NO sooner than President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. gladly announced that he has struck some sort of an understanding with Chinese officials to raise the level of communication between the Philippines and China on issues involving the South China Sea, to include a direct line to the heads of state, that he had to back the Department of Foreign Affairs’ filing of a protest note to Beijing in connection with the recent incident in Ayungin Shoal.
The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) has reported that the Chinese Coast Guard drove away a Filipino fishing boat in Ayungin Shoal in the West Philippine Sea and continued to shadow them until they left the area last January 9.
Marcos assured the nation that even with the new mechanism in effect, this does not mean that the Philippines would just sit by in the face of incidents such as this.
‘… we cannot be complacent with just sending notes verbales and protests every time an incident occurs, as hundreds of these complaints in the past were just swept under the rug by China.’
In the Senate, Sen. Francis N. Tolentino pushed for a multilateral show of maritime security cooperation with the United States and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) amid the latest tension in the disputed waters west of the country.
According to Tolentino, expanding the conduct of joint patrols – to include other claimant states in the region – will help ensure the freedom of navigation, exercise of fishing rights, and somehow dissipate the tension in the South China Sea.
“I have been espousing that joint Philippine-US Coast Guard patrol but we might even extend that to being a multilateral patrol to include other ASEAN claimants… it will need, not just a sole Philippine initiative but the inclusion and involvement of other countries,” Tolentino, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said. He added that all countries interested in maintaining the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea may well join the joint patrols.
Philippine Ambassador to the US Jose Manuel Romualdez earlier bared that the idea of holding joint PH-US maritime patrols in the West Philippine Sea was already “on the table” even before the incident near the Ayungin Shoal (Second Thomas Shoal).
For Tolentino, having a multilateral cooperation is also not limited to holding a large fleet of joint maritime and naval patrols but can also be stretched to other areas like disaster-related exercises and joint operations concerning disaster mitigation.
The senator’s position is that we cannot be complacent with just sending notes verbales and protests every time an incident occurs, as hundreds of these complaints in the past were just swept under the rug by China. The idea of joint patrols is one step bolder than writing protest letters.
