NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/8296

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From: [e-mail] (Rich Winkel)
Subject: MM: MOI RESISTANCE: STANDING UP TO INDONESIA
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MOI RESISTANCE:  STANDING UP TO INDONESIA

By Anna Laine

[Published in the October 1992 issue of Multinational Monitor]

Land in Indonesia "is the single greatest source of dispute, poverty and
disenchantment for the agrarian population ... namely between 70 and 80
percent of the people," according to SKEPHI, one of the country's major
environmental organizations.  The Indonesian government's power to
subvert traditional land rights is enshrined in the country's law, and
the government has granted massive logging concessions to both Indo-
nesian and foreign logging companies.  An estimated 1.2 million hectares
of Indonesia's natural forest were felled in 1990.

Over the past several years, loggers, encouraged by the Indonesian
government, have set their sights on Irian Jaya, or West Papua, an area
that is still over 80 percent forested.  West Papua, as its indigenous
inhabitants prefer to call it, forms the western half of the island of
New Guinea.  Since annexing West Papua in 1963, Indonesia has repressed
the territory's Melanesian inhabitants and sought to exploit its rich
resources, including rainforests, copper deposits and oil reserves.
During the same three decades, the island's Free Papua Movement has been
fighting for the right to self-determination.

West Papua is home to 31 million hectares of natural rainforest--the
world's largest remaining virgin rainforest outside the Amazon.  Such
forests make the province notoriously inaccessible to outsiders.  For
Indonesian officials in Jakarta, this lack of access represents a
double-sided obstacle.  It hampers both "national security" efforts--the
army has been waging a guerilla war against the Free Papua Movement
since 1963 -- and the "East Indonesia Development" drive which seeks to
fund repayment of Indonesia's enormous foreign debt by opening up West
Papua and other eastern territories to external exploitation.  President
Suharto recently proclaimed road-building in Irian Jaya a national
priority in order to improve access to the forests for the army, miners,
loggers and anyone else with an interest in the "development" of West
Papua.

The developers are meeting with considerable resistance, however.  The
West Papuan Moi people are waging a bold struggle in one of the most
militarized provinces in the country against the appropriation of their
ancestral lands by both the logging companies and the highly repressive
Suharto government.

Moi protests

About 4,000 Moi live on the "beak" of the Bird's Head Peninsula of West
Papua, in the town of Sorong and its surrounding areas.  Since February
1991, they have been resisting the encroachments of PT Intimpura, an
Indonesian logging company that has been granted an enormous 339,000
hectare logging concession in the heart of the Moi ancestral lands.
None of the local Moi people were consulted by the government or the
company before PT Intimpura moved in.

A woman from the Moi village of Aimas expresses her anger in "Last Stand
of the Moi," a report produced by the Canada-based Endangered Peoples'
Project (EPP) which documents local resistance to logging in West Papua.
"The [Indonesian] government has come in and allowed the company to work
in the territory of Aimas village.  And we the village people didn't
know anything about it ...  The company is just working away, without
giving compensation to Aimas village," she says.

In these words lie the key aspects of the government's approach to
"development" Not only are local people excluded from decisions to
develop their lands, but they are rarely paid compensation.  Hasjrul
Harahap, the Minister of Forestry, spelled out the government stance on
indigenous land rights in a May 1989 edition of the Japan Times:  "In
Indonesia, the forest belongs to the State and not to the people ...
[T]hey have no right to compensation."

In granting logging concessions on peoples' ancestral lands, the
Jakarta-based government effectively assumes ownership of the land.
Indonesia's Basic Agrarian Law only recognizes adat (traditional) land
control, "as far as it is not adversary to the interests of the nation
and the State."  As a joint United Nations Development Program/World
Bank study notes, the Law "does not adequately recognize adat rights in
land ... thus frustrating environmentally sound, sustainable land
management practices."

"They treat us, the owners of the land, as if we were nobodies, as if we
were worthless people, people with no rights.  But in fact, we are the
people who have the right [to this land]," says the Aimas woman.

Early Moi protests to PT Intimpura were met with assurances that the
company's operations would have no impact on the Moi people's way of
life, and promises of compensation of 50 million rupiah (US$25,000) per
clan.  The company also promised village improvements, such as a new
road and an electrical service.  So far, however, the company has made
only one payment of a half-million rupiah (US$250), to be shared among
all nine clans.

Intimpura's path of destruction

PT Intimpura, like all timber concession holders in Indonesia, is
formally regulated by strict guidelines on the allowable cut, the
species and dimensions of trees that may be felled and the methods of
extraction and replantation, but the company shows little respect for
the guidelines, or for the Moi people and land.

The Moi people are forest dwellers.  While they do some gardening, the
bulk of their diet comes from hunting and gathering.  Their staple food
is sago, supplemented with kangaroo meat, wild pig, fish, fresh water
shrimp, birds, forest greens and wild fruit.  Resin from the damar tree
is burned as a source of light.

PT Intimpura's operations are devastating the Moi way of life.
According to the woman in Aimas village, PT Intimpura "destroys the sago
orchards, the stands of damar trees, the wood and the water; there are
no fish, there are no birds, there is nothing at all."  A Kelasaman
villager explains that the company's method of dragging out the cut
timber with heavy machinery "means that everything in [the machinery
operators'] path, all the growing things--whether sago, langsat,
cempedak fruit ... are destroyed."

Intimpura's road-building through Moi lands is also endangering the Moi
people's health and sustenance.  Because the company built the roads
without constructing drainage culverts, a roadside string of stand-
ing pools, which produce unusually high concentrations of mosquitoes
and present the threat of malaria and other diseases, has developed.
"All the streams have dried up and become muddy.  The fish which we used
to catch in them have simply disappeared....  The water is not clear
anymore," says an Aimas man.  "The birds of paradise have also
disappeared; they have flown away to other places....  Mosquitoes have
come into the village and infest our homes," he adds.

EPP activists are concerned that "this disruption of the natural water
system jeopardizes the long-term recovery of the forest.  Perhaps the
greatest danger . . . lies in the very existence of these roads; they
will permit the entry of more loggers, both legal and illegal, poachers
and settlers."

Restricting Moi rights

For the local villagers, however, there are more immediate problems
than the long-term impact of logging roads.  They have been told they
need permits to hunt or gather in the forest, requirements which
typically accompany logging developments.  The Indonesian Basic
Forestry Law states, "For reasons of public safety, in an area where
logging operations are being conducted within the scope of the forest
utilization, the implementation of community rights to extract forest
products shall be suspended."

These kinds of restrictions have incited the wrath of the local Moi .
"We tore down a guard post, because they wouldn't allow us to gather
firewood on our land for our Christmas celebrations," says a Moi man.
"They said we needed a permit to gather wood.  Why should the people
need a permit when there is no agreement between PT Intimpura and the
people?"

The Moi people have written plea letters and met at least six times with
representatives of the company, the local government, the Sorong
Forestry Service and the army to protest the logging operations on their
land.  Both Intimpura and the government refuse to recognize the Moi
people's land rights.

The people's anger over their treatment has driven them to forms of
protest which highlight their desperation.  Political demonstrations
are rare in Indonesia, where public protesters are liable to be branded
"subversives" or members of illegal organizations, such as the Communist
Party or the Free Papua Movement, detained without charge, tortured and
imprisoned.  But despite the presence of the army, protestors from seven
Moi kecematan (subdistricts) have risked arrest to demonstrate outside
their representatives' meetings with the company, the military and the
local Forestry Office in Sorong.

The Moi have also turned to other forms of protest, which express their
frustration at having their lands appropriated by Intimpura.  Where the
company has posted signs forbidding the Moi access to their land in the
concession, the Moi have in turn posted signs forbidding Intimpura to
cut down damar trees, threatening the company with fines of five million
rupiah (US$2,500) per infraction.  The people of Kelayili village, as
well as tearing down the buildings of the survey camp, have posted signs
forbidding the company from entering their territory.  Intimpura has
already surveyed up to the edge of the village itself.

A foreboding future

The Moi people' s situation is an indication of what is to come for the
rest of the province:  logging concessions planned for West Papua cover
close to 70 percent of its land area.  The Intimpura project is only one
of several timber concessions on the Bird's Head Peninsula.  The Kayu
Lapis Group, one of Indonesia's largest corporations, owns a number of
subsidiaries working in the area to develop the group's paper and pulp
line.

The government has appropriated indigenous land for its own purposes as
well.  Since 1981, Sorong has been a target for Indonesia's vast
transmigration program.  This controversial project aims to move
millions of poor farming families from the densely populated islands of
Java, Bali and Madura to less densely populated outer islands like
West Papua [see "Uprooting People, Destroying Culture:  Indonesia's
Transmigration Program," Multinational Monitor, October 1990].
Ironically, while one aim of the program is to provide the landless poor
from Java with a plot of land of their own, transmigration has resulted
in the extensive destruction and expropriation of forests properly the
domain of local people.

Human rights activists charge that the transmigration program has
broader and more sinister goals than simply population and land
redistribution.  Jakarta's national security objectives are also a
factor, according to critics who say that the government is using
transmigration to quash local resistance to the military presence
and government development plans.  According to World Bank statistics,
West Papuans will become a minority in their own country by 1995.

For the Moi, the effects of transmigration and government land
appropriation represent a lesson not to be forgotten in their dealings
with PT Intimpura.  "We've already given more than half of our land to
the government.  This is all we have left," says a woman from
Kelasaman village.  "We cannot accept Intimpura coming on to our land.
We must resist them."

Maintaining Moi land

For the Moi, maintaining control of their land in the face of
Intimpura's encroachment is paramount.  No amount of money can serve as
adequate compensation for loss of the land.  "Our love of nature is
firm.  It doesn't matter what kind of compensation they offer, we will
firmly refuse it.  The only thing that endures is the land," says a
Kelasaman villager.  A Kelasaman mother says, "We are defending our land
for our children's future-- in the future we will need our forest.  In
the forest there is so much that we need, so many things necessary for
our culture."

The Moi's ancestral domain now being logged is to them a Tamasani
(mother or center of life).  The land not only has economic value, but
is also home to Moi landlord spirits.  As another villager describes the
destruction, "Tearing down our forests is like tearing out our heart"

The government, unfortunately, has little concern for the cultural or
emotional identity of the Papuans, whom Indonesian officials describe as
"simple-minded" and "backward."  Instead, the government aims, as the
Indonesian Minister of Transmigration said in 1985, "to integrate all
the ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation ...  The
different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of
integration ... and there will be one kind of man."

Next to this sort of philosophy, any adat attitudes which preserve
marginal ethnic identities are bound for extinction.  The logging of Moi
lands can be seen as yet another example of what SKEPHI calls "the
deprivation and marginalization of indigenous people" in West Papua.
Others have called it cultural genocide.


Anna Laine works at Tapol, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign based in
Surrey, England.

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