Duterte and the UN

Rodrigo Duterte, the new president of the Philippines, gives good copy. Here’s a quote from his final election rally: “Forget the laws on human rights. If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor. You drug pushers, hold-up men and do-nothings, you better go out. Because I’d kill you. I’ll dump all of you into Manila Bay, and fatten all the fish there.”

And here’s another, from last Sunday, after United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the U.N.’s Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) condemned Mr. Duterte’s “apparent endorsement of extrajudicial killings.”

“I do not want to insult you,” Duterte said (he only called them “stupid”). “But maybe we’ll just have to decide to separate from the United Nations. If you are that rude, we might just as well leave. So take us out of your organization. You have done nothing. Never. Except to criticize.”

What upset Ban and the UNODC is the fact that Duterte is having people murdered. Since he took office three months ago, some 900 “suspected drug-dealers” have been shot dead by police and civilian vigilantes acting in his name. None were found guilty by a court, and some, of course, were completely innocent.
Duterte is not denying it or apologizing. Before he leaves office, he says, he’ll just give himself amnesty:
 
“Pardon given to Rodrigo Duterte for the crime of multiple murder, signed Rodrigo Duterte.”

“The Punisher,” as he was known when he was mayor of Davao, is very serious about his “war on drugs.” He recently said he would kill his own children if they took drugs. But crime is not the Philippines’ biggest problem, and it’s not clear what else he is serious about.

But he does have a plan of sorts for what to do after he walks out of the United Nations. He says he may ask China and African countries to walk out too and form a rival organization. He doesn’t know much about China or Africa, so maybe he thinks they would like to get together and defy the parts of the world where governments believe that killing people is wrong.

“Duterte Harry” (another nickname) is very popular in the Philippines, but he is not really a threat to global order. The 100 million Filipinos will have to live with him for the next six years, but the United Nations is not doomed. In fact, it is doing better than most people give it credit for.

One proof of this is the fact that the secretary general now has the right to criticize a member government merely for killing its own citizens. That’s not what the U.N. was designed for. When it was created in 1945, as the catastrophe of World War II was ending, its main goal was to prevent any more wars like that.

The founders tried to give it the appearance of a broader moral force by signing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, but that was mainly window-dressing. The U.N. was created by the great powers to prevent any government from launching another war of international aggression, not to make governments treat their own citizens better.

The U.N. has done well in its original task; it shares the credit with nuclear weapons for the fact that no great power has fought any other for the past 71 years. It has gradually moved into other areas like peace-keeping and promoting the rule of law in the world, but it never interferes inside the territory of the great powers. Even in smaller countries it almost never intervenes without the invitation of the local government.

So when Duterte called the U.N. useless because “if you are really true to your mandate, you could have stopped all these wars and killings,” he was talking through his hat. Besides, he would never accept U.N. intervention in his own country to deal with an alleged crime wave. He’s just talking tough because he hates being criticized.

It’s very unlikely that he will carry out his threat. The U.N. is the keystone in the structure of international law that, among many other things, deters China from settling its territorial dispute with the Philippines by force. Rodrigo Duterte is just a problem for the Philippines, not for the U.N. or the world.