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Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte once boasted about how, as mayor of the southern city of Davao, he used to ride on a motorbike looking for drug suspects to kill. Now his bloody wars on narcotics have landed him in a Netherlands jail cell accused of crimes against humanity.
Duterte’s fall from retired head of state to International Criminal Court detainee has been as sharp as his rise to rule his country between 2016 and 2022. The man branded “the Trump of Asia” won power and popularity by casting himself as enforcer, nationalist and peace-bringer, in language laden with insults and menace. The same ruthless politics that took him to the top have now unseated him, after his successor Ferdinand Marcos Jr, son of the dictator, paved the way for his arrest.
“Duterte rode a singular crest of bravado and brutality,” says Richard Javad Heydarian, author of The Rise of Duterte and senior lecturer at the University of the Philippines’ Asian Center. “But the defiant hubris that catapulted him to the presidency and notoriety, also blinded him to his vulnerability. In the end, he picked a fight against the wrong opponent — the Marcoses, the masters of Machiavellian politics in the Philippines.”
Duterte, who will turn 80 this month, appeared by video link for an initial ICC hearing on Friday afternoon in The Hague. It capped an extraordinary week during which he was arrested in the capital Manila on Tuesday and then dispatched by air to Europe that night.
Philippines authorities moved in response to an arrest warrant issued by the ICC, which was established in 2002 to pursue the “gravest crimes of concern to the international community”. Judges had found reasonable grounds to believe Duterte committed murder between 2011 and 2019 as “head of the Davao Death Squad” and then as president, said Karim Khan, ICC prosecutor.
Duterte’s detention, the ICC’s first of an Asian ex-leader, has been welcomed by rights groups and relatives of the Philippine drugs war dead. The bloody crackdown during his presidency officially killed at least 6,200, but some independent estimates have put the figure as high as 30,000.
Police during Duterte’s presidency killed people “like they were animals”, says Lourdes De Juan, whose husband was shot dead in their home in Manila in 2016 after their children were dragged outside. “For me, it’s just the start of holding him accountable for what he did to the victims of the war on drugs,” she adds.
Duterte’s defenders are regrouping after the shock. His daughter, Philippine vice-president Sara Duterte, has decried his arrest as politically motivated. Her father has told Filipinos there will be “long legal proceedings” but he will take responsibility for the actions under scrutiny.
“I will continue to serve the country,” he said, in a recorded video message uploaded on his Facebook page. “So be it, if that is my destiny.”
Duterte emerged on to the national scene in the Philippines from the southern island of Mindanao, where he was part of a regional political elite. His father Vicente was provincial governor of Davao and later a cabinet minister under Ferdinand Marcos Sr, the current president’s father.
Duterte trained as a lawyer, worked as a prosecutor and then became mayor of Davao in 1988. He cast himself as a restorer of law and order in a city that was the site of battles involving communists, Muslim separatists and criminal gangs.
Davao became the template for Duterte’s presidential push. He embraced the nickname of “The Punisher” and pledged to fill Manila Bay with so many bodies of drug trade participants that the fish would “grow fat”. He bristled at outside criticism, calling both former US president Barack Obama and even Pope Francis “son of a whore” — usually a taboo in a strongly Catholic country.
Duterte, who is running again for mayor of Davao, enjoyed high approval ratings until the end of his constitutionally limited single six-year presidential term. Some saw his success as the product of a failure by successive leaders to build on the 1986 “People Power” uprising. The revolution restored democracy by overthrowing Marcos Sr, under whose rule thousands of people were killed or disappeared.
Duterte’s post-presidency life unravelled after his daughter Sara fell out with President Marcos Jr, with whom she had allied to sweep the 2022 elections. Last year, she threatened to have Marcos killed if she herself were harmed, prompting legislators to file to impeach her.
Marcos, who had himself been forced into exile when his father’s regime collapsed, has now reversed a previous policy of not co-operating with ICC demands. This marks a further shift away from the Duterte era, coming after Marcos ended his predecessor’s tilt towards Beijing and rebuilt frayed ties with the US.
The arrest is the “beginning of the end of the Duterte political family” and an unlikely boost for a successor compromised by his own history, says Jean Encinas-Franco, a political-science professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
“Whether you support Marcos or not, this will actually help revitalise the Marcos family name,” she says.
At a diaspora rally in Hong Kong two days before his arrest, Duterte had defended his war on drugs, saying it was meant to give Filipinos “a little tranquility and peaceful life”. He jokingly asked the crowd to contribute towards a monument for him, which he gestured should show him holding a gun.
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