MANILA—U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday the U.S. wants to see a peaceful resolution of the territorial dispute in the South China Sea, urging claimants to refrain from resorting to intimidation to enforce claims in the area.
Ms. Clinton, who is touring Asia to strengthen U.S. diplomatic ties to the region in part to counterbalance China’s growing influence there, was in Manila on Wednesday to meet with Philippines President Benigno Aquino and mark the 60th anniversary of a U.S. security treaty with the Philippines, its former colony.
“We are strongly of the opinion that disputes that…exist primarily in the West Philippine Sea between the Philippines and China should be resolved peacefully,” Mrs. Clinton, who was visiting Manila, told a televised joint briefing with Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario.
“The United States does not take a position on any territorial claim because any nation with a claim has a right to assert it. But they do not have a right to pursue it through intimidation or coercion.”
Later Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton traveled to Thailand where she met with Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in Bangkok and reaffirmed the U.S.’s commitment to help Thailand rebuild after some of the worst flooding in its history. Over 560 people have been killed since flooding began in late July, and a large swath of Thailand’s manufacturing base has been affected, disrupting the global supply of everything from car parts to hard disk drives.
In a news conference with Ms. Yingluck, Mrs. Clinton said the U.S. will continue looking for ways to provide military and civilian assistance to Thailand to support its long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts. The U.S. is making a further $10 million in aid available to add to the $1.1 million it previously offered.
In particular, Mrs. Clinton noted that the USS Lassen had arrived in the country and that its helicopters will be used in relief efforts. She also said the U.S. would also focus on helping to get Bangkok’s second airport, Don Muang, back up and running after it was badly flooded.
“While we are focused now on the immediate needs of the Thai people, we will also be here for the long run,” Mrs. Clinton said.
The reaffirmation of the U.S.’s commitment to its longtime ally the Philippines comes as Manila has been increasingly vocal about its concerns about China’s claims on waters near its shores, and asking for backup.
In his state of the nation address in August, Mr. Aquino said he planned to defend his country’s claims in the South China Sea (which official government documents from the Philippines refer to as the West Philippines Sea), including increasing the country’s military might.
China, Vietnam, the Philippines and several other Asian countries have overlapping claims in the resource-rich sea. The Philippines has clashed with China in the past in an area known internationally as the Reed Bank but also called “Recto Bank” by some Filipinos, after a busy Manila street. In an incident in March, a Chinese patrol boat reportedly threatened a Filipino oil exploration ship in the area. In response, the Philippines said it is planning to upgrade its military by buying more weapons and possibly more naval vessels.
Manila has been pressing for more concrete support from America in its scraps with China, analysts say, while the U.S. wants to keep Manila happy without unnecessarily antagonizing China.
The U.S. is attempting to swing away from its decadelong entanglements in the Middle East to concentrate again on the less troubled and more promising region of East Asia. U.S. officials often credit America’s presence in the region over the past half century for helping maintain peace and underwrite the area’s spectacular economic boom. However, now Washington is worried China’s rise could sour the security and environment across the entire Asia-Pacific region.
“The signal [the U.S.] wants to send is ‘we are focusing on this region and we are here to stay,’ ” said Ernie Bower, senior adviser and director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Mrs. Clinton’s trip to Manila is part of America’s multipronged plan to tighten ties in the region and maintain the U.S.-backed stability that helped spawn the Asian economic miracle.
“After a decade in which we invested immense resources in [Iraq and Afghanistan] we have reached a pivot point,” Mrs. Clinton said in a speech in Honolulu last week as she unveiled some of her plans for Asia. “We now can redirect some of those investments to opportunities and obligations elsewhere and Asia stands out as a region where opportunities abound.”
In the latest sign of simmering tensions, the Philippines on Monday denied China’s claims on territory within 50 miles of its islands. China had protested the Philippines’ plans to award rights to explore for natural gas in the waters off of the province of Palawan in July, but the disputed areas are part of the Philippines, Energy Undersecretary Jose Layug Jr. told the Associated Press.
President Aquino is trying to use nationalist sentiment in the Philippines to prop up his approval rating, analysts say. While his popularity is still high, it has slipped from peaks after he was elected on pledges to clean up corruption and build infrastructure–promises he has made only slow progress on so far.
While China has repeatedly said it wants peace in the region, it has also insisted on its sovereignty over much of the disputed region and said it wants to untangle disputes on a bilateral basis without involving multinational organizations.
The Philippines has recently unveiled its own plans for peace around the disputed territories. President Aquino unveiled what he dubbed the Zone of Peace, Freedom, Friendship and Cooperation, or ZoPFF/C. It creates a structure where the different claimant states can find ways to cooperate in and share the areas where they have no overlapping claims, including possibly creating a Joint Marine Peace Park.
President Aquino will likely bring up his proposal during the meetings this week of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on Indonesia’s resort island of Bali, said Surin Pitsuwan, secretary general of the association.
Asean’s own careful attempts to untangle competing claims, which involve at least four of its members, have taken years and are expected to progress slowly, meaning some people may pay little attention to Mr. Aquino’s plans, analysts said.
As it looks for stronger support from the U.S. and Asean, the Philippines is also thinking of taking its claims to international courts or the United Nations, said Mr. Del Rosario, the foreign secretary, in a letter to his counterparts meeting in Indonesia on Tuesday.
“The Philippines will consider a parallel track of pursuing third-party adjudication, arbitration or conciliation as may be appropriate in the context of the dispute settlement mechanism” of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, he said.
Write to Cris Larano at [email protected]
==============================================================================
By: Eric Bellman and Cris Larano with a contribution from James Hookway
Source: The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16, 2011
To view the original article, click here.
Subscribe to the Arangkada NewsRoom via RSS
Comment here