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Friday, March 29, 2024

Telling the US where to go

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WINSTON Churchill once said diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions. 

By this measure, President Rodrigo Duterte clearly fulfilled the first part of Churchill’s description but may have missed the second part when he tore into the United States for the atrocities that American troops inflicted on Filipinos during their brutal pacification of the Moros in Mindanao in the 1900s.

Duterte’s angry remarks, coming on the eve of a scheduled one-on-one meeting with US President Barack Obama on the sidelines of the Asean summit in Laos, were triggered by a question about what he would tell the American leader, who has raised concerns about the growing number of extra-judicial killings in his administration’s war on illegal drugs.

“You know, the Philippines is not a vassal state. We have long ceased to be a colony of the United States,” Dutere bristled. “I do not respond to anybody but to the people of the Republic of the Philippines. I don’t care about him. Who is he?”

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“They invaded this country and made us their subjugated people. Everybody has a terrible record of extrajudicial killings. Why make an issue about fighting crime? Look at the human rights of America along that line, the way how they treat the migrants there. He [Obama] must explain to me why there are extrajudicial killings there. Can he explain the 600,000 Moros massacred in this island? Do you want to see the pictures? Maybe, you’ll ask him, and make it public. We have a recorded history of that sordid period of our national life,” Duterte said.

In his angry diatribe, Duterte said about a tenth of the Moro population of six million was wiped out in the American campaign to “pacify” Mindanao in the early 1900s. It is difficult to verify the President’s figures from historical documents , but most historians agree that the loss of Moro lives during the American campaign in Mindanao was particularly high.

To put things in perspective, the American campaign from 1899 to 1902 to “pacify” this fledgling state that had just declared its independence from Spain killed 20,000 Filipino soldiers—and more than 200,000 civilians perished as a result of combat, hunger or disease. 

Responding to Duterte’s expletive-laced outburst, Obama had suggested earlier that the meeting might not push through.

“I always want to make sure if I’m having a meeting that it’s productive and we’re getting something done,” Obama said during a news conference, adding that he would bring up the issue of human rights if he sat down with Duterte.

Later on, the White House announced the meeting was canceled.

In attacking the United States on the eve of his meeting with Obama, President Duterte exhibited two traits for which he has become known. His lack of tact and finesse is the first; his brutal honesty is the second. 

The sudden outburst was, after all, rooted in historical fact—the United States as a colonial power had subjugated a freedom-loving people when it replaced the Spaniards at the turn of the century, and its occupation here was often brutal. The resentment that remains, particularly in Mindanao, is certainly very real.

On the other hand, by his blanket condemnation of the US, the President seems to have forgotten that the Americans have time and again come to the country’s aid in times of need, or that there are strategic benefits—both in defense and the economy—of maintaining cordial ties with Washington.

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