Nickel miners dig up Indonesia’s Gebe Island despite Indigenous and legal opposition

GEBE ISLAND, Indonesia — Abdul Manan Magtiblo watched the excavator dump a piece of Gebe Island into the back of a truck. Barely a thicket remained on the buzz-cut upland above Umera village as the vehicle drove off to the nearby port.

“That’s the PT Bartra Putra Mulia [BPM] nickel mine,” Manan, the village chief, told Mongabay Indonesia.

Locals like Manan say life has become harder since 2020, when the company began operating here on Gebe, a remote island of fewer than 6,000 people in the Halmahera Sea, on Indonesia’s Pacific rim.

When BPM first broke ground on its 1,850-hectare (4,570-acre) nickel mining concession here, the company’s executives told the elders in Umera they would have to relocate the Indigenous community’s shrines.

Since then, residents say, water sources have run dry, community plantations have withered, and pollution from the mine has bled into the local fishing grounds.

Manan and his neighbors in Umera are not alone in enduring change to the environment and way of life on Gebe. Mining companies are busy extracting the mineral wealth from seven nickel concessions beneath this 22,400-hectare (55,350-acre) island, which is around half the size of New Orleans.

Research by Forest Watch Indonesia, a Jakarta-based environmental nonprofit, showed corporate land concessions occupy 876,000 hectares (2.2 million acres) on 242 small Indonesian islands. Of these concessions, 28% are for mining.

Myriad criminal investigations have demonstrated extensive corruption in how licenses are awarded to industry. Last year, a court sentenced Abdul Gani Kasuba, the former governor of North Maluku province, where Gebe Island is located, to eight years in prison on bribery and money laundering charges.

Forestry campaigners told Mongabay Indonesia that small islands like Gebe should by law be excluded from mining, under the 2007 law on small islands and coastal areas, known as PWP3K, which was drafted to conserve fragile coastlines.

In March 2024, Indonesia’s Constitutional Court rejected a judicial review brought by the Harita Group, the diversified conglomerate of Indonesia’s billionaire Lim family, concerning a nickel concession on Wawonii Island in the country’s east.

The suit was seen as a test case against the PWP3K law. However, Mongabay reporting shows that the coast of Wawoniii today has been defaced, perhaps irretrievably, by nickel mining.

People in Gebe told Mongabay Indonesia they’d received no advance information of what was about to happen to their own island, which is administratively part of Central Halmahera district in North Maluku province.

A review of geospatial data shows the BPM concession overlaps with customary territory, raising questions over why the island’s then-district head, Al Yasin Ali, had authorized the entire 1,850-hectare extraction permit in 2013.

The Forest Peoples Programme has worked to advance clauses in international legal instruments for community leaders like Gebe’s Manan to the right of “free, prior and informed consent,” or FPIC, of any land-use change.

The U.K.-based campaign group defines FPIC as “the principle that a community has the right to give or withhold its consent to proposed projects that may affect the lands they customarily own, occupy or otherwise use.”

Here on Gebe Island, however, there’s little indication that the Magimai, Magpo and Magtublo people, or the Umlil, Umsandin and Umsipyat, among the many distinct groups here, were given any say in the changes.

Nickel and dime

Indonesia holds the world’s largest reserves of nickel, conferring strategic importance on the world’s fourth-most-populous country as a supplier of raw materials for the batteries required by the global energy transition.

The value of the country’s processed nickel ore exports increased from $1 billion in 2015 to more than $30 billion in 2022.

That has supported government revenue in a nation where the persistently low ratio of tax to national income remained less than 12% in 2024. That level is far below the average 34% in OECD economies, which limits the government’s ability to improve public services without expanding the country’s debt burden.

However, employment and poverty data published by Indonesia’s statistics agency, the BPS, don’t show an increase in living standards for local populations, suggesting the wealth generated by a spectacular mining boom is largely being captured by companies and elites.

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The first nickel mine on Gebe Island was cut by a Japanese company in the 1960s, before state-owned miner PT Aneka Tambang (Antam) began operating a decade later on the island in 1978.

After Antam finished mining Gebe in 2004, the water and electricity services it had provided to the local population also ended, according to research by a coalition of nonprofits.

Today there are seven nickel concessions, including the 915-hectare (2,260–acre) Kaf block operated by PT Mineral Jaya Molagina (MJM).

Hamdala, a resident of Sanof Kacepo, which is believed to be Gebe’s oldest village, said his people recognized Mount Kaf as a place of reverence.

“The caves on Mount Kaf are all sacred sites,” he said.

Sanof Kacepo elder Abdulajid Fatah Umsipiat, said local life remained administered through customary rules.

“We’re trying to fix it,” Hamdala said. “The administrative area of the village is different from the customary rights.”

These norms were brought to Gebe Island by sea from the Tidore sultanate, which ruled much of the islands around Halmahera for centuries.

In 1825, the 23rd sultan of Tidore, Achmad Mansur Sirajuddin Syah, who governed from 1821 until 1856, signed a letter affirming the customary law on Gebe Island.

“There are institutions and communities,” Abdulajid told Mongabay. “Companies shouldn’t be able to just ignore them — there’s a saying in Indigenous communities that ‘no land is unclaimed.’”

On Gebe, the political economy has absorbed many of the changes introduced by the foundation of the Indonesian nation-state, including the adoption of the village head position by Manan in Umera.

Food insecure

Manan drove his pickup truck up a dirt track on the outskirts of Umera, passing neat rows of cacao, coconut, clove and nutmeg trees arranged in order up until the fringe of the communal grove of sago trees.

“People here could use each other’s land and take plants,” Abdul, 70, explained. “The important thing is to just let them know.”

However, a layer of mud has leached onto the sago grove from the higher ground of the mining site, inundating 9 hectares (22 acres) of sago that the Magtublo clan in Hol and Kayai rely on for food security.

“Almost all the sago groves inherited by the clan in Umera village have been damaged,” Manan said.

Magbo community resident Ramalan Abubakar Magpo said their customary forest first flooded in 2021. “We can’t take the sago to be refined,” Ramalan said.

Sago and root vegetables were primary food staples across Indonesia before government subsidies saw nutritionally inferior white rice begin to supplant sago in diets from the 1970s.

Ramalan said the mining company had told local people it would compensate members of the Magpo community for any land affected by pollution.

“It still hasn’t been paid,” he said.

PT Barta Putra Mulia didn’t respond to a request for interview.

Generations of Indigenous Gebe families have threaded sago into the island’s culture. When a man seeks to marry, he must accompany any proposal with four tumang, small woven baskets of sago flour.

“Once that is fulfilled, a traditional ritual is arranged where a man proposes to his betrothed,” Ramalan said.

However, the trunks of the sago trees that Ramalan’s family inherited remain stuck in mud they say came from the mining site operated by PT Anugrah Sukses Mining.

“They’re the worst,” he said. “We the Magbo people weren’t consulted from the start and our rights were simply ignored.”

Mimin Dwi Hartono, policy analyst at Indonesia’s National Commission for Human Rights, said Indigenous peoples’ dependence on the land for basic and cultural needs meant extractive industries had to tread with additional care.

Thousands of Indigenous identities with unique modes of governance, often dating back centuries, have been absorbed into the Indonesian state since the nation declared independence in 1945.

“When it comes to Indigenous people’s rights, they can claim them based on history and origin,” Mimin said. “Even if they don’t have actual legal documents.”

PT Anugrah Sukses Mining didn’t respond to a request for interview.

‘We make a loss’

Mongabay’s reporting has documented over recent years the impact of nickel mining on the near-shore fisheries on which small island communities depend.

On Gebe Island, much of the coastline has turned from azure blue to the color of sludge, while sedimentation has buried alive the coral reefs that fringe the island.

“The color is this brownish yellow, and there aren’t any fish,” said Manan, the Umera village chief. “It’s the poor fishers who are most affected.”

Research published in 2018 by the Mining Advocacy Network, an Indonesian civil society group known as Jatam, recorded extensive damage to coral reefs and forests off Gebe.

“The mangroves in Tanjung Oeboelie no longer flourish due to being buried in mud sediments carried by erosion from mining and nickel extraction sites,” Jatam noted in its 2018 report.

Abdul Motalib Angkotasan, an oceanographer at North Maluku province’s Khairun University, said the impact on mining could pose systemic risks to the viability of coastal ecosystems.

“Everything in the water column will be disturbed,” he said. “The seagrasses and coral reefs will lose their ecological function.”

Groupers and snappers have fled the area in response to this damage to their near-shore habitat, requiring Gebe fishers like La Ode Iluaudin to give chase deeper into the Halmahera Sea if their trade is to survive.

Iluaudin used to venture no further than 50 kilometers (30 miles) out to sea to secure his living. Now he must sail to Raja Ampat, an archipelago in neighboring West Papua province more than 80 km (50 mi) away.

“When the catch is large, that can cover operational costs,” Iluaudin said. “If not then we make a loss.”

Agustinus Kastanya, a professor in the agriculture department at Pattimura University in neighboring Maluku province, said the impacts of mining would exacerbate longer-term depletion of fishing stocks and processes caused by climate change.

Udin, a fisher from Kapaleo village, said the shift to monsoon conditions had become increasingly unpredictable, elevating the risk of encountering extreme weather conditions at sea.

“But what can we do, we have to just go with it and not back away,” Udin said. “Even though we face all the risks.”

‘It’s going to Weda’

Less than 500 meters (1,640 feet) from the shore of Gebe, a hive of excavators on a hillside on Fau Island rumbled back and forth, depositing ore from hillside to mound. At night, barges carry the ore west from Gebe, more than 100 km (60 mi) away toward the Halmahera mainland.

“It’s going to Weda,” one miner told Mongabay Indonesia.

The Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park (IWIP) is one of the world’s largest nickel processing facilities (the main concession in Weda district that feeds this smelting complex is the world’s single largest nickel mine).

Mongabay’s reporting this year from Lelilef Sawai village, which borders the Weda Bay industrial estate, revealed respiratory infections diagnosed by a local clinic skyrocketed from 434 cases in 2020 to 10,579 cases in 2023.

The separation of nickel from the ore dug out of Gebe and other islands in North Maluku province uses high-pressure acid leaching (HPAL), a fiercely polluting chemical reaction.

The rapid construction of these smelting facilities by Chinese conglomerates reflect a policy choice by successive administrations in Jakarta to process raw minerals within Indonesia, rather than export the country’s natural wealth for value-added processing elsewhere.

However, the hurried drive for onshore processing has entailed ubiquitous workplace accidents and well-documented cases of ruinous pollution, from the outer islands of North Maluku to the blighted landscapes of southern Sulawesi.

Analysis by the NGO Forest Watch Indonesia showed tree cover on Gebe declined by almost 63 hectares (156 acres) between 2022 and 2023 due to nickel mining. Excavation over the longer term will have led to significantly higher rates of deforestation.

FWI analysis showed a loss of 318,500 hectares (787,000 acres) of forests on small islands across the world’s largest archipelagic country, 56,000 hectares (138,000 acres) of which are in industrial concessions.

Central Halmahera district lost 27,900 hectares (68,900 acres) of tree cover between 2001 and 2023, according to data published by the World Resources Institute, representing a 13% decrease in tree cover.

That includes forests loss on North Maluku islands like Fau, Gebe, Mabuli, Malamala and Pakal, which have all witnessed extensive changes following mining excavation.

More than half of the area of Fau Island, just east of Gebe, is covered by a mining permit valid until 2032 despite local opposition.

Campaigners say the Indigenous people who call these islands home should have been afforded legal protection under the 2007 law preventing mining on small islands.

Lawmakers also enacted that statute in 2007 in part to preserve the unique biodiversity often found on small islands. Off the west coast of Sumatra on Enggano, an oceanic island, Indigenous peoples are resisting attempts by the oil palm industry to cut industrial plantations into a landscape that’s home to several unique species.

In 1994, Australian anthropologist Alexandra Szalay met explorer Tim Flannery when they joined Indonesian scientist Boeadi on an expedition to New Caledonia.

While on Gebe Island, the group discovered a new marsupial species, the Gebe cuscus (Phalanger alexandrae), named in honor of Szalay. Flannery and Szalay went on to marry.

Hamdala, the Sanof Kacepo resident, said he used to spot the endangered Gebe cuscus lounging around in the trees in the north of the island. Gebe’s endemic marsupial was only described by science 30 years ago, but Hamdala said he has yet to encounter one since the mines proliferated on the island.

When the nickel runs out, the companies will pick up and leave, said Anggi Putra Yoga, the advocacy manager at FWI, leaving behind a small island that will perhaps be unrecognizable from the place where locals like Manan grew up.

“The people there get left with misery,” Anggi said. “Because there is nothing left of use.”

This story was first published here and here in Indonesian on Feb. 14 and Feb. 22, 2025.

Red seas and no fish: Nickel mining takes its toll on Indonesia’s spice islands

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Philip Jacobson Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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