The former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte defended his so-called war on drugs in testimony before the country’s Senate on Monday, saying he took “full legal responsibility” for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that left thousands dead and is being investigated by the International Criminal Court.
“I did what I had to do and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country,” Mr. Duterte, whose six-year term ended in 2022, told senators. He said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for the campaign, during which rights groups say as many as 30,000 people were executed by police officers and vigilantes.
Only a handful of people have been convicted in connection with the deaths, but the International Criminal Court in The Hague is investigating Mr. Duterte’s role in them. Even as he claimed responsibility for the bloodshed on Monday, Mr. Duterte showed the belligerence he was known for in office, saying that the campaign had been necessary to stop the spread of narcotics.
“I have warned all of you as a president, then and as a private citizen now,” he said. “Drugs will destroy the Filipino, it will destroy my country, and I will not allow it.”
Mr. Duterte’s testimony came five months into an inquiry by the House of Representatives into the drug war. Supporters of Mr. Duterte have dismissed those hearings as politically motivated, calling them part of a feud between his family and that of his successor, President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr.
Mr. Duterte has refused to testify at the House hearings, invoking his right against self-incrimination. Instead, he attended a hearing Monday in the considerably more divided Senate, where his staunch allies include Senator Ronald Dela Rosa, who oversaw the antidrug campaign as Mr. Duterte’s police chief.
He and several other senators defended Mr. Duterte. Others upbraided him, including Leila de Lima, a former senator and critic of the drug war who spent six years behind bars on charges that were later dropped. “We can destroy and we need to destroy drugs, but we cannot destroy lives,” Ms. de Lima said.
Several relatives of people who were killed in the campaign also testified.
Randy Delos Santos, the uncle of a 17-year-old boy who was gunned down by three police officers in 2017, said the family had yet to receive any court-ordered damages, despite a ruling that the officers were guilty of murder.
“We haven’t gotten full justice yet,” Mr. Delos Santos said. Mr. Duterte occasionally glanced at Mr. Delos Santos, sipping from a Starbucks cup.
Mr. Duterte, 79, who arrived at the Senate using a cane, read his statement from a script, in contrast to his usual freewheeling style.
“For all of its successes and shortcomings, I, and I alone, take full legal responsibility,” he said of the antidrug campaign. “For all the police did pursuant to my orders, I will take responsibility. I should be the one jailed, not the policemen who obeyed my orders. It’s pitiful, they are just doing their jobs.”
There have been signs that Mr. Duterte’s perceived impunity in connection with the killings is coming under strain.
The Marcos administration, which once indicated that it would not cooperate with the I.C.C.’s investigation, has now allowed investigators from the court into the Philippines, according to an official close to the investigation. His government has also reopened cases from the drug war.
Mr. Duterte denied on Monday that there had been “state-sponsored killings.” But he painted a confusing, contradictory picture of the so-called “Davao Death Squad,” a group that a retired police officer and rights activists have said was formed by Mr. Duterte when he was mayor of the southern city of Davao, with the mission of killing drug dealers and petty criminals.
Mr. Duterte testified on Monday that he had no knowledge of such a group. But later, he said there had been police officers in the Davao Death Squad. Afterward, he retracted that statement, saying that he’d had his own “death squad” as mayor, but that no police officers were involved in it.
He suggested that many of the killings during his tenure had been in self-defense, saying that if police officers’ lives were at risk, they had to “act accordingly.” Journalists and rights activists have long viewed this narrative with skepticism, citing witnesses who described the gunning down of suspects who never resisted.
Mr. Duterte said he had always seen drug addicts “as victims and patients requiring medical help and not as criminals,” but that he loathed “the purveyors, the merchants and the pushers of this demonizing element.”
Later, after a heated exchange with a senator, Mr. Duterte said of the drug war: “I will do it all over again if I’m allowed to return.” Some in the gallery applauded.
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