Vietnam Has Prepared Evidence Against China in Sea Spat By Bloomberg News May 30, 2014 10:48 AM ET Vietnam has prepared evidence for a legal suit challenging China’s claim to waters off the Vietnamese coast and is considering the best time to file it, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said today in an interview. “We are prepared and ready for legal action,” Dung said, sitting in the prime minister’s compound in Hanoi in front of a bronze bust of Ho Chi Minh, the founder of communist Vietnam. “We are considering the most appropriate timing to take this measure.” Dung, 64, spoke four days after a Vietnamese fishing boat sank in a collision with a Chinese ship in an area near the disputed Paracel Islands where China has placed an oil rig. A legal filing would follow a case against China submitted by the Philippines to a United Nations’ court over contested shoals off its coast. Dung, who faces pressure from citizens calling for a strong response to China’s oil rig maneuver, risks damaging economic ties with its bigger communist neighbor if it chooses to go down the legal route. A suit by Vietnam, though, would add to pressure on China to submit to arbitration in the South China Sea where it is asserting control in a push to gain greater access to the area’s oil, gas and fish. If open conflict were to erupt in the South China Sea, “there will be no victor,” Dung warned, saying that two-thirds of global maritime trade passes through shipping lanes in the area. “Everyone will lose,” he said. “The whole world economy will be hurt and damaged immeasurably.” Tough Choice Dung faces a tough choice, having to weigh the economic cost of antagonizing Vietnam’s largest trading partner against stepping up pressure for China to defend its claims before an international court. Trade with China rose to $50.2 billion last year and accounts for about 15 percent of Vietnam’s global trade, according to Vietnam’s General Statistics Office. The two countries aim to boost that flow to $60 billion in 2015, according to an April 14 statement from Vietnam’s government. The sea dispute with China “has caused some impact in a few sectors of the Vietnamese economy,” Dung said. “However, we have taken suitable measures to respond.” In a meeting earlier this week in Hanoi with U.S. Senator Ben Cardin, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dung called for a “stronger voice” from the U.S. against China. “We expect the U.S. to make more concrete, more effective contributions to regional peace and stability,” Dung said without elaborating. “The U.S. is a global power and a power in the Asia-Pacific region.” ‘Good Neighbors’ Vietnam, which fought a border war with China in 1979, has to “walk a very fine line,” Alexander Vuving, a security analyst at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii, said by phone. “In Eastern culture, Vietnam and China are neighbors, and using legal measures has the symbolic meaning of, ‘We are no longer good neighbors.’” China’s “nine-dash line”, first published in the 1940s, extends hundreds of miles south to the equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo. It claims sovereignty over more than 100 islets, atolls and reefs that form the Paracel and Spratly Islands, and jurisdiction over the seabed and subsoil. The Philippines and Vietnam have led opposition to the map. Under the 1982 Law of the Sea, which China ratified in 1996, a country can exploit oil, gas and other “non-living resources” on its continental shelf or an area stretching 200 nautical miles from land known as an exclusive economic zone. ‘Defend Ourselves’ China’s President Xi Jinping is using his nation’s expanding naval reach to back its claims in the South China Sea, which Vietnam refers to as the East Sea. China’s success in assuming control of the Scarborough Shoal in 2012, an area previously overseen by the Philippines, highlighted the potential consequences for nations from Vietnam to Japan of China asserting its territorial claims. Chinese aircraft flew close to Japanese planes in disputed airspace in the East China Sea, just days before the Vietnamese boat sinking. Earlier this month, violent anti-China protests erupted in Vietnam, targeting businesses thought to be Chinese. Vietnam said three Chinese nationals were killed in the rioting. Vietnam and China blamed each other for the boat collision. Qin Gang, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said May 27 that Vietnam’s attempts to disrupt its oil rig operations were “in in vain and it will in the very end hurt the interests of the Vietnamese side itself.” Dung said Vietnam would use “all possible peaceful measures” to defend its sovereignty. “Vietnam will only take military actions when we are forced to defend ourselves,” he said. To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: John Boudreau in Hanoi at [email protected]; K. Oanh Ha in Hanoi at [email protected]; Nguyen Dieu Tu Uyen in Hanoi at [email protected] To contact the editors responsible for this story: Peter Hirschberg at [email protected] Dick Schumacher
Posted on: Fri, 30 May 2014 19:42:01 +0000