THAT’S essentially what President Duterte has done by announcing the Philippines’ withdrawal as a signatory to the treaty that set up the International Criminal Court (ICC), an institution that has become under fire for its racial bias and disregard for countries’ sovereignty.

The Yellow Cult, through its contract political assassin Sen. Antonio Trillanes and his minion, obscure lawyer Jude Sabio, last year transformed the ICC into its propaganda weapon against Duterte. Never before has the Philippines’ image been so badly yet falsely tarnished in the world as in the case filed by the Yellow Cult in the ICC against Duterte.





The Yellows filed charges against Duterte and 11 other government officials for alleged “mass murder” committed during the president’s anti-crime and anti-drug campaign. The charges even preposterously included alleged killings in Davao City more than a decade ago when Duterte was mayor there.

It was obviously entirely a propaganda gimmick. The suit did not submit any single actual case of murder by the police—only media reports, especially by the news website Rappler. Anybody filing a case with the ICC would have realized that the case would take at the very least a decade to resolve, way past the end of Duterte’s presidency, as in the case of the Uganda and Colombia complaints that were filed in 2004, but which the ICC is still investigating.

Does anyone really believe that Trillanes and this hoodlum-looking Sabio filed the case for the sake of humanity, in order to prevent inhumane pogroms in the future?

The ICC has been viewed as an institution created solely by Europe, as its way of assuaging its guilt for its brutal colonial regimes in Africa, which created failed states in Africa that have become the breeding ground for ruthless tribal-based armies intent on wiping out their tribal enemies.

All Africans

The 32 individuals who have so far been indicted in the ICC are from sub-Saharan Africa—the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire, countries wracked by civil wars that had tribes fighting against each other to capture the state, and committing mass killings and rapes.

In its 13 years of existence, and spending $1 billion, the ICC has convicted only four persons, all black: three warlords from the Congo and a Islamic fundamentalist from Mali, Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi.

C’mon now. Not by any kind of exaggeration or stretch of imagination could the killings that have happened in Duterte’s war against drugs be compared to the horrific massacres and pillage that occurred in those godforsaken parts of Africa that are really barely emerging from the Stone Age.

The ICC’s silence on the wars of aggression by the US, the UK and its allies in Afghanistan and Iraq where their forces have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and turned these countries into failed states, has been deafening.

What the Yellows through Trillanes and Sabio have done is really disgusting. This suit at the ICC in order to blacken Duterte’s image, is an attempt to put the Philippine president with his war against illegal drugs in the category of brutal African warlords, and the Philippines to be viewed as a country as backward as failed states in that continent ravaged by European colonialists. The two should be lynched.

Duterte recently claimed that he was given by an unnamed foreign government a transcript of a phone conversation that the Filipino-American billionaire Loida Nicolas-Lewis had with an unnamed official about orchestrating an ICC investigation into Duterte.

Handsomely paid

I certainly believe that allegation. I don’t think Trillanes and Sabio even knew that an ICC existed. The two would certainly not spend money to travel to The Hague in the Netherlands and to pay for legal fees from expensive lawyers to file their suit there. I suspect they were paid handsomely for their gruesome deed.

Many even doubt the qualifications of its chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who announced last month that she was examining Sabio’s complaint against Duterte and his officials.

Other than being ICC deputy prosecutor from 2004 to 2012, Bensouda’s experience has been as Attorney General and Minister of Justice as well as Chief Legal Advisor to the President and Cabinet of Gambia, a tiny, poor country of two million in West Africa that was given its independence by the United Kingdom only in 1965. Her master’s degree is in international maritime law.

The current big powers of the world—the US, China, and Russia—have refused to be signatories of the ICC because of its arrogant declarations and powers that interfere with nations’ sovereignty. Except for Cambodia, none of our Asean neighbors are signatories to the ICC. It was the Aquino administration which passed the bill that supposedly ratified our membership in the ICC, after hardly a debate in the Senate.

But Duterte has pointed out that the treaty organizing the ICC was never published in the Official Gazette nor in major newspapers as required by law for any bill to be considered a law, and is therefore essentially illegal within our country.

But the Yellows still used that illegal weapon. Duterte is simply confiscating it. There should be heavy penalties imposed on Trillanes and Sabio though.

Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

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