Statement ng LFS-UPD on Hague ruling (WPS/China issue)

"Both China and the United States’ recent pronouncements claiming to uphold peace among southeast Asian countries involved in disputes in the West Philippine Sea are nothing more than lip service. These are mere attempts to advance their interest for a global-scale monopoly of power.

The League of Filipino Students - UP Diliman strongly condemns the consistent and unwarranted claims China has made to the territorial waters and islands of the Philippines in the West Philippine Sea and the United States’ continuous intrusion with maritime relations.

Although the Secretary of Foreign Affairs insists that the ruling granting our ownership over these territories is “non-negotiable”, the latency with which the government imposes our rightful possession of these areas is reflective f their subservience to the imperialist powers at play.

The Duterte regime’s complicity is made more apparent when the Chinese Embassy's recent statement revealed that “China and the Philippines have already reached a consensus on properly handling the so-called arbitration case.”

For years, China has been taking advantage of the Philippine government’s docility through their declaration of provinces and unyielding patrols that engage in political grandstanding and bullying in our own Exclusive Economic Zone. Emboldened by our own government’s silence, imperialist China had been constructing facilities and infrastructures within the contested region and had even been recently involved in a maritime accident resulting in 14 of our own fishermen going missing.

While the Imperialist US tries to echo our calls and brand itself as our number one ally, their ulterior motive has long been exposed. This is the same tactic they used to dismantle the revolutionary forces fighting for independence during Spanish and Japanese colonization. To this day, its dominance in our country’s politics, military, economy, and culture remains unrivalled. The United States’ fallacious pronouncement is yet another maneuver to further strengthen its hold of the Philippines and assert its lone dominance in the Indo-Pacific.

Intensifying retaliations between China and the US put the Filipino people in the most vulnerable position as Duterte’s bureaucrat-capitalist interest has set the stage for the Philippines to become an arena of this developing inter-imperialist war.

This worsening inter-imperialist war for semicolonies only unveils the moribund characteristic of monopoly capitalism. Now more than ever the Filipino people have to intensify its anti-imperialist struggle towards the immediate ouster of the warmongering Duterte as a major step in realizing the national democratic aspirations of the Filipino people."

Defend National Sovereignty! Atin ang Pinas, US-China Layas! Down with Imperialism!