Philippine National Police(PNP) chief Gen. Nicolas Torre III has tagged “Oplan Tokhang,” the battle cry of President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody anti-drug war, as a “flawed operation marred by falsehood.”
Meanwhile, Mamamayang Liberal party-list Rep. Leila De Lima met with Torre in Camp Crame on Friday to discuss transitional justice for the victims of Duterte’s bloody anti-narcotics campaign.
“I believe that Oplan Tokhang in its most basic concept is flawed. Flawed in the sense that it shows how misinformation can start inside our own house,” said Torre during the oath taking of officers of the PNP Press Corps Wednesday night at Camp Crame.
Under Oplan Tokhang, PNP operatives were supposed to knock on the doors of drug suspects, then ask them to stop their illegal activities.
However, critics of the Duterte administration charged the operation was just a cover for the law enforcers to kill the suspects outright, an unlawful practice labelled as extra-judicial killing (EJK).
Data from the previous administration said over 6,200 drug traffickers and users were killed in purported shootouts with law enforcement authorities.
However, activist and human rights groups claimed more than 30,000 perished in the Duterte anti-drug campaign, mostly EJK victims.
Torre also said Tokhang was an illogical concept that should not have been implemented by the PNP in the first place.
“Think about it, we go to someone’s house, knock on the door, beg the suspected lawbreakers to stop, yet do we have the evidence,” Torre noted.
If there is strong evidence, the PNP chief said police officers have no business pleading with suspected criminals.
“Our job is to bring the warrant whether it is a search warrant or warrant of arrest and enforce the law and haul them (suspects) to jail,” he explained.
Police officers who enforced Tokhang, Torre said, also committed crimes such as slander and harassment.
He added Tokhang was a policy based on rumors that “only created noise, stoked fear and eroded trust of the public in the institutions.”
Torre also criticized Senator Ronald dela Rosa, Duterte’s first PNP chief and alleged architect of the war on drugs.
Torre adverted to Dela Rosa’s infamous remarks on the death of a three-year-old girl who was killed in an anti-drug operation in Rodriguez, Rizal in 2019, Torre said Duterte’s supporters should not sow false information on the killings in connection with the anti-drug war.
“Let us be clear, the deaths of drug war victims are not as someone famously shrugged off as shit happens. Each was a human life,” Torre stressed.
Former senator De Lima hinted that a comprehensive probe on the drug war should “put a closure with what happened during the past administration’s murderous war on drugs.”
There’s got to be a closure, but it has to start with truth-telling,” she said in a phone interview with reporters.
“In fact, the PNP itself should be open. They must be open to investigations,” De Lima stressed.
A long-time vocal critic of Duterte’s bloody anti-narcotics campaign, De Lima agreed with Torre’s view that before the police confront a suspected offender, they should have evidence.”
“That wasn’t what happened with Tokhang. Police just went to houses on a whim. Many different teams were formed, which were converted, in most cases, into death squads. That’s not right because it did not go through the right process,” De Lima pointed out.
According to De Lima, she and the PNP chief also discussed compensation for drug war victims.
Republic Act 7309 established the Board of Claims under the Department of Justice (DOJ), providing up to P10,000 in compensation for victims of unjust imprisonment, detention or violent crimes.
De Lima said she mulled filing a bill to raise the amount of compensation as part of her proposed transitional justice measures.
She added that the meeting also discussed prison reform and unified penitentiary system bills, which she intends to file in the 20th Congress.
