It’s funny how top officials of the Duterte administration are tripping all over themselves to make Filipinos believe there is nothing wrong with China making a travesty of our sovereignty. Instead of loudly protesting the territorial intrusions being carried out rampantly by the country’s giant neighbor, the national leaders are displaying an unusual eagerness to defend China’s aggressive actions in territories that have been declared by the United Nations as belonging to the Philippines.
President Rodrigo Duterte, who once dramatically said he would jet ski to the disputed Spratlys, plant the Philippine flag and challenge China “suntukan o barilan?” (fistfight or gunabattle?) during the presidential campaign, has been singing a different tune since he assumed office almost 20 months ago.
Compare that to what he said last Monday in a speech before Filipino-Chinese businessmen: “Why would I go there, bring my Navy, my soldiers, my police and everything only to be slaughtered? I will not commit the lives of the Filipinos only to die unnecessarily. I will not go into a battle which I can never win. We cannot do that today. It is unrealistic.”
What was the drama about the jet ski and the challenge then?
Duterte, while declaring that the disputed islands in the South China Sea (which we call West Philippine Sea, he reminds his audience) are ours, insisted that the Philippine government can only be “diplomatic” in dealing with the territorial row and that the country could not go to war with China.
The President went further, albeit a joke, to say that Chinese can even make the Philippines a province of China if they wanted. Perhaps, Duterte can ask one of his Dutertards to lead a China provincehood movement, just like the US statehood movement of former congressman Rufino Antonio and Elly Pamatong.
“Well, we can only be diplomatic. We can only be talking on friendly and civilized terms,” Duterte said. “We cannot go there, ride in our whatever, Navy, the gray ships, the Coast Guard and start waving our rifles. We cannot do that today. It is unrealistic. It cannot be true.”
But nobody’s telling him to go to war with China. Critics are just telling him to at least file a strong diplomatic protest each time the Asian bully encroach on the country’s sovereignty as it has done in building artificial islands and structures that are obviously for military use on the Kagitingan Reef, after it has been declared by a UN Arbitral Tribunal on July 12, 2016 that the Philippines has exclusive sovereign rights over the West Philippine Sea (in the South China Sea) and that China’s “nine-dash line” was invalid. The tribunal also ruled that China had violated Philippine sovereign rights.
Earlier, Duterte said it’s not the time to fight China and that any move that the country would make in protest of China’s actions may be viewed negatively by our giant neighbor and lead to war that, he said, we are not ready to fight. So our national leader is basically telling China go ahead, bully, you can punch us in the nose whenever you like and we won’t raise even a whimper because we are not ready to hit back.
Duterte has been echoing what China’s President Xi Jin-ping allegedly told him during a visit to Beijing: “His response to me, ‘We’re friends, we don’t want to quarrel with you, we want to maintain the presence of warm relationship, but if you force the issue, we’ll go to war.’”
His narrative of this alleged exchange with Xi has not been confirmed nor denied by Chinese spokesmen, nor by Xi himself, but it seems Duterte is using this line to defend his “friendly” relationship with China. He has, in effect, been making us believe that there are only two options to the territorial dispute: capitulation or war.
Duterte has conveniently forgotten that the previous administration was able to wrangle a crucial legal victory that although not immediately enforceable, could have put pressure on China to slow down on its aggressive actions in the disputed territories. But instead of rallying the family of nations, especially the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) to pressure the Chinese to back off, the Duterte administration decided to play footsie with the funds-rich China in exchange for billions of dollars in pledges – repeat, pledges — of loans and grants.
Instead of following up on the victory obtained by the administration of President Benigno S. Aquino III, a person for which he has shown so much disdain, Duterte’s spokesman, erstwhile professor of international law and nationalist Harry Roque, has blamed the Aquino administration for allowing China to reclaim the islands, saying that the structures found in the disputed isles have been there since the time of Aquino.
A report released by the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative (AMTI) in December last year contradicted Roque’s assumptions. The report showed that China continued its construction of infrastructure necessary for fully functioning air and naval bases on its larger outposts and that some of the structures that were built since the start of 2017, well into Duterte’s first year in office, range from underground storage areas and administrative buildings to large radar and sensor arrays.
Roque not only ignored the recent photos published by the Philippine Daily Inquirer that clearly showed the militarization of the South China Sea by China, he also said that when China loses its might and decides to return the disputed islands to the Philippines, Filipinos would even be thankful to China for building the islands on the South China reefs, wrongly assuming that China would one day find remorse or lose a war and return the islands.
Roque also said the administration is relying on China’s “good faith.” He also asked: “If the Aquino administration was not able to do anything about these artificial islands, what do they want us to do?”
Here’s a simple reply: The Aquino administration not only protested, it brought the matter to the UN tribunal and won a hard-earned victory that Duterte and his minions opted to set aside to pursue super-friendly ties with China.
Guess what Roque had to say after he was told that China has managed to register Chinese names affixed to five submarine features in Benham Rise (which the UN has also declared as belonging to the Philippines) in the books of the International Hydrographic Organization?
“Siopao, mami, hototay soup, all these were named by the Chinese, but this did not mean China owned these,” he said. “There is no bad faith on China’s part.”
Foreign Secretary Alan Cayetano, another erstwhile nationalist, also ignored the photos, the AMTI report and the Benham Rise story. “We’ve never said that they have stopped (building) or that there is nothing happening. What we are saying is, they are not occupying areas that are not habited, meaning, they are not occupying new areas,” he added.
To the report on Chinese names for Benham Rise (now renamed Philippine Rise), Cayetano said: “What was the original name of Philippine Rise? Benham is an American name! The Americans named it. Did we file a diplomatic protest?” Need we say more?
Earlier in August, Cayetano said that those who would like to frame the South China Sea issue as one between the Philippines and China had political objectives and simply wanted to shame Beijing before the international community.
Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio warned against a policy of appeasement by the Philippines, which he said would only embolden China to further militarize its artificial islands in the Spratlys.
“Any statement from the Philippines that it cannot stop China from militarizing its artificial islands, or from undertaking new reclamations, is actually telling China to proceed because the Philippines will not stand in the way,” said Carpio, a member of the legal team that argued the Philippines’ challenge to China’s claim to almost all of the South China Sea in the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
“At the very least the Philippines should protest, and keep on protesting, to preserve its sovereignty and sovereign rights,” he said. “Otherwise, if the Philippines remains silent, it may be deemed under international law to have waived or abandoned its sovereignty or sovereign rights.”
Will this administration ever listen to reason or wake up from its blind love of China?
(valabelgas@aol.com)