Medicine, the Spratlys, and the good Dr. Socrates

He stands in front of his audience, a tall, thin, soft-spoken man, wearing the blue rubber tsinelas that have become his trademark here in Puerto Princesa. Surrounded by a confusing array of maps and transparencies, he is totally engrossed in the point he is making, which is that the Philippines has a strong geological claim to the Spratly Islands, but that we must do our homework and make the claim, formally, to the UNCLOS (United Nations Commission on the Law of the Sea) if we do not want to forfeit our rights to China. And we must establish ownership of the Spratlys if we want to realize the big dream, which is to turn the whole area into a marine reserve, with an international research center, and a real chance at preserving one of the most important and most beautiful tropical marine resources in the world.

Dr. Jose Antonio Socrates, otherwise known as Doc Soc, is Provincial Health Officer of the Province of Palawan, an orthopedic surgeon, but also a geologist by training, and a community organizer by inclination. In Palawan he wears many hats. He works out of the sekued office in the Provincial Hospital. What does sekued stand for? He grins. Sentro Ng Kulang Sa Edukasyon, he says. It seems that when he was being interviewed for his post as Provincial Health Officer–a position he never sought and didn’t even want to accept –he admittedly did not have quite the right credentials for the job: he is a doctor, a trained orthopedic surgeon, in fact a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh, U.K.), but he didn’t have a degree in Public Health, or Management. He somehow offended one of the interviewers–he is famous for speaking his mind–so that in her evaluation she wrote that he lacked not credentials but education. Thus when he got the position anyway, he posted a sign on the door that said Sentro Ng Kulang Sa Edukasyon, and worked under that for some time, until it got abbreviated to sekued. Now it is a community feature and a popular meeting place.

Doc Soc is a simple, modest man, despite the fact that he has lived and practiced medicine in a variety of places, from England to Lesotho to Saudi Arabia to the U.S. He came back to Palawan, his father’s province and his birthplace, about twelve years ago, and set up a practice in orthopedic surgery at the Provincial Hospital.

Soc practices what he calls "appropriate orthopedics", which is to say that whenever possible, he avoids the sort of costly, invasive, "high tech" operative procedures which are routinely urged on patients by so many doctors in the country. Most of Doc Soc’s patients are, of course, simply not able to pay expensive specialist fees anyway. But with funding from the British Palawan Trust, put together by personal and professional friends in England, Soc is able to keep fees down to a real minimum. He is frankly more interested in the patients’ health than in his own finances.

But once his orthopedics practice was established, he saw that by itself it wasn’t enough; the patients often needed long periods of rehabilitation. So his wife Cecile got to work and set up a rehabilitation center, relaxed and child friendly and thriving to this day, out of the same hospital. This led eventually to a home traction program, started up when the Socrates were challenged by a father who found it difficult to care for his young son, hospitalized and in traction, and wanted to bring him home, to normalize the lives of the entire family.

A child with a broken leg is best treated, says Doc Soc, with sustained traction for four weeks or more. But the child is not sick and does not require medication, and is thus probably better off in the security and friendly atmosphere of his own home. Of course medical supervision is necessary, to make sure the traction is properly set up, and stays that way. But this program has proved very successful since its inception – and has relieved pressure on the hospital facilities as well.

The next need that Doc Soc addressed was that for artificial limbs. So a prosthesis workshop was developed with the assistance of "Handicap International", a French charity, as the rehab center was developing. Then last July a wheelchair workshop was opened. Both workshops have qualified technicians who trained at Tahanang Walang Hagdanan in Cainta, Metro Manila.

Doc Soc has big dreams for providing high quality medical aid to all the people of Palawan. Soon after elections were over he pulled together a group of NGO representatives to meet with the newly-elected mayor Dennis Socrates (no relation) and councilors at (where else?) sekued, to put forth civil society concerns to the new officials. Health concerns were at the top of the list, with the health officials present arguing for empowering people to understand, and manage, their own health care. "Don’t forget", says Doc Soc with a little grin, "a cooperative of patients is quite different from a cooperative of doctors, who after all only get together to enrich themselves!" He’d like to see the Provincial Hospital rebuilt and turned into a Medical Center. Then he’d like two provincial hospitals in the outlying areas, one to the north and one to the south, so that the six existent satellite medical clinics "would have something to orbit around!"

Doc Soc is a popular man in Palawan, and he is completely at home in the province. Absorbed by his medical work (and now the Spratly campaign), he rarely gets to relax, but when he does, he takes his wife Cecile and daughter April (here briefly on vacation from her work with the mentally ill in Aberdeen, Scotland) and goes to the beach, up north to Sabang or across the province to Napsan. Here, says Cecile, he invariably gathers stray dogs around him–Cecile says Soc can’t imagine a heaven without dogs, and one particular stray in Sabang seems to recognize him on every visit. He also, of course, always has his eyes open for people with medical problems, especially people in need of orthopedic attention–and when he finds such people, he makes sure they get to the city and get the attention they need. (Yes, we do need two provincial hospitals!)

For the last two years Doc Soc has been nearly obsessed with the problem of the Spratlys and the need for the country to make the claim. He writes for the local newspapers and gives talks to NGOs, politicians, students. He goes into every aspect of the problem, from history to geology to biology. This is part of what he has to say:

Most people seem to wonder first whether the Philippines has any historical claim to the hotly contested Spratly Islands. Well, historically our interest in the Spratlys starts with a man named Tomas Cloma, born in Bohol in 1904, who filed a claim on Kalayaan in 1947. Just a few years later, in 1954, an international swindler named Morton Mead started selling claims to the area, causing Cloma to claim the area as free territory. But the government wasn’t really interested, and when Cloma attempted to make the claim before the United Nations, the Philippine ambassador to the U.N. refused to let him do so. On a later trip to Kalayaan, he spotted a Chinese flag.

But then came the energy crisis of 1973, and in 1974, Ferdinand Marcos "invited" Cloma to talk about turning over his claim. This he was inclined to do, but he did want to seek legal counsel first. The impatient Mr. Marcos thus put him in prison for two months, at the end of which time he signed his claim over to the government in return for payment of one peso. Thus, says Doc Soc, our historical claim to Kalayaan is based on little more than two frauds.

The Chinese, on the other hand, base their claim on occupation, dating all the way back to the Han Dynasty–i.e. 200 B.C.

But we do have something better on our side: we have a strong geologically-based claim. This is so because Palawan, unlike the rest of the country, was originally (meaning 34 million years ago) part of the eastern rim of the giant Asian continent. When this rim was fractured by violent shifts in underground plates, what was to become Palawan split off from Asia and began a slow drift southward, coming to rest in its current position about 16 million years ago. Thus it is not surprising that the Palawan coast has an extended continental shelf.

Now this shelf is important because basically it allows the Philippines to extend its territorial claims further into the sea. We have not yet done this. But the situation is a bit more complicated because we have to document the existence of the continental shelf before we can file the claim. But this requires some fairly high-tech and therefore expensive geophysical (seismic) mapping. This is where we are getting into real problems, because the Cabinet Committee on Maritime and Oceanic Affairs, the government entity tasked with the mapping, has misguidedly been mapping areas that have already been mapped, or are not under dispute anyway–and they have spent $52 million in the process.

Fortunately, another entity, Certeza, can do part of the work that is necessary for only about $3 million. There is also a good deal of survey data that has already been put together by oil companies. But, stresses Dr. Socrates, we have to get this moving and get it done, hopefully before 2004 when the unclos boundaries are due to go into effect. Because if we don’t do it, the Chinese will gain possession of Kalayaan by default, and then Kalayaan will have its own eez (Exclusive Economic Zone) and we will be pushed out, leaving China to exploit the presumably oil rich area of Reed Bank.

Not that Doc Soc wants the Philippines to exploit the area for oil. This area, he says, is the heart of the South China Sea–and then for emphasis he corrects himself and says no, it is the womb of the sea, incredibly rich in marine life. He would opt for the Antarctica solution, in which the disputed area is internationalized as a nature reserve, housing international research centers, etc. But we have to establish our claim before we can even suggest this–there is too much at stake to expect China to fall in with it.

This is a Palawan-type dream, and Palawan would indeed profit from "hosting" such a reserve– but the bigger profits would be in terms of the health of the environment and the continuing beauty of the province.

And this, not surprisingly, is what Doc Soc is really after.