Indonesian pirates

From 1978 until 1981 I practised law in Jakarta. It was an incredibly exciting time to be there as the first wave of major multinational corporations were exploring the opportunities Indonesia offered since it opened up to foreign investment during the 1970’s. There were at that time only five foreign lawyers in a country of over 200 million. As a young lawyer then in my late 20’s, I had the opportunity to personally manage the legal issues of these major clients for whom, back in Australia, I could only dream of acting. There, such clients were few and far between and would be handled by senior partners and I would, at best, have been given segments of the legal work.

And the range of work we did was enormous and, in many cases, my Australian experience ill-equipped me for the assignment. My blog today is about one such experience. As you may know Indonesia has (or at least had) large reserves of oil and gas and much of it is to be found offshore the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo called Kalimantan. The other parts of that island are divided between Sarawak and Sabah being part of Malaysia and the Sultanate of Brunei. Kalimantan is rich in resources, not just oil and gas, but minerals too. I suspect it is not true (“fake news” if you like) but some Indonesians told me back then that the name Kalimantan comes from the Indonesian words of “kali” meaning “river”, “mas” meaning “gold” and “intan” meaning “diamonds” . Whether true or not, Kalimantan is indeed blessed with abundant resources of gas, timber, gold, coal and other minerals. But it is sparsely populated and much of the island is covered in thick jungle with very few roads. Rivers and the sea are the roads in Kalimantan.

Our client owned an oil or gas exploration rig which was working off the eastern coast of Kalimantan. With its work completed the owner hired a tug from Singapore to tow the rig back to Singapore. The tug boat captain was towing the rig close to the coast when suddenly he spied a speed boat racing towards him. The speed boat pulled alongside the rig and a number of men jumped onto the rig and cut the tow rope. The tug boat captain immediately turned the boat around and approached the rig only to find the men on board were carrying rifles and made it very clear if he sought to tie up to the rig they would shoot him and his sailors. The tug boat captain made the decision he was not being paid danger money to deal with pirates so sailed full steam ahead back to Singapore. Our client was there waiting to inspect his rig and was, needless to say, rather angry to hear what had happened. He contacted our law firm and instructed us to get the rig back for him.

I assumed this was a pretty simple case for Indonesians to sort out amongst themselves and thought the first thing we had to do was to find out where the rig was being held. I arranged for one of our young lawyers to take on this task. He arrived back a week later to say he had found the rig located at the mouth of a river four hours by speedboat north of Samarinda, the capital of East Kalimantan. Samarinda itself is a two hour flight north from Jakarta, which is on the island of Java.

With this information I decided the next thing to do would be to seek assistance from the government of East Kalimantan province, rather than even thinking about commencing legal proceedings. There is an expression in Indonesia of “hukum rimba” meaning the “law of the jungle” and, back then (and perhaps even now), the conventional view was that the “law of the jungle” started just beyond the outskirts of Jakarta. Some would argue the expression even covers Jakarta. But one thing all Indonesian lawyers know is that litigation is an extremely unpredictable weapon and to be avoided at all costs. To seek assistance from the East Kalimantan Government, we sent a senior lawyer plus the young lawyer who knew where the rig was. They flew to Samarinda and met with the Governor. He expressed great concern at what had happened and immediately issued a document ordering the people holding the rig to return possession to our two lawyers. With the document, like the young lawyer had done a week or so earlier, the lawyers hired a speed boat to head north up the coast to where the rig was being held. On arrival they went and met the local policeman and gave him the document. I am told he read the document and said something along the following lines to our two lawyers “I can see this is a valid order, but you must understand I am the only policeman for miles around and I live here with these people who have stolen the rig and there is nothing I can do to help you.” That is, he had not only to maintain harmony in the village but he did not have the practical power to force them to hand the rig over. Our lawyers gave up and came back to Jakarta.

With the unpredictability of lengthy legal proceedings, and absent any real assistance from the Government of East Kalimantan, our client was sadly left with no option but to go himself and negotiate for the release of the rig because, without proper maintenance in the tropics, the equipment on the rig would quickly become worthless or inoperable. We lawyers had failed him. This experience was a shock to me as all my legal training had been of the importance of the rule of law and here was a clear case of its unimportance in the jungles of Kalimantan.