By Jewel Topsfield of The Sydney Morning Herald in Jakarta

It’s hard to comprehend it happened in this century: human slaves trapped on fishing boats being whipped with poisonous stingray tails, having ice blocks thrown at them and being shot.

“If Americans and Europeans are eating this fish, they should remember us,” says Hlaing Min, 30, a runaway slave from Benjina, a remote fisheries weight station in eastern Indonesia’s Aru Islands.

“There must be a mountain of bones under the sea…. The bones of the people could be an island, it’s that many.”

In 2015 more than 1300 foreign fisherman from Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos were rescued from Benjina and Ambon, after an Associated Press investigation revealed the brutal conditions aboard many foreign vessels reflagged to operate in Indonesian waters.

Extraordinary images of men being kept in a cage exposed the chilling reality of 21st century slavery.

“They were trafficked from their home country, mostly by means of deception, forced to work over 20 hours per day on a boat in the middle of the sea, with little to no chance of escape,” says a report on human trafficking in the Indonesian fishing industry released this week.

Some were kept at sea for years at a time.

After the rescue, the International Organisation for Migration interviewed the fishers.

They were told of excessive work hours — 78 percent of 285 victims interviewed in depth claimed they worked between 16 and 24 hours a day, cramped conditions, meals of watery fish gruel, physical and psychological abuse and even murder.

‘Several crews died’
“While on board, I often heard the news from the boat radio that several boat crews had died, either falling to the ocean, fighting or killed by the other crews,” a Cambodian fisher says in the report.

“While I was working on the boat, I saw with my own eyes more than seven dead bodies floating in the sea.”

Witnesses testified that requesting to leave the boat could be a death sentence for some victims. Those who did might find themselves chained on the deck in the middle of the day or locked in the freezer.

“The heartrending stories of these fishers could not be left untold,” says IOM Indonesia’s chief of mission Mark Getchell.

The report says the Benjina and Ambon cases highlight the lack of adequate policing of the fishing industry and a lack of scrutiny of working conditions on ships and in fish processing plants.

Seafood caught by modern day slaves entered the global supply chain, with legitimate suppliers of fish “unaware of its provenance and the human toll behind the catch.”

“The situation in Benjina and Ambon is symptomatic of a much broader and insidious trade in people, not only in the Indonesian and Thai fishing industries, but indeed globally,” the report says.

Repatriation of enslaved fisherfmen
In 2015 the Australian government provided $2.17 million to IOM to support the daily care, repatriation and reintegration of formerly trafficked and enslaved fishermen from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, who had been stranded on islands in Indonesia’s Maluku province.

“This funding support has since been extended to enable IOM to provide assistance to foreign fishermen stranded in any area of Indonesia,” an Immigration Department spokesman said.

“This assistance plays a crucial role to support and protect victims of trafficking and slavery in the fishing industry by reuniting victims with their families and providing them with limited financial assistance which can help them establish an alternative livelihood.”

IOM spokesman Paul Dillon said Australia provided the lion share of the funding for its emergency response to the human trafficking crisis, which included returning more than 1000 victims to their home countries.

“This would not have been possible without the Australian government,” he said.

At the launch of the report in Jakarta this week, Indonesian Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Susi Pudjiastuti unveiled a new government decree requiring all fisheries companies to submit a detailed human rights audit.

This was one of the report’s key recommendations to protect fishermen and port workers from abuse.

“That being said, Indonesia still has homework towards the approximately 250,000 Indonesian crews on foreign vessels operating across continents that remain unprotected,” Pudjiastuti says in a foreword to the report.

The report also called for greater diligence in recording the movement of vessels in Indonesian waters, more training on human trafficking, independent inspections of ports and vessels at sea and centres in ports where fishers could seek protection.

Jewel Topsfield is the Jakarta-based Indonesia correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.This article was first published by the SMH and has been republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.

The scene happens every day in capitals across south-east Asia: a strategy session in an ambassador’s ornate sitting room over coffee with like-minded senior diplomats from the US, Canada, and EU member states trying to figure out how to persuade a national government to reverse course on human rights.

On this particular day in Bangkok the ask was a tough one, demanding the government stop arresting and roughing up critics, chastising and censoring the media, and cracking down on public protests.

Human Rights Watch got a rare invite, and during the inevitable brainstorming, I asked “Where is Australia, why aren’t they here?”

Eyes lowered and heads shook ever so slightly around the room. Talking like a friend has fallen off the wagon, one diplomat said “We’re not sure of them anymore. They’re going a different way.”

Left unsaid in this polite circle is that the human rights principles once a core part of Australia’s foreign policy have been undermined by its single-minded determination to stop boats of asylum seekers and migrants “by hook or by crook.”

Last year was a hard one for human rights in many parts of Asia, with governments arresting and jailing critics in opposition parties and civil society, trying to put the internet genie back in the bottle through censorship and cyber-crime laws, and cracking down on NGOs and community groups with new draconian regulations.

Repression in Thailand is in full swing under the military government. Prime Minister Najib of Malaysia has arrested dozens of people for publicly criticising his government. Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam routinely arrest and jail dissidents using ruling-party controlled courts.

Myanmar has a new government but no solution to end the repression of ethnic Rohingyas. Religious minorities in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia face blasphemy charges, death threats, and massacres.

Rights-respecting solutions rare
Australia is rarely pushing for rights-respecting solutions these days – and more than that, is too often part of the problem. Politicians trapped in the refugee policy dialogue in Canberra frequently fail to recognise that Australia’s boat push-back policies, and offshoring asylum seekers into abusive conditions of detention in Nauru and on Manus Island, are seen as a green-light by Asian governments to do the same: send asylum seekers and refugees back into harm’s way or lock them up in indefinite detention.

For example, during the south-east Asia boat people crisis in May 2015, the Thai, Malaysian and Indonesian navies played a cruel game of “human ping-pong” by pushing away boats of starving and sick Rohingya.

At a time when the governments were prepared to let these people float around waiting to die, then prime minister Tony Abbott did the unconscionable by justifying those tactics, saying “if other countries choose to do that, frankly that is almost certainly absolutely necessary if the scourge of people smuggling is to be beaten.”

It suddenly became much harder for non-governmental organisations, governments, and UN agencies to persuade those three countries to bring the Rohingya to shore.

By soliciting governments to help stop boats, Australia also ends up looking the other way on other rights abuses. By cooperating with Australia to take back boats of their nationals, both Sri Lanka and Vietnam know they could count on Australia not to publicly raise concerns about the rights abuses that drove those people into the boats in the first place.

Push backs by other countries are also met with silent acquiescence from Canberra. Australia said nothing when Thailand sent back 109 ethnic Uighurs in July to China to face torture in custody and long prison terms, and has kept silent as Beijing pursues its dissidents in Bangkok.

China arrests and sends fleeing North Koreans back to the brutal regime of dictator Kim Jong-Un, and is met by deafening silence from down under.

Praised Cambodia
Australia has praised Cambodia for signing the September 2014 Cambodia-Australia deal to resettle refugees from Nauru to Phnom Penh. Prime minister Hun Sen told Australia that Cambodia was safe for refugees to resettle – but don’t tell that to ethnic Montagnards fleeing political and religious persecution in Vietnam who Cambodia hunted down in the border forests of Ratanakiri province and forced back into Hanoi’s hands, all after the Australia deal was signed.

Meanwhile, Cambodia is laughing all the way to the bank with at least $55 million of Australia’s taxpayer dollars for taking just five refugees so far from Nauru. All this for a deal that the UN high commissioner for refugees termed “a worrying departure from international norms” of refugee protection.

With the recent high court ruling, Australia now faces the return of 267 asylum seekers to Nauru and Manus Island, where they face possible renewed physical and sexual assault, and life in limbo.

Australia’s international reputation has suffered enough – it’s time to do the right thing by accepting its responsibilities, not only as a party to the UN Refugee Convention but also as a responsible neighbour and member of the international community, and provide this group with fair and timely refugee status determination in Australia.

And for those found to be refugees, let them stay.

Phil Robertson is the deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch. This article was first published in The Guardian.

By Dyna Rochmyaningsih in Jakarta

Scientists in South-East Asia and the United Kingdom’s Met Office have teamed up to develop a model that predicts how the climate in the region will be like in the next 100 years.

According to the model, the region will be generally 2-4 degrees Celsius warmer by 2060 and continue to heat up around 3-5 degrees Celsius until 2100.

The strongest warming will occur in mainland South-East Asia. Extreme rainfall events will occur in the northern part of the region, which covers northern Vietnam, Laos, parts of Thailand and northern Philippines.

From June to August, the region will face significant reduction in rainfall. From September to November, rainfall rates will increase. In the archipelago, the difference between wet and dry seasons will be more pronounced.

The project, called Southeast Asia Climate Analysis and Modelling (SEACAM), was initiated by the Centre for Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) in collaboration with the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre. Scientists from Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam were involved.

SEACAM and the Met Office have put up a climate change tool website for South-East Asia based on a climate modelling system dubbed PRECIS, which stands for Providing Regional Climate for Impacts Studies.

“One of the main aims of the SEACAM project is to enhance collaboration and capacity-building among South-East Asian countries in climate research,” says Raizan Rahmat, CCRS project coordinator and senior research scientist.

Climate scenarios
He adds that prior to SEACAM, there had been limited collaborative research in South-East Asia to create climate scenarios in the region.

“Given the geography of South-East Asia, with its complex terrain and maritime characteristics, it was necessary to generate more detailed climate simulation at a higher resolution than that provided by global climate models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports,” he says.

Unlike global climate models, PRECIS has a higher resolution that can more accurately predict the future climate of the region. Several climate parameters such as temperature and rainfall have been analysed.

Developed by the Met Office, PRECIS is beneficial for smaller islands in South-East Asia because the climate model shows these islands as land masses rather than ocean points. Lands respond to climate change differently from the ocean.

David Hein, a software engineer from the Met Office, says the model is user-friendly. Scientists can simulate regional climate parameters with a mouse click.

“PRECIS allows anyone with a desktop or a PC to be able to run a climate model. It is simply a matter of clicking ‘Run PRECIS’ and PRECIS will produce data which can be used to study possible climate change in the region,” he says.

This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s South-East Asia and Pacific desk.

As 190 nations grapple with the world’s future at the global climate summit in Paris, forest fires in Indonesia have been continuing to rage since July 2015.

Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2, bumping Indonesia up from sixth largest to fourth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter in the world, surpassing Russia in a matter of six weeks and the entire US economy in just 38 days. [1]

Global Forest Watch Fires detected at least 127,000 fires across Indonesia this year, the worst since 1997. These fires were mostly caused by the clearing of forested peat lands to plant palms for oil.

The fires have produced toxic smog smothering Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and as far away as Thailand and the Philippines. The haze closed schools, disabled airports and caused more than 500,000 cases of respiratory illnesses in South-East Asia. More than 40 million Indonesians have been affected.

In preparation for the Paris climate summit, 190 countries that are party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change were asked to submit their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to control carbon emissions. [2]

The UN has received 120 INDCs, which will be used to draft a new international climate agreement towards a “low-carbon and climate-resilient future”.

Eight of the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have submitted their INDCs before the 1 October deadline. Only Brunei Darussalam and Malaysia have yet to make submissions.

Conditional target
Cambodia committed to reduce GHG emissions by 27 per cent by 2030, which will be taken from the energy, manufacturing and transport sectors, aside from other industries. But this target is “conditional” on international support. Cambodia also plans to increase its forest cover to 60 per cent of its land area by 2030.

Laos plans to increase its forest cover to 70 per cent of its total land area by the year 2020, with trees and forests serving as GHG sinks. The government also commits to increase the share of renewable energy to 30 per cent of its energy consumption by 2025.

Myanmar has the largest tropical forest area in mainland South-East Asia, so it is already a net GHG sink, its INDC said. But it will need international assistance in its socio-economic development.

The Philippines promised to reduce its carbon emissions by 70 per cent by the year 2030, which will be taken from the energy, transport, waste, forestry and industry sectors. But like Cambodia, the target is “conditional” on assistance from the international community.

Singapore, the first ASEAN country to submit its INDC, said it will unconditionally reduce emissions intensity by 36 per cent by 2030 in energy, industry, agriculture, land use, land-use change, forestry and waste.

Thailand, which is one of 16 countries considered most vulnerable to future climate change impacts in the next 30 years, placed adaptation as top priority and pledged to reduce its GHG emissions by 20 per cent by 2030.

Vietnam promises to unconditionally reduce its GHG emissions by 8 per cent by the year 2030, but the rate could reach 25 per cent with international support. Vietnam has intensified its efforts in forest protection, afforestation and reforestation.

For Indonesia, its INDC pledged to reduce deforestation and cut annual emissions by 29 percent by 2030 is unlikely to be met, however, if it does not put out the forest fires permanently.

Core issues
Observers note that the UN-sponsored climate talks start with countries submitting their INDCs to the planned climate change agreement. That these INDCs, focusing mainly on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, are “nationally determined” suggests that the agreement will have a strong bottom-up approach.

The summit will try to merge the INDCs with “top-down” elements to forge a compromise that assures broad participation and stronger direction. The task, however, will not be easy. Four core issues remain intractable. [3]

Differentiation – Developed countries do not want to have binding emissions targets for developed nations only, which they contend should be for all. Developing nations want the onus to be on the big emitters.

Finance – Developing countries want developed countries to make good on their commitment to mobilise US$100 billion a year in public and private finance by 2020 to establish a Green Climate Fund to finance mitigation and adaptation projects. Developed nations want to have more donor countries so the burden is not entirely on them.

Legal character ­– While the agreement will have “legal force”, there is no consensus on precisely what form it will take. While the United States, for example, is ready for binding procedural commitments, it opposes binding emission targets.

Transparency – Existing requirements for the reporting of country efforts are two-tiered, with a more rigorous system for developed countries than for developing ones. Developed countries are pushing for a common framework for all parties.

But there is hope that intractable positions in the past might change this time around, in view of undeniable evidence that global warming and climate change are here.

The United States and China have announced that both want a deal. The European Union also has set its target, which accounts for more than half of the world’s emissions. India has begun devoting more attention to climate change.

If only Indonesia can put out its fires and two big Asian economies, Japan and Korea, join the bandwagon, and political will strengthens among the big economies, Paris 2015 could be a landmark for the struggle to mitigate global warming and climate change.

Crispin Maslog is a former journalist and now science journalism professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and director of the Silliman School of Journalism, Philippines. He is a consultant of the Asian Institute of Journalism and Communication and board chairperson of the Asian Media Information and Communication Centre, both based in Manila. This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s South-East Asia & Pacific desk.

References
[1] Nancy Harris et al. With latest fires crisis, Indonesia surpasses Russia as world’s fourth-largest emitter (World Resources Institute, 29 October 2015)
[2] Center for Climate and Energy Solutions Submitted Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) (Accessed 14 November 2015)
[3] Elliot Diringer The core issues in the Paris climate talks (Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, 2 November 2015)

Source: Pacific Media Watch 9508