STATE KILLING
Philippines drug war & extrajudicial killings of 2016: Comparisons with Thailand 2003
A total of 402 suspected drug traffickers have been shot dead with at least 4,418 arrested in the one month since Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines, took office at the end of June.Shootings have been accompanied by a non-stop stream of images of corpses and inmates in standing room only crowded prisons (see here).
Shootings without due process of law also seem to be concentrated among low-level drug trade functionaries, if the high-level drug functionaries accept the announced procedures they automatically get due process of law, as in the case of Cebu businessman Peter Lim (see here).
Duterte won the Philippine presidency on an anti-crime platform and promised to end crime and corruption in six months.
The popular law and order policy has included encouraging police and ordinary citizens to act as vigilantes, take the law into their own hands and shoot suspected drug dealers with promised cash rewards.
If vigilantism is normally conceived as ordinary citizens taking the law into their own hands, this however seems to be a different variety or offshoot of vigilantism in which security forces and police are involved and seem to do most of the work.
Acting as an agent of the public, security forces could almost be viewed as carrying out vigilante acts on behalf of the public.
Human rights organizations and the UN have condemned the shootings.
Philippine Senator Leila De Lima called for an end to Duterte's brand of vigilante justice in a speech on Tuesday:
"We must call for the accountability of state actors responsible for this terrifying trend in law enforcement, and the investigation of killings perpetrated by the vigilante assassins," she declared.
This new vigilantism, however, is incredibly popular and the question of why it is so popular is an important question to answer, even for those morally opposed to it.
It is instructive to look at a local case of how the new drug policy has been applied.
LOCAL POWERFUL ELITES INVOLVED IN DRUG TRADE: CASE OF ALBUERA, LEYTE
The family of the mayor of the town of Albuera on the island of Leyte, Rolando Espinosa, was recently linked to to the drug trade. Over the period of a few days a drama played out.
First, two bodyguards and three employees of the mayor were arrested for selling drugs during a police operation on a Thursday afternoon. Two of the employees took care of the mayor’s fighting cocks. Some of the men were armed, but didn’t put up a fight.
Four other suspects escaped arrest, fleeing to the house of the mayor's son, Kerwin Espinosa, located inside the gated compound of his father.
The local police chief declared that the police had "no authority to barge into the compound after the gate was locked" clearly indicating the limitations of Duterte's new policies vis-a-vis powerful local elites.
The mayor was reported to have gone on leave. A 24-hour deadline for the mayor to surrender was issued by Duterte or both the mayor and his son would be shot on sight.
Espinosa finally surrendered to the Philippines national police chief making a dramatic declaration that the police had permission to shoot his son, if he did not surrender. There were reports that the mayor's son had already fled the Philippines.
Police clashed with armed bodyguards of the mayor on Wednesday, killing six.
Local people, in general, seem to have been aware of the mayor's illegal activities as well as his impunity in the face of the law.
COMPARING THAILAND'S 2003 WAR ON DRUGS
Thailand's "War on Drugs" of 2003, though similar to the Philippines war of 2016 was a lot less public with less media coverage and few images.
Observers commented that the 2003 Thai extrajudicial killings often took place at night with corpses quickly removed.
Lists were quickly assembled and some people on these lists faced quick deaths that seemed unjustified according to the evidence available at the time. The final death tallies were made rather imprecisely by taking the abnormally high death rate during the war and subtracting off the normal death rate, providing an estimate of killings.
To my knowledge, a research project to collect death certificates for the period of the killings to systematically determine cause of death has not been undertaken. Such a project might perhaps not be feasible or possible.Any official count and any independent count would face possible dangers and ethical considerations in doing interviews with witnesses.
The difference between a justified police shooting in self-defence and an execution-style killing in which police play the role of judge, jury and executioner is also hard to distinguish when there are already low levels of police accountability and transparency.
VIGILANTISM AS GLOBAL WORLD HISTORICAL PHENOMENON
Now we turn from this local case of drug war vigilantism to the larger question of why vigilantism has been so popular historical around the world.
The recent volume Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective sheds light on this phenomenon.
For over a hundred years, vigilante killings have been explained as the way that locals in rural areas, for whom an elite-oriented legal system had failed to provide adequate security and legal protections, enact their own regime of self-help justice.
Communal justice in the Russian village dished out swift and cruel punishment to gangs of horse thieves
Seen in a global perspective, vigilantism or "lynching" is seen historically to have been an "ideology of communal justice" and "a form of communal self-defense against crime that is unchecked by the state."
In the history of post-World War II Southeast Asia, vigilantism has played a role in incidents of mass killing during the cold war era both in Indonesia circa 1965 and Thailand circa 1975, with the perceived "crime" perceived by certain segments of society to be ideological in nature, namely leftist communist ideologies.
More recently since the millennium, the focus has been on the problems of drug-dealing and drug addiction that societies face, first in Thailand during the 2003 War on Drugs and then in Philippines during the ongoing War on Drugs.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Eric Haanstad's 2008 PhD dissertation at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Constructing Order through Chaos: A State Ethnography of the Thai Police clearly shows what needs to be done in the way of research (available at the Thailand Imformation Center (TIC) at Chulalongkorn University's main library here & catalog here)
Currently, there is only scattered documentation on the victims of the 2003 War on Drugs extrajudicial killings in Thailand.
Theories on how the process of killing unfolds and either sustains itself or grinds to halt need to be formulated and compared with available historical information from different states and different historical eras.
One big problem, as the prominent Thai blogger named Bangkok Pundit points out, is that statements of large numbers of deaths are due to the differences between the normal death rate and the death rate during the period of killing.
Indirect measures of extrajudicial killings have been necessary to-date because the whole process of death reporting lacked government transparency in contrast with the heavily publicized process in the Philippines circa 2016.
One could imagine collecting together the thousands of death certificates from the period and then doing structured interviews with the families of the victims to try to ascertain what happened and construct an oral history
Whether this work is potentially too dangerous or whether it is unethical to put yourself as researcher in this position or to put a witness supplying information in this position where they give you information is also a question. These are all ethical concerns that might make the whole research project infeasible within an academic context. In an investigative reporting context, however, it might be feasible.
PLEA TO UNCOVER THE TRUTH & UNDERSTAND EXTRAJUDICIAL KILLING ON ITS OWN TERMS
Despite all the possible hurdles, it really behooves researchers in the social sciences to determine what actually happens during extended periods of extrajudicial killing and to write an accurate history of extra-judicial state killing in Thailand and Philippines in recent history.
After the extrajudicial killings have occurred, it is difficult to reconstruct the truth of what actually happened. Those involved in the killings may be negatively affected by these revelations.
The public itself may not want the facts and details of how a tiny of minority was killed without due process of law to be revealed either.
Democratically popular mass extrajudicial killing that advocates "crime fighting" without "due process of law" in the interests of perceived "law and order" is a reality.
Truly understanding why mass extrajudicial killing is so popular with so many people and how it fulfills perceived needs for these people in dealing with crime that threatens local communities is needed to supplement the raw, and often not thoroughly informed, condemnation.
Extrajudicial killing must be understood on its own terms even by those who condemn it.
Only then will it be possible perhaps to work against the forces that cause it and prevent it in the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berg, Manfred & Simon Wendt (2011) Globalizing Lynching History: Vigilantism and Extralegal Punishment from an International Perspective, Palgrave.
Haanstad, Eric (2008) Constructing Order through Chaos: A State Ethnography of the Thai Police,
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/asean/1051869/6-killed-in-philippine-police-anti-drug-operation
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/800946/leyte-mayor-on-leave-as-5-in-his-staff-caught-with-p1-9m-shabu
http://cnnphilippines.com/news/2016/08/03/albuera-leyte-encounter.html
http://www.rappler.com/nation/141607-duterte-surrender-rolando-espinosa-mayor
http://www.rappler.com/nation/141657-leyte-mayor-espinosa-surrenders-duterte-warning
http://k2.abs-cbnnews.com/news/08/02/16/narco-mayor-surrenders
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