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State of the World's Minorities and Indigenous Peoples 2009 - Indonesia

The year 2008 saw a number of setbacks for religious freedom. In June, Islamist mobs attacked Ahmadiyya Muslims, whom they accuse of heresy. While the government decried the violence, human rights organizations saw the roots of the violence in a government committee's April 2008 recommendation that the sect be banned. The government later issued a decree that did not ban Ahmadiyya, but warned its adherents that they faced potential arrest under laws on the protection of religion. Muslim hardliners attacked Ahmadiyya mosques in West Java and Islamic Defenders Front members closed the local Ahmadiyya headquarters in Makassar, South Sulawesi. In September the South Sumatra provincial government issued a total ban on Ahmadiyya. Ahmadiyya Muslims number some 200,000 in Indonesia.

Communal tensions remained high elsewhere. Human Rights Watch reported that in January 2008 a mob burnt down the Sangkareang Hindu temple in west Lombok and in July Muslim hardliners attacked students at a Christian theology school in east Jakarta, injuring 18 and forcing the school to shut its campus. In June, the International Crisis Group highlighted continued Muslim migration from other parts of Indonesia and the rise of exclusivist Christian groups and hard-line Islamists on Papua's west coast as factors heightening the risk of conflict in the area.

The UN Committee against Torture urged the government in 2008 to promptly investigate violence and discrimination against religious minorities and to allow the Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion to visit the country. According to the US State Department, in 2008 members of minority religious groups continued to experience official discrimination in the form of administrative difficulties, often to do with the issuance of identity cards.

Indonesia has the second highest rate of annual forest loss after Brazil, but is the largest source of greenhouse gases from deforestation and land use change. Deforestation is driven by logging and conversion to industrial oil palm plantations – some 7.5 million hectares of land have been planted with the crop, mainly in indigenous areas. Despite state support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Indonesia continues to lack any effective legal means for the protection of customary land rights.

In Riau, on the eastern coast of Sumatra, where rampant deforestation is occurring in the peatlands, Forum Asia reported an attack against the Sakal indigenous people in December 2008. The attack, allegedly by armed groups hired by PT Arara Abadi, one of the world's biggest paper producers and part of the giant Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas Group, led to the death of two children, burning of homes and the arrest of about 200.

In Papua, home to some 800,000 indigenous people divided into many hundreds of groups, Greenpeace has documented large-scale conversion of tropical forests for oil palm plantation in a Sinar Mas concession near Jayapura affecting indigenous peoples' rights to own and control their own territories.

Rights groups report that although companies such as Freeport-McMoRan (who own the massive gold and copper Grasberg mine in Papua) have started in the last few years to implement programmes to hire more Papuans, ethnic Javanese and other Indonesians continue to occupy the best employment categories.

Also in Papua, the Institute for Papuan Advocacy & Human Rights (IPAHR) reported that Indonesian police shot dead one man, Opinus Tabuni, and injured others at a rally in Wamena in August 2008. The rally was held to mark the International Day of the World's Indigenous People. According to IPAHR, around 20,000 people attended the rally.

The use of Dayak languages in schools in the parts of Kalimantan where they are the majority or live in substantial numbers remains largely illusory or simply prohibited. Government policies continue to exclude the use of the Batak languages in Sumatra in many areas of public life, and schooling in their languages remains limited.

Topics: Forced eviction, Indigenous persons, Religious minorities, Religious discrimination, Ahmadis, Freedom of religion, Minorities,