‘You’ll see less of me until the Marawi incident is over,” the Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte announced, having re-emerged after disappearing from public view for the second time last month, as an insurgency led by Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) gripped the country’s south.
This lying low is, no doubt, not the position Duterte had hoped to be in, with Friday marking the end of his controversial first year in office. Having attracted widespread condemnation for his unrelenting war on drugs that turned the capital Manila into a bloodbath, after the extrajudicial killings of upwards of 7,000 Filipinos, it was cut short amid claims of endemic police corruption and the murder via mistaken identity of the South Korean businessman, Jee Ick-Joo. Not wanting to lose momentum, Duterte also managed to cosy up to United States President Donald Trump, goad Chelsea Clinton with Monica Lewinsky gags and deploy troops to the South China Sea’s hotly disputed Spratly Islands.
Throughout this first year, the one thing you could not knock was the man’s gruelling schedule. It’s been a year packed with rallies and public appearances, enabling him to showcase the no-nonsense, “man-of-the-people” persona.
However, the capturing of Marawi City — the heart of the Philippines’ Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) — by the Maute group and supported by both Abu Sayyaf and foreign Daesh terrorists, is the start of a tangle of unrest that cannot be brushed off with braggadocio. The first president from the Philippines’ rural badlands of Mindanao, Duterte is well-versed in his home island’s long and labyrinthine struggle with guerilla warfare, that’s seen the government clash with multiple groups, including Muslim separatists, private militias and Communists. As a mayor, his devoted following was built having brokered successful peace deals between warring factions in Davao City, earning it the title of one of the safest cities in the world. So what happened with Marawi and why couldn’t Duterte stem a conflict happening on his home turf?
After seemingly calling on the ghost of the Philippines’ most reviled leader, former president Ferdinand Marcos, by granting his body a hero’s burial, Duterte’s quick decision to declare all of Mindanao under martial law brought back painful echoes of Marcos’s rule. The legality of his declaration was immediately challenged, with four Marawi women represented by lawyer Marlon Manuel stressing there would be a grave breakdown in human rights. after Duterte himself quipped to soldiers: “If you had raped three [women], I will admit it, that’s on me.” The Supreme Court is set to come to a conclusion.
Beyond repair
But now, five weeks into the fighting, the Philippines armed forces, aided by US intelligence, are close to capturing the city back. Thousands of civilians have been displaced into refugee camps, with the intensity of initial fighting flattening the city beyond conceivable repair. The original death toll of more than 400 people, including the militants, is also expected to rise significantly as the city is cleared. What’s more, reports of militants evading heavy air strikes through complex tunnel systems and utilising mosques as safe havens, in addition to using home-made improvised explosive devices and strategically placed snipers has drawn eerie comparisons to Daesh tactics in the Middle East. So while the imminent liberation of Marawi may provide some brief respite, the fear of renewed clashes led by sleeper cells more vicious and organised than ever before is palpable.
To further complicate the aftermath, Duterte’s assertion, as the clashes started, that Marawi was a “bedrock” for drugs was proved right, as last week 11kg of methamphetamine, or “shabu”, were seized from the house of an ex-Marawi mayor, along with high-powered firearms and a Daesh flag. Not only does this pour petrol on suspicions that local government was aiding militants long before any fighting started, but that the Philippines may be inviting in a different level of drug war that government is just not equipped to deal with.
This only serves to highlight that Duterte’s social cleansing of the capital’s most poverty-stricken meth addicts and small-time dealers has been nothing more than chasing minnows. By contrast, narcos collaborating with Daesh presents a potentially dark new frontier of narco-terrorism for the Philippines’ south.
All of this has seemed to trigger a change in protocol for Duterte as, after a spate of visiting grieving families and evacuees, he’s spent most of the last month locked away from public view, including failing to make an appearance on the Philippines’ Independence Day. While opposing senators have called for transparency, asking where their president has disappeared to in a time of crisis, devotees have theorised that he’s conducting surveillance incognito and his aides have been busy vociferously denying rumours of his ill health. Duterte himself has said he is continuing to meet soldiers away from the view of the media.
Whatever his reason for keeping an unusually low profile, it’s clear the bloodshed in his home region is affecting him deeply. Going into his second year, Duterte must step up and abandon his kneejerk indignance to provide not just a powerful but a smart leadership, that can reassure the public he’s in control of a crisis that’s unlikely to stop at Marawi City. Or else he may see Filipinos rapidly lose faith.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Joanna Fuertes-Knight is a filmmaker and journalist.
