July 24 (EIRNS) — Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has declared a war on drugs, widely acknowledged to be just as tough as the war on drugs by Philippine President Duterte in the Philippines. Speaking in Jakarta on July 22, Jokowi said: “I have told you, just be firm, especially with foreign drug dealers who enter the country and resist. Gun them down. Give no mercy. We are indeed in an emergency situation in dealing with drug trafficking.”
The {Jakarta Post} reported that National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian said a lot of drug dealers thought that Indonesia was a potential market because they considered its drug laws weaker than those of Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.
On mining, Duterte announced in his State of the Nation
speech Sunday that he was adopting a policy that is like that of Indonesia — mining companies will only be allowed to do mining in the country if they also build processing facilities.
Duterte said it is “not enough that we mine this wealth. What is more important is that we convert the raw materials thereof into finished products for international and local purposes. That way, it will not only be the few who are the rich but also the poor who are many who will benefit therefrom. Therefore, I call on our industrialists, investors, commercial barons to put up factories and manufacturing establishments right here in the Philippines to process our raw materials into finished products. At this point in my administration, if possible, we shall put a stop to the extraction and exportation of our mineral resources to foreign nations for processing abroad and importing them back to the Philippines in the form of consumer goods at prices twice or thrice the value of the original raw materials foreign corporations pay for them.”
