Duterte’s Philippines drug war kills over 5,000

Sayeed Muhammad of DOT
The official death toll from Rodrigo Duterte’s violent war on drugs in the Philippines has exceeded 5,000 people, authorities have said.
Philippine drug enforcement agency, PDEA’s mouthpiece Derrick Carreon referring to official figures said 5,050 lives were lost, mostly at the hands of the police, said that, according to official figures, between July 2016 and November last, reports The Guardian. Since assuming office back in July 2016, Duterte has made his crackdown on drug users and dealers the focal point of his administration, continuing the brutal campaign of violence that he enacted as mayor of the city of Davao.
The official toll falls well short of estimates given by human rights groups and campaigners for victims, which range from 12,000 to 20,000. Many of the undocumented killings, rights groups say, were carried out by “death squads” and unofficial militias.
Last week, Chito Gascon, the chairman of the Filipino human rights commission, said the toll could be as high as 27,000. He, however, claimed that investigating the deaths was complex because police withheld records on anti-drug operations.
Although initially a popular policy, Duterte’s crackdown has been criticised for the killings by police raids.
Carreon defended the rising death toll, saying that the lives of police officers carrying out drug raids were often under threat and that “naturally, commensurate force has to be implemented in order to repel the threat”.
According to the government statistics, there were also 164,265 arrests of “drug personalities” as part of 115,435 anti-drug operations across the country during the two-and-half-year period.