MANILA, May 15, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - 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," organiser
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.