Filipino priest exposes ex-Philippine president Duterte's war on drugs with travelling museum

With barely two weeks before former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte's confirmation of charges at the International Criminal Court (ICC), a Filipino priest is visiting schools and offices with a mobile museum dedicated to exposing the "atrocities of Duterte's so-called war on drugs".

- Raymund Villanueva

Fr Flaviano Villanueva, himself a reformed drug dependent, founded last year 'Lakbay Museo ng Paghilom' (Travelling Museum for Healing), dedicated to the memories of those killed under the Duterte regime. The museum exhibits artefacts, images and narratives by families of extrajudicial killings during the Duterte presidency.

The exhibit shares the loss, realities and resistance against the nationwide operation that killed tens of thousands of Filipinos that Duterte admitted to having ordered as centrepiece of his government's so called 'peace and order programme'.

An item in the exhibit includes a bloodied shirt of three-year-old Myca Ulpina, killed when the police raided their home on suspicion that a family member was a drug dependent. "To remember the victims by name, by story, by the fullness of their humanity-is to declare that the victims were not statistics, not collateral damage, not disposable," Fr Villanueva said.

'Truth over lies'