Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, in response to the European Union (EU) denouncing his administration’s extrajudicial killings of drug suspects, reportedly said “fuck you.”
“I read the condemnation of the EU against me. I will tell them, ‘fuck you.’ You’re doing it in atonement for your sins,” declared the Filipino president while addressing local government officials in Davao City, reports the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
He accused various EU members, namely France and Great Britain, of being hypocrites for criticizing him given their own record of killing Arabs.
“And then EU now has the gall to condemn me. I repeat it, ‘fuck you,’” he said.
Referring to the victims of his bloody war on drugs, President Duterte proclaimed: “Who are they? Criminals? You call it genocide? How many did they kill?”
The Inquirer reports:
Duterte said members of the European Union have become strict about the behavior of other nations due to their ‘guilt feelings’ over the atrocities they had committed in the past.
Since he became president on June 30, vowing to crack down on drug-related crime by having the police and the military kill suspects, his war on drugs had resulted the violent execution of more than 2,000 people “at the hands of law enforcement, vigilante groups, and other unidentified actors” as of the end of August, reported The Atlantic.
“Human rights groups and the United Nations have condemned the extrajudicial killings, with the UN stating that the campaign amounts to a crime under international law,” it added.
At the end of last month, Reuters noted, “The Philippine National Police said that close to 900 drug traffickers and users had been killed in police operations from July 1 to August 20. That was an increase of 141 people over a week, on average 20 people a day.”
Nevertheless, The New York Times (NYT), at the beginning of August, acknowledged that Duterte’s deadly efforts do appear to be “driving down crime,” adding:
The police say that they have arrested more than 2,700 people on charges related to using or selling illegal drugs, and that crime nationwide has fallen 13 percent since the election, to 46,600 reported crimes in June, from 52,950 in May.
Moreover, NYT pointed out that “Duterte’s crackdown has been hugely popular” among the Philippine population.
Duterte is no stranger to using profanity to denounce condemnation from various world leaders of his bloody war on illegal drugs.
Early this month, Duterte caused a major controversy that led to a diplomatic rift with the United States when he referred to President Barack Obama as something similar to a “son of a whore.”
His comments came after the U.S. leader’s aides mentioned that Obama would raise concerns about the Philippine war on drugs when the pair were scheduled to meet in Laos, a meeting that was eventually cancelled by the United States after Duterte’s “colorful” remarks as the American president described them.
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