Manila, Oct 28 (EFE).- Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte on Monday appeared before a Senate committee tasked with investigating the controversial anti-drug war he spearheaded during his term and in which thousands of people were killed.
«My mandate as president of the republic was to protect the country and the Filipino people. Do not question my policies because I offer no apologies, no excuses. I did what I had to do,» Duterte said during the first hearing on the war on drugs of the Senate Committee on Accountability of Public Officers and Investigations.
«To this day, most agree with what my government achieved,» he added.
The war on drugs launched by the former president during his term, between 2016 and 2022, is being investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC), although the Duterte administration withdrew his country from the body in 2019 to avoid being implicated.
Although several committees of the lower house of Congress have examined extrajudicial killings during the Duterte era, the main architects of the war on drugs had called for a Senate probe.
«We don’t even have the death penalty in our statute books, and even assuming that we had this, the state would not have executed more than 6.000 death convicts in six years,» said the senator and chair of the committee, Aquilino Pimentel, calling to respond to «the cries for justice for our people.»
In addition to Duterte’s appearance, the first session was marked by clashes between critics of the former president and one of the senators on the committee, the former Philippine National Police chief and mastermind of the war on drugs, Ronald Dela Rosa.
Filipino priest Flaviano Villanueva underlined the similarities between the murders carried out by the death squads allegedly led by Duterte when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao, and gave as an example of the insensitivity of the authorities a remark by Dela Rosa after a three-year-old girl was killed in a police shootout.
«Shit happens,» the then former police chief, better known as Bato, said after the incident.
«I said that, because during operations, when you don’t have complete control of the operation environment, then you expect this,» Bato said in response to Villanueva’s comments.
Some 6,000 people died in operations and extrajudicial killings during the violent campaign, according to police figures, although local non-governmental organizations put this figure at more than 30,000. EFE
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