Fw: Poachers

[Princess Nemenzo]

Please read Alvin Firmeza's article below. Why are our leaders so blind?!!!

 

Apologies for cross-postings.

 

Princess

 

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: alvin firmeza <alvin....@gmail.com>
To: 'Princess Nemenzo' <anane...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thursday, 26 April 2012 10:09 PM
Subject: RE: Poachers

Just forward it your friends. I don’t think the papers want it. Sent it to inquirer etc

 

From: Princess Nemenzo [mailto:anane...@yahoo.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2012 7:59 PM
To: Aileen Baviera; alvin firmeza
Cc: Rowena Pangilinan; Teresa Tadem; <roxa...@yahoo.com>; JM Taguiwalo; agnes ranzinger; AidaSantos; <amado.m...@gmail.com>; Ang Tessie; Tina Ebro
Subject: Re: Poachers

 

Dear Alvin,

 

Your article is a most welcome and insightful piece. Did this appear in published form, where? If not, do something to bring it to the wider public. We listened recently to Chito Sta. Romana's comprehensive talk on China which was very illuminating. I wish our policymakers could listen to him, learn how to deal with the Chinese leaders, and especially on the current dispute. But this is on the historical/geopolitical level. Your article brings out a human dimension that is mostly left out in the "jingoistic" claims of both countries -- ignoring history (from the people's perspective) as reflected in their traditions and practice of fishing and sharing in a common good. Worst of all, the Balikatan exercises in the disputed area aggravate the prolblem, not only will they drown out any sensible thinking on the issue,  they will also scare the fishes and the turtles and pollute the seas! We must get these U.S. military poachers off our back!!!

 

Princess

 

From: Aileen Baviera <aileen....@gmail.com>
To: alvin firmeza <alvin....@gmail.com>
Cc: Rowena Pangilinan <weng.pa...@gmail.com>; Teresa Tadem <teres...@gmail.com>; AnaMaria Nemenzo <anane...@yahoo.com>; "<roxa...@yahoo.com>" <roxa...@yahoo.com>; JM Taguiwalo <judym...@yahoo.com>; agnes ranzinger <agnes.r...@gmail.com>; AidaSantos <aidam...@yahoo.com>; "<amado.m...@gmail.com>" <amado.m...@gmail.com>; Ang Tessie <tita...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Monday, 23 April 2012 5:50 PM
Subject: Re: Poachers

Hi alvin. Good piece and helpful angle. In the same vein that fishermen from small islands off Palawan gather 'balat' or sea cucumber in the Spratlys but fear for their safety when harrassed by foreign troops. Hainan fishermen are known to capture pawikan and hang the shells in their homes, believing it has some power to ward off evil, in their superstition. Zha Daojiong has written about how Hainan fishing communities have been affected in an article that was published several years ago. I was also part of a study which also looked at local Palawan perspectives - fishing and environmental interests. My position has been to de-securitize, demilitarize the resource disputes as there are normal diplomatic channels for addressing those; similarly as you said our fishermen are caught poaching esp in Indonesian waters and we just negotiate.

Sent from my I-phone 

On Apr 23, 2012, at 2:46 PM, "alvin firmeza" <alvin....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, Here’s a piece I wrote on the Scarborough issue. You may distribute

 

POACHERS

By Alvin Firmeza

22 April 2012

alvin....@gmail.com

 

The Norwegian scholar Stein Tonnesson, in a paper titled “An International History of the Dispute in the South China Sea,” (East Asia Institute Working Paper No. 71, National University of Singapore, 16 March 2001, 30 pp) states that during the period he calls The Colonial Condominium in 1842-1941:

 

‘While both commercial and naval ships continued to shun the two archipelagos (referring to the Paracels and Spratlys), oceanographic expeditions were sent to survey them. They found that the islands were inhabited during parts of the year by nomadic fishermen, most of whom, it seems, spoke Hainanese dialects and lived in Hainan during parts of the year.’

 

In a footnote to this text, Tonnesson writes the following:

 

‘In 1957, the British government studied Admiralty records and found that Chinese junks regularly visited the Paracels and that “fishermen from Hainan usually visit the [Tizard Bank in the Spratly] islands in December and January and leave again at the commencement of the South-West monsoon”. P.D. Naime (Military Branch, Admiralty) to D.C. Symon (Foreign Office), M/NID, 216/6042/56, 14.2.57, Foreign Office File FO 371/127311, Public Record Office, London (PRO).’

 

The fishermen said to be caught “poaching” in Scarborough Shoal (or Reef) in April this year come from Hainan.

 

The “Scarborough Affair” has been an annual (Chinese) Spring or (Filipino) 1st quarter affair for at least a dozen years now, with the same sequence of events repeated exactly: the “poachers” are arrested by the Philippine Navy, followed by an exchange of strongly worded diplomatic protests with both sides reiterating their respective positions on sovereignty and jurisdiction over Scarborough. In 2000 as well as in 2012, the Philippines also mentioned the need for environmental protection which was why it had to arrest the fishermen in the first place and not only to protect intrusion into the claimed Philippine exclusive economic zone. In 2000, the Philippines invoked international treaties concerning the protection of corals while in 2012 it invoked domestic fisheries laws.

 

On the part of the PRC government, both in 2000 and 2012, it protested against the Balikatan Exercises which coincide with the fishing season of the Hainanese.

 

What is different in 2012 from the other years is that this seems to be the first time that China sent official vessels to (successfully) protect and prevent the arrest of the fishermen. This time it was the Philippine side which turned tail.

 

All this time, the Philippines never denied the identity of the “poachers” as real fishermen (otherwise they would not be poachers) although there would be stray suggestions from both official and unofficial commentators that the fishing activities were not innocent or purely or primarily economic activities but were carried out to promote the official Chinese claim.

 

It seems that the Chinese fishermen that the Philippine Navy arrests every year invariably come from Hainan and nowhere else. If the British in 1957 had also investigated the activities in Scarborough as it did for the Spratlys (incidentally the name Spratly was given by a British ship captain) and the Paracels, they would most likely have found that Hainanese fishermen during the fishing season also visited Scarborough, especially since it is nearer Hainan, except that they would not be able to stay in them for extended periods being just shoals or reefs and not real islands, unlike the Spratlys or Paracels.

 

In almost the entire voluminous legal, scientific, political, journalistic and other literature in English on the South China Sea dispute, there is hardly any mention or a study to be found of the seasonal fishing behavior of the Hainanese and other peoples living in and around the South China Sea (this is not to mean however that the existence of fishing activities by ordinary people is denied). The Chinese themselves refer only in general to the fishing activities of Chinese but not specifically to Hainanese fishing as a traditional economic activity in the sense that it is described in the Admiralty study. The statement of Tonnesson itself appears to be a stray or anomalous reference in the entire literature. Even in the informal workshop convened by Indonesia to discuss and try to resolve the South China Sea problem, the subject of fishing appears to be seen only from the viewpoint of a formal commercial activity and not as a traditional economic activity of peoples from which could be built up modalities for common resource exploitation. In proposals for common resource or marine exploitation, the assumption almost always is that fishing can only be a state-sanctioned activity and that all other fishing activity is somehow illegitimate or worse destructive. Here we see again, as in discussions on ancestral domain, the difficulty of reconciling the reasoning of the modern legal mind with communal needs and older social practices that antedate the nation-state.

 

It would certainly be enlightening to read and learn more about this subject especially from an historico-anthropological perspective. Were the Hainanese really the only ones who fished systematically in the Spratlys and could they been fishing in these areas since neolithic times? What was the role of fishing in their lives? Considering that the Spratlys have always been considered a danger area for ships, how were they able to navigate in this area? What was the nature of their navigation skills and equipment? What kind of marine and fishing knowledge did they possess? In the case of Scarborough, is there ample documentation that “Filipino” fishermen indeed fished in that area at least during Spanish times, considering that it is only a “near” 124 nautical miles from Zambales?

 

Perhaps it is to be expected that in a dispute among nation-states for territory and expanded maritime borders, the traditional fishing behavior of people would hardly merit consideration. Maybe to the Chinese, this is simply one of many evidence (and one not too important or too impressive) of its claim that the South China Sea has always been a Chinese sea. An imperial junk with a eunuch admiral on board visiting ports and bearing gifts and receiving tribute no doubt would count higher as evidence. Certainly, to the Philippines any and all fishermen who are not Filipinos who enter seas or waters it considers its own are simply “poachers,” whether or not this fishing activity has been continuously going on for centuries or millennia and predates the naming of the Philippines or even the inclusion of Hainan into the Middle Kingdom. Only after the signing of a bilateral or multilateral agreement on a “common fishing ground” as then Philippine Defense Minister Orlando Mercado suggested in 2000, could they be allowed to enter as “legitimate” fishermen.

 

Like the majestic giant sea turtles or the indomitable salmon that go back to the place of their birth to lay eggs or to spawn, the Hainanese fishermen will keep returning to Scarborough and the Spratlys every year, agreement or no agreement on a “common fishing ground.” This is not something that they do because the fishing grounds nearer their homes have yielded less fish than before and so they have to move further and further away. The evidence adduced by Tonnesson tends to show that they have been visiting these areas since time immemorial. It is traditional behavior to them, almost like a genetic clock, dictated by the winds and the ocean currents and the cycles of growth and renewal of the creatures of the oceans and because being island peoples like ourselves, they know that the sea can yield so much bounty. And so the drama that we have seen repeated every Spring or first quarter of the year during the last 12 years will replay itself next year and the year after next and so on.

 

The problem of the Hainanese fishermen in Scarborough would have been there even if there had been no China claiming the area as its own or if Hainan were Vietnamese territory or if China had not suddenly grown rich and powerful and therefore become a bully, as so many Filipinos are now taught to think. Did we (or UNCLOS or more precisely how we interpret it) perhaps create the problem when we wanted Scarborough (or Bajo de Masinloc as we wish to call it now) exclusively for ourselves as a fishing ground? Did we ever follow up on the 2000 suggestion of Minister Mercado to have a “common fishing ground” in Scarborough (which by the way could be interpreted as a tacit admission that non-Filipinos have some right to this area)?

 

We have our own Hainanese fishermen in our own backyard in the form of the Filipinos who keep going back and forth to Sabah or North Borneo simply because many of their close relatives live there and have lived there even before it became Malaysian territory and who are hounded by Malaysian authorities as illegals when it becomes in their interest to do so.

 

In the jingoistic atmosphere that Philippine media have been able to whip up, it might be useful to see this aspect of the South China Sea dispute. Would it such be a big loss for the Philippines to (unilaterally) acknowledge traditional fishing rights of non-Filipinos? Or are we forever to be haunted by this problem of “poachers” and the risk of an even greater catastrophe?