‘So sorry for guarding our coasts against you intruders’

That title essentially is the message the Philippines sent to Taiwan via a swirl of events last week. It unfolded with the government indicting for homicide eight Coast Guards who shot dead a Taiwanese poacher. It climaxed with another Philippine apology – the third – and an indemnity check to the poacher’ s family.

The incident at sea last May was not a turkey shoot like it was first made out to look in news leaks. There was no plan or premeditation, the National Bureau of Investigation concluded. The Coast Guards legitimately were patrolling Philippine waters when they spotted two launches with no flag but with trawls cast. In the charts they were but a few miles from Balintang Island off mainland Luzon, far away from Taiwan.

There was “no treachery, no sudden or unexpected” move, as the Coast Guards blew their boat horn while approaching for inspection. Suddenly the smaller of the alien steel vessels turned around to ram their fiberglass craft, they had claimed on interrogation. The NBI said this was unproved in the video of the operation, so the maneuver could have been to prepare to escape. But the Coast Guards made “sufficient warnings” by continuing to blow the horn and firing into the air, the NBI stated.

Giving chase, “there was no abuse of superior strength because the firing was made intermittently, and not fully taken advantage of by the personnel.” The force employed “was mainly aimed to disable the engine and not to maim or kill” the 65-year-old engineman.

It clearly was not murder, contrary to raps filed by the Taiwanese fatality’s daughter. Still, for the NBI, the Coast Guards “wrongfully applied a deadly weapon.” So the eight who fired the automatic rifle, including the commanding officer and his deputy, are to be charged with homicide. The offense can fetch 12 to 20 years in prison. The two highest officers and two other men will be charged as well with obstruction of justice in attempting to splice the boat video.

The NBI report seemed part of a contrivance. An hour after it was given in a press conference in Manila, Taipei’s too ceremonially filed homicide raps against the eight. At the same time, it lifted the economic sanctions imposed at the height of a public outcry about the killing.

In afterthought, the NBI said charges of poaching could also be brought against the fatality’s three cohorts aboard the Taiwanese craft. But that depends on the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, it added. Unmentioned was that if the BFAR had any intention to assert Philippine justice, it would have done so three months ago. All that was drowned out by rejoicing in Malacañang that Taiwan would now resume accepting Filipino contract workers and allowing its citizens to visit the Philippines.

There was, of course, no reciprocal move by Taiwan to prevent its fishermen from trespassing Philippine waters, as they’ve been doing for decades. Manila should be thankful enough that Taipei is processing the visas of a thousand Filipino jobseekers. In Taiwan’s mind, the Philippines should know better than to guard its coasts against intruders.

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The sending of workers to overseas jobs is now haunting Filipino dignity and sovereignty. Since the 1980s successive administrations have failed to stir the domestic economy enough to sustain the growing labor force. Professionals have had to leave families behind to earn enough abroad – sometimes as domestics – to send the kids to college; the unschooled have had to sneak out to slave for abusive foreigners. As the 10 million overseas workers now bring in more dollars than goods exporters do, their welfare is also the excuse for limp-wristed foreign policy.

The Taiwanese case is not isolated. Earlier this year Malacañang rightly invoked the jobs of 100,000 Filipinos in Sabah in indicting the leaders of 200 “invaders” from the Sulu Sultanate. But then the Malaysian hunt down for the troublemakers led to arbitrary detentions and deportations of hundreds of Filipinos in Sabah. Manila’s foreign office protested, but Malacañang’s parallel action was essentially to twit the adventurists from Sulu.

Malacañang recently approved the demotion and other sanctions of an Army colonel. That act seemed to stem as well from the policy of myopically appeasing alien interlopers.

The colonel had dispatched a platoon to patrol a town in Basilan in late 2011. The separatist Moro Islamic Liberation Front ambushed them, shooting and beheading 19 soldiers. The MILF blamed it all on a renegade commander. The government, deep in Malaysian-brokered peace talks with the secessionists, readily accepted the excuse. It was under pressure from Western leaders to speedup a peace settlement. As well, the MILF commander claimed kinship with the local but rival Moro National Liberation Front. That group already has a peace pact with the government, though with no disarmament, backed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

In the end the colonel was blamed for the 19 troopers’ deaths. The Moro butcher remains free in his manor in Basilan.

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