A tragic odyssey

Last Sunday, at about 9 a.m., the answer to the mystery of what happened to the missing Cahaya Bahari was at last revealed.

The Minahasa IX passenger ship, alerted by the National Search and Rescue Agency, picked up 11 people who had been adrift for three days in the sea, about 73 miles from the Sangihe-Talaud islands at the northernmost tip of the Indonesian archipelago and about 60 miles from the point where contact with the ferry was lost at about 10:45 a.m. last Thursday.

Thus, a mystery that has hounded the minds of many people in Indonesia has come to an end. And not only Indonesians showed their concern. Pope John Paul II told pilgrims in St. Peter's Square that he has "learned with great pain of the boat with some 500 people aboard.

"I express great sorrow for the victims, while I pray that the Lord grants them their eternal reward and I invoke with all my force peace and security for those islands tormented by violence."

The pope's grief and concern for this latest calamity is wholly understandable. Many of the 492 passengers on the ship were Christian refugees seeking to escape the sectarian violence that devastated their village in Tobelo on Halmahera Island in the northern Maluku.

For days, speculation was rife in Jakarta about the fate of the ferry. Among other things, it was said that the vessel could have been captured by Muslim fighters and that the passengers were being held hostage.

That was not what happened. What did happen, however, was no less tragic. The ferry set out on its disastrous odyssey, heavily overloaded with people fleeing the doom and destruction that has ravaged North Maluku over the past few months.

On that fateful Thursday, when the Cahaya Bahari set out from Tobelo, bound for Bitung in North Sulawesi, the wooden-hulled ferry, built to hold only about 200 passengers, was literally besieged by hundreds of refugees trying to escape the strife-torn area.

"The crew tried to reduce the overcrowding by turning some people away, but some of them threatened the captain and said they would attack the ship if they were abandoned," one of the survivors told reporters after her rescue.

Consequently, when the disaster struck, passengers found there were not enough life vests for everybody. People fought each other, even using sharp weapons, to get hold of what was available. With so many people aboard, the ferry was obviously unable to travel in heavy seas with wave crests of up to three meters high.

As things are, it would be quite unexpected for any more survivors to be found. A glance at the map will show that finding any more survivors in the seas or on the islands around the area is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Of the 11 rescued passengers of the Cahaya Bahari, 10 may indeed count themselves lucky to be safe, as one later died in hospital.

The Cahaya Bahari's sinking, meanwhile, could be the most disastrous sea accident in terms of casualties since the sinking of the Tampomas II in the waters off the Masalembo Islands, northeast of Madura, on Jan. 25, 1981. In that catastrophe, 99 people died and 346 remain unaccounted for.

Given this fact, as well as the overloading that set the scene for this most recent human tragedy, one would wish a little more attention could be paid to the plight of the people living in those areas that are at present ravaged by violence.

In the first place, the violence must be brought to an end. Secondly, if that is not immediately possible, provisions must be made to anticipate any outflow of refugees, as was the case this time. Steps could have been taken, if not to evacuate those people, then to protect them against any further attacks.

Those people who boarded the Cahaya Bahari on Thursday last week thought they were sailing to the safety of a refuge. Instead, they escaped the violence in their area only to meet their deaths in the waters of North Sulawesi.