For a country with a record of large deforestation projects, Indonesia’s current activities in the far southeastern corner of the republic, South Papua province, surpass all.

With 2.5 million hectares of land being cleared for sugarcane and rice production for food and biofuel projects, alongside large oil palm concessions, Indonesia’s government has created a hugely consequential project right on Papua New Guinea and Australia’s doorsteps.

It is transforming the shape of an otherwise forest and swamp-dominated region, as well as the environment, culture and health of local Papuan communities.

New film on West Papua highlights ‘ecocide’.     Video: RNZ

“The world should notice this. It’s not the Amazon, it’s just in our front door, in the Pacific here,” said Dandhy Dwi Laksono, director of Pesta Babi (Pig Feast): Colonialism in our Time, a new documentary film about the impacts of the deforestation in South Papua, the agri-business schemes behind it and the role Indonesia’s military plays in it all.

Laksono has been in New Zealand this week promoting the film with its producer, West Papuan journalist Victor Mambor, who said few people in other parts of the world know about what’s going on there.

“Maybe they only know [of] the conflict, military conflict, armed conflict in West Papua. But they never know the conflict like that,” he said.

The film sheds new light on the response by local Papuans in the wider Merauke region and its remote bush communities to an agri-business master plan attempted by several Indonesian presidents now.

Prabowo accelerated project
The current president, Prabowo Subianto, has accelerated the project and committed military support for it, saying the military is needed to secure the agri-business projects in Papua because of their scale and importance to Indonesia’s national food and energy security.

However, Mambor said the presence of Indonesian troops in Papua had long been problematic for Papuans, and was growing.

“This is the problem in West Papua. There will be more troops, and then of course because of more troops there will be more conflict. More troops, more conflict, more problem.”

Given the ongoing armed conflict between West Papuan independence fighters and Indonesia’s military in other parts of Papua region (known internationally as West Papua), this film offers a useful insight into a struggle that is less known, but no less concerning.

Papua has some of the world’s largest remaining tracts of native rainforest — and clearing this large region of forest and swamp systems is likely to add to carbon emissions, pollution haze and biodiversity loss.

According to the NGO Mighty Earth, estimates of the CO2 emissions from so much land clearance range from 315 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent (Indonesia’s first state-owned inspection, testing, certification, and consultancy company) to more than double that, according to a report by the Indonesian independent research institute.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

Two Indonesian journalists who had reported on an illegal oil palm plantation in Sumatra have been found stabbed to death.

According to environmental news site Mongabay, the body of Maraden Sianipar was found on October 30 in a ditch in the concession of palm grower PT Sei Alih Berombang (SAB).

The body of Martua Siregar, 42, was found the next day in the bushes nearby.

Both men worked for a weekly publication, Pindo Merdeka, based in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province.

Witnesses said the journalists had also been involved with a community dispute with the plantation company in which the community was attempting to take control of the oil palm once the local forestry office had ruled that the company’s expansion onto forested land was illegal.

While Mongabay reports that SAB’s concession was sealed off by authorities a year ago after it was found to have cleared 750 hectares of forest to plant oil palms, the plantation still maintained a detail of security guards who were known to violently confront locals seeking to harvest the palm fruit.

Witnesses said that the journalists had gone to the plantation on October 29 with a group of locals to harvest the palm fruit. According to one witness, he had warned Maraden that plantation guards armed with machetes were waiting for them.

Two people have since been arrested in Labuhan Batu in relation to the murders and police are hunting down another four, reports The Jakarta Post.

Labuhan Batu police chief detective Jama Kita Purba said the motive behind the murder was “revenge over a land dispute.”

While it is unclear whether the murders were a direct response to the men’s journalistic work or their activism work with the community, The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) and the Indonesian Journalists Association (PWI) have weighed in, condemning the killings and called on authorities to further investigate the case.

In an editorial, The Jakarta Post wrote that: “Indonesia has become an increasingly dangerous place for journalists, and the consequences of this disturbing trend could be dire for the world’s third-largest democracy.”

“Regardless of the results of the investigation, the incident has again rung the alarm bell on the state of press freedom in the country.”

“We can’t afford to let this go on. To quote United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, ‘when journalists are targeted, societies as a whole, pay a price’.”

The murders come a month after another Indonesian activist, Golfrid Siregar was found dead in similar circumstances in Sumatra.

A human rights lawyer an activist for Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia, or Walhi, Indonesia’s largest environmental group, Siregar was a tireless advocate of communities threatened by oil palm plantations.

He had been engaged in a lawsuit against North Sumatra’s governor over his 2017 approval for the construction of the Batang Toru hydroelectric dam in the only know habitat of Indonesia’s critically endangered Tapanuli orangutan.

A cab driver found Siregar unconscious on a street in Medan and took him to a local hospital where he later died on October 6.

He had suffered multiple injuries and his wallet and other personal effects were missing.

Police ruled Siregar’s death the result of a drunken-driving crash, despite the contradictory nature of the injuries, his undamaged motorbike and testimony from his family that he hadn’t drunk alcohol that evening.

The cab driver and two others have since been arrested for robbing Siregar of his possessions.

Walhi colleagues said that Siregar had received several threats since they had filed the lawsuit against the Batang Toru dam.

According to Andreas Harsono of Human Rights Watch, the death and its investigation should ring alarm bells.

“All those concerned about Indonesia’s environment will be watching the authorities to ensure that a credible investigation occurs and that any crime associated with his death is appropriately prosecuted.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk

Thousands of forest fires have been burning across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, disrupting air travel, closing schools and sickening thousands of people, reports the New York Times.

Officials have said that about 80 per cent of the fires were intentionally set to make room for lucrative cash crops like oil palm.

Spokesman for Indonesia’s disaster management agency Agus Wibowo said that these “slash and burn tactics” were the quickest and cheapest method for farmers to clear the land of its carbon rich rainforests.

READ MORE: Precarious politics pose threats to world’s three biggest rainforests

Aerial photographs have showed huge clouds of white smoke across vast areas of Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, which is home to the endangered Orangutan.

The toxic haze from the fires has also been affecting neighbouring countries, with hundreds of schools in Malaysia forced to close, reports The Guardian.

Indonesian officials have reportedly attempted to deflect some of the blame for the smoke to fires in Malaysia.

“The Indonesian government has been systematically trying to resolve this to the best of its ability. Not all smog is from Indonesia,” said Indonesia’s Environment Minister, Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

However, her Malaysian counterpart Yeo Bee Yin has since released data from the ASEAN Specialised Meteorological Centre (ASMC), which showed the total number of hotspots in Kalimantan was 474 and 387 in Sumatra. By comparison, only seven were recorded in Malaysia.

According to CNA News, Indonesian president Joko Widodo has said he has “made every effort” to extinguish the fires by deploying aircraft and 6000 troops to the hot spots and holding a “salat istisqa”- a prayer to Allah for rain in times of drought.

If nothing comes of the prayer, Coordinating Minister for Politics, Security and Legal Affairs Wiranto has said that the government will seed the clouds with chemicals to prompt “artificial rainfall”, reports Detik News.

While 200 people have been arrested in relation to the fires, officials have said that air quality had been recorded as “unhealthy” or “very unhealthy” in Malaysia, Sarawak and Singapore.

Indonesian forest fires have been a major environmental and health issue in recent decades as dryer conditions and the growing global demand for palm oil exacerbate their spread.

The 2015 forest fires resulted in huge plumes of smoke reaching as far away as Cambodia. Research has estimated at least 23 million were affected and over 100,000 thousand were killed from respiratory related illnesses in Indonesia alone.

The cost to mitigate the 2015 haze was reported to be US$40 billion.

The fires in Indonesia have added to global alarm about the dire situation in Brazil, where blazes have consumed over 2 million acres of rainforest in the Amazon basin, known as the “lungs of the earth”.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Michael Andrew’s Pacific Media Watch interview with Rosa Moiwend of West Papua. Video: Pacific Media Centre

By Michael Andrew

West Papuan human rights defender Rosa Moiwend was in New Zealand this week, speaking about the need for more countries to challenge Indonesia on its human rights abuses in her homeland.

Her New Zealand tour featured talks in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland where she discussed West Papuan resistance to expanding Indonesian military and business interests.

She told Pacific Media Watch contributing editor Michael Andrew about Indonesia’s confiscation of indigenous land for oil palm developments and its attempt to isolate West Papua from the rest of the Pacific.

“Land has been taken away from the indigenous people,” she says in this video report.

“And this massive food project is a kind of third wave of taking people’s land without permission.”

Moiwend also says there needs to be stronger media coverage.

“To get the information, maybe they are not well informed, that’s my assumption,” she says.

“Or, the second thing is, maybe they don’t have access to get into West Papua. Again, it is really important that the New Zealand government talks to the Indonesian government and asks them that they should open up to the media.”

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz