Opinion

Self-defense

SKETCHES - Ana Marie Pamintuan - The Philippine Star

February 21, 2018 | 12:00am

TOKYO – Before China’s touted peaceful rise lost credibility, before the Philippines posted military personnel on a rusty ship beached on Ayungin Shoal to stake the country’s maritime claim, Beijing had long been feuding over territory with several other countries closer to its land mass.

The Chinese have feuded for centuries with the Vietnamese, and more recently with the Indians. China has had disputes with Russia and South Korea. Beijing claims territory usually because it can, and backs off if prevented by a stronger force.

Japan has that stronger force – both in terms of military capability and civilian Coast Guard resources. Plus it is backed by a defense treaty with the United States whose terms, unlike the one with the Philippines, specifically makes Uncle Sam duty-bound to come to Japan’s defense in case of external attack. So China can only huff and puff over its territorial claim to the resource-rich, Japanese-occupied Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.

Since 2016, however, China’s so-called maritime law enforcement ships (as opposed to military vessels) have increasingly conducted missions challenging the Japanese Coast Guard near the Senkaku Islands.

Japan has several strategies for dealing with the heightened activities. One is to keep talking with China to settle the dispute; the two neighbors, after all, have strong economic and other ties.

Another inevitable response is to ramp up Japan’s capability to protect its territory and deter aggression. Hiroaki Ohdachi, press director of the Japanese Coast Guard, told me here the other day that his country has 10 ships and two helicopters dedicated to patrolling the waters around Senkaku Islands – a maritime area of approximately 4.74 square kilometers, more than double the size of Metropolitan Tokyo.

While Japan is deploying more ships and aircraft to the East China Sea in the next few years, however, Beijing is doing the same, although the coverage of its vessels would likely include the South China Sea and possibly the Western Pacific, where its so-called research vessels are busy with submarine exploration to obtain naming rights to sea features.

A third strategy for Japan is to encourage global support for Chinese compliance with international maritime rules. In line with this, Japan is supporting efforts to create a free and open Indo-Pacific region, from the Pacific Rim to the Indian Ocean.

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President Duterte is realistic enough to see that the Philippines lacks the military strength to confront China, and he professes not to believe in the call-a-friend strategy of deterrence. So despite a landmark ruling by the Permanent Arbitration Court that deprived Beijing of legitimacy in its entire nine-dash-line maritime claim in the South China Sea, Duterte has adopted as his policy in disputed waters the equivalent of sitting back and enjoying rape when it is inevitable.

He does have a point when he says we’re on our own in this dispute. All countries, including our treaty ally the United States and Asia’s naval power Japan, consider their own strategic interests in dealing with China, the world’s second largest economy.

Still, thanks to Beijing’s militarization of artificial islands, the winds seem to be shifting. Or is it just my imagination?

Next month the Brits are sending their warship HMS Sutherland from Australia to the South China Sea on a freedom of navigation mission.

France supports such missions, and is also stepping up its naval presence in the Asia-Pacific, which is home to some 1.6 million French citizens.

Beijing has publicly shrugged off the British mission, dismissing it as nothing but a case of KSP – kulang sa pansin or attention grabbing.

Even Beijing, however, must be sensing a creeping shift in the mood of the international community, as it completes its island-building in the South China Sea and installation of military facilities.

Countries are beginning to see the risks those artificial islands, with airstrips and submarine docks and missile launch pads, can pose to their strategic interests in the world’s most dynamic region.

When the UN-backed arbitration court in The Hague invalidated Beijing’s South China Sea claim in July 2016, the European Union, with the exception of France, had issued a largely timid call for respect for international rules. You could smell the EU members’ concerns over jeopardizing economic relations with China that could affect European jobs, businesses and consequently political fortunes

But with recent developments in the South China Sea, certain countries are seeing what Japan, the United States and the previous Philippine government had seen all along: those artificial islands aren’t meant to serve merely as fishermen’s shelters and marine research centers.

There are increasing foreign comments about the need for China to abide by international rules. Based on those rules, Beijing has no legitimate claim over the entire South China Sea, and the Philippines has sovereign rights over several reefs and the Recto or Reed Bank.

The arbitral ruling specifically declared that China’s occupation of Panganiban or Mischief Reef is illegal and the Philippines has sovereign rights over the reef. When will President Duterte tell his Chinese friends to leave Mischief? Or will his attitude always be, the Philippines won’t because it can’t?

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This brings us to Japan’s fourth strategy for its national security, which is to help allies like the Philippines boost self-defense capability.

Japan has so far donated patrol vessels to the Philippine Coast Guard and aircraft to the Navy. The items come with technology transfer, training and maintenance support. Filipinos are also learning to build commercial ships from a private Japanese company operating in Cebu, Tsuneishi Heavy Industries, which manufactures and sells medium-sized vessels and parts around the world.

Japan has even trained a Philippine Navy officer in submarine exploration and mapping – the type of research that China has been conducting in the Philippine Rise in the Western Pacific for official naming rights to sea features.

“Even without China, it’s really important for Japan to have a Philippines that’s capable of watching its own areas,” Shingo Miyamoto told me. Miyamoto is the director of the Second Southeast Asia Division of the foreign ministry handling Japan-Philippines bilateral relations.

I told him that perhaps one day the Philippines, like Japan, could build its own patrol ships and aircraft. Based on Filipinos’ work at Tsuneishi, Miyamoto said, “You can do it.”

Foreign allies can only do so much, he stressed; defending one’s territory lands squarely on the shoulders of each country.

“In the end, it has to be done by the Philippines,” Miyamoto said.

For sure, other Philippine allies have the same opinion.