One Year On, DDS Should Let Go

EDITORIAL: What is at stake in this anniversary of Rodrigo Duterte’s arrest by the ICC is not one man’s freedom or one man’s legacy. What is at stake is whether Philippine society can hold the powerful to the same standard it demands of everyone else.

A year ago today, Rodrigo Duterte — former mayor of Davao City, former president of the republic, once the most powerful man in the country — was taken into custody and transferred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. For his most ardent followers, the Diehard Duterte Supporters who had made his name a war cry and his face a devotional image, that day felt like an amputation.

We understand the grief. We do not – or try not to – mock it.

Davao loved Duterte with the fierce, almost proprietary love of a place that believes it made a man and that the man, in turn, made it. For decades, he was the city’s defiant mascot — foul-mouthed, swaggering, genuinely accessible in ways that presidential-caliber politicians rarely are. That bond was real. The pride was real. And so, today, is the pain.

But one year is long enough. It is time — past time, really — to come to terms.

Consider the example of Reggie Ryan Mandy, a Dabawenyo whose Facebook post last week drew quiet attention in corners of social media that seldom agree on anything. Mandy, by his own description a longtime DDS, wrote with striking candor that he has had to sit with the discomfort of this past year — the hearings, the testimony, the evidence placed on the international record — and has concluded that loyalty to a person cannot be the same thing as loyalty to truth. He did not renounce his affection for the former president. He simply refused to let that affection become a blindfold. It was a small act of intellectual courage, and it deserves to be named as such.

His is not a solitary voice. Quietly, incrementally, there are others in Davao and across Mindanao who are making the same difficult turn. Not abandonment, not betrayal. Just the mature recognition that a person they admired may have also done things that require accounting. And that accountability is not persecution.

This distinction matters enormously, and it is being deliberately obscured by those who stand to benefit from the confusion. The word “persecution” implies a legal proceeding driven by malice, stripped of evidence, designed to destroy an innocent man. The ICC process is none of those things. It is slow, it is adversarial in the proper legal sense, and it offers the accused the full architecture of international due process. What it does not offer is impunity. And impunity, however loudly it has been demanded, is not a right.

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The killings that brought Duterte before the court — the thousands of deaths during the drug war, the bodies on the streets of Davao long before he reached Malacañang — were not rumors confected by political enemies. They were documented ,they were witnessed. Many were witnessed right there in Davao, by Dabawenyos themselves, people who said nothing for years because speaking meant risk.

What is at stake in this anniversary is not one man’s freedom or one man’s legacy. What is at stake is whether Philippine society can hold the powerful to the same standard it demands of everyone else — whether we are capable of saying, as Mandy said, that love and accountability are not opposites.

A nation that cannot do that is not yet a mature democracy. It is a country of clans and patrons and omerta, where justice is a performance staged for the powerless and immunity is the quiet reward of the powerful. The Philippines is better than that. Davao is better than that.

One year on, the process continues. Let it. (Rights Report Philippines)