In 2019, nearly 800 aggressive and often armed Chinese ships ransacked North Korean waters and violated diplomatic agreements. A practice that explains the mystery of “ghost ships” drifting in the Sea of Japan, says today’s edition of Libération
The captain of a South Korean fishing vessel agreed to take a reporting team from the French newspaper Libération through the dangerous waters prohibited to him: those of North Korea. Shortly after dark, at the end of the first day at sea, the flash of a boat appeared on the radar screen. The captain accelerated to reach the area. To the crew’s surprise, the dot on the screen did not hide one, but almost 24 ships. They all flow from the South Korean waters to those of the neighbor to the north. They all bear the Chinese flag. None of them have their transceivers connected, although South Korean law requires it.
China’s ships are hiding because they are illegal, the report said. China is a member of the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously imposed sanctions on North Korea in 2017, banning foreign fishing in its waters. It was a UN response to Pyongyang’s nuclear tests, with the aim of punishing Kim Young-Un’s authoritarian regime by banning the sale of fishing rights.
For the first time, thanks to satellite surveys by the NGO Global Fishing Watch, Libération reports that it was able to identify about 800 Chinese vessels fishing in North Korean waters in 2019, that is, almost a third of the long-distance fishing fleet. This authentic armada of industrial boats from China, hitherto invisible, violently rammed small North Korean boats and led to a reduction of more than 70% of the previously abundant squid stocks.
“This is the largest known case of illegal fishing perpetrated by a single industrial fleet operating in the waters of another country,” Jaeyoon Park, a specialist in data analysis at Global Fishing Watch, told the French newspaper.
