AO 29

I suspect President Aquino was merely trying to save face when he issued Administrative Order 29 that officially but unilaterally renamed the South China Sea as the West Philippine Sea and in the process formally declaring certain disputed islands as our own.

 To me the issuance of the administrative order was an ill-advised, ill-timed knee-jerk reaction to the snub he got from Chinese leader Hu Jintao at the recently concluded APEC summit in Vladivostok.  Not that we like our leader to be so shabbily treated, especially by the biggest bully in the South China Sea. But frankly we had it coming. If the supposed planned meeting between Aquino and Hu on the sidelines of the summit was not a done deal, it should not have been advertised.

 But trust the communications “experts” of Aquino to shoot themselves on the foot without fail. That China never issued a peep about the supposed meeting should have raised red flags all over that something just wasn’t right.

 Still, Aquino’s communications team pressed ahead, fired up by the notion that our leader would no longer be the pushover China wanted him projected to the world if Aquino could get Hu to sit down one-on-one, even for a very informal chat lasting no more than a chinaman’s minute.

 And so Aquino’s communications experts flooded the Philippine media with unilateral announcements about a supposed sidelines meeting between the two leaders. Of course we all know now what happened.

 But instead of putting a finger on his communications policies as the likely culprit for the debacle, a severely miffed Aquino instead chose to embark on a rather risky gambit, which was to issue AO 29.

 Now, I am no expert in international law. But as geography lover, I can say with almost absolute certainty that, by simply looking at the map, any map, the logical geographic conclusion anyone can make is that the disputed islands are nearer to us and must therefore be ours.

 And if they are ours, then surely I have to rally behind my president in staking and defending our claim to what is ours. But I am also a practical person. And as such, I do not think it wise to make that claim at this point in time without the muscle to back it up.

 These are not very good times to stoke some fires in the region. China is in the process of change in leadership, a time when power brokers could do something stupid just to prove their own strength.

 Lest we forget, China is not only the largest country in population (1.3 billion to our 90 plus million — meaning forget the one billion Chinese, we are just a third of its .3) it is, more importantly, a communist country with a military-propped leadership)

 Right after Aquino issued the administrative order, China promptly dispatched warships to the area, with the clear intent to prove the hollowness of the words contained in the AO. To make matters worse, China’s own mortal enemy, Taiwan, has chosen not to recognize the order.

 Now, one would have expected that the enemy of your enemy has be your friend. That can only be true in other circumstances. But not on this one. The AO is simply too thin to be of any moment that the only sensible thing for anyone to do is regard it as a joke.

 Issuing an administrative order is not how any country asserts territory and I wonder why no one among Aquino’s legal advisers ever told him that. If you have not heard any laughter yet, it is only because the other countries are civil enough to laugh behind our backs.

 What Aquino did was like claiming a piece of land by saying so on a cigarette wrapper. The problem is, while nobody is expected to take that AO seriously, China apparently does, if for no other reason than as a ploy to flex its muscles to show its real audience, the United States.