Mere maps unacceptable for territorial claims

In this last of a three-part series culled from his recent lecture, Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice Antonio T. Carpio shows how hollow Beijing’s basis is in claiming the entire South China Sea by virtue of “ancient maps.” Entitled “Historical Facts, Lies, and Rights,” his research reviews for Filipinos their ancestors’ feats, and opens Chinese eyes to the shamelessness of their communist leaders:

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1.  The Austronesians also developed a warship, called Karakoa by the Spaniards in the Philippines and Korakora by the Dutch in Indonesia. The average Karakoa was 25 meters long, with three masts, and could carry 100 oarsmen and warriors. There were bigger karakoas called royal joangas with triple-planks that carried 200 oarsmen and 100 warriors, like the one Martin de Goiti encountered when he invaded Manila in 1570. The noted historian William Henry Scott, in his paper “Boat-Building and Seamanship in Classic Philippine Society?” (Philippine Studies 30, 1982), described the Karakoa as follows: “They were sleek, double-ended warships of low freeboard and light draft with a keel on one continuous curve, steered by quarter rudders, and carrying one or more tripod masts mounting a square sail of matting on yards both above and below, with double outriggers on which multiple banks of paddlers could provide speed for battle conditions, and a raised platform amidships for a warrior contingent for ship-to-ship contact. Their tripod masts and characteristic S-shaped outrigger supports show up in the ninth-century stone carvings of Borobudur, and their other features appear in Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and English accounts over a period of half a millennium.

2. Although principally a warship, the karakoa was also used as a cargo and trade vessel. An account of the 1561 Legazpi expedition describes the karakoa in this manner: “It was a ship for sailing any place they wanted.”

3. The early Filipino warriors who sailed in karakoas were like the Vikings — they pillaged coastal areas. At the end of the 12th century, a fleet of Visayan karakoas sailed to Luzon, and then to Taiwan, crossed the Taiwan Straits and raided the Fukien coast. The historian William Henry Scott writes: “We know that Visayan caracoas were on the Fukien coast in the twelfth century. Governor Wang Ta-yu of Ch’uan-chow was eyewitness to a raid by three chiefs with several hundred followers sometime between 1174 and 1189; he said ‘the Visayan complexion is a dark lacquer, so their tattoos can hardly be seen.’

4. “The swift, sleek and long Visayan karakoas, with hundreds of dark skinned warriors standing on their platforms with gleaming eyes, struck terror to villagers along China’s southern coast.”

24. Evidently, the early Filipinos were masters of the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean. Sailing the seas was part of their life and culture. In fact, the Samals and Bajaos of Mindanao and Sulu were sea nomads or sea gypsies --— living in their balangays or vintas all year round, buying and selling merchandise from island to island.

25. China points to ancient Chinese maps as “historical facts” to claim the islands, rocks, reefs and waters within its nine-dashed line claim in the South China Sea. At the outset, we must stress that under international law a map per se does not constitute a territorial title or a legal document to establish territorial rights.

26. In the leading case of Burkina Faso/Republic of Mali (1986 I.C.J. 554), the International Court of Justice explained the evidentiary value of maps in this way: “[M]aps merely constitute information which varies in accuracy from case to case; of themselves, and by virtue solely of their existence, they cannot constitute a territorial title, that is, a document endowed by international law with intrinsic legal force for the purpose of establishing territorial rights. Of course, in some cases maps may acquire such legal force, but where this is so the legal force does not arise solely from their intrinsic merits: it is because such maps fall unto the category of physical expressions of the will of the State or States concerned. This is the case, for example, when maps are annexed to an official text of which they form an integral part. Except in this clearly defined case, maps are only extrinsic evidence of varying reliability or unreliability, which may be used, along with other evidence of a circumstantial kind, to establish or reconstitute the real facts.”

27. Thus, for maps to constitute material and relevant evidence, the contending parties must agree to such maps. This is a matter of common sense, as one state cannot just unilaterally draw a map to claim an entire sea or territory and use such map as evidence of title against another state or the whole world. A state cannot enlarge its rights under international law by its own unilateral acts or domestic legislations. The Philippines cannot just draw a U-shaped map in the Pacific Ocean and claim the enclosed waters as its indisputable territory just because the ancestors of the Filipinos, the Austronesians, crisscrossed the Pacific Ocean in their balangays 3,000 years ago. Yet, this is exactly what China did in 1947 when China drew its nine-dashed line map in the South China Sea, claiming as basis “historical facts.”

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