[Newspoint] The old goat and the sea

Sovereignty over the West Philippine Sea ought to be a non-issue; the issue has long been resolved by a process to which we rival claimants agreed to submit ourselves. The long and the short of it is that, by right under international law, those waters belong to us; it’s part of our territory, not China’s.   

Alas, there are always poor losers, and the Chinese happen to be an extreme case. They are the guy who, after we’ve defeated him fair and square, waits outside, jumps us, beats us up, takes all our winnings, and beats us up some more. 

I don’t pretend to have any idea how to recover what we lost. In fact, it’s hard to feel sanguine about that prospect with the Chinese able all this past decade to have their way. I wish only to try to clear up the waters before they become so polluted by fake narratives the truth gets pushed deeper and deeper under and carried away by the currents of misinformed and misdirected discourse.

How, indeed, have the Chinese managed to prevail over us, and prevail over us so brutishly, without the law on their side? By a sellout, however else!

That sellout was consummated in the very first month of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidential term, within the same month, as happened, of the issuance of the arbitral ruling, on July 12, 2016. He had just succeeded Benigno Aquino III, whose government it was that had gone to the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, to challenge China’s claim under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Apparently too impatient to seize the day for the Chinese, he threw away the ruling and told them the sea was theirs for the taking.

What was with Duterte? Actually, his own election to the presidency raised a similar question, though not about him but about us.    

Rodrigo Duterte had been a mere provincial city mayor before he became president. A reputation, as a police-state autocrat, had preceded him. His type proved — and continues to prove to still dangerous extents — to have popular appeal, something not exactly odd, given our damaged culture, but sick all the same. He is now detained in The Hague, awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court for “crimes against humanity” in murders perpetrated in his time both as mayor and as president.    

Duterte happens as well to be the precise type China might cultivate as a surrogate. But how could he have become so ready so soon for deployment? The plot only began to dawn in hindsight, when Duterte’s alliance with China’s previous favorite came to light.   

That old favorite was Gloria Arroyo, who had come before Aquino, the president the Chinese couldn’t touch. It was in her time that the sellout conceivably began. It was, of course, a case of mutual favors. China was her own favorite creditor, and Chinese companies her favorite contractors, especially for major infrastructure and technological projects. But, exposed for prohibitive lending rates and grossly padded building costs, the projects that would have made the biggest money for the unholy partnership were scrapped — the NBN-ZTE broadband network and the north and south railways were the most notorious.    

At the close of her presidency, Arroyo was taken to court for plunder, but was exonerated by a Supreme Court she had found the chance to fill with appointees during her abnormally long term — she had stepped up from vice president to serve out the remaining half of her impeached and subsequently resigned predecessor’s term, then got her own elective six years after that. Presumably, Arroyo, who needed to make it up to China, had linked up with Duterte for the purpose, for, sure enough, she became his main person in Congress, serving as Speaker, then Deputy Speaker during his presidency. It was under those arrangements that the Chinese re-staked their claim on the West Philippine Sea.    

As soon Duterte gave the signal, the Chinese began deploying a naval force there to keep even us legal owners out, ramming our boats and blasting us with powerful water cannons when simple chasing away didn’t work. The communities on the coast who lived off those rich grounds fairly contentedly all their lives, as their forebears had done, have thus been robbed of their living. Apart from fish, protected marine species, like corals, and mineral wealth under the seabed, like gas, also lie open to Chinese plunder.   

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte’s successor and former ally, has done little more in asserting our territorial rights than send out our Coast Guard, if only to somehow make our nobly defiant presence felt. Lately, fishermen and civil-society partners have been joining the Coast Guard in the protest, and together, with one voice, they have been countering China’s fake narratives with facts on every accessible platform at every chance.    

But some of our diplomats don’t seem to recognize where diplomacy ends and patriotism begins; they still insist on being nice while we continue to be bullied in our own ground by outsiders. Hopefully, they are merely jaded, thus reformable.   

But that’s hoping against hope in the case of two irrepressibly vociferous senators — Rodante Marcoleta and Alan Peter Cayetano. Being hardcore political descendants of Rodrigo Duterte’s makes it hard to imagine them nice or innocent at all, let alone pure-intentioned. Marcoleta is even suggesting we hand over to the Chinese a whole town in the West Philippine Sea — for goodwill.    

It sure sounds more like ransom to me. – Rappler.com