Body Count Rises as Philippine President Wages War on Drugs
By JASON GUTIERREZ, AUG. 2, 2016

MANILA — Since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines
just over a month ago, promising to get tough on crime by having
the police and the military kill drug suspects, 420 people have
been killed in the campaign, according to tallies of police reports
by the local news media.

Most were killed in confrontations with the police, while 154 were
killed by unidentified vigilantes. This has prompted 114,833 people
to turn themselves in, as either drug addicts or dealers, since Mr.
Duterte took office, according to national police logs.

Addressing Congress last week in his first State of the Nation
address, Mr. Duterte reiterated his take-no-prisoners approach,
ordering the police to “triple” their efforts against crime.

“We will not stop until the last drug lord, the last financier and
the last pusher have surrendered or been put behind bars or below
the ground, if they so wish,” he said.

But human rights groups, Roman Catholic activists and the families
of many of those killed during the crackdown say that the vast
majority were poor Filipinos, many of whom had nothing to do with
the drug trade. They were not accorded an accusation and a trial,
but were simply shot down in the streets, the critics say.

“These are not the wealthy and powerful drug lords who actually
have meaningful control over supply of drugs on the streets in
the Philippines,” said Phelim Kine, a deputy director of Human
Rights Watch in Asia.

“We’re small people, insignificant.”

Critics of the president’s campaign have rallied around the case
of Michael Siaron, a 29-year-old rickshaw driver in Manila, who
was shot one night by unidentified gunmen as he pedaled his vehicle
in search of a passenger. When his wife rushed to the scene, a
photographer took a picture of her cradling his body in the street,
and the photograph quickly gained wide attention.

Scribbled in block letters on a cardboard sign left near his body
was the word “pusher.” His family members insist that he was not
involved in the drug trade, though they said he sometimes used meth.

Indirectly acknowledging criticism that his policies trample over
the standard judicial process, Mr. Duterte said that human rights
“cannot be used as a shield to destroy the country.”

He has called for drug users and sellers to turn themselves in or
risk being hunted down, a threat backed up by the bodies piling up
near daily on the streets of Philippine cities.

The approach appears to be driving down crime: The police say that
they have arrested more than 2,700 people on charges related to
using or selling illegal drugs, and that crime nationwide has
fallen 13 percent since the election, to 46,600 reported crimes in
June, from 52,950 in May.

Mr. Duterte’s crackdown has been hugely popular. Filipinos, pummeled
by years of violent crime and corrupt, ineffective law enforcement,
handed him an overwhelming victory in the May presidential election,
and have largely embraced his approach.

[Photo]
Former addicts and dealers took an oath last month, promising not
to use or sell drugs, in Tanauan, south of Manila, as part of a
government campaign. Credit Erik De Castro/Reuters

A national opinion poll conducted after his election and just before
he took office found that 84% of Filipinos had “much trust” in him.

The model for Mr. Duterte’s policies is Davao City, where he was
mayor for most of the past 20 years. Draconian laws there, including
a strict curfew & a smoking ban as well as a zero-tolerance approach
to drug users and sellers, have been credited with turning the city
into an oasis of safety in a region plagued by violence.

The dark side of that approach was that more than 1,000 people were
killed by govt-sanctioned death squads during his administration,
according to several independent investigations.

Mr. Duterte has denied having direct knowledge of death squads, but
he has long called for addressing crime by killing suspects, whom
he calls criminals and has referred to as “a legitimate target of assassination.”

He has repeatedly said that those hooked on meth, the most popular
drug here, were beyond saving or rehabilitation.

He ran for president largely on the pledge of applying the same
policies nationwide, promising to kill 100,000 criminals in his first
six months in office. While the number may have been typical Duterte
bravado, the threat of mass killing appears to have been real.

On Tuesday, the International Drug Policy Consortium, a network of nongovernmental organizations, issued a letter urging the United
Nations drug control agencies “to demand an end to the atrocities
currently taking place in the Philippines” & to state unequivocally
that extrajudicial killings “do not constitute acceptable drug
control measures.”

Ramon Casiple, a political analyst at the Institute for Political &
Electoral Reform, said that he shared those concerns but that it was
too early to decide whether Mr. Duterte’s approach is effective.
“Let’s give him his 100 days,” Mr. Casiple said.

Mr. Duterte has recently raised his sights beyond street-level users
& dealers, accusing five police generals of protecting drug lords,
though he presented no specific evidence.

He also publicly accused a mayor, the mayor’s son & a prominent
businessman of drug trafficking, threatening their lives if they
did not surrender.

But the people killed on the street tend to be more like Mr. Siaron,
the rickshaw driver. Mr. Siaron lived with his wife in a shack
above a garbage-strewn creek. Having never finished high school,
he survived on odd jobs like house painting & working in fast-food
restaurants. Lately he had been pedaling a rickshaw, earning about
$2 a day ferrying passengers though the warren of alleyways in a
run-down part of metropolitan Manila. On the night he died, he had
stopped by his father’s fruit stand to ask for an apple. Then he told
his father he would seek one more fare before heading home. As he
rode off, gunmen on motorcycles sped by, pumping several bullets
into him. What happened next turned him into a national symbol of
the human toll of Mr. Duterte’s war. When she heard he had been shot,
Mr. Siaron’s wife, Jennilyn Olayres, ran into the street, burst thru
police lines & collapsed next to him on the asphalt. The photographer
snapped the picture: a distraught woman cradling her lifeless husband
under a streetlight, a Pietà of the Manila slums.

The police have not commented publicly about the case and have not
accused Mr. Siaron of selling drugs. “My husband was a simple man,”
Ms. Olayres said at his wake several days later. “He may have used
drugs, but he was not violent and never bothered anyone. His only
concern was looking for passengers so we can eat three meals a day.”

During his speech to Congress, Mr. Duterte dismissed the photo, which
had appeared on the front page of The Philippine Daily Inquirer the
previous day under the banner headline “Thou shall not kill.”

“There you are sprawled on the ground, and you are portrayed in a
broadsheet like Mother Mary cradling the dead cadaver of Jesus
Christ,” he said. “That’s just drama.”

But if the antidrug campaign has targeted people on the margins of
society, Mr. Siaron is an apt symbol. “We’re small people,
insignificant,” Ms. Olayres said through sobs as she stood next to
her husband’s coffin. “We may be invisible to you, but we are real.
Please stop the killings.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/asia/philippines-duterte-drug-killing.html

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)