Article on current land reform movement in Indonesia

[Colin Donoghue]

Why can't people say the crucial words: *Land is a Human Right?*  Many
people, like the Indonesians highlighted in this article, understand the
importance of land for justice and freedom, yet they don't hit on or
promote the crucial truth that can actually make that a reality:  claiming
your fair share of cost/tax-free land as your birthright.  I don't recall
ever hearing anyone in this group saying it either... what gives?  Clarity
and speficity are crucial for positive change to occur; I hope those 5
words become a more commonly heard phrase, otherwise it will basically just
be more of the same (i.e. empire).
-------------------------------
"Fighting for land"
(article with photos here:
http://boilingspot.blogspot.com/2012/03/fighting-for-land.html)

Rural social movements have a rich history in Indonesia, and they have
recorded significant achievements in recent years
Dianto Bachriadi | Inside Indonesia | 18 January 2012

Jakarta, 1953: DN Aidit, one of the young and rising stars of the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) launches his analysis of Indonesian
agrarian society. He says agrarian revolution must be the essence of the
people’s ‘democratic revolution’ in Indonesia. At the fifth party congress
a year later, the PKI adopts Aidit’s analysis as the core of it new
agrarian program. The program calls on the party to build mass power in
rural areas, and to make the struggle for land reform central to its
appeal, using the slogan ‘land to the peasants’.

Twelve years later, Aidit is dead and the PKI is in tatters. A wave of
killing has swept through rural parts of Indonesia, with the military and
its allies targeting many of the cadres and activists who had been at the
forefront of the PKI’s struggle for land reform. The New Order regime which
comes to power, with the military at its core, sets in train a series of
policies that aim to depoliticise the countryside, permanently eliminate
the left, and proscribe independent organisation of the peasantry.

Yet the repression of 1965-66, despite the intentions of Suharto and his
comrades, did not negate the centrality of agrarian problems to Indonesian
political life. Nor did it stamp out for all time rural social movements.
The core problems that Aidit identified in his analysis in 1953 – such as
landlessness and stark inequality in rural areas – have continued to
characterise much of rural Indonesia to the present day. As the New Order
regime consolidated, it added new problems by opening up land to commercial
agriculture and other business interests, displacing entire rural
communities. As the years and decades passed, and despite great repression,
new movements of poor and dispossessed farmers erupted in many rural parts
of Indonesia.

Rural mobilisation accelerated further after the collapse of the New Order
in 1998. Around the country, peasants occupied land that had been taken
from them – or from their parents – over the preceding thirty years.
Peasant unions and other rural social movement organisations gained
thousands of members. Even though they are now fragmented and localised in
their orientation, these groups have succeeded in once more putting the
idea of agrarian reform onto the national political agenda. Aidit’s dream
of agrarian revolution has not been realised, and perhaps it never will,
but rural social movements are back as part of the Indonesian political
landscape, and as part of the Indonesian left.
A tradition of rural radicalism

When the PKI made its shift toward the countryside in the mid-1950s, it
faced an uphill struggle. In 1953, less than seven per cent of peasants
were organised. The PKI and its affiliate, BTI (Indonesian Peasants Front),
began their work with moderate actions to help peasants improve their
livelihood and social and cultural life. Many poor farmers were attracted
by these programs, and by the party’s vision of social justice. Others were
driven into the arms of the party by the severity of rural poverty and
inequalities in land ownership and control. Both the PKI and BTI grew
rapidly in rural areas. In 1955, BTI declared its membership had reached 3
million and the PKI was placed fourth in the 1955 general election, with
much of its vote garnered in the countryside.

When a new share-tenancy law and the basic agrarian law were promulgated in
1960, the left gained another opportunity for rural mobilisation. These
laws provided the PKI and BTI with a legal basis to escalate their demands
for the destruction of feudalism. The BTI called for ‘land to the tiller’,
and it campaigned for tenant farmers to receive a fairer share of the crops
they produced (it wanted a 60:40 ratio in favour of tenants, or least
50:50, in contrast to the the traditional 20:80 or 25:75 division in favour
of landowners). By 1962 BTI had around 5 million members.

When landowners and their allies in local governments resisted both the new
share tenancy regulations and the land reform program, rural radicalisation
was the result. The PKI launched a campaign targeting the ‘seven village
devils’ (such figures as ‘wicked landlords’ and ‘blood-sucking
money-lenders’) and the BTI tried to lead a campaign of land occupations by
poor farmers, the so-called ‘unilateral actions’ (aksi sepihak).

But many of their opponents in the countryside were affiliated to other big
political parties, including the PNI (Indonesian National Party) and NU
(Awakening of the Islamic Scholars, a traditionalist Islamic organisation).
The rural campaign thus compromised the PKI’s national-level ‘political
front’ as part of its commitment to President Sukarno’s ‘Guided Democracy’
regime, and the party called off its campaign.

This was the background to the anti-communist massacres of 1965-66. Rural
radicalisation prompted the PKI’s opponents to convert class-based conflict
into religious-based confrontation: sympathisers of the left’s agrarian
revolution were condemned as ‘atheist’ – a deadly political stigmatisation.
These rural anti-communists provided many of the shock troops who in
1965-66 carried out the killings of PKI and BTI supporters, in cooperation
with the army. The New Order came to power. Mass-based rural mobilisation
for radical social change suddenly ended.
Resisting developmentalism

But the New Order did not permanently end rural upheaval. Its support for
commercially-oriented ‘development projects’ caused massive land
dispossessions across the archipelago. Thousands of rural people
experienced brutal evictions from their land and sole source of livelihood.
Often, they received terribly unfair compensation for their losses. Serious
human rights abuses abounded.

The regime’s repressive political control over rural life did not stop
resistance by the victims of these policies. Beginning in the 1970s, land
conflicts began to erupt, as local communities resisted dispossession. The
conflict database compiled by the agrarian advocacy organisation KPA
(Consortium for Agrarian Reform) recorded more than 1,750 such land
conflicts during the New Order period. Komnas HAM (National Commission for
Human Rights) has reported that since its establishment in 1993 land
conflicts have constituted the single largest category of complaints it has
received.

Political repression in rural areas, and the absence of press freedom and
of independent peasant organisations, stacked the cards against local
protests against land evictions. Many of them would have flared and died
without leaving a lasting legacy, were it not for the fact that, from the
1970s, critical urban-based middle class activists became anchors and
organisers for rural protest movements. Such activists articulated local
concerns about land expropriation and rural human rights violations to
national audiences, and they linked land protests to wider political
contention against the New Order regime.

Thus, in the mid to late 1970s university student councils spoke out
against the brutality of forced land transfers. In the 1980s and 1990s,
activists from NGOs and informal student groups organised themselves into
action committees to campaign on numerous individual land conflicts around
the country. Such groups in effect stood in for the absent peasant
organisations and political parties that might otherwise have defended
farmers’ land rights.

Then, in the 1990s, some youth activists with a leftist political
orientation – though without links to the old communist movement of the
1960s – tried to revive the left movement in rural areas. They tried to
transform local instances of peasant resistance against land loss into
autonomous local peasant organisations. These activists developed new
programs of political education for rural activists, and tried to push the
orientation of peasant struggles beyond immediate goals of reclaiming lost
land or gaining fair compensation. Many young leftists tried to position
the peasants and rural masses once more as the pillar (soko guru) of
radical social change in Indonesia and they revived the idea of agrarian
reform (pembaruan agrarian) as the central goal for rural social movements.

At the start of the 1990s, SPJB (The West Java Peasant’s Union) was formed,
the first autonomous peasant union in the post-1965 authoritarian era. It
was a coalition of urban-based activists and local peasant leaders in land
conflict cases. The goal was that it would be a step in building a national
peasant union. Next, a network of student and NGO activists centered around
a string of cities stretching from North Sumatra to Central Java
(Asahan-Bandar Lampung-Bandung-Yogyakarta) formed several others local
peasant unions. These included the Independent Peasant Union of Central
Java (SPMJT), the Lampung Peasant Union (PITL), and the North Sumatra
Peasant Union (SPSU).

This network, along with other student groups, NGOs and some leaders of
local peasant groups committed to develop the embryo of independent
peasants’ organisation at the national level. In Lembang, West Java in 1993
they declared the foundation of the Indonesian Peasant Organisation. In the
same year in Central Java, some other radical left activists formed STN
(The National Peasants Union) as part of their attempt to form a broad
radical movement centered around their left political party, the PRD
(People’s Democratic Party).
Scaling up

In short, despite sustained repression, violence and arrests, over the long
term the New Order failed to prevent the re-emergence of movements that
challenged its supremacy, including in rural areas. By the mid-1990s, not
only were embryonic peasant unions emerging, but a new national coalition,
the KPA (Consortium for Agrarian Reform) was formed (in 1994) with its
central goal being the promotion of the long-neglected idea of agrarian
reform.


When Suharto fell in 1998, formal restrictions on independent organisation
ended and social movements of all types expanded rapidly. Effort to build
national peasant organisations accelerated. The key initiative was taken by
SPSU activists from North Sumatra and, in mid-1998, just a few weeks after
Suharto resigned, a Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions (FSPI) was
formed. Within the next few years several other peasant organisations –
such as API (Indonesian Famers Alliance), AGRA (Alliance of Movements for
Agrarian Reform) and PETANI Mandiri (Self-Reliant Indonesian Peasant and
Fisherfolks’ Movement) – were formed, and claimed a national presence.

However, these efforts did not consolidate a movement at the national level
because the dynamics of peasant mobilisation were instead leading toward
localisation. Moreover, these ‘national’ organisations competed with each
other to claim the title of ‘representative of the Indonesian peasants’.
Many local unions did not affiliate to just one national organisation.
Instead, double or triple memberships were common, as a kind of strategy
for local unions to multiply their links with national dynamics.
Democratisation and localisation

Over the long term, one of the most important developments in peasant
movements has been the reappearance of a strategy of occupation of
contested land. Beginning in the 1980s and accelerating dramatically after
1998, throughout Indonesia numerous peasant groups have simply taken over
and started to cultivate land they claim as their own. This strategy of
direct action has similarities to that of the radical peasant movements of
the 1960s. Unlike in the 1960s, however, peasants rarely target land owned
by landowners who are themselves part of local rural communities. Instead,
they occupy vacant state land – including state-forest lands – or land that
is being used by plantation companies or other commercial operators. Most
of them are reclaiming land they have previously been pushed out of, but
some simply take over land they claim they need as part of their economic
and social rights for a decent livelihood.

Land occupations flourished above all in the context of weakening state and
security force power after the fall of Suharto. Many groups of farmers
reclaimed land that had been denied them by the New Order. Through this
strategy, many local peasant organisations became stronger. They now
provided their members with control over the land they had long craved, and
hence with a concrete material resource to defend. For instance, local
peasant unions SPP (Pasundan Peasant Union) in West Java and STaB (Bengkulu
Peasant Union) in Sumatra were each able to consolidate memberships of
about 25 thousand peasant households and controlled around 20 to 30
thousand hectares of land that was legally part of large plantation estates
or state forest.

Their successful land occupations made these local organisations more
independent than previously. They now had greater bargaining power in
national coalitions and networks. National leaders began to experience
difficulties in controlling them. A sense of a unified national agrarian
movement began to break down. Meanwhile, the implementation of
decentralisation politics and the blossoming of local democracy drew these
unions into local politics. Their mass memberships made them a valuable
resource for mobilisation in local elections and they began to be courted
by local elites.

For the ordinary peasants who are part of such unions, participation in
elections is above all a way to secure their control over land. They hope
to back winners who will in turn recognise their claims to occupied land,
even if securing formal title can be a lengthy, onerous and uncertain
process. For some union organisers and leaders, local elections are a
bridge for them personally to enter formal politics as candidates. Others
try to become brokers in the ‘market of democracy’, selling their capacity
mobilise voters to local politicians. Sometimes this engagement in local
politics has led to positive consequences in terms of the security of
occupied land, and access to the local budget and policy-making if the
candidate wins. But in many cases it has also led to the destruction of
local unions because of contention among union activists and members.
A long and winding road

While there has been some dramatic rural mobilisation at the local level,
left-wing political parties have struggled to establish themselves at the
centre or to link themselves to the new peasant unions and other rural
activism. As a result, peasant movements have evolved in ways that are not
connected to wider political struggles or to the contest for state power.
They have developed in ways that make them localised and fragmented.

Meanwhile, while local struggles to reclaim land lost in the New Order
period have recorded considerable achievements, the ironic result of such
successes is that many of the participants have lost their enthusiasm for
yet more struggle. Many farmers simply want to be secure as they return to
the agricultural production that has always been their goal, and they want
to enjoy normal social life rather than engaging in perpetual political
mobilisation. As a result, a gradual de-escalation of peasant movements has
been occurring.

Yet it has not all gone the peasants’ way in the post-1998 period. State
policies have facilitated large-scale investment in land by corporations,
and hence concentration of corporate control over large tracts of land.
Land grabbing and dispossession is once again on the increase. Many
autonomous local governments do little to help, and are often effectively
bought off by the corporate interests. Using the power of their money,
plantation owners, miners and other business interests are able to pay
police and civilian militias to evict local people. Patterns of massive
land conflicts involving violence and human rights violations very
reminiscent of those witnessed under the New Order are occurring once more.

These conditions pose a challenge for the left. Indonesia has a rich
tradition of peasant mobilisation in defence of the interests of landless
and marginalised rural people. It is time for yet another revival of that
tradition.
Dianto Bachriadi (dianto.bachriadi at gmail.com) is a researcher at the
Agrarian Resource Center (ARC), Bandung.

-- 
“To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards out of men.” -Ella
W. Willcox
http://colindonoghue.wordpress.com
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