THERE was another incident in the Ayungin Shoal area of the West Philippine Sea that became a cause for serious concern among the public and our officials.
The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) has reported that the Chinese Coast Guard drove away a Filipino fishing boat in Ayungin and continued to shadow them until they left the area last January 9.
The incident happened, quite ironically, on the heels of President Bongbong Marcos' return from a state visit to Beijing. He had just cited an understanding with Chinese officials to raise the level of communication between the Philippines and China on issues involving the South China Sea, particularly the establishment of a direct line to the heads of state.
Now the Department of Foreign Affairs is again sending a protest note to Beijing in connection with the recent incident in Ayungin Shoal. Teddy Locsin, the former DFA secretary of the Duterte administration, revealed then that the Philippines has filed hundreds of such protest letters with the Chinese embassy in Manila, covering various incidents at the WPS.
In the Senate, Sen. Francis "Tol" N. Tolentino pushed for a multilateral show of maritime security cooperation with the United States and members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) amid the latest tension in the disputed waters west of the country.
According to Tolentino, expanding the conduct of joint patrols—to include other claimant states in the region—will help ensure the freedom of navigation, exercise of fishing rights, and somehow dissipate the tension in the South China Sea.
“I have been espousing that joint Philippine-US Coast Guard patrol but we might even extend that to being a multilateral patrol to include other ASEAN claimants… it will need, not just a sole Philippine initiative but the inclusion and involvement of other countries," Tolentino, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said. He added that all countries interested in maintaining the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea may well join the joint patrols.
For Senator Tol, having a multilateral cooperation is also not limited to holding a large fleet of joint maritime and naval patrols but can also be stretched to other areas like disaster-related exercises and joint operations concerning disaster mitigation.
The senator's position is that we cannot be complacent with just sending diplomatic notes every time an incident occurs, as hundreds of these complaints in the past were just swept under the rug by China.
The idea of joint patrols is one step bolder than writing protest letters. These patrols, however, are risky as US and Filipino security forces will have to be in eye-to-eye distance with the Chinese Coast Guard in the same flashpoint area in the contested territories.