Arbitration suit vs China militarized South China Sea
THE claim that the arbitration suit filed against China in 2012 was a victory for us and the international rule of law is as blatantly false as the US allegation in 2003 that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction so that Iraq had to be invaded and put under the American yoke.
It won’t take too long to prove how colossal this lie is, as incontrovertible facts are plain to see if one just removes the blinders created by the powerful American media, as they did in the case of the fictitious WMD.
Instead of a legal victory that strengthens the rule of international law, the suit led to the militarization by China and then by the US of the South China Sea, making our part of the world a powder keg that could make it a nuclear battleground for the two superpowers.
Read, and you will agree with me that if an unintended war breaks out in the South China Sea, historians will trace such a horrific development to the filing of the arbitration suit under the US aegis.
The indisputable fact, ignored by anti-China apologists, is this: As soon as the suit was filed on Jan. 22, 2013, the Chinese used this as a justification to their citizens and the world to transform their seven reefs in the Spratlys into artificial islands on which they built ports, airstrips and other facilities they could turn — or have already secretly turned — into huge military bases, which would be staging grounds to recover Taiwan or fight the US for whatever reason.
In fact, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in 2014 said China would be willing to halt its island-building in the Spratlys if the Philippines dropped the suit that it initiated the previous year. The Aquino government — or the US — said “no.”
COC
The Chinese wouldn’t or couldn’t have militarized their seven reefs if not for the arbitration suit. China signed with eight Asean members on May 14, 2012 a “Declaration on the Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea” (COC). It stipulated that the claimant countries “would resolve their territorial and jurisdictional dispute in the South China Sea through friendly consultations and negotiations by sovereign states directly concerned.” The COC also specified that “the Parties undertake to exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability.”
The Chinese claimed the filing of the arbitration was a belligerent act by the Philippines, which invalidated the COC. It, therefore was justified to transform what before were its militarily puny reefs into huge fortifications.
I don’t think the Americans, the brains for the arbitration suit, would have thought that China could have embarked on such a massive infrastructure project in an area known among mariners to be risky to navigate through because of its shifting sands at the bottom and its unpredictable squalls.
Based on land reclamation costs in recent years — and in coastal areas — the 12.9 square kilometers that China reclaimed from 2013 to 2014 cost $27.6 billion, a mammoth expense for China, representing 12 percent of its defense budget, or just about the cost of two Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. But achieving nearly impossible feats has been a Maoist dogma in the Chinese Communist Party, derived from ancient Chinese mythology: “The Foolish Old Man” fable who removed a mountain shovel by shovel for decades until his death.
Shocked
Shocked, the US, of course, could just watch helplessly as the Chinese built up their artificial islands into massive fortresses and totally changed the theater for war in the South China Sea.
China’s defense ministry justified this huge cost to its citizens and the ruling Communist Party by claiming that creating the artificial islands is a successful tactic of “establishing facts on the ground.” The Israelis had used this tactic when they built Jewish settlements in the Golan Heights and West Bank that they grabbed after defeating the Arabs in the Six-Day War of 1976, thereby making it almost impossible for Egypt and Syria to reclaim these lands now.
The Chinese also calculated that transforming their reefs into islands would make moot and academic one of the arbitration suit’s claims that reefs and rocks that become submerged at high tide — which had been mostly what the Chinese had occupied since 1988 — cannot claim territorial waters.
The Americans were shocked as they thought the Chinese didn’t have the technology nor the resources to undertake the biggest and most expensive land reclamation project in history. The Americans apparently forgot that the defense of territory is a Chinese top priority, that they are willing to put so much resources into creating artificial islands.
‘Island builder’
China even specially designed and built for its reclamation project in the Spratlys the biggest dredger ships in the world, with its newest one, a deep-sea dredger named Tian Kun Hao, the “island-builder” capable of gathering 6,000 cubic meters of sand per hour from the sea. Vietnam also rushed to reclaim land to expand its existing fortresses but on a much smaller scale. Because of its smaller resources, it transformed oil rigs into armed outposts.
From the smallest “landowner” in the Spratlys having the worst “properties,” i.e., reefs, China has become the biggest landowner with 1,300 hectares, triple the total area held by the other claimants. Every year since 2013, the US Defense Department has expressed alarm to Congress over the building of the Chinese artificial islands.
The US, through a Washington-based think tank, established an outfit, the Asian Maritime Transparency Institute, whose website posted detailed images taken by various satellites of the Chinese islands while another unnamed US intelligence outfit leaked nearly ground-level photos of the Chinese installation to the Philippine Daily Inquirer. These were intended to create international outrage against the building of artificial islands.
No such international pressure against it emerged since no nation, including the US, had claimed that China had no sovereignty over the eight reefs it had occupied since 1988 and, therefore, could do whatever it wanted in its territories. They had merely recognized that these islands, as well as the entire Spratlys, were subject to a territorial dispute over which they were neutral.
Ecstatic
However, the Chinese generals must have been ecstatic that the arbitration suit led to the building of their huge fortifications on reclaimed islands. The seven reefs before were mere observation posts.
After the Chinese artificial island building and the construction of ports, airstrips and other facilities there, the People’s Liberation Army created what have been called “unsinkable aircraft carriers” a thousand kilometers from Hainan, the nearest Chinese coastal city.
With their artificial islands built in the wake of the arbitration suit, the Chinese have projected their military power deep across the South China Sea. This has made it possible for their Navy and Coast Guard now to routinely patrol even the coastal areas of the Philippines, to refuel and be resupplied by the seven fortifications in the Spratlys, or what they call Nánshā Qúndǎo.
The US, of course, retaliated by getting the Philippines to agree in April 2014 (six months after China started its building of its artificial islands) to an Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) that allows the US military to use Filipino camps and other facilities as their “rotational base” to install their weapons and other war materiel as well as combat troops whenever America says war is imminent. From just five such “EDCA” sites under the agreement with President Benigno Aquino 3rd’s administration, President Marcos Jr. gave the US five more sites, several of which were obviously intended for a war with the US over Taiwan.
Under the Aquino and Marcos administrations, and triggered by the arbitration suit, the South China Sea has been militarized, with the country becoming what practically is one huge American aircraft carrier ranged against the seven smaller Chinese “aircraft carriers” that are their artificial islands.
It is a mirror image of NATO bases — or nuclear-tipped missile launching pads — in Europe facing those in Russia and Belarus. One reckless step or an accident would make the country a nuclear battlefield.
And to think that the arbitration suit yielded absolutely nothing for us except its use as a propaganda tool. Anti-China propagandists keep claiming that the suit’s ruling invalidated China’s sovereignty claims in the South China Sea. This, however, as I have explained in so many columns and in my book “Debacle,” is a blatant lie as Unclos has totally no authority to judge territorial claims, only maritime area claims, such as the extent of a country’s exclusive economic zone.
China’s claim is not that it has an EEZ that encompasses the Spratlys. It claims that Spratlys is part of its sovereign territory, an “outlying area” which, even if far from its mainland, is its long-established territory, in the genre of US owning the Hawaiian islands, France its New Caledonia, and Britain, its Falkland Islands.
Those who celebrated the “arbitral suit” victory last week should have their heads checked, their persons condemned for spreading lies that could push us into a totally foolish, violent fight with a superpower that would cost millions of Filipinos’ lives.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Arbitration suit vs China militarized South China Sea
Source: Breaking News PH
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