Indonesia has deployed a warship to its North Natuna Sea to monitor a Chinese coast guard vessel that has been active in a resource-rich maritime area, the country’s naval chief said yesterday of an area that both countries claim as their own.
Ship tracking data showed that the CCG 5901 had been sailing in the Natuna Sea, particularly near the Tuna Bloc gas field and the Vietnamese Chim Sao oil and gas field since Dec. 30, the Indonesian Ocean Justice Initiative told reporters.
A warship, maritime patrol plane and drone had been deployed to monitor the vessel, said Laksamana Muhammad Ali, head of the Indonesian navy.
“The Chinese vessel has not conducted any suspicious activities,” he said. “However, we need to monitor it, as it has been in Indonesia’s exclusive economic zone [EEZ] for some time.”
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Jakarta was not immediately available for comment.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) gives vessels navigation rights through an EEZ.
The activity comes after an EEZ agreement between Indonesia and Vietnam, and approval from Indonesia to develop the Tuna gas field in the Natuna Sea, with a total estimated investment of more than US$3 billion up to the start of production.
In 2021, vessels from Indonesia and China shadowed each other for months near a submersible oil rig that had been performing well appraisals in the Tuna block.
At the time, China urged Indonesia to stop drilling, saying the activities were happening in its territory.
Southeast Asia’s biggest nation says that under UNCLOS, the southern end of the South China Sea is its EEZ and named the area as the North Natuna Sea in 2017.
China rejects this, saying the maritime area is within its territorial claim in the South China Sea marked by a U-shaped “nine-dash line,” a boundary that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague found to have no legal basis in 2016.
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