1) New Zealander killed in Papua shooting

2) Foreign worker killed, two others severely injured in Freeport shooting

https://en.antaranews.com/news/145010/new-zealander-killed-in-papua-shooting

1) New Zealander killed in Papua shooting 

hours ago

Timika, Papua (ANTARA) - One New Zealand national died and two Indonesian workers were injured after members of a Papua armed group opened fire at the offices of PT Freeport Indonesia on Monday in Kuala Kencana subdistrict, Timika, Papua.

According to eyewitness accounts, eight members of a Papua armed group mounted a gun attack at the PT Freeport office building around 2 p.m. on Monday before fleeing into the forest behind the Kuala Kencana area towards Mile 39.

A New Zealander, identified as Grame Thomas Wall, was killed after he was hit by a bullet, said Mimika Police Chief Adjunct Senior Commissioner I, Gusti Gede Era Adhinata, on Monday.

“There was one death. The remains of Grame Thomas Wall will be flown to New Zealand tomorrow,” said Adhinata.

Two more workers were also injured in the shooting, said police. They have been identified as Jibril MA Bahar, employed with PT Kuala Pelabuhan Indonesia, and Yoshepine, a construction worker with PT Freeport Indonesia. Bahar was shot in the right thigh, while Yoshepine was injured by bullet fragments on the leg.

The two have been admitted to the AEA clinic in Kuala Kencana.

Eyewitnesses have said they saw eight persons carrying firearms entering the PT Freeport office building.

"We suspect there were eight gunmen. Witnesses saw eight people carrying firearms," Adhinata said.

The attackers are believed to be members of the Kali Kopi armed group, led by Joni Botak.

At the time of the shooting, the office building was being guarded by six personnel from the Police Mobile Brigade's Amole Task Force.


A joint military and police team has been deployed to nab the gunmen. "We have intensified security in Kuala Kencana area and are coordinating with all units to hunt them down. We will conduct massive raids in prone areas,” said Adhinata.

He asked workers and families residing in Kuala Kencana to stay calm as the authorities have stepped up security in the region. (INE)

Related news: Tembagapura's security intensified as measure against rebels' terror
Related news: Papuan gunmen attack Freeport Indonesia's escort car

EDITED BY INE

Reporter: Evarianus Supar, Sri Haryati
Editor: Suharto

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https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2020/03/30/foreign-worker-killed-two-others-severely-injured-in-freeport-shooting.html

2) Foreign worker killed, two others severely injured in Freeport shooting

Victor Mambor 

The Jakarta Post  

Jayapura   /   Mon, March 30, 2020   /   08:38 pm

A foreign employee of gold and copper mining company PT Freeport Indonesia was shot dead on Monday by gunmen in Timika, the capital city of Mimika regency in Papua.

The employee, identified as Graeme Thomas Wall, was engaged in construction work with colleagues on the company site in Kuala Kencana district when the shooting took place on Monday afternoon, Freeport Indonesia spokesperson Riza Pratama said.

“The shooting happened on Monday, March 30, at around 2 p.m. local time. We express our deep condolences for one of our workers who was killed in the shooting at the office complex of Freeport Indonesia,” Riza told The Jakarta Poston Monday.

Two of Wall's colleagues, identified as Jibril Wahar and Yosephine, were admitted to Tembagapura Hospital with serious injuries, Riza said. Four other people sustained minor injuries and were treated in the office.

Local authorities and Freeport security officers have secured the location and evacuated all workers and residents near the vicinity following the attack.

Freeport management has issued an incident notification alert asking workers to postpone all activities and find shelter following the shooting.

“We will provide further information when there are reports of new developments from this incident,” Riza said.

Papua Police chief Paulus Waterpauw alleged that the perpetrators who launched the attack were under the command of Joni Botak, the leader of an armed gang operating in the Timika area, and who is also on the police's most-wanted list.

“The group is now being hunted by our joint team,” Waterpauw said.

Separatist group West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB), however, claimed responsibility for the shooting.

“Our battlefield is at the Freeport and Grassberg mining sites. Kuala Kencana is also a war zone. We will not stop until Freeport closes down, so they better close at once,” TPNPB Timika operational commander Hengky Wamang told the Post.

Papua has been the hotbed of separatism for years and armed groups, which authorities say operate in several regencies in the province, are reported to have been behind numerous violent incidents in the region.

Earlier this month, the police said some 790 people fled their homes in mountainous areas around the Freeport mining site on March 7 to take refuge at the Tembagapura Police headquarters in Timika over fears of an armed criminal group, which had reportedly terrorized the villagers.

Security authorities previously reported that armed groups had been shooting at Indonesian Military (TNI) and police guard posts. The residents’ access to basic needs, such as food and health care, had reportedly been restricted by armed men who blocked roads.

Authorities also claimed that the local residents were still traumatized from their previous encounter with the armed group in November 2017, when its members blocked access into and out of several villages. (mfp)

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1) Covid-19 death reported in West Papua

2) Papua mangroves could help Indonesia coast to climate targets

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https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/412774/covid-19-death-reported-in-west-papua

1) Covid-19 death reported in West Papua

Johnny Blades, RNZ Pacific Journalist 

5:41 pm today 

A 43-year-old woman has reportedly died due to Covid-19 in Indonesian-administered West Papua province.

It's the first recorded death from Covid-19 in the Papua region, and adds to fears that a looming surge in cases could overwhelm the health system on both sides of New Guinea.

The death was recorded in Sorong, the western most city of New Guinea. Tabloid Jubi reports the death was confirmed by West Papua's Task Force Covid-19.

The victim had been a patient at a hospital in Sorong city, where another five patients remained under supervision for suspected coronavirus infection.

West Papua's provincial administration has not yet declared emergency measures to close access for travellers to the province and restrict public movements like in neighbouring Papua province.

Papua's covid response unit confirmed seven cases of covid as of Thursday, as the provincial government this week closed entry of travellers into the province both through sea and air travel.

Papua has also restricted daily activities in public to eight hours, from 6am to 2pm. Large gatherings, including for religious worship, have also been restricted.

The death in Sorong City is a concern not just for all of Indonesia's Papua region, but also in the neighbouring country of Papua New Guinea whose 800-kilometre border with Indonesia is porous, making it difficult to control movement back and forth between the two sides.

The official land border access point between the two countries has been closed for two months, as PNG's government seeks to protect its under-resourced health system from the chaos that covid-19 threatens.

But the governor of PNG's West Sepik province, Tony Wouwou, said it was nearly impossible to stop people slipping across the border by bush or sea.

PNG's government this week declared a 14-day state of emergency, with restrictions on travel and closure of all schools and non-essential businesses.

Lacking testing kits and a general capacity to deal with an outbreak, PNG's government is working closely with the World Health Organisation to establish isolation facilities where covid cases would be taken to.

So far, PNG has confirmed only one case of covid-19 in the country, a 45-year old mine worker who flew to Morobe province via Port Moresby after travelling through Singapore from Europe.

The man has since been transferred home to Australia, while PNG health officials conducted contact tracing and tests of people the man had been in contact with - so far all tests have come back negative.

Back on the western side of the island, Papua province's government, has been urging people to stay at home as much as possible. By and large the public in the Papuan capital, Jayapura are adhering to this call.

Jayapura's streets are noticeably quiet today, as is Sentani airport which along with other ports in Papua was still receiving transportation of goods into the province, at a time when distribution of certain supplies was more vital than ever.

A member of Papua's Covid-19 response team, Silwanus Sumule, told the Jakarta Post that a lack of necessary medical equipment, including rapid testing kits to examine swab samples from suspected patients, was a concern for the province.

Meanwhile, hundreds of people are being monitored for coronavirus symptoms in Papua.

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2) Papua mangroves could help Indonesia coast to climate targets

Indonesia - The characteristics of mangroves in a range of ecosystems – from undisturbed natural settings to areas where considerable land-use changes have occurred – should be evaluated to properly assess country-level blue carbon emissions accounting, according to new research.

While mangroves have long been recognized as significant “blue carbon” sinks and as coastal buffers against erosion caused by ocean activity and sea level rise, now scientists have shown that their carbon storage capacity varies greatly depending on a variety of ecological factors.

This discovery could have implications for Indonesia’s targets under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“Our findings show that mangrove regeneration over the long-term has the potential to contribute to Indonesia’s Nationally Determined Contributions(NDCs) by increasing mangrove carbon stocks and offsetting anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change,” said lead author Sigit Sasmito, a researcher at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) and a Ph.D. candidate at Australia’s Charles Darwin University.

Almost a quarter of all mangroves worldwide are situated along 2.9 million hectares — an area roughly the size of Belgium — throughout the Indonesian archipelago. Roughly 10 percent of them – equal to half of Indonesia’s mangrove area — are in carbon-rich Papua and West Papua, the country’s easternmost provinces, where research for the study published in Global Change Biology journal took place.

“Our assessment of blue carbon stocks and their potential emissions and removals suggest that current land management practices in Papua’s mangroves, such as forest harvesting and small-scale aquaculture, reduce carbon stocks substantially,” Sasmito said.

Indonesia has a key role to play in nature-based climate change mitigation policy, he said, adding that scientists anticipate that future escalation of land-use change in Papua’s mangroves may result in substantial greenhouse gas emissions with implications for NDCs……...

https://forestsnews.cifor.org/64784/could-help-indonesia-coast-to-climate-targets?fnl=en

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Indonesian plane shot at in Papua

https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/412629/indonesian-plane-shot-at-in-papua

Indonesian plane shot at in Papua

7:58 am today  

An Indonesian military plane has been shot at by a faction of the West Papua Liberation Army in Papua province.

The air force transport plane was flying over remote Pegunungan Bintang regency when shot at on Monday.

A Liberation Army spokesman, Sebby Sambom, said its troops fired on the aircraft because Indonesia's military has been dropping off "large numbers" of personnel to Oksibil, the regency's capital.

The Jakarta Post reports Indonesian authorities saying the plane was carrying three tons of foodstuff and other materials owned by the regency administration.

The Indonesian regional military comand spokesman, Lt Colonel Eko Daryanto said five bullet holes were found on the plane's body, but that it was able to land and had not been heavily damaged.

He said this followed another shooting incident in the regency at the start of March when trucks belonging to a state-owned enterprise were shot at in Oksibil..

Papua province has seen an escalating number of shootings since the beginning of the year, as the Liberation Army continues its war on the Indonesian state.

Shootings happened in several regions, such as Nduga regency, Intan Jaya, Mimika, Pegunungan Bintang and Keerom, several of them deadly.

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1) Papua Closes Ports, Airports as Coronavirus Emergency Response

2) New player starts clearing rainforest in world’s biggest oil palm project 

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https://en.tempo.co/read/1323597/papua-closes-ports-airports-as-coronavirus-emergency-response

1) Papua Closes Ports, Airports as Coronavirus Emergency Response 

Translator: Dewi Elvia Muthiariny   Editor: Laila Afifa 

24 March 2020 22:42 WIB

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Papua provincial administration raised its coronavirus alert status to an emergency as of Tuesday, March 24.

Referred to the letter made available for Tempo, the regional leadership coordination forum in which the members included governors, regents, and mayors of Papua agreed to impose several policies.

One of them is the blockage of entry access for immigrants via airports or ports. “The closure of passenger planes and ships at the entrance gates of Papua region, such as airports, ports, and cross border posts,” as noted in Point 6 of the letter.

However, the regional administration ensured it would maintain a sufficient supply of logistics for the community. 

Additionally, Papua restricted the arrival of foreign nationals and set certain time for the people to conduct their daily activities. “The public is allowed to conduct their daily activities to meet their basic needs and other activities from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. As for market operations, it is specially set from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m.”

Meanwhile, religious activities are also restricted in a bid to avoid crowds of people. Papuans are also required to conduct medical tests related to COVID-19.

To support the tests, Dok 2 Jayapura Hospital is tapped as the special hospital for the coronavirus handling. As of date, Papua recorded three confirmed cases of COVID-19.

SYAILENDRA PERSADA

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https://news.mongabay.com/2020/03/new-player-starts-clearing-rainforest-in-worlds-biggest-oil-palm-project/

2) New player starts clearing rainforest in world’s biggest oil palm project 

The Digoel Agri Group has begun operating in an Indonesia megaproject being fought over by investors from around the world. 

BY THE GECKO PROJECT AND MONGABAY ON 24 MARCH 2020 Mongabay Series: Indonesian Forests, Indonesian Palm Oil, Jokowi Commitments, Land rights and extractives

• Companies owned by a politically connected Indonesian family and an investor from New Zealand have begun clearing rainforest within an area slated to become the world’s largest oil palm plantation.
• The project will push industrial agriculture deep into the primary rainforests of southern Papua, but has been plagued by allegations of illegality.
• While the new investors represent a break from those allegations, the government’s failure to investigate them has ongoing consequences.

This article was co-published with The Gecko Project.

A new company has begun clearing rainforest in an area of Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province earmarked to become the world’s largest oil palm plantation, in a vast project that has been mired in allegations of lawbreaking.

If seen through to completion, the Tanah Merah project will generate an estimated $6 billion in timber and create a plantation almost twice the size of London, at the heart of the largest tract of intact rainforest left in Asia. It will also release an immense amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, at a time when Indonesia has committed to reducing emissions from deforestation.

Since March of last year, the Digoel Agri Group, a consortium founded by a politically connected Jakarta family and now backed by an investor from New Zealand, has bulldozed 170 hectares (420 acres) of rainforest in a section of the project previously spared from land clearing, satellite imagery shows.

The clearance amounts to a fraction of the 280,000 hectares (692,000 acres) allocated for the project, now controlled by several different conglomerates. But it signals that deforestation could quickly accelerate after a decade of false starts by other investors.

Since it was first conceived in 2007, the rights to the project have changed hands several times, involving a string of investors who have deployed crude and complex corporate secrecy techniques to hide their identities.

The licensing process for the project has been plagued by irregularities. A cross-border investigation by The Gecko Project, Mongabay, Malaysiakini and Tempo, published in November 2018, revealed that key permits were signed by an elected official who was simultaneously serving a prison sentence for embezzling state funds.

A subsequent report found that officials believe other essential permits — for both the plantation and a giant sawmill to process the timber — were falsified.

Two companies, majority-owned by anonymous firms registered in the United Arab Emirates, began operating on the basis of these permits, to the north of the land now held by Digoel Agri. In response to written questions from The Gecko Project and Mongabay they have denied the allegation that the permits were falsified.

On paper, Digoel Agri’s involvement in the project represents a clean break from those allegations. The firm arrived on the scene after the suspect permits held by earlier investors were revoked and reassigned to it.

Jackson Iqbal de Hesselle, 32, a member of the Rumangkang family, which is behind Digoel Agri, said its operations were clean. “We’re obeying the rules,” he said in a recent interview at the firm’s office in Jayapura, the capital of Papua province.

However, while there are no apparent links between Digoel Agri and the previous investors, its ability to operate is partly predicated on the allegedly compromised licensing process that went before.

The legal basis of Digoel Agri’s activities rests partly on decrees rezoning the land to allow development, issued by the Ministry of Forestry in 2012, following requests from earlier investors. The applications were based on the plantation permits that were allegedly falsified.

As of late last year, Indonesian authorities had yet to investigate the allegations, officials from several agencies said at the time.

NGOs scrutinizing the project assert that officials rushed into reallocating the lands to new investors without properly considering the allegations of irregularities in the licensing process and the environmental and social impacts the project would have.

Arie Rompas, the head of forest campaigns at Greenpeace Indonesia, called the Tanah Merah project a “public scandal” and said the permits underlying it should be examined and revoked.

“There is still an opportunity to save this area,” he said.

Enter the Rumangkangs

Digoel Agri was set up by members of the Rumangkang family, according to the Indonesian government’s corporate registry. The late family patriarch, Ventje Rumangkang, who died in February at the age of 74, was a founder of Indonesia’s Democratic Party, the vehicle for Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s successful presidential run in 2004.

At their office in Jayapura, Jackson and his brother Jones Rumangkang, 44, said they had decided to invest in the Tanah Merah project after being encouraged to do so by bureaucrats in Boven Digoel, the district in which the project is located. They then formed several companies under the Digoel Agri brand and set about acquiring the permits.

The brothers said they were helped along by Fabianus Senfahagi, the head of a local indigenous people’s association. He had played a role shepherding through the project in its early stages, accompanying surveyors sent by other investors around 2012.

A paper trail of correspondence among Fabianus and government officials shows he subsequently agitated for the permits to be revoked and reassigned to the Digoel Agri Group.

His letters to the district government in 2014 claimed the local Auyu people were anxiously waiting for the project to begin. By this time, the land concessions that would be transferred to the Rumangkangs were majority-owned by Tadmax Resources, a Malaysian logging and property conglomerate. Minority stakes were retained by the Menara Group, an enigmatic Jakarta firm that brought the project to life in 2010.

Over the next three years, the permits held by Tadmax and Menara were revoked by the district and provincial governments. The stated rationale for cancelling them was the companies’ failure to begin operating. However, bureaucrats at the Papua investment agency had also raised concerns that some of the permits had been falsified.

Tadmax and Menara have not responded to repeated requests to comment on these allegations.

By 2017, the concessions previously held by Tadmax and Menara had been reallocated to the Digoel Agri Group.

In early 2019, Tadmax and Menara challenged this decision. A letter to the central government from Dr. Sadino & Partners, a law firm representing the joint investors, accused officials of illegally revoking the permits. They also argued that anyone using the same land on the basis of new permits — like the ones underlying Digoel Agri’s operations — was committing a crime.

Jones and Jackson insisted that Digoel Agri was in compliance with the law and had obtained the permits it needed to begin operating, from the district and provincial governments.

Ordinarily, to convert rainforest to a plantation, Digoel Agri would also have needed to apply to the forestry ministry in Jakarta to rezone the land for development. But by the time the Rumangkangs arrived in Papua, this process had already taken place.

The Menara Group and its co-investors had obtained decrees rezoning the land from the then-minister in 2011. These decrees were issued on the basis of permits that provincial government officials have repeatedly reported were falsified.

In an interview last year, Sigit Hardwinarto, the ministry’s director-general of forest planning, said the rezoning could be reviewed if the allegation that the permits had been falsified was reported to his department.

The rezoning of the land is a legacy of the administration of President Yudhoyono and then-Forestry Minister Zulkifli Hasan. During his tenure, Zulkifli reportedly rezoned 2.4 million hectares (5.9 million acres) of land for conversion to oil palm plantations.

Yudhoyono’s successor, President Joko Widodo, and the new forestry minister, Siti Nurbaya Bakar, have sought to strike a different path. In 2018, Widodo signed a three-year moratorium on the issuance of new licenses for oil palm plantations.

The policy had been announced in the wake of Indonesia’s 2015 fire and haze crisis, in which Indonesia’s vast peat swamps burned as a result of agricultural fires from the oil palm and timber plantation industries. Toxic smoke from the fires drifted into neighboring countries, creating a public health crisis.

The moratorium explicitly barred the forestry ministry from rezoning land for oil palm development. It also instructed the cabinet to review all existing oil palm permits with an eye toward possibly revoking them. Several weeks after the president first declared he would sign the moratorium, in 2016, Siti singled out the Tanah Merah project as one that merited scrutiny.

In comments posted on her personal website, Siti referred disparagingly to the fact that the project appeared to have been established so the licenses could be “traded” to Malaysian investors, and said the president had instructed her to prioritize implementing the moratorium in Papua.

“We really have to safeguard [the forests of Papua] and must formulate and implement a development concept in Papua to the best of our ability,” she quoted Widodo as telling her.

However, neither these policies nor the allegations around the Tanah Merah project have stymied its progress under the direction of new investors. NGOs monitoring the implementation of the moratorium have noted limited progress in Papua.

“There has been no significant progress in how this policy is implemented,” said Arie, the Greenpeace campaigner. “The Tanah Merah project should be a strong case to see how this [policy] can be carried out seriously and effectively.”

Competing interests

The Rumangkangs insist that the project will benefit the Auyu people. Jones said the ones he met were overjoyed about the prospect of a plantation on their land.

“They didn’t just ask, they cried,” he said. “The Auyu tribe is the poorest in Boven Digoel, even though they’re so rich [in natural resources].”

The Rumangkangs have enlisted foreign investors to help them develop the plantation. Their chief partner is a New Zealand property developer named Neville Mahon. In 2018, Mahon became the majority shareholder of the Digoel Agri subsidiaries with land concessions in the project. He could not be reached for comment.

Mahon associate Thirunavukarasu Selva Nithan, an Australian national, is the sole director of the three companies, corporate records show. Contacted by email, he said he had resigned his position and directed questions to Jackson.

The involvement of these investors adds to a growing list of actors from across the world with a stake in what could become the world’s largest stretch of oil palm. Malaysian logging giant Shin Yang has constructed a sawmill to process timber from the project.

North of the Digoel Agri concessions, investors whose identities are hidden behind anonymously owned companies in the United Arab Emirates have also begun clearing land, with the Menara Group and the sister of a prominent politician from Indonesia’s National Mandate Party as their minor partners. So far, they’ve bulldozed 8,300 hectares (20,500 acres) of forest, nearly 3% of the project’s total area.

Yet another firm holds the rights to the northernmost block of the project. Corporate records show it is majority owned by two holding companies registered to a letterbox address in Malaysia. The minor shareholder in that venture is the Malaysian logging giant Rimbunan Hijau.

Many Auyu remain steadfastly opposed to the Tanah Merah project, according to Franky Samperante, the director of Pusaka, an Indonesian nonprofit that advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights.

On a recent trip to the area, he found that members of the Kemon clan, whose land has been targeted by Digoel Agri, did not want the plantation to go ahead on the grounds that it would destroy their food and water supplies.

He questioned the government’s decision to allow the plantation to move ahead, without investigating the allegation that permits held by the earlier investors had been falsified.

“In light of the irregularities that have arisen, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry must review the decrees rezoning the land,” he said. “The government must impose sanctions on the perpetrators.”

Banner: Moses Wine returns from hunting in the forest in Meto, a village within the boundaries of the Tanah Merah project. Image by Nanang Sujana for The Gecko Project.

Article published by mongabayauthor

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