In leaked transcript, Trump and Duterte also discuss whether North Korea’s leader is ‘stable.’
President Trump, in a recent phone call, congratulated Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte for a “great job” in his crackdown on drugs, which human rights groups and the United Nations have condemned as a vigilante-style campaign that has left thousands of suspected drug dealers and users dead.
The exchange is found in a leaked transcript of a April 29 conversation between the two leaders published by The Washington Post and reported on by The New York Times .
“I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem, ” Trump says, according to the transcript . “Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.”
Duterte, who has boasted about personally shooting and killing at least three crime suspects, replies, “Thank you, Mr. President, this is the scourge of my nation now and I have to do something to preserve the Filipino nation.”
Trump then responds with an apparent swipe at former President Obama, who canceled a meeting with Duterte in September after the Filipino leader referred to him as a “son of a whore” for criticizing him over human rights abuses.
“I understand that and fully understand that and I think we had a previous president who did not understand that, but I understand that and we have spoken about this before, ” Trump says.
The Philippines Star reports that the American office of the Philippines’ department of foreign affairs made the transcript and initially warned recipients not to disclose its contents. But the document — marked “very urgent and confidential” — began circulating Wednesday.
A senior Trump administration official acknowledged to the Post that the transcript is accurate but declined to speak on the record about “a leaked document from a foreign government.”
Duterte took office June 30. By January 20, his war on drugs had resulted in the deaths of over 7,000 suspected drug dealers and users, according to human rights groups.
Investigations by the media and rights groups have found that many were killed by police or police agents acting as “death squads.” Human Rights Watch charges that Duterte has given his police a “license to kill.”
In December, the U. N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ ad Al Hussein condemned Duterte’s “dead or alive” policy, saying, “Children as young as 5 years old have been the innocent victims of this appalling epidemic of extra-judicial killings.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and two Democratic senators — Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Chris Coons of Delaware — said in a letter to the U. S. State Department last year that the anti-drug push in the Philippines “appears to be a campaign of mass atrocities thinly disguised as a response to a public health emergency, ” the Times reported.
Duterte has repeatedly shrugged off such criticism, saying, “For as long as there are drug lords, this campaign will go on until the last day of my term and until all of them are killed.”
In the phone conversation, Trump also sought Duterte’s opinion of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and told him the U. S. had two nuclear submarines “over there.”
Regarding the young North Korea leader, Trump asks Duterte, “Are we dealing with someone who stable or not stable?”
Duterte replies that “he is not stable, ” yet has “a dangerous toy in his hands which could create so much agony and suffering for all mankind.”
Trump notes that Kim does not have a delivery system and that “all his rockets are crashing.”.
Later, Trump notes that the U. S. also has a lot of power in the area. “We have a lot of firepower over there. We have two submarines — the best in the world — we have two nuclear submarines — not that we want to use them at all.”
“I’ve never seen anything like they are, ” Trump continues, “but we don’t have to use this but he could be crazy so we will see what happens.”
