So let's start building

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / June 18, 2014 / Daily Tribune


Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Secretary Albert del Rosario shrieked through media frantically last Monday that China “and other claimant states” are rushing construction activities in their respective claimed territories to establish facilities.

Which the “other claimant states” are the non-Filipino-speaking DFA secretary did not say, probably to highlight only China, which he has been concentrating fire on from Day One of his appointment to the office by BS Aquino.

Del Rosario wants the Philippines to “call for a moratorium of activities that escalate tension,” which obviously the other claimants won’t do for obvious reasons.
Every party to the claims of disputed islands and territories on the China Sea knows that presence, possession, and development weigh far more than other factors in the determination of a claim. 

In fact, second to China, Vietnam is the most active in building facilities on its claimed islands — including the island the Philippines calls Pugad, where the Philippine military boasted, to spite the Chinese, they played soccer a few weeks ago with their Vietnamese counterparts. Vietnam calls that island Dao Song Tu Tay.

The Vietnamese have been building up their facility on that island since they took it over in 1975, after Philippine forces guarding it left to attend a party at a nearby island, indicating a lack of seriousness.

If the Philippines were to be taken seriously on its claims, shouldn’t it be as active, if not more, than the other claimants in establishing and constructing facilities in its claimed islands, atolls, shoals and reefs?

What we’ve seen so far from the Philippine government under BS Aquino and his DFA secretary is rhetoric and vituperations against one and only one claimant, China, which in reality it has no chance to oppose at all, while contradictorily, it cavorts with other claimants that have taken islands away from it, like what the Vietnamese did on Pugad Island.

I had a debate at the socials of the ribbon-cutting of the Botswana Consular Office at the First Global Building in Makati.  Among the guests were Gen. Danilo Lim and former GNN show host, Gerry Cornejo. When the Johnson or Mabini Reef reclamation by China came up, Gerry proceeded with a harangue against China as it had been mainstream media’s foreign affairs headlines for weeks.  I replied, “So, the Philippines should start building on its own claims!” Expectedly he said, “But we don’t have the money… blah, blah...”

If the Philippines can’t even raise funds to back its claims while trillions are siphoned off by oligarchs, politicians, and needless debts, does the Philippines deserve any of its claims?

It came to a point where Gerry asked (and in a friendly manner), “Are you Filipino?” — to which I responded without any hesitation, “I am more Filipino than you.” Naturally, he retorted, “How can you say that?”  My answer: “I’ve been detained several times for advocacies on national issues.”  Then, his reply was “How does that make you more Filipino than me?” “I put my life where my mouth is,” I emphatically said.

My erstwhile co-detainee from the 2007 Manila Peninsula siege, General Lim, was quiet; knowing him as a straightforward man of his word, I think he silently agreed with me. General Lim, I’m sure, would not tolerate the raging corruption of the system and had to resign his position in the present government.
I dispute the impulse of many Filipinos to treat China as an adversary and aggressor, and their penchant for labeling the pursuit of any other option as anti-Filipino.
I said in an open forum at a recent UP talk that “I resent this constant reference to China as ‘aggressor’ when the historical and continuing fact shows it’s the US and Britain.” To my surprise, the speaker, Central Intelligence Agency Asia expert Robert Sutter, responded, “Certainly, what China is doing is small cake compared with what the British and Americans have done.”

What China, Vietnam et al. are doing are not even “small cake” aggression, but probes and positioning with no intention to cause bloodshed or domination of another nation — with the promise of peaceful resolutions in the end.

In the recent China-Vietnam oil rig standoff, China has openly announced that it “will never send the military.”

China has been meticulous in following civilized international practice: In the 2012 Scarborough standoff with the Philippines, it only sent in its maritime surveillance ships when the Philippines used its BRP Gregorio del Pilar to arrest eight Chinese fishermen.  In the USS Cowpens and oil rig imbroglio, China issued “no sail zone” alerts when the ship from a country 20,000 kilometers away tried to enter the zone, and when ships form Vietnam came up to the security perimeter of the oil rig.

Meanwhile, as five Asian countries are on a building campaign on their claims, with two in a steel-crunching test of wills, the Philippines is merely yakking to the media and whining before an international tribunal.

(Watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; and visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)

The 'dispute' trap

DIE HARD III / Herman Tiu Laurel / June 16, 2014 / Daily Tribune


Congressional insiders texted us to raise alarm on Speaker Feliciano Belmonte’s rush to pass Charter change on second reading in record time. Others wanted to clamor for an end to the nefarious precinct count optical scan system by restoring manual voting and/or counting to end the digital “Comelec-tion” farces.

While both are important calls, these are just some of the evils of the US-led lobby that BS Aquino and the “trapo” Senate and House kowtow to.
To defeat such projects, the power behind them must first be stopped, i.e. the hegemonic US sway over Malacañang, Congress, various national and local government agencies, as well as “civil society.”

Though the US is unrivalled in its hegemony in Asia, it now wants more of Asia under its control.

US strategic thinkers know as much as Mao Zedong that “Power comes from the barrel of the gun.” Guns open markets — like Admiral Perry’s guns on Japan in the 18th Century and Commodore Dewey’s in Manila Bay at the turn of the 20th Century. Guns can regain lost markets as well. The US “pivot” to Asia is led by the “shift in 60 percent of US military forces” to the region by the year 2020. Should China still wait for the full force of the new Perry and Dewey armada to arrive?
With the “pivot,” the US has already started the demonization propaganda of China by setting up its last Asian pawns to provide the provocations: Japan in nationalizing Diaoyu and the Philippines in arresting Chinese fishers at Scarborough.

Before all that, Sino-Japan and Sino-Philippine relations, notwithstanding certain issues, were friendly and productive. Japan’s trade with China was rising; and the Philippines, during the previous administration, was already into signing agreements with China — most notably, the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU).
But, after the US pivot and Diaoyu nationalization, imports from Japan crashed, an Air Defense Identification Zone was declared, and a war of words ensued. In the case of the Philippines after the pivot announcement was made, coupled with its Scarborough provocation, and then its International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLoS) suit and its signing of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement with the US, the country successively lost ground to Chinese physical assertions over disputed islands.

Ellen Tordesillas of Malaya, citing a US Navy study, once wrote: “History has shown that (the) Chinese never let pass a hostile move against them. The retaliation may not be immediate but they hit back.”

Tordesillas indicates that China does not initiate conflict but will not hesitate to respond to provocation. She quotes the US Navy study of Lt. Michael Studeman on the aborted Chinese-Philippine joint development deal of the gas-rich Reed Bank, which said, “Manila decided to grant a six-month oil exploration permit to Alcorn… (by) secretly licensing an exploration effort, the Philippines had appeared to engage in unilateral efforts to exploit the… Spratlys. Stung by Manila’s ‘betrayal,’ China decided to advance (to)… Mischief Reef… (where) physical occupation was the only method by which Chinese interests could be protected. Beijing’s own misstep was in not foreseeing that this characteristically ‘defensive’ response would be interpreted as offensive.”

Despite Philippine protestations against the Chinese, the government thinks very little of giving away the country’s interests to Western corporations, such as the Malampaya gas project where Shell and Chevron get 90 percent while the Philippines gets a nominal 10 percent, which is actually only 5 percent (after deducting taxes, investment cost of all parties, and the funds used to buy vintage US war ships and planes to “protect” the facility).

The Philippines today opposes joint development with China even on a 50/50 basis, which certainly makes the US and the Brits very pleased. The scrapping of many such joint deals, such as the JMSU, was actually carried out under intense pressure from the US and its puppet Philippine politicians in Congress.
In the UP talk I wrote about last week of Georgetown University professor and former Central Intelligence Agency Asia analyst Robert Sutter, I spoke at the open forum of how “myopic” (or tunnel vision-sighted) the Philippine intelligentsia is by focusing only on the “dispute.” In raising sentiments against our neighbor on the China Sea issue, I argued, the Philippines is missing the bigger picture: How the “dispute” angle entraps the Philippines in a conundrum.

It is certainly something that it can’t win because China is not participating in the ITLoS. In the meantime, the Philippines merely grasps at straws of US or Vietnamese support.

The US enjoys needling China with this while the Philippines pays the economic and diplomatic costs, seeking consolation in a football game with the Vietnamese — on an island where the Vietnamese kicked the Filipinos out of in 1975!

The Philippines and its intelligentsia should take a cue from Sam Bateman, senior fellow at the Maritime Security Program of S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, who said in a CNN report: “What I’m concerned about is all this debate is leading nowhere in terms of establishing effective regimes for managing the South China Sea and its resources… It’s taking us away from the effective cooperation that’s necessary because the reality is that I don’t think the sovereignty claims are ever going to be settled in the foreseeable future.”

The Philippine intelligentsia likes to argue and dispute, like Justice Antonio Carpio and his ancient map hullabaloo. (Recall in 1998 Ambassador Fu Ying showing a Philippine official map sold in National Bookstore that puts the Spratlys outside its territory?) But wasn’t Carpio just keeping the Philippines farther away from resolving the problem by tightening the psywar trap set by the US?

(Watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m.; tune in to 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; and visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)

Disingenuous talk

(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 06-11-201

 
Last Monday the University of the Philippines Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea sponsored a round table discussion with Georgetown University professor and former Central Intelligence Agency China expert, Prof. Robert G. Sutter, on the US role in the China Sea crisis.  The Malcolm Hall seminar room was packed with eminent experts in relevant fields aplenty, such as former UP President Dodong Nemenzo, acclaimed international correspondent Chito Sta. Romana, writer Richard Javad Heydarian, former ambassador to ASEAN Wilfrido V. Villacorta, security expert Romel Banlaoi, journalist Ellen Tordesillas, and many others.
 
Prof. Sutter’s books take up two pages on Amazon.com.  On the Internet I found Sutter involved in a controversial refusal of cooperation with a Federal Bureau of Investigation “sting,” as well as in appeals for help in tracking Chinese spies, urging others to do likewise.  Sutter covered a very wide range of issues and never left any doubt as to his view of China as an “aggressor” and the usefulness of the US to its ASEAN allies in counterbalancing China.  Even though Sutter maintained a scholarly demeanor in his talk, to my mind, several lines betrayed the disingenuousness intention.
 
Sutter admits that a power shift has occurred in Asia with the ascendance of China and the decline of the US.  In explaining the US “rebalancing” (a.k.a. “pivot”) to Asia, Sutter admitted US perception that the future is in Asia and that Barack Obama is giving the “pivot” high priority.  He reiterated several times that the US is here to stay because Asia is important for “US jobs” and in order “to pursue free trade policies”--reflecting a US fear of growing Asian skepticism of US reliability.  But Sutter emphasized that the US is not out to isolate China; only to engage it.  One of what I thought was a very disingenuous line of his was when he posed this question regarding China’s peaceful intentions vis-à-vis its economic success: “Why are they (the Chinese) building their military if they are peaceful?”
 
As echoed by former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his speech at the Pentagon in 2005, every student of international relations and diplomacy knows that “Weakness is provocative.”  As such, defense and military capability is essential for nation-states serious with their sovereignty; and China is no different.
 
Another Sutter line that struck me as utterly disingenuous was “(the) US does not like war, neither does it like appeasement,” which reminded me immediately of the destruction of the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, now Syria; the US drone wars in Pakistan, Sudan, and Yemen; the West’s deployment of new troops to Africa; and US destabilization of Venezuela (and now, likely, Brazil to weaken BRICS), ad nausea.
 
Sutter emphasized what he sees as tense relations of China with its neighbors such as India, Pakistan, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Indonesia while leaving out growing trade ties between India and China, the $4-billion gas deal between Russia and China, or how South Korea criticized Obama on Japan, etc.
 
Moreover, Sutter didn’t explain that the US “free trade” scheme in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which demands that other countries open their agricultural sector to US dumping, was rejected by South Korea and Japan, or that the TPP violates national sovereignty and prioritizes corporate power over human and economic rights of nations, which the Chinese trade pact, the Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership (RCEP) rejects in favor of respect of national economic sovereignty.
 
Sutter insists that the US is the “leader of Asia” (his words) because it provides “security and stability,” which Asians need because, as he claims, “Asians don’t like each other” and would require the US to mediate.  And so, the US is willing to spend “$50-billion to stay” (perhaps militarily) in Asia.
 
When the open forum started, the first to raise a question was Dodong Nemenzo who inquired about how “ironclad” the guarantee of Obama was to defend the Philippines, to which Sutter had no satisfactory answer.  Richard Heydarian then asked about the “nexus” of the Chinese people and the Chinese government’s policy on the China Sea claims, which Sutter had to admit was a serous factor as the Chinese have to respond to popular expectations.
 
Chito Sta. Romana asked whether China is claiming the seas or the islands (which has implications on adjacent waters).  I later stood to lament the myopia of Philippine forums missing the timeline and broad geopolitical panorama: Tensions started with Obama’s “pivot,” followed by (US pawn) Japan’s “nationalization” of the Diaoyus, and the Philippine naval ship BRP Gregorio del Pilar’s arrest of Chinese fishermen at Scarborough.
 
Finally, I asked Sutter, “What is US retired Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes’ ‘Offshore Control’ war doctrine (which is the US plan to choke off China’s economy by closing the Malacca and Lombok straits)?”--to which he pleaded ignorance.
 
Is China then building the “artificial islands” as forward defense to preempt the US shift of 60 percent of its forces to Asia by 2020?
 
(Watch GNN Talk News TV with HTL on Destiny Cable Channel 8, SkyCable Channel 213, and www.gnntv-asia.com, Saturday, 8:00 p.m. and replay Sunday, 8 a.m., this week on “Tiananmen: The whole truth”; tune in to 1098 AM, dwAD, Tuesday to Friday, 5 p.m.; search Talk News TV and date of showing on YouTube; and visit http://newkatipunero.blogspot.com)