By Hader Glang
ZAMBOANGA CITY, the Philippines (AA) – A day after being sworn in as the Philippines’ 16th president, Rodrigo Duterte has presided over the oath-taking ceremonies of the country’s new police and military chiefs.
Duterte — the first president from the troubled southern island of Mindanao — formally installed Ronald Dela Rosa as head of the Philippine National Police at Camp Crame in Quezon City on Friday, before swearing in Gen. Ricardo Visaya as Armed Forces of the Philippines chief in Camp Aguinaldo.
In his speech at Dela Rosa’s oath-taking ceremony, the president warned that he would not tolerate corrupt practices among the police force, adding, “but do your duty, I will die for you.”
He underlined, however, “I also know sometimes you can become a bad boy in the organization so beginning from now, I will not tolerate, zero tolerance for abuses committed by the law enforcement,” Philstar reported.
Duterte had served 22 years as the mayor of southern Davao City before winning the May 9 election on a crime-fighting campaign.
Under the outspoken politician, the city transformed from a crime-ridden hovel to a peaceful and investment-friendly city, where he imposed bans on public smoking, and the selling of alcohol and the operation of entertainment spots past midnight.
However, his pledge to work toward re-imposing the death penalty, his comments on journalist killings and his offering of bounties for drug suspects have led to rights groups expressing concerns over such stances in a country that has suffered from extrajudicial killings.
On Friday, Duterte — a lawyer by profession — reiterated that police may only shoot criminals to defend themselves or others, and only after declaring authority and the crime committed.
“If there is a resistance that plays your life in jeopardy then by all means shoot and shoot him dead. That is my order,” he told the police force at Camp Crame. “Do your duty and if in the process you kill one thousand persons because you were doing your duty, I will protect you. And if they try to impeach me, I will hurry the process and we will go out of the service together.”
During Visaya’s oath-taking at Camp Aguinaldo afterwards, the president said he had begun negotiations with the country’s communist insurgency before his inauguration and would do likewise with ethnic Moro rebels in the Muslim south.
News broadcaster ABS-CBN quoted him as saying that he planned to meet next week with leaders of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which was involved in a peace process — for which Duterte has expressed support — with the previous government.
He is also set to meet with Nur Misuari, the fugitive founder of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), which the MILF broke away from in 1984.
The MNLF faction led by Misuari considers the MILF’s 2014 peace deal with the government a betrayal of an 1996 Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)-brokered agreement.
Misuari is currently eluding charges filed against him and his men for a siege on the predominantly Catholic city of Zamboanga in September 2013, in which around 300 people were killed and thousands of houses razed.
“It is not a war that can be fought forever. We cannot fight forever. We might have the weapons, the armaments, the bullets and the mortar but that does not make a nation,” Duterte told military personnel Friday.
“My job is to bring peace,” he added, stressing that if he succeeds, “I can retire happy and I can look back and say I did my duty in nation-building.”
