MANILA, Philippines -- Ex-speaker of the House and ex-president of the Lakas-CMD party, Jose de Venecia has a lot of explaining to do on the Spratlys deal with China and Vietnam. De Venecia is the Ben Abalos of this deal; he brokered and pushed it through the government. He also brokered the NorthRail project, which was funded with a huge loan from China and, like the ZTE national broadband network (NBN) deal, was given to a Chinese company handpicked by the Chinese government. We urgently need the NorthRail and SouthRail projects (we were crazy to be suckered by the United States into giving priority to highways and allowing the railroad to wither and die) but not under overpriced contracts. How much of that overpricing went to brokers?

De Venecia said it was a way of ?turning a zone of conflict into a zone of peace and cooperation.? Instead of several Asian nations with conflicting claims on the Spratlys fighting over the group of tiny islands, at least three of them (the Philippines, China and Vietnam) would cooperate with one another to look for oil there, he said. Nice to hear, but it looks like we?ve been had in the deal.

Parañaque City?s Rep. Roilo Golez, a former Navy man (a graduate of Annapolis), explained it to the Kapihan sa Manila last Monday. Many Filipinos don?t know what the Spratlys are or where they are. So here?s a brief background:

The Spratlys is a group of tiny islets scattered in 410,000 sq km of the South China Sea, off the southern coast of Palawan province. They are so tiny they don?t even appear in most small maps. These islets used to be uninhabited, but now the nations claiming them, including the Philippines, have built airfields and fortifications on the bigger islands. But even they are only a number of hectares in size on the average. The islets are mostly barren coral atolls, few crops grow in them, but it is believed that large pools of oil and gas are stored underneath them. Hence the sudden interest of many nations that have not bothered with them for centuries.

They were largely unknown to Filipinos until ?Admiral? Tomas Cloma stumbled upon them in the 1950s and laid claim to some of the islands and called them ?Freedomland.? The former Freedomland is now the Kalayaan group of islands of the Spratlys that the Philippines now occupies.

The Philippine claim to them hinges on the fact that many of the islets (1/3 of the Spratlys) lie inside the Philippines? 200-mile exclusive economic zone. They are 1,000 nautical miles away from China and a little less than that from Vietnam, yet these two nations are also claiming the Spratlys.

In 1988, China and Vietnam had a naval confrontation over the islands and two Vietnamese ships were sunk and seven soldiers killed. A little later, Filipino troops garrisoned on one of the islands went to another island where the Filipino commander was having a birthday party. When they tried to go back to their island, they found it occupied by Chinese troops who shooed them off. They could not take possession of their island. The Philippines complained to the Chinese government. No dice. The Philippines sought the aid of ASEAN, which issued a strong statement, but the Chinese still did not leave. So the Philippines abandoned the area with its tail between its legs.

These islands are inside Philippine territory under House Bill 3216 on the archipelagic doctrine which was approved on second reading by the House of Representatives. Approving it on third reading was a routine matter, but for some strange reason the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) sent a letter to the House of Representatives, objecting to it. During the discussions on the bill, the DFA was present but posed no objections. Suddenly, when the bill was about to be approved, our DFA, which is supposed to protect Philippine territory and sovereignty, is objecting to it. And yet we have only until the middle of 2009 to pass that bill under the terms of the United Nations or we will lose the islands. Strange behavior from the DFA, ?di ba? [wouldn?t you say]?

Comes now the Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU), an agreement among the Philippine National Oil Co. (PNOC), China National Offshore Oil Co., and PetroVietnam to conduct tests on 142,000 sq km of the Spratlys. The agreement was authorized by their respective governments. At least 24,000 sq km of this is within the continental shelf of the Philippines, says Golez. As stated earlier, they are 1,000 nautical miles away from China.

Did the agreement encroach on the territory of the Philippines? Definitely. Why was the agreement only on islands nearest the Philippines? Why did it not include islands nearer to China and Vietnam? Golez asked. Some legal minds, including Ombudsman Merceditas Gutierrez, believe President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo may have committed an impeachable offense for authorizing the agreement. Others, like the Far Eastern Economic Review, went so far as to say that Ms Arroyo may have committed ?treason.?

But even discarding the issue of constitutionality, Golez said the JMSU is still anomalous because it jeopardized the territorial integrity, energy security, and national security of the Philippines. In short, we were on the short end of the deal.

The islands are mostly inside Philippine territory, clearly inside its 200-mile exclusive economic zone; none are inside or even near those of either China or Vietnam. It is the Chinese who are making the seismic surveys. If they find oil or gas, what is the assurance that they would share the information with us? Golez asked. Does the PNOC know what the results of these tests have shown so far? We have allowed foreign powers who are claiming the Spratlys to enter and snoop around in our territory. Doesn?t that put our national security at risk?

Let?s hear the answers from De Venecia and Ms Arroyo, the Filipino partners in the Spratlys deal.