Duterte, war maker

Why is President Duterte so angry at those critics, especially from the West, who accuse him of human rights violations? Perhaps it is because he feels that such critics, by speaking out, are themselves violating his rights as the sovereign embodiment of the people—rights that include the right to violate the rights of some in order to protect the lives of others.

Critics of Mr. Duterte contend that human rights are universal and transhistorical, protected by both the state and civil society. From this perspective, state-sanctioned killings of suspected drug dealers, much less drug users, amount to criminal acts.

The President’s brutal response to this accusation is to say, in effect: I am in a state of war, not peace, and so I must fight. I must kill or be killed so that others might live.

You who criticize me cannot see that my violence is pure. It is disinterested and sacrificial, meant to cleanse society with the blood of the guilty. So how dare you tell me in public that I am wrong! I am right because I have the right to take away the lives of those who threaten to take my people’s lives. For these drug lords and dealers and addicts and users—no difference, really, among them—are no longer human, much less citizens once they are possessed by the devil of drugs. They, and all those who defend them or call for due process, are also guilty and deserve to die. Or at least, as in the case of Leila de Lima, they deserve to be publicly shamed.

By criticizing me, you seek only to take away my freedom to act, the very same freedom you claim for yourselves. I know what you have done, how you have grossly violated the rights of your minorities and people you have colonized, including those in my own country. So do not tell me that I do not have the same right that you have long enjoyed: the right to summarily execute others.

When you lecture me about human rights, you only really seek to humiliate me, to treat me like a dog on a leash. You violate my character and honor by telling me that I cannot be like you, that I cannot kill my own people the way you have done with yours.  In the face of your insults, I can only return the favor by cursing you, paying you back with my violent language and intent.

It is not hard to see how Mr. Duterte and his critics occupy two different worlds: for the latter, a post-1945 world of rights meant to constrain fascist horrors and revolutionary excess; for the former, an older world of authoritarian politics (some would say datu-ship) that draws on fascist discourse and revolutionary martyrdom to do away with any constraints. He emerged, after all, from the spectacular violence of post-Edsa Davao, where “people power” included death squads battling with various criminals and New People’s Army Sparrow units. While his cosmopolitan critics install human rights as a key foundation of governance, Mr. Duterte sees it as a hindrance and prefers instead the force of his personality articulated through extrajudicial methods that have defined his experience with politics. As with absolutist kings, provincial warlords or Mafia leaders, Mr. Duterte regards public criticism to be an injury to his personhood, requiring less a rational defense as an irrational torrent of abuse meant to reduce his critics to silence or death.

So long as Mr. Duterte remains wedded to an idea of power where he alone can decide and others must follow, and where social problems like drugs are to be treated as existential crises, he will always call for war as both metaphor and method for mobilizing society and securing its support. Treating social problems as matters of war, he will insist on his right to act on his own terms rather than on the basis of the human rights of those he acts upon. And so long as he is able to sustain this narrative about war, and compel the belief among the majority of Filipinos that society is in a state of emergency, he will be able to use the state to impose his will and still retain his popularity. Things will change once people stop believing in this story. New stories will then emerge, those that draw attention to his suspect claims about drugs based on flawed facts and paranoid, hyperbolic assumptions.

But it is hard to say when or even if that will happen. Since dead bodies keep turning up in the streets every night almost like clockwork, it does feel like the country is in a state of war, albeit one that is rapidly and tragically becoming normalized.

Unleashing the police, rival gangs and assorted hired killers, Mr. Duterte incites—and clearly thrives in—the very conditions of crisis he claims to be fighting. Barely beyond his first 100 days in office, he has quickly established himself as a wartime president seeking to annihilate what he regards as the country’s enemies—his own people.

Vicente L. Rafael (vrafael@uw.edu) teaches history at the University of Washington, Seattle.