Bums

President Bongbong Marcos and former president Rodrigo Duterte. Photo by abs-cbn.

"Bums" by Ingming Aberia was also published by The Manila Times on 28 February 2024.

He who unfollows the rules is either a maverick or a bum. Mavericks are of two kinds. When people believe them, they are, at one extreme, called prophets; when people don't believe them, they are, at the other extreme, swatted away like a nuisance or discarded as mental cases. In a hostile political environment, those who populate both ends of the spectrum and everyone else in between can attract the ruler's ire, as in the case of many of our heroes who ended up being trolled, ostracized, persecuted, and even condemned to death.

There are two kinds of bums, too. There are the bullying kind who pick fights against those who are not their size but quit the battle when they find their match; and then there are the misfits who think they are saviors but are in fact deserters.

The latest disappointment comes from the mouth of President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, Jr.  

Asked (for the nth time) in an impromptu interview if he would allow the International Criminal Court (ICC) to conduct a probe into the country’s war on drugs, the president said “no”.

Although supported by a broad segment of the population, the war on drugs mounted by the government of former president Rodrigo Duterte, Marcos' predecessor, was responsible for thousands of deaths of suspected drug users, many of them in drug raids conducted by government forces in urban poor neighborhoods.

Death toll estimates vary, from a low of 3,891 to a high of 30,000. The government's Drug Enforcement Agency puts the total at 6,201, while the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has it at 8,663. In a 2019 interview, then Philippine National Police spokesman Col. Bernard Banac said that at least 29,000 cases of killings categorized as deaths under inquiry (DUI) have been recorded nationwide.

In 2020, the World Organisation against Torture and the Children's Legal Rights and Development Centre reported that "at least 129 children have been killed in the Philippines' four-year war on drugs, most by police or allied assailants, but they may only represent a fraction of the toll...the tip of the iceberg, because it is only those cases that we were able to document and verify, there may be many more in the country..."

Within a year of the drug war, Amnesty International charged in a report that the police were being paid between Php8,000 to Php15,000 per kill. Police interchangeably used the terms “encounter” and “nanlaban” (fought back) to justify the killings as part of a legitimate operation.

“We’re paid in cash, secretly, by headquarters…There’s no incentive for arresting,” the report added, anonymously quoting a policeman. As a result of the cash incentive, said the cop, “it never happens that there’s a shootout and no one is killed.” Duterte even repeatedly encouraged private citizens to join him in his murderous rampage, making it easy for anyone to settle scores with a handy alibi. In one such occasion, he told a returning group of overseas Filipino workers that “if you lose your job, I’ll give you one. Kill all the drug addicts.”

The Duterte drug war enjoyed broad public approval, especially in its early years of implementation. A 2017 Pulse Asia survey showed that 88 percent of respondents expressed support for it. In 2019, a Social Weather Station survey showed that 82 percent of the respondents expressed satisfaction with how the drug war was being waged, although an almost equal number (76 percent) of respondents thought human rights abuses were committed by law enforcers. Duterte himself benefited from high satisfactory ratings throughout his term, from a “low” of 45 percent in 2018 to a high of 79 percent in 2020.

The DUI cases and the persisting climate of impunity—of the investigations that reached the courts, only three murder cases involving teens Kian delos Santos, Carlo Arnaiz and Reynaldo de Guzman have prospered, resulting in conviction—indict the country’s judicial processes. The willingness and the effort to hear thousands of drug war cases are patently scarce. Only the intervention of someone not beholden to wielders of political power like the ICC can plug the go-to gaps.

Duterte, Marcos and the International Criminal Court

The International Criminal Court in The Hague.

When he was a senator, Bongbong Marcos signed the 2011 Senate resolution for the ratification of the Rome Statute of the ICC. The late Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago who sponsored the ICC resolution, said:

"If the state is already investigating or prosecuting its own head of state or similar official, the Court will not intervene. But if the state is unwilling or unable to prosecute, then the Court will try the case in The Hague. By concurring in the ratification of the Rome Statute, the Philippines will help the Court to end the culture of impunity and affirm our position as a leading human rights advocate in Asia."

Threatened by an ICC suit, Duterte unilaterally pulled the Philippines out of the Rome treaty in 2018. The withdrawal took effect a year later. But last year, the ICC dismissed the Philippine government’s appeal to defer its investigations on the drug war killings, claiming to have assumed its jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed from 2011 until 2019.

Duterte’s drug campaign unfollowed the rules, but he quickly quit the battle and untied his responsibility for it when he found his match. Now Marcos takes a no-harm, no-foul, do-nothing approach to the issue of the inviolability of human rights. It is like playing iwas pusoy—a safe refuge for bums. In that same interview, he rationalizes that he has yet to see answers to the question of jurisdiction and sovereignty.

Will he change his mind based on evidence? Marcos said no. “It’s not about the evidence. It’s about the jurisdiction of the ICC in the Philippines. They could produce as much evidence as they want. But they could not act upon it in the Philippines, that is the point.”

Did he, based on evidence, work with Philippine judicial processes so there would be no need for ICC to intervene? No. After more than two years in office, he has not done anything rim-rattling to show he cares for the truth, for justice, for social conscience.

Both Marcos and Duterte recognize the hand of God in their rise to the presidency. In the 2022 presidential campaign, he said that God had other plans for him after he lost his vice-presidential bid to Leni Robredo. As the deadline for substituting candidates approached in 2015, Duterte mumbled something like: "Well, let us see. I don’t know. I leave it to God. If he wants me there, he will place me there. Ganoon iyan. It’s God’s play. It’s not ours.”

They think they are sent by God to save his people but are nowhere to be found when the higher call of truth and justice beckons. They are unfit to think or do something sensible when it matters. On the promotion of human rights, they are bums.