suspects, it’s hard to imagine what is.
Mr. Dutete pulled out the police from the brutal drug operations and tasked the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) to take over. That the PDEA is too small to even have a faint chance to succeed in stopping the drug trade was part of the strategy. The PDEA isn’t capable of the large-scale EJKs that the police had been on a rampage on, and that was part of the strategy to project a tamer picture of the drug campaign.
And now, Duterte has indeed put the police back in charge of the drug campaign. Which gives away the strategy, that the police had been pulled out just for show.
For the police to deny the thousands of EJKs isn’t just dishonest, it’s an over-confidence on their part that they can fool all of us, that we would believe this new line about no EJKs at all. It’s part of their effort to clean up their image and to project a different story or narrative especially now that the United Nations rapporteurs have renewed their calls for Duterte to stop the EJKs.
Personally, Mr. Duterte doesn’t care much about the UN rapporteurs, he’s not scared of them. But he’s undertaking a PR campaign to convince the world, if not the rapporteurs, that there are no such things as EJKs in the Philippines. Notice that presidential spokesperson Harry Roque, too, has been saying that the Duterte administration will never condone EJKs here. It’s part of the overall strategy.
There’s not been much pushback from the public against this new tack of the police to deny the EJKs. Does this mean the people are buying Dela Rosa’s line that no single EJK has occurred in the country, or Roque’s claim that this government doesn’t tolerate them?
The police are toying with us. They’re now trying to brainwash us that no EJKs have taken place in the country despite the reported figure of between 7,000 and 10,000 EJKs. They’re not only trying to fool us, they’re insulting our intelligence.
The police are revising the truth. If we believe them, then they are right: We are fools.
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Christmas greetings to all readers of BALITA and to all the good people who put together the newspaper fortnight after fortnight, especially Mrs. Tess Cusipag!
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