A tragic odyssey
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.