The suspect was not in court. The court’s doctors had pronounced him fit to stand trial, but the suspect disagreed. He said he was an aging man of unreliable memory, too tired and too frail to appear before his judges. He said he did not recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. He said he had been kidnapped from his country and renditioned to The Hague. He said the allegation he had overseen a policy of extrajudicial killing was an outrageous lie.

“I can face the ICC,” President Rodrigo Duterte said in 2018. “If they want to indict me and convict me, fine. I will gladly do it for my country. I told them, find a place where they allow execution by firing squad.”

The hearing was a confirmation of charges: three counts of crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder. Were the court to determine there is sufficient evidence, the suspect would stand trial. If not, he would go home, back to the city praying for his return.

It was Nicholas Kaufman, counsel for the defense, who faced the judges. His client, he said, was “a unique phenomenon,” a wildly popular man with an unfortunate tendency towards expletives and coarse attitude. Yes, his language was incendiary. Yes, it was controversial. Yes, it was vulgar and belligerent. But they were only words. Hyperbole. Bluster. Rhetoric. There was no lethal intent. Those who listened were at fault: the salacious media, the reactionary civil society, the world leaders, the left-wing academics, the sensitive folk who watched from afar unaccustomed to the “tough tongue of the street.” His language “offended sensibilities,” was “unpalatable to many,” and it was that language “that set him on the slippery slope to a prison cell in The Hague.”

As it happens, Rodrigo Duterte is not in detention at Scheveningen Prison because he punctuated sentences with son of a bitch. Neither is he there because he considered fuck a reasonable alternative to a number of everyday verbs. Rodrigo Duterte said, “Do not fuck with my country, because I will really kill you.” Kill was the operative word. It was not fuck. And when he said kill, he was not a drunken uncle holding court at a kitchen table, “rambling on in his own uniquely colorful and crusty language.” When he spoke of what Kaufman called “homespun theories on crime control,” he spoke as President of the Republic and Commander of the Armed Forces, the man who held executive control over more than 200,000 police officers equipped with lethal weaponry.

“He spoke openly,” said Kaufman, “from the heart, sincerely and truthfully, and what a contrast between him and his successor in the Malacañang. For President Rody, his word was his word, and the people knew it.”

Rodrigo Duterte was a man of his word, said Kaufman, unless the president’s word was kill.

The president, in fact, had many words for killing. “Slaughter these idiots,” he said. They would “have to perish,” he said. Wipe them out “from the face of the earth,” he said. Hang them with wire. Drown them at sea. Push them off helicopters. Cut off their heads. Ambush them, poison them, stab them, shoot them in the vagina, kill them all. “I am telling everyone, the criminals, the druggies, the rebels. Do not destroy my country because I will kill you, period,” he said in 2019. “No excuses, no apologies, no nothing.”

Here, said Kaufman, look at this speech, and that speech, listen to all the times the words were appropriate, correct, true exhortations of law and order. The president spoke of due process. The president said he would hold erring cops responsible. The president insisted on “lawful self-defense.”

Listen to Rodrigo Duterte. He did not say shoot, when he told his cops to shoot resisting drug suspects. Rodrigo Duterte said shoot to kill.

The rules of engagement for the police allow the use of force to “prevent, repel, and immobilize” suspects. It categorically disallows excessive force. As much as possible, “avoid hitting the head or other vital parts of the body,” read the police handbook.

“But I’ve always told you,” Duterte said, “that if you have to shoot, shoot them dead.” Shoot them dead, he said, because suspects who were arrested could always find their way out of jail. “I’d prefer they’d shoot them in the heart or in the head. That’s the end of the problem.”

This is how Rodrigo Duterte defined lawful self-defense, when he argued that the police did not need to kill illegally, because they could kill legally. Don’t wait for them to take out a gun, said the president. You just have to kill him, said the president. Kill the son of a bitch, said the president.

Rodrigo Duterte was a man of his word, said Nicholas Kaufman, unless that word was repeated, printed, broadcasted, published. It began with the media, said Kaufman, the media that rendered neon “a totally lawful Duterte campaign against illegal drugs.” And when he was asked why he consistently criticized the media during his presentations, Kaufman was righteous. “Why does the media always criticize my client? Full stop.”

It was as if, in Kaufman’s view, a monolithic media had looked at Rodrigo Duterte, this blustering man of good intentions, and decided he would be a convenient target for newspaper editorials. But remember who Kaufman’s client is, no matter how often Kaufman might refer to the suspect as “Tatay Digong.” His client is His Excellency Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Republic of the Philippines. Because he was the president, what he said and what he promised was public interest, particularly, especially, when what he said and what he promised included the wholesale slaughter of civilians. Rodrigo Duterte said kill, and people died.

Rodrigo Duterte was not, as Kaufman would have the court believe, “a person who is far removed from the incidents of murder.” Take, for example, the evening of the 30th of January in 2017, after Rodrigo Duterte first suspended the drug war. The press waited outside police stations, as they had waited every night for seven months. Yet there were no drug-related killings across the country that night. For the second time since the election of Rodrigo Duterte — the first was Christmas Day — there were no fatal encounters. No drug suspects were found dead “after the smoke of gunfire subsided.” Nobody died of drive-by shootings or in the hands of “unknown hitmen.” There were no corpses wrapped in packing tape. The death toll stalled at 7,080. Rodrigo Duterte suspended the war, and every killer put down his gun, even the vigilantes who carried no badges.

Rodrigo Duterte was a man of his word, said Nicholas Kaufman. His client did not “say one thing, mean another.” He did not “super craftily” insert exonerating comments into his speeches to prepare for the day he would stand in court.

And still, Kaufman follows in the long line of men who made it their duty to explain what Rodrigo Duterte meant after Rodrigo Duterte said what he meant. The president’s words should be taken “seriously, not literally,” said former Spokesperson Harry Roque. Duterte’s language should be interpreted with “creative imagination,” said former Spokesperson Ernesto Abella. Duterte’s jokes could be identified “by using one’s common sense,” said former Spokesperson Salvador Panelo. It was the excuse his supporters made when Duterte, narrating the violent death of an Australian missionary, said he wished he had raped her first. “I know in his heart, he behaves differently,” said his running mate Alan Peter Cayetano. “Sometimes, what he says in a speech is different.” Cayetano made the statement just before Rodrigo Duterte delivered a 28-minute monologue insisting he was not joking.

Here is the doctrine of Rodrigo Duterte: to admit to killing while claiming he had never killed; to promise to kill and claim he did not mean death; to assert the law and demand the law’s violation; to threaten publicly and decry the publication of his threats; to encourage vigilante murder and denounce extrajudicial killing; to declaim the value of human rights and demean those who upheld those rights; to vaunt responsibility for the slaughter and categorically deny accountability. It is a fickle doctrine, belligerent when convenient, decorous when required, the language ever shifting in response to the adoration of the crowd. Rodrigo Duterte is a brave man, except when he is not.

Listen, said Kaufman, this was “the people’s president.” This was a man who had won the “love, respect, and admiration of his fellow citizens.” This was a man beloved, reelected “time after time, term after term, on no less than seven occasions over more than two decades.”

Listen to Rodrigo Duterte speak in his palace by the river. Here was His Excellency, crusty and colorful and homespun before an applauding audience, explaining the secret to his electoral success.

“It’s all about sincerity,” he explained. “When you say, ‘Son of a bitch, don’t do it, or I’ll kill you’ — you’re not the one doing the killing anyway.”

He tilted his head and smirked. “Pssst, police.”

I’ll kill you, he said. They’ll kill you, he meant. 

The president now sits in Scheveningen Prison. It is exactly a year since his arrest. In two months, the court will decide whether there is reason to try him for crimes against humanity. His client, said Nicholas Kaufman, has little interest in the workings of courts and counsels. His eyes glaze over. He is solemn and somber. He has done his duty and left his legacy.

Rodrigo Duterte laid out his defense a long time ago, before the public, before the press, before the nation that offered him love and admiration and respect.

“If you kill criminals, it is not a crime against humanity,” His Excellency said in 2017. “The criminals have no humanity, God damn it.” – Rappler.com

Patricia Evangelista is an investigative reporter and Rappler contributor. Her debut book, the critically-acclaimed Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country, was published by Random House in 2023, is an account of the Philippine drug war. It will soon be translated into six languages.