Rodrigo Duterte won the presidential election in the Philippines in May by a landslide, largely based on his promises to rid the country of drugs and crime in six months by killing tens of thousands of criminals. He certainly seems to be doing his best to fulfill that promise so far, with corpses piling up on the streets and some estimating that over 2,000 drug suspects, both dealers and users, have been killed during Duterte’s reign.
While many observers within the Philippines and abroad have decried the violence and have called on Duterte to put an end to the extrajudicial killings, Duterte has replied to their criticism by stating “I don’t care about human rights”.
While he has many vocal critics, Duterte certainly has his fans as well. One of those is Indonesia’s National Narcotics Agency (BNN) head Budi Waseso, who enthusiastically stated his support for the Filipino president’s shoot on sight approach to drug dealers during a speech in Sukabumi yesterday.
“If such a policy is implemented, we believe, dealers and drug users in our beloved country will decline drastically,” he said as quoted by Merdeka.
Budi said the indiscriminate killing of dealers was justified given the 40-50 people who die from drugs in Indonesia each day (a figure which remains completely unsubstantiated).
“Look at the impact of drug dealers killing the next generation. So the life of one drug dealer is insignificant and every dealer should be killed,” Budi said.
The BNN chief said that the current law on narcotics still had shortcomings in that it allowed dealers too much time to find legal loopholes to appeal their verdicts and seek leniency (we believe the technical term for those kinds of loopholes is “due process”).
And although we haven’t seen him talk about it for quite a while, it appears Budi has still not given up on his idea to build a special prison for drug criminals housed on an island guarded by hungry crocodiles which garnered ridicule across the world last year. In fact, he went even further this time, saying, “If we catch the drug dealers alive, just throw them to the crocodiles”.
It’s not clear if he was joking or not but, according to Merdeka, that comment was met by an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Yikes.
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