In a meeting with the Filipino community in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Friday, Mr. Duterte also confirmed he showed pictures of the killing of Moros in Mindanao in that summit at the close of the annual meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
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Addressing reporters following his week-long worldwide trip to the ASEAN summit in Laos and then to Indonesia, he urged the national media to criticise him for his wrongdoings.
Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who accompanied Duterte in his trip, said that this was how the two presidents met informally in a holding room before attending a gala dinner at the ASEAN Summit.
“I don’t take these comments personally, because it seems as if this is a phrase he’s used repeatedly, directed at the pope and others”, Obama said of the slur.
The two also subtly differed on how to proceed after a UN-backed worldwide tribunal in July outlawed most of China’s claims to the strategic South China Sea, including areas that overlap with those of the Philippines and other neighbours.
“I assured everybody that there are only two options there: We go to fight, which we can not afford at all, or talk”, Duterte added.
Duterte is now on a two-day visit to the country.
Barack Obama briefly met with Philippine leader Rodri days after the Philippine leader branded the US President a “son of a whore”.
“I don’t think the guy’s qualified to be president of the United States”, Mr. Obama said in a press conference early Thursday, shortly before his return to the U.S.
The US and Philippines presidents shook hands at a banquet on Wednesday.
“I said that, but not in relation to Obama, I’m not fighting with America”. Entirely coincidentally, he also missed a United Nations meeting last week after Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon expressed similar worries over the human rights situation in the Philippines. Lawyer to lawyer, we are both lawyers anyway.I said I never made the statement. Over 2,800 people have been killed in this crackdown so far.
Duterte also thanked China for its help in the Philippines’ war against illicit drugs.
Setting aside a prepared speech, Duterte spoke for more than five minutes about human rights and his campaign against drugs during the East Asian Summit in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, according to one Indonesian diplomat at the meeting.
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Duterte’s main campaign promise was to eliminate illegal drugs – a task that he said would be bloody.
