DUTERTE UNDER FIRE FOR VAGINA REMARK

He boasts of ordering soldiers to shoot female guerillas in the genitals

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine strongman who has earned a reputation for dirty tactics and language, was criticised on Monday for having boasted that he had ordered soldiers to shoot female communist guerillas in the genitals.

“Tell the soldiers, ‘There’s a new order coming from the mayor’,” the president said in a speech, recalling a directive he said he had given when he was mayor of Davao City.

“‘We will not kill you. We will just shoot you in the vagina’.”

Duterte made the remarks in a speech to former rebels last week, but the comments went largely unreported because he was speaking in his native Visayan language. He expressed exasperation that some women preferred joining the New People’s Army, a communist rebel force that has waged an insurgency since 1969, to raising kids.

Since Duterte’s remarks began circulating more widely, the criticism of his choice of words has been fierce. It “is just the latest in a series of misogynist, derogatory and demeaning statements he has made about women”, said Carlos H. Conde, the Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It encourages state forces to commit sexual violence during armed conflict, a violation of international humanitarian law.”

Rep Emmi de Jesus of the Gabriela Women’s Party said Duterte had, in effect, given the green light for soldiers to violate women’s rights.

“He has further presented himself as the epitome of misogyny and fascism terribly rolled into one.”

This is not the first time Duterte had been criticised for crude remarks about women. During the presidential campaign in 2016, he made a joke about the rape and murder of an Australian missionary by inmates during a prison riot in 1989 in Davao City.

Recalling his reaction on seeing the woman’s body, he told a crowd: “I was angry because she was raped. That’s one thing. But she was so beautiful. The mayor should have been first.”

He has also used sexual jokes and rumours to attack women who questioned his contentious and bloody war on drugs.