The deaths of the four Alia brothers will never be heard at the International Criminal Court. The ICC case against former president Rodrigo Duterte is limited to killings committed from November 1, 2011, to March 16, 2019, the period when the Philippines was still a party to the Rome Statute, Rappler reported. The last of the four brothers died in 2007.
Their mother, Clarita Alia, will instead take her account on Friday to the third public session of the Drug War Truth Commission. The 72-year-old sells vegetables in Davao City and outlived all four of her teenage sons.
She traces the killings to a confrontation in July 2001. According to a 2009 Human Rights Watch report, police from the San Pedro station came to arrest her son Richard without a warrant, and she pushed back. She told the group that an officer then warned her to “watch out because your sons will be killed, one by one!”
Richard was 18 when he was killed on July 17, 2001. About three months later, 16-year-old Christopher was dead. Bobby, 14, died on November 3, 2002, and Fernando, 15, died on April 13, 2007. None of the killers were ever identified.
The Human Rights Watch report added details the family has carried for years. All four brothers were stabbed. Bobby died in the same Bankerohan market where Christopher was attacked, two days after his mother got him released from police custody following his arrest over an allegedly stolen cellphone. Witnesses said they could name his attacker, a local hitman reportedly close to the police, but Clarita kept that from investigators because she believed police already knew who was killing her children. After Christopher’s death, she filed a complaint with the Commission on Human Rights but never learned of any action on it.
Human Rights Watch said the cases have never reached a courtroom after two decades, and the “killers remain free.”
The commission, which argues that the Davao killings became the model for the nationwide drug war Duterte launched after taking office in 2016, is a civil society-led body that began operating in May. Forensic pathologist Raquel Fortun, one of its members, has said it has no power to prosecute but is willing to share its findings with the government and the ICC. Official figures put the drug war death toll at around 6,000, while rights groups estimate it at 20,000 to 30,000.
Commission head Raul Pangalangan, a former ICC judge, said the sessions are meant to give a voice to victims left out of the Hague proceedings, because “the struggle for justice, accountability, healing, and closure does not end in The Hague.”
Clarita has not always testified publicly. She was invited to the House quad committee hearings on extrajudicial killings but did not attend because of fears for her safety, according to Rappler.
She acknowledges that her sons had encounters with the police. Her position is that, as suspects, they should have been arrested and not killed.
