Well, now that the meeting’s off, President Duterte said he regrets that his comments were seen as a personal attack.
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Clinton, the Democratic Party’s nominee for president and Obama’s former Secretary of State, said the U.S. leader was right to cancel the bilateral meeting with the Filipino leader.
National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said the meeting with Mr Duterte was off.
“Our primary intention is to chart an independent foreign policy while promoting closer ties with all nations, especially the USA, with which we have a long standing partnership”, he said in a statement.
The statement from Duterte expressed regrets that his comments had caused “much controversy” and said that he looked forward to “ironing out differences”.
He indicated that a meeting with Obama could prove a testy affair, saying if the US president questioned him “I will curse you in that forum”. The first US president to set foot in Laos while in office, Obama lamented that many Americans remain unaware of the “painful legacy” left behind by a bombardment that claims lives and limbs to this day. Instead, he’ll will meet with South Korean President Park Geun Hye, Price said in a statement.
“I do not have any master except the Filipino people”, Duterte defiantly declared.
“Who is he? I am the president of a sovereign state and we have long ceased to be a colony”, Duterte said.
Declaring a “moral obligation” to heal the wounds of a secret war, President Barack Obama on Tuesday pledged help to clear away the 80 million unexploded bombs the US dropped on Laos a generation ago – more than 10 for every one of the country’s 7 million people.
Image: A man, who admitted to be a drug user, wears an election campaign armband of President-elect Rodrigo Duterte, as he shows a copy of his fingerprints to a police officer (not pictured) at a police camp, after more than 700 people surrendered to policemen and local government officials in Quezon city, Metro Manila, Philippines June 24, 2016.
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Last week, the number of people killed since July 1 reached 2,400: about 900 died in police operations, they said, and the rest were “deaths under investigation”, a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings. “We will end up disrespecting each other if you do that to me”.
