A Chinese man surnamed Ruan (阮) on June 9 drove a motorboat into the Tamsui River (淡水河) estuary, but the Coast Guard Administration (CGA), the CGA’s Northern Branch and Ruan gave conflicting accounts of what happened.
No coast guard patrol boat was dispatched in time to intercept and inspect Ruan’s boat, but coast guard personnel arrested him when his boat reached the shore, the CGA said.
The Shalun (沙崙) radar station detected a suspicious vessel at about 9am and immediately reported it to law enforcement to bolster monitoring and response, the CGA’s Northern Branch said. Ruan’s boat bumped into a ferry at the Tamsui ferry wharf and the ferry operator reported it to the authorities, it added.
As for Ruan, he said that after bumping into the ferry, he drove his boat to the shore, walked onshore and asked passersby to call the authorities, whereupon coast guard personnel quickly arrived and arrested him.
A recording of the ferry captain’s phone call, which showed the coast guard unit did not know what was going on until it received the call, was released by the media. The inconsistent accounts given by the coast guard units highlight laxity in the reporting system.
Regardless of whether Ruan had ulterior motives, this was not a one-off case of lax discipline among coast guard units.
Friends who did their military service in coast guard units in northern Taiwan told me their duties included coastal watch patrols. They would go out at night with high-magnification and night-vision binoculars, which they carried to elevated points along the coast to monitor the movements of surface vessels. They regularly reported these movements to nearby radar stations so they could be matched against objects detected by radar.
However, coast guard personnel on night-watch duty, be it because of poor weather conditions, physical discomfort or sheer laziness, sometimes did not monitor boat and ship movements and simply made up their reports, which the radar station took at face value, they said.
Personnel thought they were onto a good thing, because if the radar operators were slacking, they could also skimp on their duties. Consequently, they used their binoculars to watch the nighttime urban scenery and check whether any superior officers were coming up the hill to inspect them.
As for other duties such as inspecting cargo ships, fishing boats and passenger ships, coast guard personnel often went through the motions, sometimes even asking the crew of foreign-flagged ships for beverages and souvenirs from overseas to add to their collections. These former coast guard personnel said that, based on their own experience in the service, they were not surprised to hear that others let a Chinese man drive his boat into the Tamsui River estuary.
It would be nice to think that such goings-on were the exception rather than the rule, that the situation should have improved and that most coast guard personnel are devoted to guarding our borders.
It should not be hard to get to the bottom of this incident. As long as officials are willing to investigate what happened, analyze problems in the system, equipment, personnel and procedures, and make the necessary changes, the public would fully support the coast guard.
If, on the other hand, special considerations get in the way of explaining what happened, then simply announcing a list of people who would be punished would not satisfy the public. It would undermine confidence in the CGA and weaken the morale of personnel who take their jobs seriously. With this in mind, the government should handle this issue in a proper manner.
Huang Xin-he is a doctor of law and a research fellow.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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