If there is a moment in these last almost 500 years for the country and our people to finally take off, it is now. It is now actually a situation where the dream is so near, but we must not let it slip away. It used to be that we had to fight the [...]
Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masingloc and Panatag for the Philippines or Huangyan Island for China), located some 220 kilometers from the province of Zambales (Philippines), has been a bone of contention between the two countries since 1997.
Yes, it has truly been an exciting week that has been tackling key issues that can change the course of our history. Three major concerns have been happening simultaneously that can set the tone of our immediate future and change the flavor of national life way beyond that.
President Aquino showed statesmanship when he resorted to back-channeling to ease the tension between the Philippines and China. China is the Philippines’ third biggest partner in the areas of trade, investment, development assistance and technical cooperation. The Philippine National Oil Co. and the China National Offshore Oil Corp. have signed in 2004 an “Agreement for [...]
The brouhaha over Scarborough Shoal, much to my chagrin and at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I can only view as puerile, comical, or pure braggadocio. The mere fact that the general area has been called “South China Sea,” and the tiny atoll “Scarborough,” since time immemorial should have served us notice long ago that some intruders were “trampling our sacred shores.”
The failure of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to issue a joint communiqué after a regular meeting of foreign ministers concluded in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh last Friday was truly unprecedented. It was the first time in the 45-year history of the Asean, a virtual paper factory with dozens of regularly scheduled, amply documented conferences every year, that a post-event statement could not be released. The failure bodes ill for the usefulness of the Asean as a regional association.
Around four-fifths of the Philippines is actually water, and only one-fifth land. This is premised on the 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. As an archipelagic country, this fact is of utmost importance to us. But until recently when incidents in our western seas put our territorial seas and outlying islands at the center stage of national discussions, we tended to all but this much larger part of our territory.
The Cabinet meeting on Thursday left the country in suspense over how soon the Aquino administration will send ships back to Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal to reassert the Philippine claim over disputed territories in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea) amid expanding Chinese maritime incursions in the area.
When I read that a Chinese vessel rammed a Filipino fishing boat off the shores of Bolinao, Pangasinan, I felt so enraged. Then, I wondered why the incident was not near the Scarborough Shoal, and decided to wait for more information. It did surface a few days later that a HK cargo ship was a [...]
On its face, the ramming of a Philippine fishing boat by a vessel of purported Chinese ownership and the fishermen’s struggle to survive make for gripping reading, rather like an adventure on the high seas where the heroes keep themselves alive on little more than grit and rainwater. But occurring as it does during a [...]
Not a confusion but a miscalculation seems to be what happened when the Philippines pulled out its ships from Bajo de Masinloc (Scarborough Shoal) without China doing likewise. Foreign Secretary Alberto del Rosario and the spokesperson of the Department of Foreign Affairs, Raul Hernandez, initially told the press over the weekend when the Philippine ships [...]
In her opinion piece titled “Understanding China” (Inquirer, 6/6/12), Andrea Chloe Wong notes that China claims “what it calls the Huangyan Island [Scarborough Shoal] on the belief that it first discovered it, named it, and incorporated it into its territory.” It is not a matter of discovering a place but occupying it that is the essential basis of territorial claims. China never settled on Scarborough Shoal until recently, when it saw the potential oil in the area. Why did it not settle on the islands upon discovery?
