‘Never a promise’: did Philippines ever agree to tow away grounded warship in South China Sea?

The circumstances behind the 1999 grounding of the Sierra Madre have come into sharp focus in recent weeks following the August 5 episode when Chinese actions – including the firing of water cannons – forced one of two Philippine boats resupplying personnel on the vessel to turn back.

The Philippines and several Western nations, including the United States, have slammed the Chinese actions as “dangerous”.

China in turn has said its coastguard – operating 1,000km from its nearest land mass, Hainan island – was “professional and restrained” and urged the Philippines to remove the vessel. It said Manila, which calls the shoal Ayungin, had reneged on multiple promises over the decades to do so.

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Philippines accuses Chinese coastguard of firing water cannons at its vessels in disputed waters

Philippines accuses Chinese coastguard of firing water cannons at its vessels in disputed waters

The current debate is focused on whether there had indeed been a commitment in 1999 and thereafter by the Philippines, at the time led by President Joseph Estrada, to abandon the shoal.

The views and comments of Mercado, a former senator and Manila’s first permanent representative to Asean, as well as others such as Eduardo Maria Santos – who was navy chief when the BRP Sierre Madre was grounded – have been closely parsed.

While the 86-year-old Estrada has not passed comment, his son Jinggoy, the senate defence committee chair, this week released a statement underscoring that Mercado had confirmed there was “no agreement or promise” to remove the vessel.

It is commonly accepted that the Philippines did indeed intentionally ground the two vessels as part of its sovereignty claim to the Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal, which both lie within its exclusive economic zone (EEZ). The BRP Benguet was immediately towed away after its November 1999 grounding.

Troops who are stationed on the crumbling World War II-era BRP Sierra Madre to assert the Philippines’ South China Sea claims depend upon resupply missions – which Manila says Beijing regularly tries to disrupt – to survive their remote posting.

The Philippine coastguard fears China will seek to occupy Second Thomas Shoal if the military detachment leaves.

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Many observers fear the South China Sea dispute is a powder keg, with any miscalculation or accident able to ignite a military conflict.

From Manila’ standpoint, the BRP Sierra Madre in effect hosts its only military detachment guarding the oil and gas-rich Reed Bank from further Chinese intrusion. “Ayungin is only 22 nautical miles away from Chinese-occupied Panganiban [Mischief] Reef,” retired navy chief Santos told This Week in Asia. “At night, you can see [from Sierra Madre] the lights of Panganiban,” now militarised and fortified.

On Monday, the Chinese embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission Zhou Zhiyong told a forum in Manila: “It’s been 24 years and the Philippine side has yet to honour its commitment.”

He said China had requested the government of incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr to “immediately … tow away the vessel”, further urging Manila to “meet the Chinese side halfway and find an effective way of managing the situation on the sea through diplomatic consultations”.

Zhou insisted that the Philippine government had agreed to remove the vessel as early as 1999. “The Philippine side also made explicit commitments to do so,” he said. “The representations were put on record and well documented.”

However, Mercado categorically denied to This Week in Asia that any such agreement ever existed: “We never promised. There was no such promise.”

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A tit-for-tat move?

Through interviews and an examination of the events that transpired, This Week in Asia was able to piece together what had happened that caused China to believe Manila made a commitment to remove the warship, but also allowed Mercado wiggle room to deny such a promise was ever made.

For Mercado, the issue isn’t one of a broken promise but a tit-for-tat reaction.

He explained that the grounding of the two vessels should be understood in the context of China’s sudden seizure and occupation of Panganiban Reef in 1995, during the presidency of Fidel Ramos.

Mercado said China would not budge despite diplomatic protests and insisted it was only building fishermen’s huts for shelter during storms on Panganiban Reef, which it called Meiji Jiao. “But pretty soon they had fortified it with cement structures.”

“Binobola naman tayo, e de bolahan tayo,” the straight-shooting Mercado said, which loosely translates to mean: “since they are bamboozling or playing us, then let’s play each other”.

“We have to protect our interests. We cannot allow them to take over our areas,” he said.

Any vows he may have uttered at that time should be taken in this context, Mercado said.

Whether or not he and other officials made commitments to remove the ships – explicit or otherwise – is up for debate. While Mercado denies having done so, his comments at the time suggest a degree of word play – presumably to keep the Chinese at bay.

For example, in a November 1999 press conference, Mercado was quoted as saying that “we are doing our best within our capacity to repair the [two] ships that ran aground. This will be done in compliance with our policy that no new structures [will be built] in the area”.

Mercado was also quoted as saying that he assured Beijing “that appropriate steps have been undertaken to assess the extent of damage to the vessels [and] efforts will be made to immediately extricate the vessels from the shoal”.

There may have been cause at the time for the Estrada administration, of which Mercado was a part, to intimate that the two vessels would be towed away immediately. Estrada was that year’s host of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations summit that was to be attended by senior leaders from Japan, South Korea and China – represented by then-premier Zhu Rongji. A proposed code of conduct for the South China Sea was top of the agenda at the talks, and the stand-off over the vessels would have caused awkwardness at the meeting.

There was little to no progress made on the code of conduct during the meeting, and BRP Benguet was towed away on November 29, the day after the summit ended, media reports from the time show. BRP Sierra Madre remained in place.

Jay Batongbacal, director of the University of the Philippines Law Centre’s Institute for Maritime Affairs and Law of the Sea, said the continued presence of the derelict BRP Sierra Madre to this day on Second Thomas Shoal was “about asserting and securing the EEZ and continental shelf, which require presence in the sea area being claimed by China”.

He noted that in 1999, for Manila beaching was “the only feasible means available to try to monitor and deter further incursions into Philippine waters, in the absence of the needed maritime capabilities and resources” required by other methods.

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According to former senator Antonio Trillanes IV, who was then a lieutenant senior grade officer in the Philippine navy, “there was never an order to remove BRP Sierra Madre from Ayungin that I am aware of”.

If there was, incumbent President Marcos Jnr said last week he was rescinding it.

Mercado recently suggested beaching more vessels to stake out shoals. He also pointed out that since BRP Sierra Madre is still a commissioned vessel, “any attack on it will trigger the Mutual Defence Treaty with the US”.

But Trillanes expressed doubts that this strategy could still work since the “China of 2023 is way more aggressive and antagonistic [than in 1999]. So, any such move should be considered only as a response to a similarly aggressive act by China”.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse