“Lahat. Military, police, nakadikit diyan sa mga ito, I give you 24 hours to report to your mother unit or I will whack you”.
Advertisement
In his speech, Duterte said there were as many as 600,000 people connected to the drug trade in the country, including both dealers and users, and blamed the high number on the complicity of “government personnel” who are “into the (illegal drug trade)”.
Duterte read a list of those he said “destroy the country” during a visit to an army base in his hometown Davao city.
Majority were killed by police allegedly because they fought back when arrested, while others were suspected of having been killed by vigilante groups or rival drug gangs.
Duterte said Espinosa was lucky to have surrendered.
He said the military and police had compiled the list which he insisted was not coloured by politics or personal links, adding that some of those named were even his friends.
Across the world, atrocious, inhumane and severe responses have been undertaken in the name of drug control, from mass incarceration of people who sell or use drugs; to destruction of livelihoods and the environment from aerial fumigation of illicit crops; to militarization and accompanying human rights abuses in the name of the war on drugs; to cruel, degrading and involuntary treatment.
In a statement, Presidential Spokesman Ernesto Abella said the president’s order on narco-politicians “is congruent with government policy on maintaining and protecting peace and order in the nation”.
Some of those named have since come out in radio and television and denied their guilt.
About 800 people have been killed since Rodrigo Duterte won a landslide election in May 2016, according to reports by Philippine local press.
Mr Duterte acknowledged abuses in his “war on drugs” but ignored a call by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to halt extrajudicial killings, which said they are “a breach of fundamental rights and freedoms”. “Look at what you’re doing to the Philippines and I’ll forgive you?” he asked rhetorically after visiting a police chief shot in the chest by a suspected drug dealer and rushed to hospital.
However, the head of the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines made an emotional appeal to the public to denounce the wave of drug killings. During his tenure, he made a name for himself by dramatically reducing the city’s violent crime rates, making it safe for global business.
“I am a human being”.
In June, UN chief Ban Ki-moon strongly condemned Duterte’s apparent support of extrajudicial killings.
Advertisement
Duterte’s centrepiece anti-crime drive, focused on an ambitious campaign promise to end the widespread drugs problem in six months, has left more than 400 drug suspects dead, many of them either in firefights with police or under suspect circumstances.
