By Jarius Bondoc
The Philippine Star
Lawmakers are finding Sixto Brillantes unfit for confirmation as Comelec chairman. He not only was the election lawyer of the despotic Ampatuan clan accused of massacring 53 political foes and journalists in Maguindanao. As interim Comelec boss he also has promoted six officials tied to the 2004 “Hello Garci” poll rigging.
The promotions were premised on the six’s clearance from all raps. But then, their investigations were made internally, by agency associates instead of outside examiners. Allegedly they were treated affably and exonerated readily. Being an election lawyer all of his career, Brillantes knew the workings of the Comelec, yet fell for it.
When Congress resumes, senators and congressmen will study Brillantes’s views. He has said that the electoral system is working fine and needs no reforming, only a little fine-tuning. That’s contrary to the two-dozen or so reforms proposed by ex-Chief Justices Hilario Davide and Reynato Puno — some by constitutional amending, others by congressional legislating, and a few by Comelec action. Brillantes has also said the Comelec too needs just a little improving. He ignores murmurs of poll case fixing and party-list accrediting for sale. In one radio interview he said there is no Mafia of nine suppliers that have been cornering Comelec contracts for the past decade. He thinks the favored nine are just adept at bagging deals, having been at it for so long. Duh!
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China treats the South Sea much like the ancient Romans did the Mediterranean: mare nostrum, our sea.
The Latin was not just the term for the waters between Europe and Africa, but for policy. After conquering first Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily, then Iberia and North Africa, the Roman Empire began to regard the Mediterranean as its possession. After the unification of Italy in 1861, germinant fascists revived the term as the claimed inheritors of the great imperial past. It mattered not that the desert shores of Tripoli hosted no Italian farm or factory; it was theirs as part of mare nostrum. Mussolini used mare nostrum to justify expansionism in the 1930s.
China asserts rights over almost the entire South Sea by virtue of 1st-century maps and records. Mimicked by Taiwan, it claims ownership of all four archipelagos therein. China and Taiwan are fighting over the Pratas and the Macclesfield islands. The two are disputing Vietnam over the Paracels, which the latter claims as its ancestral isles. The three are feuding with the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei over some Spratly isles within the latter’s continental shelf or exclusive economic zones. China says the old empire’s navy used to patrol all the islands.
Too China insists on owning reefs and shoals close to Luzon. In 1991 its ships planted buoys around Sabina Shoal, 100 kilometers west of Palawan, on the pretext that it is part of the Spratlys. In 1995 it erected “fisherman shelters,” but with military helipads and radars, on Mischief Reef, also off Palawan. In 1997 it tried to do the same on Scarborough Shoal, off Zambales, had not the Philippine Navy stopped it. Mischief and Scarborough are Filipino fishers’ rest stops; the latter has been called Masinloc Baja since the Spanish times. If China maps are to be believed, even the Malampaya natural gas site in Palawan is its. Of late it has been claiming as well the Reed Bank, about 150 kilometers off Palawan and within Philippine boundaries under the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The Reed Bank is believed to be oil rich, so China has begun to say it’s part of its Spratlys. A Chinese “scholar” has produced a map showing the Sulu Sea — east of Palawan and north of the Zamboanga Peninsula, in Philippine internal waters — as an adjunct of its South Sea. By implication, Palawan too is China’s.
Since March China has forayed six times into the Reed Bank. When the Philippines reported to the UN and its ASEAN allies, Beijing berated Manila about supposed antagonistic acts. Two of the sorties were particularly warlike: two Chinese naval vessels threatened to ram a Philippine exploration ship, and a gunboat fired at three Filipino fishing craft. Coincidentally Vietnam nearly clashed twice with China in the Spratlys. The next day the Chinese ambassador to the Philippines warned Spratly counter-claimants to cease oil explorations without Beijing’s permission. Again by implication, the Reed Bank is now its.
A 1992 accord commits all claimants to peaceful resolution. But Chinese shrillness over the South Sea resurged after a January conference in Shanghai of Chinese oceanographers, some recalled from abroad. The meeting ostensibly was to plan the mapping of the 3.5-million square-kilometer underwater terrains. But all such undertakings, like the British Admiralty’s charting of the world’s seas and coasts in the 1800s, enhanced its imperialism, commerce- and military-wise.
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The first paragraph of my piece last Friday disappeared. It should have read:
What is judicial independence? On its interpretation hangs ex-President Gloria Arroyo’s objection to the nomination of Justice Conchita Carpio Morales as Ombudsman. It shows in her letter to the Judicial and Bar Council, which is presently screening the possibilities for the vacancy.
At any rate, the Newsbreak survey of 2008 shows Carpio-Morales to be independent minded. With no misplaced fealty to her appointer, she decided ten times for and 11 against the Arroyo admin’s major cases. Similarly freethinking is Justice Antonio Carpio, who ruled nine times for and 12 against. This exposes Arroyo and Raul Gonzalez’s illogic that the two are un-independent since they vote against their appointer. Given their interpretation, “independent” are justices who lean in Arroyo’s favor.
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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ, (882-AM).
E-mail: jariusbondoc@workmail.com
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