Video belies PCG Tarriela and NSC Malaya’s claims about collision
HERE we go again, with the officials of the National Security Council and the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) — claiming to be speaking for the entire Philippine government — blaming China for “aggression” and “bullying’ in the disputed Spratly Islands. Commo. Jay Tarriela of the PCG claimed a China Coast Guard vessel at around 3 a.m. on Aug 19 undertook “dangerous maneuvers that resulted in a collision that caused structural damage to two PCG vessels.”
This time, though, a video clip taken by the China Coast Guard incontrovertibly showed who was to blame for the two collisions near Sabina (Escoda) Shoal. Tarriela, as he has so many times before on the South China Sea disputes, is again lying.
At 3:22 a.m., the PCG’s BRP Bagacay (MRRV-4410) sailed close to the CCG vessel 21551 — at a distance violating the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) rules for avoiding collisions — to eventually collide with it. Apparently unfazed, the same PCG vessel raced and suddenly turned right to traverse the Chinese vessel’s path, resulting in another collision at 3:25 a.m. (Time from time stamps on the video clips, which can be viewed at my website, rigobertotiglao.com, or in my Facebook and X accounts.)
The US ambassador to the Philippines on the same day, without even getting the Philippine government’s report on the incident, echoed the PCG’s claim, condemning the CCG’s “dangerous maneuvers endangering the lives of PCG personnel.” Of course, she didn’t need to get the facts: it hews to the US racist depiction of China as an aggressor and bully in Asia.
The collisions were obviously not accidental but deliberate on the part of the PCG vessel. The BRP Bagacay’s actions are in violation of the IMO’s Convention on the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), which went into force in 1977. A vessel cannot cut into another’s path from the left, especially if it is so near a collision is likely to happen. The Philippines is required to implement the COLREGS provisions. Yet it is its own coast guard that is shamelessly violating the COLREGS.
Amazingly, but as a testament to the power of the powerful US propaganda apparatus, newspapers and international news agencies still blamed China — even if the photos some of them used for their anti-China biased news articles were images grabbed from the CCG video. Reuters TV and Associated Press internet editions posted only a very short grab of the CCG video clip and instead used more of its video section to show the minor damage done to the PCG vessel.
Liar
Jonathan Malaya, NSC secretariat assistant director for communication, lied through his teeth to claim: “Video and photographs, including the ones taken by journalists from a US TV network who were on board one of the Philippine Coast Guard ships, showed that the Chinese ships caused the collisions.” There are no such videos and photographs of the collisions by US media, nor by the PCG. Unlike the Chinese, the PCG did not have cameras for night-time video coverage of the incident that took place at 3:25 a.m.
Later realizing the lie he made, Malaya changed his tune to claim, totally without any evidence, that the Chinese video was “spliced and edited.”
The PCG’s Commodore Tarriela again demonstrated his ignorance of the South China Sea disputes when he posted just hours after the collision incident: “Escoda Shoal is located within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines, in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 2016 arbitral award.” While the shoal is within the presumptive (i.e., no official maps have been made) Philippine EEZ, which confers to it exclusive rights on the maritime area’s resources, China and Vietnam claim the Spratly Islands where Escoda Shoal is as their sovereign territory, established centuries ago and affirmed in the modern era by their governments. All countries — including the US — see this case as a dispute and have been neutral to the opposing claims.
Tarriela has never read the ruling on the Philippines’ arbitration suit against China: We did not claim Escoda, and the 500-page decision did not even mention Escoda Shoal.
Ashamed
The chief of staff of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the defense secretary should be ashamed — and resign — if they do not undertake an investigation of this incident, which, with the many video evidence the Chinese will eventually release, will make the world condemn and mock us. From the face of it, the captain of the BRP Bagacay deliberately rammed the CCG vessel. Why? Or was he ordered to by his higher-ups? By who?
Tarriela made up another lie: that BRP Bagacay with two other PCG vessels, were merely on the way to Lawak and Patag Islands to supply the Philippine troops there with food and other necessities. But the two islands only have a small contingent of Marines, said to number just a bit more than a dozen. The PCG needs three ships to bring food to them? The two islands are also resupplied through the Philippines’ biggest island in the South China Sea, Pag-asa. The collision happened only 50 kilometers south of Sabina Shoal, which, as I describe below, has become another area where the Marcos Jr. government seems to have planned an incident to portray China as a bully.
Congress has been so fond of investigating such things as a small-town mayor’s involvement in criminal activities of Chinese-run online gambling outfits or a teenage actor’s allegations of rape by GMA-7 contractors years ago. Why don’t they investigate not only these clashes but also the overarching racism against China, which, after all, is the superpower in our neighborhood? Who’s giving the orders to the PCG to go nearly to blows with China? Is it the secretary of the Department of Transportation who supervises it PCG, maybe Tarriela guided by US operatives, or Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro Jr., another of our high officials obviously in awe of or in servility to the US Deep State?
The Marcos Jr. government — or is it, in reality, the US Deep State? — in the past few months has undertaken, mainly through the Philippine Coast Guard and the Navy — actions obviously intended to rile China, to provoke its coast guard to respond with force.
Grounded
Especially in the first half of this year, the PCG tried several times to supply its grounded BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal with materials to repair it, which is in violation of its agreement with China made during President Estrada’s time not to do so. The Chinese responded by having their vessels maneuver to shoo away the Philippine boats, which eventually led to water-cannoning them and to blocking maneuvers with their dinghies, which resulted in an accident in which a Filipino sailor’s thumb was cut.
The Marcos-controlled media, as well as the US-controlled Western media, reported these as demonstrations of Chinese “aggression” and “bullying,” which US propagandists claim merely showed on a micro-scale what Beijing would do to invade Taiwan, its rogue province.
When that tack at Ayungin Shoal ran out of steam, Marcos and the US turned to Scarborough Shoal, which the Aquino 3rd government lost to the Chinese in 2012 in a non-violent way due to that president’s and his foreign secretary’s gullibility over the American lie that the Chinese would be leaving the area simultaneously with the Filipino vessels. The PCG vessels in the past month ramped up their “patrols” near Scarborough Shoal despite the fact that it had de facto become Chinese territory 12 years ago.
That track proved useless as no front-page news story came out of it since the Chinese vessels merely shadowed the PCG vessels, which eventually had to turn back to their ports when they ran out of fuel.
The Marcos government turned to Sabina (Escoda) Shoal, and had a PCG vessel stay there since April. The excuse was that it was merely patrolling what it claimed was its EEZ to guard the area from illegal fishing. It was, in reality, telling China that it has not given up its claim over the area — and hoping that the CCG undertakes actions to get it out of the shoal in a way that the Philippines and the US can portray it globally as Chinese aggression and bullying. The Chinese, though refrained from shooing away the PCG vessel out of Sabina.
After PCG vessels stayed in Sabina Shoal for three months without incident, it was certainly a shock to the Chinese why the BRP Bagacay suddenly, in the wee hours one morning, collided deliberately with a Chinese vessel twice. That reminds us of a “road rage” incident in which a crazed driver has his car bump another and, not satisfied, bumps it again.
Was the captain acting on his own, perhaps brainwashed so much by his superiors that Sabina Shoal is “Atin Ito” that he was enraged when a CCG vessel asked him to leave the shoal immediately since it has no permission to enter Chinese waters?
Or is it part of the US plan being undertaken by the Marcos Jr. government to continue creating incidents that would portray China as an aggressor, a bully?
It is so abominable that the Marcos Jr. government has been undertaking this mammoth operation on behalf of the US to portray its rival as a hegemon in the region as bullying us, to the point of creating a jingoist hysteria, especially by those claiming to be patriots when they are merely US stooges.
Indeed, the adage by 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson rings so true for the likes of Malaya, Tarriela and Teodoro: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
X: @bobitiglao
Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com
The post Video belies PCG Tarriela and NSC Malaya’s claims about collision first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.
Video belies PCG Tarriela and NSC Malaya’s claims about collision
Source: Breaking News PH
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