Filipino Marines (centre) teach their US counterparts how to cook rice using bamboo during an exercise on survival in tropical jungles, at a Naval Reserve in Zambales yesterday.
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN: US Secretary of State John Kerry gave tacit backing to the Philippines’ stance in a tense maritime dispute with China on Thursday, saying all countries had a right to seek arbitration to resolve territorial claims.
The Philippines, a US ally, has angered China by launching an arbitration case with the UN to challenge the legal validity of Beijing’s sweeping claims over the resource-rich South China Sea.
The US has refrained from taking sides in the dispute, one of Asia’s biggest security headaches, but expressed a national interest in freedom of navigation through one of the busiest shipping channels.
“All claimants have a responsibility to clarify and align their claims with international law. They can engage in arbitration and other means of peaceful negotiation,” Kerry said at the East Asia Summit in Brunei, in the presence of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.
“Freedom of navigation and overflight is a linchpin of security in the Pacific,” he added.
China claims almost the entire oil- and gas-rich South China Sea, overlapping with claims from Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam. The last four are members of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
The row is one of the region’s biggest flashpoints amid China’s military build-up and the US strategic “pivot” back to Asia signalled by the Obama administration in 2011.
Diplomatic efforts to ease tensions are now centred on Chinese talks with Asean to frame a code of conduct for disputes, but Beijing has restricted talks to low-level consultations rather than formal negotiations.
The annual East Asia Summit ended without progress on the dispute, with an Asean-China statement saying both sides had agreed to “maintain the momentum of the regular official consultations”.
Frustrated by the slow pace of diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute, the Philippines has hired a crack international legal team to fight its unprecedented arbitration case under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, ignoring pressure from Beijing to scrap the action.
Any result will be unenforceable, legal experts say, but will carry moral and political weight.
China has accused the Philippines of pursuing the case to legalise its occupation of islands in the disputed sea and said it would never cooperate.
Diplomats have expressed concern that Asean-China consultations are a bid by China to delay an agreement on a code while it expands its naval reach and consolidates its expansive claims. The US and Japan, which has its dispute with China, pressured China to abide by rules for the South China Sea. Reuters
