A scheduled meeting of U.S. President Barack Obama with the president of the Philippines at the sidelines of the ASEAN summit on Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016, has been cancelled after President Rodrigo Duterte appeared to call Obama a “son of a whore”.
The U.S. State Department move followed a warning from Duterte to the US president to keep off the subject of extrajudicial killings in his country’s brutal drug war when they were due to meet on Tuesday at a regional summit in Laos. Duterte told a press conference that Obama “must be respectful”.
“You must be respectful,” Duterte said of Obama. “Do not just throw questions.” Using the Tagalog phrase for “son of a b**tch,” he said, “Putang ina I will swear at you in that forum.” He made the comment to reporters in Manilla
President Duterte was answering a question from an international news agency (Reuters) about how he intended to explain the extrajudicial killings to Obama, before getting onto a plane to Laos for the Association of South-east Asian Nations summit.
It’s not normal for one president to tell another what to say or not say, and much rarer to call the other a “son of a b**tch.” Duterte managed to do both just before travelling to Laos for a regional summit, cautioning Obama not to test him over extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.
Early Tuesday, spokesman Ned Price of the National Security Council (NSC) said the meeting with Duterte was off. Since it will not be productive if it pushes through.
President Obama will not be holding a bilateral meeting with President Duterte of the Philippines this afternoon,” National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.
“Instead, he will meet with President Park (Geun-Hye) of the Republic of Korea.”
Duterte has been under extreme worldwide scrutiny over the more than 2,000 suspected drug dealers and users killed since he took office. Obama had said he wanted to bring the issue up in his first meeting with President Duterte, however, the Philippine leader demanded he was just listening to his own country’s the Filipino people. -JCE.
