Help the Bika community in Putussibau seek justice for the seizure of their land.
Putussibau, West Kalimantan: The chainsaws started before sunrise. By the time the people of Bika Village ran out of their longhouses, the sacred forest where their grandparents are buried was already bleeding red earth.
Six hundred hectares, gone in weeks. And when the Dayak families stood in front of the bulldozers with tears streaming down their faces, begging for their ancestors to be left in peace, the police pushed them back so the machines could keep roaring.
“I Heard My Grandmother’s Grave Crack”
Agustinus couldn’t finish the sentence without his voice breaking.
“I was there when the blade hit the ground. I swear I heard the wood crack like bones. That’s where my grandmother is buried, under the old durian tree. Now there’s just a scar in the dirt.”
He says the village only asked for eight million rupiah a hectare; barely five hundred dollars an acre. “We’re not greedy,” he whispers, eyes red. “We just wanted enough to buy rice for our kids and maybe fix the church roof. They wouldn’t even give us that. They gave us nothing but dust and grief.”
Mothers stood clutching their children while the machines chewed through burial grounds and the rubber gardens that fed them. One elderly woman collapsed when she recognized her late husband’s favorite hunting spot turned into a muddy trench.
The Day the Police Chose Sides
When the villagers linked arms and refused to move, the call went out. Dozens of officers arrived in full riot gear. But instead of listening to the sobbing elders, they formed a human wall shielding the company’s excavators.
STOP KILLING OUR FOREST. STOP KILLING US.
“I looked into one policeman’s eyes,” Silun Ayang recalls, still shaking days later. “He’s from the next district, maybe has kids the same age as mine. I begged him: ‘Would you let this happen to your mother’s grave?’ He just looked away and pushed me back. That moment broke something inside me.”
Cell-phone videos show grandmothers being dragged aside while the bulldozers rev their engines like they’re laughing.
This Pain Has a Thousand Faces
Bika isn’t alone. In the same district, villages have danced in full warrior regalia to “lock” company roads with sacred chicken blood. Others have wept as they burned their own rubber trees rather than watch them fall to a stranger’s chainsaw.
Across West Kalimantan, the numbers are brutal: over a hundred land grabs last year, almost all palm oil, almost all on indigenous soil.
Environmental watchdogs say the corporate group behind PT BIA has already torn down rainforest the size of 10,000 football fields this year, right on the edge of a UNESCO biosphere reserve that’s supposed to be untouchable.
“We Will Die Here Before We Let Them Take More”
Last weekend the village rose again. Hundreds walked for hours through the heat, some barefoot, carrying hand-painted banners soaked with tears and rage: STOP KILLING OUR FOREST. STOP KILLING US.
he people of Bika Village are demanding that PT BIA pay compensation for 606 hectares of customary land that the company has already exploited, at a rate of 8 million rupiah per hectare, totaling 4.8 billion rupiah. However, the company is only offering a goodwill payment of 500 thousand rupiah per hectare for the 1,900 hectares located in Bika Village.
“We will not back down from fighting for our rights. We want the company to respect our rights and provide fair compensation,” said Antonius, a representative of the Bika Village community.
Antonius stood on a stump where an ancient belian tree once grew and screamed until his throat bled:
“This land is our mother. You don’t sell your mother. And to the police to the government I say it with all my heart: if you keep choosing money over people, remember our faces. One day your own children will ask why you stood with the destroyers while grandmothers cried.”
The company still hasn’t said a word. The machines are quiet today, but everyone knows they’ll growl again tomorrow.
In Bika Village tonight, the longhouses are full of soft crying and the low drum of angry prayers. The Dayak say the spirits are restless now. And when the ancestors are angry, even the jungle itself fights back.
The people here have nothing left to lose but the graves of everyone they’ve ever loved.
And that, they say, is the one thing they will never surrender.
Reported by: Apai Deraman
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