Horrendous claim

As it is now fast turning out, China can’t prove its case that there was a 2016 “temporary arrangement” on Panatag Shoal or Bajo de Masinloc.

If it were otherwise, China by now should have provided official documents on the so-called verbal “temporary arrangement” it had with the Duterte regime.

But, alas, no documents are forthcoming.

So, as matters now stand, the deliberately worded “temporary agreement” joins the series of vague Chinese-coined terms which have all turned out to be political duds despite propaganda efforts to make them explosive.

Earlier terms included “promise,” “gentleman’s agreement,” “new mode,” and now “temporary arrangement.” How soon China will trot out new terms under Duterte-era verbal deals is anybody’s guess. The English dictionary is thick enough.

Still, whatever terms China coughs up next, the fact remains China has nothing with its weirdly strange demand that the present administration honor Duterte-era deals.

Yet, China desperately insists on it. Even if she knows full well that past verbal deals don’t bind a succeeding government to whatever arrangements a previous regime might have agreed to.

In short, no one has yet given an adequate explanation for such a weird demand. Not even the suspicion that it’s a crude propaganda ploy aimed at fueling the anti-Marcos sentiments of the doomsday-crazed Duterte cult.

Still, to be charitable to the crazed, and since most of us suffer from short memories, there is now a need to recall what is known so far about the supposed 2016 deal that China conspicuously waved last week.

Duterte’s verbal “temporary agreement” with China supposedly was made after he met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during his first China visit.

Duterte was then noticeably reticent about the deal, although he announced he had secured a fishing rights deal for the hotly contested Recto Bank, where China had earlier forcibly stopped the country’s energy exploration activities.

Later, however, in his 2019 State of the Nation Address, Duterte elaborated on this verbal deal, which now included a fishing rights deal for Panatag Shoal.

He also insisted that there was nothing wrong with forging fishing rights deals since the 2016 ruling of the arbitral tribunal stated that the Philippines may enter into fishing agreements with other countries.

Nonetheless, Duterte met with justifiable criticism over those deals. Former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio, for instance, pointed out as early as 2021 that allowing China to fish within the country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) emboldened Chinese vessels to stay put in the WPS.

A criticism that now has credence since China has permanently stationed China Coast Guard (CCG) and Chinese Maritime Militia ships at Panatag Shoal and elsewhere.

Turning now to what the Chinese embassy said last week about the 2016 deal, China’s revelations are essentially about two things.

First, Filipino fishermen can fish with small fishing boats in designated waters, except in the lagoon of Panatag Shoal. Nothing is presently repugnant here as Duterte frequently boasted of such an arrangement.

All hell broke loose, however, over China’s second claim in her latest striptease act.

China claimed the previous administration had agreed that the Armed Forces of the Philippines, Philippine Coast Guard, and other Philippine government vessels and aircraft should refrain from entering the designated 12-nautical-mile territorial sea and corresponding air space of Panatag Shoal.

If there was any truth to that supposed claim it had only one horrendous implication — that China owned Panatag Shoal.

So horrendous was the implication of this phony Chinese narrative that all the Marcos government officials — and even government critics — understandably went ballistic, all damning the supposed deal as “absurd! ludicrous!”

And rightly so. Primarily because wannabe autocrat Duterte had no constitutional authority to solely enter into a “temporary arrangement” in the first place.

“Under the Constitution, then president Duterte had no power to waive, even temporarily, Philippine sovereignty or traditional fishing rights unless the waiver was embodied in a treaty ratified by the Senate,” rightly pointed out Carpio last week.