Transmigration townships and the Dayak Bekati': indigenous peoples' rights in an industrialised palm oil landscape in Indonesia

Industrialised plantations, State-sponsored resettlement schemes, integrationist government social policies, combined with land tenure systems which fail to protect customary rights, create a deadly cocktail threatening the survival of Indonesia’s indigenous peoples.

Indonesia’s Transmigration Policy: the sponsored resettlement of farmers from Java to the ‘outer islands’, was adopted with the objective of assimilating the diverse peoples of the archipelago into one Indonesian national identity.

This briefing documents the situation of the Dayak Bekati’ of Indonesian Borneo in the Province of West Kalimantan, whose lands have been taken over by a relatively new model of Transmigration referred to as KotaTerpadu Mandiri – integrated self-sustaining townships. KTM are designed to achieve the total transformation of both human and biological landscapes through deforestation, industrial developments such as mines and plantations,colonisation and cultural assimilation. There are dozens of KTM schemes being implemented all across the archipelago.