2018-02-06

Philippines a Chinese Suzerainty?

"Possession is 9/10s of the law."

Inquirer.net: EXCLUSIVE: New photos show China is nearly done with its militarization of South China Sea
If the Philippines does not assert its legal victory, it stands to lose 80 percent of its EEZ in the South China Sea, covering 381,000 square kilometers of maritime space, including the entire Recto Bank, or Reed Bank, and part of the Malampaya gas field off Palawan, as well as all of the fishery, oil and gas and mineral resources there, Carpio said.

“My estimate is 40 percent of water in the Philippines is in the West Philippine Sea, so that’s 40 percent of the fish that we can catch and we will lose that as a food source,” he said.

“Malampaya supplies 40 percent of the energy requirement of Luzon. If Malampaya runs out of gas in 10 years or less . . . we will have 10 to 12 hours of daily brownouts in Luzon. It will devastate the economy,” he added.
The Philippine government is watching its territory be absorbed into China:
Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, a member of the legal team that argued the Philippine case against China’s claim to almost the entire South China Sea in the Hague arbitral court, slammed Roque’s position, comparing it to trusting a thief.

“You don’t rely on the good faith of the thief [who’s trying to break] into your house. If you have that mindset, you rely on the good faith of someone who’s trying to break into your house, that means you’re out [of touch] with reality. You’re in a fantasyland. That’s not how the world is put together. That’s not realpolitik,” Carpio said.

The Philippines is battling communist rebels, terrorists loyal to the Islamic State jihadi group, and Abu Sayyaf bandits but the country is facing a much bigger security threat, Carpio said.

“The biggest [security] problem is China. If we lose [our maritime space in the West Philippine Sea], we lose it forever,” Carpio told the Inquirer in a recent interview, using the local name of the waters within the Philippines’ EEZ in the South China Sea.

“And the area we will lose is huge, as big as the land area of the Philippines, about 300,000 square kilometers,” Carpio said.

China will never return the territory it grabs, he added. “We cannot go to the [International Court of Justice] because China has to agree and China will never agree to submit to arbitration.”
Kicking the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay was a strategic blunder if the Philippines continues on this course.
Carpio said the Philippines could have generated support from the international community if it asserted its victory over China in the arbitration case.

“If we are not aggressive, if we are sitting on the ruling and we are not enforcing it, the others will not support us,” he said.

The military, for its part, cannot do anything but follow the government’s foreign policy.

“We still navigate in those waters. But we are instruments of national policy so we just follow whatever our national leaders and policymakers decide,” said a ranking military official who requested anonymity.

“Were there challenges [from China]? Yes, but we also challenged them, that’s part of the rules of the road. But the policies of the government are not only military, there’s also political, economic and diplomatic. You can’t confine it to the military,” the official said.

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