SAIGON:
A Chinese vessel attacked and sank a Vietnamese fishing boat in
disputed waters off Vietnam’s coast, Vietnam’s foreign ministry said.
“It sank,” ministry spokesman Le Hai Binh said of the Vietnamese vessel.
“It was rammed by a Chinese boat.”
The 10 fishermen on board
were rescued by other Vietnamese boats after the sinking yesterday
around 17 nautical miles from a Chinese oil rig located near the
contested Paracel Islands, Vietnam News reported.
Vietnamese ship DNa 90152
operating out of Danang was encircled by 40 Chinese fishing vessels in
what Vietnam regards as its exclusive economic zone, the newspaper said.
China’s placement of the rig
off the coast of Vietnam set off violent anti-China protests in Vietnam
this month, as well as clashes between the two nations’ coast guard,
with water cannons used and accusations of boats being rammed. China
says the rig is in its own territory and that it has long carried out
exploration work in the area.
China’s actions violate
international law and threaten peace, security and freedom of
navigation, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung said in a speech
May 22 in Manila. Tensions in the South China Sea risk disrupting the
flow of goods, Dung said, with the waters carrying some of the world’s
busiest shipping lanes.
Dung said Vietnam will decide
soon what legal course if any to take, Philippine President Benigno
Aquino said, citing their conversations.
China’s President Xi Jinping
is expanding the country’s naval reach to back its claims to the South
China Sea that are based on the “nine-dash line” map, first published in
1947. That claim extends hundreds of miles south from China’s Hainan
Island to equatorial waters off the coast of Borneo. China and Vietnam
both claim the Paracel Islands, and Association of Southeast Asian
members Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines have claims to other areas
in the South China Sea.
Asean leaders meeting in
Myanmar on May 11 issued a statement expressing concern about South
China Sea tensions, without referencing China directly. The grouping has
maintained a policy of neutrality on the disputes.
“China will have one version
of the events, Vietnam will have one version of the events. We don’t
need to get into that,” Singapore’s Foreign Minister K. Shanmugam told
reporters in Myanmar on May 10.
Asean leaders have called for
progress on a code of conduct with China that would seek to preserve
freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Talks have made little
headway since China agreed in July to start discussions, with China
introducing fishing rules in January requiring foreign vessels to seek
permission before entering waters off its southern coast.
— Bloomberg
Comments