Yearbook 2011
Philippines. The trial continued during the year against nearly 200 defendants for the 2009 massacre which claimed 57 lives. Visit ABBREVIATIONFINDER for the acronym of PHL that stands for the country of Philippines.
The Court froze millions of assets for the family designated as the main culprit for the brutal murders of journalists and supporters of a governor’s candidate.
The candidate, who later became governor, survived an explosive attack in August that claimed another man’s life.
Sales of electronics, the most important export sector, fell for the first time in two years due to weak world economy. Slow economic growth prompted President Benigno Aquino to launch a $ 2 billion stimulus package, including infrastructure and poverty reduction.
A report showed that the Philippines had 350,000 call center employees, which was more than India. One advantage was assumed that the Filipinos readily adapt their English pronunciation to suit the telecommunications service market in the United States.
According to Countryaah official site, the Senate got a new member in August, after the votes from the 2007 Senate election were recalculated. The recalculation came when the former winner resigned because of growing corruption charges against him and other supporters of former president Gloria Arroyo. The opposing candidate, who has constantly claimed that cheating occurred, turned out to have won the election. He announced that a reform of the electoral law was on his program during the two years remaining in the term of office. President Arroyo was arrested in November, on suspicion of electoral fraud in connection with the 2007 Senate elections.
When President Aquino met Murad Ebrahim, the leader of the Muslim separatist group MILF, in August, it was the first time a president met the guerrilla leader face to face. Aquino went to election with promises to try to make peace with various guerrilla groups. The MILF has been fighting for independence in the southern Philippines for over 30 years, and over 120,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the violence. In spite of the ongoing peace talks, new violence sprang up on the island of Mindanao in the fall. After more than 20 soldiers were killed, the military deployed bombers and cannon boats in the first major attack in three years. But according to the military, it was an outbreak group, without the support of the guerrilla leadership.
In December, Mindanao was hit hard by a typhoon that caused major injuries. Over 1,000 people were killed and tens of thousands became homeless.
2016 War on Drugs. Tens of thousands are murdered by Duterte’s security forces
The May 2016 presidential election was won by Rodrigo Duterte of PDP-Laban with 39.0% of the vote. The second most votes were Mar Roxas with 23.5%. Duterte was particularly supported in Mindanao and in the capital Manila. For almost the entire period 1988-2016, he was the mayor of Davao, fighting “crime” by consistently executing “criminals”. In 1998-2016 alone, 1,400 people were executed by death patrols attached to the mayor. Most of them drug addicts and drug dealers. Duterte even boasted that in 1988, as mayor, he had killed 3 kidnappers taken by police control. The mass executions did not make Davao a safe city. In 2010-15, it was the city in the Philippines where the most murders and the second most rapes took place. At the same time, Duterte made the city the country’s most important child prostitution and sex tourism,
Duterte’s landslide victory in the presidential election was mainly due to his promise to transfer the methods from Davao to the entire country. After the election victory, security forces allowed free hands to murder. The number of murders committed by security forces rose to 7,000 in January 2017, after which authorities no longer published statistics. Most were innocent, petty criminals or drug addicts. The huge number of executions led to significant criticism from the UN, causing Duterte to threaten to withdraw the Philippines from the UN and instead form a new “world organization” with the Philippines as the focal point. Even the Philippines’ traditional ally began to criticize the regime and its mass executions. But good relations were restored after Donald Trump was inaugurated as US President in January 2017. During a telephone conversation between the two heads of state in April 2017, Trump congratulated Duterte for “doing a fantastic job on the drug problem”. (Transcript of telephone conversation between Duterte and Trump 29/4 2017). The two heads of state planned to meet during Trump’s November 2017 visit to Asia.
In August 2016, Duterte approved that former dictator Ferdinand Marcos be buried at the Heroes Cemetery in Taguig. The decision triggered a storm of protests by Filipinos who were victims of the dictator’s regime.
In September, the militant group Daulat Ul-Islamiya fired a bomb at a Davao market that killed 14 and wounded 70. Duterte subsequently signed a decree granting military and police free rein on Mindanao. Then the fighting escalated quickly. In March-October 2017, the city of Marawi in Lanao del Sur was on Mindanao war zone for clashes between the military on the one hand and the IS affiliated militant groups of Maute and Abu Sayef. Duterte put all of Mindanao in emergency mode. The fighting cost nearly 1,000 Islamists, 165 soldiers and 87 civilians. About 1.1 million of the city’s inhabitants were driven to flight. The fighting first ebbed when militant leaders Omar Maute and Isnilon Hapilon were killed in October. Both the United States Air Force, Army and Special Forces were involved in the fighting.