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february 3-9, 2017 • NOrCaL aSIaN JOurNaL
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OpiniOn
The purge
Features
IN recent months, when the Philippine government ushered in a new leadership under President Rodrigo Duterte, members of the police seemed to be invincible. Because they’re the government’s first line of defense—and offense—against the war it waged on illegal drugs and criminality, the police managed to remain unscathed, despite mounting poor public perception and criticisms over some officers’ alleged abuse of power and violation of human rights. The country saw a wave of drugsrelated killings since July last year. More than 7,669 deaths have been linked to the administration’s war on drugs, but only 2,555 alleged drug personalities were killed during police operations, which the officers involved say were all in self-defense. The other deaths are classified as investigated, or under investigation. The president defended the spate of drug-related killings and even admitted to personally killing suspects when he was still the mayor of Davao City. “In Davao, I used to do it personally, just to show to the (police) that if I can do it, why can’t you?” Duterte said in December last year. However, Duterte maintained that he is not condoning extrajudicial killings, saying that his directive to police authorities was to hunt for drug suspects and “arrest them if it’s possible, but if they offer a violent resistance…then kill them.” In October last year, a police van rammed into a crowd of anti-U.S. protesters who were calling for an end to American military presence in the Philippines. The van barreled back and forth into the crowd of demonstrators, scattering them like bowling pins and running over on a few of them. Duterte did not justify the police officer’s actions over the violent dispersal and maintained that he did not want any of the police officers nor the mili-
tants hurt. “I’m not justifying it. Just maybe he was under stress. They might gang up on him, hurt him. So he acted by instinct, self-preservation,” he said. A total of 50 protesters and 34 police officer were injured during the encounter. In November, Albuera, Leyte Mayor and alleged drug lord Rolando Espinosa Sr. was killed in an alleged “firefight” with the operatives of the Criminal Investigation and Detection Group in Northern Leyte (CIDG8) while being detained at the Baybay, Leyte Sub-Provincial Jail after being charged with possession of illegal drugs and unlicensed firearms. CIDG operatives went to the prison to serve him a search warrant when the encounter occurred but Espinosa allegedly resisted the arrest after which the firefight ensured. Espinosa and Raul Yap, another detainee, were killed during the encounter. The National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) inquiry called the incident a police rubout and recommended the filing of murder and perjury charges against the CIDG officers. Duterte vowed to protect the CIDG officers, saying he was more inclined to believe the police than the testimony of criminals. “I will not allow these guys to go to prison, even if the NBI says it was murder. After all, the NBI is under me, the Department of Justice,” he said.
Editorial
ManilaTimes.net photo
On Sunday, Jan. 29, Duterte had a sudden change of heart when he ordered the halt on the Philippine National Police (PNP)’s drug war and demanded a cleansing of the police force instead. “The culture of corruption in the police is deep. Even generals are into it,” he said in a meeting with military generals at Malacañang on Tuesday, Jan. 31. He ordered for some members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to go after police scalawags. The order came in the wake of the kidnapping for ransom and murder of South Korean businessman Jee Ick-joo inside the police headquarters in Campe Crame, Quezon City. PNP Chief Director General Ronald Dela Rosa
confirmed this directive saying that the cleansing of the organization comes after a series of scandals involving police officers. After what seemed like a string of criminal incidents wherein policemen are involved as perpetrators, the very organization bound by law to uphold the law and protect the citizenry from criminality is hounded by bad cops. It is a betrayal of trust and a degradation of peace and security. The PNP is now tasked to not just ensure the public’s safety and purge misfits from the streets, it must do so within its ranks. This calls for strong and effective civilian oversight of the police. (AJPress)
Gallup Poll: Trump plummets to historic low eight days Into his presidency SUPPORTERS of President Donald Trump chastise his critics and nonsupporters for not being on board the “Trump train” even after he won the majority vote of the Electoral College, which catapulted him to the United States’ highest office. Even as they hail him for churning executive orders one after another to build the border wall, temporarily ban refugee immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, plans to repeal Obamacare, deregulate financial institutions and give more tax breaks to the wealthy, appoint billionaires in his administration, etc., there has been no honeymoon stage for those who disapprove of him and his vision and
Trump into the plans for America. highest post of the Millions protested The Fil-Am land should be reon the streets across spected as a manthe United States and Perspective date for Trump to around the world on move forward — an the second day of his argument that can presidency, in airports be debunked by the after his “Muslim” G el sanTos-relos fact that Trump did travel ban, and many NOT win the vote more are expected as people exercise their First Amend- of more Americans, having lost the ment right to voice out their opposition popular vote to Democratic candidate of the direction Trump is stirring the nominee Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes. America into. In the onset of his presidency, GalHis supporters contend that Trump was just fulfilling his campaign prom- lup Poll revealed Trump garnered only ise to the American people and that a dismal 45 percent approval and 45 the rule of the voters who elected percent disapproval. Data show he is
HOW would the world look like after Donald Trump gets done with the things he has set out to do as President of the United States? And what happens to our poor dear Philippines? The basic question is what the American media and political establishment are trying to discern as Trump uses the social media, especially Twitter, to define the policies of his government. “Career government officials and members of Congress alike are left to discern policy from random Twitter posts spurred by whatever happened to be on television when the President grabbed the remote control,” says a recent front-page article in The New York Times. For someone like former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile, however, what could happen is not totally unpredictable. War could be on the horizon. I had Enrile on my weekly TV show on Destiny cable recently, and he showed an undoubtable grip on the global situation. At 93, our longest living Filipino politician remains intellectually functional. Since coming out with his memoirs and leaving the Senate after a second stint in political detention under the second President Aquino—the first one was under Cory Aquino, whom he, as Marcos’s long serving defense secretary, and his comrade generals had installed as revolutionary President after they revolted in
lowing days for his immediate predecessors to reach the below-majority approval rating: Reagan: 727 Bush I: 1336 Clinton: 573 Bush II: 1205 Obama: 936 WHAT should Trump do to win the support of most Americans moving forward? *** Gel Santos Relos is the anchor of TFC’s “Balitang America.” Views and opinions expressed by the author in this column are solely those of the author and not of Asian Journal and ABS-CBN-TFC. For comments, go to www.TheFil-AmPerspective.com, https://www. facebook.com/Gel.Santos.Relos
Is war necessary or unavoidable for Trump?
Commentary
Francisco s. TaTad
the first elected U.S. president to start out with a job approval rating below 50 percent in the history of Gallup surveys, which date back to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953. By comparison, Gallup Poll has the following approval ratings for his immediate predecessors: Barack Obama 68% Bill Clinton 58% George W. Bush 57% George H.W. Bush 51% Ronald Reagan 51% And in just eight days into his term, a majority of those surveyed by Gallup Poll said they do not approve of Trump’s performance as president. Polling data showed it took the fol-
February 1986—Enrile has devoted himself to a serious rereading of history. The first bold moves While still struggling with some initial administrative difficulties, including Press Secretary Sean Spicer squabbling with the media on the accuracy of their count of the inaugural crowd, Trump has embarked on a number of audacious moves, which have awed, if not alarmed, the public. He has, for starters, withdrawn the US from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation economic grouping (without China or the Philippines) which the Obama administration had tried to put together as a trading club, under US leadership, and is now proposing bilateral trade agreements with various individual nations instead. This seems to create a wider window for the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) proposed in 2012 and which China has since championed. It will hold its 17th round of negotiations in Kobe, Japan by the end of February, and take firm decisions on how to step into the void left by TPP. In keeping with his campaign pledge, Trump has also taken the first steps to replace Obamacare (the Affordable Care Act) with something that is yet to be defined by Congress. He has also reinstated Ronald Reagan’s Mexico City policy of 1984, which bans the use of US funds to support abortion in foreign countries. This policy was suspended by Bill Clinton, who promoted abortion as a way of life
within and outside the US. It was reinstated by George W. Bush, who was a pro-life President, but was suspended again by Obama, who with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State became known as the most pro-abortion US President. The present ban could become permanent if more conservative and pro-life justices are appointed to the US Supreme Court and the Court reverses the Roe v. Wade ruling, which legalized the murder of the unborn in 1973. But it will be opposed by a large part of American society which has come to believe that the slaughter of the unborn is a fundamental human right of women who want to engage in sex—even married sex—without any biological consequences. The famous wall Also in keeping with a campaign pledge, Trump has started talking about his plan to build his own great wall along the US-Mexican southern border to prevent the illegal entry of people and goods from Mexico into the US. This so horrified Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto that he promptly cancelled his scheduled visit to Washington, D.C. Trump is now talking of increasing taxes on all Mexican imports to finance the building of the wall, estimated at $15 billion to $20 billion. Apparently many thought the wall idea was but a campaign hyperbole—a joke—; they were all shocked to learn it wasn’t. Now Mexico is girding for a “trade war.” Trump has also revived the proposed construction of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipeline, over the opposition of environ-
mentalists and the native American community. The proposed pipeline will cross Lake Oahe, a water source for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose reservation lies less than a mile away. A spillage or rupture could devastate the area and the tribe (Wikipedia). On global security, Trump has called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “obsolete” and has provoked speculations that he would move to dismantle the defense alliance, which has been expanding its membership and territorial reach into Eastern Europe, to Russia’s increasing discomfort. For Enrile, this could mean rolling back the vast US naval presence around the world, which until now has provided world security for travel and trade in the high seas. This could prompt the other powers—Russia and the United Kingdom, for example–to try to fill in the resulting void in the Atlantic. It would usher in a period of great uncertainty similar to that which preceded World War II in Europe. With Britain out of the European Union, the other EU members could follow, and previous allies could find themselves in conflict with one another. Keeping NATO? However, in his meeting with British Prime Minister Theresa May—Trump’s first meeting in the White House with a foreign head of government—he allowed May to announce that he had, during their talks, expressed 100 percent support of NATO, a statement he did not dispute. Maintaining NATO, while at the same time improving relations with Russia,
to include the lifting of sanctions imposed on Moscow, could be the most important development in the security architecture of Europe and the world. This could help exorcise the demons of inter-state, regional and global conflicts, and allow Europe to work together in fighting various seaborne crimes like piracy, illegal drugs and human trafficking, and international terrorism under the aegis of ISIS. In fact, in a telephone conversation last Saturday, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly agreed to pursue a more muscular cooperation between their two governments to destroy the ISIS in Syria, resolve the “Ukraine crisis,” and rebuild US-Russia relations on a “constructive, equitable and mutually beneficial basis.” Banning Islamic refugees As part of his avowed effort to destroy ISIS, Trump, who has criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s refugee policy as a “catastrophic mistake,” issued an executive order banning the entry of refugees from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. This was instantly met with sharp disapproval from human rights groups within the US and abroad. It negates and nullifies America’s long and distinguished tradition of opening its doors to refugees, a tradition enshrined in Emma Lazarus’s 1883 poem “The New Colossus” posted at the Statue of Liberty on Liberty Island, New York, part of which reads: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled mass yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming
shore. Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me. I light my lamp beside the golden door!” The order also seems to contradict Trump’s effort to bring back God and humanity into America’s conduct of political affairs. After the past administrations banned God and prayer from the public square, and Obama led the last national Thanksgiving without any mention of God in his statement, Trump shocked everyone when he brought in God in three passages in his 16-minute inaugural. This is what he said: “Have no fear. We are protected and will always be protected. We will be protected by the great men and women of our military and law enforcement, and most importantly we will be protected by God.” Later on, he said: “And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or in the wind-swept plain of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky, they will their heart with the same dreams, and they are infused with the same breath of life by the same almighty creator.” And he ended his speech with “God bless you. And God bless America.” The order against refugees creates a monstrous disconnect with a God-loving America. The Asian challenge The more pressing challenge to Trump’s global security position appears to be in Asia, where the US President had given Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe full assurance of support for the maintenance of a robust US-Japan alliance, and Secretary of State PAGE A7
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