Pelalawan, Indonesia – A radical new policy to relocate people living in a notoriously deforested national park on Sumatra has moved hundreds of families to date, with Indonesian officials presenting the controversial program as a blueprint for other protected areas across Asia's largest remaining tropical forests.
"This activity will serve as a model for other locations in restoring national parks," Indonesian Forestry Minister Raja Juli Antoni said in a statement.
Tesso Nilo is one of the few remaining habitats of the critically endangered Sumatran elephant (Elephas maximus sumatrensis) and Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae). The forest is also home to thousands of plant species.
The lowland national park in Sumatra's Riau province has suffered extensive deforestation, however, despite being granted the highest level of state protection two decades ago.
Tesso Nilo was designated a national park in 2004 on a former logging timber concession. Following a subsequent expansion in 2009, Tesso Nilo National Park now spans 81,793 hectares (202,115 acres) – an area larger than New York City.
Data from Global Forest Watch, a satellite platform managed by the World Resources Institute, showed Tesso Nilo National Park lost 78% of its old-growth forest between the expansion in 2009 and end-2023.
Fieldworkers in Riau say the extraordinary level of destruction in Tesso Nilo reflects complex challenges to the rule of law on the ground, from community encroachment and migration to corruption and organized criminality, which successive local and national governments have failed to control.
In an attempt to halt the crisis, the government announced last year it would upend the status quo in Tesso Nilo by relocating smallholders growing oil palm inside the national park.
The seizures of palm oil zones and community evictions in Tesso Nilo takes place as President Prabowo Subianto empowered a new task force led by the military to claw back millions of hectares of illegal plantations nationwide.
Task force head Dody Triwinarto, an army general, had ordered Tesso Nilo residents to relocate within three months after palm plantations were cleared last June. However, that deadline was pushed back after concerns raised by the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas Ham), which was established as Indonesia's independent rights watchdog in 1999.
Across the country, soldiers and civil servants have since last year taken control of more than 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) of commercial operations land within forest zones, among the most consequential shifts in agrarian policy since decentralization reforms in 2001 devolved authorization over mines and plantations to local governments.
This vast collection of seized plantation land has since been thrown together under a hastily assembled state-owned holding company, PT Agrinas Palma Nusantara. It has become, almost overnight, the largest palm oil company in the world.
By late November, the forestry ministry said it had seized several thousand hectares of illegal palm oil plantations in Tesso Nilo, razed encampments used by workers, and blocked some access roads.
"These steps are reasserting state control over conservation areas that were converted into illegal oil palm plantations a long time ago," a forestry ministry spokesperson said in November.
On Nov. 20, several thousand people protested against Agrinas Palma Nusantara in Pekanbaru, the capital of Sumatra's Riau province. Riau accounts for more oil palm plantations than any other province in Indonesia, which is the world's largest producer of the edible oil widely used in consumer goods.
The operation in Tesso Nilo has since entered a highly sensitive new phase involving the removal of hundreds of families within the beleaguered national park. This has also encountered scrutiny and oversight from civil society, the national human rights commission, and even the Prabowo-friendly parliament, reflecting the potential for abuses of power.
For some, what is happening in Tesso Nilo aligns with the government's term of "relocation." However, for others, relocation is interpreted ultimately as forcible displacement overseen by military personnel, should any residents stand their ground.
"Relocating residents could sacrifice the economy, history, social, cultural, religious and even Indigenous customs of the communities," Sugiat Santoso, deputy chair of a parliamentary commission overseeing human rights, said last year.
Sugiat, a representative from Prabowo's ruling Gerindra party, said the forestry task force was formed in order to confront large plantation companies, not to crack down on smallholders.
On Dec. 20 last year, military and police officers together with forestry officials watched on as more than 200 families from settlements within Tesso Nilo moved out of the national park to new plantation land sequestered from companies operating outside the park boundaries.
At the time of writing, the relocation had affected 47 families from the village of Pangkalan Gondai, as well as 72 in Pesikaian and 108 families in Baturijal Barat village. Pangkalan Gondai lies in an area frequently visited by Sumatran elephants.
Bagan Limau, previously selected as the first village for relocation after residents backed the restoration efforts, saw more than 200 families settle in December.
"We are committed to supporting efforts to restore the function and ecosystem of the [Tesso Nilo] forest area through the relocation of community land," said Syafirudin, the elected village head of Bagan Limau.
Officials have created new replacement plots by reallocating land from existing concessions held by the state plantation company and nearby commercial planters.
For civil society, the viability of the relocation policy hinges on the provision of viable alternative agricultural and residential land.
"We agree that Tesso Nilo must recover," said Riko Kurniawan, founder of civil society organization Paradigma, who as the former Riau chapter manager for Walhi, Indonesia's largest environmental group, is a leading expert on the region.
"But the formula should be clear," Riko added. "To build first, and then to relocate."
Change places
Successive Indonesian governments have established 57 national parks across the archipelago since 1945.
These protected forests range in size from Papua's Lorentz National Park in Papua, an area 30 times larger than Singapore, to the Kelimutu enclave on Flores island, which at 5,357 hectares (13,236 acres) is smaller than the city-state.
However, Indigenous societies and migrant communities have lived within many recently created national parks for generations, with some tracing their presence back centuries before Indonesia emerged as a modern state after the Second World War.
In the case of Tesso Nilo, almost all those who established plantations within the national park boundary are relatively recent internal migrants from other areas of Indonesia, which is corroborated by peer-reviewed studies as well as anecdotal testimony to Komnas HAM.
The rights commission held talks with residents in Tesso Nilo in August last year, during which it found that many oil palm plantations had been developed over recent decades by migrants who settled in the 2000s, then built schools and mosques.
Previous surveys by national park authorities and WWF Indonesia recorded 2,279 families living within the park, around 95% of whom were migrants from other provinces of Sumatra, Java and Bali.
However, officials say today there are at least 6,000 families living within the boundaries of the national park.
Many residents opposing the relocation told Komnas HAM at the time they had lived in the area for more than a decade, and had not been offered compensation, or options for resettlement.
At issue is the absence of legal title deed of land ownership, or formal tenure agreement. In effect, the law typically sees such communities as squatters, regardless of schools and places of worship established by communities on the ground.
These informal arrangements can lead to harmful consequences. The Ministry of Human Rights acknowledged last year it had received reports of families in Tesso Nilo unable to register children at local schools, although the ministry later said the matter was resolved.
Complexity in Tesso Nilo has been apparent ever since the national park was founded two decades ago.
In 2006, the Indonesian government decreed Riau a priority area for conservation of the Sumatran elephant – the same year a herd of 10 elephants was discovered tied to trees in Tesso Nilo, without any food or water.
"These elephants need room to live, which means ending problematic pulp and oil palm development," said Nazir Foead, WWF Indonesia's species conservation lead at the time.
A decade later, Nazir was appointed to lead the newly established National Peatland Restoration Agency, which then-president Joko Widodo established after wildfires during the 2015 El Nino catastrophe burned millions of hectares of land, including much of the lowland farmed by migrant communities in Tesso Nilo.
Environmental fieldworkers writing for Eyes on the Forest, a media platform founded by civil society organizations in Riau, were unsure whether migrants had settled in the forest on their own initiative, or were paid to do so on behalf of local elites.
Researchers said the departure from Tesso Nilo of forestry companies PT Hutani Sola Lestari, PT Nanjak Makmur and PT Siak Raya Timber caused more families to arrive, and widespread issuance of counterfeit land certificates.
Forest encroachment surged as incomers built settlements near a road cut into the forest for a concession held by Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper, a subsidiary of Asia Pacific Resources International Holdings Limited (APRIL), WWF reported in 2006.
Eyes on the Forest research in 2011 found 22 crude palm oil mills connected to international buyers with no-deforestation commitments that had at some point sourced illegal palm fruit from Tesso Nilo.
Tesso Nilo is a prominent example of how national efforts to protect high-conservation-value forests in Indonesia can clash with complex local context, from Indigenous and migrant human settlements to the presence of criminal actors tied to local elites and state apparatus.
The efforts underway since last year to halt the crisis in Tesso Nilo proved fraught in the earlier stages – government officers sent to the national park retreated after the group's command center in the forest came under attack.
In response, the government seconded 30 soldiers from a newly establish military detachment based in Riau. An additional 20 rangers were assigned by the forestry ministry, along with a rapid-reaction team known as SPORC. These personnel will be based at the repaired command post within Tesso Nilo.
At the same time as boosting the security presence, national park officials have sought to mediate land disputes and provide alternatives to communities open to relocation.
Civil society leaders in Riau emphasized the need for safeguards as the government prepares alternative land for communities. A parliamentary commission overseeing human rights requested the Ministry of Human Rights oversee the relocation during a public hearing in September last year.
"Don't let people be moved to empty land without the guarantee of a livelihood," said Paradigma's Riko Kurniawan.
Munafrizal Manan, a director-general at the Ministry of Human Rights, said the government is actively monitoring the implementation of the policy in the field. Munafrizal traveled to Riau in December for meetings two days after culmination of the Bagan Limau village relocation.
Rights advocates pointed to the stated aim of President Prabowo's task force, to confront large-scale plantation companies, noting that the rules governing smallholders were less clear-cut.
"Solutions for smallholdings, those that are under 10 hectares [25 acres], require caution," Saurlin P. Siagian, a member of the national rights commission, told Mongabay Indonesia. "There are tens of thousands of people there – this must be given serious consideration.
"We're resolving this through dialogue, humanism and persuasion," said Dodi Triwinarto, the general leading the forestry task force. "We're prioritizing taking this approach so that everything goes smoothly."
However, Okto Yugo a coordinator with civil society organization Jikalahari, pointed to a lack of community representation at parliamentary hearings over the Tesso Nilo relocations.
And Achmad Surambo, director of Sawit Watch, an environmental organization focused on the palm oil industry, said long-term questions remained about the viability of relocation arrangements.
"Will residents receive legal certainty and full ownership rights to the replacement land? Or will they simply become farmers on land that is owned by [palm oil] companies, creating new dependencies?" Achmad said.
Protecting Domang
Encroachment around the park has worsened flooding along the Batang Nilo River, at times blocking the main road that skirts the park, while the use of fire to clear land for planting has fueled wildfires in and around Tesso Nilo.
Among the most severe ecological impacts, however, is the destruction of one of the few remaining habitats for Sumatran elephants.
Ministry of Forestry data from 2021 estimated that only around 60 elephants remained in Tesso Nilo National Park, due to the increasing fragmentation of the habitat.
The surviving Tesso Nilo population cluster is significant for this critically endangered subspecies of Asian elephant. The Indonesian Elephant Conservation Forum (FKGI), a Sumatra-based nonprofit, estimated there were only 12 herds with a population greater than 50 elephants in 2007.
Meanwhile reported incidences of conflict indicate a sustained increase in encounters between elephants and human settlements, with 13 cases in 2017, rising to 39 in 2020, and 58 in 2024.
The government is also presenting its reforestation and relocation program in Tesso Nilo as a campaign to save Domang, an elephant calf born in Tesso Nilo in 2021 who captured attention on social media.
"For us, Domang is more than just a viral figure on social media," the forestry ministry's director of law enforcement, Dwi Januanto Nugroho, said in a statement published in November. "He is a symbol of a new generation of Sumatran elephants who have a right to a safe, intact home free from illegal plantations."Domang sitting at its mother's feet in December 2021.
The forestry minister said during a visit to Tesso Nilo in November that President Prabowo had ordered officials to oversee complete restoration of the national park.
Sawit Watch's Achmad warned of the risk that relocating the local community would simply "shift the problem from one location to another, without resolving it equitably."
"Sawit Watch believes that the future of the Tesso Nilo landscape, for both elephants and people, lies in designing a shared future," he said. "Not in driving one or the other out."
Across Indonesia, the national task force continues to seize illegal gold mines, unauthorized tourism ventures in protected areas, and plantation encroachment in national parks.
"Law enforcement in Tesso Nilo is aimed at restoring this national park as a home for Domang and other elephants, not as a palm oil plantation," Dwi from the forestry ministry said in a statement.
"Our enforcement operations in Tesso Nilo are designed to break the chain of business that destroys the area," Dwi added. "Not to victimize citizens."
Citation:
Tua, H., & Sundari, M. (2021). Impact of population migration in Tesso Nilo National Park, Riau province. Sosiohumaniora, 23(1), 72-79. doi:10.24198/sosiohumaniora.v23i1.30700