THE reported scrapping of the sale of 26,000 brand-new assault rifles by the US to the Philippines is just the first in a series of moves that Washington may undertake to punish the Duterte administration for its alleged state-sponsored human-rights violations.
This possibility was raised on Wednesday by Phelim Kine, deputy director of the Asia Division of Human Rights Watch (HRW), who had clashed with Duterte when he was still mayor of Davao City and even during the campaign for the May 9 presidential election.
Kine’s comment comes as the US State Department suspended the sale of the assault rifles to the National Police (PNP) after Sen. Ben Cardin, a senior Democrat member of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed reservations that the weapons would be used for a bloody anti-drug campaign unleashed as soon as President Duterte took power on June 30.
Kine said: “Cardin opposed the deal due to concerns about human-rights violations in the Philippines. That’s well-justified, as the police are deeply implicated in President Rodrigo Duterte’s abusive ‘war on drugs’, which has resulted in the deaths of nearly 5,000 Filipinos since he took office in June.
“The PNP’s own data indicate that the campaign resulted in the police killing at least 1,736 ‘suspected drug personalities’ between July 1 and October 28. That’s more than twentyfold the 68 recorded between January 1 and June 15.”
Kine has been Duterte’s nemesis for years since he released reports about the Davao Death Squad (DDS) and the murder gangs in cities of Tagum and Digos.
The PNP has admitted that 3,001 alleged drug users and dealers were killed from July to October by “unidentified gunmen,” including children aged 4 and 5 and a 17-year-old girl toting a Barbie doll.
It also confirmed that the police shot and killed suspects who “resisted arrest and shot at police officers,” but no evidence has been produced to prove that lawmen acted in self-defense.
All that the PNP chief Director General Ronald M. de la Rosa could say is that the police killings prove that law enforcers use an “uncompromising approach” to drug crimes.
“The State Department’s decision is the first real US move to put teeth in its criticism of the spiraling death toll of Duterte’s ‘antidrug war’. And it’s hit the police where it hurts: De la Rosa has said it ‘has a huge effect’ on police efforts to expand their arsenal. But he can’t say that he didn’t see it coming. Senator Cardin castigated the abuses linked to Duterte’s antidrug campaign during a September 26 Senate colloquy as ‘systematic, wide-spread, brutal and beyond the bounds for a constitutional democracy,” Kine added.
The HRW leader added that US Sen. Patrick Leahy warned of possible “further conditions on assistance to the Duterte administration to ensure that US taxpayer funds are properly spent and until that government demonstrates a commitment to the rule of law.”
“Duterte and de la Rosa are now on notice that the blood-letting they have encouraged carries a cost with its longtime ally. And that other US funding to the Philippines’s police, including $41-million in State Department aid for counternarcotics and law enforcement programs for 2017 and $32 million in assistance pledged by US Secretary of State John Kerry in July, may be at risk, unless they stop the killings and honor their government’s obligation to defend, rather than abuse, the rights of Filipinos,” Kine also said.