Marcos burying his head in the sand about Scarborough loss
MORE than a month after China declared its “baselines” around Bajo de Masinloc — de facto territorial borders defined by the precise geographic coordinates on the shoal — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. continues to ignore this historic, formal amputation of the country’s territory.
Marcos is either so ignorant over the meaning of this recent Chinese move or he is burying his head in the sand, refusing to think about the problem. He has so far not commented on this formal loss of Philippine territory, the first since we lost Sabah in 1963.
Instead, he has merely condemned China’s recent moves to enforce its claims of sovereignty over Bajo de Masinloc (international name, Scarborough, Huangyan Dao to the Chinese) such as the Chinese coast guards’ firing water cannons at and maneuvering to force a Philippine fisheries bureau ship going to the shoal.
He has not even convened the National Security Council nor his trusted national security and foreign affairs officials to discuss the development. Or, is he waiting for guidelines from the US administration, which unfortunately is busy with the Ukraine and Gaza Strip wars, as well as the fact that US President Joe Biden is a lame duck president with President-elect Trump still to assume power on Jan. 20?
Only a foreign affairs undersecretary, purportedly its spokesman Ma. Teresita Daza and the National Maritime Council chaired by the impassive Executive Secretary Lucas Bersamin, have protested the Chinese move. The Philippine government, of course, has not been able to draw its own baselines — much less submit it to the United Nations — as China did for its baselines, two weeks after its earth-shaking move.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) defined baselines as the lines connecting “base points,” those farthest seaward low-level points along the coast of a country or an island, from which the limits of a state’s territorial sea and certain other maritime zones of jurisdiction are measured. While Unclos has no power to determine the sovereignty of a land, a country determining its baselines in effect claims that the land around these are its territory.
Analogous to base points are the stone markers — “muhon” in Filipino — defining the boundaries of private property. A nation submitting its baselines to the UN is roughly analogous to a person submitting these muhon as markers of his property to the Land Registration Authority.
Second
The baselines declared over Scarborough — as near to the Philippines as the 200 kilometers from Manila to Baguio — is the second the Chinese have declared for any feature it claims or controls in the South China Sea, after they did so for the Paracel islands back in 1996. The Chinese haven’t even drawn such baselines for its purported outlying archipelago, the Nansha Qundao (which we claim as the Kalayaan Island Group), where it transformed into artificial islands with complete military facilities and the seven reefs there that it occupied in the late 1980s.
The Chinese move has taken US strategists by surprise as they were expecting that China would first declare such baselines over Nansha Qundao (Spratlys) and the Zhongsha archipelago (mostly the Macclesfield Bank), whose shoal nearest the Philippines is Scarborough.
The Chinese move to declare baselines only around Scarborough shoal could mean they are bending over the criticisms that their Zhongsha has weak legal basis as it is mostly low-tide shoals. Or perhaps they did not want a bigger adverse global reaction, since baselines drawn for Zhongsha would occupy nearly a third of the South China Sea, drastically reducing the international waters there, where there is total freedom of navigation by vessels of all flags.
China’s declaration of the baselines for Scarborough Shoal debunks two lies that have been mostly spread by retired justice Antonio Carpio, which very unfortunately has been believed by the gullible Philippine economic and political elite.
First, Carpio has been saying since 2012 that China’s claims of sovereignty over the Spratlys and Scarborough Shoal are based on the nine-dash line the Chinese arbitrarily drew on its maps depicting the South China Sea in 1946. He called the line in his only book, an e-book collection of his lectures, “the main driver of the South China Sea dispute.” Indeed, Carpio has been spreading the lie that since the arbitral panel that heard the suit that the Philippines brought against China in 2012 ruled that the nine-dash line had no basis in international law, the Spratlys and Scarborough are ours.
However, the Chinese’s formal annexation of Scarborough Shoal had nothing to do with the nine-dash line. It claims that China had for centuries considered it as its territory. True or not, Scarborough is within the Zhongsha islands which China in its 1958 and 1992 formally declared as part of Chinese territory.
Treaty
China has pointed out that Scarborough is outside Philippine territory as defined by the 1898 Treaty of Paris by which Spain ceded its colony to the US. Contrary to Carpio’s claim that Scarborough is ours because it falls within our exclusive economic zone, the official Philippine line is that the country had exercised effective control of it since the US colonial occupation.
A second lie Carpio has managed to spread and incontrovertibly debunked by this recent formal annexation of Scarborough by the Chinese, is his claim that a 1734 map by Pedro Murillo Velarde clearly showed that “Bajo de Masinloc” was within Philippine territory. Among the many arguments that debunk that claim (among others, maps are useless in territorial disputes, if a claimant government does not categorically claim it represents its territory), Carpio’s claim is so hilariously wrong: All our maps starting with that made when the Spanish turned over its colonial territory to the US in 1898 obviously superseded all past maps, including that Velarde map made nearly three centuries ago.
Things aren’t looking good for us — and the US — going by what happened after China drew baselines around the Paracels in 1996. In a few years’ time, China built on Woody island, a harbor, facilities and an airport with a 2,700-meter runway that is capable of handling any fourth generation fighter aircraft and long-range bombers. Analysts claim the Chinese had secretly installed mid-range missiles on the island.
If China does the same things with Scarborough, it would be the Chinese’s most forward military base in the South China Sea.
Scenario
We cannot dismiss a scenario, especially with the US success in brainwashing such officials as Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro Jr. and Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela, in which they manage to get our vessels — with or without Marcos’ permission — to test the Chinese resolve to defend territory that it claims to own. A military conflict, intentional or not, would break out in the Scarborough waters and with China’s mightier force, our vessels would be easily routed and scores of our sailors killed.
That, in fact, happened when the Chinese drove out the Vietnamese from the Paracels in 1974, in which 18 Chinese sailors were killed and 100 Vietnamese. The Vietnamese have commemorated their deaths yearly, to honor their patriotic heroes.
In our case, there might be a different scenario, as happened in the Falklands war in which the Argentinian junta foolishly tried to wrest those islands from the British that had occupied it since 1833. Angry over that fiasco, the Argentinians ousted the military junta just three days after their defeat to the British. This, of course, is a pattern that has happened several times before in history: for example, the overthrow of Russia’s czarist regime after its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905; Emperor Napoleon III’s fall after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871); and the Qing dynasty’s after its defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895).
Would a battle with China over Scarborough that results in many Filipino casualties lead to this administration’s fall? Maybe Marcos had this in mind when he said the other day that the Philippines will never provoke China over the South China Sea disputes.
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Marcos burying his head in the sand about Scarborough loss
Source: Breaking News PH
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