The Deadly Secret of China’s Illegal Fishing Armada: It’s Killing Impoverished North Korean Squid Fishermen

I thought the ChiComs were the only ally the slave state of North Korea had. If they treat their friends like this, God save their enemies!

From NBC News

By Ian Urbina

Desperate North Korean fishermen are washing ashore as skeletons because of the world's largest illegal fleet.

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. 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.

For 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.

But 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. 

The Chinese vessels — nearly 800 in 2019 — appear to be in violation of U.N. sanctions that forbid foreign fishing in North Korean waters. The sanctions, imposed in 2017 in response to the country’s nuclear tests, were intended to punish North Korea by not allowing it to sell fishing rights in its waters in exchange for valuable foreign currency.

“This is the largest known case of illegal fishing perpetrated by a single industrial fleet operating in another nation’s waters,” said Jaeyoon Park, a data scientist from Global Fishing Watch, a global ocean conservation nonprofit group co-founded by Google, based in Washington. The group specializes in artificial intelligence and satellites that, along with an international team of academic researchers, discovered the Chinese fleet.