The International Criminal Court thinks the Philippines has not advanced from the stone age that it has no functional judicial system. If the ICC prosecutors think there were 6,000 victims of extrajudicial killings, then this proves from the start the ignorance of the ICC investigators about the facts of the drug menace in the country and how feeble the Aquino government was that it drove the country to the edge of a failed and narco-state.
The ICC case stemmed from a complaint against then-President Rodrigo R. Duterte filed by lawyer Jude Sabio back in 2017 that alleged thousands of extrajudicial killings during Duterte’s campaign against illegal drugs.
Stung by his conscience and realizing the ICC case had been used by opposition politicians as a “tool for propaganda”, Sabio later withdrew the complaint. In a letter to ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, he said, “I fervently request that it be expunged or erased from the record and that it should not be used in any way in the ongoing preliminary examination.”
Sabio, who died of cardiac arrest a few months later, was the lawyer for Edgar Matobato, the man who testified in the Senate that he was part of the Davao Death Squad organized and operated on Duterte’s orders.
The Senate Blue Ribbon Committee concluded later that Matobato was a prevaricator and perjured witness who was recruited by a Jesuit priest and handed over to Sen. Antonio Trillanes who gave him protection to testify against Duterte. The BRC recommended the filing of cases against Matobato but before this could be done, he slipped out of the country and has not been heard from since.
Matobato was lying through his teeth. In the first place, the DDS was a phantom force created by then Integrated National Police Regional Commander Brig. Gen. Dionisio Tan-Gatue Jr. to scare off the “sparrows”, the New People’s Army liquidation squad.
That Matobato personally killed more than 200 EJK victims suspected to be drug pushers and buried them in an abandoned quarry was also a fairy tale. In 2009, then Commission on Human Rights chairperson Leila de Lima headed a probe team that investigated suspects whom she claimed were behind the murder of 2,000 EJK victims, among them was then-Mayor Rodrigo Duterte.
De Lima’s allegation was that the victims were buried in an abandoned quarry. After nearly three months of unrelenting digging, they failed to find even one piece of evidence. Her team was able to exhume the bones of a person who had badly deteriorated that when she presented these to the Regional Trial Court in Manila, the judge promptly declared the evidence inadmissible in court.
An interesting issue that was not revealed by De Lima was that they had barricaded the site where they found the skeletal remains to deter the media from witnessing the digging.
But someone sneaked in and took pictures. What has not been presented to the court were unearthed sets of license plates that had not even rusted, suggesting that the bones and the license plates were planted.
(To be continued)