Our Enemies are in Power

The city of Singapore, which Alfred Russel Wallace reached during the first of several visits in 1854, was founded only twenty-five years prior to his arrival by another Englishman, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826). When the Dutch lost their Indonesian colony to the British during the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Raffles acted as governor of Java for a few years beginning in 1811. From 1818 until his departure for the island of Singapore, Raffles was then governor of Bengkulu in the southern region of West Sumatra. In Singapore, the legacy of the colonial administrator is commemorated by statues and the name of one of the city’s most luxurious hotels; in Bengkulu, Raffles’s namesake is given to a plant, which goes by the macabre colloquial nickname of “corpse flower.” Endemic to the rainforests of this region, the Rafflesia arnoldii is the world’s largest flower; as an insectivore, it exudes a revolting odor of rot to lure its prey. Anna-Sophie and Etienne were introduced to this flower for the first time in 2014, when they visited the area with Zenzi, a trained plant biologist and environmental activist normally based in Jakarta. Zenzi was born and grew up in a small village in the hilly forests just a few hours drive from the city of Bengkulu. 
    Since this first foray into the rainforest together, Zenzi—currently the Head of the Department of the Research, Advocacy, and Environmental Law of the non-governmental organization Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WALHI), the Indonesian division of Friends of the Earth—has been a generous and important interlocutor about the archipelago’s environmental history, contemporary ecological challenges, and current forestry politics. In the summer of 2016, Anna-Sophie recorded two long interviews with Zenzi: the first conversation, conducted together with Dr. Paulo Tavares during his visit to Jakarta in preparation for Forensic Architecture’s installation at the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial— Are We Human?; and the second one shortly thereafter during a field research trip with Jakarta-based designer Christina Leigh Geros in South Bengkulu. While the Rafflesia arnoldii is now protected (and celebrated as one of Indonesia’s three “national flowers”), large-scale monoculture plantations and mineral mining pits increasingly devour the biodiversity of tropical forests which naturally host this extraordinarily curious species. It is not alone in the struggle to survive among rapacious developments all over the island. In the edited version of our conversations with Zenzi that follows, he shares his perspective on the complicated political economic reality of Indonesia’s rapid and all-too-often inequitable land-use transformation and the corpses this process has left in its wake.

A S
Let’s start off with a brief introduction of you and your work.

Z S
I am a forest campaigner at WALHI’s National Office. I joined the organization in 2004 for two reasons: first, I grew up in a village-turned-plantation and witnessed firsthand the devastating impact of large-scale oil palm monocultures. Second, I studied biology for my bachelor’s degree, and I saw how many environmental impact assessment reports (AMDAL) carried out by my professors were fraudulent—they were modified to deceive the public. So my motivations at WALHI are to limit the damage of deforestation and to expose the lies produced by academics. 
    I invited you to visit the regency of South Bengkulu because it is a region within the province of Bengkulu where the forest is still in good condition compared to the other eight regencies and the city. Bengkulu’s total area is 1.9 million hectares, with over fifty percent of the land as forest. With a total population of two million people, most residents live traditionally and procure their subsistence directly from the forest and small-scale, integrated farming. Unfortunately, out of 900,000 hectares of land that should have been accessible to the people, 560,000 hectares have already been conceded to private businesses for monoculture plantation agriculture and mineral resource mining. Hence, two million people are only able to share the remaining 340,000 hectares of land, with the result that for the most recent generation, on average individuals must subsist on only a quarter of a hectare of land.  

A S
Besides monoculture acacia plantations, which are utilized for the pulp and paper industry, the other monoculture currently transforming the Indonesian forests is the oil palm. The first oil palm plantation in Nustantara opened in Sumatra in 1911, when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony. But, as I understand it, these early plantations were not so important. In fact, during the Second World War, Indonesia was instead the number one global exporter of quinine, a malaria cure derived from the cinchona tree. More recently, Indonesian crude palm oil (CPO) exports have soared, especially since the early 2000s. Not least due to increasing global demands for all kinds of products, from household items to biodiesel, Indonesia has become the most productive CPO exporter worldwide. Can you tell us a little bit about how oil-palm monoculture plantations were introduced in relation to the recent history of Indonesia?

Z S
Kelapa sawit, the oil palm, or Elaeis guineensis, is not a native plant of Indonesia; it originates from West Africa. It was first introduced by the Dutch government in 1848. After Independence, the Indonesian government began to establish oil palm plantations on a large scale after it received a loan from the World Bank in the late 1970s. Back then, oil palm plantations were managed by a state-owned business called PT PN [Archipelago Plantation Company]. Where I’m from, in Bengkulu, it’s called PT PN VII; this business started its operation in the mid-1980s with a scheme known as the “nucleusplasma plantation.” 
    
The PIR [Perkebunan Inti Rakyat, or People’s Nucleus Plantation] sounds good in theory because the land that is developed into a plantation is supposed to be divided between the company and the local village community. In reality, this has been rather problematic as we’re facing a heavy mixture of systematic ecosystem damage and prevailing land-grabbing practices. So someone who back then (or today) gave up his or her land for a commercial plantation is not guaranteed ownership over a portion of it, even after the land was cleared and the plantation was set up. The number of rural people who lose access to their land in this way—without ever receiving any kind of monetary compensation—is high, especially where I am from, but this process occurs in many of Indonesia’s plantation areas. With the introduction of these businesses, conflicts over land ownership started and have persisted ever since. By 2010, this conflict reached its second generation. 

Historically, it’s also important to note that the forest has been a major source of revenue for the state and the economic elite of our country; the transformation of people’s sawahs [rice fields], forest gardens, and other lands into commercial monoculture plantations was not always voluntary. If someone decided not to give up his or her land for a plantation, historically they were denounced as a state enemy, a traitor, or a member of PKI [Partai Komunis Indonesia/Communist Party of Indonesia]—a title that could jeopardize one’s life during the de facto dictatorship of Soeharto from 1967 to 1998.   

A S
Regarding the “nucleus-plasma” scheme, who is entitled to sell the nucleus plantation’s harvests: the community who manages this section of the plantation?

Z S
Nucleus plantations are divided among the people by kavling [a Bahasa Indonesian word derived from the Dutch kaveling, meaning “lot”]. Communities must work on their land and sell the subsequent fruit bunches (which the crude palm oil is derived from) to the company until they have repaid their loans for machinery, seedlings, fertilizer, etc. So, for a very long time, up to thirty percent of every month’s harvesting income will be used to pay off these loans.

P T
You mentioned that oil palm plantations were introduced in the 1980s as a World Bank program, and that residents were forced to give up their land to avoid being called a rebel or a communist. Could you tell us a little bit more about this?

Z S
Being called a communist was a very serious accusation in Indonesia—you may have seen the anti-communism posters reappearing in Jakarta and across the countryside recently. During the Soeharto era, however, not only could you face extrajudicial arrest, the government could also restrict your access to facilities provided by the State. For example, if a person aspired to be a civil servant, his or her application and future career would be hampered because of such an accusation. Pressured in this way, a lot of people chose to give up their land. Many others refused to give up their land in the 1980s and they ended up being jailed.

P T
So there were many conflicts and violence in the twentieth century when this modern plantation economy was introduced here. What was the process and impacts for the people who resisted?

Z S
Back when the state-owned palm oil business entered my home region, the majority of the area was still forested, yet it nevertheless belonged to someone. At first, nobody was killed for resistance. But, in 2004, there was a person who refused to give up his land and he was shot at his farm. He was accused of stealing palm fruit from the company’s plantation. I am not sure about the statistics and numbers during the land seizures of the 1980s as I was still a child, but by 2010, when I was WALHI director in Bengkulu, I was already advocating for twenty or so people who demanded that their land be returned. The company replanted the area even though the whole initial cycle of twentyeight years had passed and the land was supposed to be given back to the original owner. Even though only one person died, the impact affected the friends and families and a lot of people suffered from mental trauma. The parents of the killed farmer were traumatized after the event. And later, during a time when twenty people were captured in 2010 and kept in jail to stop them from reclaiming their land, the remaining farmland was quickly transformed into plantations.

A S
Would you explain the growth cycle of oil palm?

Z S
The common belief is that one oil palm tree is productive for about twenty years.¹ However, PT PN replanted theirs after twenty-eight years. Most plantations in Bengkulu were planted in the 1980s; replanting was scheduled for 2010. With the right treatment, an oil palm tree can be harvested twice a month (with an average of fifteen fruit bunches per year). A one-hectare plantation produces close to four tons of annual yield, since the oil palm is the most productive oil plant. Crude palm oil is a natural resource with stocks traded on the international stock markets; the price per tonne is never stable, but since the fall of 2015 it’s gone up from around 400 Euros per tonne to nearly 600 Euros.²

P T
Previously, you mentioned the recent conflicts, when you were still based in Bengkulu, and said you had to engage with the situation closely as you saw your home region being turned into an oil palm plantation. Do you think there is a relationship between the moment the palm oil business was introduced and the displacement and violence that people suffered? Also, what is the relationship between these events in the 1980s and decentralization in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Z S
You can observe an increase in the income level for the local community, but this increase is not accompanied by any improvement of wealth or sense of buen vivír. After landowners had given up their land and turned into workers, ideally they would receive money, but at the same time they were obliged to pay for resources that used to be freely available from the natural environment.
   
We have identified several basic changes in the human-nature relationship that have resulted from this dynamic. First, as owners became workers they lost their flexibility and independence. They must now adjust their daily schedule to the company’s working hours. Second, the sense of mutual aid among the communities has diminished. For example, when a person wants to hold a ceremony, in the past local people would gather the required materials collectively from the forest. However, as they suddenly began to make money, they also had to pay for everything (which made most things more costly, too), forcing people to sell even more of their land. Third, heterogeneity was replaced by homogeneity. People used to live with and from the surrounding nature and could consume diverse foods, but as the environment was turned into monocultures with restricted access, local people have fewer nutritional choices and people believe that the limited range of foods, with a shortage of traditional plants, has also decreased life expectancy. Lastly, a lot of people lost their identity. They no longer own land and therefore have no legacy. To people who grew up in the village, the process of land grabbing on a large scale did not only cost them their clean and free water, but also the rights of unborn Indonesians to their land inheritance. Traditionally, if someone was born here, he or she has a right to own land in this country. Since the commercial plantation business has been introduced, spreading across seventeen provinces in Indonesia, babies born after 1990 are no longer born into a village. Instead, they are born into the afdeling [a Bahasa Indonesian word borrowed from the Dutch expression for “division” or “unit”]—a new zoning system designated by the oil palm sector.  
  
The identity crisis has also changed the culture. As people’s lives are controlled by the company, person-toperson and village-to-village interactions lose their traditional import. This is problematic, especially since the changes came so rapidly: the next generation will grow up in a new order, but one that frequently gives way to chaos. That’s why you can see an increase in substance abuse and many sexual offenses; as traditions and cultural orientations are lost, people are no longer held in place as they used to be in their village communities. In the 1990s, many youths whose parents had lost their land went to Jakarta to find jobs. Eventually, they come back to their hometown bringing Jakarta’s free culture. My father, a village elder and tribal leader, tried to restore the order during his eight-year leadership, but this did not last long after he stepped down. Economic development is not always the answer.

P T
I am trying to understand this history more clearly. Could you explain how, when oil palms were introduced, the  land grabbing expanded in the areas?

Z S
This is all part of the paradox where earning money was not accompanied by wealth improvement. The introduction of large-scale oil palm plantations has triggered an unprecedented horizontal conflict among the people.
   
We had a customary law that used to regulate land tenure. If a person claimed tenure over a certain area by cultivating that land, people in the village would respect that. With regards to so-called adat communities, this would be adat land [adat = “ancient,” sometimes used like “Indigenous,” but often also in the sense of “traditional”]. However, as plantation companies entered the scene, they tried to take over the land using a positive law where nothing was admissible without proof. So, since people hardly ever had written proof of their land ownership, conflicts ensued and stretched over a long time. Common people lost in court because they did not have official land certificates. 

In addition, horizontal conflicts arose due to a new land configuration which divided plantation land into lots. When a person gave his or her land for such a plantation, there was no guarantee that they would be assigned to work on this stretch of land—everyone received a share based on the allotment, but that could be anywhere in the region. In other words, they might suddenly have to go work on their neighbor’s land.

P T
You mentioned earlier that, in Soeharto’s era, the government was very repressive. Do you think there was a relation between such repression and the expansion of the palm oil business in Indonesia?

Z S
The pattern of land grabbing in the Soeharto era is slightly different from how this has worked since 1998. But land grabbing is still a major problem that continues to involve palm oil companies today. Back in the days of
Soeharto, the government was very authoritative and any resistance to their plans would easily lead one to prison. Since the reformasi that came with the end of the dictatorship, companies instead have tended to push for sectoral regulations that can protect or endorse their practices. For example, the recently introduced Undang Undang Perkebunan [Plantation Laws] and Undang Undang Mineral dan Batu Bara [Mining Laws] regulate land ownership and limit a community’s customary rights. These regulations were backed by companies to serve three functions: as a legitimation of illegal practices; as a way to expropriate people’s rights to enter and own land; and, as a means to expand privatized territory. In addition, private businesses use these laws as a way of avoiding responsibility.

P T
We heard there were massive fires in 1997 and again in 2015, as well as land grabbing, dispossession, and other forms of violence. Perhaps you could give us a sense of what this means on the ground right now?

Z S
During my tenure at WALHI, I have observed four developments that have all recently increased proportionally with one another: 1) permit issuance; 2) criminalization and conflict; 3) floods and landslides, and 4) large-scale fires. If in one year a lot of permits were issued, the year after there would be an increase in criminalization and conflict. This event would be followed by floods and/or fires in subsequent years. Usually, a spike in permit issuance starts during an election year, which could produce a sharp increase of up to 200 per cent.

A S
In your estimation, do small-scale swidden farmers, who habitually burn patches of land to clear it and prepare the soil for agriculture, have anything to do with the catastrophic fires that Paulo just mentioned? 

Z S
Indonesian farmers have tenured in the peatlands for hundreds of years; traditionally, so rice could grow, farmers would only burn one hectare of land at a time during the monsoon (which does not match the haze timeline).³ It is necessary because peat is highly acidic and oxidizing the soil by burning the land makes it fertile for agriculture. But we are only seeing the very massive fires since the mid-1990s, which is when peatlands were first turned into concessions. The resulting haze is the result of uncontrolled — and largely uncontrollable—peat fires. Imagine that the biggest pulp and paper company in Indonesia, for example, owns 300,000 hectares. In relation to its permanent employee numbers this means one worker must oversee almost 500 hectares of land. The government grants concessions for areas that are much too large to be effectively managed by a company—at least as long as it doesn’t employ more people. In this way processes get out of control. Burning the especially carbon-rich peat soils of Sumatra and Kalimantan [Indonesian Borneo] emits what some have called a “carbon bomb” into the atmosphere that exceeds annual emission rates of Western industrial nations such as the United States or Germany. In 2015, the number of hotspots reached 100,000. During the enormous number of fires and toxic haze last year, people in Malaysia and Singapore lost their access to clean air; according to scientific estimations, around 100,000 premature deaths occurred in Indonesia as a result of this haze.⁴ It is also important to understand that environmental damage cannot be tied by administrative boundaries.

P T
Is there a connection between the forest fire incidents and the land grabs for plantations? How are these areas managed in relation to one another? 

Z S
Indonesia classifies its territory into various land-use types. Among these, “forest” type areas are managed by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry (established by the Soeharto regime), while land classified as “horticulture” and “plantation culture”—or “cultivation” areas—is managed by the Ministry of Agriculture. Through the Forestry Law No. 41/1999, land that is classified as hutan negara, or “state forest,” is only accessible to the government, whereas a cultivation area can be accessed by anyone.⁵ A problem arises when an area is designated as a state forest while people are actually living on this land. There are hundreds of thousands of villages whose area overlaps with so-called state forest areas. Companies often use this land status to displace people from their homes, so, if people have refused to give up their rice fields for plantation, companies often lobby the government to convert the area into a state forest so they can then evict the people from these enclaves with charges of illegal logging, fishing, or farming. Once the residents are displaced, the status is changed back to a cultivation area and the company can get a permit to develop it into a plantation. 
   
If we overlay the concession map with the fire hotspot locations from 2015, we can see that many hotspots were found outside of cultivation areas and in forest areas instead. These, however, are restricted access for local farmers. This reflects a situation that favors the commercial sector; so-called damaged forests are prioritized for conversion into cultivation areas.
   
Peatland normally works like a sponge, absorbing huge quantities of water. Peat forests grow on swampy ground, and it is only by being inundated with water that the soil can sequester such high levels of carbon. To make this land available for production, companies must first dig canals to drain the water out of the peat. As the land is desiccated, valuable trees are also logged, and the soil itself becomes increasingly flammable. After it is drained, logged, and burnt, these former peat forests are converted into plantations; besides oil palm trees, acacia trees are planted in huge quantities for the pulp and paper industry. These practices put an immense strain on both the ecology and the local people inhabiting these regions. 

A S
Among lay people, environmentalists, and policy makers, trees and forests are a longtime favorite in discussions about global warming because of their ability to sequester and store carbon. For decades, “planting trees” has been a poster strategy. But in the context of the gigantic industrial monoculture plantations as we encounter them in Indonesia, I am beginning to understand that the definition of which type of green cover may in fact count as “forest” becomes crucial. There are the oldgrowth, ecologically rich and symbiotic forests; then there are now systematically planted monoculture forests created for the purpose of international carbon offsetting schemes such as REDD and REDD+; and then there are also industrial tree plantations, including the oil palm plantation.⁶ Do you know of any cases where those categories have been blurred and an oil palm plantation is actually classified not as agriculture but as forest and thus made financially relevant in the carbon sector? 

Z S
Classifying oil palm plantations as forest is a misleading idea and a wrong strategy because they produce more greenhouse gas emissions than natural forests—starting with the process of clearing the land and continuing through fertilizing, harvesting, and so on. Even though oil palms do grow faster than many other forest trees, the carbon released by establishing such a plantation can never be balanced out again with the carbon sequestered by the oil palm tree, not least because compared to other tree species it has the lowest sequestration potential. Sustainability criteria for oil palm plantations remain controversial; proposals to include certain oil palm plantations in the REDD+ scheme, in my opinion, are only driven by greed for more money but cannot deliver any real justice regarding ecological or environmental struggles.

A S
In 2014, when you took Etienne and me to your home in Bengkulu, we went to a village that was struggling to protect their land against an oil palm company. Could you summarize the situation there? 

Z S
There have been many incidents where people burned excavators or other heavy equipment that belong to a company. This was something they had learned from the government itself. They had the courage to burn these things because the government allowed companies to pressure and evict them. One of the cases in Bengkulu actually originates from a conflict leading back to the 1980s. A company obtained a license to plant cocoa, but instead only extracted the timber from the land. Later, it used the license over the land as a means for “land banking”—that is, when the land is invested to procure financial credit from a bank, but otherwise is not exploited through the means of agriculture or agroforestry. When the company CEO was charged with corruption, the license was expropriated and auctioned off by the government. The problem was that meanwhile tenure over the land had changed because the local people had started to use the land for their own agriculture. You see, land issues are very complicated in Indonesia. So when another company bought the license and wanted to operate commercially on the land, it turned out that people had already cultivated the land.The company then hired a bunch of preman [thugs], backed by the police, to evict these people. When they reported their harassment to the local government but failed to receive any response, they started to burn the equipment.

A S
Villagers we spoke to emphatically said they were at “war.” Is that the language that people typically use to describe the situation?

Z S
Yes, that is still the case. Sometimes people get arrested; then there are usually two options: have all charges dropped but admit that a respective company is legitimately entitled to the land, or go to jail for a very long time.

P T
Is it a common practice to hire thugs to displace people in order to occupy their lands? 

Z S
Yes, it is common to find this practice in relation to most palm oil companies operating in Indonesia; these are gangsters who are paid to commit violence, light fires to open up land for planting, and get local people arrested.

P T
If we also overlay a map of displacement onto your map relating fires and concessions, do you think we could also see a relationship between concession, fire, and displacement? 

Z S
These three things are clearly related to each other. But, from the map I’ve shown you, we can only see the connection between fire and concession. Where a fire happened outside a concession, companies would start to plant on that land the following year. In the Sumatran province of Jambi, we did gather evidence that the process of burning forests had been used as a tool to displace people. When fires reached local fields (which had never happened before), farmers lost their harvests and in turn had to sell their land in order to make up for the loss of income.

C G
Here, in the regency of South Bengkulu, what are the names of the companies that are trying to purchase or have purchased (more) forest land? 

Z S
In South Bengkulu, we divide the companies into three categories:
   
Palm oil companies. The three companies with a hold over the land are PN, Agro Bengkulu Selatan (ABS), and Jatropha. PN’s land has been given back to the local people. However, ABS and Jatropha have started the land clearing process.
   
Iron sand mining companies. This sector was stopped from 2009 to 2012 when operations in ten companies throughout the coastal area of South Bengkulu were frozen.
   
Gold mining companies. This sector is currently our first priority because it is acutely threatening. Barrick Gold Corporation, from Canada, owns concessions for almost 300,000 hectares of land along Bukit Barisan, which includes all the forest land where the headwaters of the rivers in South Bengkulu and Kaul are located. If Barrick Gold initiates their operations, all the remaining forest land will be gone and all the rivers will be destroyed.

A S
Can you describe the forests that we saw today? Were they primary forests? If so, could you explain why the trees nevertheless are relatively small? Has there been any selective logging happening here and, if so, since when? 

Z S
If we are walking from Bengkulu towards South Sumatra, the forest on the left hand side is primary forest; on the right hand side, it is a hutan adat [traditional community forest] owned by local people (not by the state), which is usually used for small-scale plantations. The forest on the right- hand side looks different because it has been opened for coffee plantations and the big timbers have been used for house construction—this is why the trees are relatively small. In South Bengkulu, residential areas follow the course of the river and the roads, which also creates patterns for cultivation and extraction.
   
The condition of the forest will deteriorate further if the communal forest falls into the hands of commercial development because it would be opened entirely. On the contrary, if the forest stays within the control of local people, it will be much better protected because they will implement the local wisdom by planting shadowing trees that are higher and denser than coffee and thus maintain the natural environment.

A S
In the primary forest how many species of trees must one imagine? 

Z S
I don’t have the exact number of tree species. However, in my previous research about orchid taxonomy, I found 179 different species of natural orchids within 500,000 hectares of forest land. This indicates the richness of biodiversity in South Bengkulu.

A S
In our meeting this afternoon, I asked the Bupati [regent] what it would take to make the forest into a national park. He replied that it would be very difficult due to people’s need for agriculture. This reminded me of the growing recognition by many conservationists that complex forest ecosystems benefit from the presence of local communities, which are better able to support conservation practices than creating zoned-off parks where people are not allowed. What is your experience regarding the forest as a social space?

Z S
Yes, we agree with the Bupati. Your question also connects to the “state forest”/“cultivation” issues we’ve already talked about. Since the people are doing agroforestry, it is not necessary to change the land status into hutan negara [state forest]; rather, the combination of people and forest could create a territorial buffer zone against monocultures. Converting the land into a “conservation” area, on the other hand, would in fringe on the rights of the people because the state would be severing the relationship between the people and the land. In a “conservation” area, people are usually not allowed to produce or harvest anything. In fact, the people’s needs from the forest are quite diverse; besides sourcing timber, they also use it to collect organic medicines and many other non-timber forest products. 

The idea of changing the land’s status into a “conservation” area or national park mainly comes down to an issue of power. National park status means the land control falls under national power. But, we think such questions should be approached via regulations for management and production on the provincial or regional government and legislature level. The most important thing is that the process of protecting the environment should not harm the local people’s rights to the land because one of the main goals of saving the environment is to protect the needs of the people and empower them in their role as stakeholders. 

A S
I understand that the community argument is important for all of WALHI’s environmental activism. But, through my fieldwork, I have come to believe that the separation between “good people,” on the one hand, and “bad company,” on the other, becomes tricky as soon as small-holders lose their access to traditional ways of life and are forced to adapt to (and often participate in) the conversion of the forest into monoculture plantations. As you’ve said, many people have no other choice than becoming plantation workers. And, what many people seem to want then is a piece of the pie, so to speak, of the wealth that palm oil promises; that is, they want their own productive oil palm plantation.
   
Can you describe some of the difficulties that you have encountered in your work with rural communities? I am wondering how difficult it might be to re-establish the forest stewardship practices we’ve just talked about when the land is being converted so quickly and so violently across vast areas of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and West Papua?

Z S
The most important lesson that WALHI learned from the last thirty-four years of working with communities throughout Indonesia has to do with people’s loss of a sense of belonging and their diminished sense of responsibility towards the land once their right to the forest has been taken away. This structural undoing is commonly utilized by private and corporate players with an interest in gaining access to land. Indonesia has the world’s third-largest tropical rainforest. Of the circa 190 million hectares of land that make up Indonesia, approximately half are forest land.⁷ However, the government’s capacity to monitor the forest is very limited. For instance, between 2000 to 2012, the estimated destruction of forest land was six million hectares.⁸ Unfortunately, the government was only able to process a disproportionally small amount of hectares in forestland claims in court. Hence, the act of protecting, managing, and utilizing the forest should prioritize local people as the main actor by allowing them to exercise their sense of belonging and responsibility. A lack of political will will always be an important factor as well. Even the most well-intentioned moratoriums do very little unless they are fully enforced on the ground. But, we also must work harder to enhance people’s ecological understanding from the educational point of view. One example is river biodiversity. As we’ve seen earlier when rafting down the river, some people still use poison or electric shock for fishing because they don’t know or care about the broader effects of these practices. Therefore, education—and legal education—remains both a huge factor and a huge challenge in all of this. 

C G
It seems that your work has to happen on so many different levels. One is within the national government in Jakarta. Of course, you are also active at the local level, such as what you are doing here in Bengkulu, but I imagine throughout the archipelago, you have to get officials to see the value of other kinds of economies and the value of protecting the land for the people. In addition to all this, you have educational programs teaching communities about how to use the land more carefully in order to increase biodiversity and to understand how different plants can be used. This creates a sense of ownership so that people realize that the land is theirs, and it becomes their privilege and pride to take care of it. What kind of overall strategy does WALHI have for addressing all of these different levels?

Z S
We have always developed our strategies based on pilot projects because we soon realized that we have a big spirit with limited resources. We pick one focus area to start a pilot project in one of the areas you’ve described, ranging from management to advocacy to education. If a strategy proves successful, we later implement it in other places. One example, from Bengkulu, comes from when we tried to stop the iron sand mining in the region. We first organized against one company in a village called Kampung Penago. Successively, we confronted nine other iron sand mines, always one at a time. When one company had been shut down, we moved on to another company, and so on. So in the end, we were able to close down all of the iron sand mines along the coastal area of Bengkulu province.  

Regarding the regulation of the management system, one example is the model developed in Meranti, Riau province. The people were able to adapt to the peatland ecosystem in such a way that they no longer need to apply the use of fire: by cultivating sago palms. Then, in 2014, we invited the current President Jokowi Widodo to go there with us so he would implement our model on all levels of the government system.⁹ Nevertheless, taking care of Indonesia cannot depend on a federal approach, it has to start from the countryside; but, we also benefit from international pressure on transnational mega-corporations and financial institutions funding what is going on here.¹⁰

A S
Earlier, you referred to Forestry Law No. 41/1999. In the Indonesian weekly magazine Tempo, I read about a change which the Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara [AMAN—the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago] achieved at the Constitutional Court. If I understand this correctly, one central phrase in a paragraph of this law was changed from “customary forests are state forests with customary laws” to “customary forests are forests with customary laws” [editor’s emphasis]. The new definition seems to be more open to the needs of adat communities; as you’ve explained previously, the designation of state forest actually criminalizes people who access these areas. So there seems to be an increase in rights to the land and its resources. But, by dropping the word “state,” the definition also seems to have been opened up to such forest areas that the state might have already given away, commercially, for instance, through a concession. Will this change be helpful, then, in disputes about the recognition of customary land rights, or will it simply increase disputes without much practical effect? I’d also like to ask if you can explain why in the Indonesian Constitution and legal system the consideration of land tenure rights remains so fuzzy?

Z S
If we reflect on the history of law and regulation development, you will see that the state has ignored land rights of Indigenous communities since the Dutch colonial era. Already, the colonial government wanted access to the land for the exploitation of natural resources and commercial agriculture. Even our contemporary Constitution purposely ignores the Indigenous peoples’ presence and identity. I’ve identified four ways, which create land tenure conflicts between local small-scale stakeholders and large-scale commercial value extraction:

1) exploration of natural resources located above ground (logging and monoculture plantations); 
2) exploration of minerals located underground (gold, iron sand, nickel, coal, etc);
3) land banking;
4) green grading (when land is zoned in the name of environmental service functions such as the carbon trading business, but also in some eco-tourism and conservation contexts). 

In addition to the Forestry Law No. 41/ 1999, there is also the law MK35/2012, which was issued also by the Constitutional Court [Mahkamah Konstitusi or MK]. It says, “customary forest is not state forest.” It is a declaration from the state to acknowledge the forest owned by adat, or Indigenous peoples. However, the definition of who are to be considered Indigenous peoples (and where they are located) has not been clarified. As a result, MK35 cannot be directly implemented.   

A constitutional bill should be enforced through the implementation of government decrees known as PP, which stands for Peraturan Pemerintah. PPs should regulate the mechanisms to formally recognize Indigenous peoples and their territorial location. But the government is reluctant to recognize customary land rights because Indonesia’s Kawasan Hutan [“forest zone”] is so crucial for the generation of wealth and power. So these laws are unclear, inconsistent, and incomplete. Under the given circumstances, laws such as MK35 can even be played with horizontally, among communities themselves, because the customary land tenure system of adat peoples varies greatly across the Archipelago’s different regions and islands. For example, in Maluku or Kalimantan, a tribal leader is often still considered a Sultan. If we refer to MK35, the land is owned by the Sultan and his offspring, not the community. This condition will allow a Sultan and his offspring to set a claim on the land and sell it to private businesses for their own profit. Such cases have happened frequently in Kalimantan. Therefore, the law of this country still does not sufficiently formalize and secure the status of adat lands and adat customary land rights.  

One could say that, since Independence, Indonesia’s Constitution has gone through several amendment processes, which mainly served to protect the exploitation of natural resources by the state and private businesses with close ties to the political class. This is a problem and major challenge with effects for both the nonhuman environment and the human population. Here, Indigenous peoples and other forest communities are among the most marginalized social groups.¹¹

C G
You were saying to me earlier that you are now beginning to focus more towards Eastern Indonesia because of the different land use development stages compared to Sumatra and Kalimantan. Can you explain the recent situation and some of the changes you’ve been witnessing in Maluku and Papua and talk a little bit about the work you’ve been doing there?

Z S
Actually, I am not only interested in those regions because land-use extraction in Sumatra and Kalimantan is so much more advanced. In fact, the exploitation of natural resources in Sumatra and Kalimantan has been massive, with devastating environmental effects, and there will be more of this type of expansion towards the Eastern regions of Indonesia. We focus on the advocacy model to shield the land from such destruction. Eastern Indonesia’s ecosystems have more savannah, small islands, and large regions of wetland. So the landscape is very different from Western Indonesia, whose islands are very large and where peatland only exists in Sumatra and Kalimantan. In Eastern Indonesia, small changes will lead to significant consequences; this will harm people, flora, and fauna because small, more adapted ecosystems have stronger dependencies. For example, if the forest on a small island is turned into an oil palm plantation the fresh water will be drained very quickly. In Sulawesi, the wetland areas play a vital role; all the fish come from there. Once such an ecosystem is changed, people will suffer from the fish shortage for their daily consumption.

A S
As an activist working in the field, what is your intuition, your outlook, at this moment in the struggle?

Z S
If I were a pessimist I would have hung myself a long time ago. We realize that our enemies are in power and have the ability to change everything, including laws, to their will. The future in this country for our children cannot just rest on the Constitution. For instance, there are many children born and raised in the megacity of Jakarta who have never experienced and enjoyed the beautiful nature across Indonesia. If our generation is not working hard to save the natural environment, it means that we will lose the battle against the profit maximization of a handful of super rich people. In addition, we would also be complicit in the future generation’s loss of Indonesia’s rich and beautiful natural environment. No one decides to be born in Indonesia. It is all contingency. Therefore, I am neither an optimist nor a pessimist; I am talking about our responsibility to the future generations. Even if we lose the fight, our effort will still help the next generation by not having to start from zero. But, if we win, the next generation will not face the same conditions as we are seeing right now. In fact, we have been successful in several cases, including in court, and our struggle continues.