FINANCIAL TIMES

21-10-16

Anger and indignation drive Duterte’s fraught relations with US

Philippine president’s stance on America is rooted in his personal history

by: Michael Peel in Manila

When President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines lashed out at his country’s long-standing alliance with the US during his first official visit to China, the motivation may have been personal as well as political.

Alleged abuse by an American Jesuit priest when he was a schoolboy, a mysterious explosion in his home city of Davao and student years that coincided with the Vietnam war have all stoked Mr Duterte’s anger.

Add the recent US censure of his bloody war on drugs and the result is incendiary.

“He is a very knee-jerk kind of politician who is extremely sensitive to criticisms and personalises them,” said Walden Bello, a Philippine academic and analyst, who supports Mr Duterte’s decision to distance himself from the US. “L’état, c'est moi — that’s him.”

The president’s trip to Beijing this week underscored his strong feelings about the US. He dramatically announced his country’s “separation” from Washington and said it was “time to say goodbye” to the Philippines’ treaty ally and colonial occupier. A day later he backtracked, saying that the Philippines could not sever ties with the US but that the two countries’ foreign policies need not dovetail. His comments underlined the mercurial — and often emotional — nature of his leadership.

Indeed, Mr Duterte gave an insight this week into possible reasons for his feelings about the US, speaking of sexual abuse he says he suffered from a US priest when he was a high-school student.

“It’s what you get along the way that shapes your character,” he said in an interview with Al Jazeera. “At that time [it influences] your politics and how you look at the world.”

Mr Duterte had previously named the priest, who has since died, saying he had molested several high-school boys at the Jesuit-run institution he attended in Davao. “It was a case of fondling, you know what, he did during confession. That’s how we lost our innocence early … How could you complain? We were afraid.”

The president has also previously referred to a 2002 incident in Davao, where he was mayor for more than 20 years. A self-proclaimed US treasure hunter named Michael Meiring badly injured himself after a box in his hotel room exploded at a time when insurgents were carrying out a bombing campaign in the surrounding region.

Mr Meiring disappeared from his hospital bed and left the country in the midst of a police investigation. Mr Duterte’s aides have claimed Mr Meiring was a US intelligence agent and was spirited away by colleagues.

Another strand of Mr Duterte’s resentment of the US appears to date back to his time as a student in the 1960s and 1970s. International criticism of the US was high over the war against communism it was prosecuting in Vietnam and neighbouring Southeast Asian countries. The president has in the past spoken of his particularly high regard for his former teacher, Jose Maria Sison, a Philippine communist leader now in exile in the Netherlands.

Mr Duterte has been enraged by criticism in the west and from human rights groups over his ordering of extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and addicts in the Philippines. Last month, China backed his crackdown while President Duterte likened himself to Adolf Hitler and vowed to slaughter millions if needed to win the war on drugs.

But Mr Duterte has widened his critique of the US well beyond his own experiences, attacking Washington on subjects ranging from colonial-era abuses to its modern-day Middle East policy.

While he was in China, anti-American demonstrators clashed with police outside the US embassy in Manila. Some of the hundreds of protesters waved Duterte banners, but there is little sign the president has carried along the broader public in his anti-Americanism — opinion polls in the Philippines have found most people well disposed to the US.

Mr Duterte has nevertheless raised questions about the nation’s inevitable love-hate relationship with its former colonial power. The modern history of the Philippines, which was ruled by Spain for almost three centuries, is sometimes described as 300 years in the convent and 50 years in Hollywood.   

Some Filipinos say the US has had an outsize position in culture and the education system, leading it to be seen as the source of just about anything important. As one woman put it only half-jokingly: “We thought The Beatles were American”. Meanwhile, Spam — a brand of tinned precooked pork meat — introduced during the US era has become a national dish.

Washington says Manila has not formally notified it of any policy changes. US businesses are for now more on alert than alarmed. But Mr Duterte’s rhetoric taps realms deeper than realpolitik — which adds a new unpredictability to this historic bilateral bond