Callamard

It’s 2018 but UN Rapporteur Agnes Callamard has not gotten over her cantankerous attitude against Pres. Rodrigo Duterte and her notion that drugs, crime and terrorism are not that bad in the Philippines and therefore an all-out war against these evils is unnecessary and, in her judgment, a crime.
   
She went into sepulchral silence when Pres. Donald Trump declared the menace of drugs in the US of A a national emergency which prompted him to declare an all-out war against illegal drugs. That 64,000 Americans of all ages, to include infants, die annually in the land of Uncle Sam should shock this rapporteur and her sidekick, someone she introduced as Dr. Carl Hart whom she had towed with her when she surreptitiously came to the Philippines to talk about drugs and EJK before a cabal of anti-Duterte lawyers in the UP campus.

Hart, whom Callamard paraded as a specialist, casually dismissed the danger of shabu which he claimed does not cause brain damage and that it does not lead a user to violence. The victims in the US are mostly users of non-synthetic drugs and yet 175 addicts die on a daily basis.
     
Callamard has suddenly resurrected. This time she blabbers around with two alleged Filipino rapporteurs she identified as Victoria Corpuz and Cecilia Damary. The duo were identified by Callamard as human rights rapporteurs.
    
Suddenly rapporteurs have become a dime a dozen. They emerged following the announcement of President Duterte declaring the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed elements, the New People's Army, as terrorists. Coming close to the heels of that announcement, the President extended martial law in Mindanao. The "rapporteur" labels will not cow Duterte anymore and neither will it save or shield drug lords, drug pushers nor terrorists from the long arms of the law.

With these twin measures, expect a decisive military and police campaign against the NPAs and human rights non-government organizations who had been using the lumads for some economic agenda. With the refurbishing of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the men in uniform are eager to go to war with terrorist groups. Again Agnes Callamard should know that the US and the European Union had long declared the CPP/NPA as terror organizations. She should credit her pet peeve for bending too far back to win the CPP/NPA/NDF to the folds of the law by giving them vital positions in the government. But there was no end to the demand. In fact what they wanted was to divide the Philippine territory like a piece of cake, a matter which Duterte rejected outright.

This is about the Philippines and Duterte against threats of terrorists. The US and the EU have a different language and courses of actions which are characteristic of their primal hubris. Callamard has an overdose of that. They deal with threats and perceived enemies dIfferently and classic examples of this are exemplified  in the way they dealt with Iraq and Libya. Pres. George W. Bush simply declared that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction while Libya, which had long been under Khadaffy's one-man rule, was faulted with human rights violations and violence. Then followed the  carpet bombings with no regard for the lives of the innocent. These countries never recovered from the shambles and the canards. Yes it's all about alleged human rights abuses as defined by the West, the mass slaughter that according to the West does not fall under that definition. Callamard and her ilk are forward agents of dubious and diabolical propaganda, and sadly we have compatriots who succumb to the lure and the machinations that she peddles.

The United Nations should have sanctioned or dismissed Agnes Callamard outright for acting like she is her own UNCHR institution within an institution. She rejects formal invitations from a sovereign leader to discuss issues about human rights violations but surreptitiously sneaked into the country only to listen to an anti-Duterte cabal who hated the man for making their life miserable. When one considers this braggadocio and manic interference on how the President addresses crime syndicates and threats of terrorism as a slap in the face and not just a tender rap on the knuckles, it could just be the right thing to do to bring a disdainful intruder to her or his senses.