At his meeting with the Filipino community in Laos on Monday evening, Duterte said that Ramos had shown him the drug list way before he made a decision to run for presidency last May 9.
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“Instead, he will meet with President Park (Geun-hye) of the Republic of Korea”.
Despite the heavy sanctions, North Korea says the programs are justified because of the threat posed by the US and South Korea.
The U.S. President cancelled the meeting with his Philippine counterpart after the latter appeared to call him a “son of a whore”.
But hours before his arrival, Duterte dropped a diplomatic bombshell by saying he doesn’t want Obama to ask him questions about extrajudicial killings that have occurred amid an ongoing crackdown on drug dealers in the Philippines.
Duterte today expressed regret for the obscenity-laden outburst against Obama and said “it came across as a personal attack”.
“We are going to work diligently together with the most recent United Nations sanctions”, Obama told reporters after meeting with South Korean President Park Geun-hye.
A Philippines official who declined to be named said there would be no formal meeting rescheduled in Laos but a short “pull-aside” conversation between the two presidents was still possible.
Making the first visit for a sitting U.S. president, Obama said too few Americans know of the United States’ covert bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War.
The United States announced on Tuesday it would provide an additional $90 million over the next three years to help Laos clear unexploded ordnance, which have killed or injured more than 20,000 people since war in the 1970s.
The 10-member ASEAN will also meet leaders of other regional powers: China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Russia and the United States.
When Duterte was running for office, he promised a full-out war on drugs.
The Daily Mail has reported that the number of people killed under Mr Duterte’s regime since July 1 has reached to 2,400: about 900 died in police operations, and the rest is “deaths under investigation”, a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
He lambasted the United Nations after it criticized the surge in killings and he turned down a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the Laos summit. “Son of a whore, I will curse you in that forum”.
Obama met with Lao president Bounnhang Vorachit, where he toasted to a relationship he said would mean “greater progress and opportunity for the people of Laos”.
USA officials have also expressed deep concern over the possibility of China developing Scarborough into an island or starting to erect concrete structures there, which could reinforce Beijing’s control over a swath of the South China Sea.
Under Aquino, the Philippines had forged closer military ties with the United States to deal with the China threat. He’s visited the country twice in his second term, and announced on a stop there in November the return of a USA military presence at a critical naval base on the South China Sea.
The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also have competing claims to the strategically vital waters, but have watched China expand its presence by building artificial islands in key locations.
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Duterte has sought to heal ties with China by not pressing an global arbitration court’s July ruling that invalidated Beijing’s vast territorial claims to the strategic waterway.
