Indigenous peoples often play a vital role in preserving biodiversity, something that is often forgotten.
Conservationists and Indigenous communities share the aim of preserving biodiversity, even if their incentives differ. That creates a grim irony when tribal peoples are estranged from the environment they have safeguarded, for the sake of safeguarding the environment.
New
research on how Indigenous communities in Papua province, Indonesia conserve the forest resources they rely on concludes, “The potential tragedy of the unseen sentinels is that so much may be lost simply because we failed to open our eyes to look.” Working closely with three communities to examine their conservation practices, a team of scientists associated with the
Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) discovered each has a system for monitoring resources and responding to threats. Challenging
assumptions that Indigenous communities damage forest resources, the research feeds into a growing body of evidence that “natural resource management by local communities can be more effective and cost-efficient for large-scale conservation than government-sanctioned protected areas.”
To contextualise this study, let us first consider the conservation contradiction that exists.
This contradiction has been unfolding around the world, much to the detriment of traditional custodians like the
Wanniyala-Aetto of Sri Lanka, the
Karen of Thailand, the
Baka of Cameroon and the
Kalahari Bushmen of Botswana. Tribal peoples are being booted from their customary forests and ancestral lands not only to make way for agricultural, mining and logging concessions (land grabs that are widespread and have been well documented) but also in the name of “wilderness,” to keep forests pristine and away from the pilfering hands of human exploitation. On the surface, the creation and expansion of inviolate zones, in the form of national parks and sanctuaries, are a win for environmental aims; however, communities that call these forests home and rely on their resources for survival become “
conservation refugees.”
Disenfranchised, they are cast as conservation opponents, accused of damaging natural resources; they are marginalized to resettlement areas on the fringes of reserves, forced to eke out an existence on government handouts, by begging or “stealing” from their former forest home to survive.
This is a serious problem, as a 2014 Survival International report,
Parks Need Peoples explains. “Overnight, resources that have sustained the tribe since time immemorial are out of bounds. If they hunt in the park they are accused of ‘poaching’. If they are caught gathering, they can be fined or imprisoned.” For example, since the Wanniyala-Aetto peoples in Sri Lanka were disenfranchised for the Maduru Oya National Park in 1983, they have
reportedly been killed, beaten and arrested for subsistence hunting on their ancestral land. In Cameroon, eco-guards, partially funded by WWF and the German Government, are
accused of human rights abuses and torture against the Indigenous Baka.
Survival International Director, Stephen Corry
said, in a
Guardian piece, that the expulsion of Indigenous communities from their customary territories “is based on unscientific assumptions that tribal peoples are incapable of managing their lands, that they overhunt, overgraze and overuse the resources on their lands.”
“It’s no coincidence that 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity is found on the lands of tribal peoples and that the vast majority of the 200 most biodiverse places on Earth are tribal peoples’ territories,” Survival International
reports, “By developing ways to live sustainably on the land they cherish, tribal peoples have often contributed – sometimes over millennia – towards the high diversity of species around them.”
At the Asia Regional Conservation Forum in Thailand last month, a Karen leader
appealed to the Thai Government to be more considerate of Indigenous peoples whose customary land had been turned into official conservation zones. “We are not the destroyers of the forest. We have nurtured our natural environment through our ‘use and conserve’ practice, which is part of our simple lifestyle and culture. The forest we manage, including our practice of shifting cultivation that provides us food security, are better conserved and enriched with biodiversity.”
American professor and philosopher, J Baird Callicott criticizes the idea of “wilderness” as environments that are free from human habitation as an
ethnocentric concept with foundations in Western discourse. He notes the name “wilderness” constructs landscapes in a way not shared by all social groups; indeed, there is no translation for the word in many languages. Soon after the world’s first national park – Yellowstone — was created in the United States in the 19th century, the local Native American tribes were
expelled from their traditional lands to conserve the wilderness.
The paradox here is that Indigenous peoples, as CIFOR studies have shown, are actually stewards of the forests – their very survival depends on fostering sustainable relationships with surrounding ecosystems.
Conservation Friends Not Foes
CIFOR’s new study,
Unseen Sentinels: local monitoring and control in conservation’s blind spots, is significant because it reveals how Indigenous peoples are protecting vast natural areas. Co-author, Senior Associate at CIFOR and scientist based at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Douglas Sheil
said effective local protection is undermined, not because these local systems are invisible, but “because no one recognizes what they see.”
“For conservationists pushing for the expansion of protected areas, the study highlights the potential dangers of alienating people from their environment, and represents a neglected opportunity to support them doing what they already do,” Sheil said.
Territories of the three Papuan communities studied – Kay, Metaweja and Yoke — overlap with the Mamberamo-Foja Wildlife Reserve, a conservation zone spanning two million hectares and brimming with biodiversity. While being aware of the park’s protected status for the past decade, the communities maintain their traditional land claims, customs and tribal systems. They hunt crocodiles, catch fish and collect forests resources in their territories. Rather than revealing a pattern of over-exploitation, the study
found “respected individuals or groups have a recognized responsibility for protecting key resource-rich areas.”
Illustrating this, in Kay, hereditary stewards called “Ijabait” live at strategic points along the Tariku River. In Yoke a family controls access to the most valuable fishing area, Lake Tabaresia. And in Metaweja the responsibility of safeguarding the region was shared around, with people regularly camping out at critical locations. These actors, the paper states, prove a powerful deterrent for anyone wishing to encroach on customary areas to exploit natural resources.
Along with deterring outsiders, independent monitoring is used to ensure healthy ecosystems are maintained. In Kay, crocodiles are a critical resource, hunted for their skin and meat; assessing the number and size of the animals, villagers stop or reduce harvesting when stocks appear low. In Metaweja, survey and discussion is used to decide if a resource needs time to recover and replenish. When a wild pig is caught, for example, details of the location, ease of the catch, and the animal’s condition are considered to determine areas that should be set a side until the following rainy season. The report notes that monitoring was an innate part of people’s “lives, livelihoods, and cultures.”
Study co-author Sheil points out that with poorly funded official protection mechanisms, recognizing local monitoring practices in and around parks and reserves is vital to understanding how Indigenous communities are “filling the gaps.”
“One serious implication [of expelling tribal people] is that effective indigenous conservation systems may be replaced by formally protected areas that are inadequately managed by overstretched government authorities,” Sheil said.
Highlighting how thinly conservation
authorities are spread, in 2009, about 140 staff was in charge of overseeing more than 4.6 million hectares of sanctuaries and parks across Papua province. That’s about 33,000 hectares, or roughly the size of the Maldives, per person. Underfunded, overstretched park management leaves forests vulnerable to unchecked poaching, logging and unlawful plantation expansion. Additionally, when protected areas are created, alienated communities stripped of their stewardship roles may lose their incentives for sustainable forest product use, intensifying threats to biodiversity and ramping up conservation costs. The CIFOR report states, “Such outcomes appear tragic and ironic when adversaries had previously shared similar goals: to safeguard the environment and its resources from uncontrolled use.”
Indonesia’s “Conservation Refugees”
There are both old and emerging cases of “conservation refugees” in Indonesia.
In Southeast Sulawesi, the Moronene people were made to leave their ancestral land after the Rawa Aopa Watumohai National Park was created in 1989.
Reportedly, for at least six generations they had cultivated seasonal crops on small rotational plots, while also relying on edible forest products. Their struggle, and cycle of eviction and return, continued for decades until an NGO stepped in to represent them, arguing the park’s ecosystem contains plants, animals, and
people too. Finally, the rights of the Moronene were recognized.
Another case is now unfolding in West Papua province, which sits beside Papua province together forming the Indonesian part of the island of New Guinea. A
Mongabay article notes how the Demaisi people have a system of sanctuaries and family agricultural rotation that has sustained them, and maintained the forest’s abundance, for as long as anyone can remember. Families rotate through a handful of small garden plots, using a patch for one to three years depending on soil health, and then leaving it to recover for up to six years. They are forbidden from hunting and gathering in the core protected area called the “bahamti” but are allowed to hunt, with proper permissions, in the heavily forested area between their gardens and the bahamti.
However, a newly developed spatial plan for the regency that includes a proposal for an 83,000-hectare nature reserve in the Arfak Mountains looms over the Demaisi peoples’ traditional way of life. In the Mongabay piece, George Dedaida from the NGO Papuan Conservation comments, “The government needs to consider the existence of Indigenous peoples, because their lives depend on nature. For them the forests are the Mother who provides everything.”
Survival International’s Asia Campaigner, Sophie Grig told The Diplomat that sadly, the situation facing the Demaisi in the Arfak Mountains is all too familiar.
“Tribal peoples, who have sustainably managed, nurtured and protected their forests for generations, suddenly find themselves barred from their lands because outsiders decide that they should be ‘protected.’ The irony is, studies have shown that the best way to protect forest cover and biodiversity is to recognize indigenous land rights. Tragically too many conservation initiatives, like this one, seek to expel the very people who have protected the forest for for so long. It’s time for a new sort of conservation, one that puts indigenous land rights at its heart.”
Indonesia did not fare well in a recent
report comparing Indigenous forest rights in several countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The study, by the World Resource Institute and the Rights and Resources Initiative, states that forest covers more than half of Indonesia’s land area and of its extensive forest estate community rights were officially recognized in just
one percent (compared to 97 percent recognition in Papua New Guinea and 49 percent in Nepal). According to AMAN, an alliance of Indigenous Peoples from across Indonesia, up to
40 million hectares of what the government claims as national forest is actually managed by local and Indigenous communities.
Fortunately, this legacy of ignoring customary tenure is starting to change, catalyzed by a landmark
ruling in 2013. Indonesia’s Constitutional Court declared that customary forests should not be classified as “State Forest Areas.” Efforts are underway to gazette the country’s forest zone, clarify land boundaries and recognize community-managed forests.
Legal recognition of Indigenous land rights could lead to increased protection against deforestation in Indonesia.
Figures from last year show community managed forests had an average deforestation rate 11 times lower than land outside their borders. Andy White from the Rights and Resources Initiative
said that when the rights of communities are respected, they are far more effective than governments or the private sector in protecting forests.
CIFOR’s
study calls for greater attention to autonomous monitoring. It suggests case-by-case examination to understand the extent and efficiency of community activities and consideration of how these systems may be supported.
“Whether autonomous monitoring is widespread and effective, or rare and ineffective, we need to recognize not only when local people are willing to champion environmental causes, but also when they are already doing so.”
Gemima Harvey (@Gemima_Harvey) is a freelance journalist and photographer.
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2) Remembering Indonesia’s Bloody Coup
Fifty years ago this week Indonesia experienced one of the 20th century’s darkest moments.
By Nithin Coca
October 02, 2015
Image Credit: REUTERS photographer
What it commemorates, though, is one of the 20th century’s darkest moments. The Monumen Perjuangan 66 has on its white-plastered sides visual depictions of the military-led crackdown that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 to 2 million Indonesians.
This week saw the 50th anniversary of the aborted coup that led to the mass killings, which have been depicted as an act of heroism on the Medan memorial. Killings for which, today, few have been held responsible and which remain a rarely discussed and barely understood topic in now democratic Indonesia.
“The world has to understand that this was genocide, and the world has to take responsibility,” said Saskia E. Wieringa, professor at the University of Amsterdam and Chair of the
International People’s Tribunal 1965.
A Misunderstood History
On September 30, 1965, in what remain murky circumstances, six top generals were killed by a group allegedly consisting of left-wing Indonesians. This allowed a previously little-known military leader, General Suharto, to assume power and launch a nationwide campaign against the perpetrators of the killing, which, according to him, were the Indonesia Communist Party (PKI) and its left-wing allies. Within two years, Suharto was in firm control of the country, the PKI had been completely destroyed,
and hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were dead.
Indonesia’s mass killings rank alongside some of the bloodiest events in post-World War II history. The estimated death toll puts this event alongside the Korean War, or the Rwandan genocide in terms of bloodshed. Yet, unlike those two events, it receives little attention globally. Within Indonesia itself, the situation is worse.
“The younger generation has grown up with very little knowledge of anything about this period of time, unlike their parents who had swallowed government propaganda for years,” said Tom Pepinsky, associate director of the Cornell University Modern Indonesia Project.
Democratic Indonesia’s Blind Spot
Throughout the Suharto era, which ran from 1965 to 1998, on October 1 each year, a controversial documentary
, Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI (The Treason of the September 30 Movement and the Indonesian Communist Party), was aired on television and shown in school. It greatly exaggerated the threat of a takeover by the PKI and honored the militias and military leaders who organized the mass killings.
Today, the documentary is no longer shown and the holiday celebrating the killings no longer celebrated, but teachings of the event take on either a strong nationalistic tone, or are completely ignored. Only in a few elite universities, such as Univeritas Indonesia, are students able to learn openly about what really happened in the 1960s.
This is part of the progress made since Suharto fell from power in 1998, during the Asian Financial Crisis. Then, Indonesia quickly moved to build a democracy that, contrary to the expectations of many, has survived and thrived. One thing it did not do, however, was create a space for victims of Suharto’s three-decade long rule to gain justice.
“When Suharto fell, a bunch of people, shall we say, ‘switched sides,’ which narrowed those who would be held responsible,” said National Coordinator East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN). “There really was no thorough accounting of the Suharto years, or a cleaning of house”
In fact, democratic Indonesia is run by many of the same people or families who ran Suharto’s New Order regime. Sometimes, the connections are so close as to be comedic. Former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was a general who served numerous terms in East Timor, where more than 200,000 died during Indonesia’s bloody, Suharto-led invasion and occupation. Prabowo Subianto, who ran for president in a tight race against eventual winner and current President Joko Widodo last year, was Suharto’s son-in-law. Marrying into his family allowed Prabowo to become head of the 27,000-strong Army Strategic Reserve Command (Kostrad) in 1998, where his subordinates were
accused of torturing pro-democracy advocates. Amazingly, his close connection to Suharto and alleged involvement in human rights abuses in East Timor did not stop him from being just a few percentage points short of becoming Indonesia’s seventh president.
“This is why there is enormous corruption in Indonesia,” said Wieringa. “Power is still unchecked, corruption is still going on, and it is impossible for Indonesia to make progress on human rights or in checking corruptions if these people still remain in power.”
In fact, SBY and Prabowo are just the tip of the iceberg, as Indonesia’s political, business, and civil service ranks are dominated by Suharto supporters and those who took part in, or at least supported, the mass killings of the 1960s. They, Wieringa believes, are the ones holding back a true accounting of Indonesia’s past.
“Although we now have democracy, and lots of things have improved, still the old power holders are there, and they prevent closure of this kind of history,” said Wieringa.
The West’s Role
Responsibility for what happened is not Indonesia’s alone. Many Western countries strongly supported Suharto’s rule in the name of anti-communism during the cold war,
most notably the United States.
“The U.S. was Suharto’s main international patron,” said Miller. “America wanted to keep Suharto happy as it was their big ally in the region.” This included turning a blind eye as the killings were taking place across the archipelago. Miller’s organization, ETAN, is calling on the United States to
release files showing the full extent of its cooperation with Indonesia
Today, world leaders often cite Indonesia as an example of civic democracy, both for Asia and the Islamic world. Last year, the world was enthralled with the election of Joko Widodo to the presidency. He was a true break from the past, Indonesia’s first president not tied to Suharto, and without the blood of the old regime on his hands. However, his record over the past year, tarnished by an inability to move his party or the government, shows just how much power the old regime still holds in Indonesia.
“Jokowi is not tainted [by Suharto regime] directly, but is at the mercy of many connected to the events of 1965,” said Miller.
Jokowi has made hints that it might release an apology for the killings, a landmark admission that would have repercussions throughout Indonesian society. If it happens, it would be just the first step towards a belated, but needed, healing process.
“Coming to grips with Indonesia’s older wounds will be a long-term project that will require generational changes and efforts by elites and regular citizens at every level,” said Gregory Poling, an Indonesia expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
On the 50th anniversary of one of the worst atrocities of the last century, Indonesia has an opportunity to take another step towards reconciliation and furthering the cause of its democratic progress. Someday soon, perhaps the monument in Medan will no longer memorialize the killers, but pay homage to the innocent victims of Indonesia’s darkest era. Then, perhaps, the country can be a true model for the world.
Nithin Coca is a freelance writer and journalist who focuses on cultural, economic, and environmental issues in developing countries. Follow him on Twitter @excinit.
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