Collateral damage of ‘tokhang’

We will never know the real casualty rate for Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, often referred to as “tokhang.” Official government figures put the death toll in March 2022 at 6,220 but human rights groups have much higher figures, running to more than 20,000.

These are the deaths that happen in the police operations, originally involving tokhang—from the Cebuano words “toktok” and “hangyo,” meaning the knocking on the door of people suspected of being involved in drugs, accompanied by a supposedly polite request to surrender. The official script, too, is that the suspects would resist arrest, or draw a gun, and would then be killed. “Nanlaban” in Filipino.

In reality, many of the killings happened in the streets and, in some ways, this may have been more merciful for family members, especially children, as they were spared the sight of the executions.

On a few occasions, government authorities have admitted to children being killed in the crossfire, the last figure I saw of such casualties running to 53. During military conflicts, they are part of collateral damage, coldly defined by Merriam-Webster as “injury inflicted on something other than the intended target.”

Duterte’s war on drugs introduces another angle to the term collateral damage because the killers are the police themselves, executing civilians suspected of being drug users and pushers, with no benefit of arrest warrants or investigations. The battlefield has been an entire country, with urban poor areas being the most bloody.

I thought about tokhang’s collateral damage reading, in the Inquirer, Jacob Lazaro’s “Thousands of orphans bear drug war trauma,” (News, 6/16/23) with a focus on 12 orphaned children, all minors, left behind by two fathers killed in the war on drugs in 2017, in Caloocan City.

The children are described as having experienced “double abandonment,” their mothers leaving the children after they were widowed. All 12 children were then adopted by their paternal grandparents.

There is a surreal photograph of the grandmother with 10 of the 11 orphans, surreal because the children—their faces blurred—were all dressed neatly. The grandmother carries what could have been the youngest, still a toddler.

The family is being helped by nongovernmental organizations and the Redemptorist Church, with the children’s grandmother as one of those testifying against the Duterte administration in a case filed with the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

The story of this grandmother and her 12 orphaned grandchildren reminds us of the extent of the injustices of tokhang, each death in a war leaving behind the bereaved, the ones suffering the most being the children who lose their fathers.

Most of those executed in tokhang were men, many of whom were fathers.

It is not just the loss of a breadwinner father but of the lifelong psychological impact on the orphaned children. Fr. Teodulo Gonzales, a priest and pastoral counselor, explained the “repetition complex,” where the survivors unconsciously repeat traumatic events by “embracing the power of the aggressor.”

I thought of other violent cities in the world where two or three generations of children are growing up, or have grown up, with extrajudicial executions being common. These children sometimes become perpetrators of more violence, even becoming abusive and violent policemen themselves.

What is being done for these children? The grandmother of the 12 orphans says she has received no government assistance.

Are the children going to school receiving any psychosocial support?

I think, too, of the collective impact on the urban poor communities that had the most deaths. Many of the children of neighbors witnessed or heard the executions. Are their psychosocial needs being met?

Ultimately, we speak of an entire nation that will pay a high price for the bloody collateral damage, in our continuing denial of the collateral damage during the war on drugs, and in a long history of extrajudicial killings.

mtan@inquirer.com.ph