Sarah Celiz wept as she sat at home watching footage from Manila’s main airport on her phone. They were tears of sadness, and of relief.
The former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, who had just landed in the capital, was surrounded by officials and being taken into custody. The international criminal court had issued an arrest warrant over his bloody “war on drugs”, in which her two sons were among the tens of thousands of people killed in deprived urban areas.
A man who for years had seemed untouchable was finally facing justice. “I was really shocked. It was as if a bomb had suddenly exploded,” Celiz said. “I cried because of so much joy and sadness. Sadness because we lost our loved ones … joy because he [Duterte] is now where he belongs.”
But, she added: “For me, it’s not enough. What I want is for what happened to my sons to happen to him as well … His family will feel what we felt.”
Celiz’s sons Almon and Dicklie were killed in 2017, six months apart, during Duterte’s deadly crackdowns. Her area, Bagong Silang, in Caloocan, a poor district of Metro Manila, was one of the worst affected.
Almon, 32, a father of five, was killed on 6 February that year when a police taskforce arrived at a wake he was attending.
Celiz was at home when she heard the news from her daughter-in-law. She recalls racing outside: “I felt like I was running on air, like my feet weren’t touching the ground.”
She rushed to the spot where her son had been shot, just 10 minutes from their home, but his body was no longer there – friends had taken him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He had been shot in his chest and an arm.
Between 12,000 and 30,000 civilians are estimated to have been killed in connection with anti-drugs operations, between July 2016 – when Duterte took office – and March 2019, according to data cited by the ICC. Most were young men, targeted in the streets of deprived urban areas.
At the height of the killings, dozens of people were killed in a single night.
Six months after Almon’s killing, Dicklie, his 31-year-old younger brother, a father of seven, was also killed. He had been out on a tricycle. Celiz was told a bag was placed over his head and he was taken to a police station. She found his body only the following day, at a funeral parlour.
The police said he had fought back against their officer, a claim frequently made by authorities to justify the killings. He had been shot multiple times, including four times in the chest, and once in his head. His body was abandoned in the streets, she was told.
Duterte and his supporters have argued that allegations of wrongdoing should be dealt with by the Philippine justice system. Yet in the years that have passed since Celiz’s sons were killed, there has never been any investigation. She says police at a local station told her that even if she tried to file a complaint, there was no evidence.
Today, Celiz cares for her 12 fatherless grandchildren. “Even though it is hard, I told them the truth [about what happened],” she said. The family struggles financially, she added. Her granddaughter cried recently because she could not afford to buy a special robe to mark her high school graduation.
“If their fathers hadn’t been killed, they wouldn’t have lost their parent. Now, I can’t do anything [to financially support them],” she said.
Duterte, who appeared before a senate inquiry into the drugs war killings in 2024, said he offered “no apologies, no excuses” for his drugs crackdown, saying: “I did what I had to do, and whether you believe it or not, I did it for my country.”
Celiz feels only relief that he will finally face the courts. At 11.03pm a plane carrying the former president set off for The Hague, in the Netherlands, the home of the ICC. “I am sorry to say this,” she adds: “That demon doesn’t know how to say sorry.”
