Monday’s diplomatic dustup between the USA and the Philippines was over nearly before it began, after newly elected Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte quickly apologized for calling President Barack Obama a “son of a b***h”.
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“We look forward to ironing out differences arising out of national priorities and perceptions”, the statement released on Tuesday said.
Duterte, who had been expecting Obama to criticize his deadly, extrajudicial crackdown on drug dealers, later said he regretted the personal attack on the president.
“Who does he think he is? Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum”, Duterte told reporters on Monday when asked about his message for Obama.
Obama, who became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Laos, admitted during a speech on Tuesday that America’s secret bombing campaign against Laos obliterated the country and killed thousands of people. “Son of a b****, I will swear at you”.
Duterte and Obama were scheduled to meet for the first time Tuesday on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summits in the Laotian capital to discuss strengthening their alliance against Beijing’s expansionism in the South China Sea.
VIENTIANE, Laos Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte defiantly reaffirmed his controversial campaign against drugs Tuesday and called for a redoubling of crime-fighting efforts across Southeast Asia as he prepared to face two prominent critics of his policy: President Barack Obama and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. “If you make me mad, in all honesty, I will eat you alive, raw…” “Everybody has a awful record of extrajudicial killings”. “That whole conversation enables individual countries, whether it’s the Philippines or someone else, to stand up and say ‘There’s no moral high ground for the United States anymore. I’m not kidding”, Duterte said, as cited by AFP. “If (Obama) can answer that question and give the apology, I will answer him”.
Duterte has bristled at criticism over his “war on drugs”, which has killed 2,400 people since he took office in June, and on Monday said it would be “rude” for Obama to raise the question of human rights when they met.
“Yet since then, the USA government failed to fully explain to me how come they violated our sovereign right to prosecute Meiring who committed a crime here in our city”, Duterte said in an interview with CNN in 2011.
In an interview with al Jazeera last month, presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella admitted the job of constantly defending Duterte is a tough one, but also said some of the president’s most offensive remarks sound so aggressive because of translation difficulties.
“There’s enormous concern about what the rise of Donald Trump means for both continued USA prestige in the world and also United States willingness to engage and to play that role”, Glasser says.
The president, affectionately known to many Filipinos as “Rody”, also noted that 600,000 Muslim Filipinos, or Moros, were killed by USA military personnel during the pacification campaign that took place prior to the US withdrawal from the island.
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Police say about 900 of those killed died in police operations, and the rest were “deaths under investigation”, a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
