Huh? Aquino lost ‘Bajo’ 12 years ago, didn’t he?
THE dictator Marcos would have admired the uniformity and obedience of Philippine mainstream media under his son’s watch.
For two days now, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his security officials, including this country’s most intellectually vacuous foreign secretary ever, have been fuming over China’s People’s Liberation Army fighter jets intercepting over Bajo de Masinloc a Philippine Air Force aircraft, even firing flares in front of it.
The aircraft, our military reported, was on a “routine maritime patrol” over Bajo de Masinloc, which all broadsheets uniformly referred to as within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
However, not a single paper reported on the Chinese side, as follows:
“On August 8, the NC-212 aircraft of the Philippine Air Force illegally intruded the airspace of China’s Huangyan Dao (Bajo de Masinloc to the Philippines) in South China Sea in spite of repeated warnings from the Chinese side and disturbed China’s normal training activities,” according to a written statement released by the PLA Southern Theater Command on Saturday.
“The PLA Southern Theater Command organized its maritime and aerial forces to conduct identification, verification, tracking, monitoring, warning, to drive away the aircraft in accordance with the law. The on-site operations of the PLA are professional and legitimate, the Theater Command pointed out.”
Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said the incident “took him by surprise.”
Neither did any paper report what would give the incident its very important context that explains the Chinese actions. The government of President Benigno Aquino III and his foreign secretary Albert del Rosario, because of their blatant blunders, lost Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal, also Panatag) to China in a two-month standoff that started in April 2012.
They lost it when they were fooled by the US that the Chinese had agreed to a simultaneous withdrawal from the shoal. There wasn’t, but del Rosario — according to Aquino’s special envoy Antonio Trillanes IV — believed US State Department official Kurt Campbell’s fib and ordered our vessels out of the shoal — in effect abandoning it.
After that, Aquino never ordered Philippine vessels even to try entering the shoal and instead was fooled again by the US that the country could recover it through a suit at an international body, which, however, turned out to be a powerless arbitration tribunal working under the provisions of the United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
Tribunal
The tribunal, in its July 2016 ruling, did not rule on Scarborough’s sovereignty as Unclos provisions are limited to the validity of a nation’s maritime-area claims, mainly to its territorial sea and its exclusive economic zone. The panel repeated this important point several times:
“The Tribunal records that this decision is entirely without prejudice to the question of sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal.” (page 31)
“The question of sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal will remain entirely unaffected by the Tribunal’s determination.” (page 176)
“The Tribunal has not addressed — and will not address — the question of which State has sovereignty over Sandy Cay, Thitu, or Scarborough Shoal and would thus have an entitlement to the surrounding territorial sea.” (page 296).
What Philippine media did not report is that Bajo de Masinloc has been, since 2012, part of Chinese territory because Aquino had stupidly abandoned it to the Chinese, and no international body had ruled or could rule otherwise. At the very best for the Philippines, the world, even the US, classifies it as still part of “disputed territories,” which they have not taken a stand on whether it is China or the Philippines that owns it.
Incontrovertible
What is incontrovertible is that China has totally controlled Bajo de Masinloc since 2012, and since it sees it as its territory, then it has all the rights to intercept the plane of a foreign Air Force entering it. (Sentence deleted here.)
Before the 2012 standoff, China, the Philippines and Vietnam had downplayed the issue of sovereignty over it and let fishermen from any nation fish in the area. The Philippines, under previous administrations, didn’t even strictly enforce its ban on endangered aquatic species. Under presidents Ramos and Estrada, however, there were instances in which Chinese and Vietnamese fishermen violating the ban were arrested and brought to a court in Zambales to be tried for the alleged crime. However, they were quietly released a few weeks later, apparently after the Chinese Embassy’s pleas.
It was solely Aquino III who tried to totally control Bajo de Masinloc.
Standoff
After the Scarborough standoff which the Philippines lost, the Chinese coast guard and even its navy have increased their patrols in the area, on the level it has been doing in the islands it controls in the Spratlys.
I suspect this recent interception by Chinese jets of a Philippine Air Force plane is merely another move by this government, under US prodding or even orders, to provoke the Chinese so they would be portrayed again as the bully in the South China Sea. This is merely another level of the kind of provocations the Philippine government has undertaken since Marcos Jr. became president by attempting to resupply the BRP Sierra Madre with materials to repair the dilapidated wreckage from sinking — which the Philippines promised not to do since President Estrada’s time.
The sequence of events in this episode is intriguing.
The incident occurred on August 8, Thursday. The Associated Press (AP) reported that the Southern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army said in a statement issued two days later, on August 10, that a Philippine Air Force aircraft had ‘illegally’ entered the airspace above Huangyan Island — the Chinese name for Scarborough Shoal, which China claims — and disrupted its training activities.”
Hours after the Chinese statement was posted by the AP, Armed Forces chief Gen. Romeo Brawner confirmed the episode, that two Chinese fighter jets made a dangerous maneuver and dropped flares on the path of the Philippine Air Force plane. Brawner said he had reported it to the foreign affairs department and the National Security Council’s secretariat.
Questions
The questions that are begging to be answered: Why did Brawner report the incident only two days after? Does the Philippine Air Force routinely, as Brawner claimed, conduct air patrols over Scarborough? Is Brawner, with the rest of this current officialdom, denying that the Aquino III had lost Scarbrough and that the Chinese are in total control of it?
Is it factual for the Chinese to claim they were undertaking training activities in the airspace above Bajo de Masinloc when the Philippine plane was spotted and intercepted?
An important piece of information is that fighter jets deploy flares as a defensive move, mainly so heat-seeking missiles from a hostile force targeting them would be diverted to the flares’ heat and not to their jet exhausts. On the other hand, the flares might be the version of Chinese water cannons that shooed away Philippine vessels trying to resupply the BRP Sierra Madre.
What would have happened if the Philippine Air Force pilot panicked and, in his attempt to evade the flares, stalled his engine to crash into the sea?
This time, it wouldn’t be just a Filipino sailor’s thumb that would have been the cost of such an exercise.
Conflicting claims: A briefer
For National Security Council deputy director Jonathan Malaya, assistant director general for “strategic communications,” to claim that Bajo de Masinloc is ours because it is “well within” our exclusive economic zone is another instance of our officials’ ignorance about our disputes with China.
The Philippines’ main argument for its sovereignty claim over Bajo de Masinloc** is that it has exercised effective occupation and jurisdiction over it, a mode of asserting sovereignty recognized by international law, while China never did. It has never claimed the shoal is ours since it is within our EEZ.
Such a ruling has been made in a number of cases by international courts or tribunals, most notably in the Palmas Island case (US v. The Netherlands, April 4, 1928). The name itself is an indication of its effective jurisdiction since it means “under Masinloc” or within the municipality of Masinloc, part of Zambales province of the Philippines.
Philippine flags have been erected on some of the rocks around the lagoon since 1965, and the Philippine Navy operated a lighthouse in one of the islets in 1992. Just 290 kilometers from the former US naval base in Subic Bay (which left in 1992), American and Philippine naval and air forces had used their surroundings as targets for the training of its warships and warplanes’ weapons. The Philippines and the US navies visited the feature, charted it, and exercised law enforcement jurisdiction over the features.
On the other hand, the Chinese claim that Bajo de Masinloc (‘Huangyan Dao’ to the Chinese) is part of the Zhongsha islands, over which China had been exercising effective jurisdiction for more than two centuries, and formally declared as an integral part of China in its 1958 Declaration of the Government of the People’s Republic of China on China’s Territorial Sea and its 1992 Law on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone.
China’s major rebuttal against the Philippine claim is that Scarborough Shoal is incontrovertibly outside the Philippine territory as defined in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, by which Spain turned over its colony to the US. This territorial definition was explicitly affirmed in the 1935 Constitution and implied in the 1961 Republic Act 3046 and the 1968 Republic Act. 5446. Philippine maps published in 1981 and 1984 also indicated that Scarborough was outside the Philippine territorial limits.
These conflicting claims, though, have been made moot and academic because of China’s wresting control of it in 2012, not through force, which the United Nations categorically bans, but through the Aquino government’s gullibility over a US claim.
*These assertions are narrated in detail and the sources of information in my book “Debacle,” available at rigobertotiglao.com/shop, amazon.com, and Fully Booked.
**Department of Foreign Affairs. “Philippine Position on Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) and the waters within its vicinity,” April 18, 2012.
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Huh? Aquino lost ‘Bajo’ 12 years ago, didn’t he?
Source: Breaking News PH
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