Lakardowo: Building Movement Under The Pressure

Lakardowo is an isolated village at Mojokerto regency, with many of it’s villager works as farmers. During the last 6 years, the environment is degrading rapidly, while social condition is chaotic in 3 sub villages. Conflict between 2 groups was heating up and building over time, suppression and intimidation are taking turns between each groups. Both groups is fighting for their rights, which is to have a better livelihood. 

It was started in 2010, when a company who have business in managing hazardous materials bought villager farmland (3 Ha). They gathered the village government staff and villager representative and told them that they would build brick and paper factory which would give prosperity the villages and community. As they piled up the cliff to flatten the land and build the factory, the communities recognized the first anomaly happened in their nature. All the bamboos near the place where they piled up dried up in instant.  

Villagers saw the company worker poured tons of liquid with sweet smell (detergent) mixed with fly and bottom ash from coal burning, pulp and paper and medicinal waste (syringe, diapers, etc) day and nights. From then on, the environmental was degrading rapidly: the soil is coated with oil, ground water is polluted and can not be used as drinking water anymore, their plant covered with black dust, their feet is hurt and itch due to the bottom ash which fell from the factory embankment, and people gets sick in numbers that they’ve never seen before.  

The communities had enough with all the condition. They started to gathering id card and signatures to complete their complaint letter to the company in 2013. They asked village to  regency government to stop the production, but no response. After they’ve sent the letter to local house of representative, they recommended to stop the production activity. The company replied with making agreement to isolated and rehabilitate the contaminated land and promised not to dump their hazard materials.

Community demonstration in front of East Java Governor Office

Later on, the company gave such compensation in form of rice and people who got it need to sign a form which then was used to complete their environmental impact assessment (EIA) to gain environmental permit in order to run the factory. Further step  they’ve taken was ’bought’ the demonstration leader and make him a vice director of the factory. It hurt the community faith/ trust and in the same time intimidate them.

2015, the company bought  incinerator to manage their hazard waste. Even though they bought incinerators, their illegal dumping activities didn’t stop, but went wild. Hiring the community leader as vice president of their company, and having military and police officer as their back up builds confidence and arbitrary. 

February 2016, the fish and eels in irrigation channels died and the communities suspected that the company spill their liquid waste into the rice field and irrigation channels. Gathering community from 3 sub-villages in village hall, they agreed to stop the company activities. February 20th, communitiies stopped the trucks loaded with hazard materials to get inside the factory. 60 polices blocked villagers activity and beat them up. The beating is so traumatizing for the villagers, when there are polices comes to the village, they’ll immediately panic. After the incident, they established women group called KPPL (Women Group for Environmental Sustainability) and MPL (Community Care for Lakardowo) and wrote complaint letter to provincial EPA (environmental protection agency) and ministry of environmental and forestry (MEF). Each groups have different role to build this movement and support each other. Since then, MEF had already visited and taken sample from community’s wells. They’ re waiting for the groundwater examination and choose their next steps.