Marcos now like Congolese dictator in the betrayal of a compatriot
THE International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants since 2006 against 60 individuals brought to The Hague for trial for genocide and other crimes against humanity. Of these, only two heads of state surrendered to it their own compatriots who were accused: Congolese dictator Joseph Kabila and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos.
What infamy the dictator’s son has brought to himself and to the country. Kabila turned over to the ICC the heads of rebel groups trying forcibly to overthrow him, in the course of their rebellion massacring over 200,000 civilians, including children and raping hundreds of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) very brutal civil war.
Marcos, on the other hand, surrendered Duterte because of his intensified police operations, which can be called a “war” only in the context of sloganeering. The ICC claimed there were 43 killings by the police in Duterte’s three-year intensified police operations against illegal drugs. To justify that Duterte killed thousands, the ICC declared in several of its documents that there were 12,000 to 30,000 deaths. Yet it said that these were based on reports by media and human rights groups — i.e. newspaper clippings or internet posts. The accusations against Duterte will go down in history as a testament to the power of a lying media.
The Congolese Kabila and Marcos share one thing in common for their debauched betrayal of their own citizens: Their real motive is to perpetuate themselves in power.
Kabila’s surrender of the three heads of rebel groups to the ICC and their transfer to The Hague decapitated the rebellion in 2006, facilitating his Machiavellian moves to establish his dictatorship that lasted until 2019. At the same time, this portrayed him as a champion of human rights, and most willing to enforce Europe’s new neocolonial weapon, the ICC, which overrode the sovereignty of nations and brought their leaders to Hague. The case of the three Congo leaders was the first for the ICC, a test of whether it can undertake the mission European countries gave it. The West even gave Kabila huge amounts of money for his cooperation in this test case, in the form of $1.3-billion official aid to the DRC in 2006, when the rebel generals were arrested.
Footsteps
Marcos, on the other hand, surrendered Duterte to the ICC in order to follow his father’s footsteps in holding on to power beyond the constitutional limits. Duterte continues to maintain his huge political support while daughter Sara, the sitting vice president, is a shoo-in for the presidency. The two, therefore, make up an insurmountable obstacle to Marcos and his clan’s plan to remain in power, first by having his cousin Speaker Martin Romualdez succeed him in 2028, followed by his son Alexander, who turns 40, and therefore eligible to run for president in the 2034 presidential polls.
The international community’s outrage over Marcos’ betrayal of his predecessor has been growing, with a respected Italian newspaper for instance headlining Duterte’s arrest as: “Philippines’ Marcos betrays Duterte and handed over to The Hague.”
Most nations frown on a country’s surrender of its own citizens to another nation to be tried by that nation’s laws, as this weakens internationally the all-important respect for a country’s sovereignty, this era’s basic principle. At best, Marcos is now seen as a weakling president bowing to foreign powers.
There are numerous cases where a country has refused to turn over a fugitive convicted by the courts of other countries. Most unfair to us has been the refusal of the Netherlands (where The Hague is) to extradite to us Communist Party founder and strategist Jose Maria Sison for 32 years until his death in 2019. Despite the communists’ responsibility for thousands of military and civilian deaths, with Sison practically admitting he is still in command, or at least has a leadership role in the insurgency, the Netherlands has ignored our pleas.
Other notable cases:
– Film director Roman Polanski, whom Switzerland refused to extradite to the US in 2010, after having been convicted in the US in 1977 for unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
– Edward Snowden, who leaked the US’ illegal surveillance of its own citizens and other security secrets, and whom Russia has refused extradition to since 2013.
– Sanjeev Kumar Chawla, who was convicted of cricket match-fixing in India but whom the UK has refused to turn over.
Abominable
What is so abominable about Marcos’ kidnapping of Duterte is that the case against Duterte is clearly so baseless, concocted by the US Deep State for his distancing against America and getting the country closer to China, and mostly undertaken by its media minions.
The plot to exaggerate the casualty figure was first executed by Rappler, funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy and run by American citizen Maria Ressa. It falsely claimed that 7,080 were the casualties in the war vs illegal drugs at September 2017. But what the police reported was just 2,582 killed, with the additional 4,525 Rappler reported were other cases being investigated by the police, which had nothing to do with the drug war. Rappler ignored the police’ protests on its distorted figure. Vice President Leni Robredo jumped on the Rappler figure and went to town repeating those false figures, especially in her travels.
Columbia University professor Sheila Coronel, practically an American at least in speech the next year increased the number to 9,000 in an article she wrote for a prestigious US magazine, and when asked how she came by the figures merely said it was what she had read somewhere. Commission on Human Rights Chito Gascon, a stalwart of the Duterte-hater brigade, in 2019 further raised the figure to 27,000 without any explanation except for a “it-is-widely-believed” phrase.
In a hearing last year at the Senate, lawyer Jose Diokno resorted to the same trick as Rappler, saying that according to the annual report of the president, there were 20,322 killed in Duterte’s antidrug war. That was a blatant lie: nothing in the report said that. The police’s official tally is 6,252 killed from July 2016 to November 2019.
The police’s 6,252 figure hews closely to researches undertaken by private entities, among them, pointing to its accuracy:
– Philippine Daily Inquirer’s “Kill List” based on its reporters’ tally of drug-related homicides: 2,174 from May 10, 2016 to Feb. 16, 2017.
– ABS-CBN’s death toll from May 10, 2016 to July 2, 2019: 5,997.
– De La Salle, UP Diliman and Ateneo project funded by the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University: 7,029 from May 2016 to Dec. 31 2018.
The simple debunking of the ICC’s allegation that 12,000 to 30,000 were killed in Duterte’s antidrug war involves looking at the overall homicide rate in the Philippines. This went down from 10 homicides per 100,000 population in 2015 to five in 2018 and to four in 2019. By comparison, homicides increased from nine in 2008, to a high of 24 in the course of Mexico’s drug war. In Colombia, the rate rose from 57 in 1990 to 78 in 1992. These two cases pointed to the huge casualties in these countries’ operations against illegal drugs.
Our homicide rates wouldn’t have fallen from 11 in 2016 to four in 2019, if there were “12,000 to 30,000” killed in that period. The decline is very easily explained: It is due to the fact, reported by many, that the overall crime rate fell, as criminals became very afraid of Duterte’s clampdown on illegal drugs and stayed home.
Another data to show how imbecilic the claim of 12,000 to 30,000 killed in Duterte’s drug war is the fact that from 2016 to 2019, there were 29,441 homicides due to all causes. The “12,000 to 30,000” would mean that from 40 percent to 101 percent of all homicides were due to the drug war, which is certainly preposterous. Our funeral parlors and hospital morgues would have been so visibly overcrowded if there were such huge numbers of drug-war casualties. There wasn’t, of course.
Indeed this is a case of the Hitlerian propaganda trick of repeating big lies again and again, until many believe it.
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Marcos now like Congolese dictator in the betrayal of a compatriot
Source: Breaking News PH
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