‘Vietnam set to become biggest expansionist power in South China Sea’

THE recent report by a US think tank Asian Maritime Transparency Institute (AMTI) — an anti-China outfit — on Vietnam’s rush to accelerate the building of artificial islands, and fortifications and structures on every single feature it has occupied in the South China Sea should finally knock the heads of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., his security apparatus, the military establishment and Congress.

Rather than being puppets of the US which has been disseminating the false narrative that China is an expansionist power out to grab our islands and reefs in the South China Sea so that therefore we should run to the US for protection, we should see our disputes as the conflicting claims of our country, China and Vietnam (and recently, Malaysia), which had been made even centuries ago. We don’t need to make China an enemy to resolve our disputes with it in the South China Sea.

China merely has been reasserting its claims as it has developed economically and more importantly, militarily, to do so in the past three decades. Similarly, Vietnam has also done so, only in the past decade.

It was the dictator President Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who had bullied China and Vietnam, when starting 1970 he ordered his military to occupy eight islands in the South China Sea, which the two countries had long ago claimed as part of their sovereign territory but had not occupied.

Marcos Sr. annexed a hexagon in which the eight islands were located as the Kalayaan Island Group, and declared it part of Palawan province through a 1978 presidential decree. This action came in the wake of reports made by a UN agency that the area had potential oil and gas reserves, and US and European oil exploration companies were lobbying Marcos Sr. to declare the Spratlys as Philippine territory so they could explore for the natural resource there, with Filipino partners, of course.

Occupy

The Philippines could easily occupy the islands as China was then still recovering from the economic ravages of its horrific misadventure called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Vietnam, on the other hand, was in the last stages of its devastating civil war between the US-supported South Vietnam and North Vietnam. Both had only diminutive navies, really just coast guard vessels.

Marcos Sr. also had calculated that China and Vietnam would hesitate to resist his occupation of the area because he could invoke US military assistance because of the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty.

Several years after the Democratic Republic of Vietnam defeated the US-backed South Vietnam in 1976, its nationalist government ordered its battle-hardened troops to occupy 10 reefs from 1988 to 1990. It didn’t attempt though to grab the eight islands that the Philippines had occupied. The Chinese, fearing Vietnam would try to grab other remaining features, occupied six reefs, also in 1988.

The Philippines was helpless, or didn’t even care. These occupations occurred just two-and-half years after the People Power 1 revolt, and it was still unstable politically, with the Cory Aquino government focused on defeating the coup attempts against it, launched by her former allies themselves.

I have been raising the alarm over Vietnam for several years now, and have written eight columns on this topic. The following are the first paragraphs from my July 31, 2023, article titled “PH blah-blahs over Spratlys claims; Vietnam builds artificial islands and fortresses”:

Senate

What a country. The Senate is spending P10 billion for its new building at the Bonifacio Global City — close, of course, to the swankiest restaurants and shops there. (The cost has ballooned to P35 billion, according to the latest Senate report). The Aquino III government spent P1 billion for an “arbitration” suit against China that turned out to be useless except as a propaganda campaign tool.

We will allocate P125 billion for a Maharlika Investment Fund that most investment bankers who aren’t with the government are shaking their heads over.

Yet we spent and will spend almost very little in order to defend the islands we occupy in the Spratlys, by fortifying them. We just blah-blah about it, fooling ourselves that calling the sea there the West Philippine Sea establishes our ownership of everything there.

Vietnam, a nation ravaged by war for decades, shames us. Since 2016, it has spent considerable amounts — at least $200 million by one estimate — to turn the islands and reefs they occupy into formidable fortifications, to ensure their defense against an aggressor. Following close on China’s heels, it has reclaimed 300 hectares to enlarge the small islands they control. It plans to spend another $500 million for such purposes in the next few years, according to exclusive articles by this newspaper’s reporter. It certainly hasn’t been only China that has reclaimed land in the Spratlys to transform them into artificial islands complete with infrastructure.

Right after the arbitration panel handed down its useless “award” in 2016 and seeing that even the US has been powerless to stop China’s massive island building, Vietnam has done the same, albeit on a smaller scale that it could afford, in order to, as that geopolitical aphorism puts it, “establish facts” (sovereignty) on the ground.

Aquino III

While President Benigno Aquino III, his foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario and our political elite were shouting to the world to force China to comply with the arbitration (even as the tribunal didn’t actually order it to do anything), Vietnam, the other major claimant in the Spratlys, was quiet but wasn’t sitting idly by.

By 2021, Vietnam had built on the 29 features it occupies in the Spratlys one airport (on Spratly Island), 13 artificial islands, 38 helipads, 49 reef forts, four radar stations and 28 “rigs.” Vietnam’s outposts in the South China Sea fall into three categories: occupied islets, concrete buildings atop reefs (called “pillboxes”) and isolated platforms constructed on undersea banks, the so-called DK1 rigs.

These rigs (called DK1 by the Vietnamese) constitute Vietnam’s unique strategy to assert its sovereignty in the Spratlys at much lesser cost than that incurred by the Chinese with their artificial islands. The structures are engineered after offshore oil rigs, and 29 of these have been built on nine submerged banks and shoals from 1997 to 2016.

“Together with guardian vessels, these ‘DK1’ rigs could monitor and expel foreign fishing vessels away from nearby waters and accommodate injured or sick Vietnamese fishermen for treatment, creating favorable conditions for helicopters to pick up and rescue the sick and the ‘wounded,’” a detailed study on Vietnam’s recent expansion and military deployment explained.

DK1

Vietnam, in fact, boasts that its DK1 rigs are a huge accomplishment in its defense of its Spratly possessions that its newspapers have run articles praising the architect of these rigs and hailing the heroism of soldiers stationed on these rigs for months.

Vietnam doesn’t hide the fact that the features it occupies are military installations. An article in the Vietnamese media Vinexpress was headlined: “The military outposts guarding Vietnam’s southern continental shelf, a look back.” Instead of being managed as a civilian entity, as part of a province as in the case of China and the Philippines, the Vietnamese-occupied features on the Spratly Islands are supervised by military commands: the Naval Regions 2 and 4 of the Vietnamese Navy.

In February 2021, the AMTI, which has been an American anti-China propaganda venue for the South China Sea disputes, published an article that detailed Vietnam’s accelerated militarization of its facilities in the Spratlys. It claimed that it was “Hanoi’s continuing focus on making its bases more resilient to invasion or blockade and strengthening deterrence by ensuring it can strike Chinese facilities.”

Then in July 2022, the AMTI reported:

“Vietnam has accelerated and expanded dredging and landfill work at several of its outposts in the Spratly Islands in the second half of 2022, creating roughly 420 acres of new land this year and bringing its total in the last 10 years to 540 acres. The work includes expanded landfill work at four features identified by AMTI earlier this year and new dredging at five additional features. The scale of the landfill work, while still falling far short of the more than 3,200 acres of land created by China from 2013 to 2016, is significantly larger than previous efforts from Vietnam and represents a major move toward reinforcing its position in the Spratlys.”

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‘Vietnam set to become biggest expansionist power in South China Sea’
Source: Breaking News PH