(Ottawa) Canada assures that it has full rights to navigate the Taiwan Strait, after China claimed to be “permanently at a high alert level” the day after the passage of a Canadian military ship and an American.
The USS Rafael Peralta, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, along with the Canadian frigate HMCS Ottawa made a routine transit through the strait on Wednesday for the second in two months.
The Canadian government did not hide it: the Minister of National Defense, Bill Blair, announced it on the X network on Wednesday evening.
“Canada and the United States are working to support a free, open and inclusive Indo-Pacific region. HMCS Ottawa and USS Rafael Peralta crossed the Taiwan Strait. And as a Pacific nation, we will continue to promote peace and stability,” he wrote.
This is a routine transit, its communications director, Daniel Minden, said on Thursday.
“We regularly sail in these waters, which are international,” he wrote to The Press.
The United States argued the same thing: the American Seventh Fleet declared in a press release that the transit had taken place in accordance with international law and “through a corridor in the strait located beyond the territorial sea of any State coastal”.
But China did not interpret it in the same way.
“The troops there remain on constant alert and will resolutely protect national sovereignty and security, as well as regional peace and stability,” said Colonel Shi Yi, spokesperson for China’s Eastern Theater Command. , in a press release.
Washington and its Western allies have increased transits through this strait as part of the “freedom of navigation” of warships, in order to remind people that these are international waterways, which has aroused the anger of Beijing .
The Taiwanese Ministry of Defense said on Thursday that it had monitored this passage during the night from Wednesday to Thursday but affirmed that “the situation was normal”.
with Agence France-Presse