Marites D. Vitug’s new book, “Rock Solid: How the Philippines Won Its Maritime Case Against China,” tells the story like a film thriller.
It begins in three time zones on July 12, 2016, the day of the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) decision. Waiting for the
5 a.m. e-mail from The Hague was the law firm retained by the Philippines in Washington, DC.
Waiting with them late afternoon in Manila were Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, progenitor of the case and its champion, former DFA secretary Albert del Rosario and Benigno Aquino III, two weeks after his term as President ended.
Three years back, he resolved intense Cabinet debate between pros and antis. Deciding to file the case “because it’s right,” his government’s question to the ICJ’s Arbitration Tribunal was: Who has sovereign rights over these islets, now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t rocks, atolls and reefs west of the Philippines?
When The Hague e-mail finally broke the news of “overwhelming victory” for the country, faces beamed like the sun suddenly out in the typhoon season of the Duterte government.
A flashback to nearly half a century backdrops the ICJ decision’s global significance. It’s 1967 and Arvid Pardo, United Nations representative of the tiny island republic of Malta, is giving an impassioned speech at the UN General Assembly. Shifting its gaze to “the seabed and ocean floor (that) constitute nearly three-quarters of the land area of the earth,” he declared: “Oceans are the earth’s womb of life.”
Prevalent legal chaos at sea, with countries fighting over territorial waters and fishing rights, gave Pardo’s warning a sharp edge: “Some countries may be tempted to use their technical competence to achieve near-unbreakable world dominance through control over the seabed and ocean floor.”
A year after that prophecy, the UN formed a commission “to study the seabed, anchored on philosophical thinking that the resources of the deep sea are the common heritage of man,” Vitug writes.
“China, not yet a global power, aligned itself with the developing countries… a leading voice in demanding a 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), where the coastal state had exclusive sovereign rights,” she continues.
In December 1982, the historic Constitution of the Ocean, the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), was ready for signing. The Philippines was among the first 167 signatories.
Prescribing an eminently practical method for protecting the maritime territory of coastal states—“baselines” aka boundaries drawn along their coasts to determine their 200-mile EEZ was “the stellar achievement of UNCLOS,” Vitug writes. “(It) gives states exclusive rights to explore and manage living and nonliving resources in their zones. Countries with opposite or adjacent coasts were to negotiate their overlapping EEZs. When they fail to agree, they should resort to dispute-settlement processes laid out by UNCLOS.”
The Rule of Law where there was none, UNCLOS came in force in 1994. China signed only in 1996, hinting at its divergent perspective. It was 28 years since major historical events converged. Mao Tse Tung was in the throes of his Cultural Revolution in 1968. A new UN Commission was debating a global policy for the sea, and Ferdinand Marcos was looking out to sea.
Top-secret mission
That same year, Marcos ordered a top-secret Marine-Navy mission to the Spratly Islands in what was still universally called the “South China Sea.” It laid a series of stakes, the Philippine flag on an area “that does not legally belong to any state or nation”—five of its 50 scattered, uninhabited small islands among reefs and sandbars, then three more, all renamed “Kalayaan Island Group” (KIG).
Most landlocked Filipinos never even heard of the Spratlys as the Philippines laid stakes on waters with “strategic and economic value.”
In isolation with only birds and turtles for company, the mission entered the geopolitical climate in what would soon be renamed the “West Philippine Sea.”
In 1971, the Philippine Navy cocked its guns upon sighting two Taiwanese warships, which thankfully sailed off.
Recovering from Mao’s economic disaster, China was nowhere to be seen. But in the ’90s, Deng Xiaoping’s China broke its silence. The Philippine Navy was now destroying Chinese buoys in the Spratlys.
By 1994, a newly wealthy China was building four structures, flying its flag on unoccupied Mischief Reef (Panganiban), dead center of the Spratlys. “Eleven Chinese vessels, gunboats and around 1,000 men” were sighted 250 kilometers from Palawan’s shoreline, the closest China had come to Philippine waters in living memory.
Soon, the skipper of a Philippine fishing boat reported to the Coast Guard that he and his crew were detained by the Chinese, driving them off their fishing waters with a warning not to disclose what they saw—a naval base on the reef.
Philippine air and naval reconnaissance photos of three naval ships, two commercial vessels and four small fishing boats confirmed this.
When Philippine media reported the indignation of President Ramos, the Senate, Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and National Defense (DND), “China’s foreign ministry issued a blank denial,” Vitug notes. “But when the Chinese embassy in Manila was shown the photographs, China altered its statement. Now they said, “The structures were put up by low-level functionaries without the knowledge and consent of the Chinese government. Later, Chinese officials simply said these were not military structures but wind shelters for Chinese fishermen in their traditional fishing ground.”
Word war
Things quickly turned into a diplomatic word war between Manila and Beijing over Mischief Reef. Manila insisted China was violating Philippine territory. Beijing made sounds of Sino-Philippines friendship while intoning its claim to “historical rights” to the South China Sea, all the while expanding its infrastructure.
DFA dialogues with Asean on new danger from China was familiar ground by now. Soon after “Beijing’s passage of a law explicitly stating its sovereignty over the Spratlys,” Asean foreign ministers in Manila agreed on a statement of concern on the South China Sea in 1992. Meanwhile, the DFA was instructing all Philippine embassies to tell the world.
To no avail. By 1998, China had a helipad, wharves, more communications equipment over Mischief Reef. By 2003, several buildings stood on concrete platforms with weather monitoring equipment, even a greenhouse.
By 2013, when the Philippines filed its case at the ICJ, satellite photos showed China building an artificial island over the reef. By 2015, 32 dredgers were breaking up coral beds, pulverized to what gradually became 598 hectares of new land at severe cost to the ecosystem. Pardo’s warning was coming to pass.
This near irreparable damage continued in the reefs of Scarborough Shoal to the north—“a narrow belt of barely submerged coral reefs enclosing a lagoon of clear blue water,” rich fishing grounds and typhoon refuge for sea vessels 220 km west of Zambales.
“By the late 1990s onwards, every typhoon season brought the political temperature between China and the Philippines (to) fever pitch. Chinese fishermen, supported by their maritime authorities, often plied their trade in the Scarborough Shoal using illegal methods,” Vitug writes.
“Creeping invasion,” President Estrada’s Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado called it. In 1999, the Estrada government laid a ninth stake in Ayungin Shoal, purposely running the BRP Sierra Madre aground as a lookout to Scarborough 40 km away.
Replacing Joseph Estrada in 2001, President Gloria Arroyo’s first five years saw continued Chinese dynamite fishing and poaching of sharks, giant turtles, clams and oysters, semiprecious corals and seaweed in Scarborough.
This led to a regular rhythm of arrests, confiscation and detention with cases filed against the Chinese.
Ancient shipping lanes
Besides its trove of marine treasures, some a century old or older, the South China Sea also happens to be ancient shipping lanes. Crippling this route for 30 percent of global maritime trade would cause a global economic crisis, analysts say.
China’s 9-dash line, announced in 2009 claiming historical rights to 90 percent of the South China Sea, and refusal to recognize arbitration under the UNCLOS it signed in 2013, challenge the whole world, just as Pardo warned.
Vitug recounts thriller-like details of the quest for oil in Reed Bank, 250 km off Palawan, with a hotshot Filipino geologist, who discovered signs of an oil-rich area in the West Philippine Sea, prodding the Arroyo government to explore.
This was quickly followed by a Chinese naval blockade halting a private Filipino firm’s oil exploration and Philippine archaeological and marine research.
All these would bring the United States, France, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom and Indonesia to joint naval exercises in the South China Sea. Shedding light on this standoff with China is a chapter retracing a century of Philippine-US relations.
A vital sticking point remains—what does its Mutual Defense Treaty commit the US to protect of Philippine territory expanded to the sea by UNCLOS?
What Pardo did not foresee was byzantine political conflict projected out to sea. Arroyo’s three state visits (and 12 more “working” and “official” visits) to China in her 10-year presidency led to 65 agreements in seven years.
Her 2004 state visit to Hu Jintao’s China led to two graft-ridden deals: the Philippine North Rail and the national broadband network with China’s ZTE.
Arroyo’s arrest for plunder in 2011 and dealings with China shadowed Aquino’s successor, Rodrigo Duterte, whom Arroyo supported.
Loans
Ignoring the country’s improved position to protect its now larger territory with The Hague ruling, Duterte released Arroyo from hospital arrest. Then, after his own state visit to Xi Jinping’s China, he initiated agreements for massive Chinese infrastructure loans.
Beyond “Rock Solid’s” timeline, these happened in Duterte’s first two years: hushing up China’s most recent seizure of Sandy Cay, 4.6 km from Pag-asa. Chinese firms and labor to rehabilitate Marawi City pulverized in war with Muslim extremists. Chinese investors taking over Boracay with gambling casinos. Chinese mining leases on ancestral land, with the Philippine military driving its indigenous owners to mass evacuation.
Chinese investors all over the country’s farmland and fishing pens with lurid stories of Filipino slave labor. Destruction of mountains in Surigao, Mindanao, for nickel ore bound for China, along with pulverized undersea corals to build China’s artificial islands, all radically reshaping the country’s face while destroying a haven of marine biodiversity valuable to the whole world.
Thousands of young Chinese males migrating to Manila. Building a new bridge with China like a slash on the capital’s oldest historical face.
“Rock Solid” wakes the nation to how this Chinese invasion began in Filipino ignorance. Carpio calls its “a multigenerational struggle” to defend our territory—and our very soul, I might add.
Carpio says: “This generation got the ruling. The next generation will convince the world to support us. And maybe the next generation after that will convince China.” —CONTRIBUTED