MANILA: During his victory party in Davao over the weekend, Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte declared that citizens are hereby free to arrest and shoot drug dealers and other criminals. But does this not fatally weaken the institutions of law?

In a span of three days last week, from Thursday to Saturday, five men died by what appeared to be summary execution — two in Negros Occidental, two in Iloilo and one in Negros Oriental, all in central Philippines. All were reported to have been suspects in the trade in illegal drugs.

Two were shot dead by motorcycle-riding gunmen, and the bodies of the other three were found riddled with gunshot wounds, their hands tied behind their back. The most gruesome case had the victim’s hands cut off and a cardboard sign placed beside the corpse: he was a thief, an addict and a member of the Akyat Bahay gang, and others like him will be next, according to the message.

In Cebu days earlier, another man was found dead — a rope tied around his neck. The body was wrapped in a trash bag and secured with packing tape. It also sported a warning written on bond paper: “Tulisan ko (I’m a bandit), DU30.”

And in May, just five days after Rodrigo Duterte emerged the winner in the presidential election, a known drug user in Davao City was felled by four bullets fired to his head and body by two masked gunmen. The murder hardly merited mention in the papers; it seemed to be, in the context of Davao at least, just one of those things.

No official statistics have been issued by the Philippine National Police on whether vigilante justice is on the rise across the nation following the open endorsement of extrajudicial crime-fighting methods by the incoming administration of President-elect Duterte. It will probably take a while before the police under the command of Duterte’s designated PNP head, Chief Supt. Ronald dela Rosa, will begin tallying the numbers.

Dela Rosa, who served as Davao City police chief from January 2012 to October 2013, appears to be much in the mould of his mentor and boss. He has taken to cursing in public like Duterte, and is an enthusiastic backer of Duterte’s methods. Asked to clarify Duterte’s “shoot-to-kill” order on suspected criminals, Dela Rosa said it would apply only “if the criminal fights back or is armed”. And if the suspect gives up peacefully? “Make them fight back,” he said.

From the beginning, every time Duterte was forced to give an answer about his human-rights record as longtime mayor of Davao City — outside of his blustery dismissal of, say, the Commission on Human Rights and the international watchdog Human Rights Watch — this was his standard defence: that the suspects killed by what has been called the Davao Death Squad were resisting arrest and so had to be taken down. Apparently, all 1,400 of those killed — the conservative number documented by human rights groups since 1998, consisting mostly of drug users, street urchins and petty thieves, with uniformly impoverished backgrounds — were sufficiently foolhardy to slug it out with armed arresting officers, thus winding up dead.

Human Rights Watch says that by and large, Davao police have turned a blind eye to these summary executions; no serious, wide-ranging investigation has been conducted to get to the bottom of the vigilante killings, and, worse, some police officers themselves may have acted in cahoots with gunmen in identifying targets.

In interviews, Duterte himself has hardly been shy about his role in envisioning the ruthless tenor of his city: “Only 1,000?” he said in reply to a question about the number of deaths attributed to him. “I’ve been mayor for 22 years. That’s too cheap.”

Now the incoming president has raised the stakes even more. During his victory party in Davao over the weekend, he declared that citizens are hereby free to arrest and shoot drug dealers and other criminals. They may even get a medal for the act. “Do it yourself if you have the gun — you have my support,” he said, to rousing cheers from the crowd.

Citizen’s arrest, of course, is allowed under the law — but killing suspects outright? And why only street lowlifes and not, say, corrupt politicians? Deputising citizens in this way does not strengthen the institutions of the law; it only fatally weakens them. The Bill of Rights is itself assassinated. At any rate, the joke that has been making the rounds since last month is that in the next six years, the surefire businesses to get into are not only funeral parlours but also manufacturing of trash bags, packing tape and cardboard.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer

Published in Dawn, June 8th, 2016