After Spratlys, China out to claim Palawan - GOTCHA by Jarius Bondoc

The scene has been played out countless times before. Chinese "fishermen" would poach in Scarborough Shoal, 180 miles west of Subic, well within RP’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone. Filipino navy boats would chase them off or, if fast enough, arrest some. China would protest, claiming to own the island 700 miles off Hainan, a province farthest south of the mainland and thus well outside its own EEZ. Filipino diplomats would growl about increasing navy patrols and banning fishing in the area. China would growl louder, and Filipinos would clam up.

China has mastered the cat-and-mouse game, although the cat is more like a limping kitten and the mouse a crouching tiger. Farther south, in fact, China does the chasing around Mischief Reef. On this island 135 miles west of Palawan yet 1,200 miles off Hainan, China has built what it claims as harmless fishermen’s shelters but what looks from the air as military fortifications with helipads. Again, all Filipinos can do is shrug.

If Filipino shrugging can be called strategy at all, it consists of two prongs: one, air and sea patrol chases using decrepit planes and ships; two, diplomatic alternating of saber-rattling and surrender. China, with 4,000 years of hard-nosed diplomacy tucked under its belt, is snickering. For it knows that RP has nothing to back up its posturing of armed might, much less its many proposals for joint peaceful use and exploitation of oil and aquatic resources in its western seas. For, RP has not done its homework. It has not mapped the geologic basis for its legal claim to Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal, much more to the Kalayaan Island Group of Spratlys farther out west.

When the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea came into force on November 16, 1994, it gave countries with territorial sea disputes ten years to establish the geologic evidence for their claims. UNCLOS set the rules of evidence: map and verify the underwater continental shelf on which the country perches, as basis to delineate its 200-mile EEZ. Such mapping requires bathymetric (or underwater topographic) surveying of beds and rock formations of the continental shelf and certification under world-accepted procedures of geologists.

RP hemmed and hawed about the survey because of the huge costs. Only in 1997, after four years of boom, was it able to afford the $54 million for two modern ships that National Mapping and Resource Information Authority needed for the job. In that year, too, Japan donated another ship to the Mines and Geosciences Bureau. Mapping Kalayaan Islands is just one of many pressing assignments of Namria and MGB. Only in 2000 did Malacañang deploy Namria’s ships to Palawan. And the ships’ crew spent only two months at sea before heading back due to bad weather. They were able to cover only a small corner of the Kalayaan Island Group. Dr. Jose Antonio Socrates, Palawan’s provincial health officer and a renowned geologist, shakes his head in dismay: "At that rate, they will take at least ten years to cover the entire KIG." That would be in 2010, six years past the UNCLOS deadline for submission of geologic evidence. "They cannot chart the shallows over the shoals and fringing the islands, lest the ships run aground," Socrates adds. That would entail other mapping means, like modern planes which RP doesn’t have.

Military-political decisions further botched the science homework. The ships were set to sail back to the Kalayaan Islands after the monsoon rains when one of the frequent sea chases played out again in Scarborough Shoal. Malacañang suddenly ordered Namria to not cross the "trip wire," an imaginary border to avoid close encounters with vessels from China and other claimants of Kalayaan: Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei. This "trip wire" was set at 160 degrees longitude, which is just about a hundred miles off Palawan. Farther west is Mischief Reef, and farther out is the Kalayaan Group. One can just imagine if the "trip wire" was drawn during one of those all-night drinking sprees in Malacañang of the past administration. What’s sure is, Namria officials aver, the no-cross order is still in force to this day.

RP is fast running out of time to meet the 2004 UNCLOS deadline. Socrates says the underwater surveying must be finished by 2003, since verification and certification would take another year. Meanwhile, China is seeking to establish another forward outpost, past Mischief Reef and closer to Puerto Princesa. Twice since 1998, it planted buoys on Sabina Shoal, just 82 miles off Palawan. Twice, RP air force planes blasted the buoys out of the water. But with RP planes deteriorating and with no replenishment in sight, it would take only one more monsoon season for China to not only plant buoys but set up "fishermen’s shelters" in still another RP island.

Why China is bent on doing so is apparent for Western analysts. It is building a Great Sea Wall of defense far advanced from its mainland. Corollarily, it wants to control international sealanes in the South China Sea through which one-fourth of the world’s commercial ships pass. Of course, it also wants to exploit for itself the oil and aquatic resources of the South China Sea, even to the point of encroaching on RP territory.

The chairman of the special concerns committee of the Geological Society of the Philippines, Socrates has an idea of China’s intent. It is on a major economic push yet has no more new oil wells on the mainland to fuel its drive. The area around Palawan, meantime, has proven to be an oil mine. Its northern Malampaya well will be pumping oil to Batangas and onto Manila by 2004. China has cast an envious leer on that direction.

Socrates also has an idea of the geologic evidence that lies beneath Kalayaan Islands to legally bolster RP’s claim under UNCLOS. Centuries of geologic studies, in fact, show that the Philippine archipelago did not just emerge from underwater volcanic eruptions. It was also pushed out of the waters between what is now the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean eons ago, when the Indian subcontinent split from Antarctica and Australia and collided with Laurasia (what is now Europe and Asia). That collision millions of years back crunched up the Himalayas, which once were Laurasia’s southern seashores, and also shook its eastern shores (China). It explains RP’s strange continental shelf as an island arc. RP’s eastern shelf is narrow, and drops into the Pacific Ocean after a few hundred miles. Its western shelf, however, is far wider, evidence that tremors from the past had pushed it up as an underwater plateau. On that plateau lies Kalayaan Group, Mischief Reef, Scarborough Shoal and all of the Philippine archipelago. Beyond it farther west are deep ocean waters that then rise to another plateau, Asia’s continental shelf which China is entitled to claim as its own. Proof of these are not only in geology books, but also the latest bathymetric surveys conducted by Germany in three expeditions in the past decade.

Socrates also reveals an astounding discovery that China would have a hard time disproving scientifically. Rocks and minerals found in Puerto Princesa’s famed underground river are of the very type of rocks and minerals spread across the Kalayaan Group’s seabed – but not seen anywhere near China or ancient Laurasia. This would show that the higher rocks in Puerto Princesa form but the tip of the "iceberg" of a vast continental shelf beneath the waters around RP. But China doesn’t care about RP’s scientific evidence, more so in the absence of bathymetric surveys that UNCLOS requires. After all, it has the military evidence to show that, despite monsoon rains, mere fishermen’s vessels can enter RP waters and unload tons of steel and concrete to build forts closer and closer to Palawan. Using such "evidence," China would soon also claim the RP province by conjuring up a supposed Chinese name for it.

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