The final story in a three-part series exploring changes in Indonesia’s network of marine protected areas through the lens of Wakatobi National Park. Read the first and second articles.

This is the forest primeval: mangroves like you probably have never seen or imagined before. Unlike the gnarly beachfront variety in the genus Rhizopora, these ramrod-straight Bruguiera mangroves grow up to 12 meters tall nearly a half a kilometer inland. The forest floor is pitch black, littered with finger-length mangrove flowers, olive green on the outside, pink on the inside, and torpedo-shaped fruit pods. One wrong step and you sink calf-deep in peat, stirring up a faint smell of ammonia — far from a Club Med vision of island paradise.

Yet, to marine conservationists, mangrove bogs such as this anchor one corner of the “holy trinity,” of prerequisites for a healthy tropical coastal ecosystem. (Seagrass beds and coral reefs hold down the other two corners.)

To the land-dwelling farmers of nearby Sumbano village, this copse retains the same status it held for them under generations of rule by the Sultanate of Buton, which ended in 1960 with the death of the last pre-independence era monarch. It’s a sacred grove, held in common by the whole village, whose trees may never be harvested.

To the managers of Wakatobi National Park, Indonesia’s third largest marine protected area (MPA), it’s just one more backwater on their impossibly vast patrol beat of 1.34 million hectares (5,188 square miles) of land, scattered over four major islands with a population of 95,157 mostly poor villagers, according to a 2010 census.

And to the Bajau “sea gypsies” who comprise a third of the MPA’s populace, a nice, tall stand of mangrove timber represents an inviting source of much-needed construction material. Since they gave up their free-ranging, boat-dwelling oceanic lifestyle in the 1970s, many took up residence onshore under government pressure. Officials claimed living at sea made the community vulnerable to tsunamis and typhoons, despite Bajau surviving for centuries on houseboats and remote stilt villages.

So now the Sumbano thicket has become a crime scene. Wakatobi park head La Ode Ahyar Mufti and some park police are walking a foursome of Bajau suspects through the grove in an effort to reconstruct the arrest of some 53 Bajau who were caught here illegally logging, in violation of the park’s protected status.

“You can gather dead wood for your cooking fires,” Ahyar explains. “Everyone is allowed to do that. But these,” he says, pointing to a bundle of severed branches, “are stumps of live trees.”

The Bajau remain baffled. “We didn’t know we couldn’t cut inland,” the oldest among them, a man in his 40s, protests. “We thought it was just the coastal mangroves. Why, my grandmother used to cut here.” The youngest perpetrator, barely a teenager, hangs back in silent bewilderment, clutching a Hello Kitty doll.

Such disconnects may be an inevitable product of the cruel irony that Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, sits squarely astride the 958 million hectare expanse of the world heritage Coral Triangle ecosystem. The country is a hotbed of biodiversity, but also of ethnic and cultural diversity, with all the attendant potential for conflict.

In a 2014 paper in the journal Nature, Stuart Campbell, head of Wildlife Conservation Society Indonesia’s marine program, and two-dozen coauthors laid out five key determinants for a successful MPA: “no-take zones” closed to fishing; strong regulatory enforcement; maturity (at least a 10-year track record); size (larger than 100 square kilometers, or 10,000 hectares); and isolation (remoteness from human population centers).

Indonesia’s 16.6 million hectares of MPAs, and especially Wakatobi, score pretty well on the first four criteria, Campbell told Mongabay. But the fifth, isolation, poses challenges. “Nearly all larger MPAs in Indonesia are inhabited,” he said. So park authorities have to manage humans in addition to the other life forms within.

That’s no mean feat here in Wakatobi, given the sheer size and population density of the MPA. Park authorities have to be on the lookout for a gamut of infractions, ranging from mangrove poaching to harvesting coral rock for construction to destructive fishing practices like bombing reefs and using potassium cyanide to stun live reef fish. Between 2000 and 2011, National park guards made arrests in 34 instances. The most common violation was coral bombing.

Such depredations are far more easily monitored close to towns than out on the open sea. In Mongabay’s 10 days in Wakatobi, there were two investigations by park guards: the Sumbano wood chopping ring and a villager on Wanci Island who was caught moving coral by boat to build a piling for his house. On the other hand, none of the Bajau fishermen interviewed for this series – neither the net setters, line fishermen, spear fishermen, octopus hunters, nor the live reef-fish traders – admitted to meeting a single park guard or fishery official anywhere more than a kilometer away from land.

Not that there’s nothing to check up on out there. Villagers on eastern Kaledupa Island, one of four larger islands in the Wakatobi chain, complain that their local reef was bombed as recently as April, although the last reported potassium cyanide arrest in the park was way back in November 2014 (the perpetrator got eight months in jail). And on the dock at Wanci, another of Wakatobi’s main islands, Mongabay saw half a dozen big crates of yellowfin tuna fillets and nearly 200 soft-shell mantis shrimp all set to get shipped out on that morning’s Kendari-bound ferry without a shred of the required documentation.

Perhaps the discrepancy is due to the fact that land-based patrolling is easier than ocean patrolling. Driving a jeep two miles to a wooded lot on a small island is also cheaper than multiple hours circling the same island. Local fishery officials have recruited a cadre of civilian auxiliaries — informants — from onshore villages to augment the MPA’s overstretched official resources. And now, park guards are looking to resurrect a sultanate-era code of resource management that allows local village councils, known as sara, to fine violators.

The new version of sara will not involve royalty, park authorities say. Instead, locals and the national park will create a set of local regulations and determine the fines “through a townhall meeting,” explained Chris Tambea, the head of one of the national park’s three guard units.

This seems, at first glance, an elegant, locally empowering solution, using time-honored grassroots institutions to safeguard the ecosystem. But there’s a rub: the sara is only familiar to the land-based Butonese ex-subjects of the erstwhile sultans. The seagoing Bajau, the most vigorous exploiters of maritime resources, never came under royal sway. So they remain completely unrepresented on the local councils that would now have prosecutorial authority over them under the proposed plan.

One sara that has already been set up in advance of the parkwide rollout is in Binongko, the park’s outermost island. Unsurprisingly, locals here focus on infractions, mostly by Bajau, close to the land-based Butonese villages. Residents of the Binongko hamlet of Wali caught a Bajau coral bomber and fined him 10 million rupiah ($715), more than double the region’s average annual income. The 200 Wali villagers got to split the fine money between them.

“The bomber in Wali said, ‘No one told me the fine would be 10 million’,” recalled Wakatobi Park guard La Fasa. “I explained to him that these waters are like our house. In eastern Indonesia, our culture is that when we arrive somewhere new, we introduce ourselves; we ask what we are allowed and not allowed to do. He didn’t ask for permission, he didn’t introduce himself, so it’s his own fault that he got fined.”

The sara might willingly extend their monitoring scope beyond the immediate offshore doormat of their watery “houses,” given proper incentives. In Sumbano, site of the mangrove-poaching bust, village head Talabiru complained that coral bombers still prey on local reefs. “The government … should give us a speedboat so we can chase the offenders,” he told Mongabay.

The government of Wakatobi regency seems more than ready to meet village leaders like Talabiru halfway. Radini, the regency administration’s point person on fishery problems, already strengthens regulatory enforcement through an informer network motivated by grants of boats, free boat fuel and skills-development training.

National park authorities insist that the proposed local council system has nothing to do with the onetime sultanate, but when Mongabay went to Sumbano to gauge local responses to the potential reintroduction of the sara system, villagers deferred comment to those elders with the honorific title of La Ode, indicating royal lineage or courtly connections. These elders were considered to have a better knowledge of what a sara should look like. And eventually, they are likely to lead the system if it comes into effect.

Senior among them was a cassava farmer named La Ode Kotafu. Though he lives just 50 yards from the sea, he told Mongabay he rarely visits the village reef or even the beach more than once a month. Rather than matters maritime, Kotafu fixates on the village’s land boundaries, specifically on the question of where the precise border between Sumbano and Mantigola, the new neighboring stilt-village of the Bajau, is located.

Another elder, La Ode Samoane, seemed less hydrophobic, but still sees no need to venture beyond the shoreline fringe of seagrass. There he and six of his Sumbano neighbors ply their small-gauge mesh nets, each landing a daily average of about 50 five-inch fish, which totals to 350 juvenile reef fish a day from the group – a haul that is likely not that sustainable for the local ecosystem. Yet Samoane wonders why his catch is now so much lower than it was seven years ago, a decline he blames on Bajau potassium-cyanide use.

It’s up to park administrators and regency fishery officials to guard against such scapegoating and self-serving calculus. A truly sustainable MPA management would need to more evenhandedly balance the interests of Wakatobi’s two main communities. The Bajau need a seat at the regulatory table. But they present the MPA with no such readily accessible, institutional interlocutor as the Butonese sara. Not even Abdul Manan, the self-styled “president of the Bajau,” can muster this authority over his tribe.

These sea gypsies — who make up a third of Wakatobi’s population — are traditionally a leaderless, oceangoing people. But they were never given the land rights that go along with being settled. As a result, they have no clear source for building materials and firewood. Nor do they have reliable legal recourse against regulatory restrictions upon their traditional maritime livelihood. They are, in effect, stuck between two ways of life.

Harun, a wizened senior Bajau, summed up their dilemma: “If our elders were still here, we could ask them what the rules were. Now we can barely read the signs that nature sends us.” Bajau were known for navigating throughout Indonesia’s archipelago relying only on sails, stars and clouds. “We used to know days in advance when a storm was coming. Now we use cellphones and contact the coastguard to get out of a tight place.”

Abdul Manan, another senior Bajau, atypically possesses a university education but still hearkens back to traditional tribal lore. “Once, we used to pound on the seafloor with a gogor stick to call up the fish. And we’d only take those fish that answered our call. But now, Bajau must also catch more to pay for their kids’ schooling. We are receiving outside influences and economic pressure, but have no one to check with about how to react.”

Such nostalgia recalls a simpler age when sea tribes lived at sea and land tribes lived on land in the balanced symbiosis of an island-bound local micro-economy. But now the two groups must learn to live together in close, forced and competitive proximity, responding to the of a globalized trading economy that offers undreamt-of prices for sea produce and undreamt-of consumer luxury.

And, as the two groups come to terms with each other, there’s a third party, too, at the table, represented by the MPA management and its NGO advisors. It’s the common interest of humanity and the planet at large to preserve the unique and irreplaceable biodiversity heritage of the Coral Triangle.

CITATIONS:

Edgar G.J., et al. (2014). Global conservation outcomes depend on marine protected areas with five key features. Nature 506: 216-220.

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BiodiversityCoastal EcosystemsConservationCoral ReefsFishingGovernanceIllegal FishingIllegal LoggingIndigenous CulturesIndigenous PeoplesIndigenous RightsLaw EnforcementMangrovesNational ParksOceansOverfishingProtected AreasSeagrassAsiaCoral TriangleIndonesiaSoutheast AsiaSoutheast SulawesiSulawesi

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