Twenty years on, the Lapindo mud is still teaching Indonesia a lesson

On 29 May 2006, hot sludge began pushing up beside a gas well drilled by PT Lapindo Brantas in Sidoarjo, East Java. It never really stopped. The mud buried a dozen villages and pushed more than 40,000 people out of their homes, and twenty years later the argument about who was responsible has still not been settled. Writing for Fulcrum, Muhammad Fahmi Nurcahyo looks at what happened to the people afterwards rather than at the geology.

The state handled it as paperwork. President Yudhoyono set up a special agency, BPLS, to manage compensation. President Widodo closed that agency in 2017 and the area was rebranded as a place to visit, a mud tourism site, which residents and researchers have objected to since 2018. Nurcahyo's term for what the young people there now carry is "post-memory": a memory of something you did not live through, passed down until it feels like your own. He describes a boy who has never seen his mother's village but can describe its streets from her stories, and a girl whose drawing of the site carries the caption "there is resistance here". At the anniversaries, families build ogoh-ogoh, the giant festival puppets, in the shape of a "Monster Bakri", after the tycoon Aburizal Bakrie, to reject the official line that the mud was a natural accident.

The part that reaches beyond Sidoarjo is the method. Nurcahyo says the same steps show up again wherever land is taken for a big project: argue over the numbers, draw the affected zone narrowly, and split the community into those inside the line and those outside it. He traces that pattern from Papua to Rempang, where residents were moved for an industrial park.

Why it matters

If a mine, a smelter, or an industrial estate is planned near you, the Sidoarjo story is a warning about the shape of the fight rather than the geology: the map that decides who counts as a victim is usually where the money is won or lost. Ask early who drew that boundary and on what data. Twenty years is also a realistic timeline for compensation cases in Indonesia, which is long enough for the children of the displaced to grow up inside the argument.