1) Papua govt stresses protection of customary land rights
- November 21, 2025 00:56 GMT+700
“Customary land rights are not just land but an ancestral heritage that symbolizes sovereignty and identity, so customary rights must be recognized,” Papua Deputy Governor Aryoko Rumaropen said in Jayapura on Thursday.
Rumaropen noted that land is both a trust from the ancestors and a legacy for future generations. He said the government aims to ensure a sovereign Papua through proper regional mapping and community empowerment.
“Therefore, the ongoing socialization of customary land administration and registration is a strategic step to strengthen the legal recognition of indigenous community rights in Papua,” he said.
He explained that the initiative aligns with Minister of ATR/BPN Regulation No. 14 of 2024, which recognizes customary land rights as long as they remain valid under applicable customary law.
“This requires an administrative process that includes inventory, identification, measurement, mapping, and recording in the customary land register,” he said.
He added that the success of this effort depends greatly on cross-sector collaboration involving local governments, traditional institutions, universities, and the National Land Agency (BPN).
“With solid cooperation, we can ensure that the recognition and registration of customary land is fair, transparent, and respectful of customary values,” he said.
Related news: Customary lands in Papua expected to benefit community
Related news: Local governments urged to map customary lands to reduce conflicts
Translator: Ardiles Leloltery, Cindy Frishanti Octavia
Editor: Primayanti
On Tuesday November 18, PBI-Canada hosted a webinar that featured Indigenous West Papuan environmental defenders Dina Danomira and Teddy Wakum along with Global Witness policy advisor Javier Garate.
They offered their insights about COP30 in Belém, Brazil in a discussion with PBI-Canada coordinator Brent Patterson in Ottawa and an audience of 100+ people listening in from Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Norway, the United Kingdom, Honduras, Indonesia, Fiji, Rwanda, Morocco and New Zealand.
Just a few days prior, on Saturday November 15, Dina, Teddy and Javier participated – with 70,000 people – in the Great People’s March.
Dina Danomira
During the webinar, Danomira highlighted: “Not many people know that West Papua has the third largest rainforest in the world after Amazon and Congo. It is very important for us to increase our international solidarity and raise awareness about environmental destruction and human rights abuses in West Papua.”
The Guardian has also explained: “West Papua is the western half of the island of New Guinea, home to the world’s third-largest rainforest. It is rich in natural resources, including the world’s largest gold and copper mine, as well as extensive reserves of natural gas, minerals and timber. …West Papua, which has been under Indonesian control since 1963 [is] where thousands of acres of rainforest are being cleared for agriculture.”
That industrial agriculture includes sugar cane, palm oil and bioethanol production for export. (It remains to be seen how this will be impacted by the new Canada-Indonesia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement announced by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney in September 2025.)
Teddy Wakum
Wakum further noted: “We are here to highlight the issue of Indigenous people and the other issue of human rights violations. In West Papua, in Merauke, we are concerned on the ground about the Indonesia policy that plans to take two million hectares of land.”
In September 2024, Mongabay reported: “A total of 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of forests, wetlands and grasslands in Merauke district will be razed to make way for a cluster of giant sugarcane plantations, part of the Indonesian government’s efforts to boost domestic sugar production. Five consortiums, consisting of Indonesian and foreign companies [including PT Global Papua Abadi], are confirmed to be participating in the 130 trillion rupiah ($8.4 billion) project, with roles ranging from developing sugarcane plantations and processing mills, to building the power plants to run them.”
Mongabay has also reported that Wakum, a lawyer and the director of the Merauke Legal Aid Institute (LBH), is providing legal assistance to many of the Indigenous communities affected by the food estate project.
Javier Garate
And Garate shared: “The Defenders Team at Global Witness has supported the COP do Povo or the People’s COP where there is a wall that the friends did with all the names of every person, every land and environmental defender, that we as Global Witness has documented who have been killed since 2012.”
In September 2025, Global Witness published its annual report on land and environmental defenders, titled Roots of Resistance, that showed that the total number of defenders killed or disappeared from 2012 to 2024 now comes to at least 2,253 people.
That list includes the names of 25 land and environmental defenders killed in Indonesia during that period. Global Witness notes that those killed in 2024 include:
Petition to stop PSN Merauke
At the conclusion of the webinar, Danomira stated: “For us, as West Papuan, we need all the international solidarity that we can get. So, as simple as mentioning West Papua in any action, in any protest, in any intervention, is very powerful for us. Our case is the same as in the Amazon and Congo, and even in conflict areas like Palestine, West Papua is experiencing a lot of that too.”
The Guardian has reported: “West Papuans say more than 500,000 of their people have been killed by the occupation in the past six decades, while millions of acres of their ancestral lands have been destroyed for corporate profit.”
That article adds that the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP) describes this repression as a “hidden genocide”.
Danomira highlighted: “I would like to put in a petition that is ongoing which is part of a court case that they are bringing to the National Constitutional Court about the issue of the National Strategic Project in the whole Indonesia. If everyone could just help and sign the petition we are trying to send that to the President to stop this project.”
The petition – Land Grabbing and Deforestation Is the Biggest Deforestation, President Prabowo Stops PSN Merauke! – can be found here.
Earlier this year, Mongabay also explained: “Hundreds of Indigenous people and civil society groups in Indonesia are demanding an end to government projects that have seized their lands, fueled violence, and stripped them of their rights. …[They oppose the] displacement and suffering caused by …projects classified as being of strategic national importance, or PSN… which include roads, dams, power plants, industrial estates and plantations.”
That article notes that “priority projects” with the PSN designation are fast-tracked “often at the cost of people’s rights and environmental and social impacts.”
Defenders under threat
On the same day as the webinar, UN Special Rapporteurs Mary Lawlor, Michel Forst, Elisa Morgera and others highlighted: “The protection of Indigenous Peoples’ human rights is essential, as they are facing widespread violations not only because of the continued expansion of fossil fuels in their territories, but also just transition projects, mining and carbon credits that do not respect their rights or harm biodiversity, water, food and health. Indigenous Peoples seek to be heard and ask that solutions affecting them are co-developed with them.”
Also on the same day as the webinar, Morgera, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and climate change, further wrote: “At COP30, the international community must recognize that protecting human rights defenders – and co-developing climate solutions with them – is central to delivering on the Paris Agreement. …Protection of defenders and co-development of renewables and transition minerals projects must become a condition for climate finance, not an afterthought.”
UNEA-7 in Kenya, COP31 in Turkiye
Morgera further noted: “Beyond COP30, the UN Environmental Assembly in December could be another opportunity to take these points forward.”
The seventh session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA-7) will take place from December 8–12, 2025, in Nairobi, Kenya.
It is now known that COP31, briefly discussed during the PBI-Canada webinar, will take place in Antalya, Turkiye in November 2026.
We continue to follow this.
Previous reading: Register now for PBI-Canada webinar on COP30 and West Papuan Indigenous human rights defenders (November 14, 2025)
Fatal free lunch
3) Indonesia’s free meals for kids program has left thousands of youngsters with food poisoning, and returned the country to the bad old days of military influence.
“All power flows from the barrel of a gun,” said Mao Zedong. His aphorism may have been right a century ago in China, but not in modern Indonesia. In the nation next door, power comes subtly via unarmed brigadiers in boardrooms. The riflemen are there, but out of sight.
Professional corporations with genuine jobs to fill normally advertise for the best certified and experienced applicants to stay innovative and competitive. Patronage appointments kill such management essentials.
Meat and veggie buyers, cooks, hygiene inspectors, nutritionists, quality controllers, agricultural advisors – there are scores of positions with Makan Bergizi Gratis (MBG) – the free meals for kiddies’ programme.
The venture is to stop stunting through malnutrition – a most worthwhile goal – so standards should be high.
They’re not. Much of the work is being done by young guys hired to kill but employed to care. No surprise that more than 10,000 children have reportedly been gripped by food poisoning,
Dirty kitchens, food left to the flies, delivery delays, and hands and workbenches unwashed – the list is extensive and the blame clear: kitchens are no place for enlistees.
Video grabs of screaming students on classroom floors, fouled by vomit and diarrhoea, have ensured widespread coverage and demands that the program be shut until fixed.
That won’t happen, because the initiator of this stench is President Prabowo Subianto, 74, who swept into power last year on the promise of free tucker. It remains his flagship policy, and to stall would show defeat – difficult for an ageing authoritarian who knows he knows best.
The goal is 75 million meals a week through 1,400 kitchens by the end of this year – the cost A$10 billion.
Next year, the budget is expected to blow out threefold. Economists fear health and education money boxes will get raided and services suffer, though not the military, which is on an international weapons-buying spree.
By 2027, the MBG could gallop past A$27 billion, overtaking the defence allocation of A$18 billion.
It shows what goes wrong when a voter-grabbing policy first scribbled on a restaurant receipt isn’t backed by thought-throughs on infrastructure and planning. The public gets fed up with delays in implementing promised change – but here’s a good reason why patience is prudent.
When Prabowo won the election last year and flaunted his pledge, the applause was worthy of a footy win, though players knew there were too few cooks and bottle washers and a dearth of commercial kitchens.
The solution? Conscript the army.
Soldiers who joined for adventure, a uniform, a haircut and the chance to shoot dissidents in Papua found themselves scrubbing food trays.
Corruption has reportedly flooded the fractured system as a tsunami of unchecked government cash swirls around the dishes of cold soup and burned rice. The service is a continuous rush; no time for audits.
The policy of employing the military in civic affairs was refined by the Republic’s second president, former army general Soeharto. When he was overthrown in 1998 by students preaching democracy, dwifungsi (two functions) was also ditched. Now it’s back with Prabowo, also a former general and Soeharto’s former son-in-law.
There are already ten departments and industries where the military rules. They’ve also seized 3.7 million hectares of private palm-oil plantations and handed them to a state-owned company.
The Kuala Lumpur-based youth NGO World Order Lab voiced its concerns: “Partisan loyalty has increasingly dictated appointments, often sidelining professional qualifications in leadership. This is no accident but a calculated strategy of power consolidation, which signals that loyalty and political stability outweigh technocratic competence.
“ Patronage appointments undermine the crucial link between responsibility and expertise, leaving critical programs in the hands of those unprepared to manage them.”
The military is getting bigger, spreading wider and digging deeper. Orwell’s Big Brother was a wimp when measured against the Indonesian military’s ambitions.
Expect uniforms everywhere. Regional commands will be doubled to cover most of the archipelago’s 38 provinces. One hundred ’territorial development’ battalions will deploy units in 7,285 kecamatan (districts) within five years.
This isn’t secret stuff – the Defence Ministry published a full-page explanatory ad in the Kompas newspaper. The headline read Bukan Lagi Sekadar Militer: Pertahanan Rakyat Gaya Indonesia (No longer just the military: Indonesian-style people’s defence). No need for a catchy title - it’s an order.
It listed plans to enlarge battalions specialising in health and agriculture between now and 2030, claiming these have expanded and transformed “people’s defence based on prosperity and cross-sector collaboration”. The reasoning here is impenetrable.
The ad was published “to counter public perception that these actions represent militarisation.” The public’s perception has been clear – so have the commentators.
Veteran Bloomberg Asian affairs columnist Karishma Vaswani warned: “The military’s increased influence (is) potentially enabling human rights violations and corruption.
“(The Kompas ad) was an attempt to normalise the presence of soldiers and generals in everyday life, potentially giving them the kind of influence they had during the Soeharto era…. an outsized role in politics and governance.
“A rejuvenation of the military’s power will reinforce (Prabowo’s) image as a leader who cannot rule without the assistance of the army.”
The Tentara Nasional Indonesia (TNI - Indonesian armed forces) has embedded itself in the national legend for almost eight decades, starting with guerrilla heroes routing the returning Dutch colonialists in the late 1940s.
Through its untouchable status, the TNI has boosted incomes and officers’ salaries by running foundations, factories and co-ops. Men in khaki moved off parade grounds onto the boards of banks, insurance companies, and even big retailers.
Soldiers are supposedly prohibited from business activities, though this is widely overlooked. The TNI is proposing a law change so Army wives can run village kiosks, though the real reason is to legitimise jobs for officers in civil businesses.
Perceptive readers of Pearls and Irritations would have foreseen that Indonesia was sliding into the black pit of military control when a story was published of MPs in fatigues at a post-election boot camp.
The few who still uphold democracy were dismayed; others saw it as a chance for selfies of giggling pols flashing thumbs-up. They should have been down.
The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.
Duncan Graham
Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press). He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia. Duncan Graham has an MPhil degree, a Walkley Award, two Human Rights Commission awards and other prizes for his radio, TV and print journalism in Australia. He lives in East Java.
The hospital’s President Director, Petronella Marcia Risamasu, stated in Jayapura on Thursday that as a Type B referral hospital owned by the Health Ministry, RSUP Jayapura continues to maintain service quality standards, including implementing a tiered referral system to ensure appropriate patient care.
Risamasu said that on November 19, the hospital signed a cooperation agreement with the Social Security Agency for Health (BPJS Kesehatan) as the operational basis for reinstating services, adding that the agreement is an important step in reopening public access to care.
She also hopes the public will understand the provisions of JKN services, particularly regarding the tiered referral system that underpins service delivery.
Related news: TNI provides free health services to Highland Papua residents
“Not all services can be opened simultaneously, but Jayapura General Hospital can already accept tiered referrals and is preparing competency-based referrals to optimize services,” she said.
She further encouraged the public to follow official information through the RSUP Jayapura call center, hotline, and social media channels to stay updated on service developments that the hospital continues to prepare.
Meanwhile, Hernawan Priyastomo, Head of BPJS Kesehatan Jayapura, stated that the agreement serves as a basis for strengthening service governance, including ensuring certainty in service mechanisms for JKN participants.
“The agreement covers the claims mechanism, quality indicators, anti-fraud culture, information technology utilization, and the implementation of quality and cost controls to ensure more structured and equitable services,” he said.
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Translator: Qadri Pratiwi, Cindy Frishanti Octavia
Editor: M Razi Rahman
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