President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo will welcome the newly elected Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte at the State Palace on Friday for his first state visit to Jakarta.
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Indonesia’s anti-drugs chief has supported implementing a bloody crackdown on traffickers like the war on crime in the Philippines that has left nearly 3,000 dead.
Despite widespread criticism on the Philippines’ campaign against drugs, Waseso admired Duterte’s tactic enough to want to adapt it in Indonesia’s own fight against drug crimes in the predominantly Muslim country.
According to the BBC, the Indonesian anti-drug czar said that the life of a drug dealer is “meaningless because [he] carries out mass murder”, adding that he believed Indonesia should be aggressive like the Philippines in pursuing drug offenders. “How can we respect that?” Waseso also added that they are adding investigators to help ramp up their anti-drug campaign efforts. “Do not just throw questions”, Duterte said of Obama. “We have to follow the rules”.
But he acknowledged that Waseso was “strict” and had told staff members that “we should not keep our guns in a safe, we must use them – but only for law enforcement”.
Human rights workers in the region roundly condemned Waseso’s comments.
RU Recovery Ministries says it has been invited to replicate its drug addiction recovery program now used in more than 1000 chapters for use in the Philippines.
But Gloria Lai, senior policy officer at the International Drug Policy Consortium, told Southeast Asia Globe that she was “not anxious yet” that Waseso’s ideas would come to fruition.
INDONESIA is looking to emulate the Philippine government’s ongoing war on drugs with plans by the republic beef up its police force with additional manpower and heavy weaponry.
Last November, Agence France-Presse reported that Waseso proposed to hold death row inmates convicted on drug-related charges on an island guarded by crocodiles.
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Lai said that extrajudicial killings such as those carried out in the Philippines were unlikely to spread throughout Southeast Asia.
