The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

One of Japan’s most reputed comic books, Golgo 13, had modeled a character after her. In the comic book, Pudjiastuti wore a beret and sunglasses while she commanded men to blow up a fleet of fishing boats.

Generally, China had tried to avoid armed clashes, relying instead on its civilian maritime force—in other words, its million-boat fishing fleet—to establish its foothold in the region. One Asian scholar explained it this way: China is “putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first.”

the truth is that other countries, including Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines, are engaged in the same geopolitical scramble to expand their territorial claims in the South China Sea.

In her first two years in office, Pudjiastuti sank more than two hundred illegal fishing boats, dozens of them from China.

The one big difference was that Palau’s fisheries force had one patrol boat; Indonesia had thirty. The size of Indonesia’s enforcement effort meant that Pudjiastuti’s forces were making a lot of arrests—several hundred boats per year, which was creating logistical difficulties, like how to handle the thousands of men being removed from these boats.

Human rights groups had begun referring to these men as “sea refugees.” Because most were deckhands and had no say over where their ships fished, they were not criminally charged with illegal fishing, and they were supposed to be efficiently repatriated as undocumented immigrants. Instead, they were lingering in detention, sometimes for years, forgotten in bureaucratic limbo.

Pudjiastuti was as frustrated by these sea refugees as the human rights groups were. Their numbers had grown sharply under her crackdown, and handling them was expensive for the Indonesian government. A major reason that it took so long to process and repatriate these men was that the governments from their home countries, particularly Vietnam and Cambodia, did virtually nothing to help in the effort.

I had assumed that some of the men would be Chinese, Indonesian, Burmese, or Thai. I was wrong. Virtually all were Vietnamese, which I later learned was also the case at most of the other detention centers in the country. Next to the detention area was a port run by the fisheries agency. It looked like a waterlogged junkyard, with nearly three dozen rusting, half-sunken boats parked almost on top of each other.

Adjudication seemed to me to be a misnomer for this ruinous and drawn-out process. While the authorities determined whether to charge these men, their boats rotted beyond repair, their accreditations as fishermen lapsed, and their families back home suffered acutely from the lost income. Just being arrested amounted to being convicted, whether they were guilty or not.

Once we got back to the Macan, I asked Samson about something I had heard from dozens of detainees in Pontianak. Almost all of them said that when they were arrested, they thought they were still in Vietnamese waters.

Rio hunched over a regional map I had brought that was color coded to indicate the ocean borders of different countries’ national waters. Rio seemed fit but old—how old I couldn’t tell, sixty-five perhaps—with leathery skin and crow’s-feet framing his eyes. Tapping his finger on the map, he touched several dots that I had marked to indicate where several countries’ waters converged. Shaking his head, Rio widened his eyes in fear. Then he silently reached over and opened a dashboard compartment revealing a Glock handgun.

Hours into one fourteen-day tour, my Spotify app crashed, taking its off-line library down with it. For two long weeks, I was stuck with the dozen painfully grating jingles by Parry Gripp that my son denies having snuck onto my phone as a prank.

An Indonesian officer instructed the detainees to remove their shirts. I was told later that this made them less likely to jump overboard and try to swim back to their boat because they did not want to leave without an article of clothing. This explanation didn’t entirely make sense to me, even though several guards mentioned it.

When this captain was sent to the back of the Macan, he began yelling at the other detainees to fight back as a group. In response, one of the Indonesian officers stepped forward and slapped the captain squarely across the face. The blow was hard enough that I could hear it from ten feet away over the roar of the waves and moan of the engine. “Sit down!” the officer yelled. The captain did as he was told.

All of the Vietnamese crew had been removed, so there was no one that I might encounter. But I wanted to check the living conditions. The Indonesian officers kept their distance, wondering why I would set foot on such a filthy ship. They were decrepit vessels.

Several of the captains told me that they were not, in fact, fishing illegally. They ignored or did not understand my questions about being in Indonesian waters.

As a ship moves through water, a wave forms at the bow and another at the stern. Between them a trough is created. The faster the ship goes, the deeper it sinks into the trough, a phenomenon called squat. Samson was driving the Macan at twenty-three knots—fast for this ship—so we were squatting deep, making it easier for the twenty-five-foot waves to slam across the aft deck where the Vietnamese detainees were being held.

At one point, the ship listed so far that the refrigerator broke from its bungee-cord lashing, falling on its side and smashing across the room. Several men leaped up and refastened it. I joined them in trying to clean up the cooking oil that spilled on the floor, but their efforts just spread the slippery sheen, creating a black-ice hazard for anyone who tried to cross it.

The truth was that I’d never actually seen one country’s Coast Guard venture so far into the territorial waters of another, or seen two armed ships come so close to opening fire on each other.

The last time an Indonesian fisheries officer was taken captive was in 2010. The Indonesians arrested five Malaysian boats that were fishing illegally in Indonesian waters near Bintan Island (Indonesia) and Johor Island (Malaysia). As they escorted the arrested fishing boats back to port, several larger Malaysian marine police boats appeared and removed three of the Indonesian officers from the boats.

In the days after the confrontation, I emailed James Kraska, an international law professor at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island and an expert on the South China Sea. I sent him the coordinates of where the clash occurred and asked him whose waters those were. “Impossible to say,” he replied. Countries have to agree on where to draw these lines, he said. In the South China Sea, Indonesia and Vietnam have never come to such an agreement, he explained.

After holding him for six days, Vietnam sent Mas Gun back to Indonesia. “This was not a hostage situation but a rescue effort,” said Rifky Effendi Hardijanto, Indonesia’s secretary-general of the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries, during a subsequent press conference in which he cast the Vietnamese Coast Guard more as savior than as aggressor. In later interviews, the Indonesian government told reporters that Mas Gun had been driving one of several arrested Vietnamese fishing boats back to shore when his boat began sinking and the Vietnamese Coast Guard saved him.

Pudjiastuti added that unlike the Chinese, who stopped the incursions after Indonesia blew up several of their boats, the Vietnamese government either could not or did not want to rein in its fishing fleet. I told her that perhaps the Vietnamese did not see those fishing trips as incursions because they believed they were in their own waters. Pudjiastuti laughed. “They can say that,” she said. “But I can show you on a map where the lines are.”

One of the men in the water raised his arms over his head, palms open and forward, in what looked like a gesture indicating surrender. A bullet drilled into the back of his skull, knocking him face down. A cloud of glowing red blood slowly mushroomed around him in blue water.

In late 2014, a source at Interpol emailed a cell phone video of the incident to me with the subject line “Brace yourself.” When I opened the email and watched the shaky footage, I sat back in my chair, stunned at what I was seeing. In my reporting on sea slaves, like the captive Cambodian man Lang Long, I had seen the worst types of violence inflicted on fishermen, and I had certainly heard many times of cold-blooded killings at sea. But the scene playing on my laptop was a naked abomination, the killers exhibiting the glee of big-game hunters bagging their prey.

In many countries, most fishing boat deckhands have their phones confiscated while on board. This is one reason why the conditions I witnessed time and again at sea persist today.

On so many levels, the story didn’t make sense. Despite dozens of witnesses on at least four ships, the circumstances surrounding these killings had remained a mystery. No one even reported the incident; there was no requirement to do so under maritime law, nor any clear procedures for mariners to volunteer what they knew as they traveled from port to port.