by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 16, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Diana Parker / Mongabay
Nearly 150 homes were reportedly destroyed in the latest incident in a long-standing conflict between indigenous Batin Sembilan residents and former Wilmar unit PT Asiatic Persada.
Indonesian security forces allegedly stormed several villages inside a Sumatran palm oil plantation concession last weekend and earlier this week, accompanying company staff and hired thugs accused of destroying dozens of homes and looting residents’ property.
Witnesses said the raids began when members of the Indonesian military (TNI) and the police mobile brigade (Brimob) descended on Padang Salak hamlet in Bungku village at 4 p.m. on Dec. 7 together with PT Asiatic Persada personnel and local thugs paid by the company.
“That day [Dec. 7], they destroyed the homes of [Padang Salak residents] Budi and Peheng,” Norman, a resident of nearby Pinang Tinggi hamlet, told Mongabay-Indonesia by phone on Monday. “The next day, they returned and destroyed around 50 homes of residents.”
Norman estimated that as many as 1,500 staff, thugs and security forces were involved in the raids on Saturday and Sunday, a figure also reported in multiple Indonesian news outlets covering the attack.
According to a report on Monday by the Indonesian news portal beritasatu.com, some residents tried to stand their ground but were overwhelmed by the size of the mob. At one point on Sunday, according to the report, the clash came to blows and security forces fired shots into the air.
Norman also told Mongabay-Indonesia that police and military had fired shots during the conflict and that company security officers and thugs armed with knives and machetes had tried to attack residents.
Around 70 residents who had tried to fight back to prevent the demolition eventually fled.
One community member was seriously injured when his hand was cut, Norman said, adding that several motorbikes owned by residents were also destroyed and a box containing cash and jewelry was stolen.
On Sunday, some members of the community living inside the concession reportedly responded by burning a guard post and company warehouse in Padang Salak. Two residents were arrested after the incident, and, as of Dec. 14, remain in detention. Norman added that police were also attempting to arrest community leaders.
Troubled history
These evictions are the latest incident in a more than 25-year conflict between PT Asiatic Persada, which until earlier this year was owned by palm oil giant Wilmar, and the indigenous Batin Sembilan community living inside the company’s concession in Jambi province on the island of Sumatra.
Wilmar had earlier been accused of destroying the homes of 83 families living inside the concession in 2011 following another violent clash – also involving Brimob forces – over allegations that members of the community were stealing palm fruits from the company.
After the 2011 incident, human rights groups helped the community file complaints with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the World Bank Group’s private sector lender the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – both of which have standards in place designed to prevent member companies or borrowers from violating the rights of local communities.
Wilmar is a member of the RSPO and received financing from the IFC, and in response to the complaints the IFC’s Compliance Advisor Ombudsman eventually stepped in to mediate talks between the company and members of the affected community.
However, earlier this year, Wilmar sold PT Asiatic Persada to two non-RSPO companies that do not receive IFC financing – meaning they are not bound by the same commitments to resolve the dispute. One of the buyers, PT Agro Mandiri Semesta (AMS), is a unit of the Ganda Group, a business group owned by Ganda Sitorus, the brother of Wilmar founder Martua Sitorus.
The IFC formally withdrew from the case in October after the new owners decided not to continue the IFC-mediated talks. Now it appears that PT AMS is resorting to the same tactic used by Wilmar in 2011 and forcibly evicting residents.
Evictions continue
According to multiple reports from victims and members of Suku Anak Dalam 113 – a group composed of members of the indigenous Batin Sembilan community who claim to hold the rights to over 3,500 hectares of land inside the concession – the evictions continued throughout the week and into the next weekend as company personnel and hired thugs, escorted by government security forces, destroyed homes and drove residents from at least two more hamlets in the concession.
Basron, a 41-year-old resident of Pinang Tinggi, was in his home on Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. when he felt his house shake. He went outside to see his home surrounded by plainclothes thugs and PT Asiatic Persada employees wearing green shirts, escorted by several TNI and Brimob members.
“We are from the integrated team,” a member of the mob said, according to Basron. “Quickly clean up your things. All the homes will be evicted today.”
Basron told Mongabay-Indonesia that the thugs and company personnel were armed with sharp weapons such as knives, axes and machetes, while military and police carried firearms. They had driven to the hamlet in dozens of Mitsubishi pickup trucks, also bringing heavy equipment including an excavator, which they used to destroy the homes.
In total, Basron estimated around 700 people came as part of the “integrated team,” splitting into several groups to carry out the evictions. Each group was composed of dozens of thugs and PT Asiatic Persada employees and escorted by police and military personnel.
After removing his possessions, Basron watched as a member of the team used the excavator to destroy his home. Once the house was destroyed, he said they instructed him to quickly clean up the debris.
“If it’s not clean, we will come again tomorrow. We will burn it all,” they said, according to Basron.
Basron said they also looted his livestock, taking away a chicken and several other birds worth Rp 600,000 ($50). Other Pinang Tinggi residents also reported members of the eviction team stealing livestock, cash and other valuables.
“My cash box was filled with Rp 6 million and they dismantled it and took what was inside,” Daim, another Pinang Tinggi resident, told Mongabay-Indonesia, while showing the broken box.
“Diesel fuel and oil, they spilled,” Daim added. “If they had been able to lift it, they would have even taken my generator.
Victims also reported having their cell phones destroyed when they tried to photograph the evictions. “Don’t take pictures of our actions,” an integrated team member allegedly told Meldi, a 25-year-old Pinang Tinggi resident, shortly before destroying his phone.
Meldi was still able to snap several photos of the raid using another cell phone, but villagers said they have little documentation of the evictions while they were taking place since they were told not to take pictures or use their phones.
Basron said the integrated team destroyed 109 homes in Pinang Tinggi on Wednesday. Another 31 homes were reported destroyed during evictions in Padang Salak on Dec. 7 and 8, while six homes were reported leveled in Terawang hamlet.
In total, victims said the teams destroyed 146 houses over three days. Reports also indicate evictions were carried out on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Tanah Menang hamlet, where another 600 homes are located, however Mongabay-Indonesia has yet to confirm how many houses were destroyed in those raids.
From Mongabay: “Indonesian palm oil company demolishes homes and evicts villagers in week-long raid“
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 18, 2013 | Toxification
By Justin McCurry and Simon Tisdall / The Guardian
Workers have begun the delicate task of removing spent fuel rods from a damaged reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, more than two-and-a-half years after the facility suffered a triple meltdown.
The operation to remove more than 1,331 used fuel assemblies, and 202 unused assemblies, began on Monday and is expected to take just over a year. Decommissioning the entire site is expected to take at least 30 years.
The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power [Tepco], said the fuel removal was an important step in decommissioning the plant, which experienced multiple meltdowns and explosions after Japan’s north-east coast was hit by a powerful earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
Tepco brushed off fears that removing the spent fuel rods from a storage pool near the roof of reactor No4 could cause a serious accident. Some experts have warned that a collision involving the fuel assemblies, a sudden loss of coolant water or another big earthquake could cause a chain reaction and the release of huge quantities of radiation into the atmosphere.
Reactor No4 was closed for routine maintenance at the time of the disaster and so did not suffer a meltdown. But a hydrogen explosion on 15 March 2011 blew the walls and roof off the reactor building, leaving it vulnerable to further damage from earthquakes.
The utility has since reinforced the building with a huge steel canopy and insists the structure can withstand seismic events of the same intensity that shook the plant in March 2011.
But it conceded that the fuel assemblies needed to be moved to a safer storage site as soon as possible.
“After the explosion, one big challenge was to deal with the spent fuel pool because if the water evaporated it would cause a radioactive cloud stretching all the way to Tokyo, which would have to be evacuated,” Yuichi Okamura, deputy manager of the water treatment department at Fukushima Daiichi, told the Guardian on Monday.
“It was a big challenge, so today is a big success for the cleanup teams.”
Yoshimi Hitosugi, a Tepco spokesman, said: “This is an important moment. It is one big step towards decommissioning the reactor.” He added that three fuel assemblies had been discovered that were damaged prior to the tsunami and measures were being taken to deal with them.
Hitosugi said the firm was confident that the workers would be able to cope with any debris caused by the explosion that remained in the spent fuel pool, adding that it would not compromise the fuel removal operation.
Tepco’s president, Naomi Hirose, said the fuel extraction “represents the beginning of a new and important chapter in our work”, and thanked plant workers for the “ingenuity, diligence, and courage that made this achievement possible”.
The utility believes that a specially chosen team of 36 men will need until late 2014 to remove all of the fuel assemblies from the pool, located 130 feet above ground, and place them in submerged protective casks. The casks will then be taken to ground level and transported to a more stable storage pool nearby.
Each cask can hold up 22 assemblies comprising between 60 and 80 fuel rods. Workers will remove the fresh fuel assemblies first because they are easier to handle.
“The extraction work started at 3:18pm and the first fuel completed its extraction from the fuel rack to the cask placed inside the pool at 3:57pm as planned, following thorough safety preparations with the co-operation of many partner companies and individual workers,” Tepco said in a statement.
But anti-nuclear campaigners have voiced concern over Tepco’s ability to complete the work without incident following revelations that up to 300 tonnes of radioactive water are leaking from the site into the sea every day.
The utility also came under fire this summer for installing poorly designed tanks that leaked toxic water.
“We are concerned that Tepco may not be capable of conducting this risky operation safely, and that there are significant risks involved in this operation,” said Kazue Suzuki, a nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace Japan.
“Tepco’s inability to solve the problems with leaking tanks that store contaminated water, and the continued flow of contaminated water from the site to the ocean adds to our concerns about its ability to handle this dangerous operation to remove spent fuel.
“If Tepco makes mistakes again and can’t handle this task, workers could be exposed to excessive levels of radiation and in a worst-case scenario there could be a massive new release of radiation to the atmosphere.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/18/fukushima-nuclear-power-workers-spent-fuel-rod-removal
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 18, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest
By Agence France-Presse
Thi Sieu says her family lived for generations on a small plot of land studded with cashew trees until they fell victim to an alleged land grab by powerful local elites, a fate shared with many indigenous farmers in Vietnam’s lush central hills.
All land in the communist nation is owned by the state and usage rights are frequently opaque, allowing corrupt local officials and well-connected businessmen to seize land with impunity, according to activists speaking to AFP.
The Central Highlands have long been a hotbed of discontent over land rights, thanks in part to government schemes luring big agricultural firms and lowland migrants seeking their fortunes in booming cashew, coffee and rubber industries.
Official figures show the area’s population surged from 1.5 million in 1975 to around six million in 2010, prompting complaints from indigenous minorities of forced evictions by newly arrived ethnic Kinh, who make up 90 percent of the population.
Thi Sieu is a M’Nong, one of a patchwork of indigenous minorities which make up the remaining 10 percent of Vietnam’s roughly 90 million people.
She said her family’s trees were felled and ancestral graves destroyed in 2011 to make way for a rubber plantation run by a private company operating with the support of local officials.
“They said if we did not go they would beat us and kill us. There was no compensation at all. They cut down our trees. We lost everything — our land and our crops,” Sieu, 42, told AFP.
“Most of the land in our area now belongs to those who have money. Many of them are Kinh people,” she said.
“Our M’Nong community does not have much land now. We’ve been kicked out of areas that we had been living in for generations. We’re forced to become farm labourers,” Sieu added.
Many such local tribes — collectively known as Montagnards — sided with the US-backed south during Vietnam’s decades-long war. Some are calling for more autonomy, while others abroad even advocate independence for the region.
The last major protests against the loss of traditional lands to large-scale plantations was in 2004, and the government is still hunting down those involved. Eight men were recently jailed for up to 11 years for a demonstration in 2002.
‘Robbing villagers’ land for profit’
Three decades ago, before Vietnam abolished collectivisation and began a process of market reforms, land disputes were largely based on demographics and history, and concentrated in “diem nong” hot spots like the Central Highlands.
But as the country developed and land values rose, the trouble spread to cities where land values are higher.
People realised that by owning land close to cities they could “make seriously more money” than from remote coffee plantations, said Professor Adam Fforde, a Vietnam expert at Australia’s Victoria University.
According to octogenarian activist Le Hien Duc — who began working on land issues in the 1980s — once-isolated cases of land grabbing have become “rampant.”
“Local officials are robbing the villagers’ land for profit,” said Duc, who once worked for the country’s revered founding President Ho Chi Minh.
Villagers have no way to seek redress, as local authorities — their first avenue for complaint — are usually involved in the corrupt land deals, she said, calling for a clear land law and a serious anti-graft drive.
Nationwide, some 70 percent of complaints filed to authorities concern land.
“But there is no solution,” Duc said. “The people get kicked around like a ball between different levels of government — local, district, province. Then finally, they go to Hanoi.”
Daily protests in the capital
Sieu has travelled to Hanoi three times — at great personal expense — to file complaints to get her land in the Central Highlands back, without success. She is far from alone in making the attempt.
Come rain, shine or police crackdown, protesters can be found standing on a busy street corner near several government buildings in central Hanoi, holding handwritten signs detailing their land grievances.
“I have been here four months. The police have tried to remove me many times. But I will not leave — we will not leave — until they fix this problem,” said Do Thi Ngoc Nguyen from southern Dong Nai province.
With all land owned by the state, people must rely on land use rights certificates, but in reality they offer limited protection.
The problem is set to become more acute this year with the expiry of 20-year land use leases, which give many farmers some legal claim to their land. The government has not made it clear how the issue will be addressed.
“The robbery of the land, by local government, officials and enterprises, is the root of all the instability we see,” one leading Hanoi-based Vietnamese academic said on condition of anonymity, citing a growing number of protests in the capital.
“The villagers always lose,” he said, explaining that authorities commandeer the land in the name of “public interest” only to sell it to developers who build expensive houses and shopping malls.
Public opinion is firmly on the side of the land protesters.
Farmer Doan Van Vuon became a folk hero after using homemade shotguns to resist forced eviction last year — an incident that prompted one popular blog to name him “Person of the Year 2012”. He was jailed for five years in April.
Other land defenders have paid a different price. Le Thach Ban, 74, walks with a limp after being attacked by thugs last year when he refused to give up his land for a development in Hung Yen province near Hanoi.
“I had a punctured lung, head injuries, three broken ribs and spent 23 days in hospital,” he said, vowing to stay despite the efforts to remove him.
“We will defend the land that belonged to our ancestors,” he said.
From Gáldu
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 26, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By John Vidal / The Observer
Land conflicts between farmers and plantation owners, mining companies and developers have raged across Indonesia as local and multinational companies have been encouraged to seize and then deforest customary land – land owned by indigenous people and administered in accordance with their customs. More than 600 were recorded in 2011, with 22 deaths and hundreds of injuries. The true number is probably far greater, say watchdog groups.
The Indonesian national human rights commission reported more than 5,000 human rights violations last year, mostly linked to deforestation by corporations. “Deaths of farmers caused by the increase in agrarian conflicts all across Indonesia are increasing,” said Henry Sarigih, founder of the Indonesian Peasant Union, which has 700,000 members.
“The presence of palm oil plantations has spawned a new poverty and is triggering a crisis of landlessness and hunger. Human rights violations keep occurring around natural resources in the country and intimidation, forced evictions and torture are common,” said Sarigih. “There are thousands of cases that have not surfaced. Many remain hidden, especially by local authorities,” he says.
Communities complain that they are not warned, consulted or compensated when concessions are handed out and that they are left with no option but to give up their independence and work for minimal wages for the companies.
At fault are badly drafted laws, unclear regulations, corruption and heavy-handed security and paramilitary forces – all of which favour large business over the poor. Illegal land purchases and logging are mostly supported by police, armed forces and local government staff. Companies are even allowed to work with security forces.
Feelings run high when land is taken and livelihoods are wiped out by deforestation. In December 2011, 28 protesters from a logging concession area on Padang island in Sumatra sewed their mouths shut in front of the parliament building in Jakarta in a protest against having their land “grabbed” by a giant paper and pulp company.
Last year, three people were killed in a clash with security forces during a protest over gold prospectors in Bima on the island of Sumbawa. Farmers from Mesuji in Sumatra claimed that security forces murdered residents to evict them from their land.
Over 10m hectares (24.7m acres) of land has been given away and converted to plantations in the last 10 years, forcing thousands of communities to give up forest they have collectively used for generations. Politicians offer land to supporters and give permission to develop plantations with little thought for the human or ecological consequences. In addition, government attempts to move landless people from densely populated areas to less populous areas with “transmigration” policies have caused major conflicts with indigenous groups in provinces like Papua and Sulawesi.
“Who controls the land in Indonesia controls the politics. Corruption is massive around natural resources. We are seeing a new corporate colonialism. In the Suharto era you were sent to prison for talking about the government. Now you can be sent there for talking about corporations,” says Abetnego Tarigan, director of Friends of the Earth Indonesia in Jakarta.
Three of the group’s staff members, including its south Sumatra director, are in prison following protests at the involvement of the police and military in a land dispute involving a state-owned palm oil plantation firm. “The scale of the conflicts is growing. Every day new ones are reported. More and more police are now in the plantations. Government is trying to clamp down on mass protests,” said Tarigan.
“These developments are classed as ‘growth’ but what we are seeing is the collapse of communities of fisherfolk or farmers and increasing poverty. We are exchanging biodiversity for monocultures, local economies for global ones, small-scale producers are becoming labourers and community land is becoming corporate. This is the direction we are going.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/indonesia-new-corporate-colonialism
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 26, 2013 | Mining & Drilling, Worker Exploitation
By Mongabay
Mobile device giant Samsung has admitted to using tin sourced from a controversial mining operation on the Indonesian island of Bangka, where unregulated mining kills 150 miners a year and causes substantial environmental damage, reports The Guardian and Mongabay-Indonesia.
Samsung’s admission came after a campaign by Friends of the Earth, which led to nearly 16,000 customers contacting the company. In an email sent the customers and the NGO, Samsung said it is investigating the matter.
“While we do not have a direct relationship with tin suppliers from Bangka Island, we do know that some of the tin that we use for manufacturing our products does originate from this area,” Samsung said. “We are also undertaking a thorough investigation of our supply chain in the region to better understand what is happening, and what part we play.”
Bangka and neighboring island Belitung account for about 90 percent of Indonesia’s tin production. Mining on the islands involves more than half the population, but is largely unregulated, leading to a raft of ills. An investigation last year by the Guardian and Friends of the Earth found widespread use of child labor, clearing of forests, and degradation to coral reefs. Accidents kill scores of people each year.
After the investigation, Friends of the Earth called on Samsung and Apple to disclose whether they use tin from Bangka in their smartphones and tablets. To date only Samsung has admitted to sourcing Bangka tin, a point highlighted by Friends of the Earth.
“It’s great Samsung has taken an industry lead by tracking its supply chains all the way to Indonesia’s tin mines and committing to taking responsibility for helping tackle the devastating impact that mining tin for electronics has on people and the environment,” said Craig Bennett of Friends of the Earth in a statement.
“Rival Apple is already playing catch-up on the high street in terms of smartphone sales – it’s time it followed Samsung’s lead by coming clean about its whole supply chains too.”
From Mongabay: “Samsung admits to using tin linked to child labor, deforestation; Apple mum on sourcing“
