- In May 2024, Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, signed a new regulation to enable the country’s religious organizations to become mining operators.
- The policy has been criticized extensively by civil society groups, some of which view the move as the result of a political bargain for Nahdlatul Ulama, the country’s largest Islamic organization, to deliver votes to Jokowi’s chosen successor in the February 2024 presidential election.
- Young people within Nahdlatul Ulama told Mongabay Indonesia that Indonesia’s largest Islamic group would be reneging on its environmental commitments if it were to follow through on plans to operate coal mining concessions.
A widely criticized move by Indonesian President Joko Widodo to reform mining rules to bestow coal mining licenses on an allied religious organization is carving a rift between its executive leadership and Islamic activists in the community, sources told Mongabay Indonesia.
On May 30, the president, commonly known as Jokowi, signed a revision to existing mining rules to allow the country’s religious organizations to operate mining concessions.
The unorthodox reform was spearheaded by the country’s investment minister, Jokowi loyalist Bahlil Lahadalia, who has faced serious allegations of impropriety in the revocation and reissuance of mining permits.
In Jakarta, allowing faith groups to become mining operators has been widely interpreted as part of a quid pro quo for the country’s largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, for delivering votes to Jokowi ally Prabowo Subianto. Prabowo was elected president in February this year after a court led by Jokowi’s brother-in-law changed age limits to allow Jokowi’s son to run as Prabowo’s vice president.
Prabowo ran for high office in three previous elections over a 15-year period and was rejected by voters in all three contests.
Two-term president Jokowi has long enjoyed extraordinary popularity, according to surveys of Indonesian voters dating back a decade.
The ploy to hitch Jokowi’s 36-year-old inexperienced son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to the Prabowo ticket transformed opinion polls and propelled Prabowo to a landslide election win.
Civil society groups told Mongabay that the change was fraught with procedural and practical pitfalls.
“It’s nonsense,” Muhammad Jamil, head of the legal desk at the National Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam), a watchdog group, told Mongabay Indonesia on May 1.
With a claimed 100 million followers, Nahdlatul Ulama is by far the largest Islamic organization in Indonesia. The decision on religious mining permits came as Islamic organizations were winning domestic and international praise for increased attention to biodiversity loss and climate change.
Many young Islamic activists inspired by this pivot to the environment have responded to Jokowi’s policymaking with dismay, interviews showed.
“This is fraught with conflicts of interest,” Asman Aziz, the deputy of an NU chapter in East Kalimantan province, told Mongabay Indonesia.
Six former concessions are set to be handed over to religious organizations, four in East Kalimantan and two in South Kalimantan province.
“When NU becomes joined up with the miners, all NU can do is sit back and reap the rewards,” said Asman in East Kalimantan. “It won’t be able to criticize any damage caused by mining.”
A NU low
The country’s largest Islamic organization applied for a coal mining permit in East Kalimantan shortly after Jokowi’s office published Presidential Regulation No. 25 of this year (the rule that has enabled religious groups to obtain mining concessions).
In 2015, however, NU leaders issued an edict against the exploitation of natural resources at the organization’s Bahtsul Masail, a plenary in which Islamic scholars interrogate scripture to decide contemporary policy.
In recent years, civil society organizations and young people within the NU and Muhammadiyah organizations have sought to give environmental action greater centrality. That has sparked changes such as clerical bodies issuing fatwa, a Muslim religious edict, against some forms of environmental damage, as well as grassroots initiatives to foster sustainability.
“I urge the ulama and Muslim leaders to take an active role in conveying issues related to environmental damage — then we will take more concrete actions,” Indonesia’s vice president, Ma’ruf Amin, himself an Islamic cleric, told a gathering of Islamic leaders at the Congress of Muslims for Sustainable Indonesia at Jakarta’s Istiqlal Mosque in 2022.
Roy Murtadho, an NU member who also founded an Islamic boarding school in Bogor, a city just south of the nation’s capital, said that NU moonlighting as a mining magnate would amount to the organization reneging on its environmental commitments.
“Out of many NU congress decisions, the conversion of food-productive land for big business interests was deemed haram [forbidden by Islamic law] — environmental damage that led to social-ecological damage was haram,” Roy said.
Young activists worry NU could enter into an adversarial relationship with local communities or Indigenous groups. Ordinarily, the faith organization would typically be expected to advocate on behalf of people affected by land conversion.
Roy said the policy had the potential to instill recrimination in communities if individuals felt they could not speak against a mining operation out of fear of speaking against the faith.
Others point to the fraught nature of a dangerous business in which workplace accidents are common.
That could expose a faith organization to legal risks regarding culpability. Moreover, the mining business is awash with corruption and legalistic engineering among elites, and any allegations pertaining to illegality could throw NU into a crisis of legitimacy.
Money pit
“The problem is, so far we are not aware of any discussions between PBNU and PWNU regarding this plan — this is a big problem,” Azam said, referring to the national and regional boards of NU.
“It carries the name of the organization, so this should be discussed organizationally,” Azam added. “There is no open discussion on this issue.”
Azam has made representations to the national executive board that mining has caused extensive environmental damage in East Kalimantan. Around 49 children are recorded as having drowned in abandoned mining pits in the province.
“This thing about concessions is a very important strategic issue,” Asman said, adding that decision-making of this importance required the widest possible discussion.
Like many, Asman views the sudden coal patronage as a ploy to bind NU into political loyalty.
Izzuddin Zaky, the chair of a local NU chapter in Trenggalek district, East Java province, refrained from criticizing the leadership, but said the potential costs from mining outweighed any possible benefit.
“We do not have the authority to comment on PBNU’s response regarding the mining concession,” Izzuddin told Mongabay, referring to the NU national board. “But in Trenggalek, our commitment that the gold mines do not operate remains unchanged.”
Azam said that NU should position itself as an advocate for communities affected by mining, not the executor of the environmental change damaging communities.
“As an NU person,” Asman said, “honestly, it makes me really sad.”
Banner image: A coal mine in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. Image by Cassidy K. / ILO via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
This story was reported by Mongabay’s Indonesia team and first published here on our Indonesian site on June 10, 2024.
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