Indonesia

Trouble Trees

Indigenous peoples don’t only suffer from the effects of climate change; in some cases they suffer from the solutions to climate change.

War or Water: Humanitarian Assistance Must Get Through

Indigenous peoples living in Aceh province in Indonesia, and in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala in India, were among the many victims of the tsunami that devastated the coastlines of 12 Indian Ocean countries without warning the day after Christmas.

And Then Came the Tsunami: Disaster Brings Attention and New Challenges to Asia's Indigenous Peoples

The December 26 tsunami in Southeast Asia brought heightened international awareness of the region’s indigenous peoples. Stories of traditional knowledge saving lives showed the world the importance of indigenous cultures. In many communities, the tsunami was no match for the encroachment onto traditional lands by outsiders that indigenous peoples have been suffering for decades. In Indonesia, a decades-old conflict between the Acehnese and the Indonesian government came to a ceasefire, followed by uncertainty as to whether the disaster will help bring a permanent peace to the area.

Conservation and Health: A Case Study in Borneo

Forty years ago the island of Borneo was covered by the world’s oldest and perhaps most biologically diverse rainforest. Logging and land conversion has since led to deforestation of about half of this great island. Even most national parks in Borneo are now being illegally logged. It is an ecological disaster of the first order.

Forest People in Peril

National Parks: Indigenous Resource Management Principles in Protected Areas and Indigenous Peoples of Asia

In many parts of Asia, parks—including sanctuaries, totally protected areas, and heritage sites—are found within indigenous peoples’ traditional territories. In some cases, indigenous peoples have been removed from parks, while others remain within park boundaries or at the peripheries.

Peaceful Movements for Justice in Indonesia

In early 1999 the West Province of the island of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) erupted in violence. Longstanding enmity between migrants from the island of Madura, near Java, and indigenous Dayaks culminated in street battles that continued for months. Some reports at the time couched accounts of the violence in terms of the “wildmen of Borneo,” describing “screaming tribesmen” engaged in “displays of ritual savagery” in areas beyond the reach of Indonesia’s weakened central government.

Made In Indonesia: Indonesian workers since Suharto

By Dan La Botz

South End Press, 2001 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0-89408-642-9

Since 1974 Indonesia has surfaced on the international news front as a place of turmoil. In 1998, for example, broadcast and print media briefly covered the people's uprising to overthrow the dictatorship of President Suharto with images of student protests and street riots and with descriptions of the atrocities attributed to Suharto's regime.

Indonesia Campaign Update

Indonesia: Stop Destructive Mining

Date: 04/13/2010

Our letter-writing campaign is already having an impact in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia! On Lembata Island, where a new gold mine threatened to pollute the rivers and displace 60,000 Indigenous people, the local parliament voted to prohibit gold mining. It is still important for government officials at the national and provincial levels to hear from us, however, so that they honor this decision at the local level.

Mining & Indigenous Rights: the emergence of a global social movement

Anyone who has seen the massive 900-page book entitled The Gulliver File (1992) will undoubtedly concur that for better or for worse anti-mining activism is a global social movement. This book lists mining projects and their parent companies around the world in alphabetical order and gives background history and environmental impact information (albeit from a particular activist perspective) about each project. A remarkable feature of this compendium is that so many of the listed projects involve indigenous peoples.