Here’s an excerpt from the podcast:
Teresa Tang:
What I found really interesting in your TV report was that when you were out on the water, you actually saw these orange buoys in the distance and written on them was a Filipino phrase that you said translates into “This is ours”, which is hugely symbolic. On the water, did you encounter any problems? You know what happened when you approach the shoal?
Buena Bernal:
So 40 nautical miles from shore, two China coast guard vessels already started shadowing our convoy. By this time, the 100 small wooden boats weren’t with us anymore … And I talked to experts after that trip, because 40 nautical miles from shore, that’s well within the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone of a country, and those are distances that are set by the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea that sets the belt of sea that a country can claim based on distance from its shore.
And they told me that based on their monitoring that Chinese vessels that are surveilling the West Philippine Sea, which is how the Philippines calls its maritime zone in the larger South China Sea, are coming closer and closer to shore. They’re seeing that China is moving their goalposts each time. It started in 1996 with West Philippine Sea with China seizing Mischief Reef, 2012, China’s seizing the inner lagoon of Scarborough Shoal.
And now the issue is becoming Sabina Shoal, which is the closest major maritime feature in the West Philippine Sea to the island of Palawan. And so what you’re really seeing here, according to academics that I’ve spoke to is China’s quote unquote, constructive occupation of the West Philippine Sea.
And it’s trying to normalise, the academics are saying, that movement of its goalpost. And so efforts like this, where civilians are trying to go to these maritime features … or this is our civilian mission that I joined, there have been medical missions to Spratly Islands, at least to the Philippine occupied islands there, there was a tour boat, a tour yacht that went again to the Spratly Islands that I joined last year.
So all these efforts to “civilianised” the area, they say, is basically a defiance of, or a challenge to growing Chinese constructive occupation of the West Philippine Sea, or what they say is China’s militarisation of that area.
