Jakarta
tells Beijing the South China Sea isn’t a Chinese lake
On July
14, Indonesia took a major step forward in confronting China’s South China Sea
claims with an announcement that it was renaming a part of the sea in its
territory the “North Natuna Sea,” becoming in a single step the most important
Southeast Asian nation to stand up to Beijing.
That may
have come to many as surprise – certainly to the Chinese, who called on
Indonesia to stop using the term on official maps and documents with a
diplomatic note, written in Mandarin, from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to the Indonesian embassy in Beijing.
Nonetheless,
the Indonesians are sticking to their guns. The new name encompasses an area
north of the Natuna islands that partly falls within China’s “nine dash line,”
by which Beijing claims the sea stretching 1500 miles from its mainland coast
almost to the shores of Malaysia, the Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, and
Indonesia.
The
naming was a reminder of how seriously Indonesia treats its position as the
seat of ancient trading empires and the location of some of the world’s
strategically most important straits – Melaka, Sunda, Lombok and Makassar.
Since he was elected in 2014 President Joko Widodo has made maritime issues
central to Indonesia’s foreign policy, building up its navy, arresting and
dynamiting dozens of foreign ships caught fishing illegally, and taking a quiet
but firm stand on sea rights.
In
December of 1957, Indonesia declared that it was an archipelagic state, at the
time a revolutionary move and a direct assault on the assumption by the major
western powers that territorial seas extended only three nautical miles from
actual coastlines, and that the seas otherwise were open to all.
The 1957 Indonesian claim helped set in motion 25s years of
negotiations that led eventually to the United Nations Convention on the Law of
the Sea, signed in 1982 and which finally came into force in 1994, along with
an implementation agreement which opened the way to ratification by western powers
which had had some reservations. Most developing countries, including China,
had already signed up. (The US has accepted its provisions in practice but has
still not ratified it). The Convention formerly enshrined the archipelagic
principle, which by then had become widely accepted in practice.
In total
there were 37 years of negotiations on the whole range of complicated issues
relating to territorial seas, internal waters, rights of innocent passage,
particularly through important straits, rights to fish and seabed resources,
continental shelf issues, air transit rights etc. Indonesia continuously played
a leading role.
That was
natural given that it is, by far, the world’s largest archipelagic state and
owns all or part of several of international commerce’s most important straits
– Melaka, Singapore, Sunda, Karimata, Lombok and Makassar. But success required
the continuous and detailed engagement of the nation’s foremost diplomats,
notably Mochtar Kusumaatmadja and Hasjim Djalal who remained on the case
through all the political turmoil of 1960s’ Indonesia and through to the 1970
and 80s when Mochtar was foreign minister.
The broad
story has been told before, including by Hasjim Djalal’s son, Dino Patti
Djalal, formerly Indonesia’s ambassador in Washington, but John G Butcher and R
E Elson, two Australian academics, have written the most detailed account of
the negotiations and Indonesia’s role in them in their book “Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indonesia
Became an Archipelagic State,” published by NUS Press in Singapore. It is an
impressive work of scholarship which could have been even better had the
authors been given access to Indonesia’s own National Archives or those of its
Foreign Ministry. Thus they had to rely on British, US, Dutch and Australian
records dealing with various aspects of the negotiations, and those of Fiji,
another archipelagic state which played an active part,.
The book
also used secondary works and interviews with key participants, including
Hasjim, Mochtar and Tommy Koh, Singapore’s lawyer/diplomat who as President of
the 1980-82 UN Conference played a key role in bringing the negotiations to
their conclusion with the 1982 Convention.
In
addition to dealing with big power interests, demanding sea and air access
rights and strict limits on the resources claims of littoral states, the
Indonesians had a hard time trying to keep neighbors on their side. The
Philippines was helpful enough as a large archipelago in its own right and
possessor of the internal Sulu Sea. But Malaysia was a major headache given
that its interests in communication between its mainland and Borneo territories
as well as their offshore and fishing resources ran up against Indonesia’s baseline
claims.
Eventually
formulae were devised which Malaysia could accept and were applicable in
similar situations elsewhere. Japan, though an archipelago itself, was also a
problem due to its huge fishery interests. But even before finally coming into
force, the 1982 UNCLOS provided a basis for bilateral agreements on boundary,
fishing and seabed issues. And the region has, unlike China, lived up to
promises to accept international judgments – such as on boundary disputes
between Singapore and Malaysian and Indonesia and Malaysia.
Butcher
and Elson authors show how delicate sea questions could be. During Indonesia’s konfrontasi
or undeclared war with Malaysia in 1964, Britain wanted to send a warship to
Australia using the Sunda Strait over which Indonesia claimed ownership but
which the British insisted was an international waterway. After some quiet
diplomacy, the British opted to go the longer way via the equally Indonesian
but less sensitive Lombok strait in return for an assurance that Sunda would remain
open. London ordered its navy always to give advance notice of passage to
Indonesia. These were the kind of steps which over time were to make a realty
of most – but not all – of Indonesia’s 1957 claims. Likewise was a temporary
informal deal with in 1968 provided Japanese fisheries organisations access to
the Banda Sea and its tuna stocks.
Given
maritime Asia’s key role in UNCLOS, the book by the two Australian authors is
an important if silent reminder of the demeaning nature of President Duterte’s
undermining of his own country’s victory at the Permanent Court of Arbitration
on UNCLOS issues in return for promises of cash from China. It is also an
insult to those from the region who made the Convention and formal acceptance
of the archipelagic principle possible, particularly Indonesians but including
Philippine diplomats and Singapore’s Koh. The 1982 Convention is a document of
critical importance to the maritime states of the region. They forget it at
their peril.
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