t's been one bloody Sunday indeed and you probably know I'm not referring to the Mayweather-Cotto fight at the MGM Grand Garden (what a ho-hum affair!) but to something that happened right at home. You guessed it right, the One Airport Brawl to shame all other airport brawls, that one between a celebrity couple – Raymart Santiago and Claudine Barretto – and the tough-talking macho journalist Ramon Tulfo.

It's one where celebrity, privacy claims, public interest questions and civility or the lack of it intersect in a most unlikely way. Let's try to untangle this sordid mess that has dominated the social media chatter, at least in our part of the world.

Raymart and Claudine say they were demanding an explanation from a Cebu Pacific crew over an improperly off-loaded luggage belonging to their party from Boracay when the journalist entered the picture and took a video of his wife, using a mobile phone.

Raymart claims he gently asked Tulfo, who had planed in from Davao in another flight, what he was doing, and then demanded that the journalist turn over to him the latter's mobile phone. Raymart, a sometime action movie actor, claims Tulfo invaded their privacy, hence his demand that the latter surrender his mobile phone to him. Instead, he received from the journalist the hard end of the latter's fist. All hell broke loose because of that.

For his part, Tulfo denies throwing the first punch, claiming the commotion created by the couple at the airport as Claudine berated a hapless airline employee and threatened to have her dismissed by her employers set off his journalistic instincts; after all, in previous columns, he had criticized budget airlines like Cebu Pacific for giving unsuspecting passengers scrambling for cheap tickets the raw end of the deal.

It was all a matter of the public interest about the kind of service budget airlines allow their customers to suffer. And he didn't take a video of Claudine, he took still photos.

Thus in one fell swoop three public figures found themselves embroiled in a controversy also made uncommon by the fact that one of them, the hard-hitting journalist, is used to sparring with the high and mighty in crime or politics or both but not with a celebrity couple from show business and– as a video of the altercation that has now gone viral apparently shows – some of the couple's friends.

I thus protest any characterization of this altercation as a trivial one. The brawl is not trivial as it is. It's the handling of the news about the brawl that could, and had become, trivial.

In fact, regardless of who drew first blood, this clash of claims directs us to key questions about the quality of public life many of us ordinary citizens suffer on a daily basis. It raises questions about the system of societal entitlements that allows celebrities to act like a law unto themselves in public even on the smallest of perceived slights. It requires us to ask ourselves whether we need more of the tough-talking journalism Ramon Tulfo and his kin have become known for in the face of an utterly unresponsive governmental bureaucracy. Too, it brings to the surface the hidden costs to a poorly regulated and wildly expanding low cost airline market headlined by a market leader like Cebu Pacific.

To begin with, celebrities are public figures, whether they like it or not. As a landmark case decided by the Philippine Supreme Court would put it, public figures are people who, by their accomplishments, fame, mode of living, or by adopting a profession or calling which gives the public a legitimate interest in their doings, theirs affairs and their character, have become "public personages." By being one, the couple has ceded to the public any reasonable expectation of privacy in their doings, especially where one of them heaps verbal abuse on a fellow human being in such a public context as an international airport, whether justified or not.

Besides, there's this interesting subtext to the act of extreme chivalry on Raymart's part; only months before, the couple was caught in a very public spat over a conjugal bank account reportedly worth millions of pesos. For a while, it seemed like Raymart and Claudine were on their way to being un-coupled, as their respective lawyers sparred on national media as to who had the rightful entitlement to the money. Now it appears that they have since kissed and made up, as evidenced by their family's fateful summer trip to Boracay.

Indeed, this backdrop somehow undercuts Raymart's appeal to privacy: indeed, how can he do that now when he and Claudine have allowed an even more intimate aspect of their married life – a conjugal bank account – to be discussed publicly by their lawyers in the course of one of their conjugal disputes?

Raymart has no right to demand from the journalist that he surrender his mobile phone to him. That would be, in a broad sense, deprivation of private property without due process, besides being a curtailment of a journalist's right to practice his profession to comment or report on a matter of public interest.

But you don't have to be a hard-hitting journalist to know that poor customer service from an airline that trumpets its domination of the low cost carrier market in the Philippines – with a 76-percent market share –concerns the public.

A few months back, three Muslim scholars from Basilan on their way to Sudan to study Arabic were abducted by yet unidentified perpetrators at the luggage area of Terminal 3 where the brawl happened. They have not been heard from since then. When human rights activists asked for access to CCTV footage of the area, authorities told us there isn't any. We had our doubts, but now we know that Terminal 3 indeed lacks a most basic security facility – a CCTV security camera system – at the luggage claim area. And we're talking here of an international airport!

On the other hand, you also wonder whether the public persona who is Ramon Tulfo could have avoided the fisticuffs if he weren't being himself. At least for some people, he has become a walking lightning rod for the kind of brute physicality you cannot help imagine while listening to one of his radio programs or while reading one of his newspaper columns. As purveyors of a kind of "brusque journalism," he and the rest of the Tulfo brood are a success story and make no apology for it. Moreover, under our present circumstances, it is easy to accept that it is exactly the kind of journalism that moves things, that makes things work.

Yet you cannot help asking whether in the long run, it is the kind of journalism with which we wish to build a society where respect and solidarity – in a word, civility – are as important as peace and justice. Still, it might remain the troubling case that for as long as governance in the Philippines is structured only for a privileged few, the hordes of the poor and the downtrodden will always find the kind of journalism Mon Tulfo wears like a badge as their own exemplar.

At the very least, this controversy should be an education for public figures and ordinary citizens alike in what the American philosopher Richard Mouw calls an "uncommon decency." Such a "convicted civility" is sorely needed in a modernizing society such as ours where, all too often, in the words of the religion scholar Martin Marty, "civil people lack strong convictions and people of strong convictions lack civility."*

The timeless story of David and Goliath should resonate with the Philippines in its continuing row with China over territory teeming with natural resources, especially with regard to the Scarborough (Panatag) Shoal.

What the Philippines lacks in size and military power, it can certainly make up for with what could well be its strongest suit: the judicious use of international law, coupled with multi-lateral diplomatic initiatives. While it is true that the Philippines cannot win a shooting war with an emerging world military and economic power, neither can China establish sovereignty over disputed territory by force.

Since the establishment of the United Nations Charter after World War II, the use of force to settle disputes among states has been prohibited, subject only to the well-defined exceptions of individual and collective self-defense.

If, in the old, old days, territory may be acquired by military invasion, contemporary international law rejects a resort to aggression to enforce a territorial claim. China could well rain fire on hapless Philippine navy ships and occupy Panatag shoal for a hundred years; that will not mean however that it has already won the territory for itself. Its actions will have to be read according to the legal regime that governs the conduct of states in relation to other states: international law.

All that the Philippine has to do is raise a formal protest against the Chinese invasion to prevent the Chinese from acquiring territory by acquisitive prescription.

Chinese military posturing in the West Philippine Sea is no more than an illegitimate threat of the use of force by a regional bully who is utterly mistaken to think it can get away with it. Of course, standing up to such a bully requires spunk, style and daring. But it is the right thing to do.

In the biblical story, David – no more than a teenaged sheep herder – showed how thinking out of the box could win a war. King Saul, before sending him off to face the giant Philistine warrior, wanted to outfit David in his own armor. The shepherd however, found the King's armor too heavy for his own good.

To begin with, David knew next to nothing about sword-fighting. But he was not exactly harmless or unskilled. It was not that he was not a warrior like his nemesis. Goliath, blinded by his own arrogance, saw David to be no more than a shepherd boy who was no match to his size, power and experience in battle. But David was a warrior in his own right.

Out in the fields, he had fought with wild animals to protect his father's sheep, and had become a master in the fine art of the slingshot.

He was not trained in sword-fighting but he could hurl a stone at a distant target with deadly accuracy. In sword-fighting he could not ever hope to win against his giant of an enemy. But he could fight Goliath in his own terms – in ways unfamiliar to the Philistine warrior. In territory where Goliath has no clear domination, David had a fighting chance. In such territory, he could exploit Goliath's arrogance to his advantage. And exploit it he did, with deadly effect.

Kids who grew up in Sunday School like I did know the story by heart: dressed in his shepherd's simple tunic, and armed with no more than a shepherd's staff, slingshot and a pouch full of stones, he was a laughable sight to Goliath. But David saw an opening on the giant's metal helmet and aimed for it. His aim was true. Goliath fell to the ground, a smooth stone sunk deep in his forehead.

Somehow we do have an idea of what the Chinese are thinking about their own nine-dash claim to the entirely of the West Philippine Sea, including the Scarborough shoal: it's as ridiculous as the sight of Goliath falling face down like a log, forehead bloodied by a smooth stone from a shepherd boy's slingshot.

China knows it won't stand a chance if taken to a third-party review body like the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea over the Philippines Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) claims over the shoal.

Under the EEZ, the Philippines has "sovereign rights" to the marine resources in the area, to the exclusion of all the others. Sovereign rights pertain to protective jurisdiction, and not to full sovereignty. However, the economic windfall that may arise from an area teeming with rich natural resources should be more than enough an incentive for the Philippines to assert such rights over the shoal.

As I've said in my previous column, the general principle in the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) which governs the EEZ regime is that any dispute over the interpretation or application of a provision of the treaty is subject to the system of compulsory binding dispute settlement. Thus, by becoming a party to it, State Parties consent to disputes being referred to adjudication or arbitration.

China is also party to the Law of the Sea Convention, except that on August 25, 2006, it invoked the so-called art. 298 exception, which allows it to opt out of compulsory arbitration in cases of disputes concerning military activities, including military activities by government vessels and aircraft engaged in non-commercial service, and disputes concerning law enforcement activities in regard to the exercise of sovereign rights or jurisdiction as well as sea boundary delimitations, or those involving historic bays or titles.

However, China cannot say that by virtue of the article 298 exception, it cannot be dragged into arbitration because the events at Panatag shoal concerns a dispute on law enforcement activities related to the exercise of sovereign rights. This is because it has already conceded that the shoal falls within the Philippine EEZ and is well beyond its own EEZ.

Under art. 297 (3) of the LOSC, it is the coastal state, in this case, the Philippines, which has the option " to accept the submission to such settlement of any dispute relating to its sovereign rights with respect to the living resources in the exclusive economic zone or their exercise, including its discretionary powers for determining the allowable catch, its harvesting capacity, the allocation of surpluses to other States and the terms and conditions established in its conservation and management laws and regulations." That right does not belong to the offending state, China.

Indeed, in its declaration on June 7, 1996 – the date it ratified the LOSC – China announced that in accordance with the LOSC, "the People's Republic of China shall enjoy sovereign rights and jurisdiction over an Exclusive Economic Zone of 200 nautical miles and the continental shelf." Panatag shoal is physically beyond the scope of this declaration, and besides, China has already conceded that it lies within our own EEZ. Its art. 298 simply cannot be invoked in the case of Panatag shoal.

Which explains why China steadfastly refuses to arbitrate with us on those points of rock and reef. It refuses to resort to international law, fearing that it could be used by the Philippines like a slingshot against its interests, with deadly effect.

So it is reduced to bullying like a rich spoiled brat in school, picking on the smallest guy in class. And we know from the biblical story of David and Goliath that the smallest guy is not necessarily the most harmless creature there is.*

The recent incident at the Scarborough (Panatag) shoal is no doubt the most brazen move thus far by the region's certified Biggest Bully – China – in the history of its escalating altercations with the Philippines over territory.

From news reports, it appears that the Philippine Navy's BRP Gregorio Del Pilar had discovered eight Chinese fishing vessels allegedly poaching large quantities of endangered marine species, including live sharks, at the shoal.

The resulting standoff – and our seeming inability to act decisively on a critical national security concern – further showed the vulnerabilities of the Philippines in a dispute over territory with an emergent world economic and military superpower.

But there are two ways of looking at the territorial dispute, which I will call the "thick" and the "thin" approaches. Our new baselines law, Republic Act 9522, classifies Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal as a regime of islands under Art. 121 of the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC). Under LOSC, a regime of islands has its own territorial sea, Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and Continental Shelf.

Obviously, RA 9522 assumes that the shoal is part of Philippine territory in the fullest sense of the term. From that perspective, the reckoning point therefore is the shoal as an island grafted into Philippine territory.

It is what I call the thick approach, precisely because the claim to be made from it is full sovereignty as understood in the national territory clause of the Constitution. Since it is a regime of islands, a case can well be made that what the Chinese fishing vessels did was violate its territorial sea, given the facts available to us. Given the shoal's classification under RA 9522, it would appear that the Chinese had violated its territorial sea, which extends from its coast up to a distance of 12 nautical miles.

The thin approach is what the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has been saying all this time: that the Chinese violated our EEZ, reckoned from the base points off the coast of Zambales. From those points, the shoal, which is about 137 nautical miles away from Palauig town in the province, no doubt falls within the said maritime regime. This approach is so-called, because under the EEZ, the Philippines has "sovereign rights" to the marine resources found in the area, to the exclusion of all the others.

The regime of sovereign rights is not the same as full sovereignty. It is limited only to the economic exploitation of resources found in the shoal, subject to certain conditions, and cannot be equated with the full exercise of sovereignty control of every piece and bit of territory there in the concept of an owner. It is otherwise known as "protective jurisdiction."

But either way – thick or thin – we may now have a way to take China to compulsory arbitration with a final and binding judgment, which they have not been keen on doing.

The thin approach does not even require the Philippines to assert that the shoal is a regime of islands. The shoal may well be no more than rocks or coral reefs but even China recognizes that the area falls within the Philippine EEZ, except that it maintains that the Philippine claim to sovereign rights falls in the face of China's mainly historic title to the shoal (which is highly doubtful, from the point of view of contemporary international law, which generally dismisses historic title as ineffective).

What the DFA doesn't seem to realize, Prof. Harry Roque notes, is that the issues surrounding the shoal are different from those in the Spratlys.

Unlike issues involving the exercise of sovereign rights, which are subject to the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), conflicting claims to both maritime and land territory – as what obtains in the Spratlys – will require the consent of China to litigate.

"The point is," says Prof. Roque, "with the incursion of China in an undisputed maritime area under the sovereign right of the Philippines, we could avail of mandatory and compulsory jurisdiction of the UN's ITLOS, which we could not otherwise resort to in the case of the Spratlys." (To be continued)

SCIRE LICET
By Romel Regalado Bagares

Berlin, Germany (February 23, 2012)— Twenty four years after the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” and I’m wearing a wristwatch for the very first time.

Not that all that time I wasn’t wearing one, I didn’t think of time all the time but in 1988 – or two years after our own February 1986 People Power Revolution – I was a wide-eyed high school sophomore in Lagao, General Santos City who watched with fascination television news of the “Berliner Mauer” finally tumbling down as hordes of East Germans hungry for the freedom enjoyed by their Western cousins flooded into West Berlin in their rickety Trabants.

To my young mind, the first bloodless People Power revolution destroyed the Marcos-made mythical narratives of martial law; the fall of the Berlin Wall further amplified for me the human spirit’s longing for authentic freedom.

I remember coming across a New York Times piece on the historic event carried by a now defunct local newspaper and the impression it left on me: the journalist, whose name escapes me now, wrote of how he thought he had history figured out; he had long been an observer of events in the East, and yet he too, did not see the writing on the wall.

The sudden flood of time caught him flat-footed. After watching thousands of East Berliners seeping through the broken walls and flowing into all directions, he found himself unable to come to grips with the enormity of the historical moment. What he did next totally captivated my imagination: he took off his wristwatch, and threw it away, a gesture meant to signify that henceforth, he will no longer be bound to mindless time-keeping.

I decided I’d do the same. And so for the next 24 years, I steadfastly clung to what my friends considered a sophomoric – if not inscrutable – vow . The timely advent of pagers and later on, of mobile phones, with their own time displays, somehow made the timepiece-less switch easier.

It took this trip to change all that. I’ve just planed in from Zurich, where I earlier conducted a three-day intensive course for Filipino evangelical church leaders based in Europe on developing a reformational worldview under the auspices of the Alliance Graduate School in Manila.

Yesterday, the eve of my flight to Berlin, my Filipino hosts graciously gifted me with a Swiss-made timepiece as a souvenir of my visit. Truth to tell, I wasn’t prepared for the generous gesture, but how could I refuse it?

And so before my host Hector Chio drove me to the Zurich airport early this morning for my flight to Tegel, Berlin, I finally put on my new wristwatch. It felt like an addition to the four layers of clothing I’m wearing to ward off the cold of European winter.

Ever since I’ve lain my hands on Count Harry Kessler’s diaries about the last days of the Weimar Republic, Journey to the Abyss, I’ve always wanted to see this city whose streets once bore the footprints of great thinkers like Karl Marx, Hanna Arendt, Walter Benjamin and many others (as James Wood recently noted in his column in the Guardian, Berlin has a peculiar way of naming its streets – either in triumph and atonement – as it has a habit of memorializing figures who had either brought it honor or who had borne the brunt of its own unspeakable cruelties).

But indeed, you walk down its streets and you breathe in history. For this visit, I knew exactly what I wanted to do – with only one day to spend in Berlin, as I’m heading for Amsterdam the next day –a walk through the heart of the city: from Alexanderplatz in the East in the Mitte District down towards the West to the Unter Den Linden – the city’s famously historic boulevard - and beyond . There you’ll see many of the important city landmarks, such as the Fernsehturm TV Tower, the Berliner Dom, the Museumsinsel, Humboldt University, Hotel Aldon, Brandenburg Tor, and farther West, the Reichstag.

For the better part of the day, that is what I did, a retracing in part of my first ever visit to Berlin in 2007. Back then, I was a graduate student in Amsterdam, and my Dutch friend and I, helped by a few hundred euros earned from a recent lecture at an art exhibit in Munster, Germany, stayed for a few days at an old hippie colony in East Berlin, and from there, explored many parts of the city on foot.

Later in the afternoon, I was joined by my host, law school classmate and kababayan Chicky Arumpac, who now serves as a vice consul at the Philippine Embassy; funny that she had been too busy with work since she assumed office a few months back that she had no time at all to explore the city. So I played tourist guide to her, and at her request, gave her a tour of the Humboldt University complex.

On a wall at the university’s main lobby, one reads inscribed the famous words – in German, of course –of one of its famous products, Karl Marx, to the effect that in the past, philosophers have sought to understand the world, but the point however is to change it.

I recall that on my last visit, after I posed for a photograph right beside the inscription, an old lady walked up to me – she was apparently the wife of one of the Marxist professors there – to complain how today’s generation have forsaken the lessons of history as Marx understood it. Well, the Marx-Engels Forum still stands in Mitte on the eastern banks of the River Spree, albeit 100 meters away from its original location. It was our next stop.

Chicky found it fascinating that the monument to the main architects of Marxism has no inscription of any kind and simply assumes that people knew to whom the artistic installation gave honor. “The creators simply assume that everyone knows Marx and Engels!” It was getting dark when we were done with what tourists come to do there: have their pictures taken in the lap of Karl Marx.

We had intended to see as well the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe to the south of Brandenburg Tor –a 19,000 square meter site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs arrayed in a grid pattern on a sloping field – but we absentmindedly walked towards the wrong direction.

When we realized we were in the wrong part of the city, we decided to take a bus to the memorial, hoping to see it before night finally fell on Berlin. But we missed the stop nearest to the memorial as well. We finally decided to head for the hip and colorful Kreuzberg district. There we had had dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant with another law school classmate, Anna De Vera, who is also a vice consul at the Embassy. After dinner, we retreated to a nearby café where we had some drinks and reminisced about our law school days while a lone trumpeter played sad love songs of an older era. When I looked at my watch again, it was nearly 10 p.m. It was time to call it a night.*