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

Image by Jaya Barends/Mongabay Indonesia. Retrieved from news.mongabay.com

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.