The Islands That Wouldn’t Stay Put

 

Sometimes the worst monsters aren’t the ones with fangs and claws—sometimes they’re the ones wearing three-piece suits and carrying briefcases full of official documents. Sometimes they’re the ones who can make four islands disappear with the stroke of a pen, like some bureaucratic Houdini pulling off the world’s most expensive magic trick.

The folks in Aceh had always known those islands were theirs. Hell, they could practically spit and hit Pulau Panjang on a clear day. Long Island, they called it in English, though the name didn’t matter much to the fishermen who’d been working those waters since their grandfathers were knee-high to a grasshopper. What mattered was that those four chunks of rock and sand—Pulau Panjang, Pulau Lipan, Pulau Mangkir Besar, and Pulau Mangkir Kecil—had always been theirs.

But “always” is a funny word when you’re dealing with governments. “Always” can become “never” faster than you can say “Ministerial Decision No. 300.2.2-2138/2025.”

The trouble had been brewing for near on two decades, like a pot of coffee left too long on the burner. Started back in 2007, when some pencil-pushers in Jakarta began asking uncomfortable questions about who owned what. By 2008, a fellow named Safrizal Zakaria Ali—Director General of Regional Administration, which is about as exciting a job title as watching paint dry—stood up at a press conference and delivered the kind of news that hits you like a Louisville Slugger to the gut.

“Aceh comprises only 260 islands,” he said, his voice carrying all the warmth of a February morning in Coldwater, Michigan. “But the four islands are not included.”

Not included. Just like that. Two words that could make a man’s blood pressure spike faster than Stephen King typing at 3 AM with a pot of black coffee and a deadline breathing down his neck.

The thing about bureaucrats—and this is something every small-town American knows in their bones—is that they love their paperwork more than their own mothers. They wave around documents like holy relics, and in this case, they had a real doozy: Ministerial Letter No. 136/046/BAK, dated January 4, 2018. The Ministry of Home Affairs claimed that based on some fancy conference in New York—the 10th United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names (try saying that three times fast after a few beers)—those islands belonged to North Sumatra.

But here’s where the story gets interesting, in that slow-burn, creeping-dread kind of way that makes your skin crawl.

The Acehnese weren’t about to roll over and play dead. They had something the suits in Jakarta didn’t expect: history. Real, honest-to-God, documented history that went back further than most American towns have existed.

Picture this: It’s 1853, and a German cartographer named Hermann von Rosenberg is sweating his ass off in the Indonesian heat, drawing maps for the Dutch colonial government. This isn’t some weekend hobby—this is official business, the kind that determines who owns what for generations to come. Von Rosenberg creates a map titled “Kaart van het District Singkel en de Landschappen liggende langs de Simpang-Kanan”—which is Dutch for “Map That’s Going to Cause a Shitstorm 170 Years Later.”

That map, published in 1855 in a journal with a name longer than a Stephen King novel—Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde—showed those four islands as clear as day belonging to the Singkel District. Aceh’s territory. End of discussion.

But wait, there’s more. (There’s always more in these kinds of stories.) Another Dutch colonial map from 1927, this one from the Weltevreden Topographical Service, backed up the earlier findings. Two maps, nearly a century apart, both saying the same thing: those islands were Aceh’s.

As Rear Admiral Soleman B. Ponto—a man who’d spent his career dealing with facts, not fiction—put it on his blog: “This is not just an old map. It is a colonial state document showing that, even from the Dutch government’s perspective, the islands were part of Aceh. If this country respects colonial archives in other boundary matters, why is Aceh’s case ignored?”

Why indeed? But anyone who’s ever lived through a bureaucratic nightmare knows the answer: because admitting you’re wrong is harder than a Stephen King villain staying dead.

The plot thickened in 1992—and isn’t that always the way? Just when you think a story’s heading toward resolution, it takes a hard left turn into Weirdsville. That year, Aceh Governor Ibrahim Hasan and North Sumatra Governor Raja Inal Siregar sat down with the Minister of Home Affairs—a fellow named Rudini—and hammered out an agreement. They looked at a map, pointed to those four islands, and said, “Yep, those belong to Aceh.”

Case closed, right? Wrong. Dead wrong.

See, that agreement only covered land boundaries. Maritime boundaries? Those were left hanging in the wind like laundry on a line before a thunderstorm. And that gap, that little oversight, became the crack in the foundation that eventually brought the whole house down.

Fast-forward to 2005, and something remarkable happened. The Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement signed the Helsinki Memorandum of Understanding—a peace deal that ended decades of bloodshed. It was the kind of agreement that gives you hope for humanity, the kind that makes you believe people can actually solve their problems without killing each other.

The MoU was comprehensive, covering everything from security to economics. Clause 1.1.4 specifically stated that Aceh’s boundaries aligned with the demarcation document of July 1, 1956. The agreement also gave Aceh extensive maritime rights, including 70 percent of hydrocarbon revenues from its waters.

But here’s the rub—and there’s always a rub in stories like this—the MoU didn’t explicitly define those 1956 maritime boundaries. It was like writing a recipe and forgetting to mention how much salt to add. Technically correct, but practically useless.

Meanwhile, the Acehnese weren’t just sitting around filing paperwork. They were doing what Americans would call “putting their money where their mouth is.” On Pulau Panjang, they built a pier in 2015, a prayer room, a rest house around 2012, and planted a boundary monument in 2007. On Pulau Mangkir Ketek, they put up a sign in 2008 that read, “Welcome to Aceh Singkil Regency, Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam Province,” and refreshed it in 2018, just to make sure nobody missed the point.

These weren’t abstract claims on paper—these were concrete actions by people who genuinely believed those islands were theirs. The kind of belief that runs deeper than law, deeper than politics, deeper than bureaucratic convenience.

But bureaucracy is like kudzu—it grows over everything if you let it, choking out common sense and historical truth with equal efficiency.

On April 25, 2025, Minister of Home Affairs Tito Karnavian dropped the hammer. Ministerial Decision No. 300.2.2-2138/2025 officially transferred the islands to Tapanuli Tengah Regency, North Sumatra. The Minister claimed it was “objective and legal,” aimed at ensuring “legal certainty.”

Legal certainty. That’s bureaucrat-speak for “we’ve made up our minds, so shut up and deal with it.”

The Acehnese saw it differently. They saw a violation of the Helsinki MoU, a betrayal of the peace process that had cost so much blood and treasure to achieve. They saw their history being erased by men in suits who’d probably never set foot on those islands, never felt the salt spray on their faces, never understood what those four chunks of rock and sand meant to the people who’d called them home for generations.

And maybe—just maybe—they saw something else. Something that Muslim Ayub, a member of the Indonesian House of Representatives from Aceh, summed up in four words that cut through all the legal jargon and diplomatic double-talk like a hot knife through butter: “There is gas and oil.”

Billions of barrels, he said. Billions.

Suddenly, the whole mess made a different kind of sense. The kind of sense that Stephen King characters recognize when the real monster finally shows its face. Not the obvious one lurking in the shadows, but the one wearing a tie and talking about “administrative efficiency” and “objective decision-making.”

Because in the end, this wasn’t really about maps or boundaries or historical precedent. This was about money. It always is.

The four islands that wouldn’t stay put had become pawns in a game much bigger than themselves, victims of the kind of institutional horror that doesn’t need fangs or claws to destroy lives—just forms to fill out and meetings to attend and decisions to make in air-conditioned offices far from the sound of the sea.

And somewhere in the Aceh Singkil region, the waves keep lapping against shores that have belonged to the same people for generations, indifferent to the bureaucratic monsters that would steal them away with nothing more than the stroke of a pen.

Some horrors, after all, wear three-piece suits.