Sunday, 15 January 2017
President Duterte’s willingness to proclaim martial law “if the drug problem becomes virulent” contradicts his police chief’s pronouncement last September that the war on drugs is winning, with PNP Chief de la Rosa himself claiming that Operations “Oplan Tokhang” and “Oplan Double Barrel Alpha” have reduced the supply of drugs by some 80-90 percent. Government’s lack of concrete data on the drug menace as well as its ineptitude in identifying drug related and non-drug related crimes at the beginning of the campaign allowed the President not only to confuse us with numbers and figures, and justify the killing of innocents as collateral damage, it lets the President threaten us with Martial Law despite the fact that 74% of the populace are against it. (Pulse Asia)
The late dictator Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972 to supposedly save the country from destruction. With violence towards the poor at 6,266 killed in the government’s drug war, a continuing national state of emergency and brutal police operations against criminality, Pres. Duterte apparently still thinks these are not enough to “save the Philippines.” What crisis will government peddle next to justify its threats of martial law?
Assuming that the terrorized public has not gone stupid as well, it is easy to surmise that the declaration of Martial Law forebodes another sinister plot to silence dissent from the people who are beginning to realize that the only real change that’s happening is massive extrajudicial killings. Duterte is justifying another Martial Law to suppress the press, cripple our democratic institutions, destroy our basic freedoms so that he can entrench his cronies and undertake his brand of plunder, just like Marcos did, thus paving the way to a formal dictatorship.
iDEFEND vehemently condemns Duterte’s threat of Martial Law and will oppose it vigorously whenever he decides to finally proclaim it.