Media has bombarded the airwaves with
information mainly criticizing President Rodrigo Roa Duterte putting him in a
box and painting him as Pro-Chinese and has forgotten his balls with respect to
upholding the rights of the Philippines in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).
Criticisms by the opposition
are slowly getting into the heads of the public, so much so because they want
Duterte to do un-Duterte like things or actions.
So now, we can see former
supporters of the President being more vocal , believing the so-called ‘nationalistic’
fervor being expoused by the enemies of the President.
(photo credit to owner) |
The question that begs to be
answered is the current situation/happening in the WPS be taken as it is? Is
the nationalistic feelings being evoked by the opposition not misplaced? Is the
media telling the truth with respect to the whole truth of situation until the
very root of it, years ago?
Veteran journalist Mr. Rigoberto Tiglao in his The Manila Times
column last June 17, “Nope,
Duterte won’t lose Recto Bank the way Aquino and Del Rosario lost Panatag” he lays down what transpired during the
Benigno “Pnoy” Aquino administration which overflowed to the present Duterte
administration who is now painstakingly trying to fix and balance the ever
changing geo-politics in the area which his sadly (because of lack of resources
– a respectable Philippine Navy and Coast Guard) not totally in favor of the
Philippines.
The
Republic has done what is dignified and necessary, which is for its foreign
affairs department to file a formal protest on the Recto Bank incident, and to
ask China to investigate the matter and prosecute the Chinese crew responsible
for it. As Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo put it, it is a correct calibrated
response. And “calibration” is a distinct feature of good diplomacy.
Del
Rosario now wants Duterte to make the same mistake, claiming that he should
invoke our sovereignty over Recto Bank, where the incident occurred.
The
worst and most biased statement has come from Carpio, who claims that the
Chinese fishing vessel was part of a militia under the command of the People’s
Liberation Army, which implies that China is now using guerrilla warfare to
enforce its clams in the South China Sea. Now, where did he get that
information, the CIA? Is Carpio getting so depressed over his leaving the
Supreme Court soon that he is losing his mind?
For purposes of public
knowledge and information dissemination, for reasons of being clarity and
truthful, we are quoting in full the said article.
Nope,
Duterte won’t lose Recto Bank the way Aquino and Del Rosario lost Panatag
WHY? Because he isn’t following the Yellow playbook in dealing
with foreign-affairs crises, especially as it involves China.
The gall of former foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario
to tell President Duterte how to deal with the foreign affairs crisis involving
the sinking in Recto Bank of a Filipino fishing boat by a Chinese vessel, which
to him would be for Duterte to hold “China accountable.”
It was del Rosario, after two weeks of President Aquino’s
incompetent handling of the Scarborough Shoal stand-off in 2012*, who lost the
territory to China. Del Rosario ordered—without his president’s permission,
according to a participant in the episode—the two Philippine vessels there to
withdraw, in effect turning the shoal over to the Chinese. (Scarborough, the
shoal’s international name, is called Panatag or Bajo de Masinloc by
us.)
And why did he do that? He was so gullible, or naively trusting
of the US that he believed the claim of Kurt Campbell, the US assistant
secretary of state for Asia, that the Chinese through then vice foreign
minister Fu Ying had agreed to withdraw its vessels on the same day (June 3).
Why, even a book so admiring of del Rosario that he most
probably bankrolled its writing and its printing, reported that. But there was
no such agreement, and Campbell in his 2016 book, The Pivot: The Future of American
Statecraft in Asia, didn’t even claim that.
US as broker?
And why on earth would China agree to having as a broker the US, which it knows wants Asia to hate it? As one analyst emphasized: “The PRC’s detestation of internationalization of its one-sided scrum with the Philippines is a byword in Chinese diplomacy.” Why would it let the US get involved?
It is a testament to the power of oligarchs that del Rosario
still has the gall to show his face in public, and disseminate his strident
anti-Chinese views, made possible by his highly paid academics at the “Albert
del Rosario Institute Stratbase” and the Philippine Star, controlled by the
Indonesian Anthoni Salim, for whom he has worked for two decades.
One of del Rosario’s academics at his institute, La Salle
faculty member Richard Heydarian in fact has gone all out to rouse xenophobia
against China for the Recto Bank incident. He has shamelessly posted in his
Facebook time-line a 2018 photo of a fishing vessel sinking in Palawan,
portraying it as that which the Chinese had “sunk” at the Recto Bank incident
last week. For an academic, that kind of posting of fake news is an
unpardonable lie.
But it wasn’t just del Rosario’s naivete—or servility—in
believing what a US diplomat told him that was the reason for our losing
Scarborough. It was his entire mental attitude (and that of Aquino), the
actions he got government to do, and his incessant blabbering against China
that resulted in the first loss of Philippine territory by an administration.
Now he and the Yellows—and that includes Supreme Court Justice
Antonio Carpio—want Duterte to make the same mistakes they did that made us
lose Scarborough. These stupendous mistakes were as follows:
Bad-mouthed China
First, as he is still doing now, he bad-mouthed China so much like an American hawkish general, incessantly calling it a “regional bully,” and was so belligerent towards the superpower as soon as the Scarborough crisis broke out on April 10. In response of course, China’s leadership hardened their position on their claim to Scarborough.
Let private
citizens—and we won’t lack for anti-China xenophobes like Heydarian
and Rappler in this country—curse China until they get hoarse.
The foreign affairs secretary is the alter ego of the President
in foreign relations, and diplomacy is a matter of finesse and cleverness not
crude name-calling. Theodore Roosevelt’s aphorism for diplomats is so right:
“Speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.” Aquino and del Rosario
totally, stupidly reversed this, speaking loudly and by necessity carried a
small stick.
Well actually, they thought they carried a big stick – US
military might.
But US President Obama during the Scarborough crisis outrightly
rejected Aquino’s plea for the US Seventh Fleet to force the Chinese out of
Scarborough. Instead, Obama took advantage of the situation to tell Aquino to
have enacted a new version of US military basing agreement here, the
euphemistically titled Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement, allegedly to
frighten off future Chinese plans in the South China Sea. US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton on the other hand told del Rosario to file a suit in an
international venue. After six months, American lawyers proposed the brilliant
idea of filing a suit not in the international court but with an arbitral panel.
Dignified
The Republic has done what is dignified and necessary, which is for its foreign affairs department to file a formal protest on the Recto Bank incident, and to ask China to investigate the matter and prosecute the Chinese crew responsible for it. As Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo put it, it is a correct calibrated response. And “calibration” is a distinct feature of good diplomacy.
The Chinese were much more dignified than Aquino during the
Scarborough stand-off. China’s leader Xi Jinping never said anything about it
(nor in this Recto Bank incident), nor did any ranking government or party
leader.
Who did the talking? Not even China’s foreign affairs minister.
There was only one mouth talking, and in a very disciplined way, that of the
ministry’s official spokesman. During the Scarborough stand-off, even
Philippine military officials were so talkative about the crisis. Now what
message is sent, when a general or admiral talks about his country’s squabble
with another?
C’mon now, with China struggling uphill against American and
Western media’s demonization of it—largely successfully—as the new Evil Empire,
do you think China won’t prosecute the Chinese crew responsible for giving it a
black eye in the world stage? I would think they’d try them in a flash, and
execute them by firing squad.
Protest
The Yellows are trying to bait Duterte, insisting that he should protest as loudly as Aquino did during the Scarborough stand-off.
Unless we’ve declared war on China, the nation’s representatives
can’t publicly treat it as the enemy the way Del Rosario’s many words did
during the Scarborough crisis.
Because of del Rosario’s belligerent statements when he was
foreign secretary, and especially when the Aquino government released photos of
our fully armed sailors guarding “helpless” Chinese fishermen, there was a
tsunami of outrage against the Philippines in China’s, many even demanding that
the People’s Liberation Army send its warships to Scarborough, since Aquino had
deployed the Navy’s BRP Gregorio del Pilar. That of course helped harden the
Chinese government’s position on the Scarborough crisis. Do we want a repeat of
that?
The Yellows’ second mistake in the Scarborough stand-off was
that del Rosario and Aquino immediately framed the crisis as a question of
sovereignty, insisting that the area was ours and so the Chinese should leave
it immediately. Del Rosario now wants Duterte to make the same mistake,
claiming that he should invoke our sovereignty over Recto Bank, where the
incident occurred.
The worst and most biased statement has come from Carpio, who
claims that the Chinese fishing vessel was part of a militia under the command
of the People’s Liberation Army, which implies that China is now using
guerrilla warfare to enforce its clams in the South China Sea. Now, where did
he get that information, the CIA? Is Carpio getting so depressed over his
leaving the Supreme Court soon that he is losing his mind?
The reality is that China has its claims and we have ours. No international court can and
will ever decide whose claim is legitimate, and therefore should occupy the
disputed territory.
Arbitration
The arbitration ruling that the Yellows claim was a total victory for us ruled only on maritime rights, not on sovereignty issues which is categorically not covered by the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas. For example, the arbitral panel ruled that Scarborough is within our exclusive economic zone (EEZ). It didn’t rule though whether China’s sovereign claim to it as its territory it calls Huangyan Island (and not just because of that vague nine-dash line) is legitimate or not.
As we and the world realized two years after, the ruling of the
arbitration suit against China is useless as it can’t be enforced. The reality
is that the country which physically controls a disputed area can’t be evicted.
But it can’t use force as the United Nations Charter’s Chapter I, Article 2 (4)
categorically bans “the threat or use of force” in claiming a territory.
It is useless and counter-productive for us to frame the Recto
Bank incident as a question of sovereignty. Useless, since sovereignty issues
in this era cannot be settled, except though mutual agreement of the claimants.
It is counter-productive as it risks the hardening the Chinese position to one
in which they’d use all their resources short of violence to try to claim what
they think is theirs – as they did in the Scarborough stand-off.
We should follow, as China really has been doing, Deng
Xiaoping’s idea, which is to let a “wiser next generation” deal with these
sovereignty issues. We have to find ways to cooperate with China in a manner
that would benefit us, and not just serve America’s need to demonize it.
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Report from Manila Times
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