ICC case vs Duterte: A Joint Marcos-Communist Party operation
First of three parts
THE International Criminal Court’s (ICC) case against former president Rodrigo Duterte, and his arrest to face trial in a foreign land — the first time it has done so in the case of a former president of a non-African nation — has been a conspiracy of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s camp and the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP).
The CPP’s principal cadre in this operation is Kristina Conti who since 2022 got herself to become assistant counsel to the ICC prosecutor. She was formerly National Capital Region head of the National Union of People’s Lawyers. This organization’s founder and current chairman is Edre Olalia, CPP founder and chairman Jose Ma. Sison’s longtime personal lawyer, and official counsel of the National Democratic Front in all of its past negotiations. Her Facebook page “Kristina Conti” has become the main propaganda platform to demonize Duterte and get him convicted by the ICC.
In her Facebook page, Conti has not denied that she is a member of the party, saying only that she is not an “utusan of the CPP-NPA.” But revealingly, she wrote that “besides, it is not illegal to be a member of the CPP.”
The ICC case was first brought to it in 2017 by an obscure Davao lawyer Jude Sabio (who withdrew it in 2017, and died 2021) and former senator Antonio Trillanes. It was obviously merely a political stunt and cheap propaganda offensive of the latter (who paid the former P50,000 per month) which nobody took seriously. It floundered for four years — until Conti got to be assistant counsel to the prosecutor in 2022, with the party ordering its mass organizations to support it as their leading cause celebre.
Conti brought with her the numerous members of the Left’s organizations to flood the prosecutor with much information on alleged killings, which despite the fact that most of these were media reports by leftist sympathizers, were viewed by the ICC chamber as enough to order Duterte’s arrest.
It was Conti who practically pursued the case since ICC prosecutor Karim Khan also handles, and prefers, the high-profile cases against Israel and Hamas, against Myanmar’s military junta, against Russian president Putin over his war against Ukraine, and four other “situations.” On top of that Khan faces an investigation over accusations of sexual misconduct filed by an ICC staff.
Khan in effect has given Conti the job of prosecuting Duterte, with not just ICC lawyers supporting her but also the CPP’s mass organizations and their powerful propaganda machines.
Fooled
Marcos fooled Duterte to be complacent by declaring as late as March 2023, that the Philippines will disengage from the ICC entirely. He secretly changed his mind after the vice president’s break with his government when she resigned as education secretary in June 2024, and by January Marcos had finalized his plan to arrest Duterte and bring him promptly to the ICC.
Conti strongly lobbied for the ICC chamber to issue the arrest warrant as soon as possible and kept it under wraps, claiming that Duterte was planning to seek asylum in China.
For Marcos, the motive was to remove Duterte as a political force, the still much-loved leader, and weaken the chances of his daughter, Vice President Sara, to assume the presidency, either before his term ends or in the 2028 elections.
For the CPP, the project has resuscitated itself as a relevant political force, and according to sources, got from the Marcos camp huge finances and organizational support at this time when the NPA is down only 1,500 rifles and when none of its party-lists are popular enough to win seats in the May elections. It has used this ICC issue to recruit the youth in joining first its human rights organization in getting alleged human rights victims’ testimonies, and eventually, to the party itself.
This is another of the party’s most immoral, shameful projects: How can it allow itself to be the tool of the son of the dictator under whose rule thousands of its members were killed, who himself wants to be a new tyrant.
Treason
This however is the height of treason and political debauchery for any administration: In order to continue to remain in power, Marcos has allied with the CPP that has been trying to overthrow our democracy, and which killed over 10,000 of the Republic’s soldiers in armed conflict for the past 50 years. To this day, our soldiers are being killed by the CPP’s New People’s Army through ambushes and improvised explosive devices. Yet Marcos has secretly taken them in as allies, allegedly even extending to them, especially its party-lists, financial and political support. I don’t think there can be a worse crime worthy of impeachment than this.
Last year I had thought that the ICC case against Duterte was solely a Marcos-Romualdez plan resurrected from Trillanes’ political stunt in 2017 when he got Sabio to file the case at the ICC based mostly on the alleged confessions of hitman Edgar Matobato.
I realized I was wrong after writing a column last year pointing out that lawyer Kristina Conti, the top propagandist and researcher against Duterte since 2022, who portrayed herself as a human-rights crusader, was really an opportunist, as she was listed as an assistant counsel to the ICC prosecutor, which the ICC reported carries a salary equivalent to P8 million a year. She said in a Facebook post that I was misinformed and that she was working for free for Duterte’s victims. She didn’t present documentation though — a strict requirement at the ICC — that she was waving the institution’s compensation.
This episode suddenly opened my eyes to realize without any doubt that the ICC case was a communist operation in the service of the Marcoses, because of the intense vitriol thrown at me in the comment section of Conti’s Facebook post.
Comment
One comment — “He (me) is probably fishing for additional income from Duterte. Good opportunity to nail the guy to the wall.”
I was shocked by that comment, which was the most vicious there. I had considered the guy who made it a close friend and comrade, having recruited him during our Ateneo college years to the CPP, and even vouched for his membership in the party’s committee for the Manila-Rizal region. I even considered his wife, who spent much of her working life as a researcher in Amnesty International, as another close family friend.
Why would he condemn me so casually when he could have emailed or private-messaged me. The only reason I could think of is that this fellow had continued to be a communist cadre, and probably was supervising Conti, who after all was two generations behind him in terms of communist activism and logically would not have been his acquaintance. He had made tons of money in the retail money-changing business in London that he could afford a P20-million house in Serendra in Bonifacio Global City and another in Ayala Greenfield Estates at the foothills of Mt. Makiling when he retired from the Philippines a few years ago. However, he had all the while been with Sison’s highly secret International Group for gathering finances from Marxist groups all over the world. Supervising and helping Conti was his party task, it seems. I asked him through a friend to reply to this allegation — no reply yet.
I have no doubts Conti is a cadre directing the plot — now one of the party’s major mass movements — to get the ICC to convict Duterte. She is one of the communist party-list Bayan Muna’s nominees, and I know for a fact that nominees of such fronts are designated only by the party’s very top leadership, the five-man executive committee of the central committee, headed by the party chairman.
When former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo asked me and another official, the late Renato Velasco, to talk to the Makabayan bloc to convince them to support her in the 2004 organization, the person we were asked to negotiate with was party secretary general Rafael Baylosis. We met him at Alfredo’s Steak House with party-list representatives Teodoro Casiño and Carlos Zarate, both of whom sat at an adjacent table (beyond hearing distance) and gorged on T-bones, even ordering a bottle of French Cabernet.
The CPP has ridden the Marcos convict-Duterte train, which has partially resuscitated its politics, and given it huge finances. Most analysts though think that it has backfired, indicated by Marcos’ huge fall in ratings after Duterte’s arrest. The performance of the Red party-lists in the elections next month will tell us if it means the communists’ fall.
The communists, however, had better start praying to whatever God they can think of, for Duterte not to die in The Hague. That will result in such a firestorm of people’s wrath that it will burn them and Marcos down.
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ICC case vs Duterte: A Joint Marcos-Communist Party operation
Source: Breaking News PH
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