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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-22/wps-1.avif" alt="South China Sea 1" loading="lazy" />
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(What if our neighbors also name their EEZs?)
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<p>
"WPS" is fiction, and I will stop writing forever if anybody can prove I am wrong. Worse, Marcos is maliciously tapping on Filipinos' nationalist sentiments against another nation and ensuring US support to buttress his failing presidency. Emotional sentiments against other countries are not easy to reverse, making it extremely difficult for our country to resolve our territorial maritime disputes with China and Vietnam in the South China Sea.
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<p>
It was the late President Benigno Aquino 3rd, the son of Marcos' father's archenemy, who demonstrated his utter ignorance of our territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Ironically, Marcos, in his SONA, announced to the world that he embraces the absurdity of this fiction invented by Aquino 3rd. Jedi master Obi-wan was certainly right when he rhetorically asked: "Who is more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?"
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<p>
Aquino 3rd created the "West Philippine Sea" through his Administrative Order 29 of Sept. 5, 2012, which defined the "West Philippine Sea" (WPS) as the western side of our exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles from the "baseline," roughly the outermost land points of the archipelago). It includes the waters "around, within and adjacent to the Kalayaan Island Group (KIG) and Scarborough Shoal."
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<p>
For starters, for the KIG to be part of the WPS is no longer tenable: our arbitration suit against China ruled that the KIG is as illegal as China's nine-dash line, and we committed to comply with it.
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<p>
We lost Scarborough Shoal to the Chinese even earlier, in May 2012, and China Coast Guard vessels routinely patrol it and drive away foreign vessels at will, as it claims the area is part of Chinese territory. How can we include it as our WPS?
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<h4>
Scarborough
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<p>
The creation of the WPS is, in fact, Aquino's bumbling attempt to conceal what is really one of the biggest boo-boos in our history: his administration's loss of Scarborough Shoal after his foreign affairs secretary Albert del Rosario believed US diplomat Kurt Campbell's claim that the Chinese had agreed to a simultaneous withdrawal of the two countries vessels from the area. There was no such agreement, only an American proposal given to Chinese diplomat Fu Ying, who two years later told media she was just preparing to relay the proposal to her superiors in Beijing before the Filipino vessels left.
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<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-22/wps-2.avif" alt="No such WPS" loading="lazy" />
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(No such WPS, according to International Hydrographic Organization. PHOTO FROM IHO)
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<p>
By international law, which bans the use of force to annex territory, China legally acquired Scarborough Shoal, even if because of the Americans' trickery. Tragically, out of the disputed islands in the South China Sea, our sovereign claims over Scarborough Shoal (Bajo de Masinloc) were the strongest by "effective occupation." This is because the US Navy (which we gave permission to do so) routinely used it as a firing range for its fighters and as an area to unload unused bombs carried by B-52s on its bombing missions to Vietnam and Cambodia, as Subic Naval Base was just 270 km away.
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"West Philippine Sea" is fiction, and a dangerous one