from Ayu Oktaviani
Sinar Mas, Indonesia’s largest oil palm company which has come under considerable criticism for its palm oil operations in recent years, was handed two significant defeats this week.
Food giant Nestlé found itself on the defensive, with the release of a report from Greenpeace criticizing the company for buying palm oil from Sinar Mas. This comes three months after the largest buyer of palm oil, Unilever, announced that it would no longer be purchasing palm oil from Sinar Mas, followed a month later by a similar announcement from Kraft Foods. Nestlé’s immediate response that Sinar Mas palm oil was only used in products sold on the domestic market, a practice that they would discontinue, showed how controversial Sinar Mas has become. Western consumers are becoming increasingly concerned about palm oil plantations that have been clearing forests across the archipelago, destroying local habitats, particularly in Sumatera, Borneo and Papua where most of the remaining rainforests are located in Indonesia.
A much less reported victory for local resistance against oil palm happened on March 18 in West Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). Two local indigenous leaders, Japin and Vitalis Andi, were released from custody after spending more than three weeks in a Ketapang jail for opposing a Sinar Mas oil palm plantation which is destroying indigenous lands.
The case began in April 2008, when PT. Bangun Nusa Mandiri (PT. BNM), a subsidiary of Sinar Mas, began clearing land for an oil palm plantation in the Marau Subdistrict of Ketapang, West Kalimantan. By September 2009, the company had destroyed 250 hectares of land traditionally held by the Jalai Dayak people in Silat Hulu village.
From the start, the community refused to hand over their fields to the company, and made various attempts to negotiate with the company directly and through the local government, but to no effect. On September 28, 2009, Mr. Japin from Silat Hulu reported the company to the local Marau police office on behalf of his community. The next day, about 60 people from Silat Hulu collectively confiscated two bulldozers and a theodolite from PT. BNM in an effort to stop the clearing. The community soon gave the theodolite over to the police, but continued to hold the heavy equipment as evidence in their case against PT. BNM.
The community also applied traditional justice mechanisms to the company, demanding financial compensation for trees and other vegetation that had been cleared as well as refusing the company further entry to their lands. The company ignored these demands and the traditional legal system. The community continued to look for justice, and on October 26, 2009, Luhai Hartanto, B, Ritung and Japin, on behalf of the indigenous people of Silat Hulu, brought the case to the West Kalimantan delegate for the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), and to the provincial police department of West Kalimantan.
On October 15, fully-armed local police came to Silat Hulu, to secure the peace and negotiate a settlement between the villagers and the Sinar Mas subsidiary. The police did not flatly reject the community-imposed penalty, but attempted to renegotiate the compensation amount for plots destroyed by PT. BNM. The community agreed to reduce the monetary compensation from 1.3 billion Rupiah to 510 million Rupiah (US$ 140,000 to US$55,000), in the hope of a quick resolution, with assurances that the police would push for PT BNM to resolve the case.
