Duterte’s crude threat to female rebels draws rebukes

MANILA — President Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippine strongman who has earned a reputation for dirty tactics and language, was criticized Monday for having boasted that he had ordered soldiers to shoot female communist guerrillas 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 been waging an insurgency since 1969, to raising children.

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 Conde, the Philippines researcher for Human Rights Watch. “It encourages state forces to commit sexual violence during armed conflict, which is a violation of international humanitarian law.”

Rep. Emmi de Jesus of the Gabriela Women’s Party said that 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,” she said.

This is not the first time Duterte had been criticized 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.

He has also used sexual jokes and rumors to attack women who have questioned his contentious and bloody war on drugs, including Leila de Lima, a senator and former justice minister who has been a vocal critic of his.

De Lima is in prison awaiting trial on what she says are trumped-up bribery charges.