The Times Companion to 2017

by Ian Brunskill

  CHILDREN KILLED IN DUTERTE’S DRUG WAR

  Richard Lloyd Parry, Manila

  DECEMBER 17 2016

  FRANCIS WAS AN irrepressible little boy, a laughing, jiggling joker who was always the first to wake up in the tiny room he shared with his family. His mother, Elizabeth Mañosca, made him sleep next to the door so that he could bounce out in the morning, leaving his parents undisturbed. She never imagined that she was placing him in the line of fire of the deadly struggle convulsing the Philippines.

  It happened last Sunday, when Elizabeth was deep asleep. She became dimly conscious of a knock on the door in the night and of her husband’s raised voice. Then two shots rang out. Jolted awake, she confronted an unimaginable scene. There were two bullet holes in the flimsy plywood wall next to which Francis slept; her husband and son were dying.

  “I was in shock,” says Elizabeth, who is nine months pregnant and nursing a one-year-old girl. “Even though he was on the floor, I was shaking my husband and saying, ‘Go after them! They got our boy.’”

  Today father and son lie side by side in open coffins in the Barangay Santo slum of Manila. The hole in six-year-old Francis’s forehead is crudely plugged with mortician’s putty. The police showed little interest in identifying the killer but Elizabeth has few doubts about what happened. Her husband Domingo, 44, was a bicycle taxi driver with no obvious enemies. But he was also a user and part-time dealer of crystal methamphetamine, the drug known as shabu, a suicidal occupation in today’s Philippines.

  Since the coming to power of Rodrigo Duterte, the provincial mayor who was decisively elected president in May, more than 6,000 people have been killed across the country in similar bloody scenes. Some were professional dealers; many more, like Domingo Mañosca, were small-scale “drug personalities”, as they are known in the Philippines. But plenty, like Francis, were innocent bystanders.

  About a third of the killings have been carried out by police officers, who invariably report that they fired in self-defence having been shot at first. The rest, like this one, are carried out by vigilantes, widely believed to be acting in co-ordination with the police. They are shot as they sleep, or dumped at roadsides with hands bound and heads swaddled in masking tape, bearing signs of torture. Sometimes the killers leave messages scrawled on cardboard promising a similar fate to other pushers.

  Between Mr Duterte’s inauguration on June 30 and this week, 6,095 killings have been tallied, an average of 37 a day. No criminal charges have yet been brought. The number of deaths already surpasses that in the devastating Typhoon Haiyan, which destroyed the town of Tacloban in 2013, and the 3,000 political activists reckoned to have been killed by the dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, under martial law in the 1970s.

  “We can’t keep up,” says Chito Gascon, head of the Commission for Human Rights (CHR), a constitutionally mandated organisation with 60 investigators working on the extra-judicial killings. “We’re on top of 470 cases but 90 per cent are beyond our capacity.”

  Most remarkable of all, the bloodshed has been carried out on the direct orders of President Duterte, for whom the literal extermination of the drug trade is the fulfilment of his central election promise. Having sometimes denied it in the past, this week he admitted that as mayor of Davao he participated in the work of the city’s death squads, who killed more than 1,000 people under his administration.

  “In Davao I used to do it personally,” he told an audience in the presidential palace on Monday. “Just to show to them [police] that if I can do it, why can’t you? I [would] go around in Davao [on] a big bike, and I would just patrol the streets and [look] for trouble. I was really looking for an encounter to kill.”

  The president claims that drugs are destroying the country. In his state of the union address he claimed that the Philippines had 3.7 million drug addicts. In September he said: “Hitler massacred three million Jews. Now, there are three million drug addicts. I’d be happy to slaughter them.” His figures are undermined by the official statistics. The Dangerous Drugs Board counts only 1.8 million users. Far from being addicts, a third of these have used drugs only once in 13 months; fewer than half of them have ever used shabu.

  Similarly, the government’s claims that 75 per cent of “heinous” crime is drug-related is contradicted by its own statisticians, who put the figure at 15 per cent. But so strong is his determination that Mr Duterte has promised a presidential pardon to any police officer convicted in connection with the “war on drugs”.

  With such a guarantee, the authorities are displaying an almost contemptuous carelessness. A 28-year-old fruit seller named Elfren Morillo, who took a bullet through the chest, survived by pretending to be dead. He reports that he and four friends were shot at close range by police officers who planted drugs and guns on their bodies.

  Harra Kazou, a 26-year-old mother, was told that her partner had been shot along with his father-in-law after he tried to grab an officer’s gun while under arrest inside a police station; the autopsy showed that he had a broken arm and other signs of torture. She is now under the protection of the CHR, which has run out of room to shelter frightened witnesses.

  The officers accused of killing Ms Kazou’s partner are, at least, under formal investigation. But increasingly, human rights campaigners such as Mr Gascon place their hopes for justice in the future, when another president, or the International Criminal Court, may act on evidence being gathered now. “If we fail, it’s going to be a long winter,” he says. “But we amass the evidence for when spring comes — if it ever comes.”

  Polls show that despite his bloody methods, Mr Duterte’s drug war is popular among Filipinos. His overall approval rating is 63 per cent, according to one poll yesterday.

  Anecdotal evidence suggests, not surprisingly, that drug activity on the streets has diminished but whether the problem is being eliminated is unclear. There have been no busts of drug kingpins. Most of those killed are poor men who use them to numb the hardships of poverty. Beyond the tally of victims is an uncountable number of family members and dependants, many of them women and children.

  Elizabeth Mañosca is suddenly widowed, without work or assets, with a one-year-old baby and a new one due any moment. “I am afraid about the future,” she says, “but more than that I am angry about my boy. He was so full of life — he was a lovely child.”

  ZSA ZSA GÁBOR

  Obituary

  DECEMBER 19 2016

  PROVIDED THAT YOU were not married to Zsa Zsa Gábor — and many people were — she could be a lot of fun. Long before reality television she was proof that you could become famous for being famous. She may not have had much talent as an actress, but she did for being a celebrity. One wanted Zsa Zsa Gábor to play Zsa Zsa Gábor, right down to the pink mink and the diamonds and the Hungarian inflections. That, “dahlink”, was the role of a lifetime.

  It was the husbands, all nine of them, for which Gábor was best known. For each she had a pithy quip that disabused anyone who might have thought her motives were not purely mercenary. “I’m a marvellous housekeeper,” she loved to say. “Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.”

  “I never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds,” was another gem. At her Los Angeles home, 1001 Bel Air Road, in a house built by Howard Hughes and owned by Elvis Presley, she kept a cushion embroidered with her favourite epigram: “Never complain, never explain.” Presumably somewhere else there was one with the line about the fool and his money.

  Of course, Gábor did only what most women had had to do down the ages, obtaining security by trading what it was that men liked about her. She grasped what that was from an early age. “Daddy used to hold poker games with his friends,” she told Wendy Leigh, who ghosted her memoir One Lifetime is Not Enough. “He would make me parade around the table and let each of them pat my ass.”

  Her father, Vilmos, was a diamond dealer in Budapest, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where she was born in 1917. The chief influence on her, however, was
her ferociously ambitious mother, Jolie, who lived to be 100. She was determined that her three glamorous daughters, Magda, Sári — as Zsa Zsa was christened — and Eva would make their fortunes. The sisters would rack up 17 divorces between them.

  Zsa Zsa was sent to a Swiss boarding school and made her stage debut in Vienna at 16, supposedly having been discovered by the singer Richard Tauber. She and Eva claimed to have been crowned Miss Hungary, but as Cindy Adams, who wrote Jolie Gábor’s autobiography, cautioned: “There was never any truth to anything.” For example, Jolie and her daughters were Jewish, but ostentatiously wore diamond crosses.

  In about 1937, when she was 20, Zsa Zsa met a 50-year-old Turkish diplomat and intellectual, Burhan Belge. She said that he had joked that he would make her part of his harem if she were a little older. Accordingly, when a few months had passed, she turned up on his doorstep in Ankara with her terrier Mishka, which her father wanted out of the house. The marriage, such as it was, foundered within six months. Gábor claimed that this was because she had had an affair with Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. More plausibly, by then she had a diplomatic passport that, with war looming and the Nazis threatening Jews, allowed her to enter the US. Her sisters and mother joined her.

  By now she had swelled into a chic if bosomy blonde, a Dresden shepherdess with an iron will. When she arrived in Hollywood in 1941, she had only an introduction to Basil Rathbone, the screen’s Sherlock Holmes. Within a few months she was engaged to Conrad Hilton, the multimillionaire founder of the hotel chain. They had a daughter, Francesca, her only child, but the marriage was rocky for the five years that it lasted. “It was a little like holding a roman candle,” Hilton recalled. “Beautiful, exciting, but you were never sure when it would go out.”

  Gábor described their relationship as a fiasco. “He thought that I was after his money,” she protested. She did admit to a fling with her stepson Nicky, who would marry Elizabeth Taylor.

  Next up, in 1949, was George Sanders, suave star of the Saint films and Rebecca. (“I’m madly in love with you,” she said when they first met. “How well I understand you, my dear,” he replied.) In his Memoirs of a Professional Cad, Sanders made light of his five-year marriage to Gábor, but in fact it was disfigured by his violent jealousy.

  This was demonstrated by her flagrant affair with the splendidly endowed playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, who may have been Gábor’s only real love. She said Sanders was once so aggrieved that he dangled her out of a window by her dress; fortunately it was made by Balenciaga so did not fray. The evidence that Sanders did love her was perhaps his later, very brief, marriage to her sister Magda shortly before he committed suicide.

  Zsa Zsa claimed that he was also jealous of her success as an actress, although in truth there was little of that. Her sister Eva did make a career on the screen, for instance as the voice of the Duchess in Disney’s The Aristocats. Apart from starring roles in the Toulouse-Lautrec biopic Moulin Rouge (1952) and Queen of Outer Space (1958), Zsa Zsa was confined to small parts in films including Touch of Evil with Orson Welles. Later there were cameos on television in shows such as Batman, and in the sequel to the film spoof The Naked Gun.

  Her fourth husband was Herbert Hutner, an investment banker. They were engaged in 1962 on their third date, her decision to accept perhaps influenced by the $3 million ring he had sent her after the second (“Daddy told me never to settle for less than ten carats”). Hutner lasted four years, for much of which Gábor was still dallying with Rubirosa, who was killed in 1965 speeding through Paris in his Ferrari. Husband No 5, in 1966, was Joshua Cosden, an oil heir. “I had gone into the marriage not really knowing him,” said Gábor, when she came out the other side, after a year. “I left none the wiser.”

  “I know nothing about sex,” she also said, “because I was always married.” Neither of those claims was true, and she spent the decade until her next wedding entertaining Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton and Sean Connery, among others. These apparently included Richard Nixon. “A great mind. A big brain,” she recalled, hinting that that was not the biggest thing about “Tricky Dicky”.

  In 1975, ensconced in Bel Air with her nine shih tzus — Pasha Effendi, Genghis Khan and Macho Man among them — she married her neighbour, Jack Ryan. The designer of the Ken and Barbie dolls had a penchant for swingers’ parties and was followed in matrimony after a year by the lawyer who handled their divorce, Michael O’Hara. Gábor’s eighth husband, Felipe de Alba, a property developer, lasted only a day after their wedding in international waters in 1983. There was some doubt whether she was still married to O’Hara and, in any event, “he wouldn’t have made a nice pet”.

  Presumably on occasion she was upset by some of these failures. Yet unlike, say, Pamela Harriman, Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, who also made a career of snaring rich men, she was not a thwarted romantic. Nor was self-pity her style, any more than it was Scarlett O’Hara’s. “A girl must marry for love — and keep on marrying until she finds it,” Gábor held. She found her match in 1986 in Frédéric Prinz von Anhalt. Not the name he was born with, Prinz von Anhalt changed his surname after being adopted as an adult by Kaiser Wilhelm’s daughter-in-law. Previously he had run a sauna. Perhaps Gábor fell for the bogus title, or just for someone with as much chutzpah as her. Having hired a Rolls-Royce to convince her he was rich, and then showed his class by giving her champagne to drink, he soon moved into her $10 million mansion.

  His new bride was rising 70 and, as her behaviour became more erratic, she began to need someone to see to her care. In 1989 she was jailed for three days after slapping a policeman who had stopped her for driving with an expired licence. Four years later a jury ordered her to pay Elke Sommer $2 million in libel damages after a long feud in which Gábor alleged that the German star was bankrupt.

  In 2002 Gábor was left partially paralysed when a car driven by her hairdresser crashed. Having to use a wheelchair was said to have depressed her, as did the discovery that her daughter had fraudulently obtained a $2 million loan secured against her house. A lawsuit was dropped at the last moment. Francesca Hilton died in 2015.

  “The secret to a long marriage is infidelity,” Prinz von Anhalt told the Daily Express in 2008, gallantly confiding to its readers that he had enjoyed a ten-year affair with Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy centrefold. Whatever the spark was — he and Gábor liked to watch the film Babe, about a talking pig — they remained married for three decades until her death.

  Her old age was marred by ill health, which stripped from her the last vestiges of glamour. She had several strokes, broke a hip and had to have a leg amputated — because she was paralysed she only discovered this a year later. She was also rumoured to have lost millions in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme.

  By the end, perhaps Zsa Zsa Gábor had accepted that one lifetime was enough for anyone, at least to learn the important things in life. “The only place a man wants depth in a woman,” she concluded, “is in her décolletage.”

  Zsa Zsa Gábor, celebrity, was born on February 6, 1917. She died of a heart attack on December 18, 2016, aged 99

  CASH BELONGS IN THE PAST SO LET’S ABOLISH IT

  Ed Conway

  DECEMBER 23 2016

  EVERY SO OFTEN newspaper columnists recycle their old ideas. Since this is the time of year for reflection and frank admissions, we should fess up. While I try to keep that kind of thing to a minimum, I admit that there is one idea I’ve written about more than once in the past.

  We should abolish cash: every coin in circulation, every note in every bank and cash machine around the country. I love this idea for three reasons. First, however radical it may sound, it makes a lot of economic sense: no cash means no hoarding if interest rates drop below zero, which means the economy can recover faster in the wake of a financial crisis. Second, doing so would represent a hammer blow to the black market and the corrupt criminals and cronies who benefit from the anonymity of paper money.

  But the bes
t thing about this idea is that it’s always relevant. After all, while the odd dictator and bankrupt nation — the Soviet Union, North Korea, Burma, for instance — has cancelled banknotes once or twice, this isn’t the kind of thing we expect from a sane government. Or so I thought until last month, when India embarked on one of the most controversial experiments in monetary history. On the same day as the US presidential election (a good day, if ever there was one, to bury bad news), the prime minister, Narendra Modi, popped up on TV to announce the cancellation of all 500 and 1,000 rupee banknotes in circulation.

  To put that into perspective, those two notes, the highest denomination ones in the country, account for about 86 per cent of the country’s entire stock of physical money.

  Now, this wasn’t an all-out monetary bonfire. The decommissioned banknotes will eventually be replaced with a new run of notes, including a 2,000 rupee version. No one loses money provided they exchange their notes at their local bank.

  This was, the prime minister explained, all about clamping down on the corruption and criminality that has plagued the country for decades. India’s reliance on anonymous, untraceable cash, which accounts for 98 per cent of transactions — compared with less than half in the UK — does indeed mean that those who seek to launder and hide their ill-gotten gains can do so more easily. This is a country where houses are sometimes paid for with suitcases of money.

  Demonetisation, as it is being called, will supposedly smoke out those who keep their money in the black market, which accounts for between 20 per cent and 60 per cent of gross domestic product, depending on whose figures you trust.

  On the face of it, this all sounds very compelling. High denomination banknotes are catnip for criminals — one of the reasons why comparatively few £50 and €500 notes circulate even after having been issued. And in the days after the announcement, economists lined up to congratulate Mr Modi on his decision. If only, they added, western leaders could be so bold.