A tragic odyssey<\/p>\n
Last Sunday, at about 9 a.m., the answer to the mystery of
\nwhat happened to the missing Cahaya Bahari was at last revealed.<\/p>\n
The Minahasa IX passenger ship, alerted by the National Search
\nand Rescue Agency, picked up 11 people who had been adrift for
\nthree days in the sea, about 73 miles from the Sangihe-Talaud
\nislands at the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago and
\nabout 60 miles from the point where contact with the ferry was
\nlost at about 10:45 a.m. last Thursday.<\/p>\n
Thus, a mystery that has hounded the minds of many people in
\nIndonesia has come to an end. And not only Indonesians showed
\ntheir concern. Pope John Paul II told pilgrims in St. Peter's
\nSquare that he has \"learned with great pain of the boat with some
\n500 people aboard.<\/p>\n
\"I express great sorrow for the victims, while I pray that the
\nLord grants them their eternal reward and I invoke with all my
\nforce peace and security for those islands tormented by
\nviolence.\"<\/p>\n
The pope's grief and concern for this latest calamity is
\nwholly understandable. Many of the 492 passengers on the ship
\nwere Christian refugees seeking to escape the sectarian violence
\nthat devastated their village in Tobelo on Halmahera Island in
\nthe northern Maluku.<\/p>\n
For days, speculation was rife in Jakarta about the fate of
\nthe ferry. Among other things, it was said that the vessel could
\nhave been captured by Muslim fighters and that the passengers
\nwere being held hostage.<\/p>\n
That was not what happened. What did happen, however, was no
\nless tragic. The ferry set out on its disastrous odyssey, heavily
\noverloaded with people fleeing the doom and destruction that has
\nravaged North Maluku over the past few months.<\/p>\n
On that fateful Thursday, when the Cahaya Bahari set out from
\nTobelo, bound for Bitung in North Sulawesi, the wooden-hulled
\nferry, built to hold only about 200 passengers, was literally
\nbesieged by hundreds of refugees trying to escape the strife-torn
\narea.<\/p>\n
\"The crew tried to reduce the overcrowding by turning some
\npeople away, but some of them threatened the captain and said
\nthey would attack the ship if they were abandoned,\" one of the
\nsurvivors told reporters after her rescue.<\/p>\n
Consequently, when the disaster struck, passengers found there
\nwere not enough life vests for everybody. People fought each
\nother, even using sharp weapons, to get hold of what was
\navailable. With so many people aboard, the ferry was obviously
\nunable to travel in heavy seas with wave crests of up to three
\nmeters high.<\/p>\n
As things are, it would be quite unexpected for any more
\nsurvivors to be found. A glance at the map will show that finding
\nany more survivors in the seas or on the islands around the area
\nis like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Of the 11 rescued
\npassengers of the Cahaya Bahari, 10 may indeed count themselves
\nlucky to be safe, as one later died in hospital.<\/p>\n
The Cahaya Bahari's sinking, meanwhile, could be the most
\ndisastrous sea accident in terms of casualties since the sinking
\nof the Tampomas II in the waters off the Masalembo Islands,
\nnortheast of Madura, on Jan. 25, 1981. In that catastrophe, 99
\npeople died and 346 remain unaccounted for.<\/p>\n
Given this fact, as well as the overloading that set the scene
\nfor this most recent human tragedy, one would wish a little more
\nattention could be paid to the plight of the people living in
\nthose areas that are at present ravaged by violence.<\/p>\n
In the first place, the violence must be brought to an end.
\nSecondly, if that is not immediately possible, provisions must be
\nmade to anticipate any outflow of refugees, as was the case this
\ntime. Steps could have been taken, if not to evacuate those
\npeople, then to protect them against any further attacks.<\/p>\n
Those people who boarded the Cahaya Bahari on Thursday last
\nweek thought they were sailing to the safety of a refuge.
\nInstead, they escaped the violence in their area only to meet
\ntheir deaths in the waters of North Sulawesi.<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/a-tragic-odyssey-1447893297",
"image": ""
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"sponsor": "Okusi Associates",
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