When did it all begin? (3)

On at least two occasions, former President Elpidio Quirino put it on record that the Spratlys ought to belong to the Philippines because of their geographic proximity. American diplomats summarized things in 1956, as: “For some time, members of the Philippine government have expressed an interest in extending Filipino sovereignty to the islands of the ‘Dangerous Ground’ and Spratly group.” But the Americans threw shade on that assertion because they found it risky to extend their security umbrella that far. The question is why.

In 1951, the same year as the Treaty of San Francisco (in which Japan renounced the Spratlys but no nation was awarded control), we signed the Mutual Defense Treaty with the United States, and this represented the actual problem as far as the Americans’ and the Philippines’ claims were concerned. In an area contested by countries, some of which happened to be American allies, it would be difficult for the Americans to act as referees if one ally were too emboldened by the Mutual Defense Treaty. In 1974, an American ambassador pleading with Washington to clarify Washington’s stand had no luck: this has been the decades-old frustration of Manila with Washington, because it refused, until quite recently, to publicly state an ironclad commitment to the treaty.

In many ways, the Republic of China had been best prepared, and was in fact, aggressively pursuing its claims, through naval patrols and insisting, in 1945, that the Japanese surrender the islands to a Chinese military detachment. But the Chinese civil war meant neither the old Republic (Taiwan) nor the new People’s Republic (Beijing) governments could do much beyond publicizing their respective claims.

Content with its dominance in the region, America was uninclined to take sides. Then, according to a 1956 State Department report, what kicked off the “scramble to claim the islands” was an American: Morton F. Meads, who laid claim to the “Manity Islands” west of Palawan in June 1955, which he called the “Kingdom of Humanity.” The Chinese ambassador in Manila issued a note saying any boats visiting the Spratlys were violating Chinese territorial waters. Less than a year later, it was Tomas Cloma (described by the State Department report as “a friend and business associate of Philippine Vice President and Foreign Minister [Carlos P.] Garcia” who made a claim, following on two trips, in 1947 (when he “aspired to open a cannery and develop guano deposits in the Spratlys”) and 1951.

The start of this scramble and the diplomatic notes explain why Vice President Garcia and the Philippine government in turn reiterated the Philippine claim to the Spratlys in 1955 and 1956—the years Meads and Cloma had their adventures—and perhaps why the Americans seemed to imply Garcia was in collusion with Cloma (it would be a later Philippine president who dealt with Cloma directly). In 1956, our government’s position had evolved into asserting that the Spratlys were a de facto trusteeship of the United Nations and were open to economic exploitation by all comers (the French embassy in Manila harrumphed that its annexation hadn’t been voided by Japan’s, and so it, and not even Vietnam, owned the islands).

Former President Ramon Magsaysay and other advisors decided not to pursue Cloma’s claims as disruptive. With this decision to downplay Cloma’s claim, the attention of Garcia and the government turned to something quite productive: helping to develop international law with regard to the seas. Garcia, as secretary of foreign affairs and then president, was a very tidy man, and he seems to have left his methodical mark on our foreign policy.

Here was another question entirely: What should the extent of territorial waters, particularly for an archipelago like ours, be? In 1956, the Philippines sent a note verbale to the UN asserting, “All waters around, between and connecting different islands [form] an integral part of the national or inland waters, subject to exclusive sovereignty of the Philippines.” This was followed by a law, Republic Act No. 3046, which adopted the straight baseline method to enclose its territorial waters. The two combined to establish a kind of perimeter inside of which all waters were declared internal waters. The US protested this (and reiterated it in 1984: they disagree that the Treaty of Paris, which defined Philippine territory, turned all of the waters into territorial waters, as it would impact traditional rights of navigation and free passage. Another reason Washington would withhold from stating an ironclad defense guarantee in nonterritorial waters.

A year later, on March 15, 1960, during the second UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, Arturo Tolentino, representing the republic, appealed for special treatment on its claim. The Americans, however, wanted a six-mile uniform width for a country’s territorial sea; the Philippines supported the Afro-Asian proposal for a 12-mile limit because it would accept all historic waters from a universal rule on the territorial sea. The American ambassador tried to lean on Garcia to instruct Tolentino to vote with the Americans. Tolentino explained why the American-Canadian proposal was a disaster for us: it would cause all the seas to the east and west of the Philippines to be classified as high seas. Garcia instructed Tolentino to use his discretion in deciding how to vote. The Philippines abstained, causing the American proposal to fail because it fell one vote short of the required two-thirds majority.

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Email: mlquezon3@gmail.com; Twitter: @mlq3