THE storm of blah-blahs in the wake of the alleged sinking of a Filipino fishing boat by a Chinese vessel in Recto Bank, and the Yellows’ verbal diarrhea over President Duterte’s purported weakness toward China is total nonsense, since they talk about “exclusive economic zones” (EEZs). The disputes are about sovereign territory. Period.
It is becoming absurd, even hilarious, that commentators have been wasting so much space unravelling what they think are the esoteric mysteries of the relationship of the Constitution and international law, or the difference between sovereignty and sovereign rights. That’s all gobbledygook.
You don’t really need to understand the complexities of UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (Unclos) to understand our squabble with China and, one that has been glossed over so much, Vietnam.
The dispute is about sovereign territory, not maritime entitlements. We are claiming that an area in the South China Sea internationally named the Spratly islands is ours; China, Vietnam, and Taiwan claim it is theirs. Even Malaysia claims a part of it is theirs. It is that simple.
While a big part of the disputed territory is water, the claimants claim it is an “archipelago,” which involves sovereignty as much as claims over land territory.
We “own” the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG), which includes Pag-asa, the second biggest island in that area, because Marcos declared ownership of the Republic over it through Presidential Decree 1596 issued in 1978. He justified the grab by claiming that the cluster of island and islets “do not legally belong to any state or nation” and “with [Philippine] control established in accordance with international law, it is deemed to belong and subject to the sovereignty of the Philippines.”
Our claim is not just over the “islands and islets.” It is over the entire area — water, islands, islets, reefs — in a part of the South China Sea which the Marcos decree defined by providing the geographical coordinates of the six points of the hexagon that makes up the KIG. Recto Bank is in the northwestern portion of this.
The EEZs defined by the Unclos notion doesn’t have anything to do with our sovereign claim over the KIG. In fact, half of the KIG, and even Pag-asa island is outside our EEZ, which was delineated only in the 2009 baselines law President Arroyo pushed for during her administration.
Of course, the Chinese and Vietnamese vociferously protested Marcos’ move. But they couldn’t do anything about it. Marcos had his troops occupy it, and they didn’t have to fire a single shot as nobody else was there. China was still recovering from the chaos of its Cultural Revolution, while Vietnam was still rebuilding its nation devastated by the US war against it. And of course, the wily Marcos knew China and Vietnam wouldn’t move against us, with the US military bases still in our country.
China, however, claimed that the property Marcos grabbed was for centuries its Nánshā Qúndǎo, part of Hainan province, recognized as such even by the superpowers in the pre-world war era. Japan that had physically occupied it during World War 2 formally relinquished it to China after its defeat.
The Chinese government issued several official declarations and communications starting in the 1930s declaring it as part of its sovereign territory, which no government, even the superpowers, protested against in that period, except of course Vietnam.
Same area, different maps and ownership claims, in these countries’ official websites.
Philippine map from bookstore, left, with KIG inset. Right, US map from CIA Factbook: No KIG.
Vietnam claims it as its Quần đảo Trường Sa archipelago, part of its Khánh Hòa province, in olden times, part of its ancient kingdoms that were naval powers in that era. Its modern title of ownership as it were, was from the French, sticklers about documentation, who had made it part of their Indochina colony, where Vietnam was. When the French left Indochina, it formally turned over the Spratlys and its other occupied areas to the present Socialist Republic of Vietnam, as the legitimate representative. Vietnam had issued many declarations in the 1950s telling the world it owns that archipelago.
Even if Unclos had not existed, and even without EEZs, we would still have territorial disputes with China and Vietnam because of these sovereignty claims.
The problem, which is due to the West’s dominance even of geographic representations, is that few of us — obviously even otherwise well-read commentators — are aware that several countries claim our KIG as their territory, and this is clearly shown in their maps.
China’s official government website shows the Spratlys as its territory Nánshā Qúndǎo, without any qualification that it is disputed. Vietnam’s show it as its Quần đảo Trường. (See accompanying map.)
Sadly, not in our case. The government’s official website doesn’t even have an official map of the Philippines showing its territory. Few see that kind of Philippine map, in which Marcos’ hexagon of the KIG, is attached to Palawan.
The National Mapping and Resource Agency’s website has hundreds of maps, but not a single map showing what comprises the Philippine Republic. (Obviously thinking his face is more important than the Republic’s map, Namria head Peter Tiangco’s huge photo dominates the agency’s website homepage.)
Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio boasts of over a hundred maps in his book on the South China Sea dispute. But there is just one, small map of the Philippines there showing the addition the KIG to our original territory defined by the 1898 Treaty of Paris by which Spain turned over its Philippine “property” to the US. And the map Carpio used in his book wasn’t even an official map but one made by a private hobbyist which he posted in wikicommons.
The US — which the Yellows and the likes of former Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario think will go to our military defense if war breaks in our KIG — doesn’t recognize KIG as part of our territory. US State Department and CIA maps do not even show it. As far as the US is concerned, our KIG doesn’t exist.
Academic maps of the Spratlys all have a note similar to the following that even implies we’re the least important claimant:
“All of the Spratlys islands are claimed by China, Taiwan, and part of them are claimed by Malaysia and the Philippines.”
Exasperated that government websites are useless, I had to go to the National Bookstore to get a map of the Philippines that shows KIG as our territory. Obviously intended for classrooms, the map was titled “Political Map of the Philippines,” published by a private firm Storax Enterprise, which had an inset titled “The Kalayaan Islands Group,” with a subtitle “Spratly Islands.” The map didn’t even say though whether it was approved by the Namria.
Sad. We don’t even have easy access to a map that shows all of our sovereignty.
On Monday, I’ll discuss why the Yellows talk about EEZs and not the KIG.
Email: tiglao.manilatimes@gmail.com
Facebook: Rigoberto Tiglao
Twitter: @bobitiglao
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https://www.manilatimes.net/stop-this-gobbledygook-over-eezs-its-about-territory/579295/
https://www.manilatimes.net/stop-this-gobbledygook-over-eezs-its-about-territory/579295/
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