One commentator made this strange suggestion: The unlamented ex-president Rodrigo Duterte, a suspected violator of international humanitarian law as well as mastermind of the murders of 30,000 people during the “anti-drug war” (the United Nations estimated the victims numbered nearly 8,000), should write his memoir while holed up at the Scheveningen detention facility in The Hague.
There is absolutely no need for his memoir. It is written in big, bold, bloody letters in the hearts and minds of the relatives and friends of the 30,000 victims, those orphaned by the unmitigated slaughter under Memorandum Circular No. 32 (MC 32) that in 2018, when the police and military launched attacks on civilian communities purportedly shielding New People’s Army (NPA) guerrillas, and the continuing red-tagging, harassment, abductions and summary executions conducted by the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict (NTF-ELCAC) and coddled by Duterte under Executive Order No. 70 (EO 70) issued in 2018.
Of course, Duterte was never genuinely interested in peace talks with the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP.) The overtures made to the revolutionary movement were actually a ruse to smoke out its leaders, with the military saying peace negotiations increase the opportunities for intelligence gathering and surveillance, and when Duterte scrapped the talks and repudiated the agreements signed, he was being true to his lying, murdering self.
One analyst said the “flirtation” with Duterte had a two-year expiry, and the lame excuse for scuttling it, an ambush that caused the death of a civilian, was as lame as the reason for pushing Duterte to write his memoir. Nothing similar to Antonio Gransci’s “Prison Notebooks” for Duterte, or the work of Jean Genet written in shit inside his cell, but perhaps a reworking of “Mein Kampf” of Adolf Hitler. Give Duterte a quill, along with fentanyl to inspire him to write while being hounded by the ghosts of Kian de los Santos, Carl Arnaiz, Reynaldo de Guzman, the four Alia brothers of Davao City and the many victims of MC 32 and EO 70.
Plenty of inspiration for the man who punished society for the slights he suffered and the rejection he endured in Davao City. Here is your Montresor of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” who buried his victim alive, or the jailer in Anton Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” who ended up insane after abusing patients in an asylum. Then, there is the ghost of Slobodan Milosevic, an accomplished genocidal maniac who massacred 6,000 Muslims in Srebrenica.
Writing about detention is never fun and take it from a fellow who did chronicle his incarceration but left his work in prison to be shared with those whom he had left behind. It was not a memoir but a diary, narrating how prison guards deny detainees their basic rights to be visited by relatives and their lawyers, who heard about inquests for scores of detainees but the cases languished in steel cabinets. There was no basis for holding activists exercising their rights because they were never “politically dead” inside and outside of prison. The guy who described detainees thus apparently died a lonesome death some years back.
Hunger strikes were launched that pestered Army officers responsible for keeping the “peace” at the “Ipil Reception Center” at Fort Bonifacio and clownish captains talking about their wives being “in the way of our Lord” to mean their partners were pregnant, or officers needling Dr. Bien Lumbera to treat his soldiers who were needling in pain, all because of “double dead” oink-oink in their “rancho” or meals. Flabbergasted by the request, the gentle Dr. Lumbera curtly told the captain he was a doctor of philosophy, not medicine. That reception center hosted the likes of an activist who was badgered by his own family for getting busted, and he was the only political prisoner allowed to run his four-hour jogs under the searing outside the prison camp while another fellow, the son of a retired military officer, ran backwards.
Alone and with only his troubled mind providing him company, Duterte would have trouble confronting the worst angels of his nature. He can argue that the bloody carnage he unleashed for six years nationally and more than 30 years in Davao City were a drop in the ocean of violence, perhaps citing Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” who infamously insisted that violence has petered out worldwide on the road to a universal utopia. Yet, Duterte will have to contest his own demons, the warped logic that reduced everything to murder, and argues that his conscience is clear, certainly it is for not having been used from the time he was born. Duterte memoir, anyone? (DIEGO MORRA)
