Foreign Digest Updates: Philippines and Macedonia

Philippines

            The President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, the “Filipino Trump,” last week admitted to the “sin” of “extrajudicial killings.”  His public policy is to encourage Filipinos to murder suspected drug dealers.  As President of the United States, Donald J. Trump praised Duterte’s policy.

Macedonia

An overwhelming majority of votes in the Macedonian referendum were in favor of changing the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia to North Macedonia, but the turnout was well short of the constitutionally requisite threshold of 50% voter participation.  

The proposed name change was the result of an agreement between Macedonia and Greece, which I had posted about in my post from June of this year, Foreign Digest: Macedonia, Colombia and Nicaragua, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2018/06/foreign-digest-macedonia-colombia-and.html and again in Foreign Digest Updates: Macedonia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iran and Turkey, http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2018/06/foreign-digest-updates-macedonia.html, after the Macedonian Parliament approved the agreement.  Greece had been concerned about separatism in its homologous province of Macedonia, which borders its northern Slavic neighbor.  The quarter-century-long dispute has been an impediment to the Balkan State’s entry into the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because of the Hellenic Republic’s veto.  The authoritarian and kleptocratic Russian Federation regime of Vladimir Putin has been propagandizing against the agreement.  There was a boycott of the referendum by the President, who disagreed with compromising with Greece.  The Prime Minister declared his intention to continue to resolve the dispute in order to integrate Macedonia with Europe.