Kinmen, Matsu waters to be delineated: interior minister

Interior Minister Jiang Yi-hua made the statement at a Legislative Yuan session in which lawmakers expressed concern about the government's failure to include Kinmen and Matsu in its newly promulgated territorial water delineations.

“The delineations unveiled Nov. 18 are a revised version of ones promulgated in 1999 that do not include Kinmen and Matsu. However, we are planning to delineate the territorial waters of the two outlying islands in a year,” Jiang said.

The newly promulgated delineations cover Taiwan, Penghu and the Tiaoyutai Islands, as well as Dongsha and Taiping islands in the South China Sea, but fail to touch on Kinmen and Matsu, both of which lie closer to China than to Taiwan proper. Delineating their territorial waters is expected to create controversy, as the waters around both are already claimed by Beijing as Chinese territorial waters.

However, the omission drew criticism from pro-independence opposition lawmakers and activists that the Kuomintang (KMT) administration seems to have compromised on sovereignty issues by leaving out Kinmen and Matsu from the territorial water delineations.

“The criticism is unfair,” Jiang said, adding that “the government is unlikely to budge on its sovereignty claim and jurisdiction over Kinmen and Matsu, and the two islands will be included in a second batch of territorial water delineations.

“The second batch of delineations is expected to be promulgated within a year... But of course we will factor in the time needed for researchers to survey and measure the relevant coastlines.”

When the government promulgated the first batch of baselines for delineating the country's territorial waters for the first time in 1999, Jiang said, Kinmen and Matsu were not included for fear of increasing the tension across the Taiwan Strait.

At the time, the delineations were based on charts and were not very precise. However, with the progress in technology in recent years, Jiang went on, the government has been measuring the coastlines using sophisticated instruments.

“As a result, we have now promulgated a revised version of the delineations we announced 10 years ago,” Jiang said. “Since the revisions are purely technical in nature, we saw no need for prior inter-ministerial discussions on the issue.”

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