Jenny Denton, Murung Raya, Central Kalimantan – Villagers in remote Central Kalimantan have lodged a claim for legal title to 1,000 hectares of land within BHP Billiton's vast IndoMet coal project area under a new land rights scheme in the province.
The residents of Maruwei, one of the closest villages to IndoMet's "first stage" Haju mine, have mapped the boundaries of the 1,000-hectare area in question using GPS and computerized mapping systems, and submitted detailed documentation of the claim to the Central Kalimantan government on Friday.
With the Haju mine due to start operating in August, Maruwei's headman described the process of preparing the claim as a "race" to preserve this section of the community's customary land, which is used for cultivating rice, rubber and crops.
"When BHP comes, it will be a restricted area," headman Suwanto tells the Jakarta Globe, through an interpreter. "So we have to race against BHP to claim this land under the Dayak Misik scheme."
Dayak Misik, introduced by the Central Kalimantan government in 2014, is a program that aims to recognize the customary land rights of the province's indigenous Dayak inhabitants by delivering title for 10 hectares of land to every village for communal use and five hectares to each household.
The success of the program will depend on the national government agreeing to excise the customary land from forestry estates and certify communities' ownership.
While the national government has so far proven more interested in supporting companies it has issued concessions to than local communities, commentators believe the Dayak Misik scheme, together with an inventory of customary land rights that the Central Kalimantan government has been compiling with NGOs and Dayak communities, will strengthen the communities' position in relation to their land rights.
"The mapping exercise has created a stronger political pressure on the national government to recognize customary lands and customary rights to land," says Nanang Indra Kurniawan, a lecturer at the School of Politics and Government at Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University, who is researching the Central Kalimantan government's customary land rights programs. "This pressure has been increasing following the Constitutional Court decision on customary forests in 2013."
The village of Maruwei, which is within 15 kilometers of two existing coal mines, has already experienced significant land loss and environmental impacts from mining, and around half its 700 inhabitants oppose the new IndoMet mine.
But Suwanto, while wary of further pollution and loss of land, is open to the jobs and benefits the project can bring. "We welcome mining as long as they respect our way of life, our livelihood, our customary land. When they don't, we'll fight to the end," he says.
There is still widespread discontent in Maruwei over events nearly a decade ago that saw villagers accept token payments from BHP for another area of customary forest the company acquired for the mine.
Residents say they were threatened with arrest if they did not agree to compensation of Rp 100 (1 US cent at the exchange rate back then) per square meter for the area, which they had used for generations but which was technically state land.
Nanang says that confrontations such as this are increasingly common in Indonesia.
"The growing demand for land for oil palm plantations and mining in Indonesia has led to land acquisition and the violation of indigenous and local peoples' rights," he says.
"There are a growing number of cases in which state [officials] have been used by companies to persuade people to leave their lands, or to remove them by force. We have also seen how some companies have even directly contracted [the] Indonesian police for securing their operation areas."
According to the Jakarta-based Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA), over the last decade 85 people have been killed, 110 have been shot, 633 have been injured and 1,395 jailed around Indonesia as a result of land conflicts, in which poor people were frequently "criminalized."
The KPA recorded a more than 100 percent increase in 2014, from 105 to 215 incidents, in conflicts relating to infrastructure development under the Masterplan for Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia's Economic Development (MP3EI).
The MP3EI, which is aimed at transforming Indonesia into an "advanced economy" by 2025, designated Kalimantan a mining and energy corridor, one of six economic corridors in the republic, and promoted the construction of a railway to transport coal from the IndoMet area in Central Kalimantan.
The IndoMet project, a joint venture between Australian miner BHP Billiton and Indonesia's Adaro Energy, covers 350,000 hectares of coal-mining concessions across Central and East Kalimantan, which are estimated to contain more than 1.25 billion metric tons of thermal and coking coal.
The project is expected to open up a new frontier in coal mining inside the internationally agreed Heart of Borneo conservation zone if the construction of the railway goes ahead.
Last month, activists delivered a petition containing 9,000 signatures to BHP Billiton headquarters in both Melbourne and London, calling on the company to withdraw from the project.