Can UN stop China from starting a war over the Spratly Islands dispute?
After 43 years of territorial dispute over the ownership of Spratly Islands that is situated in the South China Sea, due to the rich oil and gas reserves discovered in 1968, things may start to take a turn for the worse.
Six different countries had since laid claims to the ownership – China, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Brunei, where all except Brunei had occupied some of the Islands.
By Philip Ho, Klik4Malaysia.com
Apart from a humongous oil and gas reserve of an estimated 17.7 billion tonnes, making it the fourth* largest reserve in the world, the Spratly Islands are strategically located in the pathways of commercial shipping and also fishing.
*Kuwait, as an oil producing country, has an oil and gas reserve of 13 billion tonnes.
Although the six nations had staked claims to the islands, China, Vietnam and the Philippines were the most aggressive, whereby they had physically occupied some of the islands in the archipelago.
All claims to the islands were peaceful exchanges at first, until the China navy sank a Vietnamese armed transport ship over the possession of Johnson Reef in 1988.
Since then, Vietnam and China had been at loggerheads with each other.
Recently, China was also flexing its military muscles at the Philippines, forcefully taking over Mischief Reef several days ago on top of firing warning shots at fishing vessels from the Philippines in February this year.ChinaNavyMissileLaunch
Philippines president Benigno Aquino III condemned China for the use of excessive force and warned that China could possibly start an Asian arms race if hostility continues.
China and the Philippines had first clashed in 1995, and ASEAN stepped in to calm the tension by proposing a peaceful solution to the dispute by having China sign an accord with ASEAN countries in 2002 to exercise restraint and to stop occupying new areas.
