Between early 2003 and January 2025, 26 boats with about 3,342 Rohingya people fleeing either from Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh or from Rakhine, Myanmar,  arrived in Indonesia, mainly in provinces of Aceh and North Sumatra. While most of them have continued their onward journeys to Malaysia, about 1,500 people remained in different temporary shelters in Indonesia at the time of writing. The sailing season is not over yet, and more boats could potentially arrive in the coming weeks and months, especially if the political situation in Myanmar deteriorates further.

While Aceh used to be a rather welcoming place for Rohingya refugees, from late 2023 onwards their disembarkations were met with strong rejection from the local population, causing some boats to remain offshore for several days or move on to other sites where local people were more welcoming. Many have wondered what might have caused the drastic shift from hospitality to hostility and indeed many factors have contributed to this swift.

Hate speech and provocations that circulated mainly on social media since mid-2023 have undoubtedly stirred up xenophobia, and outright racism, towards Rohingya in some parts of Indonesia. Eventually hate speech translated into action on the ground: in late December 2023, hundreds of students were protesting in front of one of the holding sites in Banda Aceh, where the refuges were house in the basement. Because of the ferocity of the protests, the Rohingya refugees—most of them women and children—had to be evacuated to the immigration office for some hours before being returned to the very same site. As investigations by TEMPO magazine later showed, these students had not only been equipped with protests posters to use during the demonstrations but received payments and other incentives for their involvement.

According to TEMPO’s reports, these anti-Rohingya resentments were e meant to discredit Anies Baswedan, one of the candidates in the presidential election held in February 2024. However, the protests did not wane in the aftermath of the elections. The hate speech and the online provocations had fallen on fertile ground. Throughout 2024, several people claiming to be local residents were seen waiting at the designated shelter to protest against the temporary reception of Rohingya. Both online and on-the-ground campaigns saw the defamation of the UNHCR and other local and international NGOs and prominent individuals, such as head of the  Majelis Permusyawaratan Ulama Aceh, an official council of Islamic leaders. The fact that some Rohingya absconded from the camp were used by the media to portray them as ungrateful, which strengthened the stigmatisation of Rohingya further.

Several attempts to calm down the situation, including by Muzzakir Manaf, Aceh’s recently-elected governor, and also by Malik Mahmud, the Wali Nanggroe (a customary leader,  who reminded the Acehnese people of the humanitarian need but also the international duties to protect the Rohingya for the time being), were only minimally successful. Like tens of thousands of other Acehnese, Governor Muzzakir had sought refuge in Malaysia during the Aceh conflict (1976–2005).

Further rejections of Rohingya happened onshore and also at the initial reception sites. In November 2024,152 Rohingya who were held in South Aceh district were loaded onto trucks and driven all the way to the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, where they were rejected. Then, in a journey back down the east coast that lasted 48 hours and did not include a single toilet break or meal, they were returned to Lhokseumawe and eventually back to South Aceh, where they were sheltered for another month. In other cases, local people were only prepared to receive the Rohingya after the UNHCR and IOM managed to convince them of the economic benefits to the wider local community. For example, at the end of Ramadan, IOM donated a cow to the village in addition to a cow for the refugees.

The more regular, and therefore more significant, benefits offered to villages that are open to hosting refugees include the renting of land for where the camp is erected from local owners, catering and security services; costs are usually born by either UNHCR or IOM. For example, it is very common that the official village-owned enterprise corporation (BUMDes) is tasked to cook three meals a day for an overall payment of Rp 45,000 (A$4.30) per person, for which they charge a fee of up to 15%. But additional charges for distribution and others task, reaching in some instances 20%, also apply, which has negative consequences for the nutrition of refugees. Locals are also hired as security guards and deployed at the camps, earning Rp100,000 (A$9.75) per shift. This is equal the daily salary of a blue-collar worker, but these jobs require less effort than most blue-collar work, as guards’ main task is to mediate between the refugees and the local community.

The local economy is also stimulated, as new kiosks pop up around the camps to cater for the refugees and to casual visitors who come to see the Rohingya. Individual villagers also act as intermediaries for receiving remittances from the relative of the Rohingya for which they are being paid a commission. Rohingya need the money for their daily expenses but also to move on from Aceh. Those who are caught being involved in such transactions or the facilitations of onward travel can face people smuggling allegations.

While in the past, Malaysia—where there is a community of 120,000 registered Rohingya residing already—was the most desired destination, lately many Rohingya have also moved on the Pekanbaru, in Riau province. One of the key pull factors are the cash allowances Rohingya receive from the IOM—Rp1,050,000 (A$102) for adults and Rp500,000 (A$49) for minors—instead of the catered meals and earlier on also the better quality accommodation provided in proper dormitories.

However, in January 2025 the IOM had to stop the funding for these dormitories and moved all the Rohingya to an empty site, where the Rohingya have now erected self-built tents and barracks. In February 2025, IOM also had to end medical care for the Rohingya, as part of their funding was coming from the United States (in addition to the EU), whose aid program has seen drastic cuts after the re-election of Donald Trump.

The latest treatment of the Rohingya is a clear setback for how refugees have been handled in Indonesia in the past. While in other cities, refugee children are allowed to attend school and vocational training, Rohingya children are not. According to some Rohingya who have recently moved to Pekanbaru and whom we contacted in February 2025, the conditions there are worse than in the shelters in Aceh. In fact, some we spoke to said they have noticed a resemblance of the new camp to their previous shelters in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, were many have spent up to 8 years since the mass exodus from Myanmar in 2017.

Despite the substandard conditions, the new camp site in Pekanbaru has quickly filled up. As of February 2025, there were more than 600 camp inhabitants. While the overall situation in Pekanbaru is dire due to overcrowding and extremely poor hygiene, this will not necessarily deter future arrivals. The increase in violence, abduction and forced conscription in Cox’s Bazar—and the intensifying armed conflict in Rakhine—remain the main push factors for Rohingya to leave by boat and seek safety in neighbouring South(east) Asia. In light of the frequent pushbacks conducted by India, Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia remains their only hope.

The necessity to move to safer places has also created many new infrastructures for human smuggling across the Andaman Sea, within Indonesia, and between Indonesia and Malaysia that show strong exploitative features, for example in marriage arrangements for young Rohingya women. In particular, if the Rohingya have to borrow money from others, they may face heightened risk of abuse in the future when they have to repay their debts. It is safe to assume that criminal activities in the camp may increase, if the current hands-off approach continues.

While Indonesia’s Presidential Regulation No 125 of 2016 Concerning the handling of foreign refugees allows the use of the state budget for covering the care needs of refugees, the technical regulations on how to exactly do so have yet to be issued. The revision and the refinement of the Presidential Regulation is overdue and needs to be tackled by the new Indonesian government under President Prabowo Subianto without any further delay.

It is fair to note that neither Aceh—the poorest province in Sumatra—nor Riau Province may not have the resources to cover the upkeep of refugees in the long run. The current uncertainty over the treatment of Rohingya results from the central government’s preference for a hands-off approach, that leaves the caretaking entirely to IOM and UNHCR. Considering the recent funding cuts for these international organisations, the quality of care is receding, raising concerns about the sustainability of the current protection system. (In 2024, for instance, UNHCR received US$2.49 billion in funding from the United States, amounting to a fifth of the agency’s total budget—funds now suspended as part of the Trump administration’s suspension of the US foreign aid program.)

It is highly unlikely that other international donors will make up for the current funding losses to the IOM and the UNHCR in the foreseeable months, not least as the global attention is still focusing on the crises in Gaza and Ukraine. It is also highly unlikely that resettlements to safe third countries will increase any time soon: in fact, as of 20 January 2025 Donald Trump once again put resettlements to the United States on hold, except for refugees from South Africa of European descent.

The only way to prevent the creation of financially unsustainable refugee camps in Indonesia, which could potentially evolve into hubs for smuggling and trafficking, is to allow the refugees a self-sustained form of living after an initial emergency phase. Rohingya, like most other refugees, are talented and entrepreneurial people.

Despite limited resources, they are able to carve out a living if allowed to do so. Some Rohingya raise ducks in the camps in Aceh, others go fishing or assist local farmers in the rice fields. To date, they risk punishment and possibly undetermined arrest in detention centres for receiving remunerations. Given that the overall numbers of refugees (fewer than 13,000) in Indonesia remain much lower than in Thailand and Malaysia, the potential for competition over jobs with locals is negligible. The right to earn a living for refugees in Indonesia serves as a viable and pragmatic option, enabling them to attain self-sufficiency amid a diminishing refugee protection framework.

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Editor’s note: this is an amended version of an article the authors originally published at ARC GIS Story Map

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Indonesian Borneo has long been known for its gold mineral wealth—and its gold rushes. As Nancy Peluso has previously explored at New Mandala, not all of this gold mining occurs through large corporations or formal enterprises. In Central Kalimantan province, unlicensed and informal small-scale gold mining (in Indonesian, Pertambangan Emas Skala Kecil, or PESK) supports the livelihoods of thousands of artisanal and small-scale (ASM) miners and their families, while also creating transformative environmental impacts.

One of the most famous small-scale mining rushes in Central Kalimantan started in the late 1980s in Hampalit village, near the town of Kasongan, a couple of hours drive east of the provincial capital, Palangkaraya. Our collaborative research in Indonesia stretched across two Australian Research Council funded projects between 2016 and 2024, examining resource-based livelihoods and smallholder commodity production systems. The location of our fieldwork is shown in the blue circle).

The result of this boom was far from small-scale in scope and impact: at its peak during the Krismon or Asian Financial Crisis (c. 1997–99) a chaotic boom at Hampalit involved an estimated 10,000 ASM miners drawn from across Indonesia. The miners overtook a concession managed by an Australian-owned mining company, Hampalit Mas Perdhana, and began digging in the gold fields called Galangan. The landscape transformations over the past decades can be traced through Landsat/Copernicus satellite imagery hosted by Google Earth (see below).

In Indonesia such small-scale PESK mining rushes conjure ideas of the “Wild West” drawn from iconic American Western films. Mineral-rich territories become extractive frontiers with shifting claims to land and resources, where formal state authority is dissolved into complex alliances between landowners, small-scale miners, and machinery and petrol suppliers. Behind these actors are mining financiers up to the Dayak or Banjarese “big bosses” who operate in cahoots with sections of the local police and military. And then there are large ethnic Chinese Indonesian gold buyers, referred to as towkays. Sites like Hampalit are created through masculinist ideas of rugged miners taking high risks for high rewards, the proliferation of vice economies, the settling of disputes with violence, and huge environmental impacts.

Mining on land and river

Three decades after the initial rush during the Suharto era, today Hampalit remains a moonscape. The previous lush tropical peat forest is now the epitome of a ruptured landscape. While pockets of vegetation occur sporadically, there is an ugly beauty to this landscape, still nearly devoid of life, stretching beyond the horizon, a blister in the blazing tropical sun of Central Kalimantan.

While the boom years at Hampalit have long passed, the gold fields are not quite empty. Some of Kalimantan’s most precarious small-scale miners, arriving from places like East Java and Banjarmasin (the capital of neighbouring South Kalimantan province), still reside in this landscape, setting up in isolated shanties and spending their days working through the mine tailings for a second or third time.

These migrant miners use mobile engines known as dongfen after their Chinese manufacturer, placed on lanting platforms, excavating meters deep into the soil profile. The crews mine through the soil with hydraulic hoses, that slice and suck the slurry up to a kasbok (sluice), through a method they call tebang sapu (cut and sweep). Gold is then retrieved from carpets placed on sluices, albeit with a low recovery rate of only about 30%, with the remainder of the sediment spilling over into adjacent areas to the pit.

Miners take on significant safety risks, as unforeseen pit collapses can bury workers under tonnes of overburden, turning their workplaces into their grave sites. In December 2022, the pictured mining operation was producing 3-4 grams of gold per day, with 90 litres per day in fuel costs. Under a 50% profit-sharing scheme with the unit owner, five unit workers might each take home up to Rp200,000 per day (A$20). While this not quite a gold windfall, it is nevertheless double the going rate for construction labour back in Java.

Not all of Hampalit’s miners work in organised crews. On a visit in December 2022 we met “Agus” (a pseudonym)—a fiercely independent, disabled, miner and self-proclaimed online forest activist. After a divorce in Java, Agus landed a job in Bali, and then moved on to try his luck with mining in Central Kalimantan. For the previous four years, Agus had ventured each day to Hampalit on a modified 3-wheeled motorbike, sifting through the mine tailing sediment and collecting puya (a form of pay dirt), which he sells on to a local processor. Agus’ system is not mechanised, so while the volume of his puya production is low, he also avoids machinery and fuel costs, and can thus eke out a surplus.

Even in this most marginal of mining sites, Agus was not immune from paying “sitting fees” (uang duduk) to those who claimed to be the landowners, while facing petty extortion from the local constabulary. Agus survives through his force of will, and no small amount of pluck and guile: “it’s jungle law out here—everyone’s trying to make money!”, he exclaimed. We offered Agus a small sum of compensation for chatting with us under the hot sun, but he kindly refused, saying that he always supported himself. “No thanks. It’s not my mentality,” he asserted. While Agus’ situation is difficult, the ruined Hampalit landscape still offers Agus the right to an identity, and a livelihood, as an independent small-scale miner.

We learned the finer details of sampling, grading and identifying price points from a puya collector. Puya can contain traces of gold (retrieved through mercury) but the main focus is zircon sand (zirconium silicate), an element used in the production of ceramic tiles and other industrial materials. Bags of puya sell for between Rp6,000–12,000 per kilogram (A$0.60–$1.20), with so-called “red puya” fetching the upper bound). Puya is sent to Palangkaraya for semi-processing and is then exported to countries like China and India.

While Hampalit is the most famous land-based mining boom site in the area, it is far from a singular case. Another gold boom site has sprung up over the past two decades at the Sungai Sampang, along the eastern bank of the Katingan River. Down a tricky path of duckboards through the remote peatlands, one of our local PESK miner informants took us on a tour.

Boom mining sites can become quite established settlements, with their own daily rhythms and infrastructures. There are different ways of earning a living beyond mining—most of which involve separating miners from their gold and cash. While the peak of the boom has passed at the Sungai Sampang, different small shops offer machinery parts and repair, fuel, instant noodles, and of course hot coffee and cigarettes. Some warung shops with younger women double as karaoke–brothel–gambling dens in the evening.

In Sampang, we met one enterprising female duo accompanying their miner husbands who constructed a toll bridge over the swampy peatland track (right photo). While theft is always a danger on the mining sites, there is still a community here—even a local mosque. As our informant joked:

All of Indonesia is represented here: Javanese, Timorese, Batak, Banjar, Dayak. There used to be a lot more warung shops. It was lively (ramai).

The historical gold rush sites at Hampalit and the Sungai Sampang show different types of informal mining. Our next variation involves river-dredge mining. This involves larger floating barges (pontons), each fitted with a kasbok, and long sharpened pipes that can reach to the river bottom, using double Chinese-manufactured 20 and 30 horsepower engines with brands like “Sanghai” and “Yang Li”.

Ponton flotillas move down the great waterways of Central Kalimantan like the Katingan and Kahayan Rivers, the pipes puncturing the river bottom and sucking up the sediment with a terrific, deafening, smoke-belching din. Miners reported that in a good location, individual dredging crews of 3-6 miners have produced up to 100 grams of gold in one day (Rp123 million, or A$12,100 at current prices and exchange rates), although such jackpots are not the standard. As with land mining, profits are shared unevenly between the unit owner (50%) and the workers (10–20% each). The relative productivity of locations are assessed in terms of grams of gold per 200 litre drum of fuel.

As with Hampalit, with river mining there are also contested property rights, uneven enforcement of state regulations, labour and safety issues, and deep environmental harms. On large rivers like the Katingan, miners need permission from village authorities to operate near settlements, although the liminal spaces between village boundaries provide grey areas for operation. Ponton owners must pay compensation to village authorities, and to adjacent landowners to mine in specific stretches (Dayak family claims to customary land are often narrow strips of territory running perpendicular to the river). Significant community tensions can result between those community members who accept or resist such river mining, and negotiations can include intimidation by river miners and their bosses.

Unlike the nearly open access arrangements at Hampalit, it is mostly Dayaks from around Katingan Regency who control river mining. Some assert this is because “Javanese can’t swim”. But mining for gold on the major rivers is also more lucrative and is thus kept more under the control of local Dayak groups. This extraction produces drastic changes in river’s geomorphology and ecology, rendering the river unnavigable in places due to the accretion of new sand bars, and surely with major impacts for fish and other aquatic species.

Bosses and buy-offs

Overall, state authority is present, but highly compromised with what the state calls “PETI”—Penambangan Tanpa Izin or “illegal mining”. The political economy of police “crackdowns” involves an intricate interplay between actors. Outside of periodic police patrols timed for the arrival of a new government administration, or the annual Indonesian Independence Day holidays in August, major crackdowns depend on provincial or federal funding from Jakarta. Word then inevitably leaks out from the district level that a major crackdown is imminent. Miners move their river pontons in to shore for a few weeks of rest and relaxation and hide their lantings and hexa excavators in the forest. If police patrols do show up unannounced, payments of 500,000 to Rp1 million and an offering of cigarettes might be in order.

Behind the scenes, miners’ groups, and larger mining bosses, have already made their contributions to the local constabulary. In actual event, a few unlucky miners with contraband gold or mercury in their possession might be arrested, although jail sentences of up to a year have also been handed out (attracting vociferous protests from the local PESK mining community). As one of our informants related: “Mining is like a grapevine, or a tall tree. Information trickles through the system.” We asked him whether he was nevertheless concerned about police crackdowns. “Of course!”, he replied:

What I am doing is illegal! With the police, today we give them food. But tomorrow they can eat us (Kalau polisi hari ini bisa kita kasih makan, besok bisa makan kami).

The system of access to subsidised diesel fuel (solar) is another area of collaboration between mining bosses and local police units, through the “fuel mafia”. In Indonesia, petrol and diesel fuel for public consumers is heavily subsidised to a level about 30% beneath the market price. Obviously subsidised solar is not supposed to be used for informal PESK mining. However mining bosses, in negotiation with police, facilitate pelansirs (illegal fuel distributors) driving modified vehicles to stock up on cheap fuel at local petrol stations and distribute it on to their miners.

Thus, to become a top big boss in Central Kalimantan PETI mining, one needs upfront capital for purchasing mining equipment (including illegal mercury), for fending off crackdowns, and for securing access to subsidised fuel—all of which require productive relationships with the police.

Bosses also play a critical role in provisioning the required venture capital for organised PESK mining. “Big bosses” can manage numerous mining units. If one wants to be a river mining unit owner but lacks sufficient capital (typically now Rp80 million or A$8,00), a big boss (mostly local ethnic Dayak) will advance Rp50 million rupiah in financing and machinery under a profit-sharing arrangement. The aspiring unit owner then up-fronts the remaining Rp30 million to the joint venture, under the agreement that all supplies and fuel will be purchased through the boss.

Since mining is by nature unpredictable, if a unit is unproductive, the boss will write down or write off the loan. In interviews we asked why workers and unit owners do not seek to under-claim their actual gold production, or find other ways to skirt around their bosses. As one miner told us:

It’s not so easy to lie. Or rather, it’s easy to lie, but it will be just for one time. The boss has many eyes. (Interview, September 2016).

Independent unit owners in the Kelanaman

Not all PESK mining in Katingan Regency is controlled by bosses. In mining sites at the river–forest frontier of the Kalanaman River (a tributary of the Katingan), outside of the State Forest zone, local Dayak community members mine for gold and puya, using various techniques based on smaller lanting platforms and machines. Here, any youngish male Dayak villager with sufficient mining nous, start-up capital of about Rp30 million rupiah, A$3,00), and charismatic managerial prowess, can assemble a team and make the leap to being an “independent unit owner”.

The risk of being an independent unit owner is high, as any losses must be fully borne by the owner—but so are the rewards. If an independent unit owner (taking a 50% share of profits) works with a crew of 4 others (each allocated a 10% share), the owner takes 60% of total earnings. If this risk is considered too high, a villager can also focus on mining with smaller equipment for puya pay dirt, which provides a lower but a steadier income.

Below: upriver mining at the Kelanaman River, showing the effects of dredging (video by authors)

The Ngaju Dayak community miners at the Kelanaman River work with stronger social protections than elsewhere, as they are often accompanied by family members, and work with village peers. Wives and small children camp for weeks at a time with the miners at site, which enables low-cost cooked meals and childcare (while also allowing womenfolk to keep a good eye on their husbands).

In our Katingan research village of Tumbang Jukung (a pseudonym), 14 out of 25 households we surveyed said they had at least one family member working as a miner at the Kalanaman River, either as worker or unit owner. Their earnings accounted for 44% of average income in surveyed households. While environmental impacts were widely acknowledged (by 14/25 households), most did not object as the mining site was judged a safe distance (about 10km) from their village housing area.

In 2024 Tumbang Jukung did however successfully resist, and evict, a flotilla of ponton miners from dredging their village riverfront, and they have also protected a village local oxbow lake, which is a critical source of fresh fish, from the threat of mining. Thus, Dayak community members do uphold a partial conservation ethos, even as they recognise the environmental damage caused by PESK mining, while weighing that against the imperative to earn a living.

One of the strongest forms of locally-controlled PESK mining we found involves a case of community mining fully located within their village territory, with village unit owners who are also the landowners (thereby avoiding sitting fees), using village labour. Using 30 litres of subsidised fuel per day from a pelansir, a profit can be secured at 3-4 grams of gold per day. On a good day they might get 7 grams. In December 2024 the average wage for the workers was Rp200,000–300,000 per day (A$20–30), in comparison to Rp120,000 a day for village agricultural labour.

Here, PESK mining permits Dayak communities an independent livelihood on their own land—far preferable to most than corporate oil palm plantation labour. Mining generates steady returns, with the revenues circulating within the community. And the village miners are even home for dinner.

The gold shops in Kereng Pangi

What happens to the gold from Katingan Regency? There are scattered gold shops (Toko Emas) throughout the district and the provincial capital, and some even at mining sites. However, Kereng Pangi town is a key gold centre, with about 20 gold shops running down one street. These are mostly managed by people from Banjarmasin and are backed by Banjarese or Javanese bosses. The shop owners will accept a miner’s gold–mercury amalgam and burn off the mercury into a fume hood, which captures and recycles some of the mercury. The remaining gold concentrate is 90–96% pure, with the gold shop owners using something of an art to assessing this (based on knowledge its origin of location, and the structure, colour, density, and weight of the gold, informed by previous tests).

During our visit, the typical gold price paid to miners was Rp1.23 million (A$120) per gram. Shop owners receive daily price updates at 11am from their bosses. The gold shop bosses handle monthly payments to the police of Rp3.8 million (A$380) per shop, suggesting annual payments of almost A$90,000 from this street in Kereng Pangi. Our interviewees reported that an average shop might purchase from 100–500 grams per day, from a regular clientele of 50 to 200 mining groups (averaging 4 workers per unit). Using the low-end numbers of 100 grams of gold purchased per day per shop, and assuming 20 shops operating 300 days per year, we can make some conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations: at least 600 kg of gold purchased annually on this golden street of Kereng Pangi town, worth nearly Rp740 billion (A$73 million), involving at least 4,000 miners.

At Kereng Pangi, the collected gold is poured into 1kg blocks and transported by motor vehicle to South Kalimantan. There, an ethnic Chinese towkay in Banjarmasin reportedly refines the gold into 99.9% pure bars. At some nebulous point, “illegal” gold from Katingan Regency enters the legal market, and is likely sold onwards to domestic goldsmiths, to international gold markets, or perhaps even the Indonesian central bank.

With real gold prices near century all-time highs (see below), all incentives are aligned for ASM mining to continue in Kalimantan and Katingan Regency.

The end game

During our research, we often discussed, “what’s the end game for PESK–ASM mining in Kalimantan?” Our fieldwork demonstrates the diversity of mining locations and practices, and the complex social, political and economic relations that go into its production. While our informants (and local graffiti taggers) often joke that a certain boom mining site was “like Texas”, in fact the gold commodity chain we trace above is highly geographically specific.

While some boom sites take on a freewheeling sensibility, other sites are more firmly controlled by local community members. And far from being immune to government regulation, informal mining operations occurs in close juxtaposition with local state authority. Many local officials are thoroughly enmeshed in this “illegal” system. Recent upward moves in global gold prices are intensifying extraction pressures, although shop owners also note that the volume of their purchases are below the peak, suggesting there may be some limits to new boom locations in Katingan.

While thousands of Dayaks and migrants forge an independent livelihood, and an identity, as small-scale miners, the clear and pressing problem is that entire peat forest landscapes can undergo literal upheaval, and aquatic environments face more or less complete destruction—for centuries into the future—for their hidden small grains of gold. And in the rivers, streams and forests of Katingan Regency, the gold lies nearly everywhere.

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The post “It’s like Texas”: variations on informal gold mining in Central Kalimantan appeared first on New Mandala.

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