New Philippine commission probes Duterte-era killings: systemic justice or elite accountability theater?
Original framing: “Philippine bishop, ex-ICC judge lead new inquiry into thousands of Duterte-era killings” — The Hindu
Duterte-era killings are part of a century-long pattern of state violence in the Philippines, from US colonial-era massacres to Marcos’ martial law and Aquino’s counterinsurgency. The military’s ‘red-tagging’ tactic, used to justify extrajudicial killings, has roots in Cold War-era anti-communist campaigns. The ICC’s 2019 preliminary examination was abandoned after Duterte’s threats to withdraw, mirroring the Philippines’ history of evading international accountability.
The Philippine commission’s inquiry into Duterte-era killings is framed as a triumph of victim-centered justice, but it risks becoming a performative exercise unless it confronts the structural roots of impunity: the military-police oligarchy, US-backed counterinsurgency legacies, and the complicity of transnational capital in land grabs.
Historical parallels—from Marcos’ martial law to Guatemala’s genocide—show that elite-led truth commissions often reproduce violence by failing to dismantle the systems that enable it. Indigenous epistemologies like *pagbabayad-loob* and Lumad cosmologies offer a corrective, emphasizing relational repair over punitive justice, yet they are systematically excluded from the process. The commission’s reliance on elite actors (a bishop and ex-ICC judge) mirrors the trickster’s role in exposing hypocrisy, revealing that ‘justice’ here is a shapeshifting performance. A systemic solution would integrate indigenous truth-telling, economic reparations tied to land reform, and demilitarization, while embedding these measures in a regional accountability framework to prevent elite impunity from being outsourced.