Advancing Human Rights of the Sama Dilaut in Southeast Asia

The Sama Dilaut are a nomadic, indigenous community that live off the sea and are spread throughout Maritime Southeast Asia from Sabah, Malaysia, to Zamboanga City, Philippines, to the Molucca Islands in Indonesia.  They are often considered stateless and are vulnerable to displacement inland as they depend on the sea for their livelihoods.  Stateless groups often have no voice in decisions made by those governing the land nearest to where they live.  They are marginalized, otherized, and paternalized. 

This theoretical research project would consider how the Sama Dilaut, in particular, could be brought together to invoke the United Nations with a strong voice around similar issues of concern.  This would be done to exert pressure on the governments of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines to do more to address these issues and provide for the human security of the Sama Dilaut.  While this research focuses on the Sama Dilaut, the goal would be to extend the research to other marginalized minority groups.

Research Question

Can the Sama Dilaut, located in different areas around Southeast Asia, create a cohesive network of leaders to invoke the United Nations around core issues relevant to the entire group?

Background

The Sama Dilaut[1] are an indigenous community that has existed in Southeast Asia since at least 1521.[2]  The Sama Dilaut are nomadic, living on the sea and surviving off of its sustenance.  They form fluid communities among moorages and are found throughout Maritime Southeast Asia in the waters surrounding the modern states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.  Cynthia Chou describes their relationship with the sea:

the space which others have named “Southeast Asia,” comprising a number of bordered nation-states, is, in contrast, a space of deep emotional and personal meaning for the sea nomads.  From the latter’s perspective, it is a space charted by the extent of their sea-faring skills and postulated as a network of places connected by inter-related kinship ties to form what they call tempat/tanah saya (my place or my territory).  Based upon these premises, sea nomads claim ownership of and sovereignty over this entire space, despite the interference posed by current political borders.[3]

Given their seafaring skills and navigation ability, they historically “generated great wealth by providing maritime commodities to facilitate trade [and] formed a naval force to secure and protect sea lanes that were absolutely vital to the development of maritime Southeast Asia.”[4]  Today, they are otherized and impoverished in the peripheries of Southeast Asian states.  They remain sea nomads and live in houses built on stilts on the coasts.  The men fish during the day and the women dig for shellfish during low tide.  They trade what they do not need for land-grown staples such as cassava, fruits, and grains.[5] 

Social Network Analysis and Field Research

Social Network Analysis and field research through surveys can be used to locate potential leaders and common issues impacting the disparate groups throughout Maritime Southeast Asia.  There would be two networks – one involving survey respondents and the other involving issues.  These could be combined using attribute data.

Extensive field surveys would need to be undertaken to reach the Sama Dilaut around the coast of Sabah, Malaysia including Kota Belud, Papar, Tuaran, and Semporna; in the southern islands of the Philippines, including Sitangai, Sulu, Tawi-Tawi, Zamboanga City; and in the eastern islands of Indonesia including Derawan Islands, Flores, Molucca Islands, Tarakan, Ujung Pandang, and Wakatobi Islands.  While the number of Sama Dilaut that can be identified and surveyed would be based on funding, efforts should be made to reach groups from each country to better represent the potential for invoking the United Nations.  This would be with the understanding that unreached groups may have vastly different concerns than those in neighboring islands. 

Identifying Leaders

The survey should include a list of Sama Dilaut communities and families and a question asking to what extent the survey respondent knows them.  Options for the extent of communication to include ‘Not at all,’ ‘Sometimes,’ and ‘Often,’ will be used to determine where the data should be dichotomized. 

The analysis should consider centrality measures to identify potential leaders (those with high eigenvector scores representing they are well-connected to other well-connected people and with high betweenness scores representing they are someone people in the network seek most often to reach others in the network).  The analysis should look at these scores for the whole network and also for each individual country or geographic area (geographic area to be identified by the interviewer.  For example, Semporna, Malaysa is very close geographically to Sitangai and Tawi-Tawi in the Philippines).  Those found to be potential leaders could be contacted to see if they would be interested in working with other Sama Dilaut leaders throughout the region to seek access to the United Nations. 

Because the Sama Dilaut are dispersed across a large geographical region, special attention should be paid to potential brokers found during the network analysis.  These are individuals with high betweenness scores (as explained above) or high closeness scores (indicating they have a lot of connections to others and can get information directly from them).  These individuals could also be contacted to see if they would be interested in using their power as brokers to relay information across their networks. 

Identifying Issues

The survey should include a list of issues of concern for the Sama Dilaut.  These issues can be found through a desk survey of the current literature available, and should specifically include issues addressing their status as stateless and human security issues not limited to community, economic, environmental, food, health, and political security.  Additional field research should be done prior to starting the surveys to determine additional issues that can be added prior to the field interviews.  Survey respondents should include both men and women and researchers should consider how women, men, boys, and girls experience these issues differently.  Surveys should last no longer than 15 minutes to respect the time of those interviewed. 

Survey respondents should be asked to rank the issues most important to them from first to last.  Because of the magnitude of this unprecedented field research, survey respondents would not be asked for their top N number of choices in order to give the analyst a truer depiction of how each person ranks the issues and allow leeway for the analyst to use attribute data (gender, leadership potential, location, etc.) to determine potential groupings based on issue importance.  

Conclusion

            The goal of this social network analysis and field research would be to find a tangible way for marginalized or unseen communities[6] to appeal to the United Nations to call upon their government to better protect their human rights.  United Nations Special Rapporteurs and the Universal Periodic Review do a remarkable job calling on governments to fix issues they know about.  These can be issues that have gained traction in journals and newspapers recently or issues that are long-standing.  However, they are unable to advocate for groups they do not know exist.  There are countless communities that are marginalized and otherized based on gender, identity, morals, sexual identity, tribe, etc., that might be willing to come together around issues and seek to invoke the United Nations given the opportunity to do so. 

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[1] The Sama Dilaut are also called Badjaos.  Because the term Badjao can be understood as a derogatory term, the author will use only Sama Dilaut. 

[2] Antonio Pigafetta, Megellan’s voyage around the world. Edited by James Alexander Robertson, Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1906, 53.  Found in H. Nimmo, Magosaha: an ethnography of the Tawi-tawi Sama Dilaut. University Press, Quezon City (2001): 2.

[3] Cynthia Chou, “Research Trends on Southeast Asian Sea Nomads,” Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia 7 (September 2006).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Francis C. Jumala, "From Moorage to Village: A Glimpse of the Changing Lives of the Sama Dilaut." Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 39, no. 2 (2011): 97.

[6] This sentence is not meant to imply the Sama Dilaut are unseen.  There is extensive anthropological research on some Sama Dilaut communities.  This is meant to consider other communities based either on identity or even common issues of concern that are unable to invoke the United Nations, because they have not been brought together and do not have a loud enough voice.