Left Flank

Michael Breen redeems himself by pointing out a factoid I had forgotten from the last episode of Liancourt Rocks histrionics: Liancourt is not an island; it's a pile of rocks. And, in international legal terms, that's not nothing. In fact, what some cabal of South Korean bureaucrats are doing is crazy kind of smart, in an illegal, G.W. Bush-unilateral kind of way.

There is an assumption that Korea does not want to take the dispute to international resolution because that would elevate Japan's claim to equal status and, worse, because there's a good chance that Japan could win on a technicality. (Tokyo's claim is based on the fact that Dokdo was not included in the list of territories it formally renounced after World War Two).

But it is more likely that both would fail to get the resolution they really want.

That is because, by the definition of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which South Korea and Japan have ratified, Dok is not a «do» (island). It's rocks. To qualify as an island a rock must be able to «sustain human habitation,» the law says.

In other words, an inhabitant has to be able to collect water and grow or catch his own food. He can't rely on the weekly ferry from Ulleungdo for his choco pies. Having a maritime police unit and a civilian couple living there does not make the Dok Rocks an island. Nor does having a postal code and SKT connection. Nor, apparently, does the setting up of a desalination plant. Fresh water has to be naturally occurring.

You can claim rocks in international waters, but that's all. You can't claim as yours what's around or beneath them. To quote the preamble to the convention, ``Rocks which cannot sustain human habitation or economic life of their own shall have no exclusive economic zone or continental shelf.»

The squid, oil and other good things are Korean and Japanese.

That means drilling for 'burning ice' unilaterally «...as a means to strengthen [South Korean] dominion over the islets in the face of renewed Japanese territorial ambitions» is probably a no-go. But, that won't stop the forces of light and right, and history! And, when most laypeople, Korean or American, couldn't care less for the tedious intricacies of United Nations resolutions and international laws, it's a sad day for negotiation and global cooperation to go together slowly into that peak oil debacle awaiting us in the future.