Halmahera is an island in Indonesia’s North Maluku province. It holds the country’s largest known reserve of nickel, a metal the world wants very much now because it is used in electric car batteries. For years, this reserve has been dug up as fast as possible, with little thought for the people who live there. Now a second problem has appeared on the same island. An Israeli-rooted company has just won a geothermal contract in Halmahera, in a country whose citizens have marched by the hundreds of thousands for Gaza, and whose government keeps saying, again and again, that it will never normalise relations with Israel. Both problems can be solved the same way. The Gulf states, not Beijing and not an Israeli firm dressed up as an American one, should be the ones building Halmahera’s future.

What is actually happening on the ground

Halmahera has become one of the biggest nickel mining and processing centres in the world, and China is the biggest player behind this growth. The island’s largest smelting complex, the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park, is majority owned by the Chinese company Jiangsu Delong. A smelter is, simply put, a giant furnace that melts raw ore into usable metal. Running one at this scale has come at a real cost to the people who live nearby.

Climate Rights International has documented this cost. Its report points to large-scale deforestation, drinking water polluted by industrial runoff, air pollution serious enough to cause breathing illnesses, and fishing and farming families pushed off land they have used for generations. People in the area say they were never properly consulted. They say they were never shown the environmental studies they were legally entitled to see. They also say they were never told, in their own language, what was actually going into their air and water. The report is direct about who is responsible: the Indonesian government failed to enforce its own rules, the companies felt no duty to fill that gap, and both sides chose profit over people, even though fixing many of these problems would not have cost very much.

This is not a story about development helping people. It is a story about extraction, plain and simple. It is fair to ask why Indonesia keeps giving away pieces of such a sensitive island with so few conditions attached.

This is not a story about development helping people. It is a........

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