IT is likely that the Philippines’s dispute with China over parts of the West Philippine Sea will still be unresolved when the next president assumes office in June 2016.
It is a David-versus-Goliath situation. Except for size, however, the Philippines cannot compare itself with the real David, who defeated his giant adversary.
China is the world’s second-largest economy and an emerging military superpower. The Philippines, on the other hand, is still developing its economy, and has to depend on assistance from other countries to build up its armed forces.
With no military capability to defend its claims, the Philippines has gone to The Hague, where it filed a complaint against China with the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in accordance with the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
In July a team of high-ranking government officials, including Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio, presented the Philippines’s position on the maritime dispute. Unclos governs maritime disputes on overlapping maritime zones, like overlapping territorial seas. As signatories to Unclos, China and the Philippines are bound by the Unclos compulsory dispute settlement mechanism.
The Philippines filed the complaint following China’s takeover of the Scarborough Shoal, Mischief Reef and the Subi Reef, which are within the Philippines’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), as guaranteed under Unclos. According to Carpio, China claims almost 90 percent of the West Philippine Sea under its nine-dash line map, which overlaps 80 percent of the Philippines’s EEZ.
If China’s claim succeeds, the Philippines will lose 80 percent of its EEZ in the West Philippine Sea, including the Reed Bank and the Malampaya natural-gas field. The proceedings at the Arbitration Court will determine whether it has jurisdiction over the case. If it has, the Philippines will present its arguments to support its claim in future proceedings. If the international court decides it has no jurisdiction, then the case is over.
China has refused to participate in the proceedings, claiming that the dispute is not maritime but territorial, in which case the Arbitration Court would have no authority to hear the case.
The filing of the complaint did not stop China from imposing its might. The Philippines, according to Carpio, has the weakest navy among the claimants (which include Vietnam and Malaysia) in the West Philippine Sea.
Thus, the Philippines lost the Mischief Reef in 1995 and the Scarborough Shoal in 2012 to the Chinese, while Vietnam lost the Paracels in 1974 and the Fiery Reef Cross in 1988. Fishermen from Zambales and other provinces, who have been fishing in the Scarborough Shoal since the Spanish colonial period, are now being chased away by Chinese vessels.
China has also been trying to drive away the Philippine marines aboard the shipwrecked RPS Sierra Madre, which serves as the country’s station on the Ayungin Reef, by preventing the Philippine Navy from delivering food and other supplies to the marines.
Numerous reports also show China’s continuing reclamation activities in the West Philippine Sea, including the construction of artificial islands and military facilities. China has already reclaimed more than 1,173 hectares of land between December 2013 and June this year.
In August China said it had stopped its reclamation activities. In a report on September 14, however, The Washington Post said China was still constructing artificial islands in the disputed area, particularly on the Subi Reef and Mischief Reef. Citing the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), The Post said that the construction included a new airfield that would enable China to control the air space over the region.
The CSIS, which was also cited by other news reports, said a runway at the Mischief Reef would allow China to conduct constant patrols over the Reed Bank, where the Philippines has been conducting oil explorations for many years.
The only advantage, if it could be called an advantage, which the Philippines has over China is the sympathy of other countries, including the United States, Japan and Australia.
In a speech at West Point in May last year, President Barack Obama warned that the US was prepared to respond to China’s aggression, saying that it could impact America’s allies and draw in the US military. He acknowledged, however, that the US could not participate in resolving the disputes in the West Philippine Sea, because it was not a signatory to Unclos.
For his part, the Australian prime minister has advised China to ease off on its reclamation activities, because it could encourage its small neighbors to seek stronger presence of the US military in the region.
The Philippines, however, cannot expect the US to defend it in case of an armed confrontation with China, one of the biggest trading partners and creditors of the US.
Thus, the new president of the Philippines will face the problem of how to defend the country’s territory through diplomacy or the international courts (actually, the only option at present) and build up the capability of the armed forces against internal or external aggression.
To be continued
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