GENERAL SANTOS CITY, Philippines—Twenty-nine year old Joralde Maglasang thought he would not see his family again when Indonesian authorities arrested and jailed him and several other fishermen in November last year for alleged illegal entry and fishing.
Maglasang, of Barangay Fatima here, spent three months in an Indonesian jail.
“My three months in jail there was a bitter experience,” he said upon his return here on Feb. 27.
Maglasang is among 154 fishermen, who were repatriated from Indonesia with the help of the local government, in coordination with the firm RD Fishing, which is owned by the family of Mayor Ronnel Rivera.
For three years now, the Rivera administration has been implementing a repatriation program to send home fishermen seized by Indonesian authorities and imprisoned in jails in Sorong, Bitung, Ternate and Rudenim after they allegedly strayed into Indonesian waters to fish.
As of today, the number of repatriated fishermen had already reached 500. Most are not even from the city and came from Sarangani, Davao del Sur and Surigao.
“I know the risks and hardships these fishermen are facing whenever they are on the high sea. I know this because I have experienced fishing. You put your life on the line there,” Rivera said.
“This is the least that I can do, especially since times are changing. There are a lot of fishing bans that push these fishermen to go beyond the boundaries,” he added.
The culprit in the rising number of Filipino fishermen being arrested by Indonesian authorities was Jakarta’s claim of a new boundary in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), which expanded its maritime territory to 200 nautical miles.
This has caused uninformed fishermen to cross the new boundary, assuming that it was still Philippine waters, Rivera said.
Under the Unclos, Indonesia and the Philippines have 200-mile exclusive economic zones but the claims overlapped in the case of the Mindanao and Celebes Seas.
The 20-year maritime dispute between the two countries was the subject of an agreement in 2014, during which, Manila and Jakarta agreed on EEZs.