During the summit, the world leaders will review the progress of implementation of the ASEAN Community Blueprints 2025. The White House then said Obama might speak with Duterte informally.
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Duterte was answering a reporter’s question about how he meant to explain the extrajudicial killings to Obama, before boarding a plane to Laos for the summit. “There’s a protocol for that”, Duterte said.
USA president Barack Obama on Wednesday met a survivor maimed by American bombs covertly dropped on Laos decades ago after pledging to help clean up a country he said was still living in the shadow of war. “You are a garrison pretending to be a country'”.
But by Tuesday, he had done a complete U-turn in the tone of his statement.
“We look forward to ironing out differences arising out of national priorities and perceptions, and working in mutually responsible ways for both countries”, his statement said. At least 2,400 people have been killed since he took office on July 1, including 900 in police operations against drug pushers.
As president, Duterte brings a long-blemished rights record into the 10-nation ASEAN bloc, which has struggled with internal strife due to its unwieldy collective of dictatorships, authoritarian states, a monarchy and fledgling democracies since its founding almost half a century ago as an Asian bulwark against communism. You must be respectful.
Duterte won the presidency in May as he promised to suppress crime and wipe out drugs and drug dealers. Do not just throw questions.
Speaking to a reporter, the president also exclaimed “putang ina” – a Tagalog phrase that roughly translates to “son of a whore”, but is often used in a manner equivalent to “crap” or “shit” in a manner similar to the Spanish phrase hijo de puta.
In the few months since the election campaign and more than two months into the presidency, Duterte has cursed the pope, the United Nations secretary-general and gotten into verbal tussles with the revered Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines.
Upon arrival at the airport, Obama shook hands with the officials who were on hand to greet him. Duterte said, adding that the Philippines had not received an apology from the United States for misdeeds committed during its colonization of the country.
As a part of his answer to the reporter’s question, Duterte also pointed to the killing of Muslim Moros during a USA campaign in the southern Philippines, blaming the wounds of the past as “the reason why (the south) continues to boil” with separatist insurgencies. He can rely on these leaders to lend him a sympathetic ear for “his grotesque justifications of abuse of rule of law and state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence as the price of a “secure” society”, he said.
He has also taken on a more conciliatory position with US rival China.
The Philippines has expressed concern about Beijing’s massive island-building over reefs, some of them claimed by Manila, in the South China Sea.
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“An invaluable occasion to have our leaders meet for the objective of discussing how to strengthen our comprehensive areas of cooperation would have been a golden opportunity”, del Rosario said. When asked by the Global Times if there are other channels of communication at the ASEAN Summit and related meetings if a bilateral meeting between China and the Philippines is no longer an option, Abella said he is not sure, but there was no scheduled meeting between the two countries.
