Jonathan Miller (author) - Duterte Harry: fire and fury in the Philippines

DUTERTE HARRY

An author-selfie, beside a cardboard cut-out of President Rodrigo Duterte in Davao City.

Jonathan Miller was born in the north of Ireland and has spent much of his life in Southeast Asia, where his family lived for 25 years. As a foreign correspondent, he gravitated back, devoting nearly half his 30-year career to reporting from across Asia. This resulted in an abiding fascination with the region and an incurable addiction to chillis. After more than a decade as London-based Foreign Affairs Correspondent with Channel 4 News, he took up the post of Asia Correspondent just as Rodrigo Duterte rose to power. He soon found himself covering the calamitous consequences. Jonathan has won four Royal Television Society awards for his journalism and four Amnesty International TV News awards.

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Published by Scribe 2018

Copyright Jonathan Miller 2018

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9781911617037 (UK edition)
9781925322842 (Australian edition)
9781925548778 (e-book)

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CONTENTS

Foreword:

FOREWORD:
ADDICTED TO KILLING

At about the time I was assigned as Asia correspondent for Channel 4 News and arrived back in the region, a foul-mouthed maverick mayor from Mindanao an island in the far south of the Philippines announced that he was going to run for president. Rodrigo Duterte possessed street charisma and had engagingly bad manners. Filipinos called this gangster charm, and swooned. When Duterte called Pope Francis a son of a whore and got away with it in a country almost as staunchly Catholic as the Vatican, I began to pay more serious attention. This Mayor Duterte seemed like he could get away with murder. He presented himself as a man of the people, an insurgent outsider with no time for the corrupt oligarchs and dynastic elites of what he disparaged as imperial Manila. He loved guns and girls and motorbikes, and hated drugs and crime and protocol.

The Philippines, a tropical archipelago of over 7000 far-flung islands and 100 million people a quarter of whom live in poverty was on the look-out for a saviour. The mayors rough-edged appeal cut across both class and wealth divides. Dutertes brazen, cavalier style made Filipinos laugh and feel good about themselves. In his own words, he did not give a shit about what people thought particularly when it came to human rights. After years of feckless liberal leadership and decades of deference to America the former colonial ruler here at last was a straight-talking politician with simple solutions to national problems. Duterte claimed to be a socialist, but didnt peddle ideology: he spoke the gutter language of the poor and was a shameless populist authoritarian at the vanguard of an emerging new world order, way ahead of Donald J. Trump. Duterte promised that, as president, he would do just as he had done as mayor of Davao City: rid the place of bad guys and do society a favour. He revelled in his nom de guerre , Duterte Harry, after Clint Eastwoods shoot-first-ask-questions-later vigilante cop, Dirty Harry Callahan.

I am your last card, he told an electorate in his thrall. I promise you, I will get down and dirty just to get things done All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you. I have no patience. I have no middle ground. Either you kill me, or I will kill you idiots.

Rodrigo Duterte cleaned up all right. He won by a landslide and immediately began to deliver on his promises. On day one, he launched a Latin America-style Dirty War, and with it introduced the darkest of Latino shadows: the death squad. By the end of year one, he was presiding over the largest loss of civilian lives in Southeast Asia since Pol Pot took Cambodia back to Year Zero: 10,000 in just 12 months, most of them dirt poor. In Dutertes reign of terror, death squads roam the slums, and, within months of his coming to power, these vigilantes had killed three times as many Filipinos as died in nearly a decade of martial law under the disgraced dictator Ferdinand Marcos during the 1970s and 1980s.

Duterte set about rehabilitating the reputation of Marcos and his clan. To many, this felt like a frontal assault on the collective memory of a still-unresolved national trauma, but the president declared it was time to bury the past. He approved the reinterment of Marcos body in the national Cemetery of Heroes, set about abolishing the agency still trying to recoup most of the US$10 billion plundered by Marcos and his cronies, and supported an electoral challenge which could yet engineer the installation of Ferdinand Marcos Jr as his vice president. Ferdinand Jr and his sister, Imee Marcos, governor of the familys home province of Ilocos Norte, began to accompany Duterte on foreign trips, most notably on a state visit to China in October 2016. A year later a new 12-peso stamp was issued bearing the smiling face of the dead despot. Many Filipinos were aghast. A meme circulated on Facebook: New Marcos stamps wont stick. People are spitting on the wrong side.

With the daily bloodbath splashed across the headlines, in February 2017 Duterte jailed Senator Leila de Lima, the former justice secretary and his leading critic. The charges against her were condemned as pure fiction and politically motivated by human rights groups, and had followed a vicious campaign of harassment. He aggressively attacked the Catholic Church, his chief justice, and world leaders who criticised his drugs war including then US president Barack Obama who, like the Pope, was awarded the Order of Son of a Whore. Duterte turned his back on America, the Philippines strongest ally, in favour of Beijing and Moscow. Across Asia, a region where cultural rules of behavioural etiquette are strictly observed, people were struck dumb by Dutertes recalcitrance and effrontery, and watched events unfold with an uncomprehending and embarrassed fascination.

In May 2017, Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao, and gave the army a free hand to wage wars against Islamists and communists. Dissenting voices were drowned out by the presidents army of cyber-trolls on Facebook, and, by the end of his tumultuous first year in office, he was more popular than when he had been elected. Duterte basked in the sort of approval ratings usually associated with totalitarian regimes. Congress has since acquiesced in backing the extension of martial law in Mindanao until the end of 2018.

Every fresh profanity directed at world leaders would prompt demands for more Duterte! from my London newsroom, and although I would happily oblige because he was indeed good fodder friends and contacts in the Philippines saw in him a much more menacing figure than the entertaining cardboard cut-out loudmouth he was initially portrayed as abroad. Among the Filipino cognoscenti, aware of what had really happened when he was mayor of Davao City, the mood was dark. From the start, they had shuddered at the prospect of what he would do as president like the frisson that rippled through liberal America when Trump announced his intention to run for office, but worse. Much worse. The little already written about Duterte was buried in local Davao newspaper stories, leaked US diplomatic cables, and decade-old reports by a UN investigator and a human rights group. These painted him as a violent authoritarian, the Godfather of the dreaded Davao Death Squad, a cocksure mayor sincere in his belief that he was right for whom the end justified the means.