‘West Philippine Sea’ is fiction, and a dangerous one
PRESIDENT Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s worst assertion in his recent State of the Nation Address was that the “West Philippines Sea is not fictional” (kathang-isip). He melodramatically, but in a jingoistic manner, claimed: “This is ours, and it will remain ours until our love for the Philippines is aflame.” Marcos is so blatantly wrong.
“WPS” is fiction, and I will stop writing forever if anybody can prove I am wrong. Worse, Marcos is maliciously tapping on Filipinos’ nationalist sentiments against another nation and ensuring US support to buttress his failing presidency. Emotional sentiments against other countries are not easy to reverse, making it extremely difficult for our country to resolve our territorial maritime disputes with China and Vietnam in the South China Sea.
It was the late President Benigno Aquino 3rd, the son of Marcos’ father’s archenemy, who demonstrated his utter ignorance of our territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Ironically, Marcos, in his SONA, announced to the world that he embraces the absurdity of this fiction invented by Aquino 3rd. Jedi master Obi-wan was certainly right when he rhetorically asked: “Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?”
Aquino 3rd created the “West Philippine Sea” through his Administrative Order 29 of Sept. 5, 2012, which defined the “West Philippine Sea” (WPS) as the western side of our exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles from the “baseline,” roughly the outermost land points of the archipelago). It includes the waters “around, within and adjacent to the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) and Scarborough Shoal.”
For starters, for the KIG to be part of the WPS is no longer tenable: our arbitration suit against China ruled that the KIG is as illegal as China’s nine-dash line, and we committed to comply with it.
We lost Scarborough Shoal to the Chinese even earlier, in May 2012, and China Coast Guard vessels routinely patrol it and drive away foreign vessels at will, as it claims the area is part of Chinese territory. How can we include it as our WPS?
Scarborough
The creation of the WPS is, in fact, Aquino’s bumbling attempt to conceal what is really one of the biggest boo-boos in our history: his administration’s loss of Scarborough Shoal after his foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario believed US diplomat Kurt Campbell’s claim that the Chinese had agreed to a simultaneous withdrawal of the two countries vessels from the area. There was no such agreement, only an American proposal given to Chinese diplomat Fu Ying, who two years later told media she was just preparing to relay the proposal to her superiors in Beijing before the Filipino vessels left.
By international law, which bans the use of force to annex territory, China legally acquired Scarborough Shoal, even if because of the Americans’ trickery. Tragically, out of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, our sovereign claims over Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc) were the strongest by “effective occupation.” This is because the US Navy (which we gave permission to do so) routinely used it as a firing range for its fighters and as an area to unload unused bombs carried by B-52s on its bombing missions to Vietnam and Cambodia, as Subic Naval Base was just 270 km away.
“WPS” has been a propaganda tool to brainwash Filipinos and create outrage against China, as the idea would be etched in their minds that the disputed areas of the South China Sea are incontrovertibly ours, as we call it the “West Philippine Sea.” The fact would be forgotten that it was a propaganda tool invented only in 2012, in contrast to the “Philippine Sea” in the Pacific, named as such centuries ago. Aquino’s lawyers also thought it would be a persuasive trick in its arbitration suit against China filed in 2013. The tribunal, though, never referred in its ruling to a “West Philippine Sea.”
It is the height of absurdity and insane arrogance for us to name the western part of our EEZ as the West Philippine Sea for several other reasons.
Only country
Right off, we are the only country in the world to give a name to its EEZ, and it is not ours as it is not part of our territory (as the territorial seas 12 nautical miles away from the baselines are) over which we exercise sovereignty. What we have, by the definition of EEZs by the UN Convention on Law of the Sea (Unclos), are only rights similar to but not all of those we exercise if we were sovereign, mainly the exclusive right to explore its natural living or nonliving resources. EEZs do not even confer to the country having them the right to restrict navigation by vessels from other countries, except in the (very rare) situations when such vessels threaten the security of the coastal nation.
Imagine if all coastal countries give names to their EEZs. We will have the absurd situation depicted in the map enclosed, with the South China Sea, which was named as such starting in the 16th century by Portuguese sailors, being reduced to a small patch.
Aquino 3rd then and Marcos now are so ignorant of the fact that there has been, since 1921, a UN sister organization, the International Hydrographic Organization, that names the bodies of water around the world, most of which had been determined by consensus centuries ago. It requires consensus among countries involved to agree to the name of an ocean or a sea.
For instance, in 1992, North Korea and South Korea proposed to the IHO that the Sea of Japan be renamed, respectively,” Korean East Sea” and “East Sea.” Japan demanded the name be unchanged. The three countries submitted tons of data and hundreds of maps over several years until 2012 to defend their claims for the sea’s name. The IHO did not revise in its official publication the names of the oceans and seas, the name of the Sea of Japan, with most countries’ maps of the world retaining that name.
IHO
In contrast, the Aquino 3rd and Marcos governments did not even bother to inform the IHO that it was naming the western part of its EEZ and the waters “around, within and adjacent to the Kalayaan Island Group and Scarborough Shoal” as the West Philippine Sea. It is only our officials that call it by that name. The rest of the world ignores it and even laughs at its absurdity. Aquino 3rd and Marcos obviously do not believe in the international rule of law. The enclosed map in the official IHO publication Limits to the Seas totally ignores the WPS.
More importantly, what makes the naming of our EEZ as “West Philippine Sea” so ridiculous is the reality that we have very little control, if any, in terms of military might, of that area with the international name of Spratlys (Nanhai Qundao to the Chinese, Quần đảo Trường Sa to the Vietnamese, and Kalayaan Islands to us). It is the most important part of the WPS as there are islands and shoals in that area on which permanent installations can and were built.
The Philippines has the weakest presence in that area, consisting only of seven islands where it has some semblance of a military outpost, the biggest of which is Pag-asa, which has an airstrip, communications equipment and soldiers’ barracks. The other six are hardly guarded islands, with at most having only two platoons manning them. China and Vietnam, which claim them, would have invaded and successfully occupied them if not for America’s military hegemony. Vietnam controls 20 features, half of which are heavily fortified, some of which were expanded through land reclamation.
China
China has by far the largest military presence in what we stupidly call the “West Philippine Sea,” consisting of seven artificial islands that the Chinese built from 2012 to 2013 in retaliation against the Philippines’ filing of an arbitration suit intended to kick them out of the Spratlys. Each of these now is a huge military facility with airstrips and ports that could accommodate warplanes and vessels. It controls eight other reefs it regularly patrols.
It is a blatant denial of reality for Marcos to claim that the “WPS is ours” or that “it will remain as ours” when most of them are already controlled by the Chinese and the Vietnamese, through their bases and through their vessels regularly patrolling the area.
The Marcos government’s attempts in recent months to claim Ayungin Shoal by fortifying the BRP Sierra Madre there have miserably failed. Without admitting it, it has reverted to the agreement made since President Estrada’s time that it will deliver only food and other necessities of life to the Marine platoon restationed there, not construction and repair material.
Marcos’ aggressive moves have only provoked the Chinese to increase the frequency of their coast guard’s patrols throughout the Spratlys, using its biggest vessels which even sail at will into our islands’ 12-nautical mile territorial seas. The US has pedaled back on its earlier assertions that it will escort our vessels in supplying the BRP Sierra Madre.
It is a dangerous fiction in that this government has been willing to risk our very economic well-being by taking a belligerent stance against the economic superpower in the region, for the sake of holding on to a fictional “WPS.” It is a dangerous fiction in that it creates a mind-frame among Filipinos that we can never settle our disputes with China since we have to hold on to the fictional “WPS.” Marcos has even been spreading flag-waving slogans referring to the WPS as “what is ours is ours” and “we will not give up an inch of it.”
But the reality is that we have already given most of it up, Scarborough Shoal in 2012. If we do not reach a compromise with the Chinese, they will claim the shoal has a 12-nautical mile territorial sea or even a 200-nautical mile EEZ, as the Japanese have done for their bedroom-sized Okinotorishima in the Pacific.
Demonize
The “WPS” is a dangerous fiction in that it prods us into doing what the US wants, which is to demonize China as a bully when it defends what it believes is not just its EEZ but its territory, as had happened several times in Ayungin.
I challenge those who think I am wrong, especially my fellow columnists in this paper, particularly Antonio Contreras and Ranhilo Aquino, to send me their contrary views, which I promise I will provide space for in my column — and debunk. A rational debate is sorely needed for the sake of our country’s future.
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
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Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
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‘West Philippine Sea’ is fiction, and a dangerous one
Source: Breaking News PH
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