Photo shows Western Command deputy commander Brig. Gen. Guillermo Molina Jr. talking to US Navy officer Patrick Ronan on board a P3 Orion plane during the joint US-Philippines naval exercise dubbed Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) 2015 in Sulu. AP
The Philippines has exhausted all bilateral means to find solutions to the West Philippine Sea dispute and could not be accused of provoking China to go into massive reclamation activities, Malacañang said yesterday.
Deputy presidential spokesperson Abigail Valte said the country has always acted accordingly in addressing the territorial dispute.
“We have been talking to China since this dispute started. You can get the number of (diplomatic) notes, the number of meetings, the number of high-level exchanges that we have had with China from the beginning of this issue,” Valte said.
Valte said the Philippines never shut the door on China for bilateral exchanges despite its position that the dispute must be resolved multilaterally because of the many countries involved.
Aside from the Philippines and China, Taiwan, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam have overlapping claims in the area.
“We will just leave it to our neighbors what they will make of all these international observations, all of these calls from different sectors – from environmentalists, to marine biologists, to marine scientists – to halt the reclamation because for some stakeholders, this is not an issue of disputes, this is an issue of the degradation of marine resources,” Valte added.
http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2015/06/28/1470828/palace-insists-all-bilateral-means-solve-sea-row-exhausted
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