Locsin meeting with German envoy to explain ‘Hitler’ remarks

Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. (Photo by BEN STANSALL / AFP)

Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. on Friday said he was ready to explain himself regarding the remarks he made on German television defending President Duterte’s comparison of his deadly war on drugs to Adolf Hitler’s extermination of the Jews in World War II.

“[The Philippine Embassy in] Berlin is handling it. I already told them to tell the German foreign ministry to send the German ambassador to me because I’d rather finish my own fights than have others do it,” Locsin said on Twitter.

He was replying to a post by StopCorruptionPhils seeking his reaction to another post by a German journalist saying that the Philippine charge d’affaires in Berlin had been summoned by the German foreign ministry over Locsin’s “totally unacceptable” remarks.

Exterminating addicts

Arnd Henze, a correspondent of ARD-Hauptstadtstudio, said he had an interview with Locsin wherein the secretary “embraced” Mr. Duterte’s statement about the Nazi leader

In September 2016, in an arrival speech at Davao International Airport after an official visit to Vietnam, Mr. Duterte said: “There are 3 million drug addicts [in the Philippines]. I’d be happy to slaughter them.”

“If Germany had Hitler, the Philippines would have …” he said, pointing to himself.

Amid the outrage that followed, including protests from the United Nations, the World Jewish Congress and human rights groups, Mr. Duterte apologized and visited a synagogue in Makati City to personally tell the local Jewish community that the comparison he made was “terribly wrong.”

Henze also posted screenshots of Locsin’s earlier tweets, which the German journalist found to be “extremely offensive comments” that referred to the Shoah, or Jewish Holocaust.

Biased representation

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said it viewed “as unfortunate the biased representation by Mr. Arnd Henze … of his interview with [Locsin] at the sidelines of the opening ceremony of the new building of the Philippine Embassy in Berlin.”

“The video posted by Mr. Henze on his blog is incomplete and misleading. It failed to show Mr. Henze’s deliberate attempts to provoke Secretary Locsin into giving controversial remarks,” the DFA said.

A clip of Henze’s interview with Locsin showed the secretary replying to a question cut out of the video: “No, I won’t. It’s how he expressed himself.”

“I said the same thing. I myself said the same thing before he even said it,” Locsin said.

On the Hitler comparison, Locsin said “he (Duterte) just mentioned it.”

He insisted that despite what the President had said, “[Hitler] is not a role model” for Mr. Duterte’s antinarcotics policy.