Duterte and Xi Jinping. ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK CITY — Last year, when he was campaigning for the presidency, Rodrigo Roa Duterte said he was going to one of those islands the mainland Chinese had claimed as their own, even though it was well within Philippine territorial waters, on a jet ski no less, and plant the Philippine flag. The image it conjured was comical and made fun of on social media, but it did serve to highlight the willingness of the man to play David to Beijing’s Goliath, should he win the election.
He did win, in a landslide. He convinced the majority of the voters that he was going to stand up for the little people, for all those oppressed and exploited, by the powerful, whether these were individuals, corporations, or nations. He would be their David and Robin Hood and Bernardo Carpio all rolled into one, a giant killer extraordinaire.
No longer.
Instead, the president of the Philippines has metamorphosed into a pussycat where China is concerned. Not only will he not be doing what he said he would, on a jet ski or any other vehicle but he’s turned positively sweet, cloyingly so, towards Beijing and its naked grab for almost all of the South China/West Philippine Sea. A regional bromance—Digong and Jinping, paralleling that between Trump and Putin. In the latter instance, there may be closer, unsavory and possibly criminal, connections between the Kremlin and Trump’s campaign team that U.S. intelligence agencies are looking into.
Might there be similar connections between Beijing and Malacañang?
Suddenly, the People’s Republic of China has found itself an ally in a most unlikely country, one that had under the previous president Noynoy Aquino filed a case with the international courts seeking to debunk China’s bogus nine-dash claim to the resource-rich waters off the coasts of the countries that make up Southeast Asia. And the Philippines got what it wanted: a resounding rebuff of the Chinese claim.
A wonderful victory that Duterte seems determined to squander.
Why has this hypermasculine president, ordinarily so menacing and foul-mouthed, turned timid and ingratiating when dealing with China? A president who declares an independent stance in foreign policy—read that as an up-yours to the U.S.—only to all but fall into the calculating arms of our behemoth neighbor: this is a head scratcher.
But is it really?
Not when you think of his behavior as being typical of a bully who threatens others on the playground when they don’t accede to his often-capricious demands but then willingly cedes his dominance to a mightier bully.
In the “playground” that is the anti-drug war, who have been the targets? Not the drug lords, not the suppliers, not the conduits among the cops and the military, but the poor and the marginalized. Easy targets for a bully.
What has this president said about the poor that he is supposed to protect and whose lives he has the duty to improve? From the transcript of a speech he delivered in the province of Bukidnon more than a week ago, after pointing out the obvious, that the poor were mostly those being killed in his drug war, he went on to say, “They’re all poor because it’s the poor who are ignorant and so they are the ones who will get hit.”
If ever any statement gave the lie to this president’s claim to the hearts and minds of the impoverished masses, this was it.
He might curse like a kanto boy but it’s all show. His administration is indeed a killer extraordinaire but not of giants.
Even among bullies, or should I say, especially among bullies, there is a pecking order, as old as the law of the jungle. Right now, in Southeast Asia China is the biggest, baddest dude—one being resisted by Hanoi and Jakarta but not by Manila. Sure, the Armed Forces of the Philippines are no match for China’s military, but that is a pallid excuse for the defeatist statements the president has been uttering. In so doing he’s come dangerously close to relinquishing the country’s sovereignty over parts of its territory.
When he feels the media is too critical of his policies, the notoriously thin-skinned chief executive resorts to blanket condemnations. He recently castigated the Inquirer and ABS-CBN: “You [INQUIRER] are bullshit. You, too, ABS-CBN. You put out garbage. Somebody should tell you now, you sons of bitches, you engage in too much foolishness. Somebody should say, ‘You son of a bitch.’ They might be afraid to say it. I will attack, even every day.”
No reasoned rebuttal, no witty repartee, no perceptive analysis. Just out-and-out intimidation.
A word that kids on the playground use to undercut a bully when he blows his cool fits Duterte’s fits perfectly: Pikon! Sore loser!
Copyright @ L.H. Francia 2017
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