The recent arrest of former Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte has been hailed by various liberals as a triumph for international justice. Duterte is to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges related to the Filipino drug war and the allegation that he was responsible for the deaths of up to seven thousand people accused of being drug addicts and/or drug dealers.
Duterte was handed over to the ICC by his successor Ferdinand Marcos Junior, the son of the former long-time dictator and key US ally who was overthrown by a popular revolt in 1986. Duterte’s arrest and deportation is nothing to be celebrated, however, and should be understood more properly as another move being made by the imperialists to maintain their control over the Philippines.
Duterte, in his time as president, attempted to maintain something of a balance between the USA and China, which proved to be completely unacceptable to the imperialists; and thus Duterte has been arrested. This isn’t so much about keeping Duterte out of the picture – he is eighty years old and retired now – as it is about sending a message to other Filipino politicians to be sure they toe the US line.
The USA’s blood-soaked domination of the Philippines
For over 300 years the Philippines were subjected to the brutal colonial regime established by the Spanish empire. The 19th century saw a marked decline in the power of Spanish colonialism as its losses to Bonarpartist France, which saw Spain itself conquered, triggered a wave of revolts across Spanish America. By the end of the 1820s, the vast Spanish empire in the Americas was falling apart, with bourgeois revolutionaries such as Simón Bolívar successfully defeating the Spanish colonial forces and establishing new states.
This left the Philippines as one of the few major possessions that the Spanish retained, but in the 1870s it too started to chafe against colonial rule. In 1892, the first major Filipino revolutionary organisation was founded, known as the Katipunan. This was headed by Andrés Bonifacio, who would go on to be the first president of an independent Filipino republic.
The revolution broke out into open revolt in 1896 and saw the revolutionaries wage a two-year war against the Spanish colonial occupiers. The war itself saw the Filipinos push the Spanish to the point of defeat, but this also marked a bloody turning point in history as it occurred in the same period when the USA was transforming itself into an imperialist power in its own right.
The Filipino revolutionaries were themselves inspired by the French and American revolutions and had received some encouragement from the USA to revolt against Spanish rule. This was quickly revealed to be a ruse, however, as the US imperialists engaged in negotiations with the Spanish from which the Filipinos were excluded.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1898, the USA paid $20m in return for the now crisis-ridden Spanish empire signing over sovereignty over the Philippines. The Filipino revolutionaries felt a great sense of betrayal as some of their leaders had maintained illusions that they were engaged with the USA in a joint struggle against Spain.
After 1898, US imperialism attempted to impose direct rule over the country, resulting in a brutal war in which over two hundred thousand Filipinos were killed. The resistance to the USA’s attempt to impose its own version of colonial rule never ended, as a result of which it had to start to at least pretend to be moving towards granting the country full independence.
Direct US rule lasted until 1946, with a brief interruption following the conquest of the Philippines by Japanese imperialism in 1942.
The restoration of Filipino sovereignty in 1946 was very limited: the USA retained an extensive military presence in the country, which it has enjoyed uninterruptedly ever since. This has enabled the imperialists to maintain a high degree of control over the Filipino government from that day to this.
The US imperialists were the primary backers of the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted two decades from 1965-86, and even after the dictator’s overthrow (and subsequent exile in Hawaii) the US presence in the country has been maintained. Alongside the US forces that are stationed in the country, the USA has significant influence over the Filipino armed forces, all of whose senior officers are trained in the USA. Likewise, American military equipment is the mainstay of the Filipino armed forces.
The imperialists understand very well the key strategic advantage of the Philippines in their ongoing attempt to surround China on both land and sea. The hope in Washington is that, in the event of a war with China, US forces will be able to restrict Chinese shipping. Control over the Philippines is crucial to this plan.
Added to this are the imperialists’ repeated attempts to exploit the tensions which have existed between the Chinese and Filipinos over the Scarborough Shoal and the Spratly Islands. One aspect of the USA’s plan is to reinforce its ‘containment’ strategy by forcing the neighbouring states into confrontation with it.
His failure to entirely fall in line with this agenda is what ultimately lies behind the USA’s hostility to Duterte, and is the real reason for his recent arrest.
The rise of Duterte
Rodrigo Duterte rose to the presidency of the Philippines through a successful career in regional politics, principally as mayor of the city of Davao. He held this office repeatedly from 1988 through to his successful run for the presidency in 2016.
During the period of his mayorship, Duterte is credited with having successfully reduced the street violence that stemmed from open political warfare in the late Marcos period. He is also credited with having reduced street crime, partly because of his policy of clamping down hard on drug consumption.
This is where some of the ICC indictment’s allegations come from. It is alleged that he licensed the police to carry out executions of drug users and petty criminals, and that he also ran an off-the-books death squad.
Duterte certainly oversaw a period of relative crime reduction and sustained economic development in Davao. This made him a very popular figure within the city, and paved the way for his presidential run in 2016.
His anti-drug campaigns also gave him a lot of popularity with a population shocked by the increasing number of deaths attributed to methamphetamine and fentanyl abuse. The problem of widespread drug addiction and the involvement of organised crime in the narcotics trade provoked widespread anger in the Philippines, which Duterte was able to mobilise in support of his campaign.
That Duterte’s crackdown against the selling and consumption of narcotics would be popular with many Filipinos should not be a surprise. Most workers do not want to live in neighbourhoods dominated by drug dealers or see the mental and physical toll that addiction takes on their communities. Duterte offered a solution to this which has to some extent been effective.
By arresting huge numbers of drug dealers and addicts it is certainly possible to have something of an impact on drug usage. To really remove the scourge of drug dealing and addiction from any society, however, requires the removal of the conditions that lead to many workers falling prey to addiction in the first place.
The Philippines is a country that suffers from a huge poverty problem. According to the government’s own statistics, at least 10 percent of the population lives in poverty, with a further 58 percent classified as being on “low income”. Unicef and World Bank reports show that there are around 32 million Filipinos living in poverty.
The immiseration of the Filipino working class is obviously a major cause of drug addiction. Duterte, as a capitalist politician, could not solve these problems, but only make a temporary dent in the symptoms via a large-scale crackdown by the forces of the bourgeois state.
What is the ICC?
The International Criminal Court is a product of the various ad-hoc tribunals started by US imperialism in the 1990s. The most prominent of these was the International Criminal Tribunal (ICT) for former Yugoslavia – a prime example of what can only be described as ‘victors’ justice’.
That kangaroo ‘court’ was set up as a vehicle for pursuing those who had defended the continued existence of Yugoslavia, which is why the great majority of those put on trial were Serbs. The most prominent of these trials was that of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic – a trial that ended in embarrassment for the imperialists after Milosevic conducted a very successful defence of his own record.
So successful was this defence that after his death in custody he was cleared of most charges.
The USA and its imperialist allies were looking for a way to set up something that appeared to be a mechanism for meting out ‘international justice’ but which was, in reality, about usurping the jurisdiction of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ), over which the USA has always felt that it didn’t have quite enough control. Hence a new tribunal, the ICC.
Added to that was the fact that the ICC would be focused on issuing arrest warrants for individuals who had held roles within a state structure.
The ICC is actually a very instructive case study for understanding the true nature of most ‘international institutions’ of the present period. The USA was a key player in setting it up, yet has consistently refused to ratify the Rome statute under which the ICC was established in order that its own leaders can never be called to account by it. The US imperialists do not want to take the slightest risk of ever having the embarrassment of one of their own leaders getting indicted by the court.
This gives the game away as to the ICC’s true purpose: namely, to act as a disciplinary mechanism for any world leader who might be tempted to oppose US interests. Such politicians must now bear in mind the possibility that if they incur the wrath of Washington, they could end up kidnapped and deported to the Netherlands – to be detained for as long as the imperialists find it useful.
The return of the Marcos clan
The triumph in the 2021 presidential elections of Ferdinand Marcos Junior marked a return of the most reactionary, comprador sections of the Filipino ruling class to power. Duterte had attempted to find some kind of balance between the USA and China, but his successor has firmly returned the country to being in total thrall to the USA.
In 2023, President Marcos Jr approved the handing over of land for five more US military bases in the Philippines under the terms of a treaty known as the ‘Enhanced Defence Cooperation Agreement’ (ECDA).
This ‘treaty’ allows US forces and mercenaries (referred to as “contractors”) to exercise complete control over all these sites as if they were the sovereign territory of the USA itself. Originally negotiated in 2014-15 under former president Corazon Aquino, implementation of the ECDA was held during Duterte’s presidency. Marcos agreed to its full implementation immediately, thus pushing the Philippines further into its role as designated staging post for US aggression against China.
The Filipino national-liberation struggle must be renewed
The fate of Duterte is instructive for those wishing to understand the problems facing the Philippines. Ever since US imperialism stepped in to thwart the gaining of independence in 1898, it has sought to subjugate the Philippines. The sovereignty and independence of the country has always been compromised, and any attempt towards even the more balanced approach to relations between the USA and China favoured by Duterte has been stamped on.
This is what actually lies behind the ICC’s indictment of Duterte; it has nothing to do with his actions during the ‘war on drugs’ he unleashed, either when he was mayor of Davao or when president of the country. With Duterte’s arrest, the imperialists are sending a message to any head of government who might try to steer a neutral course at this time of increased aggression from the US-led imperialist bloc.
That message is that anything other than absolute subservience by a head of state or nation will be treated as a hostile act, and that ‘offenders’ will be pursued and punished even after leaving office.
The Filipino masses have been struggling to gain their freedom from Spanish and US colonisera for over a century now, and it is clear that this struggle must be intensified if they are to break free of the destructive death grip of US imperialism as it seeks to use the Filipino nation, against its own best interests, as a tool to be wielded against the China and the whole of progressive and anti-imperialist humanity.
