PRESIDENT Duterte said on Monday the US Special Forces in Mindanao must leave because they will only worsen the security situation there.
“The US Special Forces, they have to go. They have to leave Mindanao. There are many of them there,” Mr. Duterte said in a speech during a mass oath-taking ceremony in Malacañang on September 12.
He said he did not raise the issue of kicking out the US military forces in Mindanao during the Leaders’ Summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in Lao PDR last week where US President Barack Obama was one of the participants, because he did not want to cause any more rifts with the US.
“I just could not say it at the Asean Summit because I don’t want a rift with America. The situation in Mindanao will be more volatile. If they are seen there, they will really be killed,” he said.
However, during the Asean Summit last week, Mr. Duterte and his Cabinet maintained their stand against the “interference” of the US in the government’s war against drugs, and said the US does not have the “moral ascendancy” to ask any country to observe human rights. During one of the closed-door meetings of heads of state at the said Asean Summit, President Duterte showed photographs of the massacre of the Moro people by US soldiers during the US occupation of the Philippines.
Presidential Communications Secretary Martin M. Andanar confirmed that Mr. Duterte, indeed, showed the pictures of the massacre of the Moro people in 1906 during the American occupation of the Philippines when he spoke in a closed-door meeting before his fellow heads of state, including Obama, at the Asean Summit.
Andanar said the photos were always carried around by Special Assistant to the President Christopher “Bong” Go.
Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador S. Panelo said he approached Obama and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon during the Asean Summit last week to defend the Philippines’s war against drugs.
“I told him what the President had been saying that he did not insult any person, especially the President of the US. But he said that he would pursue an independent foreign policy and that he would find ways to stop all kinds of illegality, criminality, the drug menace and terrorism,” Panelo said.