Dirty little secret behind the West’s web zero sprint for electrical automobiles: Ed Miliband desires us all to drive them, however mass-mining of the nickel wanted for EV batteries threatens to have devastating ecological influence

Maklon Lube, 43, started growing cocoa, sago and nutmeg on the remote Indonesian island of Halmahera in his youth.

But more recently, a group of mysterious men in overalls cut down his trees and blocked his access to his land. Nor was Mr Lube the only one to have his land seized – others suffered the same brutal treatment.

Soon afterwards, five coal-fired power plants rose up from the dense jungle surrounding Maklon’s coastal village of Gemaf, spewing smoke over the ramshackle houses below.

When Maklon complained, members of the country’s notorious paramilitary police force showed up at his door.

This was the Indonesian police mobile brigade unit – or ‘Brimob’ – said to be responsible for some of the country’s most heinous human rights abuses, including rape, kidnappings and torture.

Locals have noticed a sinister rise in its presence since they have been forced to endure the development of a new 5,000-hectare nickel smelting mega-complex on the island.

This is the reality of the Indonesian nickel rush, in which villagers claim their land has been illegally seized by mining companies, but protests are brutally suppressed by police, with claims of torture and at least one unlawful killing.

The burgeoning industry has swallowed up vast swathes of forest and farmland that has been the lifeblood of the indigenous people for millennia.

In fact, the growth of the nickel industry on Halmahera is so drastic that Survival International, a human rights group, has warned it could see one of the last surviving hunter-gatherer peoples of Indonesia wiped out.

And what is fuelling the rapid rise of this carbon-chugging land-grab?

The answer is rich Westerners and their insatiable demand for electric cars, for whose batteries nickel is a key component.

The car companies Tesla, Ford, BMW, Stellantis and Volkswagen all have agreements with the nickel companies in Indonesia.

And the UK, with its ambitious net-zero and EV targets, is one of the market’s main drivers.

Meanwhile, the ultimate winners – you will not be surprised to hear – are the Chinese, who have invested massively in the industry and brought over thousands of migrant workers to toil away inside the factories they own.

Yet since these are located thousands of miles away, this is all happily out of sight and mind for those – such as our own energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband – who hail EVs as a major solution to the world’s climate crisis. So the Daily Mail ventured to the far flung villages of Halmahera to uncover the dirty secret behind the green car revolution.

Halmahera is the largest of the Spice Islands of North Maluku province, which attracted European colonial interest as far back as the 16th century due to the abundance of cloves, nutmeg and other coveted spices on its verdant shores.

Today, it is the epicentre of Indonesia’s nickel boom.

The country is the world’s largest producer of the critical mineral used in EV batteries, supplying 48 per cent of global demand.

Massive nickel mining and industrial park complexes are being built across its sprawling archipelago, including the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park in Lelilef, Halmahera, just 3km to the west of Maklon’s home in Gemaf.

The mountainous area to its north is rich in nickel deposits. This has almost entirely been taken over by mining, with more than 60 concessions covering almost 150,000 hectares, roughly 60 per cent of the entire district of central Halmahera.

Here, a web of mining companies from Indonesia, Australia, France and China, chop down trees and extract vast quantities of nickel to be processed back at the industrial park.

Before all this, Lelilef was home to around 1,440 people, most of them indigenous Sawai fishermen and farmers.

Now it is boomtown, with scores of Chinese workers churning up the muddy roads on motorbikes as they head to the mines.

Squalid accommodation blocks have sprung up on every street corner to house the growing population.

But there is little left for Sawai fishermen like Wite Takuli, whose way of life has been destroyed.

For as long as Maklon has grown his crops, Wite, 68, has fished the blue waters of the Halmahera Sea, enjoying an abundant supply of skipjack tuna and groupers.

Nowadays, his stock is desperately depleted and the water has turned a dirty, reddish-brown colour.

Wite’s daily catch has shrunk from 30kg to 5kg, barely enough to feed his own family.

He accuses the nickel industry of ‘stealing’ his livelihood.

Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to show mining is wreaking devastating environmental damage on Halmahera, including its fishing stock.

Mining requires the disposal of waste rock, which pollutes water with heavy metals and toxins if mismanaged.

And it is. The Weda Bay Nickel company, which has a 45,000-hectare mining concession in central Halmahera, was been found guilty of at least 25 counts of environmental mismanagement by the Indonesian Environment Ministry in 2021.

Fish caught in the coastal waters around Lelilef and other neighbouring villages have damaged tissues and cells, most likely due to heavy metal pollution, according to a local university study.

Meanwhile, other locals such as Marlene Durhan, 48, a mother-of-five, in Lelilef, are finding it hard to breathe, and they blame the dust from the nickel mines.

She has a ‘goiter’, a lump or swelling at the front of the neck which she believes has been exacerbated, if not caused, by the pollution.

‘I felt like I was dying,’ she says, adding that her two granddaughters, aged three and six, are also suffering.

They are not the only ones.

Cases of acute respiratory tract infections skyrocketed by 2,300 per cent, from 434 to 10,579, between 2020 and 2023 among eight indigenous Sawai villages around the south coast of Halmahera, according to data from local health centres.

French-firm Eramet, which has a 39 per cent share in Weda Bay Nickel and oversees its mining operations, told the Mail it is ‘committed to implementing industry best practices’.

It says it has taken ‘corrective actions’ after the findings of environmental mismanagement.

But the situation is approaching an extinction-level event for the roughly 3,500 indigenous Hongana Manyawa people who live and depend on the island’s rainforest interior.

Around 500 of them are ‘uncontacted’, living in voluntary isolation. Rampant deforestation means they are now in danger of starving to death.

The Mail did not attempt to reach the uncontacted Hongana Manyawa out of respect for their way of life, but we did meet a community elder, Ngigoro. He returns to the forest to visit his family two to three times a month.

‘It is terrible,’ he says, speaking at his home near the village of Buli Serani, east Halmahera. ‘They are struggling to get food. It is hard for them to hunt.

‘They have had to move to higher ground because the river where they were is contaminated. The mining company was just 100 metres from where they lived.’

Ngigoro claims mining company workers are committing abuses on Hongana Manyawa land, including the destruction of shelters and the theft of foraged food.

He believes they are doing this to scare them off their land, leaving it free for excavation.

The web of firms involved in mining in Halmahera makes it hard to identify which companies might be responsible.

But Weda Bay Nickel operates the largest nickel mine in uncontacted Hongana Manyawa territory, according to extensive research by Survival International.

Survival also cites leaked reports that suggest Weda Bay-commissioned researchers proposed forcibly contacting and resettling the Hongana Manyawa – an action that the charity claims would increase the ‘already high risk of genocide’.

The severity of this should not be underestimated. Like all uncontacted people, the Hongana Manyawa are acutely vulnerable to common diseases, such as flu and measles, to which they have no immunity.

Eramet says it has listened to concerns raised by Survival regarding the tribe and has taken ‘additional precautionary measures’.

The company adds that its own research has found no evidence of Hongana Manyawa living in voluntary isolation in its concession and that it has no resettlement plans.

Back on Maklon Lube’s farm, he says his land was seized in 2018 when construction started at Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park.

The complex was completed at breakneck speed, with nickel smelting starting in April 2020.

But farmers claim this was achieved through unfair land grabs, with little or no compensation paid to villagers.

Many say they were left with no option but to sell their land because they had already lost access to it, as the surrounding area had already been taken over by a mining company.

Maklon did his best to hold out, filing a lawsuit against the industrial park, claiming it had failed to compensate him for 30 of his 38 hectares of land.

This was when he started receiving visits from the Brimob and the military. ‘They came many times,’ he says. ‘The police and army as well. Every time my wife and I went to our land, they always came. They told me not to come to my land because the mining company has paid [for it]. It happened for two years.’

Maklon says he lost his case because he did not have a formal land certificate. Like many Sawai, his traditional landholding has not been recognised by the state.

Mahmud Ali, 54, a farmer in the next village of Sagea, says he too was harassed by police, the military and the Brimob, after he refused to sell his land.

Other villagers say police often turn up alongside mining representatives, fuelling a view shared by Maklon that law enforcement effectively ‘works for the mining companies’.

There is no evidence to suggest firms have issued direct orders to police.

But the arrival of the Brimob is no coincidence.

In 2021, the industrial park helped fund the construction of its new headquarters in Lelilef. Separately, an Indonesian National Army outpost was established in the nearby town of Weda the previous year.

Many are afraid to speak out for fear of reprisals, given the long history of police brutality.

The Mail was told of at least two instances in which peaceful protestors were dispersed with tear gas, with one reported shooting of an uncontacted Hongana Manyawa elder by the Brimob in the village of Sibenpopo in 2023.

Ngigoro recalls one instance in 2015, backed up by local media reports, in which two Hongana Monyawa men were jailed over a killing they argued took place far away from where they lived and therefore could not have committed.

The men, Bokumu and Nuhu, were beaten upon arrest and later tortured. Nuhu died from the injuries he sustained.

Ngigoro claims they were set up by the Weda Bay Nickel company which provided photos of the men to police, so they could gain access to their land.

Eramet, the French firm that owns 39 percent of Weda Bay Nickel, says the company has never used the police nor the army for land acquisition.

A spokesperson for Halmahera police told The Mail that it ‘always prioritises humane methods in solving problems faced by the community’, and that it ‘strives to take a neutral position between society and companies’. The Brimob did not respond to a request for comment.

Some may argue that the suffering in Halmahera is a drop in the ocean compared to the global devastation that will be wrought if the world fails to wean itself off gas-guzzling cars. But Indonesian nickel is making a bad situation worse, not better.

At least 5,331 hectares of tropical forests have been cut to make way for mining concessions on Halmahera, according to analysis by Climate Rights International and the University of California, Berkeley.

The five coal-fired power plants at Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park will ultimately become 12 and, once fully operational, use more coal than Spain or Brazil in a single year.

And it’s only just begun. Global nickel demand is expected to increase by 61 per cent by 2040 to meet the growing demand for EV batteries.

Krista Shennum, a Climate Rights International researcher, describes it as ‘perverse’ that, while the purpose of the EV transition is to reduce the carbon emissions of the motor industry, the nickel industry in Halmahera has a ‘massive carbon footprint’ that is ‘directly contributing to the climate crisis’.

And then there is the plight of the miners themselves.

Although there is no evidence of human rights abuses at the park in Halmahera, there is at a nickel plant on Sulawesi island.

A report by China Labour Watch alleged instances of forced labour, violence and dangerous conditions leading to deaths of workers at the Indonesian Morowali Industrial Plant.

The facility is run by the Tsinghshan Group, one of three Chinese companies behind the Indonesia Weda Bay Industrial Park.

Neither the industrial park nor Tsingshan Group responded to requests for comment. But Huayou Cobalt Co, one of the other Chinese partners at Weda Bay Industrial Park, told Climate Rights International that it is ‘committed to maintaining sustainable and socially responsible operations’ at its factories. It added that land acquisition is carried out after legal consultations and negotiations within the community.

Is all this what Ed Miliband had in mind when he said he wanted to spearhead an electric car ‘revolution’?

Labour’s reluctance to temper EV targets set by the previous Tory government has already been blamed for the closure of a Vauxhall plant in Luton, but ministers may not have expected to be cited in the destruction of the indigenous peoples of Halmahera.

Survival International highlights a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the UK and Indonesian governments to establish a strategic partnership on critical minerals, including nickel.

Details have not been made public, but Survival’s senior researcher Sophie Grig told The Mail that the deal is ‘likely to bring deadly nickel to British shores’ unless ‘urgent steps are taken’ to ensure it does not come from the Hongana Manyawa territory.

A Foreign Office spokesperson said the MOU is ‘not a trade agreement’ but is designed ‘to support the development and promotion of best practices in critical minerals mining and processing’.

It is worth stressing that none of this means electric cars cannot be sustainable.

Climate Rights International points out that nickel smelting can be powered by renewable energy, while collective action from global leaders can improve the ‘appalling labour and environmental practices’ that blights the industry.

All car manufacturers who have agreements with Indonesian nickel say they have sustainability and human rights policies in place to ensure ethical supply chains.

But Supriyadi Sudirman, a 31-year-old activist from Sagea, has an uncompromising message for his young British counterparts, who spend their time gluing themselves to goalposts in the name of saving the planet.

‘You know nothing of where EVs come from, of where nickel comes from,’ he says. ‘It comes from the blood of the Halmaheran people. What you think is your future is our destruction.

‘None of this is for us.’

This is electric cars’ – and Ed Miliband’s – inconvenient truth.

With photographs by Mark Large