Seeking environmental justice in North Maluku how transformed injustices and big interests get in the way.

• Author: d'Hondt, Laure
• Position: Access to Justice in Indonesia

1. Introduction

   At the beginning of 2009, I went to the Kao-Malifut area in North Maluku, Indonesia, to conduct research on the access to justice process in disputes concerning environmental issues. In the late 1990s, the Australia-Indonesian mining company Nusa Halmahera Minerals (NHM) began exploiting mainly gold in the Kao-Malifut area. According to Walhi, an environmental organization which was active in that area, as well as UNDP-LEAD (UNDP) (1) which supported Walhi, this was a good place to find answers to my key research question, specifically what obstacles do victims of environmental pollution encounter when they want to get redress for the environmental injustices they experience? Walhi and the UNDP informed me about the problems people in the area encountered. Critical amongst these was the effect water pollution from the mining company activities was causing. As a result of the pollution a particular species of fish had disappeared from the neighbouring Gulf of Kao and therefore many fishermen lost their source of income. People also noticed negative health effects such as skin diseases after being in contact with the polluted river water. The picture of the situation which these organisations created was clear; the whole local population was against the presence of the mining company for its activities had a severe negative environmental impact on the surroundings of the mining site and their inhabitants. According to Walhi and the UNDP-LEAD, lack of properly functioning forums to which people could address their complaints was viewed to be one of the major obstacles in the process of achieving justice.

   However, during my fieldwork, the situation appeared to be different from what I had expected. The injustices which the locals experienced were more diverse and did not always correspond with the injustices as put forward by local justice seeking groups who claimed to represent the population, and those put forward by organizations from outside the region that supported these local groups. Therefore I felt that it would be inappropriate to seek answers to difficulties experienced by people in their quest for redress by merely focussing on the specific barriers to access to justice and the procedural inherent in the redress mechanisms. Instead, it was imperative to take a step back and revisit the questions that are at the root of the justice seeking process. For instance, what are the daily struggles and real life problems experienced by the local population? And which issues are experienced as unjustices, and by whom? (2)

   When analysing the justice seeking process in North Maluku one should keep in mind that because it concerns environmental issues, there may exists several complications in the quest for justice. Gould et al (1996:14-5) observed that when citizens are confronted with environmental injustices they often face the dilemma of the 'citizen-workers.' On the one hand, they can benefit from the employment opportunities created by the industry. However, on the other hand, they do not want to be affected by environmental pollution. Van Rooij (2010:63-4) pointed to a similar dilemma by noting that a major obstacle for citizens to take action against a polluter is their financial dependency on the polluting entity. Furthermore, to successfully initiate action against a polluter, a sustained collective action is often required. This demands some leadership qualities and sense of coherence in the object and methodology of the affected community. Once (material) redress is granted, the decision and method of apportioning entitlements to individuals or groups might create tension if the process is not managed efficiently due to a lack of good leadership, coordination and coherence. (3)

   Thus, to understand the developments in the justice seeking process in the Kao-Malifut area, one should look further than the 'classic' modes and narratives of explaining injustices such as a lack of rights awareness, and a lack of good, accessible and properly functioning dispute settlement mechanisms. The process is not an one-directional process that starts with an injustice and, if all goes well, passes the various steps to achieve redress, or, when less successful, becomes a barrier block on the road to redress. Since the mining activities affect the community in many ways--economically, environmentally and socially--one should be aware that not only do the local circumstances affect the justice seeking process, but that the justice seeking process affects the local society. It affects what is perceived as unjust, what the desired redress is, but above all, the relations between the people within the local society. (4) To understand the process one may wonder 'what is the problem, and for whom?' These questions lay at the foundation of the process.

   Methodology

   As a preliminary effort to analyse the developments in the justice seeking process over the past decade, I embarked on desk research. First, I gathered newspaper articles and other documentation (5) starting from the time that mining company NHM began its exploiting activities in 1999. It became clear that over the years several groups had taken action in the justice seeking process. During my fieldwork in 2009, I interviewed some of these actors. Based on documentation and interviews, I looked at which complaints the various justice seeking actors had lodged over time and their attempts to get redress. These actors--comprising local interest groups such as customary leaders, former employees of the mining company, or other organizations within and outside North Maluku region--brought to light various forms of injustices. This created a picture of that the actors said represented the daily struggles of the population and what they believed the local population experienced as unjust.

   However, I did not want to rely on what these actors presented as local problems. And so to better understand the justice seeking process and the position of the local population in it, it was necessary to examine what the local population viewed as their main problems in their daily struggles and what their position was in relation to the mining issue. Nearly fifty people in three different villages close to the mining site were interviewed. (6) The three villages were selected based on the different characteristics of their inhabitants, such as their ethnic backgrounds and their divergent sources of income. It was expected that these characteristics would impact the villagers' interests in issues related to mining. This article chronicles the events in North Maluku and from that, it explores the varying aspects of the justice seeking process. The subsequent discussion is structured in two main parts. Part 2 provides a historical account of developments within the justice seeking process between 1999 and 2009. Part 3 builds on this by providing analyses of the dynamics and processes of the justice seeking process.

2. Justice Seeking in Kao-Malifut Region: A Historical Account

   The local population inhabiting the surroundings of the NHM mining site is ethnically diverse. The tensions between the two ethnic groups in the region--the indigenous Kao and the migrant Makian--already existed before the mining company came to the area. However, the tension has been aggravated by the company's arrival, as will be explained below. The tense relationship between the groups has shaped the perception of injustices related to mining and the desired redress for these injustices.

   In the 1970s, a volcanic eruption threatened the island of Makian, some 100 kilometres from the Kao-Malifut area. The Indonesian central government decided that the Makian people who are Muslims--had to migrate to the Kao region on the island of Halmahera. The indigenous population on Halmahera, the Kao, are predominantly Christians and have a customary system in which the highest leader in the hierarchy is the Sultan of the nearby Ternate island. Interestingly, this Sultan is not a Christian, but a Muslim. Over the years, the migrant Makian managed to gain a relatively strong economic and political position in the poor Kao region. Furthermore, there was confusion regarding the status of the land. While the Kao believed that the land was theirs and that they had allowed the Makian, previously displaced by a natural disaster, to reside there, the Makian had been told that the land on which they lived was State land allocated to them by the government. This led to increasing tension between the Makian and Kao(Wilson, 2008:54-6).

   In the 1990s, the Australian-Indonesian company NHM came to the Kao-Makian area to begin its mining activities, mainly exploiting gold. A few years later, a number of Kao representatives complained to the company and demanded more jobs for the indigenous Kao people, (7) more respect from the company for their customary leaders as well as favouring them over their neighbours, the Makian immigrants. (8) The tension between the Kao and the Makian exploded in the late 1990s. Its timing was linked to the process of decentralisation, introduced after the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998. Decentralisation offered the opportunity for resetting the administrative boundaries between provinces, districts, and sub-districts, while providing considerable autonomy to the district governments. Hence, many new districts emerged all over Indonesia (Van Klinken & Schulte Nordholt, 2007:18-25), including in the Kao-Makian area. The former Kao sub-district was divided after the Makian managed to get official recognition for their own sub-district named Malifut, in which the mining company was located as well.

   In August 1999, a day after the official recognition of the Makian sub-district Malifut, a violent conflict erupted between the Kao and the Makian. Local leaders in other parts of North Maluku, in particular two Sultans in the area, seized the opportunity of the conflict in Kao-Malifut for...