JAKARTA — Rights activists have lambasted Indonesia’s parliament for delaying yet again a long-awaited Indigenous rights bill — stuck in limbo for more than a decade — even as communities continue to lose millions of hectares of land and face criminalization for defending their ancestral territories.

The bill is widely seen as a crucial step to safeguarding Indigenous peoples’ rights amid an increase in land grabs, investment-linked conflicts, and the persecution of communities defending their traditional lands.

Indonesia’s main Indigenous alliance, AMAN, first proposed the bill in 2003, arguing it was essential to protecting Indigenous rights and lands and address deep-rooted injustices. In 2010, AMAN began drafting an academic paper to support the bill’s submitted to parliament. The House of Representatives adopted the proposal in 2012, formally kicking off the deliberation process.

Yet despite being listed as a legislative priority every year since 2014, the bill has seen no meaningful progress.

Martin Manurung, deputy chair of parliament’s legislative committee, attributed the delays to lawmakers’ inability to identify the core issues affecting Indigenous communities in Indonesia.

“We want to see how the identification process goes [before resuming the deliberation of the bill],” he said as quoted by investigative media outlet Tempo in March.

Martin said mapping the challenges — from tenure disputes to cultural preservation — would be time-consuming due to the diversity and complexity of issues faced by Indigenous groups. Only after this process is complete, he added, can lawmakers begin drafting stipulations in the bill to address them.

But rights groups see the delay as a convenient excuse — masking a deeper reluctance to relinquish control over land and resources.

“How come it’s been 15 years [since the bill started being discussed] and yet it’s nowhere near being finished?” said Uli Arta Siagian, forests and plantations lead at the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the country’s biggest green NGO, during a March 24 discussion in Jakarta.

Arimbi Heroepoetri, a member of a civil society coalition monitoring the bill, echoed this sentiment, blaming a lack of political will among lawmakers and government officials.

“It’s not about the complexities of the issues. It’s about reluctance to share power [with Indigenous peoples],” she said.

Arimbi noted that the Golkar Party — the third-largest in parliament and part of the ruling coalition — has repeatedly downplayed the bill’s importance. In 2021, Golkar politician Christina Ariyani said the party saw no urgency to pass the bill, despite it being on the docket since 2012. In 2024, fellow Golkar lawmaker Firman Soebagyo questioned the constitutionality of certain provisions and cast doubt on whether the bill could even be implemented.

“This bill is seen as a threat by many in both the executive and legislative branches,” Uli said. “They view it as a challenge to capital and land-based investment interests, which is not true. Economic prosperity can coexist with Indigenous recognition.”

Golkar has a long track record of championing bills deemed to favor investors at the expense of the environment and Indigenous peoples. In 2017, Firman backed a bill allowing palm oil companies to clear carbon-rich peatlands for plantations. Golkar was also among the most strident backers in 2020 of the so-called omnibus bill on job creation, a slate of sweeping deregulation proposed by the previous administration of former president Joko Widodo.

Still, not all parties share Golkar’s stance. The NasDem Party has formally declared its support for the Indigenous rights bill, according to Arimbi, but it’s not part of the ruling coalition and has less than 12% of seats in parliament.

“We want this bill to become a House initiative, meaning it must be passed in a plenary session. That takes a majority,” Arimbi said. “But other [parties] remain silent.”

Building a majority remains a tall order in the current political climate, Uli said. She pointed out that businesspeople now make up 60-70% of members of parliament — a sharp increase from 30% during Widodo’s first term from 2014-2019.

“That’s our challenge,” Uli said.

Despite the hurdles, Veni Siregar, a senior campaigner at the NGO Kaoem Telapak, said it’s important to keep pushing for the bill. If passed, it would enshrine Indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral lands, cultural practices and self-governance in national law, providing long-overdue legal certainty.

Without it, Indigenous communities must navigate a patchwork of overlapping, often contradictory sectoral regulations. Veni said 34 different sectoral regulations currently govern Indigenous affairs, resulting in bureaucratic and time-consuming recognition processes.

As a result, many communities remain unrecognized, unprotected and highly vulnerable to conflicts, she added. In 2024 alone, AMAN identified 687 land-related conflicts in which Indigenous communities lost 11 million hectares (27 million acres) of their land — an area larger than South Korea. At least 925 people were criminalized, and 60 were subjected to violence by state security forces.

“This happens because Indigenous peoples are not recognized,” Veni said.

Should parliament fail to pass the bill by August, the NGO coalition plans to mobilize a mass demonstration of 10,000 Indigenous people, Uli said.

“If by August it still hasn’t been passed, tens of thousands of people are ready to surround the presidential palace and the parliament, because this bill is in the interest of all of us,” she said. “We’ve waited a long time, and the road has indeed been a tough one.”

Banner image: A large number of Indigenous peoples and rights activists staged a protest on October 11, 2024, in Jakarta to demand that Indonesia former president Joko Widodo be held accountable for his policies and actions harming Indigenous communities. Image courtesy of AMAN. 

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