MANILA – The body of 22-year-old pedicab driver Eric Sison lies in a coffin in a Manila slum with a chick pacing across his casket, placed there in keeping with a local tradition to symbolically peck at the conscience of his killers.
Cellphone video footage circulating on social media purports to capture the moment Sison was killed last month when, according to local officials, police were looking for drug pushers in the Pasay township of the Philippines’ capital.
A voice on the video, recorded by a neighbor according to newspaper reports, can be heard shouting “Don’t do it, I’ll surrender!”. Then there is the sound of gunfire.
A poster near the coffin, which lies beside a stinking canal cut between ramshackle homes, demands “Justice for Eric Quintinita Sison”. A handpainted sign reads: “OVERKILL – JUSTICE 4 ERIC.”
These are rare tokens of protest against a surge of killings unleashed since Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines just over two months ago and pledged to wage war on drug dealers and crush widespread addiction to methamphetamine.
Very little stands in the way of his bloody juggernaut.
Last week the number of people killed since July 1 reached 2,400: about 900 died in police operations, and the rest are “deaths under investigation”, a term human rights activists say is a euphemism for vigilante and extrajudicial killings.
Duterte’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this report.
Reuters interviews reveal that the police’s Internal Affairs Service (IAS) and the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) are so overwhelmed by the killings that they can investigate only a fraction, and there is scant hope of establishing many as unlawful because witnesses are too terrified to come forward.
Meanwhile, the immense popularity of Duterte’s crusade and a climate of fear whipped up by the bloodletting have together silenced dissent from civil society. Hardly anyone turned up at candlelight vigils in Manila recently to protest against extrajudicial killings.
Even as the death toll rose, a July poll by Pulse Asia put Duterte’s approval rating at 91 percent.
Anxious reminders by the Catholic Church of the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ make few headlines in the predominantly Catholic country, with newspapers preferring to carry breathless accounts of the latest slayings.
Duterte has delivered withering attacks on his chief critic, Senator Leila de Lima, accusing her of dealing in drugs herself and having an affair with her driver.
“It’s only the president who can stop this,” de Lima told Reuters last week, deploring what she described as the “madness” that led in one case to a five-year-old girl being shot in the head.
“How many more of these cases of collateral damage are we willing to bear before we can really start screaming about it?” she asked.
As for critics abroad, Duterte pours scorn on them in language larded with curses.
He lambasted the United Nations after it criticized the surge in killings and he turned down a meeting with U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a summit in Laos this week.
Duterte will meet Barack Obama in Laos on Tuesday, although he has made it clear in advance that he will take no lecture on human rights from the U.S. president, when in the United States he alleged “black people are being shot even if they are already lying down”. (Reuters)
