Davao mother who lost 4 sons greets Du30 arrest in tears

ONE OF THE EARLIEST TO SEEK JUSTICE For Clarita Alia, 71, mother of four sons whom she believed were killed by the Davao Death Squad, the arrest of former President Rodrigo Duterte on March 11 was an answered prayer. Photo taken on Wednesday. —GERMELINA LACORTE

DAVAO CITY—Clarita Alia burst into tears upon learning that ex-President Rodrigo Duterte had been arrested and handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to be tried for crimes against humanity.

Between 2001 and 2007, Alia lost four sons to killings that she believed were perpetrated by Duterte’s so-called Davao Death Squad (DDS), a group that dispatched suspected criminals with impunity in the city, where then Mayor Duterte earned the moniker “The Punisher.”

Alia’s anguish predated “Oplan Tokhang,’’ the bloodstained antidrug campaign launched by Duterte when he became President.

It predated the rise of Ferdinand Marcos Jr., whose presidency would see Duterte off to The Hague, the Netherlands.

It predated the political warfare that is expected to escalate as a backdrop to Duterte’s legal battle at the ICC.

It even predated the country’s membership in the ICC.

And yet the pain felt so fresh for Clarita on March 11, the day Duterte was arrested—and The Punisher ceased to be untouchable.

‘I’m so thankful’

She fell asleep crying that day, she told the Inquirer in an interview on Wednesday.

“Even if he is imprisoned very far from here, I feel so happy that this day finally came,” Alia said, stifling a sob. “I’m so thankful. I’ve been asking God for this day.”

Reportage on the Duterte drug war usually highlights its viciousness by emphasizing the death toll: about 6,000, based on the official government count; or up to 20,000, based on estimates from human rights watchdogs.

The ICC case, however, focuses on 43 killings—19 of them allegedly committed by the DDS in Davao during Duterte’s years as mayor from 2011 to 2016; and 24 by the police during the first half of his presidency, from 2016 to 2019.

At 71, Alia now lives alone in a shanty at the Bankerohan public market area. The former vegetable vendor now ekes out a living by offering a pushcart to other vendors or buyers who need help with their heavy load; she does the pushing herself.

She continues to blame the DDS for the deaths of sons Richard and Christopher just months apart in 2001, Bobby in 2002, and Fernando in 2007. Their cases received scant attention from the police.

Just ‘gang war’ victims

At the height of the Davao killings, in the early 2000s, this lack of official action impelled local nongovernment organizations to band together and form a support system for the grieving families.

The resulting umbrella group—Coalition Against Summary Executions (CASE)—may be considered the first to recognize a pattern or system behind the killings.

The lawyers assisting CASE, however, had a hard time building up cases for the families, again because local law enforcers remained unsupportive.

Bato can’t hide in the Senate to shield himself from ICC warrant

One of the lawyers, former Bayan Muna Rep. Carlos Isagani Zarate, recalled that in the case of the Alia brothers, the police easily dismissed them as victims of gang wars and ordinary criminals—not DDS targets.

‘Poster woman’

Until CASE heard of her plight, Alia felt so alone in her quest for justice. Those were the years when Mayor Duterte’s popularity was on the rise, when he would go on TV to read a list of suspected drug addicts, telling them to stop or just leave the city.

CASE allowed Alia to meet other families who had a similar fate. The group gradually worked to document and expose the killings.

But while she tearfully welcomed the recent serving of the ICC warrant on Duterte, the cases of of her four sons—which happened years before the country joined the tribunal in 2011—were not among the 19 DDS hits cited in the charges.

“Alia was the first mother to have spoken against the DDS killings in Davao City; in fact, she became the poster woman against the extrajudicial killings in Davao City,” said human rights advocate Carlos Conde, recalling a conversation he had with the mother last year.

“That’s why she felt bad that the cases of her children were not included in the 19 cases from Davao City investigated by the ICC,” said Conde, the Philippine researcher for Human Rights Watch, who had also reported on the killings for The New York Times.

“It really pained her to think that her sons, whose deaths were not investigated by local authorities, who merely dismissed them as drug addicts, also remained an ‘outcast’ in the ICC,” Conde told the Inquirer on Saturday.