Palmas row: DFA diplomat canned

For defending the integrity of Philippine territory, a functionary of the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has been sacked and accused of "acts inimical to the national interest."

Hermes Dorado, until Tuesday the executive director of the DFA’s Maritime and Ocean Affairs Center (MOAC), said he was likely placed on "floating status" because he was being blamed for the publication of The STAR’s two-part special report on a brewing territorial dispute between the Philippines and Indonesia over the islands of Palmas, Marore and Merampit.

Meanwhile, Senate foreign relations committee chairman Sen. Manuel Villar Jr. said that after carefully studying the Palmas island issue, he decided to file a resolution urging the government to assert its ownership of the island.

Villar filed the resolution as the foreign office placed on "floating status" one of its senior maritime affairs experts who was falsely accused of leaking documents on the dispute to The STAR.

Dorado, 62, told The STAR he was set to be posted to London as a country representative to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) but was told by DFA Assistant Secretary Alberto Encomienda on Tuesday that he would be transferred to an undisclosed post because of "acts inimical to the national interest."

Encomienda, for his part, said "the DFA has no official position yet on the Palmas island issue."

"Now, I’m floating in the seas of southern Mindanao, not knowing where to go but I have no regrets. I have nothing to fear," Dorado said in a telephone interview.

The STAR categorically denies that Dorado or any DFA official had anything to do with the special reports published on Feb. 2 and 3.

Dorado said he was scheduled to brief President Arroyo and the Cabinet on the Palmas island issue last Tuesday but the briefing was canceled by the office of Foreign Affairs Secretary Blas Ople.

Sources said Dorado was a victim of a power play within the DFA between a group that wants to assert the country’s sovereignty over the three islands and another group that wants to sweep the issue under the rug although it would mean the loss of 15,000 square kilometers of rich territorial waters.

Dorado, who has been in the foreign service for almost 25 years, said he has been prevented from informing people who could make vital executive decisions on the matter.

Expert opinion

"I know whereof I speak. As a geodetic engineer, I know what those ‘base points used to draw straight lines’ mean to the integrity of our national territory," Dorado said, using the internationally accepted terminology in defining maritime borders.

The issue on the islands of Marore, Merampit and Palmas hinges on the fact that Indonesia has announced that, in accordance with international practice, it would redraw its maritime borders using the three islands as reference points.

When the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) took effect in 1994, Jakarta immediately embarked on a $40-million hydrographic survey to chart new baselines, including Marore, Merampit and Palmas.

The survey, which the Philippines has not undertaken for its own, was completed last year and Jakarta has already submitted the finished charts to the United Nations.

But Encomienda said "it’s too premature" to discuss the Palmas issue.

"We are still studying our baselines and basepoints," Encomienda said.

"We are always lagging behind for reasons that escape me," Dorado said, recalling that Jakarta informed the government of the moves during the RP-Indonesia Joint Commission on Bilateral Cooperation meeting in Manila on Dec. 20-21 last year.

The Indonesians, he said, were very prepared for the meeting and brought maritime experts, engineers and satellite images of Philippine territorial waters that they are now claiming as their own.

But sociologists and international law experts have declared that the Philippines’ continuous administrative control of Marore, Merampit and Palmas is well-grounded and cannot be easily controverted.

Dr. Domingo Non, a respected professor at the Mindanao State University in General Santos City, said the three islands have always been occupied by Filipinos who have inter-married with Indonesians and are clearly recognized as Philippine territory.

Non came to the conclusion after an internationally funded study on the population of the three islands.

Not everyone is asleep

Meanwhile, at the Senate, Villar said he would urge the government to assert its sovereignty over the three islands.

The senator concurred with the view of international law expert Prof. H. Harry Roque of the University of the Philippines that the islands of Marore, Merampit and Palmas are historically part of Philippine territory.

"(Palmas) Island is located within 47 nautical miles east-northeast of Sarangani which is within the country’s boundaries as defined by the 1898 Treaty of Paris," Villar said.

He noted that international experts claim that Spain could not have ceded any part of the Philippines to the United States because Filipinos had already established the Republic of the Philippines six months before the Treaty of Paris was signed in December 1898.

Villar also agreed that the Philippines need not bind itself to an arbitration ruling promulgated by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 1928 because of the international legal principle on statehood and state succession.

The United States had included the three islands within the boundaries defined by the Treaty of Paris but the Netherlands, which then controlled what is now Indonesia, claimed Palmas island in 1906.

The US and the Netherlands finally submitted the matter to arbitration in 1925 and Swiss arbitrator Max Huber ruled that Palmas belonged to the Netherlands because it always had continuous administrative control over the island.

"Even if Spain validly ceded the Philippines to the US government, the Huber decision on the Palmas Island arbitration case cannot be binding on the Philippines under legal principles on state succession," Villar said. – With Aurea Calica