They’ve been killing people here for the past three months.
The sober-minded plead for a return to sanity while the shrill continue their defense of President Duterte.
After an earlier collective silence from the public over all the summary killings, now comes a growing sentiment that the country may be going in the wrong direction. There’s a burgeoning alarm that the new government may be drastically taking the country to a new would-be reality that is not all to the benefit of all of us.
Mr. Duterte has been an activist leader from the time the 2016 election results ratified his victory. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
But, it’s becoming clear, the President is being too much of an activist. He wants to do too many things too quickly, like an old man in a hurry. And that’s especially true with his desire to eliminate the drug menace in the country.
The police put into action their so-called war on drugs in a willy-nilly way, lacking any systematic thought and planning. As soon as Duterte got elected president, the killing machine got revved up and boom! in a couple of weeks scores of suspected drug pushers and users were dead. And it continues.
What they should have done was to have a solid plan among the police to first train their elements to arrest suspects instead of killing them outright.
To use a favorite line of the President: “Wag na tayo magbulahan,” the police’s line about suspects fighting back is simply suspicious. There have been reports some people were killed while sleeping. How is that fighting back?
The next thing they should have done was to build rehab centers to detoxify and counsel drug users, and provide them livelihood opportunities.
But they didn’t do that because they didn’t intend to capture pushers and users. It was more convenient and quick to just kill them.
And, finally, why concentrate the police drive on small-time pushers and users? Why not go after big-time suppliers?
The President says the drug lords are all in China. The suppliers may be in China, but surely they have big-time conduits here in the Philippines, the local drug lords, as it were. Why haven’t the police apprehended, or killed as is their wont, any big-time suppliers and conduits here?
Police Chief Ronald dela Rosa went to Colombia to learn how to stop the drug trade. He went to the wrong country because reports say the Colombian government’s own brutal war on drugs was a failure. As was Thailand’s. The war on drugs will never succeed unless the supply is cut off. Supply is the problem. Without any supply there will not be a market.
More than 3,500 people have been killed in three months. A lot of people here are alarmed by the death toll. Foreign leaders and organizations are also alarmed. US President Barack Obama, the UN’s Ban Ki Moon, the European Union, among others, have expressed concern.
But many Filipinos, Mr. Duterte’s admirers, don’t seem bothered by the carnage so far. Let them wrestle with their consciences and their sense of fair play.
But many other Filipinos are concerned. That is becoming clear more and more in statements coming out in mainstream and social media. There is a clangorous debate going on in social media even as you’re reading this.
That’s where the sober and the shrill are fighting it out. The sober-minded are pleading with the government to review its approach to fighting crime. The shrill are applauding the President’s tactics.
At the moment, the President is unperturbed by the killings and he wants to do more, Hitler-style, which should give every law-abiding citizen the shivers. Duterte has said he will be glad to “slaughter” three million drug addicts.
I join the ones pleading with the President. Please revisit the method of fighting the drug menace and do it by the book. Due process is important.
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