MANILA, Oct 16 : Nearly nine out of 10 Filipinos support Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, and almost three quarters believe extrajudicial killings are taking place in the bloody crackdown, an opinion poll showed on Monday.
Duterte’s signature campaign has killed thousands of Filipinos and caused international alarm, amid widespread allegations by activists that police are executing suspected drug users and dealers.
Police reject that and say every one of the more than 3,900 victims in their anti-narcotics operations were killed because they were armed and had violently resisted arrest.
Eighty-eight percent of the 1,200 Filipinos surveyed by pollster Pulse Asia last month said they support the anti-illegal drugs campaign, with nine percent undecided and two percent against it.
But 73 percent of respondents believed extrajudicial killings were taking place, up from 67 percent in the June poll.
A fifth of Filipinos felt there were no such killings, as the authorities maintain, down from 29 percent in June.
The issue of extrajudicial killings is contentious in the Philippines, where definitions of what it means vary from those typically used by international organizations and human rights groups.
Pulse Asia in its survey defined the term as “killings done by people in authority, such as the police or soldiers, that do no follow the rule of law.”
Political analysts Ramon Casiple said the survey showed support for the crackdown from those who felt crime was being tackled, but reservations among those most affected.
“Communities with reported deaths, generally urban poor communities, are getting increasingly concerned of the killings,” he added.
The survey comes amid unprecedented scrutiny on the war on drugs and several opinion surveys by another pollster that indicated dwindling trust of police accounts of operations, and whether victims were indeed all drug dealers as police maintain.
Duterte last week ordered police to withdraw from the anti-narcotics campaign and leave all operations to the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) following scrutiny of police conduct.
He noted fewer killings in operations by PDEA, an agency a fraction of the size of the police, and said he hoped critics and “bleeding hearts” would be satisfied by his decision. (Reporting by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty and Nick Macfie)
Philippine survey shows big support for Duterte’s drugs war
Philippine survey shows big support for Duterte’s drugs war
Military intervention in Iran ‘not the preferred option’: French minister
- The president’s son blamed foreign interference for the protests’ violent turn, but said “the security and law enforcement forces may have made mistakes that no one intends to defend and that must be addressed”
PARIS: Military intervention in Iran, where authorities launched a deadly crackdown on protesters that killed thousands, is not France’s preferred option, its armed forces minister said on Sunday.
“I think we must support the Iranian people in any way we can,” Alice Rufo said on the political broadcast “Le Grand Jury.”
But “a military intervention is not the preferred option” for France, she said, adding it was “up to the Iranian people to rid themselves of this regime.”
Rufo lamented how hard it was to “document the crimes the Iranian regime has carried out against its population” due to an internet shutdown.
“The fate of the Iranian people belongs to Iranians, and it is not for us to choose their leaders,” said Rufo.
The son of Iran’s president, who is also a government adviser, has called for internet connectivity to be restored, warning that the more than two-week blackout there would exacerbate anti-government sentiment.
Yousef Pezeshkian, whose father, Masoud, was elected president in 2024, said, “Keeping the internet shut will create dissatisfaction and widen the gap between the people and the government.”
“This means those who were not and are not dissatisfied will be added to the list of the dissatisfied,” he wrote in a Telegram post that was later picked up by the IRNA news agency.
Such a risk, he said, was greater than that of a return to protests if connectivity were restored.
The younger Pezeshkian, a media adviser to the presidency, said he did not know when internet access would be restored.
He pointed to concerns about the “release of videos and images related to last week’s ‘protests that turned violent’” as a reason the internet remained cut off, but criticized the logic.
Quoting a Persian proverb, he posted “‘He whose account is clean has nothing to fear from scrutiny.’”
The president’s son blamed foreign interference for the protests’ violent turn, but said “the security and law enforcement forces may have made mistakes that no one intends to defend and that must
be addressed.”
He went on to say that “the release of films is something we will have to face sooner or later. Shutting down the internet won’t solve anything; it will just postpone the issue.”
