EDITORIAL

BY ROGER M. BALANZA

    If the boiling tension over territorial dispute between China and the Philippines blows up into a face-off in an armed conflict, expect a comic scenario not unlike a battle between an elephant and an ant.
    This funny scene, with the Philippines playing the hapless ant, was depicted by Philippine foreign minister Domingo Siazon years ago when the     dispute over Scarborough Shoal first erupted.
    Scarborough belongs to the Kalayaan Island Group in the South China Sea which is also being claimed by Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.
    If the conflict erupts into an actual confrontation, David Philippines would be fighting Goliath China.
    But what has caught the world by surprise is the refusal of the Philippines – whose most powerful warship is a second world war-vintage former US destroyer – to cave in to China’s demand to leave the atoll 220 kilometres west of Luzon, even if the face-off was described by former foreign minister Siazon as “between an elephant and an ant.”
    ‘Cool down’ should be the phrase that the Philippines should adopt as it treats the conflict with China.
    The Asian economic giant has all the resources to send the Philippines to its knees without firing a single shot.
    The worse of these is economic sabotage.
    Already, China has stopped its tourists from going to the Philippines.
    In Chinese ports, Philippine export Cavendish bananas worth P30 million are rotting, stopped entry by quarantine in wake of the conflict over Scarborough.
    The Chinese might wish to tickle their funny bones with this one: Millions of Chinese facing the Philippines to piss together.
    If this would happen,we would have a tragedy of comic proportions—Filipinos in a genocide of drowning and dying from a tsunami of Chinese urine!