[REFLECTION] On Duterte’s arrest and sovereignty 

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During the Duterte presidency, many of us, even people of faith, were either silent in our complicity or loud in our support for the president’s pragmatic and supposedly forceful policies

Former President Rodrigo Duterte’s recent arrest and turnover for trial into the custody of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has predictably stoked the fires of passion among both supporters and detractors.

Interestingly, those who have always supported him even through all the extrajudicial deaths and spilled blood in the name of his war on drugs are now ironically protesting his arrest on the ground of the lack of ‘due process’:  the ICC does not have jurisdiction over alleged crimes that happened in the Philippines, which meant the arrest was illegal and an insult to our national sovereignty.

What do they actually mean when they fixate on the nationalist rhetoric that our national sovereignty is being trampled upon?

Sovereignty means having the supreme authority. In the days of empires and kingdoms, the king is the sovereign ruler. In the context of democracy, we say that the people are sovereign, although their power is vested upon the government in a kind of social contract. 

In the context of international politics, national sovereignty means the recognition that a state such as the Philippines is independent and self-governing, and must not be compelled by foreign powers to act against its own volition.

For a people who have a chip on their shoulder about their place in the global order and whose insecurities have been fueled by centuries of colonial indignities, the nationalist rhetoric that our national sovereignty is being assailed hits us where it hurts: our pride.

But who, really, is sovereign? Who is being trampled upon? Is it our people? Is it our government?

On the question of who we consider to be sovereign, we often forget the spiritual dimension of our nationhood. Millions of Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims have drafted and adopted a Constitution that starts by acknowledging and imploring the aid of Almighty God. 

To those who see beneath the movement of history a subtle, guiding hand that is more powerful than the will of the people or of the government, the true sovereign will is in fact God’s will. It is the slow, hidden hand behind the wheels of justice that eventually catches up on those who are accountable, no matter how powerful. 

Despite recognizing the separation of church and state and  Jesus’s maxim that we ought to give unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, people of faith recognize that the state is merely a temporary vessel for the seeds of God’s kingdom: seeds whose ultimate fruition will require acts of faith in the here and now in order to reconcile the realities of our imperfect nation with the hope of the perfect kingdom that is to come.

But what have we as, as a nation, done on the matter of President Duterte? Do our words and actions reflect our acknowledgment of God’s sovereignty over him and his arrest? , 

During the Duterte presidency, many of us, even people of faith, were either silent in our complicity or loud in our support for the president’s pragmatic and supposedly forceful policies. A hard-to-untangle network of problems that included poverty, unemployment and illegal drugs had been reductively condensed by President Duterte into an enemy we could simply hack into bloody pieces — your local addicts and pushers. Many Filipinos supported the eradication of the ‘enemy’ in a bloody war on drugs that did away with legal procedure and patient intelligence — gathering in favor of quick action that in the end often turned out to be unsubstantiated suspicion and rumor.

We elected and supported a president who offered us a quick, pragmatic and immoral solution to a problem. In our impatient search for justice, we were complicit as a nation in unjust atrocities that profanely violated the sovereign will and justice of God.

And now, many of our people are expressing in social media the need to pray to that very same God for the release and return of “Tatay Digong.”

Legal issues aside, if you are fixated on the issue of national sovereignty, then you are focusing on the wrong thing.

I am reminded of the Biblical story of the fall of the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the chosen people of God. Prophets such as Ezekiel and Jeremiah at the time warned them of their impending doom, comparing them to the famously fallen kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah. Many people fixate on sexual immorality and hedonism (that perhaps involved the abuse of alcohol and drugs). These were the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah, but Ezekiel was clear that beneath those outward manifestations was a deeper sin: that of injustice, of “not strengthening the hand of the poor and needy.”

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a warning and cautionary tale to Israel and Judah, just as Israel and Judah are a cautionary tale to us. These kingdoms had turned their backs on God and they oppressed the poor and needy, just as we as a nation allowed a war on drugs that drowned in blood those poor communities that were supposed to be saved.  

In their moral weakness, God allowed Israel and Judah to face the consequences of their corruption: foreign invasion and exile. We should be thankful that, so far, the only injury to our nation is injury to our pride. Instead of being ashamed over the ICC’s supposed insult to our national sovereignty, perhaps we should be ashamed that we allowed President Duterte’s unjust and bloody “war” to happen in the first place. It is patent inutility that afterwards, our nation’s political and legal mechanisms were unable to prosecute him ourselves.

Therefore, if we are going to pray to God, let us not pray for the wrong thing. Instead, let us utter and remember the meaning of the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: “Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  It is not the will of God that a leader whose reign is marked by a trail of blood should remain unpunished. – Rappler.com

Joseph Nathan Cruz formerly served as an Assistant Professor in the field of Behavioral Sciences before moving from academia to the cooperative sector. He has a master’s degree in sociology from the National University of Singapore and is also currently studying law under the Juris Doctor program of the University of the Philippines College of Law. He currently writes for the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture and works as head of quality management systems for a financial services cooperative.