Yesterday, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte threatened to call President Barack Obama a “son of a whore” for mentioning his nation’s war with drug dealers.
The Filipino president has been criticized by western nations for an estimated 2,000 extrajudicial killings since taking office this year.
Subsequently, Obama cancelled a joint meeting in Vientiane, Laos following his statements.
Today, Duterte’s spokesman Ernesto Abella apologized for the president’s defamatory statements.
“… The immediate cause was my strong comments to certain press questions that elicited concern and distress. We also regret it came across as a personal attack on the U.S. president,” Abella states. “Our primary intention is to chart an independent foreign policy while promoting closer ties with all nations. Especially the U.S., with which we had had a longstanding partnership.”
In late August, Duterte told media that the United Nations and the U.S. should be concerned with the killing of Black people, not his war on drugs.
