MANILA: Civilians on board Philippine fishing boats sailed on Wednesday (May 15) towards a China-controlled reef off the Southeast Asian country to distribute provisions to Filipino fishermen and assert their rights to the disputed waterway.
The trip to the waters around Scarborough Shoal comes two weeks after China Coast Guard vessels fired water cannon at two Philippine government boats in the same area, in the latest maritime incident between the countries.
Waving tiny Philippine flags and chanting “the Philippines is ours, China out!”, about 200 people boarded five commercial fishing vessels that sailed out of a northern port in the morning, escorted by a number of tiny outriggers.
A few hours later, a lone Philippine Coast Guard boat met the convoy in open seas and stood guard as it handed out food and fuel to Filipino fishermen and dropped a dozen orange buoys marked “WPS is Ours”.
WPS is the acronym for the West Philippine Sea, Manila’s name for the South China Sea waters immediately west of the Philippines.
Later, the group issued a statement saying it would “proceed to the second phase of its voyage, aiming to reach the vicinity of Panatag Shoal for another round of supply distribution to Filipino fisherfolk in the area”.
The Philippine Coast Guard in Manila said it was deploying more vessels to escort the convoy.
A spokesman for the convoy told reporters via a messaging app that there was “no Chinese presence” where the vessels had distributed assistance to fishermen.
He declined to disclose the exact location of this phase of the voyage, except to say the boats were “still far from the shoal”.
The group had said it received reports of a “heavy presence” of Chinese vessels near the Scarborough Shoal.
Called Panatag in the Philippines, the Scarborough Shoal has been a potential flashpoint since Beijing seized it from Manila in 2012.
The fish-rich reef is about 240km west of the Philippines’ main island of Luzon and nearly 900km from Hainan, the nearest major Chinese land mass.
