NEVER before has the Philippines’ image been so badly yet falsely tarnished as in the case maliciously filed by the opposition gang at the International Criminal Court (ICC) against President Duterte and 11 other government officials for alleged “mass murder.”

While impossible to be given course by the ICC, the suit has in effect put the country in the league of African countries with failed states, where tribe-based armed groups committed horrific atrocities against other tribal groups.

Children as young as 11 were recruited from their homes and schools to take part in brutal ethnic fighting in 2002-2003. They were taken to military training camps and beaten and drugged. Girls were used as sex slaves.
Another Congolese warlord, Jeane-Pierre Bamba was convicted of ordering his private army into the Central African Republic, where it undertook widespread pillage, rapes and murders.

Sabio with his handler Trillanes 4th, who’ve likened us to war-torn central African countries.

Congolese rebel leader Germaine Katanga led an attack on the village in which rebels under his command went on an indiscriminate killing spree, imprisoning survivors in a room filled with corpses, and raping women and girls. Katanga also led the massacre of more than 1,200 civilians in an attack at Nyakunde Hospital in September 2002.

All of the 32 people so indicted by the ICC were all from sub-Saharan Africa—the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda, Central African Republic, Mali, and Cote d’Ivoire, countries wracked by civil wars that had tribes fighting against each other to capture the state, and committing mass killings and rapes.

C’mon now. Not by any kind of exaggeration or imagination could the killings that have happened in Duterte’s war against drugs be compared to the horrific massacres and pillage that occurred in this godforsaken part of Africa that is really barely emerging from the Stone Age. And to think that Sabio’s complaint is entirely based on media reports, primarily from the website Rappler.

The gang which filed the ICC case isn’t just tarnishing Duterte’s image. It has blackened our country’s reputation, putting us on the league of the least-civilized and most violent nations on earth.

The ICC is not just a “criminal court” with global jurisdiction. It was set up in 2002 specifically, to quote its so-called Rome Statute, to try only the “most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole: “the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity; war crimes; and the crime of aggression.”

It would take only somebody with a depraved mind or one intent on using all propaganda schemes to blacken Duterte’s image to allege that he has committed mass murders that would rise to the scale of being crimes against humanity.

Congress must investigate this crime against the country and expose to the public who really are responsible for it.

While it was this mediocre lawyer Jude Sabio who filed the case, obviously behind this plot is Antonio Trillanes 4th, whose office even released the photo of his minion posing beside the ICC signboard holding a copy of his ridiculous complaint.

However, I don’t think Trillanes 4th has the brains for such a plot nor the willingness to spend his own money for such a costly move. It could only be the Yellows and the Liberal Party behind Trillanes, who after all have demonstrated their propaganda expertise by getting much of Western media to believe their lie that there have been thousands of extra-judicial killings in our country since Duterte assumed power.

Could Aquino’s former foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, when he was in The Hague for the case against China in the arbitral court there, have seen the ICC offices there, and during Duterte’s administration remembered it, to suggest to his Yellow gang the filing of the case?

I am confident though that the former publisher of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Raul Pangalangan who was nominated in 2015 by President Aquino to the ICC as judge isn’t part of this plot.

This ICC case shows that this rabidly anti-Duterte gang, Trillanes and the Liberal Party, are so willing to taint the entire country’s image in its attempt to bring down this government. They have to be scolded that the nation’s welfare should be above partisan politics.

Or in Dutertespeak, Trillanes and Sabio together with their Yellow co-conspirators should be arrested and brought to the Rizal Park (Luneta), and there shot by firing squad for their treasonous act against the country.