When spurned, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte can shower his tormentors with the choicest expletives -- be it the US president, the Catholic Pope or the UN leaders. In the latest free-wheeling expletive laden attack, he called a UN official son of a bitch.
"You do not talk to me like that, you son of a bitch," the foul-mouthed president threatend UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein. The trash talk came after the UN rights chief asked for an investigation into the president's extra judicial killings.
Duterte said the rights chief was an idiot and a joker who has gone crazy. The UN official has no brains and does not know how to behave the president added, following the calls for an investigation into the killing of drug suspects in their thousands in the Philippines since Duterte came to power.
Extra judicial killing of drug suspects was a campaign theme and Duterte had never shied away from pushing the harshest punishment for the drug mules. However, his open admission that he personally killed drug suspects when he was the mayor of the southern Davao city rankled nerves abroad as well, triggering the comments from the UN rights chief.
And Duterte merely responds in his own inimitable style -- that he will simply burn down the United Nations. "You U.N. officials, sitting there on your asses, we pay you your salaries. You idiot, do not tell me what to do ... Who gave you the right," the president said.
Apart from claiming that he killed criminals and drug suspects in his night patrols as the mayor he claimed last week that he shot dead three men involved in a kidnapping case in the 1980s.
Rampant killing of drug suspects by the police and vigilante groups have claimed nearly 6000 lives ever since Duterte came to power in May this year and many of them are thought to be innocent civilians.
