The situation of human rights in the Philippines has been significantly deteriorating ever since Rodrigo Duterte assumed the presidency in 2016 and launched his campaign against drugs. Encouraged by speeches and the mandate from the president, policemen and vigilantes conduct buy-bust operations in the night, targeting people in their house unawares, based on a “drug watchlist” that local authorities have made. This operation known as Operation Double Barrel or known locally as Oplan Tokhang,[1] has targeted mostly suspected small-time drug dependents and drug pushers, killing thousands in urban poor communities extrajudicially. In fact, in one of the major newspapers in the country’s “‘kill list’ of victims of extrajudicial killings in the anti-drug campaign shows [that the] overwhelming majority are from poor neighborhoods and of modest means, suggesting the war on drugs is actually a war against the poor.”[2] Victims killed in these operations are left out on the streets with cardboard signs on them branding them as “drug pushers who shouldn’t be emulated.”[3]
In the wake of the thousands of killings, urban poor communities have been affected the worst. A study done by the Ateneo School of Government argues that
One of the hidden costs of the so-called ‘war on drugs’ is the toll that it has taken on poor families who have lost loved ones to the drug killings. Many of them are traumatized by having witnessed the violence done to their kin and have no means of providing for their most basic needs, as in many cases those targeted by the police are their family’s breadwinners.[4]
Communities and families who are left behind bear the brunt of the consequences of the violent anti-drug campaign. While studies have shown that drug use and selling have not really gone down, the results of the campaign show the communal trauma that is now being felt by those left behind, the economic burden of families (especially the women) whose male breadwinners were killed, and the destruction of the social fabric of the communities at the grassroots.
I argue that the Filipino concept of pakikipagkapwa can contribute to a more robust framework that can help heal communities in the wake of extrajudicial killings, laying the grounds for restorative justice in the future. Looking at the practices of basic ecclesial communities and community drug rehabilitation programs, pakikipagkapwa lies at the core of their practices and promotes a more relational conception of healing. Human rights are seen not as ends in themselves but more under the broader goal of right and good relations in the community for which it serves. Healing in this context can be facilitated by structures and cultures that can promote good relationships and restore the sense of pakikipagkapwa in communities fractured by violence.
As the extrajudicial killings destroy the social fabric of communities, I suggest a reimagining of healing and later on a restorative justice framework that offers a more relational conception of justice: “not simply concerned with responding to wrongs but rather with the harm and effects of wrongs on relationships at all levels… the focus of justice so conceived is on what is required to address these harms in order to establish and maintain peaceful relationships.”[5] This framework challenges individualistic notions of justice as it focuses on rebuilding and sustaining relationships in the community moving forward, it is not focused on merely correcting wrongs. This framework is deeply contextual; as a critical restorative justice frame, it takes into account the epistemologies of the south, centering “the alternative beliefs and values of Indigenous societies, which are often dismissed as ‘folklore’ by non-Indigenous structures.”[6] Next steps would include a discussion of what constitutes good relationships and how communities can foster this when they have been harmed.
This discussion is based on how Filipinos understand the value of kapwa today and how it can be further contextualized in light of the situation. As restorative justice approaches are seen as contextual, communal healing must also be seen contextually based on the shared values that the people have that can bring them forward to discerning practices and responses to foster good relationships and community. The destruction of the social fabric brought about by extrajudicial killings are also a destruction of the core Filipino value of pakikipagkapwa. The word kapwa is a Filipino indigenous concept that is at the core of Sikolohiyang Pilipino(Filipino Liberation Psychology) and is the “unity of the ‘self’ and ‘others’… a shared recognition of shared identity, an inner self shared with others.”[7] In contrast to the implications of the cognate in English, “others” that separates in opposition to the “self,” kapwa is a relational term: “the person starts having kapwa not so much because of a recognition of status given him by others but more because of his awareness of shared identity.”[8] Katrin de Guia argues that “The core of Filipino personhood is kapwa. This notion of a ‘shared Self’ extends the I to include the Other. It bridges the deepest individual recess of a person with anyone outside him or herself, even total strangers.”[9]
A retrieval of kapwa and its relationship to loob lies at the core of the path moving forward. Loob is the Filipino concept of identity and personhood. Literally translated as “interior” or “inside,” loob refers to a deep interiority within a person that constitutes one’s identity but at the same time allows the person to be in relationship with other people and the world. The theologian and social scientist Albert Alejo has described loob as “a source of strength and impulse to become human and be free” and a “choice to answer to the other.”[10] For Alejo, the loob is not a self that is in isolation and opposition to the other but a self that is deeply relational. Instead of being merely tuck away in the deepest corners of the person’s self, loob is seen as a world of relationships located in the “realm of action,”[11] especially in acts of solidarity. Even the most secret and private part of loob is located within the context of community and relationships.[12] “This is where the loob is revealed as kapwa (my fellow human being),” Alejo says, “In being conscious of the deep unity among all men [sic.] in the field of loob – the possibility of a creative transformation of the world lies here.”[13]
At the heart of the matter, the anti-drug campaign isn’t only a violation of the Filipino concept of pakikipagkapwa (in straining and paralyzing relationships within the community), but also a violation of loob (a violation against the person’s very self, freedom, and personhood). There is an expression in Filipino, “hindi buo ang loob ko [my loob isn’t whole]” that describes a situation in which a person feels that there is something wrong with a particular situation. The loob, since it is relational, can only be healed in the context of community and good relationships. That is the basis for both the basic ecclesial communities’ activities and the community-based drug rehabilitation programs that have been set up in the places most affected.
Imagining a way forward, the Filipino concept of kapwa offers a more robust response to the extrajudicial killings that has strained communities. Healing of persons and communities takes the relational notion of kapwa as basis for the good relationship that is being restored and the communal healing that is being done in the communities. This in turn can become the basis for people to join in their shared struggle as they rebuild communities in the wake of the war on the poor and to respond to the violence that is being done to women and children. More concretely, the challenge of healing and restorative justice now is to critically examine the structures, institutions, and cultures that promote pakikipagkapwa – the basic ecclesial communities in this paper are seen as primary actors that can promote this form of relationships in the members’ lives together in the context of their shared faith.
—
The Tagalog word kapwa is a relational term that refers to shared identity. Pakikipagkapwa, which is also used in this paper, refers to the act of being kapwa to one another, of relating to one another.
[1] The word tokhang comes from two Visayan words – toktok which means knock and hangyo which means plead, describing how officers would go from door to door to knock on the doors of suspected drug users and plead with them to admit their offense and suffer the consequences.
[2] Mark Thomson, “Duterte’s bloody democracy,” Nikkei Asia (29 August 2016), https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Mark-R.-Thompson-Duterte-s-bloody-democracy, cf. Inquirer.net, “The Kill List,” Philippine Daily Inquirer (7 July 2016), https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/794598/kill-list-drugs-duterte.
[3] Rachel Reyes, “Looking at images of Duterte’s drug war,” The Manila Times (5 June 2018), https://www.manilatimes.net/2018/06/05/opinion/analysis/looking-at-images-of-dutertes-drug-war/404564/.
[4] Ateneo Policy Center, The Philippine Government’s Anti-Drug Campaign: Emerging Evidence and Data (Quezon City: Ateneo School of Government, 2018), 8.
[5] Jennifer Llewellyn and Daniel Philpott, Restorative Justice, Reconciliation, and Peacebuilding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.
[6] Harry Blagg, “Doing Restorative Justice ‘Otherwise’” in Critical Restorative Justice (Portland: Hart
Publishing, 2017), 65.
[7] Virgilio Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology: the Philippine Experience (Diliman: University of the Philippines Press, 2016), 52.
[8] Enriquez, 54
[9] Katrin de Guia, Kapwa: The Self in the Other (Pasig: Anvil Publishing, 2005), 28.
[10] Albert Alejo, “Loob as Relational Interiority,” Social Transformations 6/1 (May 2018): 34.
[11] Alejo, 34
[12] Ibid., 39.
[13] Ibid., 42.