THAT is the question staring at the faces our defense secretary, the mad-looking Philippine Coast Guard officer Jay Tarriela and others screaming that the Chinese are blocking and water-cannoning our Navy and Coast Guard personnel from approaching the BRP Sierra Madre, grounded at Ayungin (Second Thomas) Shoal. Answering that question would dispel the US-manufactured fog of obfuscation and lies over this issue.
In 1995, to protest China’s building of small facilities on stilts at Mischief Reef, President Fidel Ramos tried to raise international outrage against the Chinese by undertaking a risky operation. Over two dozen foreign and local journalists were ferried by a World War II vintage Landing Ship Tank (LST) near the area, and from there were flown by Huey helicopters that the vessel had strapped on its deck over the Chinese facilities at Mischief Reef. The journalists in at least eight fly-overs took photos of the facilities. In propaganda terms, it was a resounding success, as the photos were widely published all over the world, purportedly the first photographs of what the US and Western press said were proof of Chinese aggression.
However, in terms of our claims over the area, it meant a big blunder. Two Chinese maritime surveillance ships and a fishing vessel blocked the Sierra Madre near Ayungin on its way to get closer to Mischief Reef.
After an hour’s stand-off, the LST suddenly turned around to sail full-steam away from the area. I asked the ship’s captain why. He said he received reports — later on I was told from US intelligence — that two PLA Navy frigates were steaming toward our location. Indeed, we could already see the vessels’ smoke trails on the horizon. The commander said it was better for us to leave the area ASAP. “We don’t have guns,” he said in half-jest.
What the captain didn’t realize though was that abandoning area to evade confrontation with the Chinese vessels meant that the Philippines had abandoned the area, which at that time was declared Philippine territory under Marcos’ PD 1596 of 1978 that drew a hexagonal area in the Spratlys, termed the Kalayaan Island Group and proclaimed everything in it — including Ayungin Shoal — as part of the our sovereign territory. Under international law, a territory that a country gets to occupy without the use of force is recognized as a legitimate means of grabbing a territory from another country.
Four years later in 1998, Estrada’s defense secretary Orlando Mercado — a former broadcaster and senator who had no experience in either foreign relations or international law — asked the Navy for ideas on how to reverse Ramos’ loss of both Mischief Reef and Ayungin Shoal. It was the Navy chief then, Eduardo Santos,** who proposed the grounding of the Sierra Madre at Ayungin and another LST, the BRP Benguet, near Scarborough, arguing that such vessels represented an “extension of Philippine territory.”
Absurd
That was, however, absurd: where a ship is grounded is still considered the owning country’s territory. Such shipwrecks are required to be removed by international practice as soon as they can by their registered owners or else dismantled by the state nearest to them. Mercado ordered the operation.
Ayungin was chosen as the site where the LST would be grounded. It was near Mischief Reef while its waters there were shallow with underwater rocks and reefs, for it to be easily stranded, without the risk of totally sinking underwater.
President Estrada was furious when he learned about the grounding of the vessels and ordered these to be removed ASAP. Estrada wanted to draw the Philippines closer to China, reversing President Ramos’ overly pro-American orientation.
More importantly, Estrada was told that the Chinese threatened to cancel the scheduled official visit to the country in November that year of Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji. Zhu’s official visit was supposed to give a boost to Estrada’s international image. The BRP Benguet grounded in Scarborough, just 220 kilometers from Zambales, was quickly towed away by a Hong Kong tugboat hired by the government. However, the Navy could not find a vessel here or elsewhere willing to sail through the dangerous waters of the Spratlys. The Sierra Madre’s engines were also damaged, so they needed a powerful tugboat to release it from its grounding.
While China offered to tow it away, Estrada’s foreign affairs secretary, Domingo Siazon, told them this would be embarrassing for the Philippines and would not be good even for the Chinese as the US would manage to distort this as another instance of Chinese aggression.
Agreement
China and the Philippines reached what they thought was a wise agreement: the Philippines would repair the Sierra Madre’s engines, even if it took the Navy months to do so, to sail it out of Ayungin, or find a vessel powerful enough to tow it. However, it would station a contingent of Marines to guard the vessel from scavengers who would dismantle the ship for its steel.
The Chinese, however, who had known that vessels were deliberately grounded in order to maintain a symbolic claim on Ayungin Shoal and Scarborough, insisted that while the Philippines could supply the Marines with the necessities of survival, it could not supply it with materials to repair it, which they feared would transform into a permanent facility.
The Philippines had complied with the agreement rather than risking Navy or Coast Guard vessels being blocked and shooed away by Chinese vessels if they attempted to bring in repair materials. As a result, under the elements and storms, the BRP Sierra Madre has become a rust-filled vessel, soon to tilt and sink below the waves. Is that what the Aquino III government claims is a symbol of our unrelenting claim of sovereignty over Ayungin?
However, in retaliation against the arbitration suit filed in 2013 by the Philippines against China involving the South China Sea issue, the Chinese strongly demanded that year for the Philippines to comply finally with its agreement to remove the Sierra Madre. Department of Foreign Affairs documents show that its secretary, Albert del Rosario, did not deny that there was such an agreement but declared that the shoal was Philippine territory.
It would be only in 2014, during the term of Benigno Aquino III — the first really anti-China president — that the Navy would publicly deny that an agreement ever existed and tried several times to supply the Sierra Madre with materials to repair it and even strengthen the structure so it would not sink.
Maneuvers
Of course, the Chinese response was to shoo away the supply ships through blocking maneuvers of its large vessels and the use of water cannons. Every time, though — as what happened recently — the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard would play the victim of a superpower, and have media or their photographers with them, taking dramatic videos and photos which were then disseminated worldwide to portray China as a “bully,” turning away the weaker, pitiful Philippine boats. It was theater for propaganda.
The Philippine propaganda operation involving Ayungin has been so successful that even the foreign ministers of the “G7,” the group of the world’s largest economies, including the US and its closest allies, issued a communique in 2025 opposing “China’s obstruction of high-seas freedom and navigation and its increasing use of dangerous maneuvers and water cannons against Philippine vessels.” The G7 foreign ministers also claimed that there was no legal basis for China to claim Ayungin and its Nansha archipelago as its territory “according to the 2016 arbitral award.”
That, of course, is blatantly false. The arbitral award ruled on the legality of the Philippines’ exclusive economic zones under United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) provisions but not on China’s sovereignty claims, which kind of sovereignty is totally beyond the Unclos, a treaty that took effect in 1994.
In fact, the Philippines had asked the arbitral tribunal in 2013 to declare illegal China’s alleged interference with the former’s “rotation and resupply” operations for the BRP Sierra Madre. The tribunal, though, did not rule on China’s claim of sovereignty over Ayungin Shoal. Stupidly, one of the Philippines’ US lawyers even admitted in the suit’s hearings that the country had lost the shoal, which would eventually mean losing any claim of sovereign rights to it.
“China took de facto control of that feature in May 2013. Chinese marine surveillance vessels, navy warships and fishing administration vessels have surrounded the shoal. They have blocked Philippine vessels, including civilian vessels, from approaching Second Thomas Shoal,” a lawyer for the Philippines told the tribunal (Transcript of hearing, Day 2, page 158).” Strangely, he didn’t realize that “de facto control” translates in international law as effective occupation, one way of declaring sovereignty over a particular area.
Military
Worse for the Philippines, the tribunal ruled that Chinese vessels’ actions to prevent Philippine government vessels from resupplying the BRP Sierra Madre in May 2014 were “a quintessentially military situation, involving the military forces of one side and a combination of military and paramilitary forces on the other, arrayed in opposition to one another...” As such, the tribunal could not rule on it since Unclos cannot deal with military situations. (Award, paragraph 1160)
Marcos Jr. in April 2024 declared the agreement for the Sierra Madre made 27 years ago rescinded: “Should there have been such a secret agreement, I am now rescinding it.” If Marcos felt good saying imperiously that he was rescinding the agreement, he would be ruing it. He was clueless that the agreement was really a concession made by the Chinese.
With that agreement rescinded, China now has no reason not to tow the Sierra Madre away. As has been its strategy, the Chinese are just waiting for the Philippines to do something that would justify a move to totally block even food supplies to the Marines there, or have a powerful vessel tow it away.
Would our brave defense secretary Teodoro or Tarriela be on a Navy warship to prevent that from happening?
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*A US Navy intelligence officer Michael Studeman — who rose to become admiral for naval intelligence — wrote in a masteral thesis for the Navy War College that the Chinese move was in retaliation against Ramos’ authorization secretly given to US firm Alcorn Petroleum to explore for gas in the nearby Reed Bank.
**A detailed account of this is in a 2024 The Guardian article, “I did it as quietly as I could’: the navy chief who wrecked his ship to scupper China’s ambitions.”
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