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ASEAN members decry PRC aggression in South China Sea

Tom Abke

Vietnam rallied Southeast Asian defense ministers in December 2020 to take a united stand to protect their national sovereignty and freedom of navigation following months of aggressive behavior by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea.

Defense ministers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was chaired by Vietnam in 2020, made a joint declaration that called on ASEAN states and “plus” countries, including the PRC, to “respect sovereignty and territorial integrity.” International law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), must be the basis for the “peaceful resolution of disputes” in the South China Sea, they added.

UNCLOS served as the framework for a 2016 ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands, which judged the PRC’s “nine-dash line” territorial claims in the South China Sea as unlawful. Beijing has used the claims to justify its encroachment on the territories of ASEAN member states.

The Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative documented 89 intrusions by Chinese government vessels into Malaysian waters from 2016 to 2019; illegal fishing by PRC vessels within Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), including a January 2020 incident involving about 50 boats off the Indonesian island of Natuna Besar; and the ramming and sinking of Philippine and Vietnamese fishing boats by Chinese vessels in June 2019 and April 2020, respectively. Also, Vietnam was forced to pay U.S. $1 billion to foreign oil firms after the PRC pressured it to cancel drilling and exploration operations within its own EEZ.

The ASEAN ministers named “unplanned encounters at sea” and “maritime interaction” as activities that should be governed by “an effective and substantive Code of Conduct in the South China Sea.” (Pictured: Philippine activists protest Chinese aggression in the South China Sea after a Philippine fishing boat sank after colliding with a Chinese vessel in June 2019.)

The defense ministers emphasized “the importance of maintaining and promoting peace, security, stability, safety and freedom of navigation in and overflight above the South China Sea,” and called for “self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability and avoid actions that could further complicate the situation.”

Enhanced cooperation and connectivity among members to promote a “conducive security environment” across sea, land and air is also needed, they declared.

“Vietnam has managed to get some general ASEAN consensus on the South China Sea,” Dr. Frederick Kliem, a visiting fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told FORUM. “They pitched it [PRC aggression] as a direct security threat to all member states within ASEAN.”

Tom Abke is a FORUM contributor reporting from Singapore.

 

IMAGE CREDIT: AFP/GETTY IMAGES

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