The Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has issued rare criticism of China over last month’s launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), saying the Pacific is not “isolated pockets of ocean” and it “does not welcome” Beijing’s action.
Kiribati, a Pacific Ocean neighbour of Hawaii with a vast exclusive economic zone of 3.6 million square kilometers has developed close ties to Beijing, including hosting Chinese police.
China conducted a rare launch of an ICBM with a dummy war head on Sept. 25 that landed in the Pacific Ocean, which Beijing said was for weapons testing and training, and nations including Fiji, Australia and New Zealand have said was concerning.
Photo: Reuters
Kiribati did not receive notice from China about the missile launch, the Kiribati President’s Office said in a statement on social media.
It was told by the Chinese embassy there was no need to alert Kiribati because the test was not meant to target any nation in the Pacific, the statement added.
“Kiribati does not welcome China’s recent ICBM test,” the statement said.
It also criticized other unnamed nations for past weapons tests.
“The high seas in the Pacific are not isolated pockets of oceans, they are part of our Blue Pacific Continent and are parts of Kiribati and therefore we appeal to all countries involved in weapon testing to stop these acts to maintain world peace and stability,” it added.
The 18 members of the Pacific Islands Forum, while small in land size and population, have a vast combined maritime zone they refer to as the Blue Pacific Continent and decades ago declared the region a nuclear-free zone.
Strategic competition between China and the US in the region has risen after Beijing struck a security pact with the Solomon Islands in 2022.
China, seeking to redevelop a disused US World War II airfield in Kiribati, has become a major development partner to the atoll nation since it switched diplomatic ties from Taiwan in 2019.
Kiribati is to hold a direct vote for president this month, where all four candidates are from incumbent Kiribati President Taneti Maamau’s Tobwaan Kiribati Party.
Opposition leader Tessie Lambourne has criticized Maamau’s closeness to China, and the absence of any opposition candidates in the presidential election. Kiribati held parliamentary elections in August.
The president’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees