Leaders from Southeast Asia, China and other neighboring countries who met in Singapore for the Asean summit last week cited the importance of keeping peace in the contentious South China Sea.
Yes, we can all agree. Peace must be pursued, in every way, through diplomacy, perseverance and optimism. Nobody is arguing that peaceful negotiation is the only sustainable solution to conflict in the South China Sea or anywhere else. But such a peace must be a peace of equals, not any one nation’s.
It cannot be a peace where one nation gets to display irresponsible militarism, asserting its ownership of the entire South China Sea, shooing away the civilian vessels of its neighbors while they are plying their own territorial waters, building structures on artificial islands in waters that belong to others by right.
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who attended the summit, said the region has set a good example of managing territorial disputes and keeping the peace as it works toward setting a “code of conduct” to govern navigation and other activities.
“We have found the way to properly manage and defuse differences, for example, on the issue of the South China Sea in the past years,” Li said.
President Duterte, who promised to complete a code of conduct in three years and “at all cost,” said: “Everything’s been excellent between China and the rest of Asean except for the fact that there’s friction between the Western nations and China.”
But is everything “excellent” when Filipino fishermen in Scarborough Shoal complain that the Chinese Coast Guard routinely board their fishing boats and grab their catch with impunity?
Is everything excellent when China has constructed more than 1,600 structures in the disputed South China Sea, nearly half of these in waters being claimed by the Philippines?
China wants to reassure neighbors of its peaceful intentions, but its aggressive actions cast serious doubts on its sincerity. Indeed, if action speaks louder than words, then China seems to be offering and pursuing peace with the benevolence of a bully.
Everyone knows that the only way to deal with bullies is to stand up to them, but what do you do if you’re the Philippines and the bully is China?
“China is there. That is the reality,” President Duterte said. “Strong military activity will prompt a response from China. I do not mind everybody going to war, except that the Philippines is just beside those islands. If there is shooting there my country will be the first to suffer.”
True.
But the Philippines can take other types of affirmative action that do not involve the military to help dissuade serious violations of Philippine sovereignty and maritime jurisdiction.
Aside from completing the code of conduct, we can also enlist stronger international and regional support by not abandoning the July 2016 landmark ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration that invalidated China’s massive claims to the disputed waters, a ruling that China does not recognize.
Acting Chief Justice Antonio T. Carpio, who was part of the legal team that brought the case to the arbitral tribunal, made good suggestions in this regard: 1. The Philippine government can sponsor a resolution before United Nations General Assembly urging China to abide by the ruling; 2. It can enforce the ruling without China’s participation by entering into sea boundary agreements with Vietnam and Malaysia, delineating our countries’ exclusive economic zones; 3. It can file an extended continental shelf claim off the coast of Luzon facing the South China Sea before the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf and; 4. It can ask the United States and Asean members to make Scarborough Shoal an “official red line” in the South China Sea dispute. (In international affairs, a red line is a condition set by a certain party. When that condition is violated, the offending party may suffer “severe consequences” that can range from economic sanctions to military actions.)
Congress can also pass two pending maritime measures vital to strengthening our sovereignty—The Philippine Maritime Zones Act and the Archipelagic Sea Lanes Act.
All these are nonmilitary measures for a peaceful resolution of the South China Sea issues, but at the same time they present a tougher, more direct diplomatic stand.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano