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The arrest and lightning extradition of former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to The Hague should be a wake-up call not only for Russia but for the Rip van Winkles of China as well. No sooner had Duterte landed at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino Airport (named after a former presidential contender, who was assassinated for political reasons by Duterte’s persecutors at that airport) but Duterte was bundled onto another plane and whisked off to NATO’s International Criminal Court to get their own form of kangaroo court justice.

Duterte’s crime, if such it is, is that he launched a wide scale cull of small time drug dealers, thousands of whom were summarily executed by Duterte’s death squads, off duty police officers topping up their merager salaries by drive by executions.

Although Duterte did not play by the Queensbury rules, he did clean up the mean streets, most particularly in his home town of Davao, which I could visit often, thanks in no small measure to the work of his death squads. Not only that but I used to hang out next door to the motorcycle club which boasted Duterte as a valued member.

Duterte was a successful lawyer who could get things done. As a member of the Duterte clan, he could also get political results and his daughter, who is the current vice President of the Philippines could, as part of that same network, do likewise. Being based in Mindanao, the Dutertes had to deal with an ongoing Islamic rebellion by the ISIS-linked Au Sayyaf terror gang, who almost scooped my good self up in one of their lightning advances.

Whereas the Dutertes were based in the far south of the Philippines,. the Marcos mob were based in its far north, where current President Bonbong Marcos rules the roost. Prior to Rodrigo handing on the Presidential baton to Bongbong, the Duterte and Marcos clans had agreed to share the spoils of office between them, where Bonbong would hand the Presidential office over to Sara, Rodrigo’s daughter after he finished his term.

Although MI6’s hardline BBC outlet reported in November 2024 that Sara was going to have Bongbong whacked by one of her daddy’s death squads, such words and actions are part and parcel regarding what passes for political discourse in the Philippines. Recall that Ferdinand Marcos had Ninoy Aquino (of the Tarlac based Aquino clan) whacked at Manila airport and you get a flavour of how internal Filipino politics works. It is basically a game between local big wigs such as the Duterte, Marcos and Aquino clans, with Chinese businessmen also playing roles behind the scenes. Although there was a brief flurry of democracy following Ninoy’s assassination, most Pinoys are too desperately poor to have any political impact. They subsist on beauty pageants, political patronage and on the grace of God, and that is about it. As the poorest live on pagpag which is food recycled from garbage tips and cleansed to hopefully rid it of hepatitis and the other side effects of rat urine, they are in no position to rock the tiniest of political boats, never mind the big American and Chinese armadas prowling off their coast.

Although opinions may differ on Rodrigo’s efforts to tackle the Philippines’ rampant drug problem, that has nothing to do with why he was kidnapped at Ninoy Aquino Airport and summarily rendered to the hypocrites at The Hague. Rodrigo Duterte is a prisoner at The Hague for no other reason that he wanted to engage in jaw jaw and not war war with the Chinese. Some war crime that!

Not only did I directly address the return of the oligarchs here and the return of the kiddy fiddlers here but all of this is as obvious as is the nose on my face, not least because MI6’s hardline BBC is gloating about it all.

For all his many faults, Rodrigo Duterte was correct in surmising that the Philippines is in no position to fight anybody, least of all Chia on behalf of the United States which has the most blemished of records in the Philippines and whose manifold abuses led to a wave of protests, led by Cory Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, following the latter’s assassination by Marcos’ button men.

Although there are many great Catholic and other groups doing great work in the Philippines, the sad truth is it is a case of the land for the bullock and the man for the road. The country is kept afloat by $35 bn in remittances every year, workers’ rights are all but non-existent and it is one of the world’s most fragile economies. The last thing they need is a punch up with mercantilist China.

But what they want and what they need has never been of importance to the oligarchs or those in Washington they answer to. They are on record as saying that a bigger population is good as it means more remittances, and thus a healthier peso and sweeter times for themselves and their various scams, which are evident wherever one looks.

One can look at Manila’s Ayala malls, which are amongst the fanciest malls in the world and which are a world away from the humdrum existence of the pagpag, Red Horse and Jollibee legions, many of whom would have been on the receiving end of the lead Rodrigo’s death squads dished out. Big as San Miguel, the Ayala malls and Jollibee are, the drug trade is worth a cool $9 bn a year, not exactly small potatoes unless you compare it to NATO’s military build up against China.

As a frequent visitor to the bailiwicks of both the Dutertes and the Marcoses, I knew that the first rule is to keep my trap shut unless I wanted to end up on a mortuary slab, which was fine for me as I was only passing through .But the people of the Philippines who marched behind Cory Aquino and who voted in their tens of millions for Rodrigo and Sarah Duterte in the hope of putting a cap on their drug epidemic deserve something more than having to watch the ICC try to retrieve its tarnished reputation with the show trial of Rodrigo Duterte and having the Chinese and American use their waters in a maritime war the Philippines is sure to lose.

Though the Pinoys who picketed The Hague on behalf of Duterte are to be commended, that kangaroo court is only a prelude to what awaits their homeland when NATO’s proxies tear it apart as a prelude to squaring up against China. The Apocalypse awaits.