An Example Of Extrajudicial Violence In The Rwandan Genocide

History is littered with examples of what happens when there is little to no legal system set up, or when the system is weak. In attempts to keep the peace, government forces act well beyond their mandate, and take the law into their own hands. They execute anyone suspected of illegal activity without due process, even if the accused has done nothing wrong. It is a barbaric practice that belongs in the past, and yet it continues to this day. There is no clearer example than the Philippines and President Duterte’s War on Drugs. Squeezing into office by the skin of his teeth, he vowed to clean up the country and fix the drug problem. What has followed is a brutal campaign that has left over 3,000 dead in the first hundred days of his term (Amnesty …show more content…
The Rwandan Genocide was an example of extrajudicial killing on a mass scale. Violence has long been used as a solution to problems within the Philippines, going back to colonial times. After Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, the killings in the Philippines increased. With the country descending into lawless chaos, both the rebels and government forces resorted to barbaric tactics, with the NPA “known to have used death squads known as ‘Sparrow Units’ in the mid-80s to purge its ranks of government spies and to steal armaments” (Perreño 2011). When Marcos was ousted as president, the killings and the violence across the country slowed. Piece was made with some of the rebel groups that occupy the southern part of the country. However, there has been a recent upswing in the number of killings since the early 2000s. In 2006, Reporters Without Borders ranked the Philippines 142nd on the World Press Freedom Index, citing “continuing murders of journalists and increased legal harassment” (RSF 2006). In the efforts to crack down and terminate the rebel and communist groups once and for all, the Filipino armed forces began to suppress not just their adversaries, but also the press. As rebels became harder to draw into open conflict, the nature of the engagement changed, and there was a return to the methods the existed under Marcos. “Agreement is widespread that most killings can be attributed to the government in general, and to the AFP in particular. Instead of an unrelated series of murders carried out by criminals, the killings ‘constitute a pattern of politically targeted extrajudicial executions’…” (Holden 2012). A comprehensive study of extrajudicial killings carried out between 2001 and 2010 found that “most of the suspects are still identified (57% of 837) …19% of those identified are members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines…”, and