The former Philippine president may have thought he was too powerful to be arrested over the deaths of thousands of people. He was wrong.
The former Philippine president may have thought he was too powerful to be arrested over the deaths of thousands of people. He was wrong.
By Zach Hope
Updated March 13, 2025 — 1.22pmfirst published March 12, 2025 — 3.53pm
Singapore: Rodrigo Duterte might have thought they didn’t have the guts. For decades, he has done as he pleased, first as mayor of Davao and then as president of the Philippines when his “war on drugs” resulted in the deaths of thousands of people at the hands of police and vigilantes.
But he would have been wrong. At 11.03 on Tuesday night Duterte left Manila on a flight bound for The Hague where he will face the International Criminal Court accused of crimes against humanity committed between 2011 and 2019.
The ICC said in a statement on Friday that Duterte was “surrendered to the custody of the International Criminal Court. He was arrested by the authorities of the Republic of the Philippines…for charges of murder as a crime against humanity”.
Duterte withdrew his country from the court’s jurisdiction in 2019 after it announced a preliminary investigation into his crackdown, a move seen by critics as a way of dodging accountability for the ex-judicial killings.
Families of the mostly poor and marginalised people executed in his anti-drug campaign rejoiced that his run of impunity may be over. Some estimates put the war-on-drugs death toll in the tens of thousands. Amnesty International has called his arrest a “monumental step for justice”.
Supporters, who saw in Duterte a no-nonsense leader doing whatever it took to clean up their country, gathered and wept. There will undoubtedly be protests, particularly in Davao, where he remains a candidate to reclaim his old post as mayor.
While no longer president, he remains powerful and loved by his followers.
He had embraced, rather than refuted, his “Duterte Harry” brand, justifying the deaths as recently as this week.
Advertisement
“Assuming it’s true, why did I do it? For myself? For my family? For you and your children, and for our nation,” he told a crowd of Filipino workers in Hong Kong while drumming up support for his Senate picks at the May midterm elections.
He was arrested on return to the Philippines on Tuesday. Why then? That is when the warrant came through, we are told. Most likely it was timed to get him in Manila. In Davao, his stronghold, attempts to arrest him could have turned ugly.
In an age of strongmen, and with similar ICC warrants yet to be enacted against Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, it was striking to hear President Ferdinand Marcos Jr announce that his predecessor was actually (and involuntarily) bound for Europe.
Duterte, of course, is no longer in charge, unlike Putin and Netanyahu. And while his daughter Sara Duterte is vice-president, her hostility towards her boss is so great that she has threatened to dig up his father’s bones and toss them into the sea. This year she was impeached by the lower house for remarks that she had hired a hitman to kill the president if she were killed first. The Duterte-Marcos conviviality of the 2022 election has collapsed, and with it, it appears, the old man’s presumptions to protection.
Still, Marcos had declared the Philippines would not co-operate with the ICC investigation. So he was at pains to point out that his arresting officials were only co-operating with Interpol.
“We obliged because we have commitments to Interpol which we have to fulfil,” he said. “If we don’t do that, they will no longer help us with other cases involving Filipino fugitives abroad.
Loading
“This is what the international community expects of us as … a democratic country that is part of the community of nations.”
Marcos is seeking international support to counter Chinese aggression in the South China Sea. He could hardly petition for a rules-based international order while flouting it himself.
Duterte’s arrest will have implications not only for the Philippines’ midterm elections, but geopolitics. Duterte turned the Philippines towards China. Marcos has brought the country back towards its ally the United States. Duterte’s backers will seek to use his fate to paint Marcos as a puppet of the West.
Asked on Tuesday night to respond to them, Marcos replied: “The government is just doing its job.”
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.
Loading
Discover more from World Byte News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.