Amid the guessing game started by China on who the unnamed President was who promised to remove the BRP Sierra Madre from Ayungin Shoal, Chief Presidential Legal Counsel Juan Ponce Enrile has pointed to a former senator as the culprit.
“I haven’t heard from previous presidents that they promised to remove the Sierra Madre, but what I know is that the late President Benigno Aquino III did some backchanneling, and his backdoor agent was former Senator Antonio Trillanes IV,” Enrile said.
He added: “Trillanes bypassed then Ambassador Sonia Brady in negotiating with China, and his only credential was he rode in a Philippine Navy boat when he was in the military service.”
“The subject of the backchanneling was the Scarborough Shoal standoff, but Trillanes was deceived by the Chinese. The Philippine vessels withdrew from the area of the deadlock, but China stayed put,” he recalled.
2012 Senate skirmish
Then-senator Enrile and Trillanes had a confrontation in September 2012 over the government’s covert negotiations with China that Aquino had assigned to Trillanes.
In a face-off on the Senate floor, Enrile produced the so-called Brady notes, a report on the discussions between the ambassador and Trillanes on the backchanneling mission.
During his several engagements with Chinese officials, Enrile quoted the Brady notes as saying that Trillanes indicated that Filipinos needed more interest in the conflicting claims in the region.
Enrile said the Brady notes stated that Aquino was not made fully aware of the details of Trillanes’s actions, and there was a point when the President did not know the talks were suspended for two weeks and that Trillanes was acting on his own.
“And for whom? Whose interest was he serving?” Enrile asked.
While admitting that it was the prerogative of Aquino as Commander-in-Chief to resort to backchannel talks, designating Trillanes was a huge mistake, he said.
“Trillanes should have been discreet, and he should have brought along an embassy representative to record the event. Trillanes thought he was James Bond. That should not have been allowed,” Enrile said.
“A person entrusted by the President with a mission must first exercise discretion. When you go to a country to deal with a foreign power, you must notify the embassy,” he said.
“Trillanes should have notified the embassy to alert them that he was there on a mission, and he should have brought along at least one responsible official,” he added.
He continued: “Everybody should have known that international law already provided the way to settle the dispute, which was the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but which China did not respect.”
“China based its claims not on international law but on its might. We should have a counter-balancing force,” according to Enrile. “We should not rely solely on the assistance of other nations; we should keep building up our military assets.”
“We should also be prepared, and one way to do that is to require all young Filipinos to undergo training to defend the country.”
“Only Filipinos can fight for their country; nobody else can do the fighting for you,” Enrile stressed.
False narrative
Meanwhile, China was accused of using deception in its sea maneuvers when it tried to block a resupply mission to Ayungin Shoal on 7 September.
Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson, Col. Medel Aguilar, at the weekly Saturday News Forum in Quezon City, said the Philippine Navy offered to help a Chinese rubber boat in distress near Ayungin Shoal.
“Our troops offered assistance, but the Chinese refused and another boat came to their rescue,” Aguilar said.
He said one of the Chinese rigid hull inflatable boats had gotten entangled in a fishing line while it was tailing the Philippine vessels heading to Ayungin to resupply the troops there.
Aguilar said that while the Chinese boat’s refusal to accept aid from Philippine forces was expected, what surprised the troops was Beijing’s radio call where they blamed the Filipinos for the incident.
“They had the guts to challenge our radio message. ‘Philippine Coast Guard, because of your maneuvers, the Chinese Coast Guard vessel came into problem,’” he quoted the Chinese as saying.
Aguilar said this was another narrative the Chinese would tell their people.
“After this incident, they will come up with their narrative to tell their people about what happened,” Aguilar said.
“We don’t want the truth to be drowned out by what really happened,” he added.
Misplaced bullying
Aguilar described the China Coast Guard’s behavior as “misplaced bullying” amid its continued aggression in Philippine territorial waters.
“The CCG is a misplaced bully in the WPS,” Aguilar said.
Meanwhile, Commodore Jay Tarriela, PCG spokesperson, said several CCG ships and maritime militia vessels tried to block the Philippine vessels and stop the resupply mission.
“It is very important for the government, for us, to be more transparent about what is happening in the West Philippine Sea,” he said. “We face the media; we give them the true story. The media will play a very important role in curtailing this fake news that spreads every time the Chinese release their narratives.”
He said China has been pushing the narrative that the Philippines is acting on behalf of the United States.
Ayungin Shoal, which is part of the Kalayaan island group, is an integral part of the Philippines and is well within its exclusive economic zone and continental shelf, over which the country has sovereignty, sovereign rights, and jurisdiction.
The BRP Sierra Madre has been grounded on Ayungin Shoal since 1999, where it stands as a symbol of Philippine sovereignty and on which a dozen Filipino Marines and sailors are holding the fort.