[Philippine human rights violation] Duterte Harry fire and fury in the Philippines #8/120
But what Digong lacks in stature, he more than makes up for in garrulous feistiness, and, once he starts, he doesn’t stop. What attracts attention to him is not really charisma; it’s more a macabre fascination about who he is going to target now or what sweeping statement he will come out with next. Yet Duterte’s supporters talk of how, in Mindanao storytellers’ tradition, ‘he can mesmerise a room’. There is certainly an assumption that his audience hangs on his every word. It’s hard to tell, given that traditions of Asian filial piety demand that courtesy be shown to elders even if, in Duterte’s case, his vulgar outbursts are about as un-Asian as it’s possible to be.
Journalists assigned to these press conferences are required to arrive at the appointed time, then wait. The president is always, at the minimum, an hour late. At a press conference in Davao City, scheduled to start at 10 pm, Duterte turned up three hours later. Another, in Malacañang, began at 3 am. Reporters are then required to sit through at least an hour, sometimes two, of Duterte ad-libbing about his thoughts on life, drug lords, colonialism, women, insurgencies, corruption, and the universe. He threatens to kill people, curses, and drops in smutty jokes, rambling like a drunk in a bar. In a jumbled mixture of English and Tagalog, he meanders randomly between subjects as diverse as martial law and plate tectonics, then segues between the benefits of Viagra and angry expletive-ridden sideswipes at critics of his drugs war. Only when he finally runs out things to say unprompted are the press permitted to ask focused questions. These rarely elicit a focused response — and, again, the Q&A phase will last an hour or more. If a western politician were to act in this manner, holding court like some medieval monarch, journalists would vote with their feet after 20 minutes. Not in the Philippines. Presidential ‘speeches’ are later transcribed by some unfortunate minion in Duterte’s communications team and are made available online, for all to marvel at.
As Channel 4 News Asia correspondent, it fell to me to cover a number of these dire, but sometimes entertaining, events, both in Manila and in Davao, where the atmosphere is markedly different. After winning the presidency, Duterte continued to spend most weekends in Davao, where he is on home turf, with a pliant, respectful local press corps, long used to his habits and his style. The national press are more hostile, although they too deferentially sit it out, long into the night. They began on a similar footing to their American counterparts under President Donald J. Trump. In the early days, things were tense with Digong threatening to ‘kill journalism’, and casting the profession as corrupt, characterising journalists as ‘vultures’. Duterte felt, to some degree justifiably, that the Filipino vultures had failed to pay sufficient attention to his election campaign until he belatedly topped the opinion polls. As to the foreign press, his friends and his sisters all said he felt maligned, misrepresented, and misunderstood.
Once, when a respected Filipino journalist inquired into Duterte’s health after persistent rumours had circulated that the president had a serious illness, he lashed out at what he believed to be impertinence, declaring journalists ‘sons of whores’.
He asked of the reporter: ‘How is your wife’s vagina? Is it smelly? Or not smelly? Give me a report.’
This got a good laugh from his audience, at a gathering in a crocodile farm in Davao. A few days earlier, he had said that journalists who took bribes deserved to die.
‘Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination, if you are a son of a bitch.’
On that occasion, he was responding to a question about what he would do to protect journalists in a country where nearly 180 have been killed since Marcos was ousted, making the Philippines one of the most dangerous places in the world to work as a journalist. While not apologising, he did later backtrack: ‘I never said that killing journalists is justified.’ By the end of October 2017, five journalists had been murdered since Duterte’s inauguration. The motives proved hard to establish, but at least one had been planning to file a newspaper report on the drugs war.
Like Trump, Duterte is highly sensitive to bad reviews. After months of being relentlessly lambasted by the president over critical coverage of his drugs war, in November 2017, the Philippine Daily Inquirer— one of the leading broadsheet newspapers in the Philippines — was sold to Ramon Ang, a business tycoon and friend of the president. The liberal newspaper’s coverage of the war on drugs has continued and its more outspoken commentators have not softened their tone.