10/28/2022 0 Comments Castaway paradise blue flying squidSo many North Koreans have disappeared at sea in recent years that some North Korean port towns, including Chongjin along the country’s eastern shore, are now called “widows’ villages.” Over the past two years, more than 50 bodies of North Koreans washed onto Japanese beaches, according to the Japanese Coast Guard. In most jurisdictions, this act is illegal. Up to now, the huge presence of Chinese boats in this area was largely hidden, because their captains routinely turn off their transponders, making them invisible to on-land authorities. The fishing grounds in the Sea of Japan, known in the Koreas as the East Sea, are between the Koreas, Japan and Russia, and include some of the world’s most contested and poorly monitored waters. In March, two countries anonymously complained in a report to the United Nations about China’s violations of these sanctions and they provided evidence of the crimes, including satellite imagery of the Chinese ships fishing in North Korean waters and testimony from a Chinese fishing crew who said it had alerted their government of its plans to fish in North Korean waters. When asked to comment on the investigation, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that “China has consistently and conscientiously enforced the resolutions of the Security Council relating to North Korea.” The ministry added that China has “consistently punished” illegal fishing, but it neither admitted nor denied sending its boats into North Korean waters. But the flotilla violating this ban makes up nearly a third of the entire Chinese distant-water fishing fleet, according to Global Fishing Watch. Security Council, which unanimously signed the recent North Korean sanctions. Last year more than 150 of these macabre vessels washed ashore in Japan, and there have been more than 500 in the past five years.įor years the grisly phenomenon mystified Japanese police, whose best guess was that climate change pushed the squid population farther from North Korea, driving the country’s desperate fishermen dangerous distances from shore, where they become stranded and die from exposure.īut an NBC News investigation, based on new satellite data, has revealed what marine researchers now say is a more likely explanation: China is sending a previously invisible armada of industrial boats to illegally fish in North Korean waters, violently displacing smaller North Korean boats and spearheading a decline in once-abundant squid stocks of more than 70 percent.Ĭhina is a member of the U.N. OFF THE COAST OF SOUTH KOREA - The battered wooden “ghost boats” drift through the Sea of Japan for months, their only cargo the corpses of starved North Korean fishermen whose bodies have been reduced to skeletons.
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