Adat history

After Indonesia became independent in 1949, these soldiers, due to their separatist ideology, had refused to be demobilized on Indonesian soil.

However, what sets Moluccan adat apart from all the other variants that have been discussed, is that it traveled from Indonesia to the Netherlands in 1951, along with the first generation of Moluccan migrants.

Today, Maluku is an Indonesian province, and since the late 1970 s, the Moluccans in the Netherlands are Dutch citizens.

The wide background that represents the professional figure of Claudio Ongaro, partner and CEO of ADAT, pushes him to undertake the entrepreneurial experience immediately, creating a first individual firm, already in 1987.

Now, as then, a central government is concerned to encourage foreign capital to develop the natural resources of the land, but adat law no longer functions as a weapon which might be employed to resist over-exploitation. (1989: 110).

Now, since the fall of Suharto’s regime in 1998, the focus on local autonomy suggests a new configuration of adat as an instrument of indigenous emancipation from state control.

An important step toward this envisioned decentralization was the founding of the Indonesian Human Rights organization aman (Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, translated by the organization itself as “Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Indonesian Archipelago”) in 1999.