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The shifting sands of time - and
Singapore
By Bill Guerin
JAKARTA - In a region with some of the most
ubiquitous white-sand beaches in the world, there is an
unlikely sand war in Southeast Asia, fueled to a major
extent by the steadily growing island of Singapore and
the suspiciously shrinking Indonesian island of Riau,
and complicated by the politics of Malaysia, Indonesia
and Singapore.
For most of history, Singapore
had hills - not big ones, but hills. Today, it is
virtually flat, the hills having been dumped into the
sea to make the island bigger. The Housing Development
Board (HDB) pioneered such projects in the early 1960s
with the aim of creating more land in the land-scarce
republic to cater for housing, industry, infrastructure
and recreation needs.
Singapore's sand needs
boomed in 1999, after Singapore's plan to widen Changi
Airport, Jurong and Pasir Panjang. Singapore is some 33
square kilometers bigger than it used to be - 5 percent
of its total land area - and it aims to get even bigger
yet. Predictions are that it will have grown to 820
square kilometers by 2010. For that, it needs another
1.8 billion cubic meters of sand over the next eight
years for reclamation works including Tuas View, Jurong
Island and Changi East.
An estimated 300 million
cubic meters is dug out every year from the seabed in
Riau and Bangka-Belitung provinces adjacent to
Singapore, although Jakarta caved in to pressure from
environmentalists and banned sand exports and mining
this January. The ban was supposed to be lifted after
three months but disputed borders between Singapore and
Indonesia prompted the government to propose lifting the
ban for exports to Malaysia only.
Sand is hardly
dirt cheap. The commodity fuels a US$200-million-a-year
business, allegedly protected by the Indonesian navy and
police and customs, the Riau regional administration,
and top figures from the Jakarta elite. The sand is
first sold to international brokers, at about S$1.50 (85
US cents) per cubic meter, who then mark it up to
Singapore construction firms at S$15 (US$8.50).
Riau, 800km northwest of the Indonesian capital
Jakarta, is the main source of sand used to support
Singapore's construction sector and coastal reclamation
projects. Land reclamation costs an estimated S$15 per
square meter, though the reclaimed land is then sold at,
currently, about S$850 (US$484) per square meter.
Marine ecosystems and habitats have been damaged
irreparably from the uncontrolled sand extraction, which
has also led to the disappearance of a number of small
islets in the province. It is only in the last two
years, though, that Singapore's aggressive expansion of
its coastal territory and its land reclamation policy
have sparked problems with neighbors Indonesia and
Malaysia. The issue has evolved into a two-pronged
maritime border dispute.
Nipah Island, one of 83
border islands serving as points of reference for
Indonesia's sea borders, is at the center of Singapore's
current dispute with Jakarta. Nipah lies dead in front
of the main reclamation work and is now almost
submerged. Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries
Rokhmin Dahuri points out that if the island sinks
completely the international boundary between Indonesia
and Singapore will change - to Singapore's advantage.
Though the two countries have an existing
agreement on marine territory, they have not yet settled
their continental coastlines and economic exclusive
zones (EEZs). The Convention on the Law of the Sea
states that marine territory is measured based on the
coastal base line. Jakarta is concerned that in the
future, some Riau land could thus be claimed as
Singapore's on the basis that if Singapore gets wider,
its territorial line will also get wider.
From
Singapore's perspective the land reclamation is not an
issue and it has refused to elevate what to them is a
simple trading issue to a government-to-government
level. Jakarta, however, insists on an official
agreement between the two countries.
Singapore,
whose container port is Asia's second-busiest after Hong
Kong and is crucial to the island republic's economy, is
also facing problems with Malaysia. Malaysia has said
the reclamation work could obstruct ships headed for its
US$1 billion state-of-the-art Tanjung Pelepas port in
its southern state of Johor, just half an hour's sailing
time from Singapore Port. In fact, Malaysians claim that
the project was designed to obstruct shipping and
sabotage the progress of the port, being promoted to
rival Singapore's, and officials in Kuala Lumpur have
criticized Singapore for allegedly ignoring their
concerns.
Johor Chief Minister Abdul Ghani
Othman said fisherman in his state had complained of a
sharp drop in their catch since shortly after the
project began.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir
Mohamad entered the fray, demanding a guarantee from
Singapore that the project would not unsettle the sea
bed and affect passage for boats through its waters.
Feelings can run high. In Malaysia the
opposition Islamist Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) in its
annual conference last year rallied party support
against Singapore's land-reclamation project. PAS Johor
state leader Mazlan Aliman told party members that
Singapore's continuation of the reclamation work was a
threat to his state and branded Malaysians who sell sand
to Singapore for use in this project as traitors.
Changi says these concerns are unfounded, as its
reclamation works are about seven kilometers away from
the shipping lane.
Nonetheless, some members of
Indonesia's house of parliament, the DPR, also accused
the government of treason for allowing Singapore to
"expand its territory" adding extra coastline to the
small island nation-state. To add insult to injury, they
said, Singapore reclamation works were using Indonesian
sand to claim extra territory.
There are also
questions of how much sand has been taken, leading to
suspicions that some sand smuggling has taken place, or
at least some sand skulduggery. Indonesia's House
Commission VII for the Environment was shocked to note
in February last year that official data collected
showed Indonesia's exports of sand in 2001 as less than
75 million cubic meters, while Singapore's import data
records 300 million cubic meters. Singapore in fact
reported that they had imported 1.8 billion cubic meters
so far, while Indonesian figures show exports of only
167 million cubic meters.
In February last year,
a decree temporarily banned sand exports to allow a
government team to explore a better sand mining and
export system. All land reclamation projects in
Singapore reportedly came to a standstill since no
alternative sources of sand supply were available.
Last July the Ministry of Maritime Affairs and
Fisheries issued a decree on sand mining zones aimed at
restricting the extent of sand mining areas and halting
the deterioration of the environment. The move was
motivated by the need to bring the illegal practice
under government control to obtain revenue as taxes and
licensing fees from the trade.
Indonesia's
central government, seeing that the regional
administrations involved, and the state treasury, were
missing out on billions of dollars of potential revenue
from taxes and licensing fees, took the authority back
from the provincial administration.
The minister
of industry and trade, Rini M S Soewandi, who has
recently been involved in a row with her Singaporean
counterpart George Yeo over wide discrepancies in trade
statistics, issued a decree in September limiting the
amount of sand exported to Singapore. The quota for the
final quarter of 2002 was set at 26 million cubic
meters, based on 75 percent of the minimal sand demand
of Singapore for three months. The price of sand was
also raised from US$3 from $1.50 per cubic meter, double
the price for the illegal stuff.
Sand exporters
had to pay the government some 80 US cents per cubic
meter in export tax and 60 cents in royalties. They were
also meant to set aside about 1.5 cents for community
development programs. This forced them to renegotiate
their contracts with buyers in Singapore, but many
buyers refused to pay the new price and quarrying
activities ground to a halt in Riau.
Dredgers
from Belgium, the Netherlands, Russia and South Korea
made Riau waters the busiest in the world for dredging
as Singapore seeks to expand. Some 54 sand dredgers out
of a total of 70 such vessels worldwide were operating
near Riau last year.
Though public perceptions
in Indonesia may be that foreign dredgers are smuggling
and stealing Indonesian sand, which is then dumped to
expand the coastline of wealthy Singapore, the truth
could just lie nearer to home. High-profile figures from
the Suharto regime and others from the corridors of
power are alleged by local media sources to have been
involved in raiding Riau's sands for years.
The
Riau provincial administration took over the control of
licensing for sand quarrying from Jakarta after the
regional autonomy law went into effect on January 1,
2001. Within two months Governor Saleh Djasit had issued
quarrying licenses for 18 companies exporting to
Singapore. His administration last November formed a
cartel to control the business. The Association of
Sea-Sand Mining Corporations of Riau, set up by Saleh's
office, awards contracts to dredge sand from the
Indonesian seabed and deliver it to government-owned
Jurong Town Corp (JTC) and other Singaporean government
customers.
This is the governor who said last
week, "We don't want the recurrence of the sand export
like in previous years which caused losses to the
country and people."
Saleh was announcing a
review on the Malaysian request for sand - a review
which, he said, covered matters of environment,
socio-economic conditions of the coastal people, costs
and businessmen participation.
Malaysia gained
kudos when it recently banned the sale of marine sand to
Singapore after allegations that the sand being dredged
in its own waters for a Johor port development was being
covertly shipped to Singapore. Malaysia is officially
recorded as importing 600 million cubic meters of
Indonesian sand last year and Jakarta appears ready to
go ahead and regulate sea-sand exports there on the
government-to-government basis rejected by Singapore.
Indonesia and Singapore failed to reach
agreement on border issues during a meeting in March and
will meet again next month for more discussions.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
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