By Antonio Colina IV

DAVAO CITY – Mayor Sara Duterte-Carpio will request her father, President Rodrigo Duterte, to exempt this city from martial law coverage and only place areas considered “unstable” under military rule.

Duterte-Carpio was responding to the query of Swedish Ambassador to the Philippines Harald Fries on the two-year-old effectivity of martial law in Mindanao during the mayor’s meeting with European Ambassadors on the sidelines of the 2019 Davao Investment Conference (Davao ICon) at the SMX Convention Davao.

Fries specifically asked the mayor how long Mindanao would be under military rule.

Duterte-Carpio admitted she did not know until when it will persist, but added that other Mindanaoan local chief executives believed peace and order “became more or less stable with the imposition of martial law here in Mindanao.”

But with Davao City…what they are enjoying now, we enjoyed it before martial law,” she said.

She admitted that martial law has always been one of the questions of the tourists, businessmen, and international event organizers who plan to hold major activities here.

“With us, with Davao City, we do not see, in the first few months, we saw an effect, less visitors coming, international visitors, coming to Davao City, but after about two months, everything picked up. They saw it was, there was not much of a relationship between the reason why the whole island of Mindanao was [placed under] martial law in relation to our situation here in Davao City,” she explained

Duterte-Carpio told reporters shortly after the meeting that the city’s exemption from martial law is possible since it can be declared over specific areas.

“I will write the president to exempt Davao City from the declaration of martial law in Mindanao since martial law can be localized in one area or two areas. It doesn’t have to [be] the entire area of Mindanao,” she said.

The President declared martial law and the suspension habeas corpus privileges in Mindanao on May 23, 2017, in response to the attack launched by Maute Group terrorists in Marawi City.