[Newspoint] Villains and victims

It is actually no surprise that President Marcos is cast as the villain in the arrest and extradition of ex-president Rodrigo Duterte to face trial in the International Criminal Court for his brutal war on drugs. 

Marcos is portrayed as having ordered the “kidnapping” of Duterte and his surrender to the ICC, in The Hague (the Netherlands) for political expedience. The motive being imputed here may not be altogether incredible, but the narrative being peddled is a bit of a stretch beyond the facts.

As early as 2021, even before the close of Duterte’s presidency, the Supreme Court had ruled that the Philippine government was obligated to cooperate with the ICC. That thwarted Duterte’s attempt to avoid an ICC trial by withdrawing the Philippines from the binding treaty, the Rome Statute: the withdrawal came too late; the proceedings on him had already begun.

Certainly not unexpectedly, therefore, if rather a long time coming, the Interpol arrived with an ICC warrant; whether Marcos could have afforded to choose to harbor a man wanted for “crimes against humanity” would now seem water under the bridge. The legal issue over Duterte’s delivery to the ICC has been resolved not only for the deliverer but also for the receiver.

Justifying its own takeover of jurisdiction after Duterte had been extradited, the ICC declared that the custody transfer had all been in order. As to his lawyer’s claim that he had not been treated as befits an old man of fragile health, the ICC declared him fit to stand trial. 

The all-too-visible fact was that the day before his arrest, speaking to a constituency of Filipino overseas workers in Hong Kong, Duterte had been bellicosely energetic, there swearing away and flailing his walking stick at imagined persecutors. Doubtless, Marcos was at the top of his list, which, again, makes for a credible story, although a one-sided one. Let’s try filling in the blanks.

The Marcoses and the Dutertes had started as partner dynasties, and the partnership peaked with the election in tandem of Marcos and Duterte’s daughter Sara, him as president, succeeding her father, her as vice president. But understandably intent on perpetuating themselves in power for self-protection since they both owe the nation in blood and plunder, the two dynasties could not have remained partners for long. Sure and soon enough, the partnership broke under the weight of mutual suspicion. 

The President’s own sister Imee, the eldest of the siblings, appears to have been involved in the betrayals against him. Her special closeness to the Dutertes, maintained to this day, may well have been a rebound from her being bypassed by her younger brother in the dynastic succession. In fact, reports remain unsorted linking the Dutertes and Imee, conspiratorially, to the failed suit seeking to disqualify Ferdinand Jr. as a candidate for president for unpaid family estate taxes.

Once seated, Ferdinand Jr. lost no time in consolidating power. The decisive move was the installation of his first cousin Martin Romualdez as Speaker. Thus began the sidelining of Duterte’s lead ally in the House, former president Gloria Arroyo; it in fact sealed the break between the two dynasties. 

Romualdez’s insertion in the picture raised the prospect of an administration-backed rival to Sara in her run for the presidency in 2028. Indeed, soon afterwards, her chances of being able to make that run at all were threatened.

Looking into her profligate spending, the House turned up evidence after evidence indicating embezzlement in the hundreds of millions of taxpayer pesos. Snubbing the hearings, she ended up being impeached. If found guilty, by the Senate, the assigned court in this case, not only does she lose the vice presidency and all other official positions she holds, she is barred from taking up public office ever again.

If anyone is wondering what, then, is all this fake sympathetic portraiture of Rodrigo Duterte is about, it’s hard to imagine it as an attempt to persuade the ICC to look upon him as a victim — to even think that is to insult the ICC. If there’s any villain here, it’s Duterte himself, not Marcos. Marcos and his family were themselves complicit in their own patriarch’s reign of torture, murder, and plunder (1972-1986), but they have to answer for that in their own turn; Duterte has nothing to do with it, least of all as a victim.

Duterte is a victimizer himself. And his victims are the tens of thousands killed in his drug war and their orphans, mostly hapless poor, whose voices are now lost in an apparently well-orchestrated and well-funded propaganda noise and whose quest for justice needed to be pursued as far as The Hague because it was impossible to be achieved in their own country.

If there’s no fooling the ICC, then who are the Dutertes trying to fool with all the noise going around under the baton of Sara Duterte? Who else other than the same people they managed to fool to vote for her father in 2016 and hope to do it again for her in 2028?

At this point, Rodrigo Duterte has become a distraction, at best a figure of occasional relevance, the nearest future occasion being possibly his next scheduled appearance in court in September. Now, Sara Duterte is the main feature. But she has to make some sense, not just noise, to somehow justify her own relevance. – Rappler.com