Positively Filipino image courtesy

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”
— Martin Luther King Jr.

IT’S A GOOD THING that on Monday, August 14, Monday, Australia sent its largest warship — HMAS Canberra — to the Philippines to take part in joint exercises with U.S. and Filipino forces.

“The South China Sea has been an area of tension now for many, many years. We have continued to conduct our operations and activities and exercises with allies and partners safely and securely despite those tensions. So, I’m not particularly concerned about this deployment any more so than any of the other deployments that we do,” Vice Admiral Mark Hammond, Australia’s Chief of Navy, said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

Meanwhile, a joint maritime patrol agreement between the Philippines and the United States is expected to be launched before the year 2023 ends.

For me, it’s really very important that all democratic nations on this planet must unite and fight for peace.

It’s also a race against time to repair and reinforce the BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal which has been the symbol of our sovereignty and defiance to superbully China.

To recall, the Philippine Navy intentionally grounded BRP Sierra Madre at Ayungin Shoal in 1999 during the time of former President Joseph “Erap” Estrada to reinforce Manila’s sovereignty claim in the Spratly Islands. Ayungin Shoal is located within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

But Beijing insists that the majority of the South China Sea, including parts that Manila calls the West Philippine Sea, as its own, using a “nine-dash line” on maps that an international arbitration ruling in 2016 declared has no legal basis.

Former Supreme Court Justice Antonio Carpio recently revealed that under China’s new coast guard law, Chinese Coast Guard vessels are authorized to fire their weapons on foreign vessels and to forcibly dismantle structures, that encroach on China’s nine-dash line claim.

He explained that this means that structures erected by other states on islands claimed by China, like those in the Spratlys, such as the beached BRP Sierra Madre in Ayungin Shoal, can be demolished by Chinese coast guard vessels under this new coast guard law.

This is indeed worrisome considering the possibility that Ayungin Shoal could serve as a flashpoint of a war that we always dread happening.

That’s why the urgent need to fortify the BRP Sierra Madre.

“It’s vulnerable not just because of how few people are there and their inability to defend themselves but the fact that their outpost is deteriorating and will ultimately succumb to time and the weather and the elements,” thus rightly observed Security expert and former United States Air Force official Col. Raymond Powell.

He further explained: “That will happen unless the Philippines and its US allies are able to come up with some other solution to repairing or replacing, somehow lifting, circumventing, and defeating the ongoing Chinese blockade.”

I agree with Powell that one of the leverages the Philippines could use against China’s social-imperialism that its former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping once predicted would be our country’s partnership with like-minded allies.

Indeed, in these proverbial times that try men’s souls, we need our democratic allies like the United States, Australia, Japan, and many others to help the Philippines fortify the BRP Sierra Madre and, at the same time, acquire more arms and equipment to deter China from eventually occupying the Ayungin Shoal. (ai/mnm)