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Abstract
Formalisation of customary rights in land is currently being pursued by an increasing number of Indonesian rural communities, who wish to protect their livelihoods and prevent dispossession in favour of commercial concessions. This trend has accelerated during the current presidency (Joko Widodo). This is a dramatic shift from the denial of recognition of customary rights during Soeharto’s New Order. This article reports on the ongoing efforts by the indigenous peoples of Sorowako, South Sulawesi, who lost their land to a multinational mining concession during the New Order, to have their rights acknowledged and their economic losses compensated. I argue that in the current political era, their claims of indigenous status have been overlooked by the state which has given recognition to another group who are more able to enact the current ‘script’ of indigeneity. And in a significant shift, the contemporary generation of young indigenous adults in Sorowako emphasise their claims for cultural recognition as well as for distributive rights. This case leads me to question whether formalisation of customary rights, which in essence means converting them to individual title, addresses the questions of distributive justice that gave rise to claims of customary rights in the New Order period.
Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges with thanks the funding assistance provided by Leiden University's Asian Modernities and Traditions (ATM) towards the production of this special double issue.
Notes
1 The people locally termed Karongsi’e have become better known as the Dongi (the name of their former place of residence) in the media reporting on their rights claim.
2 A Contract of Work was the legal instrument required under the 1967 Mining Law. It was replaced by a Mining Licence in the 2009 law (see Robinson 2016). In 2011 ownership of the nickel project was transferred to Brazilian miner Vale.
3 The indigenous people of Sorowako have on numerous occasions negotiated agreements on these matters with the mining company. In the last decade it has regularly involved blockading the road to the elite residential area of company managers, taking some managers ‘hostage’ in the golf club house and releasing them once an agreement had been signed.
4 See ‘Mori Bawah: A Language of Indonesia’. (Citationn.d.). In Ethnologue. https://www.ethnologue.com/language/xmz (Accessed January 27, 2018).
5 The Darul Islam rebellion in South and Southeast Sulawesi was led by Kahar Muzakar. His troops controlled much of the rural area of the south of Sulawesi from around 1950–1965 (van Dijk Citation1981).
6 The returning Dongi established an illegal connection to the electricity supply, which the company cut in their efforts to persuade the people to move to the alternative settlement. They have now (2018) been reconnected to the grid following representation by KomnasHAM.
7 In ‘citing–not citing’ my book on the original dispossession to the mining company (Robinson Citation1986), the author of the KomnasHam report chooses to emphasise my observation that they had come under the influence of the Luwu Sultanate, including in the conversion to Islam. That is, this would seem to undermine their claims to be ‘indigenous’, but in historical terms the Dongi were also under Luwu rule.
8 Discussion with a PT Vale official, Sorowako, 2017.
9 Suku terasing (left behind peoples) and komunitas adat tertinggal (left behind customary community) were terms developed during the New Order to refer to communities in remote rural areas, practising ways of life that reproduced what had been learned from prior generations.
10 The area in the mountainous interior of Sulawesi has also been subject to claims by the central Sulawesi polity, the Mori, and another Mokole (Mokole Matano) has been installed in the neighbouring village of Matano.
11 That is, except the people of Tinampu on the shore of nearby Lake Towuti, who received compensation for increased water levels that destroyed some crop and residential land as a consequence of damming the Larona River for power generation.
12 This echoes the argument of Anton Sangaji (Citation2007), noted above.
13 The Philippines has legal recognition of indigenous rights, in the form of ‘ancestral domain title’, but it has proven difficult for groups to have such formal rights acknowledged, as there are many grounds on which local government and other citizens challenge the rights. In the Philippines, as in Indonesia, the term ‘indigenous’ is not easy to define. It is often used to mean peoples who live inland and who have not been as exposed to Spanish influence and intermarriage as those on the coast.