Noer Fauzi Rachman
Ford Foundation Fellow in Culture and the Environment", Berkeley Workshop in Environmental Politics, Institute for International Studies, University of California, Berkeley. This paper was originally prepared for “Crossing Borders” Workshop: “New and Resurgent Agrarian Questions in Indonesia and South Africa”. Center for Southeast Asia Studies and Center for African Studies, October 24, 2003. Institute for International Studies - Moses Hall. University of California - Berkeley, CA. The paper was originally written in Bahasa Indonesia and was translated into English by Nancy Peluso.
To access the paper free: https://escholarship.org/uc/cseas. Later, the paper was published as Noer Fauzi Rachman (2004) “The New Sundanese Peasants' Union: Peasant Movements, Changes in Land Control and Agrarian Questions in West Java.” Jurnal Analisis Sosial 9(1):51-77.
“Agrarian reform is the offspring of agrarian conflict.” (Christodoulou, 1990)[1]
Introduction
In August and September 2003, the Sundanese Peasants Union or Serikat Petani Pasundan (SPP), which is by far the largest farmers’ organization in West Java, Indonesia, was extraordinarily busy. They had to face a “joint operation” consisting of the West Java regional police, a mobile brigade unit, the Garut police, the police of the State Forest Corporation (SFC, or Perhutani), and officials from the Regional Natural Resource Conservation Bureau. Together, these actors were set on evicting the peasants from the protected forests, the production forests, and the conservation areas they had occupied for more than three years. The operation called “Wanalaga Lodaya”[2] (Fight for the Ancient Sundanese Forest) took place between August 11 and September 23, 2003[3], and involved 387 officials - 320 regular police and 67 forest police.[4] The operation was centered on three forest districts—Talagabodas, Papandayan, and Sancang—where peasants affiliated with SPP had occupied and cultivated land that had been controlled by the State Forestry Corporation of Java and the Conservation Bureau. This was the biggest official operation that SPP had ever confronted. In the Pasirwangi sub-district alone, located in the Papandayan mountains, in the village of Sarimukti, the operation brought in “officials armed with rifles, pistols, and local maps” who “by the night of 12 August 2003, they had set up their tents in every location.”[5] Not surprisingly, the village of nearly a thousand families was apprehensive, with that many police setting up camp.
