PRESIDENTIAL Peace Adviser Jesus Dureza on Saturday lambasted two seasoned diplomats for airing undue criticisms against Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay Jr.
Dureza said it was “unfair” for former Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario and former Ambassador to the United States Jose Cuisia Jr.
to blame Yasay for failing to convince the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to issue a joint statement on the ruling of the Permanent Court of Arbitration against China.
In a radio interview, Dureza said that the statement of these “seasoned diplomats” and “stalwarts of diplomatic service” were “unfair.”
On Friday, del Rosario sniped at Yasay, saying that “Ideally he [Yasay] should have stood strongly for promoting the arbitration ruling as being part of the final statement.”
Cuisia, on the other hand, said that Yasay should have “encouraged Asean countries to come up with a statement.”
“The ruling is recognized by many other major nations including the US, European Union, Japan, and so on. What’s wrong with saying we welcome this decision and we hope to work together with ASEAN in trying to get China to come up with a reasonable stance on this South China Sea issue?,” Cuisia said.
Dureza said that before Del Rosario and Cuisia criticized Yasay the latter should have check first the position of the government.
“I think I expected something better from these two gentlemen that before they could have publicly criticized the incumbent secretary of foreign affairs of President Duterte, that they could have done due diligence first in finding out what is the real position of the government,” Dureza said in a radio interview over a state-owned Radyo ng Bayan.
Meanwhile, Yasay also on Saturday said it was his predecessors who failed to get the Asean to include the ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal.
“My predecessors failed to get this vital united statement from Asean because of their hard line approach not realizing that there are many ways to skin the cat,” Yasay said.
During the Asean’s foreign minister meeting on July 25 in Vientiane, the 10-member countries never mentioned the historic victory of the Philippines against China’s excessive claim over the contested West Philippine Sea in their traditional joint communiqué.
Apart from the Philippines, Asean countries, including Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia, have overlapping claims over parts of the South China Sea.
Yasay said that the Asean members have conveyed the same core message urging China to respect the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos).
“The united statement and joint communiqué of Asean as worded did not in any way weaken the legal foundations of our claim and the award given to us by the Arbitral Tribunal,” Yasay said.
“On the contrary the statement was a resounding diplomatic triumph that enabled Asean to join our traditional partners, ally and the international community in urging China to uphold international law and respect the processes and mechanisms under UNCLOS in resolving the dispute in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea which implicitly called for respect of the Ruling of the Arbitral Tribunal,” Yasay added.
In a previous interview, former undersecretary and Philippine Representative to the United Nations Lauro Baja urged the Duterte administration not to expect anymore a joint statement from the Asean stressing that such statement is “irrelevant.”
“We should no longer expect in the future that there will be an Asean statement on China…I think in so far as the question of South China sea concerning Asean not issuing a statement is becoming irrelevant,” Baja said.
Laos, this year’s Asean summit chair, has already declared that it will not issue any joint statement on the Tribunal’s ruling invalidating China’s excessive nine-dash line claim in the West Philippine Sea.
Baja said the reason why there was no joint statement issued was the lack of consensus among the Asean members.
“No joint statement because there was no consensus. A statement cannot be issued even only one member objecting it,” Baja said.