By Gerry Lirio

There is always a day of reckoning.

More than a year after he left Malacanang, Rodrigo Duterte now feels he is not invincible. Not anymore.

Time is ticking, and it is beginning to turn the tables on his War on Drugs, that bloody campaign that sentenced people to die without a fair trial.

All this talk about the ICC investigators setting foot in the Philippines makes him lose his cool, erratic.

Can he easily be arrested?

Victims’ ID, exhumations

Solicitor General Menardo Guevarra told Maharlika NuMedia in an ambush interview last week that the ICC investigators need the government’s support, in getting documents for the identification of victims, and exhumation of bodies, among others.

But allowing them to arrest Duterte is altogether a different issue, he said.

At a hearing at the House of Representatives last November 29, Guevarra said the Philippine government is not bound to cooperate with ICC. But he clarified that the ICC is free to do its investigation, but should not expect any help from local authorities.

Still, that he, Duterte, the unapologetic, untrammeled city mayor, and later president, would face foreign investigators, quizzed for all the senseless deaths was beyond him.

Marcos in Hawaii

Nothing could be so humiliating. What goes around, comes around. There is nothing as powerless as an idea whose time has gone. There is nothing as powerless when a strongman loses his grip over power.

The old man Marcos felt it when he, his wife, and children, and some 80 staff and supporters landed in Hawaii after they were picked up from Malacanang by a US Air Force plane at the height of the military-backed, people power revolt in February 1986.

They were frisked, fingerprinted, and interrogated, their suitcases full of voluminous cash and bank certificates, pieces of rare, high-end jewelry, weapons, and many others all seized from a back-up plane, in what was probably the most humiliating experience for Marcos since he was tried and convicted of the September 1935 murder of Julio Nalundasan, his father’s political rival in their hometown in Ilocos Norte, north of Manila.

Lessons from the drug war

We hope that all the talk about ICC would teach Duterte some lessons, if not reflections, about human rights. We hope that the policemen involved in the bloody war would now remember what Sen Sonny Trillanes used to say: Duterte would not stay forever, and that he would one day leave them holding the bag.

We hope that some policemen who said no to the War on Drugs would likewise come out and help shed light.

We remember a three-star Army general named Rafael “Rocky” Ileto, who said no to Marcos’ plan to declare martial law in January 1971. Ileto was later replaced and taken out of the loop. Marcos declared martial law in September 1972.

“Marcos is the kind of a commander-in-chief who wants his staff to say yes to him. He thinks that should be because he is very intelligent. Maybe he thought I was too independent-minded. I spoke my mind, I wanted to be heard,” he would later say in an interview.

Moral courage

That was not Rocky’s first “offense.” In the late 60s, Rocky objected to Oplan Jabidah, a military operation designed to destabilize Sabah over which the government was claiming territorial jurisdiction. Rocky thought it was unethical, not proper to do, according to a newspaper report. Talk of moral courage.

So much has been said about the need to hold accountable the Duterte administration for what happened during the War on Drugs.

But the real issue is if we have really gone beyond the surface? How many have been killed for instance? Time to find answers to these questions. Time to look back.

Where it began

And we quote from a story we wrote for ABS-CBN News published in October 2016:

“Each morning since the May 9, 2016 elections, we woke up watching the news that a drug suspect was killed overnight somewhere in some dark alleys of Metro Manila. Who killed him? We were not sure. And why? The dead, according to the police, was either a known user or a known pusher in an area the government seemed to have completely forsaken.

“And then there were two, then three, four, even five slain suspects in one night, and later in the provinces, too. In less than a week, the list of dead suspects just grew longer and longer. And we could hardly explain why, except to surmise that there could have been more than just one killer.

Right to be heard

“By May 18, there were additional details. Killers gave us something for us to make no mistake. It was a message written on a cardboard left on the body of the dead: “Pusher ako, huwag tularan.” Which left us all asking: Were they all summarily executed? Shouldn’t they have been hauled instead to court? Who decided whether the drug suspects should live or die?

“Things got clearer days into the administration of President Duterte. On July 1, the government launched an all-out war against drugs it called “Oplan Tokhang,” supposedly an innocuous invitation by the police for drug suspects to surrender and promise to leave a life of drugs-—or face violent consequences.

“Lo and behold, the police campaign prompted in no time the surrender of more than 700,000 people all over the country, which only shows that the drug menace has grown into the size of a dragon, which possibly explains the many crimes traced to drug addiction.

Too many deaths

“Alas and alack, the campaign resulted in the deaths of so many men hooked on drugs. As of Oct 18, there were 2,123 killed, 1,227 of them during police operations.

“Why have the police killed so many in so short a time? Because the drug suspects resisted arrest and traded fire with better-armed, better-skilled police shooters. All of them.

“To be sure, some policemen have likewise fallen. Penetrating some suspected drug lairs and dealing with drug pushers was no walk in the park. We believe the police. We believe in stories that some great crimes could be the handiwork of people high on drugs. We believe that some pushers are armed, all because we have seen men engaged in illegal activities finding the need to protect themselves. Against lawmen.

Night after night

“But nobody told us it would be like this. We have since been counting bodies day after day, night after night, the highest number of dead was 30, all in one night last July 1. We have been hearing the police saying that one or two or three of a team of 10 or 30, or even 100 policemen gunned down a suspect who decided to take the law into his own hands by putting up a fight in a cramped place that even two amateur boxers would find neither an elbow room nor the bwelo to raise a fist to show bravado and defiance.

“After counting 1,000 bodies, that has become an all-too familiar plot, a convenient one seems meant to justify the lack of maximum tolerance and compliance with the age-old tradition and commitment to bring the suspect to the bar of justice, to honor due process, that every man has the right to be heard, every man should have his day in court.”

It may probably take some time. Rome was not burned in a day. But the count down to the final hours is too bothersome, humiliating for all the protagonists behind the drug war. Change is coming.

Haven’t we, bitchy as we all are, waited for that moment?