Traitorous deal

The government calls the provisional understanding with China a success, pointing to 15 resupply missions completed without incident over two years of relatively calm waters.

A closer examination, however, gives it the character of a Trojan horse, a mechanism to bury the 2016 arbitral award that effectively favored the Philippines.

The agreement was signed during Enrique Manalo’s tenure as foreign affairs secretary but was negotiated by the current secretary, Ma. Theresa “Tess” Lazaro.

China wanted to make the arrangement look reasonable after a Filipino sailor’s thumb was cut off following a confrontation.

The injury happened during the 17 June 2024 rotation-and-resupply mission to the marooned BRP Sierra Madre at Ayungin Shoal.

Philippine Navy sailors on that mission encountered China Coast Guard personnel armed with axes and knives who blocked their boats. In the melee, the Chinese forces rammed, punctured, boarded and towed the Philippine vessels, and the sailor’s thumb was severed in the process. They also seized the firearms on board.

The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) then agreed to the China-imposed rules requiring Filipino vessels to notify Beijing before resupplying the country’s own troops on its own reef.

The Philippines was then baited into accepting the premise behind it: that China has a say in what happens in the West Philippine Sea (WPS).

The absence of conflict proves the arrangement is working exactly as Beijing designed it to.

The arbitral tribunal at The Hague took jurisdiction of the WPS case only because it found no overlapping maritime zones between the two countries.

China’s 2006 declaration under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea excluded the disputes over overlapping maritime boundaries from compulsory arbitration, which means the path to The Hague existed only because the tribunal agreed there was no overlap to exclude.

Since there was no overlap, there was no exclusion, and because there was no exclusion, there was no barrier to arbitration, which led to the Philippines winning its case.

The “provisional understanding” means negotiating a boundary through overlapping zones, which means it is a legal mechanism built for exactly the condition the tribunal said did not exist.

When the DFA signed the deal, it admitted that there is something to provisionally arrange, an overlap that the tribunal had already ruled was a fiction.

The acknowledgment is dangerous because it concedes arguments that the Permanent Court of Arbitration had already debunked.

The DFA’s defense — that the understanding is merely a conflict-avoidance mechanism — does not hold water.

The deal with China must be abandoned, and the government must conduct operations in Ayungin Shoal the way a sovereign nation does, without asking anyone’s leave, without prior notice, and without apology, exercising the freedom of navigation available to all nations that the tribunal already confirmed exists.

Every additional year of asking permission becomes the foreign aggressor’s opportunity to normalize the idea of its 10-dash-line claim.

Indonesia’s near-miss under its incoming president offers the cautionary case. When that nation made an early gesture toward joint exploitation with China in a supposedly overlapping zone, it triggered swift domestic backlash from Indonesian academics. It forced the government to back down almost immediately.

The arbitral award is the country’s unassailable asset in this dispute, won without firing a shot.

Now, it is being dismantled supposedly for calmer waters. China has maneuvered to mislead the Marcos administration, willingly, into a dragnet of slow forfeiture.