In Fight Against Big-Time Poaching, Susi Nets Minnows

Jakarta Globe, Nuriy Azizah Susetyo, Nov 22, 2014

Bajau Laut child in the Philippines. (Wikimedia Commons Photo/Ronnie Pucket)

Jakarta. Fisheries Minister Susi Pudjiastuti’s crusade against poaching by foreign fishing boats in Indonesian waters has turned on a nomadic sea tribe that has practiced subsistence fishing for hundreds of years.

The minister said in Jakarta on Friday that her ministry had identified 400 fishermen from the Bajau Laut community living and fishing among remote islands off East Kalimantan – an area that they have lived in and fished from for generations.

However, Susi said that they included Bajau Laut tribespeople from the Philippines and Malaysia, and that their presence in Indonesian waters – where, again, they have a history that predates the founding of all three countries – posed an existential threat to Indonesia’s maritime sovereignty.

“Under our marine laws, they are definitely violating our territory, and if seen under the fisheries law, they are guilty because they are foreigners,” Susi said.

She added that they lived mostly on uninhabited islands off Berau district in East Kalimantan, a marine conservation area where she claimed fishing was prohibited. However, she also acknowledged that authorities were tipped off to their presence by complaints about the “foreign” competition from local fishermen who also fish in the ostensibly protected area.

Conservationists have long lamented the practice of dynamite fishing by local fishermen in the area, but Susi said no such materials were found among the Bajau Laut.

“We caught 59 boats and 73 rafts, so in total we got 132 wooden boats. However, we only found spears and nets, not potassium and dynamite,” she said.

The coordinating minister for maritime affairs, Indroyono Soesilo, said Indonesia needed to take the case seriously because of the danger that it could lose the islands in question to Malaysia or the Philippines – despite the Bajau Laut generally not subscribing to the notion of statehood.

He added that the government would inform the Malaysian and Philippine governments about the matter and deport the fishermen from the region they have lived in for generations.