Whether Government, Company or Police, Divide and Conquer Is The Strategy

Indonesian hearings reveal forest ravages

Five months of hearings culminate in recommendations for Jokowi As Indonesia’s national inquiry into land conflicts affecting indigenous peoples draws to a close, it has become clear that police brutality has become a serial feature, that legions of companies are operating without permits and that the government hasn’t even catalogued the myriad indigenous peoples who live in the forest. Five months of hearings by community leaders, bureaucrats, businesspeople and security personnel from every corner of the archipelago have finished, with the commissioners writing up their final recommendations, to be released this month as a policy document for President Joko Widodo.

That presents Jokowi, as he is known, with one of his biggest challenges, betting into vastly monied timber interests that have a major interest in continuing to clear forest and plant oil palm, and which have found a willing ally in the notoriously corrupt Environment and Forestry Ministry. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that as much as 40 to 60 percent of Indonesia’s timber is exported illegally, principally to Japan and China, costing the government as much as US$3 billion a year. The hearings have produced a litany of abuses.

Yet while many feature prominently in the dialogue surrounding land grabbing and indigenous peoples, another major theme has been less talked about: the use of “divide and conquer” as a strategy for separating communities from the rights to their territory, some say as a matter of course. “It was prominent in all the cases,” Rukka Sombolinggi, international advocacy coordinator of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), said after the hearing in Kalimantan, one of eight held across the country. “Whether it is government, company or police, the main approach they always use is creating internal conflicts, and then taking advantage of that. It is their most powerful weapon.” The inquiry’s commissioners noticed it too. Asked about the phenomenon, Sandra Moniaga of the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) rattled off a series of examples from around Indonesia.

All too often, she said, proponents of development projects try to “capitalize on differences within the community” instead of seeking a true consensus, as is the decisionmaking norm for indigenous groups that tend to operate collectively, with some form of communal ownership, rather than on a typically capitalist or individual basis. “Divisions are natural; people have different opinions,” Sandra said. “But what is worrying is that [companies and officials] are utilizing those differences for their own interests. And that creates tension within communities.” Tactics vary with some companies handing out jobs, cash or other spoils to win some people over while leaving others out in the cold. A common practice is to initiate contact by hiring a few residents to convince the others. Politicians lend a hand by maneuvering their cronies into key posts at the village and subdistrict levels. Judicial processes can also be manipulated. What it all amounts to is foisting an unfamiliar model of land acquisition on communities that have always played by different rules, often by tempting or empowering some of their number to usurp the old ways, and calling in the security forces when the others resist.

The stakes are high: Indonesia is home to tens of millions of indigenous peoples, by AMAN’s count, and last year the government recorded 8,000 land conflicts. Most of those citizens and conflicts reside and exist in the some 65 percent of the country designated as forest area, which is overseen by the Environment and Forestry Ministry. These days, the ministry is facing perhaps the greatest challenge to its power yet, with a variety of new developments threatening to reduce its control over the forest zone and its authority to greenlight certain industrial activities. The lack of follow-up on one of these developments, last year’s landmark Constitutional Court ruling that took indigenous peoples’ customary forests out of state forests, prompted Komnas HAM’s inquiry, which concentrates on the forest zone. 

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Just one more illustration of how capitalism works all around the world. Divide and conquer - which is assisted to a large degree by lack of information or deliberate misinformation as in the mushroom syndrome: keep them in the dark and feed them s**t.