2017 Ramon Magsaysay awardee: 'activist, victim, indigenous person' Abdon Nababan of Indonesia

Abdon Nababan.

Abdon Nababan is acknowledged today as the single most important person in the indigenous peoples (IP) movement in Indonesia. He has worked tirelessly with the movement for twenty-four years.

He is a Toba Batak from Sumatra, one of seventy million very ethnically diverse masyarakat adat (IP) of Indonesia.

Nababan began his social advocacy when he was still a student, and became an officer of a non-government organization (NGO) after graduation from Bogor University in 1987.

I became an activist in the late '80s,' he said, 'opposing the all-too-powerful New Order Regime. In the '90s I realized that I was also a victim. I am one of millions of Indigenous Peoples of Indonesia. At the time, I--an activist, a victim, an indigenous person--fought an industrial forest company in our ancestral lands.'

The land taken over by the big industrial company was actually ancestral land that belonged to his grandparents and other Toba Batak families.

'That company, however, was just a front for the real oppressor: authoritarianism and development,' he stressed. 'For them, we the Indigenous Peoples, were not wanted. We are to be oppressed, to be eradicated, criminalized, impoverished, victimized.'

After the fall of Suharto in 1999, he helped organize a congress that launched the mass-based organization called AMAN (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara or Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago).

AMAN today is the country's largest and most influential non-state organization with over 115 local and 21 regional chapters throughout Indonesia’s thirty-four provinces: these represent a collective membership of over 17 million. Before AMAN, Indonesia recognized only one million masyarakat adat.

The indigenous peoples have become a political force to reckon with. AMAN delivered 12 million votes to President Joko Widodo in the 2014 election after he made six commitments during the campaign to address the needs of the IPs. The government has yet to deliver on these commitments though. 

Under Nababan’s leadership, AMAN challenged the existing forestry laws. In 2012, they won a landmark constitutional court ruling that forests in IP territories are not “state forests,” hence, some fifty-seven million hectares of government-controlled forest land were returned to indigenous communities.

AMAN, with the support of NGOs, launched the Ancestral Domain Registration Agency in 2010 to create a single data base for verifying land and forest claims on ownership, use and tenure. With Nababan at the helm, they were able to submit to the government "indigenous maps" covering 8.23 million hectares in 2016.  

The constitutional court ruling and AMAN’s maps, however, are still awaiting implementation.

Nababan receiving medal and certificate from Vice Pres. Leni Robredo
and RMAF Chair Ramon del Rosario, Jr.

In his response to the award, he revealed that he accepted the challenge of the indigenous peoples of North Sumatra to run for governor of the province, which he described as 'so corrupt and violent ... controlled by mobs and drug dealers.'

In parting, he said: 'When differing opinions or interests manifests into violent conflicts, when the use of religion means more killings, when developing the economy means destroying the environment, standing here before you, I am offering the values and spirit of Indigenous Peoples to tackle present-day problems of our society and the environment--inequality, crimes, climate change--in a way that is not violent, but humane and sustainable. ... And let our countries, Indonesia and the Philippines, lead the world towards peace, where the well-being of people, plants, animals, water, soils and air prevail.'

Abdon Nababan was elected by the RMAF to receive the 2017 Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of 'his brave, self-sacrificing advocacy to give voice and face to his country’s IP communities, his principled, relentless, yet pragmatic leadership of the world’s largest IP rights movement, and the far-reaching impact of his work on the lives of millions of Indonesians.'