Is China serious in demanding that the current tension in the West Philippine Sea should be solved only through diplomacy, that is, consultation and negotiation between our two countries?
We know very well that diplomacy has failed—and failed miserably—in putting an end to Chinese harassment of our Navy and Coast Guard vessels. These vessels have tried to bring food and supplies to the BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal where we maintain a small military outpost to protect our maritime rights based on the 2016 ruling of the Permanent Arbitral Tribunal in The Hague and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS.
Our Department of Foreign Affairs has fired off hundreds of diplomatic protests and notes verbale to China’s Foreign Ministry after every untoward incident in the WPS in recent years. But Beijing has simply ignored all these protests, and even increased its military presence in what is our own Exclusive Zone (EEZ) to prevent our Coast Guard, Navy and fisherfolk from asserting our rights under international law.
In the latest incident in the West Philippine Sea, reports indicate that a Chinese Navy missile boat used a high-intensity laser three times against a Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) aircraft conducting a maritime surveillance over the WPS, putting the lives of the Filipino crew in grave danger. The BFAR pilots issued a radio challenge to the Chinese vessel to stop the laser pointing but got no response.
The next day, a Chinese helicopter also chased and flew close to BFAR’s BRP Datu Romapenet during its resupply mission near Bombay Shoal close to Palawan’s mainland. About an hour after the incident, it reappeared and flew as close as 20 meters from the BFAR ship.
The recent encounter between the Philippines and China in the West Philippine Sea took place after our biggest “multilateral maritime cooperative activity” with allied countries such as the United States, Australia, Japan and New Zealand near Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal.
We understand from the latest Philippine Navy report that the number of Chinese vessels in the West Philippine Sea dropped in the last week of September from the previous week. But it appears that there is now another swarm of Chinese vessels in the area, with the Philippine Navy having monitored more Chinese vessels in various locations.
It appears that Beijing does not intend to stop its provocative presence in our Exclusive Economic Zone at all, now or in the immediate future. Given this, we should continue to assert our maritime claim in the WPS based on international law, and expand our maritime cooperation with other friendly counties to counter China insistence on ownership of almost the entire South China Sea on the basis of a fictional and ludicrous “ten-dash-line” claim over the vital sealane.
