
The Philippines is in the midst of a brutal war on drugs - jackgavigan
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37172002
======
danso
The NYT had a writeup of one particularly notable incident, in which a father
and son were killed, and how it was egregious enough to provoke outrage:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/world/asia/philippines-
dut...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/20/world/asia/philippines-duterte-drug-
killings.html)

Otherwise, the important context to have is that while 1,800 alleged drug
dealers have been killed by police and vigilantes in the _7 weeks_ that
Duterte has been in power (roughly 1,200 people were killed last year by
police in the U.S. though that doesn't count for all in-custody deaths [0]) --
the Filipino citizens are, by most accounts, supportive of the killing
campaign:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/world/asia/philippines-
rod...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/world/asia/philippines-rodrigo-
duterte.html)

> _Richard Javad Heydarian, who teaches political science at De La Salle
> University in Manila, said many members of the public were giving Mr.
> Duterte wide leeway to deliver on his promise to suppress the drug scourge
> within three to six months. Mr. Duterte’s “shock and awe” approach reflects
> not only his commitment to eradicating drugs, Mr. Heydarian said, but also
> extremely high public expectations._

> _“The more fundamental question at this point is, why the seemingly
> unprecedented support for the new president despite global criticism of his
> uncompromising approach?” he said. “I think it largely has to do with
> dissipated public trust in existing judicial institutions, a sense that the
> normal democratic processes are not coping with the magnitude of the
> crisis.”_

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/0...](http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-
interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database)

------
jister
DISCLAIMER: I am a Filipino and I live in the Philippines.

Oh please not this crap again! People outside the Philippines are greatly
misinformed by the media. Duterte did not order to kill everyone on drugs.
That's bullshit! 600K+ that surrendered are proof of that. The problem is it
seems all homicide and murders are now Duterte's fault which is what the news
emphasized.

If you want to know what's really going on come to the Philippines. Don't
judge based on what the news says.

Also, take into account that there's politics involve here. Oligarchs who have
been controlling the country for decades hates Duterte because he wants
Philippines to become Federal -- no monopoly anymore.

If Duterte did not won, we are in status quo right now. You will not hear this
kind of crap in the news until we are a full-pledge narco state.

~~~
Secretmapper
Sorry, but Duterte has literally gone on record to state that even normal
citizens should kill drug addicts:

"If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself as getting their
parents to do it would be too painful."

You literally sound like Trump supporters who bash the 'media' because they
take his 'words out of context', when he does in fact, say those things clear
as day.

~~~
jister
Trump is the result of a reality show. Duterte is not. Why the hell would you
compare the two?

~~~
Secretmapper
If you even read my comment, I'm not even comparing Duterte to Trump, I'm
comparing your logic to Trump's supporters' logic of holier than-thou, media
is biased non-sense.

Yes the media can be biased, but in this case, he was quoted word for word
(and he's basing his platform on that, so you can't just say the media is
misrepresenting him)

Anyway regardless, I don't want to get to an extended discussion with you, as
you seem deeply entrenched with your views.

~~~
jister
I agree, further discussion will not yield to productivity because you assumed
that you are talking to someone with poor logic in the first place.

------
empath75
I think you'd have to be incredibly naive to think all of those people are
drug dealers, let alone the moral problems with executing people for being
addicts, or the absurdity of banning drugs in the first place.

~~~
paavokoya
Scapegoats are a hell of a drug

~~~
0max
Communism was Marcos'

------
meric
This is how Philippines has chosen to solve it's own societal problems, and is
none of HN's or UN's business. I won't put judgement on it, but Philippine's
people deserve to experience the consequences of their own choices, and not
have other's views foisted onto them.

This is part of the reaction against globalism, and centralisation of power.
Le Pen, Trump, Brexit, Duerte. People, and collections of people have a right
to choose to do things differently from what the rest of the world considers
normal and acceptable.

Those viewing Duerte as a figure who is centralising power in the Philippines
into himself are viewing things upside down. This is a revolt against the
United Nations, against "human rights agreements" between countries, against
focusing on appearance of being good to the rest of the world. This is the
pendulum swinging from globalism back to nationalism. This is a nation whose
people is choosing the method to solve it's own problems, ignoring what we
think of it, and we have no right to intervene.

Countries must be allowed to make their own choices. Their nationalistic
tendencies must be protected. Things must exist separately, before they can be
together. Without this separateness, and expecting every country to become
globalised and be governed in the same way, like food in a giant blender, it's
called narcissism.

Stop viewing things from your own lens.

Stop trying to look good to yourself. Cast political correctness away. Focus
on the actual underlying reality.

~~~
int_19h
The problem is that some (perhaps many) of those people did _not_ make that
choice, but still have to suffer the consequences imposed on them by the
majority that did. And when you say that it's not our business to intervene
into their internal matters, or even judge them, you completely ignore those
people.

Rights of the collective do not trump rights of individuals.

~~~
meric
So is that the logic we use to impose the ideas of the majority of the rest of
the world on Philippines? Is oppression by majority solved by more oppression
by a bigger majority? What kind of logic is that?

~~~
int_19h
>> So is that the logic we use to impose the ideas of the majority of the rest
of the world on Philippines? Is oppression by majority solved by more
oppression by a bigger majority? What kind of logic is that?

Pretty straightforward logic, actually. If the entirety of my oppression of
you is preventing you from oppressing someone else, that is the right and
proper kind of oppression. There's direct analogy here with the use of
violence in self-defense: violence initiated by the attacker is bad, violence
used by the victim or a third party in defense of the victim is good.

In reality, it's often not so simple, but you can still rank the parties on
who is "more right", and whose oppression is more justified, so to speak.

So yeah, sometimes you need the majority to oppress the hell out of some
smaller majority to make them behave. Good examples include US Civil War, WW2,
and the use of National Guard in US to impose federal desegregation laws
during the Civil Rights Era. A good example of a failure to do so, and its
moral consequences, is the Rwandan genocide.

Now, this all was a hypothetical - I'm not saying that an invasion of the
Philippines would be justified on these grounds. Of course not! But what
they're doing certainly justifies, at the very least, a condemnation - and it
would be immoral to _not_ judge. Same exact kind of immoral as turning away
and muttering "not my business" or "she might deserve it anyway" when your
neighbor is beating his wife.

~~~
meric
The 'oppressed' we are talking about are meth dealers who have spread the drug
such that up to 30% of those who live in slums have become addicts. Entire
communities destroyed. Filipinos follow your exact same logic, decide the
behaviour of these drug dealers is unjustified and must be stopped at all
costs. Who am I to judge whether killing these drug dealers is right, or is
not right? Meth has not affected my family but it has destroyed theirs! And
likewise, if you are the general of a foreign army and do decide to invade
them to stop it, who am I to judge you for trying to prevent death of
innocents? In both cases I will observe, and if you are in my community, which
you are, I will give you my perspective and my advice, but I will never
intervene. I will not support or intervene Filipinos efforts to save their
communities, nor your hypothetical efforts to invade them. It is my business
to advise only so much because we and other commenters are in the same
community.

I think that is our moral difference and if you would judge me for it, I will
accept it graciously.

~~~
int_19h
It appears that you have completely missed the point of all the complaints.
The oppressed that we're talking about are not drug dealres - they're people
_accused_ of being drug dealers, which may be right or wrong, but either way
we will never know if they're just murdered in cold blood without having their
time in the court of law. Rule of law exists for a reason, and part of that
reason is to protect the innocent who inevitably end up targeted by vigilantes
in witch hunts. In many cases, the witch hunts spiral out of control to such
an extent that most people are innocent (of what they're accused of, anyway),
simply because it becomes a cheap and easy way to settle scores.

Another point that I'd like to make, is that you talk about communities. But,
who draws the lines? There's a community of Filipinos, true - but who decides
who is the member, and does being a member of that community automatically
excludes one from other communities? I would dare say that it does not; and if
so, why should that other membership be ignored? I mean, ultimately, we are
all members of one community called "people", spanning the entire globe;
everything else is a subdivision of that. So, if it's common membership that
you believe to give the moral justification to judge, and possibly intervene,
then it is membership in that community that I will claim as my justification
to do so.

~~~
meric
For me, the membership of the community means you can talk to them directly.
And even if we'e in the same community, I will never judge, and never
intervene, unless you're directly harming another member of my community. I do
not talk to the people in the slums, we're not in the same community. I talk
to you, we're in the same one.

I hold no judgement on what's happening in Philippines, just as I cannot think
of intervening in U.S., or judge U.S. citizens, where prisons where millions,
a significant fraction of them innocent, are incarcerated in horrific
conditions I could never imagine myself to be in.

Rule of law is an invention, sometimes it has force, sometimes it doesn't,
sometimes it changes.

That is my moral framework.

------
gexla
The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the
national office. And this was already happening throughout the country. It's
sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone off for
PHP 10K.

I'm guessing that a lot of these killings are sort of cover for other issues.
This person is a drug user, but also owes the wrong people a lot of money.
It's just an expansion of targets for people who were already employed in the
industry. Business is getting good.

I don't know if there is any real strategy here since the president was
already doing this as mayor of Davao and this sort of became a platform to run
on. Another platform was to fight corruption, a major problem in the
Philippines.

As you can see from the list, there are a lot of public officials allegedly
involved in the drug trade. Perhaps the drug war is the first push against
corruption. You work to seriously constrain the availability of drugs due to
fear among dealers and users and that cuts off the supply of money to the top.
At the same time you hit the top through your intelligence sources. Drug
related corruption gets squeezed from both sides. As this is the more brutal
stage, the fear of being involved in corruption spreads to non-drug related
corruption.

~~~
hackuser
> It's sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone off
> for PHP 10K.

That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there
something to back that up?

> The president was already doing this in Davao before being elected to the
> national office. And this was already happening throughout the country

I've read the former many times, but never the latter.

> Perhaps the drug war is the first push against corruption.

I don't see how murder, a refusal to punish murderers, and the effective
elimination of rule of law and the judiciary is going to stop corruption. It's
the worst possible corruption, and it's a fantasy that the person perpetrating
this policy is somehow going to be otherwise honest, or that society, without
these critical institutions, will be better able to deal with corruption.

It's ok to kill people, just don't embezzle any money?

There's also the minor problem of the complete disregard for individual life
and liberty, which is harming a huge number of people.

~~~
hawkice
>> It's sort of an open secret that in the Philippines you can bump someone
off for PHP 10K.

> That's a pretty strong claim (as are many other statements). Is there
> something to back that up?

That's about $215 US, for the record. From the time I spent in Davao back when
Duterte was mayor: no one I met was afraid of any crime, certainly not some
weird public assassination market. The only people that you'd ever have to
worry about were police, and that was only if you were a criminal yourself.

That being said, that was back when he was a somewhat crazy mayor and not
President. So maybe there's been a shift in the politics and perception of
these things? I can say the city was tremendously livable and while there was
some anxiety about him and the extrajudicial killings, it was offset by
dramatically reduced worries about normal crime for everyone I spoke to about
it (which says a lot, I think -- WHAT it says is a bit more complicated).

~~~
hackuser
> that was only if you were a criminal yourself

Who says who is a criminal? Are Filipino police somehow far more gifted than
those elsewhere and are completely non-corrupt (never using their powers for
other than justice), and never arrest the wrong person?

It's safe as long as you are not the one getting killed. Mussolini, Hitler and
Stalin offered similar security.

~~~
hawkice
I was speaking to the nature of their anxiety, not the probability they'd be
killed or by whom. I was also trying to describe their perceptions, not the
objective state of affairs. I think you'll find your comment to be oddly
hostile and non-responsive.

~~~
hackuser
While I don't agree with your characterization of your prior comment (at least
as it was written, of course I don't know your intent), I'm sorry you felt my
response was hostile; that's not what I meant to convey.

------
honksillet
The hope is that this will be a system shock that will expunge the crime and
corruption that plagues this country. It's probably wishful thinking that
after all this that normal rule of law will be easily established. The
pendulum always swings too far. There will be a hangover.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
That's always the hope. This vigilantism is a symptom of decades of rotting
institutions.

Maybe a fraction of this wave of violence's victims were guilty of _bona fide_
crimes. But most were politically-convenient targets. I don't know of a single
country, in history, that recovered from a similar event inside two
generations.

Revolution would have been more productive.

~~~
hackuser
> This vigilantism is a symptom of decades of rotting institutions

The institutions have been growing stronger for decades, I think. It's a slow
process, but democracy only began 30 years ago and has been progressing since
then.

------
Secretmapper
The Philippines love authoritarian figures. The son of Ferdinand Marcos
(dictator who instated martial law, under which the country was plunged into a
climate of repression and plunder), Bong Bong Marcos almost won the vice
presidency with a 0.64 percent difference.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounty_hunter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounty_hunter)

