JAKARTA — When Joko Widodo took office in 2014 as the president of Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, he was seen as a transformative leader who came from a modest background with a strong focus on promoting environmental stewardship and supporting marginalized groups, including Indigenous communities. In his 2014 campaign and early days in office, he promised to pass the Indigenous rights bill that had been submitted to parliament two years earlier. It promised legal recognition and protection of Indigenous rights as well as a formal framework to resolve land conflicts and secure land tenure for Indigenous communities. Jokowi, as he’s popularly known, also pledged greater involvement for Indigenous peoples in decisions affecting their territories, inviting representatives from the Indigenous Peoples’ Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), the country’s largest advocacy group for Indigenous rights, to the State Palace in Jakarta on several occasions. These promises resulted in an endorsement from AMAN for Jokowi in the 2014 election, the first time the group had ever endorsed a presidential candidate. But their hopes were quickly dashed, with Jokowi failing to make good on most of his promises by the time he left office on Oct. 20 this year. That includes the failure to pass the Indigenous rights bill, which has now languished in parliament for more than a decade. As early as 2017, AMAN was already contemplating withdrawing its support for Jokowi, who had yet to establish a promised task force on Indigenous issues, or throw his weight behind the Indigenous rights bill. In the…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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