All the president’s women: Duterte’s fiercest critics and a surly political heir

Jocellyn Duterte, sister of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, is pictured during an interview in Manila, Philippines, September 11, 2017. Picture taken September 11, 2017. REUTERS/Dondi Tawatao
Updated 14 September 2017
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All the president’s women: Duterte’s fiercest critics and a surly political heir

DAVAO, Philippines/MANILA:Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has a problem with women, says the woman who has known him longer than perhaps any other: his sister Jocellyn.
“He’s a chauvinist,” she told Reuters in a recent interview. “When he sees a woman who fights him, it really gets his ire.”
Then Jocellyn ran through a list of Duterte’s female critics that included his vice president, a prominent senator who is now in jail and the head of the Philippines Supreme Court.
All three have sparred with Duterte after denouncing his brutal war on drugs, which has killed thousands of people in the Asian nation since he took office in June 2016.
Duterte has joked about rape, insulted the Pope and baffled friends and foes with often contradictory public statements. Neither this, nor his profanity-laden reactions to women critics, seem to have dented his popularity among Filipinos.
The 72-year-old president is a self-confessed womanizer who once told a large gathering of local officials, “I can’t imagine life without Viagra.”
On the campaign trail last year, he joked about the gang rape of an Australian missionary who was killed in a prison riot. Speaking to Philippine troops in May, he said he would take responsibility for any rape they might commit.
But women’s rights advocates also praise him for handing out free contraceptives in his hometown, Davao City, where he was mayor for 22 years, and for championing a reproductive health bill opposed by the country’s influential Catholic Church.
In a recent statement, even Human Rights Watch — a fervent critic of the drug war — acknowledged Duterte’s “strong support” for legislation aimed at protecting and promoting women.
After nearly 15 months in power, he remains highly popular with men and women alike, according to the latest survey by Manila-based pollster Social Weather Stations.
While foreigners frown at Duterte’s rape jokes, says Gina Lopez, a former environment secretary in Duterte’s male-dominated cabinet, Filipinos judge him by his actions not his words.
“When I see him dealing with women in the cabinet or whatever, he has been very above-board, very decent,” she told Reuters.
She said this decency also once extended to Vice President Leni Robredo, who has publicly fallen out with Duterte. She is from an opposition party and was elected separately.
“He really liked Leni. They got along and he was always flirting,” said Lopez. “That’s what men do, right?“
In a statement to Reuters, the president’s office called Duterte “an advocate of women’s rights” who had launched a “massive campaign against gender bias” while mayor of Davao.
As president, it added, he had “hand-picked the best and brightest women” for his cabinet. Three of the country’s 25 cabinet secretaries or ministers are women.
RELUCTANT DAUGHTER
Duterte spends up to four days a week in his far-flung hometown Davao, ruling a nation of 100 million people not from the presidential palace in the capital, Manila, but from a modest house shaded by a jackfruit tree. Duterte was mayor of Davao for 22 years.
He sleeps until lunchtime, holds cabinet meetings infrequently and sometimes announces major policies without forewarning senior officials, leaving them scrambling to catch up.
Duterte’s volatility has baffled Washington, which has long seen the Philippines as a bulwark against Chinese expansionism. He has courted Beijing and publicly berated the United States in rambling speeches.
Much of Duterte’s venom is reserved for women who oppose him.
In August, he called Agnes Callamard, a UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, a “daughter of a whore” after she condemned the police shooting of a teenage drug suspect.
“He’s a misogynist,” said Senator Leila de Lima, who spoke to Reuters at a police detention facility in Manila.
De Lima was arrested in February on drugs charges she says were trumped up as part of a presidential vendetta. “To him, women are inferior,” she said. “It’s totally insulting to him that a woman would be fighting him.”
According to Jocellyn Duterte, Duterte is also fighting with the woman he hopes will cement his political legacy: his daughter Sara.
Sara Duterte reluctantly replaced her father as mayor of Davao City in the southern Philippines when he became president. Father and daughter barely speak, said Jocellyn.
“I know in his quiet moments he considers himself a failure as a father because of Sara fighting with him,” she said.
Jocellyn said she had her own problems with her older brother but they now get along. They have two other brothers.
ANYTHING BUT SUBMISSIVE
Jocellyn, who refers to the president as “the mayor,” said Duterte still eats the same simple food their mother Soledad once cooked: cheap fish simmered in vinegar.
She also traces Duterte’s authoritarianism to Soledad, who punished her children with a horsewhip or made them kneel at an altar for hours.
“You can see that in the mayor,” says Jocellyn. “Sometimes people perceive it as arrogance or call it close to being a dictator. But we grew up in that atmosphere.”
Their father Vicente, also a politician, was often absent, and the young Duterte saw the bodyguards, police and soldiers around him as role models, his sister said. He grew up in a macho culture where wives and daughters were expected to be submissive, Jocellyn said.
His daughter Sara is anything but. In 2011, during her first term as Davao’s mayor, she was caught on camera punching a local official who angered her.
In 2016, Sara ran as mayor again, but only because she was “pressured” by her father’s supporters, she told Reuters. “If it were up to me, I would not have run,” she said.
She said she now only saw her father on special occasions, such as birthdays and Christmas, but denied they had differences. “He’s very busy,” she said.
Duterte and his daughter have “a normal Filipino parent-child relationship which has its own share of ups and downs,” said the president’s office in its statement.
Like her father, Sara is blunt, down-to-earth and thronged by admirers at public appearances in Davao.
She told Reuters she wanted to practice law and, once her three-year term as mayor was up, had no wish or intention to continue in politics.
But in a country famous for political dynasties spanning many generations, Duterte wants his daughter to “preserve what the family has done for the city,” said Jocellyn.
“He is trying to instill in Sara that it is our legacy,” she said. “Maybe she needs more time.”


ICC seeks arrest warrant for Myanmar junta chief over crimes against Rohingya

Myanmar's junta chief military Min Aung Hlaing delivers a speech during a ceremony to mark the country's Armed Forces Day in Nay
Updated 4 sec ago
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ICC seeks arrest warrant for Myanmar junta chief over crimes against Rohingya

  • ICC prosecutor requests arrest warrant for Gen. Min Aung Hlaing
  • Hlaing accused of crimes against humanity, deportation and persecution of the Rohingya

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Wednesday applied for an arrest warrant for the head of Myanmar’s military regime for crimes committed against the Rohingya Muslim minority.

Nearly a million people were forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh from Myanmar’s Rakhine State to escape the 2017 military crackdown that UN experts have referred to as a “genocidal campaign,” amid evidence of ethnic cleansing, mass rape and killings.

ICC judges authorized an investigation into these events in 2019, saying that there was a “reasonable basis to believe widespread and/or systematic acts of violence may have been committed that could qualify as crimes against humanity.”

Although Myanmar is not a state party, Bangladesh ratified the ICC Rome Stature in 2010, which allows the court to have jurisdiction over some crimes related to the Rohingya because of their cross-border nature.

ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan announced the application for an arrest warrant for Sr. Gen. Min Aung Hlaing during a visit to Bangladesh, where he met members of the displaced Rohingya population.

“My office is submitting applications to the judges of the pretrial chamber and this first application is for Min Aung Hlaing, the acting president of Myanmar and the head of the Defense Services of Myanmar. Other warrant applications will follow soon,” he said in a video message.

Hlaing took power from Myanmar’s elected leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in a coup in 2021. Serving as commander in chief of the Tatmadaw, the armed forces of Myanmar, since 2011, he is accused of having directed attacks against Rohingya civilians.

The ICC chief prosecutor’s office said in a statement that Hlaing “bears criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya, committed in Myanmar, and in part in Bangladesh” between Aug. 25, 2017 and Dec. 31, 2017 by the armed forces, “supported by the national police, the border guard police, as well as non-Rohingya civilians.”

The arrest warrant application “draws upon a wide variety of evidence from numerous sources such as witness testimonies, including from a number of insider witnesses, documentary evidence and authenticated scientific, photographic and video materials,” Khan’s office said.

Khan’s application is the first against a high-level Myanmar government official since the ICC investigation started seven years ago.

Nur Khan, a Bangladeshi lawyer and human rights activist, told Arab News it was a big development in the course of delivering justice to the Rohingya community and paving the way for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees.

“Eventually, it will create psychological pressure on the Myanmar military junta. It will also pave the way for the world to create a sustainable solution to the Rohingya crisis, ensuring reparation with rights, dignity, and citizenship,” he said.

In 2022, the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top court, started a separate case brought by Gambia, which accused Myanmar of genocide against the Rohingya. Five European countries and Canada have backed the proceedings.

“It’s true that a genocide had been conducted aiming to completely wipe out the Rohingya, and the Myanmar military has committed this crime. The Rohingya have been demanding for many years that those who are responsible for this genocide should be brought to trial,” Nur Khan said.

“We want to remain hopeful that this process will be expedited and that the Rohingya will get back their rights soon.”


Malaysian court drops one of the graft cases against jailed former premier Najib Razak

Updated 27 November 2024
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Malaysian court drops one of the graft cases against jailed former premier Najib Razak

  • Najib had already been convicted in his first graft case tied to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad state fund, or 1MBD, scandal

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: A Malaysian court on Wednesday dropped charges against jailed former Prime Minister Najib Razak over criminal breach of trust linked to the multibillion-dollar looting of a state fund.
Najib had already been convicted in his first graft case tied to the 1Malaysia Development Berhad state fund, or 1MBD, scandal and began serving time in 2022 after losing his final appeal in his first graft case.
But he faces other graft trials including Wednesday’s case in which he was jointly charged with ex-treasury chief Irwan Serigar Abdullah with six counts of misappropriating 6.6 billion ringgit ($1.5 billion) in public funds. The money was intended as 1MDB’s settlement payment to Abu Dhabi’s International Petroleum Investment Company.
The Kuala Lumpur High Court discharged the pair after ruling that procedural delays and prosecutors’ failure to hand over key documents were unfair to the defense, said Najib’s lawyer, Muhammad Farhan. A discharge doesn’t mean an acquittal as prosecutors reserve the right to revive charges against them, he said.
“The decision today was based on the non-disclosure of critical documents, six years after the initial charges were brought up, which are relevant to our client’s defense preparation. Therefore the court correctly exercised its jurisdiction to discharge our client of the charges,” Farhan said.
Najib set up 1MDB shortly after taking power in 2009. Investigators allege more than $4.5 billion was stolen from the fund and laundered by his associates to finance Hollywood films and extravagant purchases. The scandal upended Najib’s government and he was defeated in the 2018 election.
Najib, 71, issued a rare apology in October for the scandal “under his watch” but reiterated his innocence.
Last month, he was ordered to enter his defense in another key case that ties him directly to the 1MDB scandal. The court ruled that the prosecution established its case on four charges of abuse of power to obtain over $700 million from the fund that went into Najib’s bank accounts between 2011 and 2014, and 21 counts of money laundering involving the same amount.
In addition, Najib still has another money laundering trial. His wife Rosmah Mansor and other senior government officials also face corruption charges.


Pakistan ends lockdown of its capital after Imran Khan supporters are dispersed by police

Updated 27 November 2024
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Pakistan ends lockdown of its capital after Imran Khan supporters are dispersed by police

  • The police operation came hours after thousands of Khan supporters, defying government warnings, broke through a barrier of shipping containers
  • Tension has been high in Islamabad since Sunday when supporters of the former prime minister began a “long march” from the restive northwest to demand Khan’s release

ISLAMABAD: Authorities reopened roads linking Pakistan’s capital with the rest of the country, ending a four-day lockdown, on Wednesday after using tear gas and firing into the air to disperse supporters of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan who marched to Islamabad to demand his release from prison.
“All roads are being reopened, and the demonstrators have been dispersed,” Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi said.
Khan’s wife, Bushra Bibi, who was leading the protest, and other demonstrators fled in vehicles when police pushed back against the rallygoers following clashes in which at least seven people were killed.
The police operation came hours after thousands of Khan supporters, defying government warnings, broke through a barrier of shipping containers blocking off Islamabad and entered a high-security zone, where they clashed with security forces.
Tension has been high in Islamabad since Sunday when supporters of the former prime minister began a “long march” from the restive northwest to demand his release. Khan has been in a prison for over a year and faces more than 150 criminal cases that his party says are politically motivated.
Hundreds of demonstrators have been arrested since Sunday.
Bibi and leaders of her husband’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party fled to Mansehra in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the party still rules.
Khan, who remains a popular opposition figure, was ousted in 2022 through a no-confidence vote in Parliament.


Anti-mine treaty signatories slam US decision to send land mines to Ukraine

Updated 27 November 2024
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Anti-mine treaty signatories slam US decision to send land mines to Ukraine

  • Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the mines “very important” to halting Russian attacks
  • Ukraine receiving US mine shipments would be in “direct violation” of the anti-mine treaty

Siem Reap, Cambodia: Washington’s decision to give anti-personnel mines to Ukraine is the biggest blow yet to a landmark anti-mine treaty, its signatories said during a meeting.
Ukraine is a signatory to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention which prohibits the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of land mines.
The United States, which has not signed up to the treaty, said last week it would transfer land mines to Ukraine to aid its efforts fighting Russia’s invasion.
Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has called the mines “very important” to halting Russian attacks.
Ukraine receiving US mine shipments would be in “direct violation” of the treaty, the convention of its signatories said in a statement released late Tuesday.
“In the 25 years since the Convention entered into force, this landmark humanitarian disarmament treaty had never faced such a challenge to its integrity,” it said.
“The Convention community must remain united in its resolve to uphold the Convention’s norms and principles.”
Ukraine’s delegation to a conference on progress under the anti-landmine treaty in Cambodia on Tuesday did not mention the US offer in its remarks.
In its presentation, Ukrainian defense official Oleksandr Riabtsev said Russia was carrying out “genocidal activities” by laying land mines on its territory.
Riabtsev refused to comment when asked by AFP journalists about the US land mines offer on Wednesday.
Ukraine’s commitment to destroy its land mine stockpiles left over from the Soviet Union was also “currently not possible” due to Russia’s invasion, defense ministry official Yevhenii Kivshyk told the conference.
Moscow and Kyiv have been ratcheting up their drone and missile attacks, with Ukraine recently firing US long-range missiles at Russia and the Kremlin retaliating with an experimental hypersonic missile.
The Siem Reap conference is a five-yearly meeting held by signatories to the anti-landmine treaty to assess progress in its objective toward a world without antipersonnel mines.
On Tuesday, land mine victims from across the world gathered at the meeting to protest Washington’s decision.
More than 100 demonstrators lined the walkway taken by delegates to the conference venue in Cambodia’s Siem Reap.


Turkiye scales down $23 bln F-16 jet deal with US, minister says

Updated 27 November 2024
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Turkiye scales down $23 bln F-16 jet deal with US, minister says

ANKARA: Turkiye has reduced its planned $23 billion acquisition of an F-16 fighter jet package from the United States, scrapping the purchase of 79 modernization kits for its existing fleet, Defense Minister Yasar Guler said late on Tuesday.
NATO member Turkiye earlier this year secured a deal to procure 40 F-16 fighter jets and 79 modernization kits for its existing F-16s from the United States, after a long-delayed process.
“An initial payment has been made for the procurement of F-16 Block-70. A payment of $1.4 billion has been made. With this, we will buy 40 F-16 Block-70 Viper and we were going to buy 79 modernization kits,” Guler told a parliamentary hearing.
“We gave up on this 79. This is why we gave up: Our Turkish Aerospace Industries (TUSAS) facilities are capable of carrying out this modernization on their own, so we deferred to them,” he said.
The sale of the 40 new Lockheed Martin F-16 jets and ammunition for them will cost Turkiye some $7 billion, Guler added.
Turkiye placed its order in October 2021, two years after the United States kicked the country out of the fifth-generation F-35 fighter jet program over its procurement of a Russian missile defense system.
Turkiye wants to re-join the F-35 program and buy 40 new F-35 jets, Guler also said.
Turkiye is one of the largest operators of F-16s, with its fleet made up of more than 200 older Block 30, 40 and 50 models.
Ankara is also interested in buying Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets, built by a consortium of Germany, Britain, Italy and Spain.
It is also developing its own combat aircraft, KAAN.