Duterte said his country hadn’t received an apology for alleged misdeeds committed during the USA colonization of the Philippines in the 1900s and blamed the United States for causing the unrest on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.
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In a statement read by his spokesman, Duterte said his “strong comments” in response to questions by a reporter “elicited concern and distress, we also regret it came across as a personal attack on the USA president”.
He also said Obama would likely hold an informal discussion with Duterte in Laos on Wednesday or Thursday, though formal talks remained off the table.
The outburst was a result of Duterte’s war on drugs, which has resulted in 2,400 deaths in just over two months.
The White House had earlier said Obama would not pull any punches on his concerns about human rights abuses in the Philippines when meeting Duterte. Following the cancellation of the meeting, President Duterte said on Tuesday that he regretted his comments about President Obama. China has urged South Korea and the U.S.to scrap the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD, saying it is merely meant to spy on the China.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will reach Laos capital Vientiane tomorrow to attend the 14th Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN-India Summit.
President Barack Obama says the USA commitments to the Asia-Pacific region will endure over the long term.
Obama’s aides announced that his planned meeting with Duterte on Tuesday afternoon had been called off following a fresh tirade by the Filipino leader the previous day.
Over the last 20 years, the United States has contributed over 100 million dollars to support unexploded ordnance clearance programmes, which have helped reduce casualties from over 300 per year to fewer than 50.
Earlier in the day, under pouring rain, the first U.S. president to hail from the post-Vietnam war generation met his Laos counterpart Bounnhang Vorachith – a former revolutionary of the communist Pathet Lao movement that successfully faced down his predecessors’ bombing campaigns.
Laos is the final Asian visit of Obama’s eight-year presidency, during which he has sought to refocus American military, political and economic resources on the region.
The comments came after a journalist asked Duterte how he would explain the Philippines’s use of extrajudicial killings.
The official noted that Duterte was new to national leadership having served as a city mayor.
He lambasted the United Nations after it criticised the surge in killings and he turned down a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at the Laos summit.
Duterte in a November 2015 speech recalling being stuck in Manila traffic when Pope Francis visited the Philippines.
They are vestiges of the Vietnam War, which spread to Laos and still plagues the country to this day. China claims most of the South China Sea, through which more than $5 trillion of trade moves annually.
The 10-nation ASEAN comprises Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
China sparked widespread alarm when it converted seven reefs in the Spratly Islands into islands that the United States says could be transformed into military bases to reinforce Beijing’s territorial claims and intimidate rival claimant countries.
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The Philippines has been central in this effort due to an global court case it brought and won against Beijing.
