THE New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has urged the United Nations to lead an independent international investigation into the deaths of more than 7,000 people in the course of President Duterte’s “war on drugs”.
HRW pleaded with new UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterrez to take the inquiry seriously since not a single police officer or a member of a vigilante group encouraged by Duterte to eliminate drug users and drug pushers has been arrested or indicted since the new President took power at noon on June 30, 2016.
The group, which has been at loggerheads with Duterte since he was mayor of Davao City for more than two decades, said despite the announced “pause” in the campaign by National Police chief Director General Ronald M. dela Rosa, for “internal cleansing” did not mention anything about the summary executions perpetrated by his underlings.
Worse, the pause became the only option for dela Rosa and Duterte following the confession of some policemen that abducted South Korean businessman Jee Ick Joo was killed by a police executioner on the same day he was snatched on October 2016 and right at the National Police general headquarters in Camp Rafael Crame in Quezon City, about 100 meters from the official residence of dela Rosa.
The murder raised a howl in the large Korean community in the Philippines and in both South Korea and North Korea as the businessman was the subject of an arrest warrant for purportedly being the deputy of a Chinese drug lord.
Phelim Kine, Duterte’s nemesis and HRW deputy Asia director, also scolded Duterte for not apologizing for the hundreds of innocent minors, elderly men and women and even pregnant women who were killed in the course of his antidrug war, with the President brushing their demise as “collateral damage”.
“Since July 1, 2016, more than 7,000 Filipinos have been killed in Duterte’s antidrug campaign. However, not a single police officer is known to have been prosecuted for extrajudicial executions or related crimes. Dela Rosa made clear that the suspension of police operations is temporary and that investigations are to purge police ranks of personnel implicated in the illegal-drugs trade, not provide accountability for unlawful killings. Duterte said in his January 29 overnight news conference that the ‘drug war’ will continue ‘to the last day of my term,’ indicating that the abuses will continue indefinitely,” HRW said.
“Suspending police antidrug operations could reduce the killings, but they won’t stop without a meaningful investigation into the 7,000 deaths already reported,” Kine said. “The Philippine police won’t seriously investigate themselves, so the UN should take the lead in conducting an investigation.”
Policemen have killed 2,551 suspected drug users and dealers in the past seven months and said law enforcers had no other recourse but to shoot since the suspects “resisted arrest and shot at police officers.”
However, the National Police has not provided any piece of evidence to prove that the police acted in self-defense.
“The National Police has failed to investigate or prosecute any personnel responsible for those deaths, despite compelling evidence that some police units are summarily gunning down suspects. Dela Rosa’s announcement also makes no mention of an additional 3,603 killings by ‘unidentified gunmen’ since July 1, despite mounting allegations that ‘death squads’ composed of police personnel operating in civilian clothes, are committing some and, perhaps, many of those killings,” Kine argued.
“The abduction and killing in October of Jee Ick Joo, allegedly by antidrug police officers at National Police headquarters in Quezon City, suggests that police officers are exploiting the ‘drug war’ for corrupt personal gain,” he added.
1 comment
Campaign to save the drug mafia? Why bother for who killed many by selling drugs? Must be very powerful mafia. Even UNO is in its pocket.