I can’t wrap my head around the fact that some people can just justify the bloody drug war.
It saddens me really how much we have spiraled down, as a society, to the depths of moral degradation. When are violent killings, with no due process, ever justified?
After I wrote about Rody Duterte’s violent campaign against drug addicts last Tuesday, some readers put the spotlight on the menace and the havoc wreaked by drug addicts on their helpless victims. What can I say, they asked, about the damage inflicted by these junkies?
Poverty, they said, is never an excuse for getting into odd jobs such as peddling drugs and the like.
They are correct on both points – that poverty, indeed, is never an excuse to give drug pushers a free pass and their victims, I am well aware, are as much victims as those of the bloody drug war.
But we can never solve one crime with another; or to put it simply, we can never solve anything with violence and extrajudicial killings.
Long-term solutions
Court convictions and restorative justice are the long-term solutions to addressing our country’s still unresolved drug problem.
Authorities must also have the political will to address the entangled web of corruption among drug lords, their politician coddlers and anti-drug enforcement authorities that enables the continued existence of this netherworld of illegal drugs in our country.
Why do drugs get into the Philippines, for example? Or why do shabu laboratories continue to operate?
Moral decay
Violence and these bloody killings should never be justified and those who support it, I dare say, are as guilty as the perpetrators.
It’s also a reflection of this country’s moral decay. As a reader pointed out, there is now so much damage caused by the drug war on our institutions such as the justice system. It has also given birth to police brutality and a generation of policemen with no respect for human rights and dignity.
We cannot let this continue. We don’t want to wake up one day and see our society riddled with mass shootings, racial hatred, social injustice and other examples of moral decay.
A Human Rights Watch (HRW) research has found that police are falsifying evidence to justify the unlawful killings.
On the eve of his May 9, 2016 election victory, Duterte told a crowd of more than 300,000: “If I make it to the presidential palace I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, holdup men and do-nothings, you better get out because I’ll kill you.”
Unfortunately, even if Duterte is no longer president, the carnage continues.
“The problem is not just lack of court convictions in the drug war – the carnage hasn’t stopped,” said Carlos Conde, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Citing data from DahasPh, Conde said there are now 246 drug-related killings under President Marcos.
“That’s nearly one death every day since his inauguration on June 30. True, not as many as under Duterte but to call this as an ‘improvement’ to the rights situation in the Philippines is an insult to victims,” Conde said.
Allow ICC to investigate
Let us allow the International Criminal Court to investigate and bring the perpetrators to justice.
This is the only way to achieve justice for the victims because our own justice system has not done enough in this regard.
And those trying to discredit the ICC are wrong.
As Tita Valderama pointed out in her VERA Files column:
“And the chorus goes on singing the same old tune that the ICC has no jurisdiction to investigate the alleged crimes against humanity in the Philippines following the country’s withdrawal from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC.
“They keep on skipping the fact that the ICC retains jurisdiction over crimes that happened in the Philippines when the country was still a state party from Nov. 1, 2011 to March 16, 2019.
“The Philippines may have withdrawn from the Rome Statute, but that does not equate to clearance from its obligations for incidents that occurred during its membership. This was clearly stated in paragraph 2 Article 127 of the Rome Statute.
“Marcos should be well aware of this. He was among the 17 senators who voted to ratify the Rome Statute in 2011.”
Perpetrators are lucky in a sense because unlike the way they treated their drug war victims, an ICC investigation gives them the chance present their side.
In their world, it would just be death by bullet and young, innocent lives could be lost in the wink of an eye. And no amount of begging for one’s life would work.
Kian Delos Santos, the 17-year-old boy who was one of the thousands of drug war victims killed five years ago, begged for mercy but his cries fell on deaf ears.
“Tama na po! May test pa ako bukas!” he pleaded but to no avail.
On Aug. 16, 2017, he was shot to death by police operatives.
He never had the chance to take the test, to finish school, to live the rest of his life. Tell me again how this can ever be justified.
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Email: eyesgonzales@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.