Marcos impeachable on the colossal loss of Scarborough

First of two parts

HISTORY will judge 2024 as the year when China formalized its sovereignty over Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc to us, Huáng Yán Dǎo to the Chinese). It is now the nearest Chinese-controlled feature to the Philippines, just about as far as the 200 kilometers from Manila to Baguio.

It is a testament to President Marcos Jr.’s incompetence and negligence: While he and his cousin Martin Romualdez were busy persecuting Vice President Sara Duterte, they were disgracefully clueless over what is the biggest amputation of our territory since we lost Sabah when the newly formed Federation of Malaysia incorporated it in 1963.

Marcos is impeachable for the loss of Scarborough on the constitutional ground of betrayal of public trust: He has demonstrated himself to be grossly incompetent and negligent in handling our dispute with China over Scarborough Shoal, naively believing that the US would help us recover it, that following the US line of demonizing China, the world would force Beijing to give it back to us.

After President Aquino III, fooled by the US, lost control of Scarborough in 2012 to China, President Rodrigo Duterte, for six years during his term, had managed, through diplomacy and a non-belligerent stance toward the Chinese, to put the issue of sovereignty over the shoal in the backburner, with Filipino fishermen allowed to fish there.

No more

No more. In just two years under Marcos, the Chinese have formalized their sovereignty over it, and there are reports that China will transform it into de facto military bases on the scale of those it had built by reclaiming land on seven Spratly reefs.

Marcos didn’t even seek the advice of other competent experts on how to handle our dispute with China, other than perhaps consulting another cousin, the extremely pro-American Jose Romualdez, his ambassador to the US, and his warmonger defense secretary, Gilberto Teodoro, Jr. Even with the obviously alarming developments in Scarborough on Dec. 4, when a People’s Liberation Army Navy vessel was first deployed to enforce China’s sovereignty claims, Marcos had not convened the National Security Council to discuss the Philippine response. In fact, Marcos has not met with the NSC during his term, in contrast to every single past administration’s convening it whenever there emerged a crisis of national scale.

Instead, even with other China Coast Guard vessels firing water cannons at Philippine vessels and maneuvering to force these out of the shoal, Marcos instead chose to call members of Congress to a dinner that very evening to basically swear loyalty to him, apparently worried that his plot to kick Duterte out of the vice presidency had backfired so much that a civilian or military plot had emerged to depose him.

China’s action to tighten its sovereignty over Scarborough — which should have alerted Marcos to convene the NSC — was when the Asian superpower announced Nov. 10 the geographical coordinates for Scarborough’s baselines and about a month later deposited this announcement with the United Nations, a move that bolstered its claim that its baselines complied with international law.

Unclos

The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) defined baselines as the lines connecting “base points,” that farthest seaward low-level point in 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 de facto claims that the land around these is 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.

China’s move didn’t happen just because some Chinese general woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Marcos officials such as national security adviser Eduardo Año and military head Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. have been tactlessly telling media that the Philippines is lobbying to get the US to permanently station its mid-range US-made missile system, the Typhon, in the country, which China and even its ally Russia have protested against.

On the heels of those stupid statements was Marcos’ signing into law the Maritime Zones Act, whose presumed exclusive economic zone, China claimed, overlapped with its sovereign outlying archipelago it calls Nánshā Qúndǎo (Kalayaan Island Group to us).

The new law, however, further weakened our sovereignty claim over Scarborough. In contrast to the 2009 Baselines Law, which President Arroyo enacted, the law did not mention the shoal as part of the Philippines’ “regime of islands,” which two international law scholars said meant that the Philippines hadn’t declared it as part of Philippine territory, as it falls outside the country’s baselines as defined by the 2009 law.

Formalized

China further formalized its claim not only over Bajo de Masinloc (nor the other Spratly features it claims) but over other disputed islands when its Ministry of Natural Resources and Ministry of Civil Affairs announced the formal naming of 64 islands and reefs in the South China Sea, providing the precise coordinates of each as well as its name in both Chinese characters and pinyin transliteration. Two international scholars pointed out that the act of giving a territory its name reinforces a nation’s claim to it. In our case, the Maritime Zones Act did not even mention the name of the islands, shoals and reefs it claims are within Philippine territory.

In our case, the Maritime Zones Act did not point out that Bajo de Masinloc was part of Philippine territory, bolstering the Chinese claim that it was outside the line 1898 Treaty of Paris, defined as the Philippine territory ceded to the US by Spain.

The loss of Bajo de Masinloc to China is forever: No international body, not a mere arbitral panel, can rule on territorial disputes between two nations unless both agree to let a third, or international panel, rule on these.

Instead, all territorial disputes, bar none, have been resolved only by force, with even one state, Israel now, apparently intent on settling its territorial dispute with Palestine by exterminating that nation’s population. Argentina, a nation that thought that “right makes might” — a favorite slogan of many of our leaders — was embarrassingly routed when its generals in 1982 tried to wrest the Falklands away from Great Britain, which has a powerful military.

Dwarfed

In our case, the Philippines’ military and economic strength is dwarfed by China many times over, the latter’s 350 aircraft carriers, submarines and other large vessels against our 100 mostly small vessels for coastal operations. It is hilarious that the Philippine Coast Guard’s notorious blabbermouth, Jay Tarriela, suggested that Marcos should order our Navy to challenge China’s PLA Navy for control of Scarborough. He is obviously ignorant of the fact that all the vessels of our Navy and Coast Guard can be sunk in an hour by China’s advanced “YJ” series of ship-to-ship missiles, with our sailors dying not knowing what hit them.

We cannot just simply buy warships and defense systems from the US to defend our territory as Defense Secretary Teodoro very naively has been saying. China’s military strength is due to its economy’s sustained, remarkable growth in the past three decades, in contrast to the three deep recessions of our economy (from 1984 to 1985, 1998 and 2020), the first due to mismanagement and corruption under the strongman Marcos’ rule. Even in a miraculous scenario of our economy growing at the fastest rate possible, it would take us half a century to be able to afford to build a navy that can rival China’s.

The other scenario, of course, would be for the US to intervene in the dispute over features it is not a claimant-country to. China, of course, would respond by waging war against the US. That, of course, would lead to global nuclear war, which will kill our species.

And who would want that?

On Friday: More on why Marcos is impeachable over his handling of the Scarborough dispute

---

Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao

X: @bobitiglao

Website: www.rigobertotiglao.com

The post Marcos impeachable on the colossal loss of Scarborough first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

Marcos impeachable on the colossal loss of Scarborough
Source: Breaking News PH