THE Philippine National Police on Monday disputed a commonly reported figure of 7,000 cases of extrajudicial killings since the war on drugs began.
“We just want to disprove the persistent and irritating claim by some sectors that there are 7,000 cases of EJKs,” said PNP chief Director General Ronald dela Rosa in a press conference in Camp Crame, Quezon City.
“Drug lords could be behind attacks against campaign on illegal drugs,” he added.
From the start of the war on drugs in July 2016 to March 24, 2017, there were 6,011 homicide cases, Dela Rosa said. However, only 1,398 of these cases were drug-related.
“It’s important that people are happy. We are working for the Filipino people, not the foreigners,” Dela Rosa said, alluding to international criticism of the government’s war on drugs.
“They want to destroy the war on drugs because the war on drugs is the face of the Duterte administration,” he added.
PNP Directorate for Investigative and Detective Management chief Director Augusto Marquez said that out of the 6,011 homicide cases, about 23.7 percent were either cleared or solved.
The PNP DIDM said that the more than 6,000 homicide cases from July 2016 to March 2017 should not be blamed on the PNP.
Marquez added that the DIDM investigators are still in the case buildup stage on the remaining 76 percent of the cases.
The DIDM chief also noted that 215 policemen were found positive for drugs, which is only 0.12 percent of the strength of the whole PNP.
Commission on Human Rights chairman Chito Gascon vowed Monday to document every single case of extrajudicial killings and preserve the evidence so that those who were responsible would be held to account in the future.
At a forum on the war on drugs, Gascon said the victims were not limited to those who were killed, but included their families.
The forum was just the start of the commission’s information gathering and documentation of victims of drug-related summary execution, and the experiences of the mothers and children left behind by their breadwinners, he said.
He described the government’s war on drugs was one of the darkest chapters in the country’s history.
“Let us turn our grief into action. Let us inspire one another. Let us hope that what we do today will strengthen us so we could do more tomorrow,” he said.
He also expressed disappointment over the government’s failure to file cases against those suspected of extrajudicial killings.
“All we can do is to only document their [victims] stories. No charges have been filed by the prosecutor,” he said.
The victims of the extrajudicial killings must not forever remain “nameless and faceless,” he added.
The Palace said Monday the war on drugs is not targeted against the poor, as the New York-based Human Rights Watch suggested.
In a statement, Presidential Spokesperson Ernesto Abella scored HRW Deputy Asia Director Phelim Kine for claiming that Duterte had “finally acknowledged” that his drug war is “a war on the poor” that exposes his “contempt for the lives of the country’s urban slum dwellers.”
Duterte’s spokesman reminded the HRW, as well as other organizations criticizing Duterte, to be “more circumspect” about meddling in Philippine affairs.
“Their lack of appreciation of the context and local reality show a deep insensitivity to other cultures,” Abella said.
Abella also guaranteed the safety and security of the Filipino people, citing that eight out of 10 of Filipinos living in Manila “now feel safer and more secure under his administration.”
In a speech delivered Saturday in Bukidnon, Duterte reiterated that individuals linked to illegal drugs, including poor people, will get killed if they do not stop their drug involvement.
The President maintained that his drug war will continue until all drug dependents were exterminated.
Responding to Duterte’s remark however, Kine on Sunday said that Duterte’s “grotesque logic” to target the poor in the anti-drug campaign suggests that “he intends to continue this unlawful killing campaign indefinitely.”
“President Duterte has finally acknowledged what police ‘kill list’ statistics have long made obvious: That his murderous “war on drugs” is in fact a war on the poor given that the vast majority of its more than 7,000 victims were urban slum dwellers—some of the poorest, most vulnerable and most marginalized citizens of the Philippines,” Kine said over social networking site Twitter.
“Duterte’s admission ends the perverse fiction that he and his government have sought to perpetuate over the past nine months that the victims of the drug war—many of whose bodies are found on street corners wrapped in packing tape, riddled with bullets or perforated with stab wounds—have been drug lords,” he added. With PNA