TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Dahlia Yati, a Paser Balik tribe native, in a webinar on Tuesday said she was shocked after witnessing the land lot she owns in East Kalimantan - the location of Indonesia’s new capital city - had been claimed for the national project.

She recalled this came after the local government issued a circular regarding land acquisition for the ambitious project. Yati said currently a sign had been installed along with a field border pillar over the plot of land she claimed had been used by her and local residents for agriculture in the past years.

“Local traditional communities are demanding explanations about customary land use, which should not be affected by the seemingly forced construction of the new capital. The installation of a sign is an act of arbitrary acquisition. No one had met us or talked about this with us,” said Yati in a webinar titled the Bersihkan Indonesia (clean up Indonesia) on March 15.

Yati explained that her field is roughly 10 kilometers away from the new capital city’s ground zero, which is where President Joko Widodo and his entourage spent the night camping and held a ritual. She claimed the field lot under her family’s name measures up to four hectares.

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A sense of disappointment was visible as she recalled this incident. She said locals feel let down by the President's decision to prioritize camping at the site rather than address the problem of land acquisition, which she believes had gone to deaf ears.

“We don’t need the camping event. What is it for? No one is benefited by that,” she asserted.

Meanwhile, East Kalimantan Mining Advocacy Network (Jatam) representative, Pradarma Rupang, said the new capital project could potentially evict 20,000 local customary communities. He said that these people are natives who had lived in the forest area far before the new capital construction plan was made public.

“The total of 260 hectares [of the new capital area] is not an empty land. There are settlements there,” Rupang said.

He made it clear that 40 percent of the entire new capital construction area is settlements. A piece of data was even confirmed by the Ministry of Agraria and Spatial Planning. He fears that if the government green-lights the construction, there will be 53 villages surrounding the new capital area affected by possible pollution.

Meanwhile, WALHI's forest and garden campaigner, Uli Arta Siagian, said that the government had always assumed that the forests in Kalimantan are unoccupied land. In fact, he said, people do live there.

Read: Jokowi: New Capital will Be a Forest City of Endemic Plants

M JULNIS FIRMANSYAH