Diplomatic protest not always a solution to China’s ‘bullying’
The Marcos administration did the right thing in forging strategic military alliances with allied forces like the US and Japan primarily because dozens of diplomatic protests have almost always fell on deaf ears, a senior administration lawmaker said yesterday.
“I think a simple diplomatic protest right now is not enough. Definitely, it’s a part of harassment and bullying - a big, powerful country bullying the Philippines,” Rep. LRay Villafuerte observed, in obvious reference to repeated incursions made by China to the West Philippine Sea.
“Given that the Philippines cannot fight China on its own, we should promote relationships with our allies like the US, Japan, or our neighbors, to make China feel that it cannot continue doing this,” the Camarines Sur congressman added.
He said it is lamentable that this thing is happening to the Philippines and urged the present administration to stand up and unite as a nation to tell China to stop bullying us. According to Villafuerte, it’s about time the government takes a “more assertive action by taking joint steps with the US, Japan, our Southeast Asian neighbors and other allies meant to demonstrate to China that it needs to stop once and for all its maneuvers in the West Philippine Sea.”
Villafuerte said joint patrols in the WPS could be conducted not only with the US, but also with other countries as well like Japan, Australia and Canada that had all voiced serious concerns over the Ayungin Shoal incident.
The president of the National Unity Party urged government to go “beyond merely issuing a diplomatic protest” against China’s latest act of bullying, which made only matters worse even if President Marcos and President Xi Jinping have agreed for a peaceful resolution.
Rep. Robert Ace Barbers, for his part, called on the government to “stand up against China aggression.” “Now that China has finally owned up to its cowardly act of bullying us in our territorial seas, we condemn in the strongest terms these acts of aggression.”
The Surigao del Norte congressman called on Filipinos “to stand united and rally behind our President as he expresses our frustrations and protests diplomatically. We cannot anymore keep quiet and endure in silence.”
“We have suffered long enough. Our fishermen have been directly victimized. As if it was not enough, they now provoked our military and committed an act of military aggression,” Barbers, chairman of the House committee on dangerous drugs, said.
“We call on our allies to help us in the implementation of the arbitral ruling that gave us territorial jurisdiction over the seas now being occupied illegally and without an iota of basis neither in history nor in International Law, by China,” he added.—Delon