Yinhe incident

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The Yinhe incident （S.Chinese:银河号事件） is a false claim made in 1993 by the United States government, which alleged that "Yinhe" (or "Milky Way"), a China-based regular container ship, was carrying materials for chemical weapons to Iran. The United States Navy forced the "Yinhe" ship to stop on the international waters of Indian Ocean for 3 weeks without supplies. Subsequently the Chinese government agreed to have the ship searched in Saudi Arabia by a Saudi-U.S. joint team, an unprecedented procedure perceived by many Chinese people as loss of sovereignty. The final inspection report, signed by U.S. government representatives, concluded that "the complete inspection of all the containers aboard the Yinhe showed conclusively [that the chemicals] were not among the ship's cargo." Even though the Chinese are proven innocent, the U.S. government refused to apologize "because the United States had acted in good faith on intelligence from a number of sources, all of which proved to be wrong". ^[1]

1 Background information
2 Aftermath
- 2.1 Increased nationalism in China
- 2.2 Continued denial by U.S. government and conservatives
3 References

[edit] Background information

[edit] The ship

The "Yinhe"（银河, lt. silver river, Chinese saying of the Milky Way）, was a Chinese regular container ship that ran on a fixed schedule between Tianjin Xinggang(new harbor) and Kuwait. Its scheduled port visits included Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Jakarta, Dubai and Daman and Diu. The ship had never scheduled to go to Iran.

The Yinhe ship belonged to the China Ocean Shipping Corp. （S.Chinese:中远集团）company, and had maintained a perfect on-time schedule before the incident. This record, of course, was broken by this incident.

[edit] Timeline of the incident

In late July, 1993, the United States alleged that a Chinese ship was carrying chemical weapon materials to Abbas Harbor, Iran, citing unspecified intelligence provided by CIA. At this time, the "Yinhe" ship had already departed China and was on its way to the destination Kuwait. U.S. officials later claimed that secret diplomatic efforts were made from this point on.

On August 9, 1993, China disclosed to the media that the U.S. Navy was harassing the "Yinhe" ship on the international waters, and declared officially that the ship cargo did not carry any chemical weapon materials ^[2]. The U.S. government dismissed the declaration and threatened to search the ship immediately.

On August 15, 1993, after 3 weeks on sea, the ship was allowed to "take on fuel and water ... to insure the safety of the vessel and crew" upon request from the shipping company ^[3].

On August 28, 1993, U.S. and China agreed to an open inspection of the ship at a Saudi Arabian port, by a Saudi-United States joint team^[4].

[edit] The inspection

The intelligence itself however, as later revealed, concluded that it was impossible to positively determine the Chinese ship was carrying chemical weapons material for sure, but this did not stop the United States for stopping the ship and divert it for inspection.

Although the inspection team was claimed to be mostly Saudi Arabian, it was reported that the personnel were mostly from the United States Navy, with test equipment directly flown from the United States). The info proveded by CIA specified suspicious container numbers CSAQ3101 and CSAQ3102, but there was no such container number at all, so the container with the most similar number, CSAQ3010, was opened first, and it turned out to be poker cards being exported to Pakistan. ^[5]

All the 628 containers on board were inspected by U.S. technicians. The U.S. intelligence specified thiodiglyol and thionly chloride as the chemical weapon materials. In the end, these were not found at all, and the only chemical material carried by the ship was ordinary solid paint.

On September 4, the inspection report proved that the American accusation was baseless. According to a TV interview with the then Chinese representative, Sha Zukang, the initial report draft simply concluded that "thiodiglyol and thionly chloride were not found after inspection" (translated from Chinese, not verbatim). However, the United States representatives insisted to add intense adjectives into the report ^[6]. The final version read as: "the complete inspection of all the containers aboard the Yinhe showed conclusively [that the chemicals] were not among the ship's cargo." (verbatim)

[edit] Aftermath

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[edit] Increased nationalism in China

When the U.S. accusations were reported in China, even the Chinese dissidents who were always critical to China felt angry, resulting in increased Chinese nationalism in response. The Chinese government, on the other hand, attempted to play down the issue by claiming that the racist accusation was not the official stand of the American government and did not represent the majority opinion in the United States.

The 1993 Yinhe incident was followed by a series of similar "incidents" in the 1990s, climaxed at 1999 when the Chinese embassy was bombed by NATO. The similarity lies in that the U.S. government attributed almost all these "incidents" to erroneous information provided by the CIA. Many Chinese people felt that CIA is unlikely to repeatedly make simple mistakes, and suspected that the U.S. government intentionally made these "incidents" happen. As concluded in a U.S. House report in 2001, the Yinhe incident "has been repeatedly cited as a case of international bullying by the United States" ^[7].

[edit] Continued denial by U.S. government and conservatives

Although many American diplomats and CIA openly admitted that the incident was a mistake, many United States officials continued to deny this. For example, Robert Einhorn, then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, testified before congress in 1997 that "our initial information was correct, that the goods were intended to be on board that ship ... we think our intelligence community had done a good job in that case" ^[8]. These claims had no proof of evidence.

Some conservatives in the United States, such as the Blue Team, even went as far as to theorize weird excuses, such that the Chinese submarine had met the Chinese ship somewhere in the trip and had secretly transferred the chemical weapons material the ship was carrying, without any intelligence support. Ocean shipping professionals have dismissed these theories because, as "Yinhe" is a container ship, the container to the destination harbor is put at bottom, so it is impossible to open those container without a huge crane on harbor. And if the goods were transferred, there would have been a lot of empty containers, but all containers were full when "Yinhe" was inspected.