This article was co-produced with The Gecko Project. The alleged assault of an Indigenous man in the Indonesian province of Papua by a police officer around two hours before he…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This post details the analysis we carried out to estimate the revenues generated by the Korindo Group from harvesting timber as it…
(Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) Part 1: ‘Maybe they didn’t expect us to find it’ In April 2019, an Indonesian delegate stepped onto the stage at a conference hosted by Interpol,…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Images by Nanang Sujana. When the people of Aru discovered that most of the land in their islands was to be converted…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. A new company has begun clearing rainforest in an area of Indonesia’s easternmost Papua province earmarked to become the world’s largest oil…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. In late 2013, during a hearing convened by the local legislature of Indonesia’s Maluku province, a…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. When the politician in charge of Indonesia’s Aru Islands signed permits for a vast sugar plantation,…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. When Indonesian government officials received a credible allegation that the permits underpinning a giant oil palm plantation project in Papua province had…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. Indonesian government officials have alleged that permits underpinning a multi-billion dollar plantation project in Papua province were falsified, leading to the criminal…
This story was co-published with The Gecko Project. When Rita Widyasari, the former head of Kutai Kartanegara district in Indonesian Borneo, was sentenced to 10 years in prison last year…
This article was produced in partnership with The Gecko Project. When Mika Ganobal, a 35-year-old civil servant, mounted the top of a van in the ramshackle town of Dobo to…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. This month Mongabay and The Gecko Project published “Saving Aru,” an article chronicling how the people of Indonesia’s Aru Islands thwarted a…
This story was co-published with The Gecko Project. Additional support was provided by Earthsight. (Baca dalam Bahasa Indonesia.) I. The movement begins Late one rainy night in August 2013, a…
This article was co-published with The Gecko Project. When a string of palm oil companies arrived in the village of Anggai, in a heavily forested corner of Indonesia’s easternmost Papua…
Sophie Chao is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney, whose work focuses on the impacts of agribusiness on the peoples and environments of the Asia-Pacific and Melanesia…
Last week, The Gecko Project, Mongabay, Tempo and Malaysiakini published an investigation into the story behind the Tanah Merah project, a giant oil palm plantation under development in Papua, Indonesia.…
In 2005, an Indonesian election commissioner named Mulyana Kusumah visited a hotel room in Jakarta to hand over 150 million rupiah, then worth more than $15,000, in cash to an…
One afternoon in 2017, an indigenous Dayak man named Kardie tracked us down to a hotel in Kuala Kurun, a one-horse town in the interior of Indonesian Borneo. He had…
In July last year, Abdon Nababan, one of Indonesia’s most prominent activists, announced his intention to run for governor in his home province of North Sumatra. During his decade-long tenure…
In the village of Tewah, in the heart of Indonesian Borneo, stands a wooden church named Immanuel. When the church was founded by German missionaries more than a century ago,…
In June this year, elections will take place in 171 districts, provinces and municipalities across Indonesia. On paper, millions of citizens in the world’s third-largest democracy will be afforded the…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia’s deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first article…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia's deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first…
In the leadup to the release of the second installment of Indonesia for Sale, our series examining the corruption behind Indonesia's deforestation and land-rights crisis, we are republishing the first…
Arkani, an elderly Dayak man, drew a telling comparison between the plight of his community and that of the orangutans inhabiting a nearby rainforest, in a part of Borneo that…
Budiardi was one of the more colorful characters we met in our reporting for “ The palm oil fiefdom.” Thickset and outspoken, he was previously a member of the local…
