Just on his 80th birthday, Rodrigo Duterte, the man who once vowed to cleanse his country through bloody anti-drug and crime campaigns, finds himself fled and in custody.
The former president met the Philippine police when he arrived in Manila on a flight from Hong Kong. There, he was garnering support for candidates for upcoming midterm elections among the large Philippine diaspora there.
Many topical warrants for his arrest from the International Criminal Court (ICC) have already been found to be in the hands of the Philippine government, and it has moved to do so quickly.
The frail looking Duterte, walking on a stick, moved to an airbase within the airport’s boundaries. The chartered jet was quickly prepared to take him to the ICC in The Hague.
How did this happen? How did people become so powerful and popular that they are often referred to as “Asian Trump” become so low?
In vain, his lawyers and his family protested that the arrest had no legal basis and accused Duterte of his frail health of the country was being ignored.
During his tenure, Duterte formed an alliance with the Marcos family, who expelled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who had been working on a political comeback for a long time. Duterte was unable to run again in the 2022 election, but Sara, the daughter of the mayor of Davao Southern City, was also popular and a strong competitor to replace him.
But Ferdinand Marcos’ son Bonbon, who was involved in politics all his life, was well placed to win and was extremely funded.
The two families signed a contract. They worked together to take Bonbon to the presidency and Sarah to the vice president.
That worked. Both took positions with large margins. Duterte predicted that his alliance would protect him from the controversial blow to the presidency once he came to power.
The most serious threat lies with him was an ICC investigation into his negligence over the thousands of extrajudicial killings he ordered during his anti-drug campaign, after becoming president in 2016 and during his tenure as mayor of Davao city in southern Davao since 2011.
Duterte retracted the Philippines from the ICC jurisdiction in 2019, but prosecutors began a formal investigation in 2021, claiming they had an obligation to investigate alleged crimes against humanity committed before that.
That position only changed after the dramatic collapse of the Duterte-Marcos Alliance. The tension in their relationship was evident from the early days of the administration. When Sarah Duterte was asked to be given control of the powerful Ministry of Defense, she was given the Ministry of Education instead.
President Marcos also distanced himself from his predecessor’s mercury policy, repaired the US and fence, confronted China in the contested seas, and stopped the threat of retaliation against drug dealers.
Ultimately, these were two ambitious power-hungry clans aimed at dominating Filipino politics, and they were not strong enough for them to share. The relationship reached Nadir last year when Sarah Duterte announced that she had hired an assassin to kill President Marcos if anything happened to her.
Late last year, the House of Representatives, controlled by Marcos’ Loyalists, filed a petition for Ms Duterte to the bluff each. The trial is scheduled to take place in the Senate later this year.
If she is being bounced under the Constitution, she is forbidden from holding a high political office, killing the ambitions of the long-standing president, and further weakening Dutertes’ political power.
It appears that President Marcos has now moved skillfully to neutralize his main political rival. However, his strategy is not risk-free. Dutertes is popular in most parts of the country and may be able to mobilize the former president’s protests against the prosecution.
Sarah Duterte has issued a statement accusing the government of abandoning her father to a “foreign power” and violating the sovereignty of the Philippines.
The early test of support enjoyed by both clans will be in the mid-term elections in May.
In comments to journalists after the plane carrying his predecessor took off from Manila, President Marcos claimed it fulfilled the country’s commitment to Interpol, which provided the ICC. However, he was embarrassed about the fact that it was an ICC warrant he was carrying out, given that many Filipinos questioned what the ICC remittance was in a country already out of its jurisdiction.
It is not risk-free for the ICC either. Courts have been a distressing agency recently, with the Trump administration threatening to arrest the top officials if they travel to the US, and few countries are trying to extradite those charged. So taking former president Duterte to the Hague might seem like a welcome and prominent success.
However, there was a warning from China. It is certainly not an ICC signator, and is not currently politicizing the ICC case in Loggerheads in the Philippines. This is a thinly covered reference to the fact that this case of accountability for serious international crimes is assumed, and it has played a critical role in the domestic feud in the Philippines between two rival political forces.
