The South China Sea (13 page)

Garcia made a public statement of support on 17 May but, according to press reports at the time, President Magsaysay ordered him to ‘cut short Cloma's comic opera before it got really serious’. Magsaysay wasn't the only one with this opinion. The French chargé d'affaires in Manila, Jacques Boizet, initially referred to the incident as a ‘ridiculous quarrel’ among ‘pygmies’ but warned that it had the potential to cause deep problems if Communist China decided to intervene. Exactly what was happening behind the scenes is still unclear. Many of the Philippine government records were subsequently destroyed in fires. The French geographer François-Xavier Bonnet, who has studied the period extensively, believes Garcia and Magsaysay – despite their public differences – were acting in consort: Garcia backing Cloma and Magsaysay holding high-level talks with the Taiwanese government to try to keep the situation under control.
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The presidency issued an official communiqué stating that Cloma was acting as an individual and that the Philippines had not officially claimed the islands. But while Cloma's actions appeared ridiculous to some, they were indeed deeply provocative to others and set in chain a series of events that still mark the region today.

On 31 May 1956, the Beijing government declared it would not tolerate any infringements of its claims in the islands. By now the French had left Vietnam and the country had been ‘temporarily’ divided between Communist north and capitalist south. On 1 June the Republic of Vietnam (RVN or ‘South Vietnam’) condemned Cloma's actions and the following day even France joined in, reiterating its own unabandoned claim dating back to 1933. But Tomas Cloma was not deterred. On 6 July he issued the ‘Freedomland Charter’ describing his new country as an independent entity seeking official recognition from the Philippines ‘under protectorate status’. He had in mind something like the position Brunei then had as a British colony. Tomas declared himself head of state with sole executive powers. His sons and friends were named as cabinet ministers. He also
unveiled the flag of ‘Freedomland’, which, rather ominously given what was to happen next, bore a large white albatross.

The following day, 7 July, just to make sure the message had been received, Cloma, his son Jaime and several of his PMI cadets marched to the (Taiwanese) Chinese embassy in Manila and presented its diplomats with a flag that Jaime said he'd removed from Itu Aba (or as he renamed it, MacArthur Island). This provoked both a protest from Taipei and criticism from the Philippine government. It was all becoming too much. The RVN Navy sent a ship to one of the Spratlys where the crew erected a monument and hoisted the national flag on 22 August.
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The nationalist government on Taiwan resolved to sort out the Clomas once and for all and despatched part of its navy under a Commodore Yao.
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They would meet at a place called Danger.

In the early morning of 1 October 1956, Vessel IV of the PMI fleet was anchored off North Danger Reef (which Cloma had renamed ‘Ciriaco Island’ in the northernmost tip of ‘Freedomland’) when it was challenged by two ships of the Taiwanese Navy. Captain Filemon Cloma was ‘invited’ aboard one of them to discuss his claim. A four-hour argument about the niceties of international law ensued – during which the Taiwanese boarded the PMI IV and confiscated all the weapons, maps and relevant documents they could find.
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The next day Filemon was invited on board again and presented with a statement in which he acknowledged he'd been trespassing in Chinese territory and pledged not to do so again. According to Filemon's son, he signed it under duress. The navy ships then departed and Filemon's crew checked the nearby islands – all the structures they'd previously built there had been destroyed.
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Tomas Cloma wasn't a man to take this lying down. So, later that month, he took himself to New York with the intention of making a formal complaint to the United Nations. But by now the Philippine government was also fed up with him. After a press conference in the coffee shop of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Cloma was taken aside by the Philippine ambassador to the UN, Felixberto Serrano, who explained that only recognised governments could present matters to the UN and the Philippines was not going to waste any more time on the matter. Garcia and his allies in the Foreign Affairs Association back in Manila made a last-ditch lobbying effort to persuade President Magsaysay to change his mind but failed.
On 8 February 1957 Garcia wrote a carefully worded letter to Cloma in which he made a somewhat arbitrary distinction between the seven islands known as the ‘Spratlys’ and the rest of the land features, which he called ‘Freedomland’. Speaking on behalf of the Foreign Ministry (not the government), he said Cloma was welcome to claim any unoccupied islands in Freedomland, just as long as no other country's sovereignty over them had been recognised. It meant nothing.
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That should have been the end of Tomas Cloma's involvement with international politics, but there was a curious coda to the whole Freedomland project. After 1956, Cloma directed his energies into his business activities but he never abandoned his dream. He enjoyed being referred to as ‘Admiral’ Cloma and wore a gleaming white uniform on special occasions at the PMI. Gradually, though, his expedition faded from public memory. In the early 1970s, however, it earned unwelcome attention from President Ferdinand Marcos. Oil exploration had begun off the coast of Palawan in 1970 and, by July 1971, Philippine forces had landed on three of the Spratly Islands: Thitu, Nanshan and Flat (respectively Pagasa, Lawak and Patag in Filipino). They also seem to have tried to land on Itu Aba but were repelled by Taiwanese forces.
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Later that month, Marcos ordered the military to create a Western Command to protect its interests in the area.

It was during this period that the Philippine government made its first attempts to formalise a coherent territorial claim over the islands, but it was one that relied on rather shaky geographical and legal foundations. Firstly, following Garcia, it tried to argue that the area included in Freedomland was different from the island group known internationally as the Spratlys and secondly it claimed that the Philippines had title over Freedomland because of the activities of Tomas and Filemon Cloma 25 years before. Cloma saw an opportunity and wrote to the
Daily Express
newspaper in January 1974 calling on the government to sponsor his original claim at the International Court of Justice. It caught Marcos’ attention and the following month Cloma was invited to a meeting at the presidential palace during which he pledged to cede the islands. All that needed to be worked out was the small matter of a contract and a purchase price. Cloma appointed three politicians to act as his legal team and the negotiations dragged on.

On 3 October 1974, Cloma, by then aged 70, was invited to the national police headquarters at Camp Crame. After a long conversation with a police colonel he was shown to his new home in Stockade No. 3. At around the same time, the government confiscated one of his vessels, the MS
Philippine Admiral
, crippling Cloma's shipping company. After a few days Cloma was told he would be charged with ‘illegally wearing uniform and insignia’. Marcos’ martial law regime had taken the ‘admiral’ joke a little too seriously. Cloma understood what was really going on. He held out for 57 days but in the end the old man was broken. He signed over Freedomland to the Philippine government for a single peso.

Marcos renamed Freedomland the Kalayaan Islands –
kalayaan
being the Tagalog word for freedom – and in June 1978 issued Decree 1596 incorporating Kalayaan as a municipality of Palawan province. The municipality still exists, although for most of the year it's based in an office in the suburbs of Puerto Princesa on Palawan. At the time of writing, the Philippine military occupies nine islands and reefs and tries to keep watch on the rest. The largest Philippine-occupied island – formerly called Thitu but renamed Pagasa (from the word for hope in Filipino) – is now home to a small statue of Tomas Cloma. It stands next to the runway, looking mournfully out to sea: at what for a few years was Cloma's domain. In July 1987, after the overthrow of the Marcos regime, Cloma and his associates requested compensation from the democratically elected government of President Corazon Aquino. They asked for 50 million pesos. Tomas Cloma died on 18 September 1996 without receiving a reply. His dream of a guano and canned fish conglomerate remained unfulfilled.

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Comic as they were to some, Cloma's activities reignited regional anxiety over the Spratlys. Taiwan returned to Itu Aba in 1956, after six years away, motivated by the same nationalism that had inspired its first expedition in 1946. By the time of the next island-grabbing episode, when Ferdinand Marcos ordered Philippine forces to seize three islands in 1971, the motivation was oil. A couple of years later, oil was also the reason for the Republic of Vietnam to join the race. President Nguyen Van Thieu was trying to win a war against Communism while simultaneously rescuing a smashed
economy over-stretched by military spending and rapidly declining American aid. On 20 July 1973, a month after the US Congress had voted to ban all US combat activities in Indochina, the RVN awarded its first oil concessions. Eight blocks off its southern and eastern coasts were awarded to Mobil, Exxon, a Canadian consortium and a subsidiary of Shell called Pecten. In September 1973, to protect the exploration, South Vietnam formally annexed ten of the Spratly Islands. It deployed hundreds of troops to Spratly Island itself and to Namyit Island – just across the lagoon from Itu Aba. The protests from Taipei and Manila were loud. Beijing took time to consider its options.
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The Communist Party leadership in Beijing had to weigh up the effects of some momentous global and regional changes. Although they were all nominally Communist, relations between the governments in Beijing, Moscow and Hanoi were far from fraternal. An ideological split between China and the Soviet Union had become progressively worse during the 1960s and the two had fought a border war in 1969. By that time, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong had begun to see the USSR as a greater threat than the US. Simultaneously, the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, realised that China could be a useful ally in the global struggle against the Soviet Union and started to cultivate a relationship. His secret visit to Beijing in July 1971 paved the way for President Nixon's fanfare-filled foray in February 1972.

Vietnam found itself stuck in the middle of this triangle. The Com---munist north had long tried to balance its relations with Moscow and Beijing, the better to fight its war against the Washington-backed south. Weapons, aid and advice came from both but Hanoi didn't want to be beholden to either. Vietnam's modern national identity is more or less built around the story of its millennia-long struggle against China. The Communist Party leadership in Hanoi was determined not to become a vassal state all over again. There were political differences too. Hanoi was determined to liberate (as it saw it) the entire territory of Vietnam while Beijing wanted Hanoi to fight a long and protracted war to keep the US bogged down.
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As a result, Hanoi started to lean in the direction of Moscow.

Two concerns sharpened Chinese apprehensions. If Hanoi won the war, the Soviet Fleet might have access to bases in the South China Sea, with the potential to throttle China's supply lines. Secondly, if there was oil
there, others were getting their hands on it first. From Beijing's perspective whoever controlled the Paracels could hunt for oil in the waters around them and control access to southern China. At the time the islands were still divided: the Amphitrite group was occupied by Communist Chinese forces and the Crescent group by the South Vietnamese. The RVN government, however, was more concerned about events on the mainland than on these specks in the sea. The garrison on Pattle Island was little more than a weather station, a small squad of guards and a herd of goats. Over in the Amphitrite group though, things were quite different. Starting in 1970, the Chinese had surveyed all the islands and constructed a new harbour on Woody Island. It was the jumping-off point for an operation that would propel a quiet American into the news.

Gerald Kosh had believed in the United States’ mission in Vietnam. He volunteered for the army straight out of high school, the words of JFK's ‘ask not what your country can do for you’ speech ringing in his ears. His father, a wounded Second World War veteran, had opposed the idea but Kosh was a determined man. In May 1967 he graduated from Airborne Ranger School as the Outstanding Leader of his class and was sent to Vietnam. He transferred to Special Forces and became a captain in the Green Berets. A veteran of long-range reconnaissance patrols, he was the epitome of the American jungle warrior. After his tour ended he remained in the army, based with the 10th Special Forces Group, periodically returning to Southeast Asia to train anti-Communist forces.

He left the military but – his family says – didn't enjoy civilian life. Bored, he headed back to Vietnam with $300 in his pocket and the promise of a job via the US Embassy. On 10 December 1973 the Naval Attaché in Saigon appointed him one of 12 Regional Liaison Officers assigned to monitor the use of American military equipment transferred to the Vietnamese government. His reports must have made grim reading, particularly as the official ceasefire, in place since the previous January, crumbled. On 4 January 1974, President Thieu announced that war had restarted in Vietnam.

Just a week later a Chinese spokesman renewed Beijing's sovereignty claim over the Paracels but hardly anyone in Saigon noticed. And if Washington had any inkling of what was coming, it didn't let on. Mao Zedong's vision was to secure a strategic fastness off China's southern coast
and enable the hunt for oil around the Paracels and beyond. Beijing's relations with North Vietnam were deteriorating fast and South Vietnam had lost American military support. January 1974 was a moment when the Beijing leadership could act without fearing the consequences. For Kissinger and Nixon, the fate of South Vietnam's island possessions was much less important than the US's improving relations with China. A tacit US–China alliance would be much more significant to the outcome of the Cold War than whatever would happen in Saigon.