Phl-Viet friendship games in Spratlys kick off today

MANILA, Philippines - The friendship games in the Spratlys archipelago, the first ever to held in the hotly-contested region, kick off today with combined Filipino and Vietnamese troops mixing it up in football, volleyball and tug of war.

For decades, soldiers on forward deployment in the region by claimant states have been confined to guarding and securing their respective occupied territories – until today, when Filipino soldiers will be at the Vietnamese occupied Pugad Island (Southwest Cay) for the holding of the first ever games aimed at promoting camaraderie and friendship among two military forces.

As agreed by Manila and Hanoi, Filipino soldiers will not be competing directly with their Vietnamese counterparts. Rather, each team that would be seeing action in football, volleyball and tug-of-war would be a mixture of Filipino and Vietnamese soldiers.

“They would be teammates,” a Philippine Navy official said.

He revealed 30 Filipino navy men will be at Pugad Island this morning.

The idea of mixing up Filipino and Vietnamese troops into several teams is aimed at avoiding friction between the two military forces.

For decades, they have been tasked to guard and defend their respective occupied areas from each other.

“Today’s event is purely a friendship game. The Vietnamese and Filipino troops would be jointly sweating it out against other teams with the same composition. There will be no losers and winners in this whole day event,” the official said.

Pugad is 1.75 nautical miles from the Philippine naval detachment on Parola Island (Northwest Cay) and it used to be under the control of Filipino troops.

Vietnamese troops occupied the island after Filipino soldiers left the area for Parola in 1975.

The holding of the friendship game between the Philippines and Vietnam, two of the six Spratlys claimant countries, comes at a time when both countries are on the receiving end of China’s increased aggressiveness in the disputed region.

The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei have overlapping maritime claims over the Spratlys archipelago, which is being claimed wholly by China.

There were plans before to involve the other claimant countries but this did not pushed through due to China’s behavior.

China has been aggressively enforcing its territorial stake in the region, spanning from its coastline in Hainan down to the waters of Brunei and Malaysia and cutting through the territorial waters of the Philippines and Vietnam.

Vietnam is currently engaged in a direct, tense maritime row with China in the Paracel Islands, after Beijing positioned its giant oil rig platform within Hanoi’s 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone last month.

Maritime tension is now mounting in the Paracels after a Chinese vessel rammed and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in a recent maritime encounter north of the Spratlys archipelago.