No one in the Philippines expected this. The terrible Rodrigo Roa Duterte, alias «Rody Duterte», the most popular man to date in this Southeast Asian country, is experiencing his first nights in detention at the ICC since Tuesday, March 11, 2025. The 79-year-old former Philippine head of state was picked up by police like a common pickpocket at Manila airport on his way back from a pleasure trip to Hong Kong. A warrant from Karim Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) sent to the local section of Interpol was enough for this purpose. Without firing a shot and despite the protests of his many fanatics in the Philippines itself and abroad, Duterte was taken under heavy escort to The Hague (Netherlands) at around 9 p.m. local time. He was the subject of a complaint filed with the ICC seven years ago (April 2017) by a Filipino lawyer, Jude Sabio, for crimes against humanity.
However, the “Punisher”, as he had been nicknamed by the complacent media because of his aggressiveness in the physical elimination of his political opponents, who were often likened to drug traffickers, firmly believed that he had surrounded himself with all the legal precautions that all autocrats resort to to protect themselves from possible prosecution by international justice. In particular, by decreeing the withdrawal of his country, the Philippines, from the Rome Statute creating the ICC in 2019 on the grounds that it had dared to investigate the crackdown on drug traffickers undertaken under its rule. But the ICC’s lawyers have circumvented this obstacle by highlighting the murders ordered by Rodrigo Duterte before his country’s withdrawal from the international judicial body as well as those committed in the city of Davao, when he was its mayor (2013-2016)…
Four years after his withdrawal from power in 2021, the former Philippine head of state has well and truly been caught up in his turpitudes. His arrest is welcomed in particular by Amnesty International, which sees it as «a sign of hope for the victims of human rights violations in the Philippines and around the world».
Like the security and humanitarian catastrophe deliberately imposed on the populations of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo by Rwandan president Paul Kagame and his regime, who are taking advantage of a kind of torpor of the international community due to the genocide of the Tutsi in 1994, the presidency of the Philippine “Punisher” was also theoretically marked by a bloody war allegedly targeting criminals (drug traffickers) and was, as a result, massively supported internationally. But in both cases, the most naïve ended up opening their eyes because, in reality, well over 30,000 people were victims of extrajudicial executions perpetrated by Duterte‘s commandos, according to Amnesty International. «Forget about human rights if I become president. It’s going to bleed!», he said during his election campaign, a prelude to his advent as head of the Philippine state from 2001 to 2010, then from 2013 to 2016. He did not go about it with a dead hand, like Paul Kagame who, unabashedly assuming the assassination of some members of his own government, declared in front of his supporters that the victims «died because they had crossed the red line».
Just as Duterte purposely equated members of the Philippine political opposition with drug traffickers and other “communist rebels” to be killed without due process of any kind, Kagame has developed and imposed on several members of the international community a narrative in which his opponents and those who challenge his hegemony or denounce his acts of predation in eastern DRC are ipso facto considered genocidaires and/or “negationists” of this crime committed in Rwanda by Rwandans in 1994, which would justify their murder.
Several human rights organizations recall that under a controversial anti-terrorism law, the Philippine police had shot dead 14 peasants and 9 left-wing activists falsely presented as members of a communist rebellion, when they were harmless civilians engaged in social and political struggles, on the orders of Rodrigo Duterte.
The new tenant of the ICC’s Scheveningen prison in The Hague is being prosecuted for personally ordering the execution, or covering up the extrajudicial execution, of nearly 10,700 people. At the time of the events, drunk with his power and his immense popularity, he was not in the least offended. «Don’t question my policies. I have no excuses, no excuses. I did what I had to do and, whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country», he said during a hearing in the Philippine Senate in October 2024. We find the same arrogance and contemptuous insolence in president Paul Kagame, the intellectual author of a hecatomb that has cost several hundred thousand deaths over the past thirty years. He has ordered his troops not only to imprison or kill his critics in Rwanda or abroad, but also to scour and plunder other states in the African Great Lakes region such as the DR Congo since the mid-1990s. The same disdain for human rights, the same crimes against humanity perpetrated with a cynicism unparalleled since the infamous German Nazi führer Adolf Hitler.
President Paul Kagame, 68, has embarked, with impunity, on an expansionist military campaign since January 1990, sowing thousands of deaths and millions of internally displaced people in the wake of his army’s expeditionary force for a «Great Replacement» that has nothing to do with the anti-immigration conspiracy theories of French polemicists Renaud Camus or Eric Zemmour. It is in the limelight that Congolese farmers in Rutshuru, Masisi and Nyiragongo (North Kivu) experiment daily in unsanitary camps that have become cut-throats under the boot of Rwandan invaders and their Congolese associates (collaborators) of the M23/AFC since the end of January.
Having taken over the leadership of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a rebel movement founded by Rwandan exiles after the death of its founder Fred Rwigema, the current head of the military principality who has ruled Rwanda unchallenged by force since 1994, had first dragged his country into an atrocious civil war, interrupted thanks to the signing of the Arusha Accords in 1993 with president Juvénal Habyarimana. But intentionally, then-Major Paul Kagame broke the agreed truce and returned to the warpath to conquer power by force of arms, massacring thousands of civilians, mainly from the majority Hutu ethnic group, according to recent revelations by independent investigations. On his way to Kigali, he had multiplied mass massacres: Populations fleeing the clashes were in many places gathered in sports fields under the pretext of distributing food before being exterminated with grenades or machetes before the bodies were thrown into mass graves or rivers. Catholic, Rwandan, Canadian, Spanish priests who had been outraged by this were also summarily executed, such as Bishop Thadée Nsengiyumva, Bishop of Kagbayi, his two counterparts Bishop Joseph Ruzindana and Bishop Vincent Nsengiyumva, assassinated with 10 priests in Gakurazo by an RPF commando led by Colonel (later General Fred Ibingira) on a direct order from Paul Kagame.
It was in these particularly horrific circumstances that the 1994 genocide took place, in which nearly a million civilians were massacred. Tutsi mainly but also moderate Hutus. This allowed Paul Kagame to seize the power he retains to this day. This was followed by a campaign of extermination of the Hutus, who were all accused of having committed the genocide of the Tutsi. For some, this punitive campaign, which is still difficult to quantify, is not far from a second Rwandan genocide to the credit of Paul Kagame‘s RPF.
Under the pretext of hunting down Hutu genocidaires who had taken refuge in neighbouring DRC, the Rwandan dictator launched a military campaign on the territory of his huge neighbour in 1996, which led to the fall of president Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire (DRC) in May 1997. On his way, as in Rwanda a few months earlier, Kagame and his thugs exterminated Hutu refugees and Congolese civilian populations in quantities. According to UN statistics, some 6 million people perished directly or indirectly as a result of this first Rwandan aggression in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since then, the Rwandan autocrat has kept his heavy murderous hand on Congolese territory by maintaining militias that kill, loot and cause recurrent humanitarian tragedies in this neighboring country, in full view of the right-thinking international community, only too happy to be offered almost without compensation the fabulous natural resources, especially mining, of this part of Lumumba‘s country.
Only, everything comes to an end. And the signs of the times, which are multiplying at a frantic pace, indicate that very soon the time will come to give an account for the countless and unspeakable war crimes and crimes against humanity committed on Congolese territory. Like Rodrigo Duterte‘s arrest on Tuesday, March 11, 2025 at Manila airport in the Philippines, Paul Kagame has little chance of escaping his natural judges.
Jacques Ntshula
(The Maximum)