[Philippine human rights violation] Duterte Harry fire and fury in the Philippines #6/120
The absent parents, the horsewhip, the crucifix, and the child-abusing priest; the paramilitary bodyguards, the disciplinarian Mayor Liaños, and the simple fact that he was the governor’s son, proved a volatile combination of precursors for the explosive character of Rodrigo Roa Duterte. These days, psychotherapists would speak in terms of childhood trauma and how the absence of positive male role models would have distorted the teenaged Duterte’s notion of masculinity. But in those days there were no psychotherapists in Davao. By the time he’d left school, Duterte was adrift, unsure of who he was, and when he went in search of himself, no matter how noble his instincts might have been, he had a worrying set of tools at his disposal. This was a young man cut off from his own humanity; desensitised to suffering.
Many years later, in 1998, when his then wife, Elizabeth Zimmerman, a former Philippine Airlines flight attendant, was seeking annulment of their marriage, a clinical psychologist called Natividad Dayan was commissioned as part of the proceedings, to assess Duterte’s character. Dr Dayan had a distinguished professional record as a former president of the International Council of Psychologists. The report she produced was an official court document, and although it was drawn from Elizabeth’s own testimony, many of the observations and analyses her report contains chime with those who have studied Duterte closely over decades and who include old friends, priests, politicians, human rights activists, lawyers, and his many victims. They believe that Duterte’s behaviour has always been, and remains, consistent with her diagnosis.
‘He is suffering from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder, with aggressive features,’ Dr Dayan concluded, citing what she characterised as ‘his gross indifference, insensitivity, and self-centredness, his grandiose sense of self and entitlement, his manipulative behaviors, his lies and his deceits, as well as his pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights and feelings.’ In summary: ‘Rodrigo’s personality disturbance, which constitutes his psychological incapacity, is deemed serious, incurable and with antecedents.’
In other words, the document acknowledges that his condition was judged to have existed prior to his marriage to Elizabeth. A section of the conclusion of this clinical analysis, which stated that his indifference to others was ‘heightened by lack of capacity for remorse or guilt’ was leaked to a Philippine national TV news station a month before the 2016 presidential poll. It caused widespread alarm about Duterte’s mental health; newspaper commentators warned that the Philippines, if it were not careful, would end up with a psychopath as president.
The full report describes Duterte as ‘a highly impulsive individual who has difficulty controlling his urges and emotions. He is unable to reflect on the consequences of his actions … For all his wrongdoings, he tends to rationalize and feel justified. Hence, he seldom feels a sense of guilt or remorse.’
The document details Duterte’s ‘exploitative’ and ‘manipulative’ behaviour within his ‘miserable and unhappy’ 25-year marriage. It claims he acted in his own ‘self-serving interests’ to ‘boost his political career’. It talks of his volatile temper, argumentativeness, and his provocative, bullying nature. Elizabeth testified that he ‘blackmailed’ her when he learned of a previous relationship she had had before their marriage, in which she alleged her then ‘boyfriend’ had raped her. This, she said, was despite her husband’s own well known philandering and a string of extra-marital affairs. As mayor of Davao, Duterte, she said, would ‘flaunt his affairs and would bring his girlfriends to public and social functions’ while continuing to deny his infidelities. He ‘humiliated Elizabeth’ by revealing the secrets of her past to his friends.
Duterte did not contest the contents of the document or that it was genuine. His supporters pointed out that for the annulment to proceed and for the marriage to be terminated, ‘he acted chivalrously in permitting his reputation to be trashed’. His only daughter, Sara, who was to succeed him as Mayor of Davao, but is known to be much closer to her mother, Elizabeth, than to her father, defended him by saying that nowhere in the court documents did it say that Duterte was not fit to lead. It sounded a little half-hearted.
When I raised the annulment papers with his sister, Jocelyn, her response was: ‘The mayor accepted everything, the talk about abuse — the mayor accepted everything.’ It was as though she too agreed that there wasn’t much to contest. The conversation drifted back to their mother, Soledad.
‘If my mother was around, he would never [have] become president,’ she said. ‘My mother would never agree. Because of his character. Because of his character,’ she repeated. ‘Because of the personal aspects, you know.’
She paused, then laughed.
‘It’s bad enough being politically exposed, but in the presidency, that is something else. I mean, they dig deeper and deeper and deeper. My mother said, “No. You are not the kind [to be] president.” But his being president is a matter of destiny.’ On that point, the two Duterte sisters saw eye to eye.
Hillary Clinton had claimed Donald Trump was ‘temperamentally unfit’ to be the US president, and leading American psychologists came forward to offer their analysis confirming this assessment. He, too, showed signs, they said, of ‘malignant narcissism’. By way of character, there are striking common denominators between the two men. Particular temperamental attributes — all warning signs of a narcissistic or sociopathic personality — surfaced again and again in conversation with Filipinos who had known, worked with, tangled with, or been crushed by Duterte; a master-manipulator, mercurial, scheming, impulsive, and ruthlessly ambitious; a misogynist. These descriptors came up repeatedly, supported by sometimes chilling stories. Many pointed to a superiority complex, but the same people talked of how thin-skinned Duterte was too, unable to take criticism, lashing out at anyone unfortunate enough to deliver a perceived slight. Much can be ascribed to nature, but, in Duterte’s case, nurture — or absence of it — had a clear and critical impact in the shaping of the man who would be king.
The political populism of the US and Philippine presidents might be of a different brand, but Duterte has appealed to fear and anger in a remarkably similar way to Trump, if taking it a few steps further. Duterte specialises in a similar politics of anxiety, building on collective fears — and popular demand to punish bad guys. The US media, covering the Philippine presidential election, quickly found a journalistic shorthand for comparing the two leaders: Duterte Harry was adorned with a new title: ‘the Trump of Asia’. Whether they read him as a messiah or as a tyrant, he made great copy, and, like Trump, he rarely disappointed.