The 75 fishermen who have been stranded in Table Bay Harbour for the past three months now face deportation.
|||Cape Town - The 75 fishermen who have been stranded in Table Bay Harbour for the past three months now face deportation after being arrested and taken to the Lindela Repatriation Centre in Krugersdorp.
The fishermen, mostly from Indonesia, were marooned in the harbour aboard seven vessels, all of which had been impounded by the Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Department for illegal fishing. Their cargoes were confiscated.
After it was discovered that the men were living in terrible conditions and had run out of food and other supplies, Brooklyn resident Mariam Augustus started cooking for them. Together with her husband Cassiem, a shipping agent for the International Transport Workers Federation and feeding scheme Nakhlistan, they continued to provide food and cleaning supplies, and sought medical care for some of the men who had started falling ill.
The federation appointed maritime attorney Alan Goldberg to arrest the vessels in a process whereby the court takes physical control of the ships.
Three of the vessels had already been taken charge of by the courts, Goldberg told Weekend Argus last weekend, and he would negotiate control of the remaining four in order to “force the owners to pay”.
Early on Sunday, the Immigration Inspectorate Unit arrested the fishermen and took them to the Lindela Repatriation Centre, a Home Affairs Department detention centre for undocumented immigrants.
When one of the fishermen called Augustus to tell her that they were being arrested she was “shocked”, but said they had been expecting the move.
“Around 3am, one of them called me, crying over the phone, saying the police were there and were taking them away. When we got there the police were already loading them into the vans,” she said.
She added that immigration officials had blamed her and her husband for the situation, saying they had alerted the media about the stranded crewmen’s dire situation.
“I was screaming at them to leave the men. The case is in court, but the department comes in the middle of the night, sneaking in to steal them away,” she said.
According to Augustus, the men had hired a shipping agent and for the first six months had to pay half their salaries to him as a recruitment fee.
Many of the crewmen had feared being deported without being paid. One even said returning home was “so unacceptable that he might as well hang himself”.
Concerned about their welfare, Augustus said she would travel to Krugersdorp to continue supporting the men and ensure they were fed properly and helped if they needed medical attention.
Home Affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa confirmed the fishermen’s arrest, saying the men were “illegal immigrants”. “They were not in compliance with immigration laws and therefore we are compelled to detain them and follow due procedure to have them deported,” Mamoepa said.
janis.kinnear@inl.co.za
Cape Argus