Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a profanity-filled tirade against the European Union, in his latest riposte to worldwide criticism of the rising death toll in his brutal crackdown on crime.
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Reacting to the European Union condemnation of his reportedly violent war on drugs on Tuesday, Duterte used obscenities and said the European Union was criticizing the Philippines to atone for its sins.
Describing the European Union as hypocrites, he said that a look at history books will reveal the atrocities that European Union member countries committed.
The report from Inquirer.net added that the President also called EU hypocrites, adding that a check of encyclopedias would show what European countries like France and Great Britain had done.
“President Duterte repeatedly urged law enforcement agencies and the public to kill suspected drug traffickers who did not surrender, as well as drug users”, the Parliament said in a resolution.
Duterte, who campaigned on the promise of putting an end to the country’s drug problem and vowed to kill 100,000 criminals in his first six months in office, is not a subscriber of diplomatic niceties.
“I did not realise how severe and how serious the drug menace was in this republic until I became president”, Mr Duterte told reporters. “I can’t forgive the people who fabricated evidence against me”.
“I repeat it – f*** you”, he said on Tuesday evening, flashing the finger at cameras to emphasise his point. “Criminals. You call that genocide”, he said.
Senate Majority Leader Vicente Sotto III said on Monday President Rodrigo R. Duterte should not be pressured if he fails to finish the war against drug within the period he promised during the election campaign.
European Union officials expressed concern last week over the “extraordinarily high numbers killed” during Duterte’s first months in office.
United States ambassador to the Philippines, Philip Goldberg, has been called a “gay son of a whore”, accused of meddling in the elections. He warned U.S. President Barack Obama against interfering, unleashing an obscenity-filled tirade that prompted Obama to scrap a meeting with him planned for the sidelines of a regional summit this month.
Duterte, whose bloody campaign on drugs has drawn the ire of worldwide communities, on Tuesday used the “F” word not once but twice when commenting on the European body expressing concerns over his government’s hardline stance.
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Mr Duterte has also been swift to attack his critics at home, including Leila de Lima, the chair of a Senate hearing that last week heard the evidence of a self-confessed hit-man who alleged the president had ordered killings when he was mayor of Davao.
