The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines has launched a campaign against the huge spike in murders of suspected drug dealers and addicts since the election of President Duterte.
The campaign, called ‘Do Not Kill’, marks an escalation of the Filipino Bishops’ response to the shocking violence of the last few months initiated by citizens and police.
President Duterte put the violent eradication of drug users and dealers at the centre of the electoral campaign that won him his landslide victory. During the campaign, he promised that the estimated 1,000 people killed by vigilantes during his mayoralty of Davao would become 100,000, and that their corpses would make the fish fat.
On the day of his inauguration in July he gave a nationally televised speech in which he told Filipinos: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”
Many citizens have responded to his encouragement. On one recent occasion, vigilantes on motorcycles shot and killed six people. A cardboard sign was left by the body of one of the victims, reading “I am a pusher”. The victim’s partner told Reuters that he had not been a dealer but an addict, and that he had voted for Duterte in the recent election.
Last month, eight people allegedly linked to the illegal drugs trade, seven men and one woman, were shot dead in a police raid. Later that day, police said they found the body of a man in the capital Manila, his head wrapped in packaging tape and his upper body covered with a cardboard sign reading “I am a drug pusher”.
Archbishop Socrates Villegas, President of the Philippines Bishops’ Conference, used his homily last Sunday to condemn the violence. He challenged President Duterte’s supporters, saying: “You will tell me, let us give the anti-drug campaign a chance. The youth need a safe and wholesome environment without the menace of drugs... Are we providing our children a safe haven, by teaching them by our tolerance of murders, that killing suspected criminals without fair hearing is a morally acceptable way to eradicate crime?”
He said: “The humanity in me cries each time I see a parent and a child grieve over loved ones killed on the sidewalk or thrown in grassy areas hogtied or masked with tape… For the killer and the killed I grieve.” Expecting backlash from his comments, he continued: “Will you kill me again and again on the social media for saying this? At this point. I do not care.”
The conference’s ‘Do Not Kill’ campaign, launched last week, aims to bring together the families of victims to protest against the killings. The tone of the new campaign is a marked change from the bishops’ statement of 20 June, released less than a month after his election. The statement expressed concern about reports of police and vigilante violence but commended law enforcers for their “new-found earnestness in enforcing the law and in apprehending malefactors” and said that “members of the community – Christians especially – should not be too quick to point accusing fingers” at them.
Relations between Duterte and the Catholic Church in the Philippines have been strained since the former mayor of Davao launched a foul-mouthed rant against the Pope. Despite an estimated 86 per cent of the population being Catholic, Duterte used attacks on the Catholic Church as an important part of his campaign. In May, he accused the bishops of corruption, infidelity to their vows of celibacy and hypocrisy.
“Some people here in the Philippines can’t even afford to have food to eat or get medicine while you’re enjoying the money of the goddamn people,” Duterte said. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves, you sons of bitches?”
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