Horus: Eramet keeps files on Indonesians, and nickel is not just about price

According to Reporterre, which speaks of an exclusive investigation, an intelligence software called Horus is profiling Indonesians without their knowledge, at the request of Eramet, the French mining and metallurgy flagship. Their personal data would be extracted without consent. The outlet cites the case of Rusdi Amin, a Muslim deeply involved in his community's life, who lives in Balambano, a small village in South Sulawesi, where nickel draws the world's biggest mining groups. Without having agreed to it, his photo and other information about him would now reportedly be part of the system.

The rest of the investigation is not included in the dispatch we have, so much remains to be established: the exact extent of the profiling, the number of people affected, the precise uses of the data, Eramet's response, and the possible role of the Indonesian authorities. We will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

It comes down to one question: why does a company need to know the inhabitants of a village in order to exploit the subsoil? The most plausible answer is that nickel is not extracted with excavators alone. Access to land must also be secured, resistance anticipated, and those who speak up, those who organise, those who refuse to sell, must be identified. If the profiling is confirmed, it would be a tool for managing a population that has become an obstacle.

This is where the notion of accumulation by dispossession sheds light on the scene. For Marxists, the separation of people from their land is not an old episode of capitalism: it continues through mining concessions and "investment opportunities". Rusdi Amin lives on land that is "coveted", Reporterre says. The word is apt. When land is coveted, its inhabitants become files.

There remains the angle of dependence. An economy whose value rests on exporting a strategic ore, for batteries and steel consumed elsewhere, has little room to negotiate with a foreign group. The host state needs the investment, the group needs calm on the ground: the temptation to look away, or even to help, is strong. Dependence is not measured only in the trade balance; it also shows in what is tolerated on one's territory. At this stage we do not know what the Indonesian authorities knew, and that is precisely a question to put to them.

There is finally a very French irony. The energy transition, sold as virtuous, demands metals whose extraction imposes its costs on the populations that have contributed least to climate change. Now they are asked, as a bonus, not to make waves, and a register is kept of those who might.

A group in which the French state remains a weighty shareholder, at least symbolically, should answer publicly: which data, collected how, stored where, and for whose benefit? As long as those answers are missing, the right of the people of Balambano to know what is known about them is no minor detail.