How Trump’s business partner exhumed graves to build a mega-resort in Indonesia
Joshua Partlow and Krithika Varagur meet the villagers in West Java fighting to prevent a centuries-old cemetery being destroyed to make way for hotels
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In Indonesia, in the valley between two volcanoes, the soldiers fan out around the cemetery as men with shovels move in to dig up the dead.
Village leader Djaja Mulyana has catalogued many grievances about the construction site that hemmed in his community. He’s filled binders documenting what he considers the deception, broken promises and lost livelihoods from the builders threatening to displace residents.
But nothing like this: In January 2019, gravediggers came to unearth corpses where his Muslim ancestors had rested since the 19th century, says Mulyana and two others who witnessed the excavations. The remains are being moved to make room for a mega-resort that will include a Trump-branded hotel and golf course.
At least one person had agreed to the exhumations, but other families have not given consent. One woman, Iyum, says the remains of her two daughters had been disinterred without her permission.
“Who did they think my children were – dogs?” she says in an interview with The Washington Post.
The Trump Organisation’s foray into Indonesia was one of the last foreign deals Donald Trump signed before he was elected president in 2016. It was part of a lucrative and relatively low-risk foreign expansion – licensing his name to hotels and towers around the world – that he halted when he entered the White House. His company, now run by his two eldest sons, said it would not pursue new projects overseas, but would continue those already underway.
The ongoing struggle over land in the jungles of West Java shows that even as the global footprint of President Trump’s company has shrunk, he continues to profit from deals with foreign developers, including some enmeshed in fraught local disputes.
The Indonesian developer – MNC Group, run by media tycoon Hary Tanoesoedibjo – is now behind schedule on two Trump resorts, including a beach front resort in Bali. MNC faced a declining real estate market even before the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic, according to current and former company officials. The Bali site is overgrown and traversed by wild dogs. Construction on the resort in West Java remains in early stages, a year after company officials had projected it would be operating.
The cemetery dispute in the Ciletuh Hilir community is one more controversy.
MNC Land – the subsidiary building the project, including the Trump resorts – says some residents of Ciletuh Hilir had accepted the company’s proposal to relocate their relatives’ remains “to a new cemetery location that we provide, which is more appropriate”. The company also accused those who refused of exaggerating their concerns as a negotiating tactic to extract higher prices to sell their homes and unearth their ancestors.
“MNC is even willing to bear the entire grave removal costs,” the company says.
The village and its cemetery is located on land slated to become the resort’s theme park. Trump’s business has sought to distance itself from the faraway feud.
“We have been told that this is not on or part of any of the Trump portion of the development,” a Trump Organisation official said in a statement, adding: “Our relationship with MNC consists purely of licensing and management agreements only, we are not the developers.”
The Trump Organisation did not respond to questions about whether it had been aware of the exhumations at the time or whether it had vetted MNC’s practises.
Tanoesoedibjo is attempting to build a vacation metropolis. It includes a theme park incorporating cartoon characters featured on his television programmes, a kind of Indonesian Disneyland
A former MNC official says that Trump’s company receive regular updates.
“They want to know what’s happening every month. They want to know the standards. They want to know who’s going to be the constructor, who’s going to be the banker, no different than a Hyatt or a Marriott,” says the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry.
The Trump Organisation’s 600-acre portion of the property – encompassing the future site of an 18-hole golf course, a 120-room hotel and 461 luxury villas – begins less than half a mile from the cemetery, according to GPS coordinates taken there overlaid with MNC and Trump Organisation project maps. The marketing materials MNC has produced for years tout the Trump connection, as key components for the 1,700-acre first phase of MNC Lido City, the project that envelops Mulyana and the 200 families of Ciletuh Hilir.
“Trump international resort, golf club and residences are at the core of the phase one master plan,” MNC said in a promotional video in August 2019.
American politics feels distant here, but Mulyana and his neighbours clearly recognise the name on billboards they drive past on their motorbikes each day.
“You see it everywhere. It’s written everywhere on the project site,” he says. “There’s the Trump project, the Trump hotels. It’s not the Hary [Tanoesoedibjo] project.”
It is also more ambitious than anything the Trump Organisation has signed onto abroad. Tanoesoedibjo says he plans to spend $1bn (£806bn) on the two Indonesia resorts. The Trump Organisation will get a small percentage of the sales of more than 800 planned “Trump residences”, many that start at more than $1m (£806,000), plus management fees to run the golf courses and hotels in Lido and Bali, the former MNC official says.
“Both the Lido and Bali Trump Hotels will be architectural masterpieces that will do for Indonesia what the Sydney Opera House is doing for Australia,” Johannes Spies, one of the MNC officials in charge of design, says in a text message.
In Lido, Tanoesoedibjo is attempting to build a vacation metropolis. It includes a theme park incorporating cartoon characters featured on his television programmes, a kind of Indonesian Disneyland. The plan includes hospitals, a university, a place called “Movie Land”, an indoor-outdoor film production studio with recreations of cityscapes and ancient Indonesian villages, plus a venue for music festivals that could hold thousands of people, to be run by Tanoesoedibjo’s daughter, Valencia, according to MNC presentations and people familiar with the project.
When Donald Trump Jr visited Jakarta in August to meet Tanoesoedibjo and investors, he told reporters that the Indonesian resorts were “dream projects” and that the two companies were “really working feverishly” to complete them.
“I see a great opportunity,” he says. “The dream is becoming a reality.”
In Ciletuh Hilir early last year, such exalted visions felt far away.
When the gravediggers broke for lunch on 23 January 2019, Mulyana and his neighbours rushed to the cemetery.
It is our belief that the land belonged to our ancestors as a community. I’m probably seventh generation... and the cemetery has been there since before the independence
The agitated crowd quickly noticed a mistake and summoned Heri, a 56-year-old out-of-work farmer who, like others in the area, goes by one name.
The remains of four of his relatives – two siblings, his great-grandfather and another relative – had been pulled from the ground without his consent, he and others in the community said, along with the bodies of Iyum’s two girls.
They had dug up the wrong people. “I broke down crying,” Heri says.
The Lido Lakes Resort and Conference Center is nestled in a stunning part of Indonesia: between lush and misty mountains about an hour south of the capital city of Jakarta. The adjacent Gunung Gede Pangrango national park is one of the last pristine tropical forests on the island of Java, a sanctuary for endangered leopards and silvery gibbons.
It was at this resort that Djaja Mulyana and other locals gathered in July 2014 to hear representatives of the property’s new owner, MNC, describe their early plans for transforming the weekend getaway into a resort that would become the pride of Indonesia. It was the middle of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and the gathering included a meal to break the day’s fast.
Residents came away impressed. Many in the village were tenant farmers who grew corn and cassava on others’ land for subsistence wages. They lived in cinder-block homes connected by dirt footpaths. The MNC officials promised jobs for the farmers and schools for their children, Mulyana recalls; the plan was to build “the biggest tourist destination in Asia”.
“They gave us hope,” Mulyana says.
Within a few months, however, doubts emerged.
When surveyors and prospectors started poking around in the neighbouring villages – collectively known as Wates Jaya, part of the Bogor district – residents questioned them. Mulyana did not think the village had given necessary permission for work to begin, and he had not seen any permits. The workers were outsiders, not locals, as residents hoped.
Villagers claimed hereditary rights to their homes. They had been allowed to farm the area even as it changed hands often between government and private companies in recent decades. Residents cite family ties back to the period of Dutch colonialism that preceded Indonesia’s independence in 1945, when the land was used for rubber and tea plantations. They date the cemetery to 1834.
“I belong to a tradition, to a culture that I cannot simply abandon,” says Firmansyah, a 34-year-old resident. “It is our belief that the land belonged to our ancestors as a community. I’m probably seventh generation... and the cemetery has been there since before the independence. That’s what I wanted to protect, the reason I resisted. It’s the historical value.”
Those sentiments have done little to impede MNC from building all around them. As earth-clearing and preliminary site work has progressed, residents say construction workers have moved a mountain of dirt across a main road into the village, blocking that access. Builders also walled off the community with concrete fencing, and filled in portions of a lake used for fishing and drinking water, residents say. The cleared land now presses right up against the tight cluster of homes.
“As the construction work is starting on site and in line with work safety regulations, fences must be built along boundaries between the project MNC’s area and Ciletuh Hilir Kampung, in which the people still [have] access to and exits from the Kampung,” the company said in its statement, using the word for neighbourhood.
This includes the land that the local community had been farming on – we’re not allowed to use it anymore. That’s one of the ways that the company was using to kill the economy in our kampung
After MNC bought the land in 2013, it had allowed the residents of Ciletuh Hilir and villages to farm on the land, continuing a decades-long practice. That permission stopped in 2017.
MNC had an “agreement stating that ‘if MNC at any time needs the land, then villagers must vacate the land without compensation from MNC’,” the company statement says. “MNC has requested the villagers to vacate the land based on the agreement, as we plan to start developing the area as an entertainment hub (non-Trump project).”
The development is an opportunity for some. MNC says it now employs more than 300 people in the broader Lido area. They do construction and site security among other jobs.
In Ciletuh Hilir, residents say MNC asked its employees in the community to sell their homes at low prices and evacuate. MNC did not respond to questions about prices.
Those who remain – and can no longer farm – have turned to buying crops elsewhere and selling them in local markets or looking for other work in town.
“They want to acquire our lands on their terms: by paying the lowest price, using intimidation and so much more,” Firmansyah says. “And this includes the land that the local community had been farming on – we’re not allowed to use it anymore. That’s one of the ways that the company was using to kill the economy in our kampung.”
Using heavy machinery, workers cleared about 70 acres of farmland without providing compensation, residents would later recount in a letter to Indonesian President Joko Widodo outlining their concerns. The Post reviewed a copy of the letter, provided by a local lawyer.
“They cut down our banana trees,” Mulyana says.
Mulyana had been elected in 2010 as head of his rukun warga, or citizens’ association, a local administrative body in Indonesia encompassing a cluster of neighbourhoods. He was a farmer, like his parents before him, and unaccustomed to facing off against a massive corporation.
At home, Mulyana kept his doors open at all hours, smoking cigarettes and trading gossip with neighbours who filtered through. As worries grew about the development next door, he contacted a pro-bono legal collective based in the nearby city of Bogor for help defending the village. He began accumulating stacks of letters, blueprints, meeting minutes and photos that eventually filled three plastic binders.
One of those documents, passed to Mulyana by a politician friend, galvanised his opposition to the project.
It was a 2014 letter signed by officials in Wates Jaya – a local jurisdiction that includes Ciletuh Hilir – stating that residents had been informed by an MNC subsidiary about the coming development. The document said that residents in the area “have no objection to and approve of the request for the site permit”. Dozens of signatures from the attendance form used during the Ramadan meeting with MNC representatives – including Mulyana’s – were appended to the letter.
“I was so angry when I found out,” he recalls.
The two men were an uncanny match. Both were entrepreneurs who liked luxury and glitz. They both developed resorts, were hosts of beauty pageants and had political ambitions
Mulyana says his signature had been used to suggest his approval of the development. He feels deceived.
“We never signed anything agreeing to that,” he says.
One of the local officials who signed the letter, Basrowi, says that he can’t recall the details of the permitting process but denies that anything deceptive had taken place. There will always be some opponents to such projects, he tells The Post in an interview.
“You’re talking about 10,000 people. Not everybody has the same opinion,” says Basrowi, who until recently was the head of the Cigombong subdistrict that includes Ciletuh Hilir.
MNC says it complied with all applicable laws and regulations in the permitting process and never falsified any residents’ signatures.
“The development permits in relation to the MNC’s land are processed and obtained from the regional government in accordance with prevailing laws and regulations,” the company says.
Trump met Tanoesoedibjo in early 2015 through associates in real estate, and by late summer they had a deal.
The two men were an uncanny match. Both were entrepreneurs who liked luxury and glitz. They both developed resorts, were hosts of beauty pageants and had political ambitions.
Tanoesoedibjo lives in the type of splendour Trump could appreciate. On his 100,000sqft estate, he keeps a 23-person house staff and a 1,000-bottle wine cellar, Forbes reported last year. When he bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, California, for $13.5m (£11m) last year, it was Trump’s, as The Post first reported last year.
“We’re partners,” Tanoesoedibjo told Bloomberg News in 2017. “We can come to meet them anytime to discuss the business.”
Before Trump’s campaign, his company was in the midst of a rapid international expansion. In 2014, Trump spent $79m (£73m) in cash to buy two golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. By the next year, when the two Indonesia deals were signed, Trump Organisation officials were touting coming hotels in Vancouver; Baku, Azerbaijan; Punta del Este, Uruguay; and Rio de Janeiro.
Trump’s foreign partners often lacked a reliable track record of real estate success. Some have faced allegations of corruption.
The beach front Trump tower in Uruguay remains an unfinished construction site, four years after it was supposed to open, bogged down by lawsuits and financing issues. The Trump Organisation dropped out of Azerbaijan just after Trump’s election amid allegations against the builder of money-laundering and bribery, The Post has reported. Developers for the Uruguay and Azerbaijan projects did not respond to requests for comment.
The company pulled out of the Rio de Janeiro hotel around the same time amid a federal investigation of potential bribery involving his local partners. Paulo Figueiredo Filho, Trump’s former hotel partner in Rio de Janeiro, says the Trump Organisation did not pull out because of the investigation but because of operational disagreements that remain confidential. He adds that no one was convicted.
Builders also walled off the community with concrete fencing, and filled in portions of a lake used for fishing and drinking water
Only the hotel in Vancouver has opened.
Even with all the problems, the Trump Organisation’s licensing deals abroad remain a lucrative source of income. In 2018, Trump reported $2m (£1.6m) to $8.7m (£7m) in foreign licensing deals and management agreements – not including revenue from the three golf resorts he owns outright in Scotland and Ireland – according to his 2019 personal disclosure form. The form lists revenue but not profits. Trump also reported $212,200 (£171,000) in technical services agreements relating to Indonesia that year.
When Trump became president, his company decided to stop new foreign projects. Donald Trump Jr told reporters during his visit to Jakarta last year that the company voluntarily gave up “tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars’ worth of deals”.
But for existing projects, or those already in motion, Trump’s new job added fresh complications. In some places, such as Panama and Toronto, building owners stripped Trump’s now-controversial name from their hotels. Land-use disputes at his golf courses in Scotland and Ireland are now supercharged with international politics.
When Trump took office, Tanoesoedibjo flew in for the inauguration. He had already lost one campaign for vice president of Indonesia and had formed his own political party and said he wanted to run for president.
Since then, the association with Trump has probably complicated his resort projects.
Trump’s executive order banning visitors from entering the United States from several majority-Muslim countries was not good for public relations in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
Although Indonesia was not included in Trump’s ban, MNC officials worried that his stance could provoke a backlash in West Java, with its more conservative Muslim population, the former MNC official says.
It was two years ago when MNC representatives approached residents in Ciletuh Hilir and offered to pay them to relocate remains from the village cemetery tucked in a grove of trees.
According to the company, some residents accepted the proposal and asked for police protection during the exhumation process because other neighbours were upset. MNC said that it had “successfully carried out” another cemetery relocation in the Gombong Onan neighbourhood.
Residents of Ciletuh Hilir recall that one man agreed to the removal of his relatives’ remains.
“There was no prior communication, no deliberation, no consensus, they were coercive right from the start,” Firmansyah says. “They came with arrogance, knowing full well they had money, they had power, they came having absolutely no regard for the fact that people here still needed our cemetery.”
On the day the soldiers and police arrived, an angry crowd gathered and argued with authorities, according to video taken at the scene.
The gravediggers disinterred six corpses and put them an ambulance, says three people who were present. Once neighbours realised that Heri’s relatives had been unearthed by mistake, they rushed to the ambulance and pulled out the four body bags.
Firmansyah says he was in tears as he helped others rebury the remains that day. According to local Islamic tradition, the ahli waris, or primary heir, should handle any duties related to the grave, not military-backed construction workers, he and other residents say.
“I cannot put into words the mixture of emotions we felt at the time,” he recalls. “We were upset, angry, all wrapped into one.”
“It felt like it was the end of the world for me,” he says.
Two other bodies dug up that day belonged to sisters – Susanti Binti Caing and Ade Holisah Binti Caing – who had died in 1985 and 1988. Their mother, Iyum, wasn’t there the day the soldiers came.
“I knew nothing about it until after they were dug up,” she says. “I was shocked. I cried.”
She has already been grieving: Her husband died about a week before the gravediggers came.
“I want my children here. Where they should be,” she says.
Iyum and Heri complained to police. Iyum’s report, written by her lawyers and filed with the Bogor police three weeks after the graves were dug up, notes that her daughters were “in no way related” to the man who approved his relatives’ relocation, according to a copy obtained by The Post.
They came with arrogance, knowing full well they had money, they had power, they came having absolutely no regard for the fact that people here still needed our cemetery
“Both of the bodies have not been returned to their graves,” it reads.
The controversy at the cemetery quickly led to angry protests. On 13 February, villagers gathered outside the Bogor police station, a scene captured by local media outlets. Nine days later, a group from the village protested in front of the House of Representatives and the presidential palace in Jakarta, according to photos of the event provided to The Post.
In letters to Tanoesoedibjo and President Widodo in the following months, lawyers representing the village said residents experienced “deep traumatic and psychological pressure” from actions by MNC and Indonesian security forces, such as the loss of the villagers arable land to the military-backed actions at the cemetery.
“The residents’ refusal was not heeded,” reads the letter to Tanoesoedibjo, dated 3 April 2019, “to the point that a physical altercation broke out, and the officers continued to carry out the destruction of the cemetery by force and with no regard for human rights.”
Lawyers representing the villagers have issued three subpoenas to MNC Land between December 2019 and February 2020 to discuss the disinterred bodies and the village’s loss of its agricultural land. But the small legal collective has been hesitant to escalate the situation in the courts because of the company’s vastly superior resources, says Anggi Triana Ismail, one of the lawyers representing the village.
“MNC has a lot of powerful people on their side,” he says.
No lawsuits have been filed against MNC as a result of complaints “raised by the villagers or relevant communities”, the company said in its statement.
“They do not have a strong basis for filing a lawsuit,” it added.
Ciletuh Hilir residents say that about 2,000 people are buried in the three-acre cemetery. Many of the graves are unmarked, except for plants and saplings rising from mounds of earth.
Even those might eventually disappear.
Residents acknowledge that they may not prevail against the coming resort. A demolition of their community – and relocation of the cemetery – is still a possibility.
For now, neighbours regularly stand guard at the cemetery, worried about an unannounced return of the gravediggers.
They also find moments of solidarity there. During a recent funeral, neighbours convened to sprinkle flower petals on the freshly turned soil.
Every Thursday evening, Abdullah Sayuti, the village cleric, leads the community in group prayer, as they work through what he called the village’s “psychological burden”.
“People have been feeling uneasy for a while now,” he says.
And so they come together and pray for better times, hoping that life alongside Donald Trump’s future golf course might someday improve.
Muhammad Fadli contributed to this report.
© The Washington Post
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