Indigenous People Want Return of land: Banten, West Java

By Barrie | May 17th, 2007 | No Comments

Despite living on their land for centuries, over recent decades the indigenous Citorek people of Mount Halimun, Banten, have found their way of life in the forest under continued threat. Now, the Citorek are looking to legal changes to help them hold on to their ancestral land.

The Citorek’s access to much of the forest was cut off in 2003 when the Forestry Ministry issued a decree expanding the Mount Halimun-Salak National Park, in order to expand the local water catchment area as an article in the Jakarta Post explains.

The expansion left only 2,760 hectares of land for the Citorek.
But this was not the first time these indigenous people had been ignored.

In 1978, the government handed over the management of Mount Halimun’s forests to the state-owned forest company Perhutani.
Under Perhutani’s management, the Citorek were obliged to give 25 percent of their annual harvest to the company as a “land tax”.

Things got worse when the government declared the area a preserved forest in 1992.

Since then the management of Mount Halimun National Park has sought to evict the Citorek, arguing the area should be for animal and plant conservation only.

“We just hope the land left for us to manage won’t be taken away by the government,” elder Ace Atmawijaya said last week.
He said that the Citorek’s movements had been restricted by the national park’s expansion.

Another elder, Kono Admawijaya, said the beliefs and traditional customs of the Citorek had protected the forest long before the government made it a conservation area.

“Our traditions taught us that the land is divided into four allotments: leuweung kolot (old land), leuweung titipan (trusteeship land), leuweung cadangan (reserve land) and leuweung garapan (harvest land),” he said.

He explained that no person could enter the leuweung kolot or take anything from the land.

“It should be kept untouchable because it’s the earth’s lungs,” he said, adding that disturbing such land brought bad luck.

Kono said that the second kind of land, Leuweung titipan, was the water source for the area. “We should preserve (this land) so the water will keep flowing,” he said.

Kono added that leuweung garapan was land for subsistence farming and leuweung cadangan was land held in trust for future generations.

Currently, around 14,800 Citorek live in four hamlets.

“Our traditions allow us to plant in the leuweung garapan only once every year, because the land needs time to rest,” Kono said.

To continue their traditions, the Citorek people have asked for government recognition to separate their ancestral land from the National Park.

The Citorek are proposing their existence be acknowledged by a bylaw from the Lebak regency administration.

Salman, from the administration’s legal bureau said such recognition could only come after an indigenous community was first found to have a prevailing system of customary law.

“There should also be distinct borders for their area (for) the jurisdiction of customary law,” he added.

Salman said the Citorek people had already fulfilled these requirements for recognition.

“This could be the grounds for their land being excluded from the National Park area. But it depends on how long it would take to issue a special bylaw for this,” he said.