Indigenous people fought alongside youth movements in the creation of an Indonesian nation. But, in the historical writing of Indonesia’s struggle for independence from colonial powers, stories of Indigenous people’s role are nearly non-existent compared to that of the elite educated youth leaders.

This lack of representation reflects the marginalisation of Indigenous peoples, which continued throughout Indonesia’s 75 years of independence.

Indigenous people, whose traditional knowledge and way of life proved to be a force to be reckoned with during the current covid-19 pandemic and who for generations serve as guardians of forests and natural environments, continue to be stigmatised and experience oppression in their own country.

Nearly 20 million, out of a total of 268 million Indonesians, Indigenous peoples are often being associated with “dirty, primitive, underdeveloped, alien, to forest encroacher.”

The stigma resulted in them being underrepresented, either economically, socially, politically, and culturally.

In addition, these communities suffered oppression from the government’s economic driven investment, evicting them from their customary lands to make way for large scale forestry, mining, and plantations.

Freedom fighters
History books barely mention how Indigenous peoples took arms with the Youth movement during the struggle for independence and helped to finally established the Republic of Indonesia.

Rukka Sombolinggi, who comes from the Toraja tribe in South Sulawesi, recalled the experience of her own family. She said that her great grandfather and grandfather were freedom fighters who fought along with students.

Rukka is the secretary-general of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN). The alliance currently represents 2366 indigenous communities throughout Indonesia or more than 18 million individual members.

“My grandfather died as a veteran. The history might not have recorded Indigenous Peoples’ roles for fighting the colonialism, but there were hundreds of thousands of them who died in the wars. Unfortunately, history recorded only the youths movements,” said Sombolinggi.

Sandra Moniaga, a Commissioner for Assessment and Research at the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM), said the majority of Indigenous Peoples, such as Sedulur Sikep in Java, were among the groups who rejected to collaborate with the Dutch colonialists.

Moniaga added that Indigenous peoples have a unique contribution to Indonesia’s struggle for independence. “They preserve Indonesia’s local cultures, protecting our identity as a nation known with hundreds of tribes and cultures,” she said.

Forest guardians
Most of Indigenous peoples’ customary lands are within and near the country’s forests. They play a huge role in protecting the country’s forest and natural environment.

In her recent study about the Marind-Anim Indigenous Peoples in Merauke Regency, Papua Province, anthropologist Sophie Chao who has been living among them for more than a decade, mentioned how the tribe is “caring for the forest, respectable to plants and animals, and nourishing relationships with the natural world”.

Under the administration of Indonesia’s first president Sukarno, Indigenous peoples got their recognition through the State’ agrarian law in 1960.

The law was the first to mention Indigenous peoples. But it stipulates that customary law applies as long as it aligns with national and State interests.

After Soeharto took power in 1966, there was systematic destruction on customary rights during the New Order, according to Sandra.

She said that the government carried out land-grabbing by issuing forest permits on customary lands for forestry, mining and large scale plantations.

“Most of these customary lands were also claimed by the government to be handed over to migrants and TNI (the army) or the police,” she added.

Towards recognition of Indigenous rights
Things started to change for Indigenous peoples in following the end of Soeharto’s rule in 1998.

The 4th Amendment of the 1945 Constitution enacted in 2000 acknowledged their “traditional existence” and “traditional way of life”.

This became the legal basis for the Constitutional Court to rule out customary lands (Hutan Adat) as State’s forests in 2012, or locally known as MK35.

Another progress, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo had revived the Indigenous Peoples Bill, which will strengthen Indigenous peoples’ existence in the Republic and to resolve ongoing conflicts related to customary lands.

“Still, it is difficult to realise these regulations. Instead of RUU MHA (Indigenous Peoples Bill), the government and lawmakers are more eager to pass the Omnibus Law on Job Creation,” slammed Rukka Sombolinggi.

She said currently, Indigenous peoples are facing another form of “colonialism”. Since decentralisation in 2001, the regents and governors were the ones issuing permits over Customary Forest without their consent.

“We are no longer fighting foreign companies, but locals, like the bupati (head of regent), the governor. Their own people,” she said citing Sukarno’s famous speech: “My struggle was easier because it was to expel the colonialists, but yours will be more difficult because it is against your own people.”

Moving forward
During the pandemic, Indigenous peoples that are still practising their traditional knowledge are considered to be the most resilient groups because of their closeness to nature.

“Indigenous peoples who are guarding their areas and not massively exploited their resources and have the spirit of sharing, they have strong resilience against this pandemic. They can even provide their own food,” said Rukka Sombolinggi.

Meanwhile, those who are exposed to modernisation or in conflict with the industries suffer from unemployment, food security, and lacking in health, clean water and sanitation access.

“The claim and promises from big corporations to provide food, open access to education, or employment, they are now becoming helpless due to the characteristic of the virus,” Sombolinggi added.

Sophie Chao admired the courage, resilience, endurance, and creativity of Indigenous Peoples, in general, in the face of ongoing threats to their lands and ways of life.

“For me, my hope is that the cultures and values of Indigenous Peoples will be fully recognised, protected, and promoted by the Indonesian state and by the international community,” said Chao.

“This means making sure that their rights to land are guaranteed, that their full consent is sought where development projects are being planned, and their development takes place in a bottom-up way, based on Masyarakat Adat‘s own aspirations, dreams, and hopes.”

Rukka Sombolinggi, secretary-general of the Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN), and Sandra Moniaga, a Commissioner for Assesment and Research at the National Commission of Human Rights (Komnas HAM) were interviewed for this article, part of a series to commemorate Indonesian Independence Day on August 17. Fidelis Eka Satriastanti is editor of Lingkungan Hidup, The Conversation. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

By Ayat S. Karokaro in Medan

Indonesian ­ activists have deplored the recent jailing of two indigenous community members in Sumatra in a land conflict involving an affiliate of pulp and paper giant Royal Golden Eagle.

The Simalungun District Court, in North Sumatra province, handed down nine-month sentences to Jonny Ambarita and Thomson Ambarita, who are elders from the Sihaporas community, for assaulting an employee of PT Toba Pulp Lestari (TPL), an RGE affiliate company.

The Sihaporas community and PT TPL have been embroiled in a dispute for decades over land to which both lay claim.

READ MORE: Will Asia Pulp and Paper default on its ‘zero-deforestation’ commitments?

As in most such cases in Indonesia, the authorities have sided with corporate interests and pursued criminal charges against the community, said Agustin Simamora, head of the advocacy at the provincial chapter of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN).

“The judges ignored all the facts in this case. This [ruling] is very regrettable,” he said.

The sentences, handed down Feb. 13, cap a trial sparked by an incident last September in which the company, or people claiming to represent it, appeared to be the side escalating the legal wrangling into a violent conflict.

Scuffle broke out
On the morning of September 16, 2019, according to the community members, a group of men claiming to be PT TPL employees arrived in their village and demanded that they cease their farming activity and leave the area.

The farmers refused, and a scuffle broke out, during which the 3-year-old son of one of the community members was reportedly hit by one of the purported company representatives. The child passed out and had to be taken to a nearby public health center.

The following day, leaders of the Sihaporas community went to a nearby police station to file a report about the alleged assault on the child. But the officers refused to receive their complaint, telling them instead to file it at a different precinct office.

Officers from that larger precinct later issued a summons for Jonny and Thomson Ambarita to appear for questioning on September 24. Unknown to the community, PT TPL had filed its own report with the police, alleging that the farmers had assaulted one of its employees in the earlier skirmish.

When Jonny and Thomson showed up at the police station, they were promptly charged and arrested.

In the months since then, they have been indicted, tried, and convicted. But police have still not acted on the community’s report on the alleged attack on the child.

Sahat Hutagalung, the lawyer for Jonny and Thomson Ambarita, called the guilty verdict unfair.

Evidence ignored
Like other observers of the trial, he questioned why much of the evidence presented in court that corroborated the community’s account ­ including witness testimony and videos of the incident ­ was ignored.

“Unfortunately, it was overlooked by the judges,” Sahat said.

Hundreds of members of the Sihaporas community turned up at the courthouse to hear the verdict and demand that Jonny and Thomson be acquitted. Community members said the trial was a familiar ordeal for them: from 2002 to 2004, three other indigenous members were arrested after PT TPL complained they were farming in the disputed area.

Arisman Ambarita was jailed for three months in 2002, while Mangitua Ambarita and Parulian Ambarita were each sentenced in 2004 to two years in prison.

The Sihaporas community has since the early 1900s claimed ancestral rights to a large swath of forest in what is today North Tapanuli district in the province of North Sumatra, where it continues to practice subsistence farming.

In 1913, it loaned part of the land to the Dutch colonial authorities for a pine plantation. After Indonesia won independence from the Dutch, the new government claimed the pine forest, among other Dutch-run assets and properties at the time, as belonging to the Indonesian state.

In 1992, the government issued a pulpwood permit in the area to PT TPL, for a concession covering 185,000 hectares (457,000 acres). The Sihaporas community contends that 40,000 ha (98,800 acres) of that concession is part of its ancestral territory. PT TPL has already planted half of the disputed area with eucalyptus.

No responses
In its campaign to free Jonny and Thomson, the Sihaporas community took its case to Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights last October. Community elders also sent three letters to President Joko Widodo to demand state recognition of their ancestral lands and ask the government to revoke PT TPL’s permit.

There have been no responses to any of those initiatives.

Since 2013, when a landmark Constitutional Court ruling struck down the state’s claim to indigenous peoples’ forests, President Widodo has recognized the rights of 55 indigenous groups to forest areas spanning a combined 24,800 ha. AMAN, the indigenous rights advocacy group, says it has mapped out some 7.8 million ha of land it says belongs to 704 indigenous communities nationwide, including the Sihaporas community.

“When did land ownership certificates come about? Only after Indonesia came into being as a nation,” said Domu Ambarita, a historian for the Sihaporas community. “But indigenous peoples have existed and lived on their customary lands since before Indonesia was established.”

Domu said it was important to recognize the Sihaporas as the stewards of their land at a time when Indonesia is losing its forest at alarming rates to agriculture and other land-use changes.

“Our rituals exist alongside and protect nature,” he said. “If the ancestral forest is owned and seized by PT TPL, everything will be destroyed. We completely reject that.”

This story was first reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a Creative Commons licence. Ayat S. Karokaro is a Mongabay contributor. Translated by Basten Gokkon.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Pacific Media Watch Newsdesk

A journalist has been taken in for police questioning while documenting the land struggles of Temiar Orang Asli, an indigenous community in Kampung Sungai Papan, Malaysia, reports the Malay Mail.

Alexandra Radu from Romania said she was taken to the Gerik district police station yesterday morning after talking to the indigenous villagers about the blockade they had set up to prevent loggers from felling trees on their customary land.

“First the police told me that they are arresting me, but later they said that they only took me to the police station for documentation purposes,” she said.

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

“I’m still here at the police station,” she told Malay Mail when contacted yesterday.

A journalist for Japanese news organisation The Diplomat, Radu said she went to Temiar village on her own and not at the invitation of anyone.

“I went there to cover the life of the Orang Asli there and their blockade issue,” she said.

According to online news site Malaysiakini, loggers and forestry officials destroyed the blockade yesterday which was blocking access to 42 hectares of Orang Asli customary land.

Speaking about the incident, the Organisation for the Preservation of Natural Heritage Malaysia (Peka Malaysia) said: “We regret that the state authorities and loggers are adamant and continuously encroaching upon their (Temiar) customary lands, despite numerous police reports and complaints being lodged with the relevant authorities and ongoing investigations.

“We hope there should not be any attempt to curb any media’s right of information and the public’s right to know any matters pertaining to Orang Asli in this regard.”

Alexandra Radu has since been released. Police have told media that she was not arrested, only brought in to record her statement as a witness to the demolition of the blockade.

While the local government approved logging in the area last year, it has been met with dogged resistance with three Orang Asli villages arrested in mid-July for impeding logging activity.

The Orang Asli are the indigenous people and the oldest inhabitants of peninsula Malaysia and have a powerful connection with the land.

According to Al Jazeera, much of their customary land and its biodiversity is being lost to palm oil plantations which are expanding rapidly throughout Malaysia.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

COMMENTARY: By Tarcisius Kabutaulaka

Since the late 1980s, the logging industry has dominated the Solomon Islands economy.

For nearly three decades, it has accounted for about 50 percent of the country’s foreign exchange revenue. In 2018, round logs account for 70 percent of Solomon Islands total exports.

Eighty percent of that is exported to China.

READ MORE: Logging ravaging the Solomon Islands’ forests

In terms of log production by province in 2018, Western Province accounted for the largest share (32 percent), followed by Isabel Province (17 percent), Choiseul (16 percent), Guadalcanal (11 percent), Makira (9 percent), Malaita (6 percent), RenBell (4 percent) and Temotu (4 percent).

Billions of dollars worth of logs have been harvested and exported from Solomon Islands.

However, we have not seen positive impacts on the livelihoods of our people and the economy of our country. In fact, the positive impacts have been negligible, and in many cases the industry has had adverse social, political and economic impacts on our societies and nation.

Undisputed owners
Why is it that indigenous Solomon Islanders are not benefiting as they should from a resource in which they are the undisputed owners?

Perhaps there are many reasons for this. But one structural issue is the formula used to distribute revenues from logging: 60 percent to logging companies, 25 percent to the state and 15 percent to landowners.

So when landowners fight among themselves over logging revenues, they are effectively fighting over only 15 percent of the value of their forestry resource.

Small share
In many cases, the share paid to landowners is much smaller because logging companies deduct the expenses incurred during the timber rights hearing process.

Also, the 15 percent is shared between the licensee/middleman and the rest of the landowning groups. If there are disputes and lawyers are involved, then that is another layer of expenses that landowners carry.

Consequently, based on this state-imposed formula, resource owners are robbed right from the beginning.

Dr Tarcisius Tara Kabutaulaka is an associate professor and director of the University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies. He is a political economist who has written extensively on development and governance issues in the Pacific Islands, with a focus on Solomon Islands. This brief comment was originally on his Facebook page and is republished by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

As it seeks to diversify its sources of fuel, India is looking to get in on the ground floor of coal mining in previously unexploited deposits in Indonesian-ruled Papua.

In exchange for technical support and financing for geological surveys, officials say India is pushing for special privileges, including no-bid contracts on any resulting concessions  a prospect that could run foul of Indonesia’s anti-corruption laws.

The details of an Indian mining project in Papua are still being negotiated, but Indonesia’s energy ministry welcomes the prospect as part of a greater drive to explore energy resources in the country’s easternmost provinces.

READ MORE: Strategic partnership between India and Indonesia

In future, the ministry hopes mining for coking coal will support the domestic steel industry, while also bringing economic benefits to locals.

Rights activists, however, fear the launch of a new mining industry could deepen tensions in a region where existing extractive projects have damaged the environment and inflamed a long-running armed conflict.

Indonesia’s new coal frontier
When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Jakarta last month, joint efforts to extract and process Indonesia’s fossil fuels, including coal, were on the agenda.

India’s interest in investing in a new coking coal mining concession in Papua can be traced to 2017, when officials from the Central Mine Planning and Design Institute (CMPDI) and Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research (CIMFR), both Indian government institutes, met with Indonesia’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in Jakarta.

The bilateral plan was announced by then-ministry spokesman Sujatmiko after the first India Indonesia Energy Forum held in Jakarta in April 2017. “The focus is on new territories in Papua,” he said.

To follow up, the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources sent a team to India in early May. The current energy ministry spokesman, Agung Pribadi, who was part of the delegation, told Mongabay that officials from state-owned energy giant Pertamina, major coal miner PT Adaro Energy, and state-owned electricity firm PLN also joined the meeting.

The Indonesian team presented research outlining the potential for mining high-caloric content coal in West Papua province, and lower-caloric coal in Papua province.

According to the team’s report, only 9.3 million tons of reserves have so far been identified. By contrast, Indonesia as a whole expects to export 371 million tons of coal this year. However, the true extent of coal deposits could be larger, said Rita Susilawati, who prepared the report presented during the meeting and is head of coal at the ministry’s Mineral, Coal and Geothermal Resources Centre. “Some areas in Papua are hard to reach due to the lack of infrastructure. We were unable to continue the research,” she explained.

During the visit, Indian and Indonesian officials discussed conducting a geological survey in Papua, Agung said. India would finance the survey using its national budget. With Indonesian President Joko Widodo prioritising infrastructure investment, the energy ministry has few resources to conduct such surveys.

Expected privileges
Indonesia also anticipates benefiting and learning from India’s experience in processing coking coal.

In exchange, India expected privileges from the Indonesian government, including the right to secure the project without a bidding process, Agung said.

Indonesia denied the request, and the talks were put on hold. Approving it would have been too risky, Agung said, since the bidding process is regulated in Indonesia. “We recommend they follow the bidding process or cooperate with a state-owned enterprise,” Agung said.

India’s ministry of coal did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

Energy and mining law expert Bisman Bakhtiar said there was still a chance India could get the rights to develop any resulting coal concessions without having to go through an open bidding process. “It can proceed under the G-to-G (government-to-government) scheme by signing a bilateral agreement,” he said.

This form of agreement would supersede the ministerial regulations requiring competitive bidding, Bisman explained, although he said any such agreements should emphasise that any projects must be carried out according to local laws.

There is precedent in Indonesia for G-to-G schemes bypassing the open bidding process, Bisman said. For example, multiple projects have been carried out on the basis of cooperation agreements with the World Bank and Australia. In another instance, Indonesian media mogul Surya Paloh imported crude oil from Angola via a bilateral cooperation agreement with Angola’s state-owned oil company Sonangol.

Draft law
A draft law currently being discussed in the House of Representatives could also smooth the path for India. It says that if there is agreement between Indonesia and a foreign government to conduct geological studies, the country involved will get priority for the contract.

However, this would still require the country to meet market prices. “We called it ‘right to match.’ If there are other parties who offer lower prices, then they should follow that price,” Bisman said.

Another option would be for India to appoint one of its local companies to work with Indonesian private sector giant Adaro or state-owned coal miner PT Bukit Asam. Such a deal could be conducted as a business-to-business (B-to-B) agreement, and would be legal according to Indonesia’s Energy Law.

Or, Indonesia could assign a state-owned firm like Bukit Asam to work with India based on a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed by both countries.

“But all these options have a potential risk,” Agung said. “They can be categorised as collusion by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).” He said a conventional bidding process should be prioritised.

Bisman said India needed to consider other risks, such as the social and political situation in Papua. The region is home to an armed pro-independence movement and has faced decades of conflict around the world’s largest and most profitable gold and copper mine, Grasberg, owned by US-based Freeport McMoRan.

‘Land grab’
Despite the presence of the mine, Papua remains Indonesia’s poorest province, with some of the worst literacy and infant mortality rates in Asia. Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), a state-funded body, has characterised Freeport’s concession as a “land grab,” for which the original stewards of the land, the Amungme and Kamoro indigenous people, were never properly consulted or compensated.

The Indonesian energy ministry’s own research says that any project must take into account the impact on Papua’s indigenous peoples, and must factor in specific local concepts of land ownership, leadership and livelihood.

Franky Samperante, executive director of rights advocacy group Yayasan Pusaka, said he was worried about the plan. “It is way too risky,” he said, pointing to the social and environmental fallout of the Grasberg mine.

“There should be communication between the mining company and indigenous Papuans,” he said, warning Jakarta to carefully calculate the social, environmental and national security impacts.

Local indigenous people need to be meaningfully involved in the decision-making process, he said, especially since the mining would occur in and near forests where indigenous people live and gather and hunt their food.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Volunteer teachers are being wrongly labelled as “terrorists” by the Philippine government while paramilitary and mining activity increases in the country, say visiting indigenous Lumad education advocates.

Fritizi Junance Magbanua, a volunteer teacher and administrator with the Save Our Schools network, says teachers, schools and communities of indigenous peoples are being targeted and labelled as terrorists by the government.

The Save Our Schools network is a collection of 215 community based schools that operate throughout the southern Mindanao island region in the Philippines.

The network is part of community groups and advocates that fight for indigenous peoples rights to “defend their land, right to education, right to self-determination,” said Lorena Sigua at a public meeting in Auckland’s Peace Place last night.

She is a volunteer at Education Development Institute (EDI) curriculum development based in Mindanao.

“Save Our Schools has documented 89 harassments of our schools, 18 military activities inside our school vicinity, 27 schools forcibly shut down because of the intensifying military presence in our area,” said Magbanua.

This does not just apply to school teachers. “The environmental activists, human rights activists are also being targeted and tagged as terrorists,” said Sigua.

The indigenous people, known collectively as Lumads, are the main people suffering. “Our indigenous peoples in the Philippines are now being attacked by our government,” said Magbanua.

“Mostly those who are killed are our parents and our tribal leaders who constructed the schools.”

Mining behind military threat
The threat of paramilitary and government military activity is part of the government’s move to allow mining by multinational corporations in the area.

“The southern Mindanao is blessed with a lot of resources. It is the mining capital of Philippines. As you know, big businesses are coming over to take advantage of that,” Sigua said.

“Ironically, we are the poorest region but it is the mining capital,” said Magbanua.

“When mining is in our area, the first step our government will do is deploy their troops to give way to the mining equipment. They harass people to vacate their land.”

It can also turn violent. “One of our supporters was killed a couple of weeks ago by a paramilitary group.”

Magbanua pointed to the actions of President Rodrigo Durterte which she said were encouraging the violence.

“In the first six months that President Durterte was elected, we were hopeful for a change… he says he was a socialist, and a leftist, a pro-Lumad, and anti-mining.”

‘Changed his tune’
But in November 2017 when the APEC summit took place in Manila and President Trump visited the Philippines, Duterte seemed to change his mind.

“After the visit of Trump, he changed his tune. He welcomed all the investors to extract our natural resources. So he’s a puppet,” said Magbanua.

Sigua said: “The educators in Mindanao are being targeted as terrorists.

“The indigenous peoples are now being empowered and educated because of the schools. If they are empowered, they know their rights.”

Magbanua said: “Duterte was the one who says he would bomb our schools… Under his regime, 37 Lumads have been extra-judicially killed under martial law.”

Sigua said: “There is massive militarisation in the in area. Students are evacuating, the community is evacuating.”

“There is now militarisation in the indigenous communities,” she said. This was a reaction against the fear and tension caused by other military forces in the area.

‘Land is life’
Land is often at the center of the conflicts. “We believe that land is life,” says Magbanua.

“We, the indigenous people, need to protect it from mining and multinational corporations. We have to defend this for the next generation.

“We get all our needs from the mountains. From our medicines, our foods it is our supermarket and hospital.

“We call our land the land of promise. The greedy people want to take it away from us and convert it into banana plantations and mining areas.”

After getting her university degree, Fritzi Junance Magbanua committed herself to serving indigenous people.

“For six years now I’ve been teaching and monitoring my co-teachers, facilitating the training, and doing some psychosocial therapy with my students.”

Magbanua has never thought about doing anything different than being a volunteer teacher.

‘Indigenous need me’
“After I graduated, a lot of opportunities came my way but I turned them down. Somebody needs me and it is the indigenous people.”

“It is my commitment and responsibility to be with them and serve them without anything in return.”

A turning point for her was her personal connection to the Lumad’s struggle. “By blood I am also a Lumad. I see their plight, their hunger for education. When I have this knowledge, I just want to help and educate them also.”

I am a part of their struggle to defend their land. Their plight at Mindanao is to uphold their right to self-determination.”

Lorena Sigua is from Manila. She is a graduate of the the University of the Philippines and currently is a volunteer at the Education Development Institute (EDI) curriculum development based in Mindanao.

Sigua was inspired to get involved with Save Our Schools after witnessing the Lakbayan march, where indigenous peoples were protesting about their concerns.

Challenging life
Life as a volunteer teacher in Mindanao is challenging, said Magbanua.

“Once you are a volunteer, you are not just a teacher. You are a counsellor too. The community respects us and sees us as their hero because no body cares. Especially the government in our communities, but only us teachers and the institutions we came from.

Being a teacher for the indigenous peoples has a lot of sacrifices. We are not salary based. We receive NZ$100 a month.

The teachers often must travel to remote locations to reach local communities. “We are deployed in far flung areas.”

The furtherest place the network serves requires a two-day walk through a snaking path to travel to. “We cross one river 52 times. But it’s just a little sacrifice. For us we are ready to commit ourselves to the less fortunate who are hungry for education.”

The organisation demands no payment for their work. “Our education is free for all. We don’t ask for anything in return. In fact, we provide school supplies, toiletries to continue and sustain their education.

“On our island in Mindanao, there is no electricity, no signal. You have to walk an hour to search for a signal. You literally have to climb up a tree just to search for the signal.”

Asia-Pacific consultation
Kevin McBride, national co-ordinator of Pax Christi Aotearoa, hosted the talk.

“I had expectations it would be a good revelation of the situation in Mindanao of the Lumad people,” said McBride.

In December 2017, McBride represented Pax Christi in attending an Asia-Pacific Consultation in the Philippines.

With the New Zealand government being in touch with President Duterte, McBride believes New Zealand should try to do more to help.

“We do have opportunities to raise these issues and hold them to account for their activities. Shamefully, too often we don’t as it would affect our trade.”

Appeal for help
Every year the indigenous peoples go to the capital region in the Philippines to rally and send a message to the government about their concerns.

It is called a Lakbayan, said Sigua, and it was similar to the Hikoi taken by indigenous Māori in New Zealand.

“We are sharing a struggle with Māori,” said Magbanau.

“We are appealing to your government to support our calls to stop the attacks on the activists. The activists in the Philippines are being tagged as terrorists.”

Jean Bell is contributing editor of the Pacific Media Centre’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project. Additional reporting by Rahul Bhattarai who is an Auckland University of Technology student studying towards a postgraduate diploma in Journalism.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The Indonesian government has relinquished control over nine tracts of forest to the indigenous communities that have lived there for generations, President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo announced at a recent conference on land tenure in Jakarta.

The move follows the government’s recognition last December of nine other communities’ rights to their ancestral forests, in line with a 2013 decision by Indonesia’s highest court that removed indigenous peoples’ customary forests from under state control.

“The spirit of agrarian reform and community forestry program is how lands and forests, as part of natural resources in Indonesia, can be accessed by the people, and provide economic justice and welfare for the people,” the president said in a speech to open the conference on October 25.

The nine newly designated “customary forests,” or hutan adat in Indonesian, cover a combined 33.4 sq km, on the islands of Sumatra, Borneo and Sulawesi.

The move is consistent with Jokowi’s campaign pledge to give indigenous and other rural communities greater control over 127,000 square kilometers of land, which helped him earn the first-ever presidential endorsement of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN) ahead of the 2014 election.

Three years into his presidency, however, the programme is running behind schedule. The administration has rezoned just 10,800 sq km of community forests, of which 164 sq km are customary forests, according to data from the Presidential Staff Office. The latter figure includes the nine customary forests the administration recognized at the beginning of the year and the nine last month.

Dozens of other indigenous communities are hoping to secure rights to their ancestral lands, too. The day after Jokowi’s speech, three groups from Enrekang district in South Sulawesi province submitted their own proposals to the Ministry of Environment and Forestry. The proposed customary forests there would cover 4.04 square kilometers.

“The government hasn’t really been performing in making this promise happen,” AMAN researcher Arman Mohammad said.

Land mapped out
AMAN has mapped out 19,000 sq km of land, home to 607 indigenous communities, which it says must be rezoned as customary forests. These groups have already obtained the required documents from district and provincial governments for state recognition of their rights, Arman said.

The official recognition last month represented just a fraction of what AMAN had proposed, he said.

As the agrarian reform conference wrapped up, a senior official said the president would issue a decree by year’s end to help indigenous groups like that in Enrekang obtain control of their forests. Yanuar Nugroho, a deputy at the Presidential Staff Office, told reporters that the decree would lay out the framework for regulation, bureaucracy and accountability.

Details of the decree were not immediately available. However, Yanuar said at the time that one of the key points was to iron out overlapping authorities between related ministries.

For instance, he said, the environment ministry would concentrate on recognizing land rights inside forests, while the Ministry of Agrarian Affairs and Spatial Planning would oversee those outside forests. Currently, the matter is handled by those two ministries as well as the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Villages, Underdeveloped Regions and Transmigration.

“The country is returning sovereignty to the people, and I believe this program for community forestry and agrarian reform is the spearhead,” Yanuar said.

Some observers welcomed the promise of a decree, saying it would help streamline the process for indigenous communities in obtaining state approval of their land rights.

Single agency
“There should be a single agency focusing on the land reform program so that the people don’t get confused,” said Dewi Kartika, general secretary of the Agrarian Reform Consortium, an NGO.

Arman called on the government to involve NGOs in drawing up the decree in order for it to be effective once implemented on the ground.

But even with a decree in place, the government may miss its target.

Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar noted at the conference that the government would only realistically be able to approve a total 43,800 sq km, just over a third of the promised total, for community forestry schemes by 2019, when President Jokowi will stand for re-election.

To achieve even that pared-down goal, the minister called on local governments to accommodate indigenous groups, who depend on district chiefs and local legislatures to issue decrees that recognise them as indigenous.

“We must now push for getting more areas that will potentially be appointed as customary lands in order to reduce conflicts,” Siti said on the sidelines of the conference.

Observers say the Jokowi administration’s actions and policies in general have failed to resolve land conflicts, which have led to the wrongful eviction of indigenous communities from their homes over the years.

Agrarian conflicts
“The locations that the government has been targeting so far are not the ones with agrarian conflicts or where there are overlapping claims between local communities,” Dewi said.

She added that policies issued by the federal government often failed to be implemented at the local level.

“A clean and just bureaucracy is our top concern,” said Rukka Sombolinggi, AMAN’s general secretary. “We have trust in the president and the ministries, but not quite in [officials at] the regional levels.”

Others also highlighted land conflicts resulting from other government programs, including its flagship infrastructure development projects and issuance of plantation permits. Efforts at land reform have also been criticized for overlooking communities in coastal areas.

“The president must take groundbreaking actions so that land reform will truly happen, otherwise it’s just a fake agrarian reform,” Rukka said.

A list of the new customary forests (from the Presidential Staff Office):

Hutan Adat Tawang Panyai (Sekadau district, West Kalimantan province, 0.4 sq km)

Hutan Adat Marena (Sigi district, Central Sulawesi province, 7.6 sq km)

Hutan Adat Batu Kerbau (Bungo district, Jambi province, 3.2 sq km)

Hutan Adat Belukar Panjang (Bungo district, Jambi province, 3.3 sq km)

Hutan Adat Bukit Bujang (Bungo district, Jambi province, 2.2 sq km)

Hutan Adat Hemaq Beniung (West Kutai district, East Kalimantan province, 0.5 sq km)

Hutan Adat Baru Pelepat (Bungo district, Jambi province, 8.2 sq km)

Hutan Adat Bukit Pintu Koto (Merangin district, Jambi province, 2.8 sq km)

Hutan Adat Rimbo Penghulu Depati Gento Rajo (Merangin district, Jambi province, 5.3 sq km)

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz