PHILIPPINE POLICE RETURN TO WAR ON DRUGS, CANNOT PROMISE TO AVOID BLOODSHED
Police in the Philippines on
Monday resumed President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, making visits to the
homes of users and dealers to convince them to surrender, but the national
police chief said he could not promise a bloodless campaign.
The announcement
came as the justice department filed its first criminal case against police officers
in the battle against drugs, bolstering human rights activists’ accusations of
fabricated accounts of shoot-outs with drug suspects.
The program of
visits, known as “Oplan Tokhang”, made a comeback with an assurance from police
chief Ronaldo dela Rosa that it should be free of violence if offenders agreed
to go quietly and did not resist.
But he could not
promise a “foolproof anti-drug campaign that would be bloodless”, Dela Rosa
added, as the police were “not dealing with people who are in their proper
state of mind”.
In the dialect of
Duterte’s southern hometown of Davao, “Tokhang” is a combination of the words
“knock” and “plead”.
Besides the visits,
police have also run so-called “buy-bust” or sting operations and raided
suspected drug dens and illicit laboratories.
In many of these
operations, say rights activists, suspects did not get the chance to surrender,
but were executed in cold blood instead. But police insist suspects died
because they violently resisted arrest.
Nearly 4,000 drug
suspects have died in gun battles with police since June 2016, when Duterte
came to power. The government lost 85 police and soldiers in the drugs war,
police data show.
More than 1.2
million people had also turned themselves in after the home visits.
Duterte has stopped
police anti-drugs operations twice due to questions over the conduct of the force,
including the killing of a teenager in a supposed anti-drug operation.
On Monday, the
justice department filed murder charges and two drug-related cases against
three police officers who killed the teenager, Kian Loyd delos Santos, after
witnesses disputed the police version of the killing.
National police
spokesman Dionardo Carlos said the force welcomed the filing.
“The police officers
have to face their accusers in court and prove their innocence, they have to
follow the procedures,” he said, urging due process for the officers.
To ensure
transparency, Dela Rosa invited human rights advocates, priests and the media
to join the relaunched program of home visits.
The police officers
involved would also undergo a vetting process to weed out “rogue” officers,
said Dela Rosa, adding that past abuses had involved the police seeking bribes
to drop the names of people from the lists they compiled.
“We are certainly
hoping that it will be less controversial, because controversy will only blur
the real intention, which is really the fight against dangerous drugs,” Harry
Roque, Duterte’s spokesman, told a regular media briefing.
Source: Reuters
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