Civilians on board Philippine fishing boats sailed Wednesday 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.
A lone Philippine Coast Guard boat escorted the civilian convoy, which includes around 200 people on five commercial fishing vessels and a number of smaller outriggers, organisers said Wednesday in an updated tally.
Four hours after it left a northern Philippine port, the convoy said it began handing food and fuel to Filipino fishermen at sea and dropped a dozen 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.
A spokesman for the convoy told reporters via a messaging app that there was "no Chinese presence" in the area. He declined to disclose the convoy's exact location, 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 shoal. "This civilian supply mission is not just about delivering supplies, it's about reaffirming our presence and rights in our own waters," organizer Edicio Dela Torre said in a statement Wednesday.
"The world is watching, and the narrative of rightful ownership and peaceful assertion is clearly on our side," Dela Torre added.
Scarborough Shoal has been a potential flashpoint since China seized it from the Philippines in 2012. The reef is about 240 kilometres (150 miles) west of the Philippines' main island of Luzon and nearly 900 kilometres from Hainan, the nearest major Chinese land mass. China claims almost the entire South China Sea, brushing off rival claims by the Philippines and other countries, and ignoring an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis.
To press its claims, Beijing deploys coast guard and other boats to patrol the waterway and has turned several reefs into artificial islands that it has militarised.
Tensions over the disputed waters and reefs have intensified in the past 18 months as Manila pushes back against China's growing assertiveness.
This is the second civilian convoy organised by the Atin Ito group. A previous trip to the South China Sea in December was aborted due to shadowing by Chinese vessels.
