Today Christ Jacob Belseran received the Oktovianus Pogau Award for courage in journalism from Pantau Foundation. The citation is usually reserved for reporters who continue their work despite adversity and, at times, direct threats.
Belseran is a contributor to Mongabay Indonesia and the editor and founder of Titastory, a local outlet he established in Ambon in 2020. His reporting has tracked how mining, land claims, and state decisions land on the lives of Indigenous communities across the Maluku islands and North Maluku— where forests underpin livelihoods and culture. Pantau credited him with explaining how large companies seize land, degrade forests, and pollute coastal waters, and with covering protests and community aspirations that some would prefer remain unrecorded.
In Pantau’s telling, the work is not performed from a safe distance. Belseran travels by boat and on foot, sleeping where he can—sometimes in village houses, sometimes alongside the communities he is covering. He has described it, with a characteristic understatement, as “nomadic journalism.” In practice, it involves carrying a machete to clear paths, foraging for food, setting small fires to keep biting insects at bay, and sleeping on makeshift beds of branches.
The greater dangers, as he notes, come from people. Pantau recounts an episode in East Halmahera in which police tried to prevent him from filming a meeting between an Indigenous community and local officials. The community responded by threatening to walk out if the journalist was expelled. For Belseran, it was a practical lesson about the role a reporter can play in contested spaces: not as a protagonist, but as a witness the public can later rely on.
He has also been pulled toward the story by the state itself. After covering the arrest of activists linked to the Republic of South Maluku flag-raising, Belseran was summoned repeatedly by police investigators and, for a time, faced insinuations that he was part of the movement. He was ultimately deemed uninvolved, but the implication lingered in rumor. The point was not simply intimidation; it was contamination—casting doubt on the reporter so the reporting can be dismissed.
The award he received is named for Oktovianus Pogau, a Papuan journalist who died at 23 and whose work helped document violence and rights abuses that much of Indonesia’s media neglected. The prize, established in 2017, is intended as an annual reminder of what such reporting can cost, and why it still matters.
Belseran’s career suggests a simple ethic: journalism as an honest way to defend the public interest and to bridge citizens and the state. He has also been recognized beyond Indonesia: he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Journalism Grant Fellowship for Southeast Asia.
Awards do not reduce the hazards attached to this kind of reporting. They serve mainly as recognition that the work exists and continues. Belseran has continued to do it in places where access is difficult and scrutiny is often unwelcome.
Credits
This story first appeared on Mongabay
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