DAVAO CITY, Philippines—Police forces involved in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs were likened to a “criminal underworld” that kill only the poor while receives payments for each killing, according to an Amnesty International report.
Amnesty International report titled “If you are poor you are killed”: Extrajudicial Executions in the Philippines’ “War on Drugs”, details how the police have systematically targeted mostly poor and defenseless people across the country while planting “evidence”, recruiting paid killers, stealing from the people they kill and fabricating official incident reports.
“This is not a war on drugs, but a war on the poor. Often on the flimsiest of evidence, people accused of using or selling drugs are being killed for cash in an economy of murder,” Tirana Hassan, Amnesty International’s crisis response director, said Wednesday.
Amnesty concluded that the wave of drugs-related killings since Duterte came to power in mid-2016 appeared to be “systematic, planned and organised” by authorities and could constitute crimes against humanity. The human rights group’s finding was based on their investigation into the 59 drug-related killings in 20 cities and towns.
“Under President Duterte’s rule, the national police are breaking laws they are supposed to uphold while profiting from the murder of impoverished people the government was supposed to uplift. The same streets Duterte vowed to rid of crime are now filled with bodies of people illegally killed by his own police,” Hassan said.
The agency said the killings that were investigated “appear to have been extra-judicial killings – unlawful and deliberate killings carried out by government order or with its complicity or acquiescence.”
“The Duterte administration’s relentless pressure on the police to deliver results in anti-drug operations has helped encourage these abusive practices,” the report said.
Meanwhile, Philippine Sen. Leila de Lima hit the plan of Duterte to enlist the military to perform anti-drug law enforcement functions through the revival of the Philippine Constabulary while at the same time running after rogue policemen involved with illegal drugs.
Delima said that Duterte’s move “cannot be invoked due to his own order suspending the PNP from conducting anti-drug operations.”
“The problem is neither PNP being unable to do its job nor the AFP taking over the PNP’s job, but the President and his single-minded obsession with drugs and his alarmist strategy in order to justify his human rights abuses,” she added.
The lady senator pointed out that the “solution is to stop the killings, and not call out the AFP to do the killings that the PNP has supposedly ceased to perform. Spare the military from the killing of civilians. Spare the civilians from all killings, whether by the PNP or the AFP.” (davaotoday.com)
