When did it all start? (2)

Approaching war meant that asserting the Philippine claim to Scarborough Shoal (more familiar to us as Bajo de Masinloc) was overtaken by events. Also, America itself had priorities that diverged from those of the Philippines. François-Xavier Bonnet, in a footnote, had to explain why for the Americans, it seemed at first indifferent to the Philippine claim: “The State Department considered that the islands claimed by France [the Paracels] were separated from Palawan by a large maritime area called ‘Dangerous Ground’ on the nautical charts. This ‘Dangerous Ground’ could not be claimed by a colonial power as it was made of reefs and other underwater features. From that time, the US government has always considered the need to separate the ‘Dangerous Ground’ from the Spratly Islands proper. In their perception, they consider the Spratly Islands as a group of islands situated west of the ‘Dangerous Ground’ even if they don’t express it publicly.”

Then the Americans discovered what Japan was up to and changed its tune. Prior to Japan annexing the Spratlys in 1939, it had sent secret missions to map the Spratlys, which “allowed the Navy authorities to perceive the area for the first time as a vast archipelago crisscrossed by secret maritime routes, with real shortcuts in the South China Sea. This change of perception was used by Japan when it annexed the Shinnan Gunto [New Southern Islands], a fusion of the nine French islands and the Dangerous Ground, at the door of the Philippines and Borneo, in March 1939. The Spratlys, after being dubbed an area to avoid, were starting to be perceived as a strategic territory with which one could control the internal sea lanes.”

In public, the United States said it was unconcerned, but it filed a secret protest with the Japanese and didn’t inform the Commonwealth government, which it knew wanted to pursue its claim to Bajo de Masinloc. Bonnet speculates that the US was exploring the idea of a secret submarine base outside Philippine waters.

So we know, prior to the war, our country was interested in more than the Bajo de Masinloc; it should be understood as the prewar Commonwealth’s trial balloon for a wider claim (together with other claims, writing after the war, for example, Francis Burton Harrison, former governor general and a presidential adviser to three presidents, said Quezon had intended to pursue the Sabah claim after independence).

With independence in 1946 came the need to finally organize our foreign service and the man chosen to be our first secretary of foreign affairs (in the modern era) was Vice President Elpidio Quirino, who’d studied the Spratlys area as a senator, had started the ball rolling on our claim in 1937 as secretary of the interior, and actively pursued it in the Cabinet and then as president. What had to be postponed until after independence could now be pursued: Sabah, the Spratlys, etc. That year, Quirino wrote to Douglas MacArthur, supreme allied commander in the Pacific, to remind him of the Philippine claims in the area. Later that year, on Sept. 25, 1946, the Republic of China also finally got around to what it had begun in 1939: asserting its claims on the Spratlys.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the year after 1947 was marked by three events. The Philippine government repeated its claim; the Republic of China prepared to formalize its claims. China and the Philippines were both posturing because that same year, the first steps to drafting a peace treaty with Japan began.

From 1947 to 1948, basic preparations and from 1950 to 1951, active negotiations occurred for this peace treaty, which would come to be known as the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco.

In 1948, China published the nine-dash line map, which used the lines to show the extent of its claims to islands, but, interestingly enough, not the seas. Quirino used the treaty for leverage, at one point refusing to sign the treaty unless demands for war reparations were recognized by Japan, which it did.

When the peace treaty was signed, neither country won. Japan explicitly renounced its claim to the New Southern Islands, but the area wasn’t awarded to any other claimant. The American position, as we’ve seen, was that the “Dangerous Ground” portion annexed by Japan couldn’t be claimed by anyone because there were reefs and underwater features. As for the Spratly Islands, Japan had renounced them, but they hadn’t been awarded to anyone.

In 1956, the State Department, in an internal memorandum, noted that, “There is no internationally agreed definition of precisely what is referred to by the term ‘Spratly Islands.’ It was used in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty to apply to an undefined group of islands west of the island of Palawan (Philippines) in the South China Sea, held by Japan during the war.”

China had aggressively staked its claim by actually occupying islands after 1945. Distracted by the Chinese Civil War, and by 1949, in exile, the Republic of China (or the new People’s Republic in Beijing) couldn’t aggressively pursue its claims: Neither Taiwan nor Beijing was invited to sign the peace treaty. Why then didn’t the Philippines win by default?

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