Coast Guard eyes revised rules of force, plans joint patrols with US
The Philippine Coast Guard plans to include laser technology in its rules on the use of force after the February 6 laser-pointing incident in Ayungin Shoal involving the Chinese Coast Guard (CCG).
“For the Philippine Coast Guard and the United States Coast Guard, there are also ongoing talks now about a possibility of joining the US Coast Guard in a joint patrol in WPS (West Philippine Sea),” PCG spokesperson for WPS Commodore Jay Tarriela said Monday in an interview on CNN Philippines.
Tarriela said the inclusion of lasers in PCG’s rules needs the approval of the National Task Force WPS (NTF-WPS), which is chaired by the National Security Adviser – currently Secretary Eduardo Ano—and counts undersecretaries from 16 government departments and agencies as members.
“For the PCG, we are currently including the use of laser technology in our rules on the use of force. But again, our rules on the use of force have to be approved by the NTF-WPS,” he said.
Last week, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. summoned Chinese Ambassador Huang Xilian and told him “close friends do not use military-grade lasers against each other.”
Mr. Marcos was referring to the latest incident in which a Chinese coast guard vessel aimed a military-grade laser at a PCG ship carrying out a resupply mission in Ayungin Shoal, which the Philippines occupies but which China also claims.
The crew of BRP Malapascua said they suffered temporary blindness.
“I said that the laser-pointing incident was only a part of what we are seeing as a—ntensifying or escalating of the actions of the marine militia of China, the coast guard of China, and the navy of China,” the President said.
China, for its part, denied pointing military-grade lasers at the PCG ship, as Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the Chinese Coast Guard only used a “hand-held greenlight pointer” to measure the distance and speed of the Philippine vessel.
The joint patrols with the US Coast Guard, meanwhile, are in line with the freedom of navigation efforts of the United States in the South China Sea.
Tarriela said the joint patrols would gain cooperation among other countries in the region and would benefit the vessels that are passing through the area.
“This is not in the infancy stage. There is already a clear path of possibility since the defense department of the United States has also supported the joint patrol with the Philippines Navy and the US Navy, so there is certainty in this particular joint patrol to happen,” he added to CNN’s ‘The Source’.
Meanwhile, Tarriela said the PH Coast Guard is eyeing to modernize and increase its assets, as it only has three offshore patrol vessels.
“We have some spaces in WPS that we failed to patrol,” he said.
The Philippines should keep pushing back against Chinese aggression in the WPS to regain ground lost because of the previous administration’s policy of appeasement, a maritime expert said Monday.
In an interview on the ABS-CBN News Channel, Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, said the Marcos administration has been more open and transparent on developments in the West Philippine Sea.
“The reason why China has been able to get away with a lot of things is that the previous administration cooperated with it in hiding events and downplaying them,” he said, referring to the administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte, who emphasized friendly ties with Beijing and downgraded relations with Washington.
“So this policy of immediately reporting what has happened really should be done,” Batongbacal said, adding that he hoped this would be a standing policy to discourage China from taking more provocative actions in the future.
He added that the Philippines should work with other countries with territorial claims in the South China Sea to make China “accept and recognize” international law and “appropriate allocation of jurisdiction in the South China Sea.”
“The only way to do that, in the context of the international community, is to make it seem that… going against the interest of this region [and of] its neighbors is only going to create more problems for it and create bigger burdens for it,” he said.
At a high-level security conference in Germany, Foreign Affairs Secretary Enrique Manalo said harassment by the Chinese has become a daily situation faced by Filipino fishers and the Philippine Coast Guard in the West Philippine Sea.
At a roundtable discussion in Munich over the weekend, Manalo said the Philippines was determined to address the territorial dispute through peaceful and legal means.
“Rival claims can only be solved peacefully by adhering to peaceful and rules-based approaches. The Philippine approach, articulated long before and formalized in the 1982 Manila Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes, enjoys the support of the international community,” he said.
Manalo said tensions caused by incidents and aggressive actions inconsistent with the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea are not conducive to promoting peace and stability.
Despite a decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration to the contrary, China asserts historical ownership of nearly 90 percent of the waters. Other claimants to those waters are Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan.
Manalo said he recognized the complexity of the country’s relations with China.
In his speech before the Munich conference, Manalo said the “very strong links” of the Philippines—as well as other countries in the region—with China on the economic and cultural fronts create a more complex situation.
“We have this issue on the South China Sea with China, but at the same time we’ve also agreed with China that this issue is not going to be the sum total of our relationship,” he said.
He said the daily incidents of harassment that Filipinos experience in the South China Sea as well as land reclamation activities have deprived the Philippines of the use of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ).
Also on Monday, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte urged the government to go beyond merely issuing a diplomatic protest against China’s latest act of “bullying” in the West Philippine Sea.
“I think a simple diplomatic protest right now is not enough,” Villafuerte said in an interview. “Definitely, it’s a part of harassment and bullying—a big, powerful country bullying the Philippines.”
Given that “the Philippines cannot fight China on its own, we should promote relationships with our allies … (with) the US, Japan, our neighbors to make China feel that it cannot continue doing this. It’s really sad that this thing is happening, that we are being bullied. We should stand up and unite as a nation to tell China to stop this.”