JAKARTA — When Joko Widodo took office in 2014 as the president of Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, he was seen as a transformative leader who came from a modest background with a strong focus on promoting environmental stewardship and supporting marginalized groups, including Indigenous communities.

In his 2014 campaign and early days in office, he promised to pass the Indigenous rights bill that had been submitted to parliament two years earlier. It promised legal recognition and protection of Indigenous rights as well as a formal framework to resolve land conflicts and secure land tenure for Indigenous communities.

Jokowi, as he’s popularly known, also pledged greater involvement for Indigenous peoples in decisions affecting their territories, inviting representatives from the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), the country’s largest advocacy group for Indigenous rights, to the State Palace in Jakarta on several occasions.

These promises resulted in an endorsement from AMAN for Jokowi in the 2014 election, the first time the group had ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

But their hopes were quickly dashed, with Jokowi failing to make good on most of his promises by the time he left office on Oct. 20 this year. That includes the failure to pass the Indigenous rights bill, which has now languished in parliament for more than a decade.

As early as 2017, AMAN was already contemplating withdrawing its support for Jokowi, who had yet to establish a promised task force on Indigenous issues, or throw his weight behind the Indigenous rights bill.

In the 2019 election, AMAN decided not to endorse Jokowi as he sought reelection, saying the president had fallen far short of the pledges he’d made to Indigenous groups five years earlier.

Jokowi’s second term was much of the same: not only did he continued to not uphold his promises, he also issued a slew of policies that prioritize economic development and corporate interests at the expense of Indigenous peoples and their lands.

For instance, his second term was marked by a number of large-scale infrastructure projects as well as resource extraction projects, including a boom in nickel mining, which largely sidelined Indigenous peoples from the decision-making process and pushed them off their territories.

In Jokowi’s decade in power, AMAN recorded 687 land conflicts covering a combined 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of Indigenous lands — an area larger than South Korea — resulting in 925 community members facing criminal persecution.

At the same time, progress on recognizing Indigenous peoples’ land rights has been glacial, said Kasmita Widodo, head of the Ancestral Domain Registration Agency (BRWA), a civil society initiative to map Indigenous lands in Indonesia.

“The [official] recognition of Indigenous territories is only 16% of the 30.1 million hectares [74 million acres] of ancestral lands registered at the BRWA,” he said.

During this time, Jokowi continued to co-opt Indigenous identities by routinely wearing traditional attire from various regions across Indonesia during each Independence Day celebration, AMAN secretary-general Rukka Sombolinggi said.

For this year’s Independence Day, on Aug. 17, Jokowi wore traditional clothing from the Kutai Kartanegara Sultanate of East Kalimantan province, one of Indonesia’s oldest kingdoms. The ensemble, known as takwo, is historically associated with nobility and ceremonial occasions.

“We live in a place where the destruction of Indigenous peoples is done by people who like to wear Indigenous attires, like Jokowi,” Rukka told Mongabay. “So the more often he wears Indigenous attires, the more our ancestral forests disappear.”

So on Oct. 11, nine days before the end of Jokowi’s presidency, a large number of Indigenous peoples and rights activists staged a protest in Jakarta to demand that he be held accountable for his policies and actions harming Indigenous communities. They also urged the new president, Prabowo Subianto, to not repeat the mistakes of his predecessor and to make good on his own promise to protect Indigenous peoples. The new vice president, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, is Jokowi’s eldest son; like his father, he’s also vowed to push for the passage of the Indigenous rights bill.

“I hope that Prabowo is not like Jokowi with his empty promises,” Rukka said.

Jokowi’s sins

There were at least 11 actions taken by Jokowi during his 10 years in office that harmed Indigenous rights, according to a coalition of NGOs called the People’s Movement for Indigenous People’s Advocacy (GERAK MASA):

1. Failure to pass the Indigenous rights bill: Despite having a supermajority in parliament, including virtually no opposition during his second term, and with the bill on parliament’s docket of high-priority legislation, Jokowi could never get the parties in his coalition to pass it. This left Indigenous communities vulnerable to massive land grabs, GERAK MASA said.
2. Relocating Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to East Kalimantan: Jokowi’s rationale for building an entirely new city on the island of Borneo was to ease population pressure on Jakarta and spread development beyond the main island of Java. But the move affects Indigenous peoples living in the area where the new capital is now being built, GERAK MASA said. No effort was made to gain their consent or participation, the movement alleged, raising accusations of displacement and violation of land rights.
3. Forced land acquisitions for corporate development: GERAK MASA said this caused numerous land conflicts with Indigenous communities.
4. Social forestry program: Jokowi’s flagship program for Indigenous and local communities (IPLCs), the social forestry scheme was launched in 2014 as a way to reduce poverty, improve livelihoods and enhance sustainable forest management by granting IPLCs greater access to forest resources and land management rights. However, GERAK MASA said it’s simply been a tool to seize Indigenous lands by categorizing them under state-managed schemes. It said this undermines true Indigenous land ownership and fails to recognize customary land rights.
5. Right to Manage (HPL) scheme: This land ownership program allows the government to designate Indigenous lands as state-owned and manage them under an HPL license. This practice potentially sidelines Indigenous land claims and making it more challenging for communities to assert their customary rights.
6. Promoting carbon trading as a climate solution: Last year, the government launched its first carbon emissions trading market, touting it as a part of its climate policies. Under the mechanism, companies that emit more carbon than their quota can buy carbon credits from companies that emit pollution below a limit set by the government or from renewable power plants. Over-emitting companies can also buy carbon credit certificates that are issued for activities or projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, such as forest conservation. GERAK MASA says this mechanism is ineffective and primarily benefits corporations rather than Indigenous communities. “The government don’t put local and Indigenous communities as the main actors in solving the climate crisis,” it said.
7. Promoting natural resource exploitation in the clean energy transition: Instead of developing truly renewable energy sources like solar and wind, the government has prioritized the development of biofuels, primarily palm oil, for its shift away from fossil fuels. It has also championed mining and processing of nickel, a highly destructive activity, as part of the adoption of “green” technology. This has given rise to large-scale oil palm plantations and nickel mines, in most cases associated with land seizures, deforestation, and displacement of Indigenous populations.
8. Passage of the 2024 conservation law: The new law, according to GERAK MASA, sidelines Indigenous rights, including increasing the risk of land grabs under the guise of environmental protection by centralizing the state’s control over conservation areas. This effectively allows the government to unilaterally designate an area as national park or protected area, excluding the Indigenous peoples who traditionally manage and live on these lands from participating in the management of these areas.
9. Expanding food estates and land banks: Food estates are massive agricultural projects aimed at increasing the production of key commodities like rice, corn and other staples. The government has promoted these estates to ensure national food security, but GERAK MASA said they lead to the expropriation of Indigenous lands without consent or fair compensation. Furthermore, they often involve clearing large areas of land, which disrupts local ecosystems and displaces communities who rely on subsistence farming and sustainable land use. The land bank program, meanwhile, is a mechanism introduced by the government in 2020 to consolidate land under state control. Under this scheme, the government takes control of all lands that are deemed to be abandoned or to which ownership can’t be legally proven. After that, the government can allocate these lands for various purposes, including agriculture, infrastructure and industrial development. GERAK MASA said this is a mechanism to facilitate large-scale land acquisitions by corporations or state-owned enterprises, bypassing the rights of Indigenous landholders.
10. Co-opting Indigenous law within the Criminal Code: In 2022, lawmakers passed long-awaited revisions to the colonial-era Criminal Code. A key provision is the integration of Indigenous customary law into the code, which allows the state to control and manipulate customary laws to fit its broader legal and political agenda. This leaves Indigenous communities without a say in how their laws are interpreted, GERAK MASA said.
11. Weakening democracy: Jokowi’s moves to consolidate power among the country’s political elites and large corporate interests have been at the expense of public accountability, Indigenous representation and fair governance, according to GERAK MASA. This was particularly apparent during the 2024 presidential election, when Jokowi was widely accused of abusing his powers to ensure that his son, Gibran, would be eligible to run as vice president and would win.

Future woes

With Prabowo and Gibran now in office, activists say they’re concerned these close ties to elite business interests might continue to undermine democratic processes, transparency, and Indigenous rights under the new administration.

“What we’re concerned the most is Prabowo continuing Jokowi’s policies that are pro-investor, without acknowledging Indigenous peoples,” Rukka of AMAN said.

During his presidency, Jokowi laid the groundwork that now lets Prabowo easily acquire lands for projects like infrastructure and mining without the need for substantial environmental and social safeguards, bypassing Indigenous rights in the process, she said.

Jokowi has also weakened law enforcement, in particular the national anticorruption agency, or KPK, which has had its independence stripped away and been rocked by corruption scandals involving its own leaders appointed by Jokowi. This makes it more likely for companies whose concessions overlap with Indigenous lands to operate with impunity, Rukka said.

“So there’s no need for Prabowo to make new policies” to sideline Indigenous communities, she added.

Rukka also noted that Prabowo, a former army special forces commander, tends to adopt a militaristic approach in his work. During Jokowi’s second term, Prabowo, who served as defense minister, was put in charge of developing food estates on the islands of Borneo and New Guinea. To make it happen, he ordered soldiers to be deployed to clear land and establish plantations.

In the Papua region, as the Indonesian half of New Guinea is called, Indigenous peoples have long lived under a heavy military presence that Jakarta imposes to clamp down on a simmering independence movement. Residents now say this climate of fear has worsened as the military beefs up its presence around the food estate there, which aims to establish 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of rice fields.

During campaigning earlier this year, Prabowo said he would continue with the food estates as part of efforts to improve food security.

“[Jokowi’s pro-investor policies] combined with Prabowo’s militaristic approach is scary,” Rukka said.

New hope?

To ensure that Indigenous peoples don’t continue to be sidelined under the new president, AMAN has issued a call for action from Prabowo.

One of the new administration’s top priorities, the alliance said in a statement, should be passing the Indigenous rights bill within the first 100 days. Like Jokowi, Prabowo enjoys the support of virtually the entire parliament, with the sole party outside his coalition also saying it will support his policies.

AMAN also called on Prabowo to speed up the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ land rights and resolving ongoing land conflicts. The president must stop all land-grabbing practices against Indigenous communities for government-backed projects and corporate concessions, AMAN added.

Prabowo must also remedy the harms done by Jokowi by revoking all regulations that put Indigenous peoples and their rights at risk, ensuring legal remedy for Indigenous individuals persecuted for fighting for their rights, and providing legal protection for Indigenous peoples and their supporters, AMAN said.

Indigenous peoples must also be assured of a say in decision-making, AMAN said, noting this is especially important given the lack of Indigenous representation in both the executive and legislative branches of government.

Just 32 Indigenous individuals ran for the more than 20,000 local legislative seats up for grabs in the election earlier this year, and only 10 of them won. No candidate identifying as Indigenous won a seat in the national parliament, which is dominated by businesspeople: they control 354 out of 580 seats in the legislature, or 60%.

Lastly, AMAN said, Prabowo should ensure the recovery of environmental damage done by companies as well as enforce the law against environmental and human rights violators.

“We hope that the leadership of president Prabowo Subianto and Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka could bring positive change to all people in Indonesia, including Indigenous peoples who are often sidelined,” AMAN said in its statement.

By protecting Indigenous peoples and their rights, Indonesia can achieve greater success in preserving its natural ecosystems, reducing carbon emissions, and building resilience to climate change, Rukka said. Science has demonstrated that forests and other biomes are healthier when Indigenous communities are in charge.

“The world’s scientists say that we, as the human race, haven’t gone extinct yet because 80% of the world’s biodiversity, including those in forests, are being protected by Indigenous peoples,” Rukka said. “So protecting Indigenous peoples isn’t only for their sake, but also for the survival of all of us.”

Banner image: A large number of Indigenous peoples and rights activists staged a protest on October 11, 2024, in Jakarta to demand that Indonesia former president Joko Widodo be held accountable for his policies and actions harming Indigenous communities. Image courtesy of AMAN.

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