Behind the glittering slogan of “green energy,” the reality on the ground tells a different story: deforestation, land grabbing from Indigenous communities, ecological destruction, increased carbon emissions, and a wave of criminalization against locals defending their land. Halmahera Island is a stark example. In this region, 1,465 land-based industrial permits have been issued—108 for metal-mineral mining, 51 of them for nickel. Between 2017 and 2023, mining expansion led to the loss of 23,763 hectares of forest.

Indonesia’s nickel boom, far from delivering national prosperity, has deepened the country’s entrenchment in global extractive capitalism under the guise of green energy. As the world races to decarbonize, nickel has become indispensable for lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles—an industry hailed as a cornerstone of the clean energy transition. With the largest known nickel reserves globally—holding 42% of global supply and producing over half the world’s output—Indonesia has become a strategic hotspot. Yet rather than empowering local communities or building economic sovereignty, this resource wealth has drawn a familiar cast of state actors, foreign investors (primarily from China), and multinational corporations to eastern regions like Southeast Sulawesi and North Maluku, where ecosystems are gutted and indigenous lands sacrificed in the name of progress.

State policy has only accelerated this extractive turn, prioritizing industrial expansion over environmental or social safeguards. Through Presidential Regulation No. 109/2020, nickel was designated a National Strategic Project, triggering the rapid construction of industrial megazones in places like Morowali, Obi Island, and Weda Bay. Backed by massive public infrastructure investment and an export ban on raw nickel ore since 2019, the government hopes to move up the value chain by promoting domestic refining and battery production. However, this nationalist industrial strategy continues to rely on the same destructive logic: extract resources, displace communities, and feed the demands of global markets—whether for stainless steel or electric vehicles. Indonesia’s green energy role may be new in name, but in practice, it follows an old and violent script.

One of the clearest examples of this contradiction lies in Maba Sangaji, an Indigenous territory in East Halmahera, North Maluku, now devastated by the operations of PT Position (POS). On paper, POS is just one of many nickel mining companies. But a closer look reveals it as a pawn in the larger game of extractive capitalism. POS is controlled by PT Tanito Harum Nickel—a subsidiary of PT Harum Energy Tbk, a publicly listed company on the Indonesia Stock Exchange. Harum Energy is owned by the Kiki Barki family, a coal tycoon dynasty now turning its appetite toward the “green gold” of nickel. With a layered ownership structure and an integrated corporate network—from mines and smelters to mixed hydroxide precipitate processing plants—they control the entire production cycle for the global market.

Kiki Barki is no newcomer to Indonesia’s mining and political elite. For over three decades, he has been a dominant figure in the coal industry and once served as a special assistant to the Minister of Defense in 2011. His influence extends beyond wealth into the political sphere, with deep ties to the ruling class. A telling example is Pramono Anung—former Secretary-General of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP), Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Cabinet Secretary under Jokowi (2014–2024), and now Governor of Jakarta (2025–2030)—who previously served as director of PT Tanito Harum, a subsidiary of Barki’s PT Harum Energy, from 1988 to 1996. In 2019, just days before PT Tanito Harum’s contract was set to expire, Barki allegedly lobbied President Jokowi to issue a mining license extension (IUPK) without auction—through the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources—a move that clearly favored his family’s business interests.

Tracing the Roots of the Conflict Between Maba Sangaji and PT. Position
In October 2024, the government issued a Forest Area Borrow-Use Permit (IPPKH) to PT Position (POS) in the customary forest area of Maba Sangaji, East Halmahera—without any public consultation or prior notice. Residents only became aware a month later, when land clearing was already underway. The cleared forest was not empty land; it was home to nutmeg—the community’s main commodity—along with damar, ironwood, and kenari trees. The company's operations also damaged small rivers such as Kaplo, Tutungan, and Samlowos, all of which flow into the main river, the Sangaji, the village’s primary water source. As a result, the marine ecosystem was disrupted: fish and shrimp began to disappear.

In December 2024, residents demanded answers from village officials but received none. A few days later, POS representatives arrived—not to provide an explanation, but to recruit workers and offer a “gesture of goodwill” of Rp2,500 per square meter for 730 hectares of land. The community rejected the offer outright, deeming it unfair and firmly upholding their principle: customary land is not for sale.

On April 16, 2025, fifteen residents went to the mining site and confiscated the keys to heavy equipment in a peaceful act of protest. The response was violent: armed security forces confronted them, resulting in a minor clash. Despite this, the villagers successfully brought the keys home as a symbolic demand for accountability from the company. Soon after, eleven residents received police summons—one of whom hadn’t even participated in the action. Officers began visiting villagers’ homes daily, sometimes with threats. The Regent of East Halmahera was reportedly involved, instructing village heads to pressure residents into complying with police demands. The community refused, recognizing this as an attempt at criminalization.

On April 28, the village government held a meeting disguised as a “compensation socialization” session, where attendance signatures were secretly used as evidence of agreement. Some villagers, realizing the manipulation, tore up the attendance list after photographing it. Intimidation continued. One resident facing pressure disappeared and became unreachable. Official summonses were only issued on April 30, followed by direct threats via phone calls. The community grew increasingly aware: this was no longer just a mining dispute—it was a coordinated attempt to suppress resistance. Still, the people stood firm. On May 18, they returned to the mining site, raised protest banners, halted operations, and blocked access roads. They planted customary flags on the site, declaring their rejection of the company. In retaliation, eight double-cabin trucks arrived carrying heavily armed Brimob and criminal investigation police. Officers tore down the flags, beat protestors, and arrested 27 members of the Maba Sangaji Indigenous community. As of today, eleven remain detained by the North Maluku Police.

Criminalization
A few days after the arrests, the police released a public statement aimed at distorting the context of the villagers’ struggle and constructing a misleading narrative. Terms like “security,” “law,” and “thuggery” were used to justify the protection of corporate interests and suppress grassroots resistance. The statement even accused unnamed “intellectual actors” of orchestrating the protests—as if the resistance did not arise from lived oppression, but from external manipulation.

Such accusations are a deliberate attempt by those in power to divert public attention from the root issues—land grabbing and ecological destruction—while delegitimizing the people’s collective outrage by framing it as a “political agenda.” Not long after the press release, the local village government issued a letter declaring that the eleven detained individuals were not part of the indigenous community. The motive was clear: to portray them as criminals and weaken public solidarity.

The attack didn’t stop there. The eleven detainees were suddenly accused of drug use, based on three urine tests conducted on the same day. The first two tests in the morning came back negative. But by evening, a third test bizarrely returned a positive result for marijuana—despite the fact that the detainees had been in police custody the entire day. Did they use marijuana inside the police station? Or was it discreetly planted through their food or drinks? Such drug allegations are a well-worn tactic used by authorities to discredit popular resistance. Exploiting social stigma, this strategy shifts public perception from sympathy to suspicion, derails legal advocacy, destroys the image of environmental defenders, and undermines collective support.

What happened to the eleven Indigenous residents of Maba Sangaji in East Halmahera is not merely an agrarian conflict—it is part of a calculated spectacle of repression. This is a form of conflict management where power no longer relies solely on brute force, but on controlling perception through legal manipulation, public relations, and disinformation. It reflects what Guy Debord described as the society of the spectacle, where modern capitalism sustains itself not by revealing truth, but by manufacturing illusions. In this case, the state plays an active role: protecting corporate interests under the guise of law and order, using loaded terms like “security,” “rule of law,” and “premanism” to criminalize resistance. The accusations of outside agitators, the revocation of Indigenous identity, and the absurd drug allegations are not random—they are all deliberate strategies to distort reality, delegitimize protest, and isolate those who fight back.

The state is not neutral; it is an actor deeply embedded in the machinery of capital. As Debord noted in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, today’s power structure operates as a unified global system in which state and capital collaborate to maintain control. In the case of PT Position, this alliance manifests in the state’s full facilitation of nickel mining operations under the narrative of “green energy” and “national interest.” When local communities resist ecological destruction, they are met with a multi-layered script: intimidation, legal harassment, narrative warfare, and social stigmatization. Within this system, the law functions less as a mechanism of justice and more as a theatrical device—a tool to legitimize dispossession and instill fear. The ultimate message is clear: defending your land and way of life is a threat to state-backed capital, and for that, you will be punished.

Green Energy, Dirty Reality
The promotion of Renewable Energy (RE) as a climate solution is less about saving the planet and more about expanding capital. Framed as “green,” RE is driven by profit motives, not ecological responsibility. The climate crisis is thus reduced to a market opportunity.

This logic is clear in the electric vehicle (EV) industry. Touted as clean, it relies on dirty practices—deforestation, land grabs, and nickel mining, as seen in Maba Sangaji, North Maluku. In reality, “clean energy” sustains the same extractive systems under a greener guise.

In North Maluku, especially on Halmahera Island, just four of 51 nickel mining companies studied by IEEFA produced 353,000 tons of nickel and emitted 15 million tons of greenhouse gases in 2023. While not immediately toxic, these emissions worsen the climate crisis and fuel transboundary air pollution. Urban consumers of “green” products like electric vehicles unknowingly contribute to the destruction they believe they’re preventing.

Though nickel mines and smelters are located outside Java, their coal-powered operations add to global carbon buildup—intensifying respiratory illnesses in already polluted cities. Heatwaves, worsening due to rising temperatures, disproportionately harm outdoor workers, the elderly, and children, while energy bills soar with the increased use of fans and air conditioning.

Meanwhile, clean water shortages loom over major cities. Prolonged dry seasons and erratic rainfall weaken surface water supplies, while poor drainage systems turn floods into recurring disasters—crippling infrastructure and small economies. Yet, coal plants continue to power both nickel smelters and urban grids, exposing communities near plants in Cirebon, Cilacap, and Suralaya to chronic toxic air.

This is the reality of the green spectacle: a market-driven illusion of environmentalism. Green solutions are sold like consumer goods—accessible only to those with purchasing power. We're told we’re saving the planet by consuming, while the real culprits remain unchallenged.

Ultimately, the climate crisis has been repackaged as a business opportunity. Energy transition, under current models, serves elite interests and reinforces the very system that caused the crisis. Behind the dazzling green rhetoric, capitalism marches on—extractive, exploitative, and dressed in green.

Bureaucratizing Dissent
This raises an urgent question: why do destructive projects that clearly harm the planet and displace grassroots communities continue unchecked? Why are voices of resistance so easily silenced, co-opted, or redirected?

The answer lies not only in the power of the state and corporations, but also in the condition of resistance itself—often trapped within the NGO framework. Across Indonesia, many movements rely heavily on donor-driven NGOs, whose operations follow the logic of projects and funding cycles. The collective imagination for confronting state-capital is often limited to what fits within NGO paradigms.

While NGOs are seen as vehicles of participatory democracy and civil resistance, in practice, they frequently act as buffers—absorbing dissent rather than amplifying it. Symbolic campaigns, issue-based discussions, and curated demonstrations rarely challenge the root problem: the asymmetrical power relations and the monolithic system of state-capital.

Instead of fueling confrontation, NGOs often encourage “participation” in predetermined frameworks laid out by power. Collective rage is channeled into safe forms—workshops, proposals, legal mediation. Direct, spontaneous action is discouraged, replaced by technocratic, institutional responses. The result is the illusion of change, not change itself.

Worse, many NGOs function as extensions of global capitalist logic—offering a sense of inclusion while maintaining systemic stability. Resistance becomes a managed process: confined to project timelines, evaluation reports, and donor expectations, while destruction continues and the powerful remain untouched.

So the question shifts: are NGOs allies—or instruments of control designed to keep the people obedient and manageable? Using legal tools and NGO support for defense is tactically valid. But how do we measure the boundary between using the system and being consumed by it?

Against Managed Dissent
The most effective path to liberation lies outside the reach of government control. True resistance begins where institutional mediation ends—through direct action. Simply put, any autonomous act taken for political or social goals without relying on third parties (politicians, parties, courts, union leaders, legal experts, NGOs, etc.) is direct action—like the sabotage carried out by the Indigenous people of Maba Sangaji on April 16 and May 18, 2025.

Though small in scale and limited in material damage, these acts declared open rebellion against extractive powers—and rejected the lie of powerlessness. They were the first weeds cracking the concrete of social paralysis, proving that waiting for the “right time” only ensures it never comes.

But weeds alone cannot break the pavement. One act may inspire another, yet the spark must meet a collective readiness to escalate. That readiness will not emerge through institutional channels, petitions, lobbying, or non-profits—the very tools democracy uses to neutralize the radical imagination.