ARU ISLANDS, Indonesia — When the ship with “J7Explorer” embossed across its hull approached the shoreline on May 13, some on the Aru Islands assumed the greenish hulk was an Indonesian warship from a nearby naval base. As the boat docked, it towered more than four times higher than the waiting SUVs parked below. A yellow go-faster stripe streaked from stern to bow. “Whose ship is this?” asked Theo Pekpekay, an Aru youth activist who watched the ship dock at Serwatu harbor. “This is definitely a warning that a new threat is coming,” he added. Anxieties remain in the Aru Islands district that much of this small eastern archipelago could soon be cleared of its rich rainforest and converted to a vast 60,000-hectare (150,000-acre) cattle ranch. The power behind that plan is a well-known tycoon from Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo Island. The boat’s owner, boy racer and coal magnate Andi Syamsuddin Arsyad, is a familiar name to many around the Aru archipelago. Most know the Kalimantan-born tycoon and founder of the Jhonlin Group of companies as Haji Isam. An aide held an umbrella over Isam as the oligarch quickened his stride through light rain toward a waiting helicopter, which was painted yellow and flecked with black tiger stripes. Haji Isam is a coal magnate with extended family ties to high levels of Indonesia’s government. His cousin is Indonesia’s agriculture minister and his uncle the governor of South Kalimantan province. Isam is a well-known business associate of Bambang Soesatyo,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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