Peace and piracy in the aftermath of the tsunami
Piracy may never be completely eradicated but with international cooperation, can be suppressed enough to ensure maritime safety most of the time
AS NATURAL disasters go, the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 was of a scale all its own: an estimated 238,000 people died as coastal towns and villages in the Indian Ocean rim were washed away in an instant. However, the wave of retrospection in recent weeks often overlooks, for Indonesia at least, an upside in the terrible event.
One of the worst hit regions by the tsunami was North Sumatran Aceh province. It had been the grip of an armed conflict between separatists from the Free Aceh Movement (known by its Indonesian acronym GAM) and the central government for nearly three decades. More than 15,000 people were killed in the fighting between 1976 and 2005. Occasionally, the rebellion would even spill over to a neighbouring country when a hijacked plane would suddenly turn up.
Paradoxically, the tsunami’s very devastation provided the hiatus for everyone to step back and think about where things were heading. After all, Aceh has a long history of resisting outside forces. The Aceh sultanate was one of the last places in the archipelago to be subdued by the colonial Dutch rulers in Batavia, as Jakarta was then known as. The Acehnese fought a guerilla war that drained the colonial treasury. Dutch subjugation of the region was not completed until 1904, a good three decades after that colonial war started.
So for Jakarta, facing the overwhelming task of rebuilding an entire tsunami-shattered region, it was a time for reflection. Previous attempts to broker a peace deal had always ended in failure. Yet unspoken, but always well understood, were fears of the demonstration effects of the rebellion on the other restive parts of the country and how it might expose the fragility of the Indonesian state. Thus a peace deal was finally agreed upon: Aceh would enjoy a significant degree of autonomy over its internal affairs. Rebel leaders would be able to partcipate in the politics of the province. Jakarta retained power over, inter alia, defence, foreign affairs and monetary affairs, including currency of legal tender.
The other big problem in the years preceding the tsunami was rampant piracy along the northern tip of Sumatra and the entrance to the Straits of Malacca. In 2004, in the months leading up to the tsunami, there were 60 reported piracy raids in the Straits of Malacca. It fell sharply immediately after the tsunami, mostly because of the disruption.
But unlike a liberation movement, piracy is not amenable to negotiations nor any settlement. Indeed, as long as the waterway remains a global shipping superhighway, accounting for 35 per cent of the world’s marine commerce, there will always be those who will find ways to plunder passing vessels.
Scholars note that that piracy along this shipping route has been a problem since the 14th century when seaborne trade between China and the rest of Asia took off. The Ming emperor even sent the famous Admiral Zheng He to battle pirates. In recent years, pirates have been shifting some of their nefarious activities from the Malacca Straits to the Singapore Strait and South China Sea.
A regional anti-piracy pact had been inked just before the tsunami and finally got underway in 2006. It now has 21 members. Piracy may never be completely eradicated but with international cooperation, can be suppressed enough to ensure maritime safety most of the time.
