The roots of the dispute reach back to the colonial era, when Acehnese fishermen operated freely along the coast, ranging as far south as Sibolga in what is now North Sumatra. When the modern province of Aceh was formally re-established in 1956 -- after a brief merger with North Sumatra -- a map drawn on July 1 of that year set the boundary between the two provinces. The four islands fell on Aceh's side. For decades, the arrangement was unremarkable. Then, in 2007, both provinces claimed the islands. The Ministry of Home Affairs sent a team in 2008 to catalogue and standardize geographical features, counting 260 islands in Aceh and 213 in North Sumatra. Somewhere in that process, a reporting error shifted the four islands into North Sumatra's column. What began as a bureaucratic mistake would take nearly two decades to correct.

Acehnese officials recognized the error and began pushing back almost immediately. Governor Nova Iriansyah sent letters and formal requests to the Ministry of Home Affairs asking that the islands be returned to Aceh's jurisdiction. The ministry did not act. Instead, in 2020, it issued a regulation setting the boundary between Aceh Singkil Regency and Central Tapanuli Regency in a way that again placed the islands in North Sumatra. A mediation meeting followed in 2022, along with a physical survey of the islands in May of that year. The Speaker of the Aceh House of Representatives warned publicly that the unresolved dispute could lead to conflict between Acehnese and North Sumatran fishermen -- people who had been sharing the same storm shelters for generations. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources assessed the surrounding waters as possessing a "rather large" potential for oil and gas development, adding economic stakes to what had been a question of administrative lines.

On April 25, 2025, the Ministry of Home Affairs published a new regulation on administrative area codes that explicitly classified the four islands as part of Central Tapanuli -- North Sumatra. The Acehnese government protested. On June 4, Aceh's governor Muzakir Manaf met with North Sumatra's governor Bobby Nasution and Central Tapanuli's regent Masinton Pasaribu. Nasution then posted photographs from the meeting to his Instagram account. Acehnese users flooded the post with angry comments accusing him of "stealing" their territory. The same day, several hundred Singkil residents held a protest on Panjang Island itself, standing on one of the disputed specks of land to make their point. On June 13, Acehnese students demonstrated in front of the Ministry of Home Affairs office in Jakarta. A provincial boundary dispute had become a national conversation, driven in part by the speed and visibility of social media outrage.

The escalation prompted intervention from the highest level of Indonesian government. Deputy Chairman of the House of Representatives Sufmi Dasco Ahmad announced that President Prabowo Subianto would personally decide the matter, acting to prevent potential instability. On June 17, the decision came: the islands would be returned to Aceh. The following day, governors Nasution and Muzakir signed a revised border agreement placing the islands back under Acehnese jurisdiction. The resolution was aided by a critical piece of evidence -- during a press conference, Minister of Home Affairs Tito Karnavian revealed that the ministry's archives team had conducted an intensive search and located the original 1992 boundary agreement, approved by then-Minister Rudini, which confirmed Aceh's claim to all four islands. The original document, buried in decades of administrative turnover, had settled the question all along.

Former Vice President Jusuf Kalla framed the dispute as a matter of dignity for Aceh and a matter of trust in the central government, noting that the 2005 peace agreement ending decades of Acehnese separatist conflict should be respected. When Nasution offered Manaf a joint development arrangement, Kalla responded dryly: "All I know is that there is no island that wanted to be developed jointly." Political analysts noted the entanglement of family and power in the affair -- Nasution is the son-in-law of former President Joko Widodo, and Minister Karnavian is widely considered a Widodo loyalist, raising questions about whether the dispute had been shaped by political interests. After the settlement, the Presidential Spokesperson acknowledged that archival records of territorial boundaries across Indonesia needed to be organized more carefully, and that similar disputes existed between other provinces. For the fishermen of Singkil and Tapanuli, the resolution changed little about daily life. The storms still come, and the islands are still there to shelter behind.