2) The (un)making of Joko Widodo
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(photos in article)
1) State neglect means Indigenous Papuans’ victory over palm oil firm is shaky
by Hans Nicholas Jong on 2 September 2020
- Local authorities in Indonesia’s West Papua province have revoked the permits for an 11,475-hectare (28,355-acre) oil palm concession because it includes a forest that’s sacred to the Indigenous Moi people.
- Activists have welcomed the move but note that the permits could have been scrapped much sooner for various other reasons, including a violation of plantation size limits.
- They also criticized the central government, specifically the environment ministry, for not reaffirming the district government’s recognition of the Moi people’s Indigenous land rights, which would have made the forest off-limits to commercial exploitation.
- Without this official recognition from the central government, the forest can still be licensed out for agriculture, activists point out.
Map of Moi customary forests.
JAKARTA — Indigenous rights activists have welcomed the cancellation of an oil palm plantation permit on Indigenous land in Indonesia’s Papua region. They say the case is a prime example of the need to officially recognize Indigenous land rights.
On Aug. 14, the head of Sorong district in the province of West Papua issued a series of decrees revoking the various permits issued since 2011 to PT Mega Mustika Plantation (MMP) for 11,475 hectares (28,355 acres) of land in the district.
The move came in response to a long-running campaign by the Indigenous Moi people against MMP and two other plantation companies — PT Inti Kebun Lestari (IKL) and PT Sorong Agro Sawitindo (SAS) — with concessions on the group’s ancestral lands.
MMP’s concession included the Klaso forest, which the Moi consider a sacred part of their creation myth.
“After a thorough study on oil palm plantation in Klaso, it’s decided to return [the area] to the citizens who own the rights to the ancestral land,” Johnny Kamuru, the Sorong district chief, said after personally handing over copies of the decrees revoking MMP’s permits to the Klaso Indigenous council chief, Danci Ulimpa.
Franky Samperante, the executive director of the NGO Pusaka, which advocates for Indigenous rights across Indonesia, welcomed the decision.
“The forests in Klaso are the place where the Moi Indigenous tribe get their education from,” he told Mongabay. “It’s for Indigenous education and it’s sacred.”
Franky noted that Sorong district had a bylaw in place since 2017 recognizing the Moi people’s Indigenous status and protecting them. The bylaw was followed by a guideline, issued by Johnny earlier this year, that spells out the details of this recognition and protection of their ancestral land rights.
Based on the bylaw alone, the Ministry of Environment and Forestry should have been able to sign a decree annulling the environment permit for the concession — one of the three permits issued to MMP since 2011 — three years ago, Franky said. He added the Moi had submitted a request to that end in 2018, but the ministry never took action.
“The ministry should have been in sync with the district government,” he said.
Exceeding the size limit
There are other reasons MMP should never have been granted the concession in the first place, activists say.
Indonesian law limits the amount of plantation estate that a company can control to 20,000 hectares (49,000 acres) per province, or 40,000 hectares (99,000 acres) in the case of Papua and West Papua provinces. In the Bornean province of West Kalimantan, local authorities recently revoked the permits of seven plantation companies for exceeding the size limit.
In West Papua, MMP’s parent company, Ciptana Group, controls 71,445 hectares (176,544 acres) of land — nearly the size of New York City — through its four subsidiaries, according to data from Pusaka. That puts it in violation of the size limit.
The spread of plantations in Papua and elsewhere should also have been checked by a moratorium issued by the president in 2018 on the granting of new licenses for oil palm concessions. And for the Papua region specifically, a top official earlier this year declared that licenses for other crops would be given preference over oil palms. Luhut Pandjaitan, the chief minister in charge of investments, including in the palm oil industry, declared the halt on new oil palm plantations.
Plantation permit review
As part of the moratorium, local governments are required to review the permits of existing oil palm plantations operating in their jurisdictions. But progress on this front has been slow, said Achmad Surambo, deputy director of Sawit Watch, an independent industry watchdog.
He noted that all that the central government had managed to achieve in the two years since the moratorium came into force was confirm the total size of oil palm plantations nationwide, which stands at 16.38 million hectares (40.48 million acres) — an area half the size of neighboring Malaysia. A lack of transparency in the review process also means it’s unclear if the Sorong district head’s decision to revoke MMP’s permits is a part of the moratorium, Achmad said.
“If we ask local heads why they aren’t conducting permit reviews, they’ll ask back ‘where’s the technical guideline and where’s the budget?’” Achmad told Mongabay. “The moratorium doesn’t say who has to bear the cost of the review, so the policy is half-baked.”
Officials in West Papua say they’ve been proactive about reviewing permits for existing plantations. Heri Wijayanto, who heads the provincial agriculture department, said the permits of all 18 concession holders currently operating there are under review. Together, they control 490,191 hectares (1,21 million acres) of land. Half of the concession holders have not yet started clearing their land for planting; five have already done so and are now planting, and the remaining four are already harvesting palm fruit.
Heri said the results of the permit reviews can’t be published yet because some information is still missing and needs to be verified.
Bustar Maitar, the executive director of the environmental NGO Econusa, which is working with the West Papua government on the reviews, said disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have made the process more challenging. This is especially the case for on-the-ground checks, which have been hampered by social-distancing rules, he said.
Bustar added that once the assessments are complete, possibly by the end of this year, the reviewers will submit their recommendations to the West Papua governor and the district heads on which permits, if any, should be revoked.
Not out of the woods yet
The victory for the Moi tribe over MMP doesn’t mean their sacred Klaso forest is out of danger. The land will continue to be a target of commercial interests for as long as the government refuses to recognize it as Indigenous land, activists say.
The process of gaining official recognition is a tedious and time-consuming one that involves petitioning the district council to pass a bylaw. It took one community in another part of Indonesia five years to secure such a bylaw; in areas where local governments have already granted concessions on the land, it can take even longer, if at all.
The Moi are one of only a handful of Indigenous communities in Indonesia who have secured such a bylaw, which they obtained in 2017. But the bylaw isn’t enough. The environment ministry must then use that bylaw to issue a decree that essentially serves as the central government’s official recognition of the land as ancestral territory. When the land thus falls under the control and ownership of the community, and not the government, any government-issued permits — including for plantations — immediately become void.
The environment ministry, however, has failed to acknowledge the Sorong district government’s recognition of the Moi people’s Indigenous land rights, and so the Klaso forest continues to be classified as a state forest.
“The Moi have verified two ancestral forests in Klaso,” said Franky from Pusaka, “but there hasn’t been a response from the ministry.”
If the status of the ancestral land remains unchanged, the government can issue new permits to other companies, including for oil palms once the moratorium ends next year, said Achmad from Sawit Watch.
“It’s happened before, where plantation permits were revoked but then new ones were given to other companies later,” he said.
Banner image: Sorong district head Johnny Kamuru talks to Indigenous Moi peoples in Dela village, Sorong, West Papua Barat. Image by Yoel Mugi.
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2) The (un)making of Joko Widodo
NAVA NURANIYAH
Published 2 Sep 2020 06:00
Ben Bland examines the tension in Indonesia of a democratic transition with authoritarian spoilers still in place.
Book Review: Ben Bland, Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the struggle to remake Indonesia (Penguin, Lowy Institute, 2020)
Indonesian President Joko Widodo, a man once dubbed “a new hope” for democracy, has instead presided over a period of democratic stagnation and regression, according to many scholars of Indonesia. Ben Bland’s new Lowy Institute Paper Man of Contradictions attempts to unpack how the affable everyman persona of “Jokowi” has given way to a more calculating, transactional leader, by bringing together contemporary academic debates and the author’s own insights into Jokowi’s Indonesia. The result is a compact, compelling narrative that serves as an accessible entry-point for policy makers and observers to understand Jokowi’s rise from small town mayor to president of the world’s largest Muslim country.
Bland’s account of Jokowi’s authoritarian turn is simple but not necessarily simplistic. It goes beyond looking just at Jokowi’s leadership style by also considering underlying structural causes, such as what he calls “the original sin of reformasi”.
“The price of a mostly smooth and peaceful transition”, Bland writes, “has been to leave Suharto-era figures and institutions with a seat at the table”.
Indeed, as Edward Aspinall argued back in 2010, the irony of Indonesia’s successful democratic transition was that it rested upon buy-in from authoritarian spoilers, and built anti-democratic potential into the new system. Bland’s knack for engaging storytelling and memorable turns of phrase helps summarise these complex themes.
The key to understanding Jokowi’s inconsistencies, Bland argues, “lies in a heavy dose of realism about the nature of both Indonesia and the man”. Jokowi turned out not to be “the democratic reformer … but neither is he some sort of authoritarian wolf in sheep’s clothing. Rather, he has been shaped by the winds that swirl around him”. The massive Islamist mobilisation that brought down his close ally, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (known as Ahok), in 2016 is particularly identified as a determining factor that “blew him off course”. Bland rightly notes that the anti-Ahok mobilisation prompted Jokowi’s “reaching for the guide ropes of authoritarian rule” by bolstering the contingent of Suharto-era military figures in his cabinet.
But Bland pulls up short of a deeper examination of how rising Islamism also directly led to Jokowi taking an Islamic turn. Rather than being flung helplessly left and right by the growing tide of sectarian polarisation, Jokowi managed to harness and turn it on his opponents.
As his rival presidential candidate (now Defence Minister) Prabowo Subianto courted hardcore Islamist groups in the run-up to last year’s election, Jokowi recast his image from simple everyman to pious vanguard of Islamic moderatism. Key to this shift in strategy was his close alliance with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the country’s largest Islamic organisation, which not only delivered important Muslim votes during the election constituencies but is now also supporting his efforts to further suppress Islamist opposition in his second term.
As a political biography, Bland’s book could have further unpacked the president’s religious and ideological background to understand how it might be informing his engagement with political Islam. If Jokowi co-opted aspects of political Islam to mitigate the Islamist threat to his position, as Bland suggests, why didn’t he opt for the all-inclusive accommodation of his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono? Instead Jokowi selectively extended patronage to conservative figures from the mainstream NU, most notably Ma’ruf Amin, while repressing more hardcore Islamist groups such as Hizbut Tahrir.
Bland holds that Jokowi is part of the abangan (nominal Muslim) class who strategically projects himself to foreign leaders as champion of moderate Islam. However, he does not give more insights into Jokowi’s personal religious and ideological inclinations. It thus remains unclear whether Jokowi’s heavy-handed policy in combating radical Islam was motivated solely by political calculations or if his personal convictions also played a part.
The chapter on foreign policy is thinner than perhaps many had anticipated. Devoting significant space to Indonesia’s faltered maritime diplomacy and multilateral engagements, Bland misses opportunities to delve deeper into Indonesia’s most complex yet important bilateral relationships, that with China. Jokowi continues to walk a tightrope between his desire for voluminous, “no-strings-attached” investment from Beijing and relatively high domestic suspicion of Chinese economic dominance – driven in large part by Islamist opponents but also shared by others within the Muslim community.
The key to understanding this trade-off may lie in Jokowi’s more visible “Islamic diplomacy” in recent years. Though some have argued this Islamic diplomacy is driven by purely domestic concerns, there are still curious contradictions that are worth unpacking. The book unfortunately skips over discussion of the stark contrast between Indonesia’s silence on the Uighur issue and its increasingly vocal stance on Palestine, its surprisingly deep engagementin the Afghan peace process, or its expressed concerns over anti-Muslim violence in India.
Also missing is the Jokowi administration’s active role in the global campaign for “Archipelago Islam (Islam Nusantara)”, which is often feted by Western diplomats eager to hold the country up as a beacon of moderate Islam. A better understanding of when and why Jokowi has sought to employ moderate Muslim diplomacy and engage on the plight of Muslims elsewhere in the world could shed further light on his foreign policy calculus.
Overall, the book provides a concise summary of Jokowi’s political ascendancy and Indonesia’s second experiment with democracy. A deeper investigation into the uneven influence of religion on Jokowi’s governing decisions, including on foreign policy would help bring Indonesia’s “man of contradictions” into greater focus.
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