Dedutertefication

After listening to human rights lawyer Joel Butuyan’s opening speech at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Monday, during the confirmation of charges against former President Rodrigo Duterte, I felt something stir inside me—something between grief and fury that I have carried for years.

In his powerful speech, the common legal representative for the victims of the “drug war” denounced the virus of impunity that Duterte spread across the Philippines, infecting Filipinos to the point that they could no longer discern right from wrong, evil from good. Butuyan provided the context that this moment desperately needed—not just for the hearing, but for this entire saga of Duterte-era atrocities that scarred our nation. He named the disease. He described the rot. And sitting in that cold, somber gallery, I felt every word land like an accusation against a country that still hasn’t fully reckoned with what it allowed to happen.

I was unsettled because I knew exactly how Butuyan felt. I know exactly where that outrage comes from, because I have lived inside it for years. The toll of Duterte’s “drug war” and his Davao Death Squad has overwhelmed me over the years and decades, as it has so many others like myself—activists, journalists, lawyers—who have spent careers documenting Duterte’s depravity while the rest of the world looked away, and while too many of our own countrymen cheered. We did not document these horrors from a distance. We were there. We saw what was done to people. We know their names.

Beside me in the public gallery sat photojournalist Raffy Lerma, one of the people who bore unflinching witness to the killing fields Duterte created. When Duterte’s lawyer, Nicholas Kaufman, made the cynical move to discredit Lerma’s “Pietà”-like photograph—a devastating image of a wife cradling her husband, shot dead by police in Pasay, which the Inquirer ran on its front page in 2016—I instinctively reached over and placed my hand on his back. Both of us had our heads bowed, as if in prayer. We were mourning. Not just the violence visited upon so many Filipinos at Duterte’s direction, but now, in real time, we were mourning the brazen lies being deployed in a court of law to defend that violence. Kaufman’s move was not just cynical—it was obscene. To take a photograph that captured one of the most intimate and devastating moments of a woman’s life, a moment born directly from state-sanctioned murder, and use it as a prop for legal maneuvering—it was an act of violence in itself.

After the hearing, not far from the ICC premises, a group of Duterte supporters stood chanting his name. They were boisterous, loud, proud—as if what they were doing, what they were shouting into the gray Dutch sky, were the most righteous thing in the world. That pride is what stopped me cold as I made my way to the bus stop that freezing afternoon. Not the noise. The pride. The utter, unshakeable conviction that they were on the right side of history, when history—real, documented, blood-soaked history—screams otherwise.

I went home that night weighed down by a sadness I struggle to articulate. Because this is not just about Duterte. It never was. It is about the millions of Filipinos who looked at the bodies piling up in the streets and felt nothing or, worse, felt satisfied. It is about the close friends and relatives—and I suspect most Filipinos reading this know exactly what I mean—who chose, and still choose, to ignore the brutality. Those who dismiss the dead as collateral, as criminals, as acceptable losses in a war that was never a war but a massacre. For what? For the adoration of a man who built his entire identity on violence and contempt for human life? Because he spoke crudely and people mistook cruelty for authenticity? Because he was “one of us”?

That bargain is obscene. And we need to say so, loudly, without diplomatic hedging.

An hour or so before I began writing this, a new Facebook friend sent me a message with a single, striking suggestion: perhaps the Philippines needs “dedutertefication” the way postwar Germany needed denazification—a systematic, painful, national confrontation with what happened, who enabled it, and why, so that it can never happen again.

He is right. The ICC process is necessary but not sufficient. What the Philippines needs is a genuine moral reckoning—in schools, in media, in families, in politics. We need to look honestly at the culture of impunity that made Duterte not just possible but popular. We need to stop treating his supporters’ feelings as more important than his victims’ lives.

Dedutertefication. It won’t be easy. It won’t be comfortable. But it is the only path back to a country worth believing in.

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Carlos Conde now edits Rights Report Philippines, a nonprofit journalism project that focuses on human rights.