Fear grows as bodies pile up
Witnesses afraid to speak out
THE body of 22-year-old pedicab driver Eric Sison lies in a coffin in a Manila slum with a chick pacing across his casket, placed there in keeping with a local tradition to symbolically peck at the conscience of his killers.
Cellphone video footage circulating on social media purports to capture the moment Sison was killed last month when, according to local officials, police were looking for drug pushers in the Pasay township of the Philippines’ capital.
A voice on the video, recorded by a neighbour according to newspaper reports, can be heard shouting “Don’t do it, I’ll surrender!”. Then there is the sound of gunfire.
A poster near the coffin demands “Justice for Eric Quintinita Sison”. A handpainted sign reads: “OVERKILL – JUSTICE 4 ERIC.”
These are rare tokens of protest against a surge of killings unleashed since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines just over two months ago and pledged to wage war on drug dealers and crush widespread addiction to methamphetamine.
Very little stands in the way of his bloody juggernaut.
Last week, the number of people killed since July 1 reached 2 400: about 900 died in police operations, and the rest are “deaths under investigation”, a term activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
Reuters interviews reveal that the police’s Internal Affairs Service (IAS) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) are so overwhelmed by the killings they can investigate only a fraction, and there is scant hope of establishing many as unlawful because witnesses are too terrified to come forward.
Meanwhile, the immense popularity of Duterte’s crusade and a climate of fear whipped up by the bloodletting have together silenced dissent from civil society. Hardly anyone turned up at candlelight vigils in Manila recently to protest against extrajudicial killings.
Even as the death toll rose, a July poll by Pulse Asia put Duterte’s approval rating at 91%.
Anxious reminders by the Catholic Church of the commandment “thou shalt not kill” make few headlines in the predominantly Catholic country, with newspapers preferring to carry breathless accounts of the latest slayings.
Duterte has delivered withering attacks on his chief critic, Senator Leila de Lima, accusing her of dealing in drugs herself and having an affair with her driver.
“It’s only the president who can stop this,” De Lima said last week, deploring what she described as the “madness” that led in one case to a 5-yearold girl being shot in the head.
As for critics abroad, Duterte pours scorn on them in language larded with curses.
He lambasted the UN after it criticised the surge in killings and he turned down a meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week.
Duterte will meet Barack Obama in Laos tomorrow, although he has made it clear in advance that he will take no lecture on human rights from the US president, when in the US he alleged “black people are being shot even if they are already lying down”.
Duterte may intensify the crackdown after 14 people were killed on Friday in a bomb attack at a market in his hometown, Davao. Police blamed the Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic State-linked group Duterte has vowed to destroy, but his war on the drug trade is making enemies elsewhere.
Rights groups documented hundreds of suspicious murders in Davao on Duterte’s watch and say death squads operated with impunity there. “The Punisher”, as some call him, denies ordering extrajudicial killings but he does not condemn them.
Across the country now, lists of suspected drug pushers are being provided to police by neighbourhood chiefs, adding to a sense of fear and distrust across communities.
Politicians of all hues have gone quiet, and a Senate enquiry led by De Lima only has the power to propose legislation, not stop the killers in their tracks. – Reuters