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IT is both remarkable and apposite that the first Asian ex-leader to be hauled to The Hague happens to be Rodrigo Duterte. He presided for six years over an extraordinarily brutal regime in the Philippines and before that during his seven terms as mayor of Davao City — a post he has been intending to regain this year.
Instead, he will mark his 80th birthday next week in an International Criminal Court (ICC) detention facility that was once a Nazi prison complex. There’s scope for irony in this juxtaposition, given that soon after he was elected president, Duterte cited the Nazi Judeocide as a justification for why he would be “happy to slaughter” his nation’s “three million drug addicts”.
It hardly needs to be pointed out that mass murder is not only morally reprobate, it’s also never a solution to any perceived societal problem. Duterte never achieved his target, thankfully, but the death squads he sponsored nonetheless managed to kill an estimated 30,000 people. The victims ranged from suspected drug dealers or users to political opponents, journalists and other complete innocents. That figure does not include his previous deadly achievements in Davao, which helped to propel him into national politics.
Not only was the voting public well aware of his alarming transgressions and vile tendencies before he entered the Malacañan Palace in Manila, but six years later, around 90 per cent of Filipinos retained a positive view of Duterte’s presidential term. That should serve as a useful reminder to those who assume that an elected leader anywhere in the world automatically deserves respect.
It’s a rare win for the ICC in unusual circumstances.
Quite apart from the killing spree that has led him to The Hague, Duterte was a prolific abuser of fellow leaders, and made no attempt to disguise his contempt for contemporaries such as Barack Obama and Pope Francis. He tended to extend the disrespect to their mothers too. Once upon a time media reports did not hesitate to more or less spell out his vile terms of abuse. Nowadays they tend to restrict themselves to adjectives such as ‘profane’, without elaborating — which diminishes the amusement.
We know well that the current US president also doesn’t hold back in denigrating his perceived foes, but his verbal abuse isn’t a patch on what the man once described by some as “the Trump of the East” routinely spouts. That’s hardly a hanging offence, of course, but an addiction to violent speech reflects a disturbed mind. It seems to run in the family in the case of the Dutertes.
Rodrigo’s political ascendancy in Davao was facilitated by the ‘people power’ uprising spearheaded by Corazón Aquino, but as president he was happy to facilitate the rehabilitation of the Marcos family — the widow and offspring of the military dictator overthrown in 1986 — and ultimately endorsed a political marriage of convenience between the two political dynasties. His daughter Sara, herself a Davao mayor, was picked as a running mate for presidential candidate Ferdinand Marcos Jr, and the result was a landslide for the son of a deplorable dictator and the daughter of a disgraceful autocrat.
It fell apart pretty quickly, leading to mutual death threats. Sara Duterte was impeached last month, and a conviction would drown her chances of a predicted presidential run in 2028. But that can hardly serve as a sufficient source of relief in a country where the democratic experiment has lapsed into infighting between rival elites amid escalating political dysfunction and economic disarray. The Aquino ascendancy in the 1980s was once seen as a template for the return of the Bhuttos, but current comparisons betwe-en Pakistan and the Philippines would be a lot less reassuring.
Marcos Jr had initially indicated that Manila would not cooperate with the ICC in the human rights case it was building agai-nst Rodrigo Duterte, but then changed his mind.
The Philippines quit the ICC in 2019, but the court argues that it still has jurisdiction over crimes committed until that exit, and used an Interpol warrant to capture the unrepentant culprit last week.
In principle, the idea of making someone like Duterte pay for his plethora of sins is appealing, although when or whether that might occur remains up in the air. But let’s not forget that he’ll find himself in the dock at The Hague as a direct consequence of political antagonism at the domestic level, alongside geopolitical machinations whereby the Marcos government has once more aligned itself too closely with the US dismissing the Dutertes as ‘Chinese lackeys’.
The ICC’s track record in holding deviant leaders to account for human rights abuses is only mildly encouraging; no one seriously expects its warrants against Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu to be actioned, even as the latter resumes the mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza after a brief and troubled respite.
Published in Dawn, March 19th, 2025
