Executive Summary
The forests of southern Jambi have long been home to indigenous peoples who produced the forest products on which the regional trading kingdoms, Malayu and later Srivijaya of the 7th to 13th centuries, relied. The forest peoples had their own polities and bounded territories and paid tribute to the chiefs of these kingdoms. The Batin Sembilan peoples lived from rotational farming, hunting, fishing and gathering and from the trade in resins, dyes, valuable woods and medicines from the forest. Under the Dutch these local systems were affirmed and their rights in land recognised, to some extent.
With independence their situation changed. Along with other social groups in Jambi they were officially classed as a poor and backward people – a „tribe of children of the interior‟ – and their rights in land were not recognised. The government handed out their lands to logging, transmigration, cocoa and palm oil projects without consultation or their consent. This seriously disrupted the peoples‟ connections with their ancestral territories, diminished the remaining forests and deprived them of land and livelihood. The land-squeeze led to out-migration of the indigenous people and the intrusion into their area of settlers from Java.
PT Asiatic Persada (AP) used to be named PT BDU, which since the 1970s held an extensive logging concession in the area. In 1987, PT BDU, with questionable legality, was given a 20,000 ha. license within its logging area to develop as plantations but it was not until the 1990s that much oil palm began to be planted. The company was renamed PT AP in 1992. As the plantations began to expand on the Batin Sembilan‟s lands, disputes emerged and, once the political situation changed allowing communities to express their views, they began to demand land rights and compensation for lands lost to oil palm. The company also changed ownership several times being bought out first by the Commonwealth Development Corporation and Pacific Rim (2000), then by Cargill (2006) and finally Wilmar later in 2006.
In response to community demands for lands and compensation, in 2004/5 the intermediate companies offered 650 ha. of smallholdings in the south and a further 350 ha. in the northern part of the concession. Maps clearly marked the areas and signs were even put up indicating their purpose. However, after Wilmar took over, the company withdrew the offer of providing smallholdings within the concession. The result was an increase in conflicts, which Wilmar, in response to a series of NGO complaints to the World Bank Group‟s International Finance Corporation, agreed be mediated by the IFC‟s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman process. Some community groups refused this negotiation process while others acceded. In the northern part of the concession participatory maps were developed showing the wide extent of the indigenous peoples‟ land claims within the concession. However, Wilmar refused to recognise their lands within the concession or provide smallholdings but instead offered a 1000 ha. joint venture on State lands west of their concession. While the mediation broke down, one northern group refused the offer but another group initially accepted. However, the leader of that group recently repudiated the joint venture agreement, which is claimed to offer better returns to the company than the people, and he is again demanding the return of customary lands within the concession.
Meanwhile there was no progress resolving the land issues in the south of the concession. When Batin Sembilan people moved back into the concession and set up settlements, PT AP initially offered them piece work for picking up loose fruits. PT AP became concerned that substantial fruit was being stolen and marketed outside the concession by an entrepreneur residing in one of the settlements in the concession. Meetings with the communities did not resolve the land dispute or the conflict over fruit. In July 2011, the company contracted the mobile police brigade (BRIMOB) to secure control of their plantation.
In August, a dispute over stolen fruit with the entrepreneur led to: his lorry being impounded; a fight with police; the alleged theft of police weapons and; a large operation by BRIMOB to recover the weapons. The confrontation turned ugly – with different parties blaming each other for initiating the violence. A policeman was badly cut and shots were fired by BRIMOB which caused villagers to flee into the forest and one person to be wounded in the back by a spent bullet. The entrepreneur and his family, with 12 other suspects (later freed), were taken into custody. The entrepreneur and his family are still in jail awaiting trial.
According to testimony recorded in our investigation, the following day, without warning, BRIMOB and PT AP staff returned to the settlement firing shots and seeking to chase the people out of the settlement. Their houses were then flattened using excavators and their properties scattered. Over the following week, BRIMOB returned to rout the people while PT AP staff, under PT AP instruction and using company heavy plant, systematically destroyed the houses of 83 families in three settlements, even using caterpillar tractors to bulldoze up concrete floors. Most people fled, some taking refuge in the forests and others in nearby towns and settlements. BRIMOB closed the area for a week while the operation continued, denying access to NGOs, the media and local people. BRIMOB remain in the area and, at the time of the study, were said to be daily continuing to intimidate people by firing their guns.
The events received considerable media coverage in the local papers. The government Department of Social Affairs brought in emergency tenting and some food for the affected people, while NGOs responded with a more sustained humanitarian operation to bring them food and clothes. Some of those evicted remain in the forests, while others have returned to their settlements to live in the temporary tenting provided. A number of NGOs appealed to the Wilmar Group to cease operations in the area and remove BRIMOB.
Wilmar repudiated the NGO complaints arguing that the case was unrelated to the land dispute and paid an RSPO-accredited assessor, PT TUV, to review the situation. The short investigation, with Wilmar and PT AP staff present, came to partial conclusions, but did note that the underlying land dispute would have to be resolved for the company to be certified.
Forest Peoples Programme, SawitWatch and HuMa, signatories of the original complaint to IFC, decided that the situation warranted a more detailed investigation. This was communicated to Wilmar which welcomed the enquiry. The seven-person team including anthropologists, environmentalists and lawyers, thus spent a week in the area interviewing villagers, medical personnel, NGOs, government officials and PT AP and Wilmar staff. This report is the result. A provincial government investigation into the evictions, carried out on 8th October 2011, confirms the three locations and the number of houses destroyed.
The team concludes that PT AP remains in violation of the IFC Performance Standards, is operating contrary to the RSPO P&C especially with respect to land and dispute resolution. We also find that BRIMOB and PT AP between them share responsibility for serious human rights violations. These violations demand further investigation to ascertain the individuals responsible. They should be charged and brought to trial by the government authorities. The independence of assessor companies, Daemeter Consulting and TUV, is also called into question, casting doubt on the credibility of RSPO‟s reliance on 3rd party assessments. We make recommendations to Wilmar, RSPO, CAO and the Government to resolve the dispute.
Introduction to this study: context, rationale and methods
The team which carried out this study are all from organisations that were signatories to complaints submitted in 2006 and 2008 to the Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO) of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) about the social and environmental problems associated with subsidiary companies of the Wilmar Group. The complaints triggered CAO-mediated negotiations between impacted communities and Wilmar to seek resolution of the land conflicts. These mediated negotiations are ongoing. One of the cases being mediated under CAO supervision was the PT Asiatic Persada (PT AP) operation in Jambi, which focused on the land claims of people in the north of the concession. The mediation ran into difficulties in June and July 2011 and led to the mediation process being terminated.
In August 2011, a stream of reports emerged from Jambi through the independent media, as well as through NGOs, of serious conflicts, violence and mass evictions in the southern part of the PT AP concession. Several NGOs appealed to Wilmar to remedy the situation and also address the underlying land conflicts that had been the subject of the mediation. Wilmar replied strongly repudiating the reports and suggesting that there was no connection between land conflicts and the problems in the south of the concession, that the land dispute was already resolved, that the evictions were justified and that there had been no abuses or injuries. A report from a third party auditor, TUV, an RSPO-accredited Certification Body, which was contracted by Wilmar to look into the situation, was later issued substantially corroborating Wilmar‟s account of the situation. The TUV report did however mention that there was an underlying land dispute which would need to be resolved before the operation could be certified.
Given the termination of the mediation process, the discrepancies between the reports from Wilmar and TUV with respect to the land disputes and the much wider discrepancies between these reports and the accounts of local NGOs and journalists, the Forest Peoples Programme, in communication with Indonesian civil society groups and affected communities, decided that an independent investigation should be carried out. This was communicated to Wilmar and the RSPO Board. Wilmar wrote back welcoming the study and offering to help provide logistical help.
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