Sea Barrier in Tangerang

THE building of the sea barrier in the waters north of Tangerang, Banten, shows the state being defeated by business interests over the management of natural resources. Rather than halting the construction of the bamboo and concrete barrier from the outset, officials and law enforcement authorities at various levels allowed this illegal activity to continue.

Fishermen working in the waters off Tangerang reported the barrier to the Banten Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Office in May 2023, when the bamboo barrier was 400 meters long. By October, it stretched for seven kilometers. A month later, the Banten Maritime Affairs Office, the Indonesian Navy, and the Water and Air Police discovered that the barrier was now 13.12 kilometers long. Strangely, they did not immediately halt the construction or follow up on the statements of local people who were involved in building it.

After the sea barrier went viral and caused an uproar online, officials began to play innocent. They claimed they did not know where the bamboo barrier had come from, despite the fact that it did not just appear overnight.

With all of its resources, the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry should have been able easily to find out what was going on there. Pretending to know nothing just made people suspect that the ministry was involved. Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Minister Wahyu Sakti Trenggono subsequently stated that the 30.16-kilometer bamboo barrier did not have a permit and ordered it to be sealed.

Bizarrely, the Tangerang Regency Land Office had issued a building use rights certificate for a 300-hectare area of the sea. Satellite imagery shows that the unlicensed ‘sea fence’ marks the border of the building use right. It is fair to suspect that this barrier will subsequently become the boundary of a reclamation project.

An investigation by Tempo also found that in 2023, a law firm sent a letter to the head of the Banten Maritime and Fisheries Office. The same letter was sent to the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry a month later.

In this letter, which had the official stamps of 16 villages in six subdistricts, the law firm said that people living in the area owned thousands of hectares of unregistered land (girik) that was previously cultivated for ponds and crops, but that as a result of climate change, this agricultural land was submerged by the sea. In the letter, the law firm asked whether the region now underwater was administered by the regional government or the province.

The Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry should have realized there was something strange about this letter. A number of village heads said that their letter stamps have been used without authorization. And the individuals mentioned in the letter as owners of this unregistered land were not local people. It transpired that this was all a contrivance. Satellite images have shown that the area was never a fishpond but is instead a fishing ground, meaning it is not possible that there is unregistered land ownership there. After news of the sea barrier went viral, the law firm representative office disappeared.

The involvement of so many people shows that this business off the Tangerang north coast was orchestrated. The existence of a network linking public and private individuals colluding in a state institution is evidence of state capture, a term used to describe efforts by corporations to influence policy or regulations in their interests.

State capture is possible because powerful oligarchs make use of state institutions in order to benefit their businesses. By controlling natural resources, these oligarchs try to maintain and increase their private wealth. They also exercise control over governments at the central and regional levels. This is what has happened in the waters off Tangerang.

The 30.16-kilometer barrier cuts across the Pantai Indah Kapuk (PIK) development area. On the coast facing the bamboo barrier, the Agung Sedayu Group, headed by tycoon Sugianto Kusuma, alias Aguan, is building PIK Tropical Coastland, a National Strategic Project (PSN) as designated by the administration of Joko Widodo in March 2024. PIK Tropical Coastland is an expansion of PIK2.

Without clear criteria, the designation of PSNs gave the impression that the Jokowi administration was using this policy to share out the cake among a few super-rich elites. With a PSN status, project owners seem to be able to break any rules they like, from circumventing regulations to breaching human rights when acquiring land.

National Strategic Projects should only be in the public interest, not for private sector business activities that bring misery to many. This includes the building of a bamboo barrier that limits the livelihoods of fishermen in Tangerang.