Taring Padi

Anaïs Duraffourg with Ruben Rubens
(an edited version of this article appeared in the Jakarta Post

It is nearly 9 o’ clock, and the voices of the children are becoming louder, women are looking for their costumes and giant puppets are lying on the ground waiting to be brought to life for the next few hours. The sun is already strong and the smell of methane is covering the other odours emanating from the village, but for this morning nobody will complain about such matters. It is the 29th of May, and we are about to start the parade for the of the 4th anniversary commemoration of the Lapindo mud disaster in Porong, East Java.
A week ago, fifteen members of Taring Padi and lafadl initiatives, arrived in Siring Barat, a village just across the road from the biggest mud volcano in the world, to support the community of mudflow victims in organizing the commemoration day. In the early morning of the 29th of May 2006, mud began to erupt from the earth, nearby a gas exploration well owned by Lapindo Brantas Inc. For four years this mud has not stopped flowing, and has already destroyed 12 villages, displaced more than 60 000 people, and many villages around the dyke are still threatened by the mud. In 2008, the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools of toxic mud per day was spewing out from nearby the drilling whole. The BPLS (Government body in charge of tackling the disaster) is no longer able to measure the mud outflow, and nobody is able to predict when it will stop. Nowadays, the mud is contained by a dyke encircling more than 800 hectares of wasteland. The excess mud is channeled into the Porong river, where, due to its toxic chemical composition (including benzene, toluene, heavy metals, ammonia) it is destoying marine ecosystems, and thus the livelihood of downstream fishing communities, compounding the economic impact of the mud on the surrounding area. In 2007, the economic cost of this disaster was estimated to have reached 4.8 billion US dollars, and the ecomic growth from the district was falling from 6.7% in 2005 to 4.6% in 2006.

Lapindo Brantas denies responsibility for causing the disaster, blaming the earthquake that occurred 300km away in Yogyakarta two days earlier. However the consensus of the international scientific community asserts that this disaster is the result of technical negligence by Lapindo Brantas’ drilling operation. Proffesor Richard Davies, leader of an international research team headed by Durham University stated in the Observer “there can be no doubt at all that it was physically impossible for the earthquake to cause this mud disaster”.
Aburizal Bakrie , head of Bakrie Group who is the majority owner of Lapindo Brantas (and according to GlobeAsia Magazine Indonesia’s 4th richest individual), was at the time Coordinating Minister of People’s Welfare, and was recently elected as the Chairman of the Golkar Party. He is now leading a coalition with the President’s Democratic Party. Clearly, the state’s primary duty to protect its population is comprimised by its interest in protecting big business’ impunity, when Bakrie has now become the leader of the parliamentary majority. And on the local level of this strategic chess game played by Bakrie conglomerate, the upcoming Sidoarjo regency election is seeing three of the five candidates being executives of the Lapindo Brantas.
While the President has issued several decrees obliging Lapindo to pay compensation to the victims, Lapindo has continually delayed to meet their obligation, and further have been able to avoid any obligation to a significant proportion of residents who do not have certification of their ownership of their land and other assets.
Then, in 2009 the Supreme Court of Indonesia dismissed a lawsuit against Lapindo citing a lack of evidence to prove the culpability of the company in this disaster. Meanwhile, most of the presidential decrees is giving to Lapindo responsibility to manage the disaster. So far international aid organisations attempts to assist the victims have been unoficially forbidden. This paradox, linked to the lack of comprehensive measures by the government to handle the disaster, is leaving an increasing number of victims with a very uncertain future.
Beneath this matrix of economic and political matters, living under the shadow of the dam, a new generation is growing up in poverty while their families have to face up against a giant of mining company, to the government, corruption and manipulation.
The human cost of this disaster has never been estimated. While we can account for the 14 souls buries beneath the mud, there is no estimation able to quantify the health situation of the population inhaling toxic gases, suffering from poor health while losing their houses, workplaces, schools, places of prayer, and having to leave behind their community, local history and culture. There is no estimation, no amount of rupiahs alone is able to compensate the trauma of a population who have been neglected and still waiting for a just closure. Some portion of the population were offered a variety of compensation packages by Lapindo in 2008, however the inequality of their distribution among the affecting population compounded the social disaster by further dividing the victims into the small proportion who recieved sufficient compensation, those whose only recieved insufficient compensation, and those who recieve nothing at all.
In Siring Barat, where I start my story, there is hundreds of families who are still living under the threat of the mud. Most of the house are fisurated, recently a new mud eruption destroyed another house, in some places, the gas coming directly from the earth is concentrated enough to cook with, and few days ago a kitchen suddenly sunk 3 metres into the ground causing the rest of the house to collapse. Declared non suitable anymore for life in 2008, most of the families received money from the government to rent house for two years, but this rent will end by July 2010 and they do not know what will happen after that.
During this week of preparation for the carnival to commemorate the 4th anniversary of the disaster, the community of Porong and surrounding areas regather their spirit and unity and renew their demand for justice. For a few hours the disempowered villagers, whose fate is held in the tentacles of multinational corporations and political interests become the manipulators of giant sized puppets representing their oppressors, and take the opportunity to destroy a massive octopus symbolizing the Bakrie conglomerate. The hundred people standing together on the edge of the lake of mud collectively experience catharsis as they watch the octopus slowly sinking into the toxic mud.
For this week, among the different activities offered, the cultural rights of the victims have been temporarily restored. But private initiative will not replace the duty of the government to ensure basic human rights and appropriately respond to the needs of the thousands of families affected by the biggest industrial disaster that Indonesia is facing.