"Resurgence of an Agrarian Movement in Post-Soeharto – Indonesia, Serikat Petani Pasundan (Sundanese Peasant Union), with Special Focus on Roles of Scholar-Activists" was a paper prepared for an international conference on “Land, Poverty, Social Justice and Development: Social Movements Perspectives”, 9-10 January 2006 - Institute of Social Studies (ISS), The Hague, The Netherlands. Jointly organized by FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), Interchurch Organization for Development and Cooperation (ICCO), and Institute of Social Studies (ISS). The author thanks Ann Hawkins for consulting on the English language of the paper.
Noer Fauzi Rachman**)
Introduction
Are there any possibilities for villagers to regain their access to lands from the powerful parties that have stolen their lands over time using official procedures? There is a lesson that can be learned from resurgent agrarian social movements in contemporary Java. Despite an absence of legal procedures to register claims, process disputes, and restitute land rights, these newly resurgent movements in Java have demonstrated that it is possible for villagers to regain access to their lands using the following methods: occupying their lands and setting up advocacy activities to strengthen their access to the lands.
This paper will built on and reuse some part of my previous work (Fauzi and Zakaria 2002, and Fauzi, 2003) with a new theoretical framework, which will analyze the ways in which an agrarian social movement, known as Serikat Petani Pasundan (SPP or Sundanese Peasant Union), has been created through struggles over access to land and forest territory in the west part of Java, Indonesia. This paper will center on the last decade of the twentieth century, encompassing drastic changes in national politics and administration. Rather than claiming a neutral attitude which is impossible for any social analysis, especially coming from one who has worked as an NGO activist and who has been so deeply involved in the movement in various ways, I explicitly state that my position as a promoter and supporter of these movements situates my analysis. But, for academic and reflective reasons I revisit and theoretically interrogate part of this experience and its context, in an attempt to explain why these movements arose when they did, the ways in which the movements have found their platforms, framed their collective actions, and seized political opportunities.
During the decade of the 1990s, agrarian protests, demonstrations, and rallies to demand land rights broke out in Java cities around September 24th, the anniversary of Peasant’s Day in 1960 when Soekarno, the first President of Republic of Indonesia enacted the Basic Agrarian Law (BAL), a national law to implement land reform. These actions are only one symptom of the resurgence of agrarian social movements during the post-repressive era, which saw the fall of the authoritarian “New Order” regime under Soeharto in Indonesia.. Currently in Java, a variety of groups of peasant groups, student activists, and NGOs, are demanding that national and/or regional governments address land rights issues. The Government of Indonesia has no adequate land reform policies and measures to deal with these thousands of land disputes, which involve land dispossession as a consequence of state-directed land acquisition policies and practices for forestry, mining, plantation, conservation, dam, industrial parks, and other government projects.[1]
In addition to these protests, another important trend is direct land occupation actions which are one localized expression of conflict over land. These (re)-occupations, which are popularly called reklaiming (from “reclaiming”), have been carried out on lands that were previously cultivated by local peoples, but were taken from them by force and used for government or corporate projects such as state forests and plantations. The occupations by local people are thus controversial. Those who do not agree with such tactics tend to call the occupations as penjarahan or “land seizures” implying that local people are taking land illegally.
Serikat Petani Pasundan or Sundanese Peasant Union is one phenomenal example of the agrarian movements. They has organized more than 50 local village chapters and occupied most of the village level political positions, such as village head or village parliament members; they have occupied and cultivated more than 12,000 ha of lands in three districts (Garut, Tasikmalaya and Ciamis) that were under the control of private and/or state plantation and forest companies; they changed the type of land use from plantation into agriculture and/or agro-forestry; they have mobilized thousands of rural people with mass protests and demonstrations in the capital city as well as in provincial and district cities to push the government to implement land reform; and they have developed networks of student organizations and NGOs at the local and national level.
We cannot have imagined that the SPP movement could have happened while Indonesia was under the authoritarian regime. During the New Order period, land dispossession had been guarded under the strict control of the bureaucracy and the military, justified by utilitarian ideas of Development and public purposes, and last but not least, by the trauma of “communism” that was still terrorizing the minds of rural people. That trauma was rooted in the 1965 brutal transition of national power into the New Order regime, in which hundreds of thousand of suspected-communists were killed, mostly rural people in Java and Bali. In addition, thousands of leftist activists also were thrown in jail without trial. It was thus that the New Order authoritarian regime stopped the land reform program and froze the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law.
I. Rural Politic under the New Order Regime (1967 – 1980s)
The killings of hundreds of thousand of members, sympathizers, and people accused of being members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and other leftist organizations, and the subsequent events of 1965-1967[2] had made the earlier Java rural social movements and land reform agenda turn into history. It was also violence that allowed the New Order rulers to implement capitalistic economic policies that reversed the anti-imperialist and democratic ideals of an entire generation of nationalists.[3] The violence had created a “red carpet” for implementing pro-capitalistic agrarian programs, for example, the “green revolution”, mining and forest exploitation, and large plantation estates. All of the programs have been tied with global capital and backed up by militaristic-bureaucratic-authoritarian control over an entire rural population (Fauzi, 1999). At the macro level, as written by Hikam (n.d), “the installation of a strong-centralistic state had been highly compatible with the economic development model adopted by the New Order, namely the state-led capitalist model. The strong state would provide a guarantee for sustainable political stability and the security which are necessary for the implementation and maintenance of such a model. At the institutional level, the idea of a strong centralistic state has been implemented through corporatist arrangements to social and political organizations and groups in society, and the politics of de-politization, targeting primarily the rural population” (see also: Mortimer, 1973; Mas’oed, 1983; Robison, 1986; Farid, 2005; White and Husken, 1989; Fauzi, 1997, 1999).
Regarding corporatist strategy implemented in rural areas, Aspinall (2004) notes that “in 1973 surviving peasant organizations were shepherded into a new body, the HKTI (Himpunan Kerukunan Tani Indonesia, Indonesian Peasant’s Harmony Association). HKTI, like equivalent bodies for labor and other groups, was dependent on the state for direction. It was affiliated to the state party, Golkar; its leaders were often military officers or other state functionaries (frequently from the Department of Agriculture). It did not attempt to build an active mass membership base, and although its leaders occasionally offered carefully-worded criticisms of government policies, they never attempted to mobilize against them.”This corporatist strategy was not only for rural groups, but for all groups whose interests had great effects upon political arrangements such as labor unions, industrialist groups, political parties, social organizations, religious associations, youth organizations, etc. (Reeve, 1990; Hikam, 1995; Hikam n.d).
In the meantime, as written by Hikam (n.d), “… the politics of depoliticizing the masses, which had been vigorously pursued since the early seventies, is to detach or alienate the grass-roots population from political party. This has been done through the so-called "floating mass" policy whose underlying assumption has been that the rural peoples, who constitute the majority of Indonesian population, would be politically better-off if they were untouched by political parties. Prior to the New Order, so the argument goes, the rural areas had been highly politicized by both the presence and activities of competing political parties. As a consequence, the rural mass became one of the main arenas for conflicts and, hence, a source of political instability.James Siegel dalam New Criminalities in Jakarta, kira-kira bilang inilah (zaman ORBA) saatnya rakyat pejuang revolusi kemerdekaan diubah jadi massa kontra revolusi. Under the policy of "floating mass", it is now the task of the state apparatus to educate the rural people and ensure their political participation along with the state's framework.” In the West Java context, the strict control over the rural population had been strong implemented, also because the regime dealt with followers of the Darul-Islam movement who actively used guerilla-armed struggle as their main method to fight for what they claimed as an Indonesia Islamic State in the late 1940s until early 1960s (Jackson, 1980; van Dijk, 1981).
Its development of the de-politization policies resulted in the disappearance of rural social movements in Java which had once flourished during those periods between the late forties to the early sixties. These decades had witnessed the rural people being directly involved with mass mobilization, and political affairs through their participation as members of certain political parties and affiliation to social organizations (Lyon, 1970; Mortimer, 1972; Huizer, 1972; Hefner 1990; and Sulistyo, 1997). By de-politicizing the rural areas, such tendencies were eradicated once and for all. For those who resisted such co-optation, as frequently happened in land disputes cases, the state would punish them, during which process the uses of violence were not infrequent.[4] Until the 1980s, the New Order state successfully maintained an overwhelming power and control which prevented the development of rural protest movements. But the coalition of rural-urban activism of NGOs, students, and local leaders in in the 1990s had finally broken the state stranglehold. (Lucas and Waren, 2000; Lucas and Waren, 2003; Aspinall, 2004) After the authoritarian regime declined in 1998, this coalition found good opportunities, and then seized them to create mass-based agrarian movements where the Serikat Petani Pasundan has been one of the largest.
II. Social Origin and Anatomy of The Serikat Petani Pasundan
– with special focus on Garut District
SPP’s land occupations are one example, which are meant to illustrate one localized movement over land reform using the political opportunity which arose following the decline of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998. The emergence of SPP can be traced back a decade before the regime declined, i.e. to the end of the 1980s. This was a period where a network formed between peasant leaders whose communities were in conflict with the forest companies and the large estates, student activists in Garut town who formed the Youth and Student Forum of Garut, student activists from Bandung (the provincial capital of West Java) who formed the Student Committee for the People of Indonesia, and NGO activists from the Legal Aid Institute in Bandung. The Sagara and the Badega cases brought these groups together.
Briefly, the Sagara land dispute involved the State Forest Company (SFC) and 776 families in Sagara who claimed the rights to some 1,100 hectares of land and the teak trees growing upon the land. The dispute was also about the capture and detention of some village leaders and the leaders of the Youth and Student Forum, which led to the area being used for the training of the mobile brigade (BRIMOB, part of the national security force). This case ended with the SFC losing, when the decree of the National Agrarian Ministry and the Head of the National Land Bureau (No. 35-VI/1997) determined that the state land in question could be subjected to land reform. This amounted to nearly 580 hectares in the villages of Sagara and Karya Mukti.[5] This victory encouraged activists in the Youth and Student Forum to expand their organizing activities to other cases in Garut district.
During the same general time period, student activists in Bandung, together with the Legal Aid Foundation of Bandung, were taking care of other land dispute cases in Garut, such as the one at Badega. Briefly, the Badega case was a dispute between the company PT Surya Andaka Mustika and 312 peasant cultivators on Mount Badega in Garut, who had a claim to some 400 hectares of land that had formerly been leased to PT Sintrin.[6] As in the case at Sagara, this case also involved the jailing of various village leaders, and the subsequent transformation of this area into a combat training facility for the military. Unlike Sagara, the Badega case became a central concern of many student and NGO activists, who campaigned broadly about it in the 1980s.
These two land dispute cases then became examples of the efforts of educated activists in urban Garut and Bandung to organize farmers in the West Java Peasants Union (Serikat Petani Jawa Barat or SPJB—different from SPP). The West Java Peasants Union organized peasants and those amongst their leaders who had been involved in the land conflict cases handled by the Legal Aid Institute of Bandung since the end of the 1980s. The SPJB was itself established in 1991 when it became involved with 5 (five) cases (Cimerak in Ciamis district, Sagara and Badega in Garut district, Jatiwangi in Majalengka district), Gunung Batu (Sukabumi district) and Cikalong Kulon (Purwakarta district). While SPJB did not succeed in mobilizing peasant issues at the regional level for as long as a decade, primarily because the political situation was not yet ready for such action, SPJB did succeed in using these land dispute cases to develop educational activities for urban NGOs and student activists.
Student and NGO activists in Garut began to break away from SPJB in 1998, after the authoritarian political situation changed with the fall of Soeharto, Agustiana, who had been a strong student activist and later became a prominent leader of SPP, was released from prison in 1998. He was released from prison due to an amnesty by President Habibie. However he originally had been put in jail because he was accused of being a provocateur of the December 26, 1996 Tasiklamaya riots.[7] He, along with other leaders and strong forces with SPP (such as Ibang Lukmanurdin and Nissa Wargadipus) wanted to out on their own and create an NGO, i.e.YAPEMAS (Yayasan Pengembangan Masyarakat or Foundation for Community Development) to initiate, promote, and support a new peasant union. Subsequently, in February 2000, several of the students and other youth activists and their organizations from Garut, and then also from Tasikmalaya and Ciamis districts, joined with rural local leaders from each of the districts to announce the formation of SPP, with Agustiana as Secretary General, who was also leader of YAPEMAS. They developed a unique organizational structure, to clearly expose the relationship between urban-educated activists and rural leaders (see: figure 1).
Since 2000, the Sundanese Peasants Union (SPP) has been one of a number of peasant organizations that have demanded that the government carry out land reform on lands controlled by state-owned plantations and the State Forest Company. According to conservative preliminary estimates made at the end of 2002, in Garut district alone, some 5,000 families have occupied nearly 4,000 hectares of land in 22 locations that all have local chapters of SPP.[8] In every area with a local chapter of SPP, a local leadership group was formed. Each group had a head, a secretary, a treasurer, public relations, and a security guard. Many of these local SPP leaders, almost all of whom are men, have had experience working and living in the city, some as salesmen in wholesale markets in Bandung and Jakarta. Their urban connections are not far in the past, but are very recent and seem to have reduced their feelings of out-sized respect and submissiveness in the presence of land controllers, who increase their power through social relations. More than that, in the city, especially in the traditional street markets, struggle through competition and bargaining are parts of everyday life. These men became very aware of their influence and gained experiences, facing down official power-holders such as bureaucrats in the market and with police, and also with unofficial power-holders such as thugs or preman. They developed their abilities to deal with these various powerful figures in very contentious places, i.e. the markets, with the police, the state officials, etc.
With SPP, they used these abilities to develop their new leadership qualities, taking care of their membership, mobilizing and leading them in occupations, demonstrations, and confrontations with landed elites and their guards, including developing arguments to dispute control over land. In addition, some of the local leaders of SPP expanded their leadership roles by getting formal positions, such as being elected to village councils and village heads, chosen directly by the villagers.
III. Political Opportunities, Frames and Mobilizing Structures
Foucault (quoted by Scott, 1996:111) explicitly pairs power and resistance: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation of power.” James Scott (1996:111) creatively adds this Foucault’s “power-resistance relation” sentence with the other side of consequences: “Power is never in a position of exteriority in relation to resistance”. Resistance is a necessary, and not sufficient, condition for creating social movement. Scottian everyday resistance, Tarrow (1994:5-6; 1998:6-7) argues, is an individualistic resentment. To categorize a contentious action as social movement, we need to see some other attributes, i.e. common purposes, collective identities, and identifiable challenges. Tarrow (1994:3-4; 1998:4) defines a social movement as collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities. As a part main proponent of so called political opportunity thesis, Tarrow claims that social movements emerge as a result of “expanding” political opportunities. By political opportunity structure he means “consistent – but not necessarily formal, permanent, or national – signals to social or political actors which either encourage or discourage them to use their internal resources to form social movement … The most salient kind of signals are four: the opening up of access to power, shifting alignment, the availability of influential allies, and cleavage within and among elites” (Tarrow 1994:54. Italics in original). He also believes that “people join in social movements in response to political opportunities and then, through collective action, create new ones. As a result, the ‘when’ of social movement mobilization – when political opportunities are opening up – goes a long way toward explaining its ‘why’”(Tarrow, 1994:17-18).
Starting with this line of argument, I argue that SPP’s land occupations have expanded as particular people’s responses over particular political opportunities. As a new collective action, land occupations have expanded substantially since March 2000, when former President Abdurahman Wahid made a statement dear to the hearts of many land-hungry farmers, in which he said that it was not appropriate that the people were being accused of seizing land, because, “in fact, the plantations have stolen the people’s land.” He then said that “some 40% of plantation land should be distributed to cultivators who need it. Moreover, people could even hold shares in the plantation itself.”[9] The statement is part of his opening speech for the National Conference on Natural Resources (Konferensi Nasional Sumber Daya Alam), a conference initiated by some national NGOs in Jakarta, 23 May 2000. These public statements largely covered by newspapers, had tremendous impact on the legitimization of the farmers’ reoccupation of plantation lands and other lands that had been grabbed by force. The General Director of Plantation in the Department of Forestry and Plantations estimated that until September 2000, almost 120,000 ha of national estate land had “been seized” (by the people) along with 40 % of its private estate lands (quoted in Kuswahyono, 2003). Kira-kira korporasi perkebunan dendam dengan Gus Dur lah Ji. Ada hubungan nggak tuh antara korporasi perkebunan/kehutanan dengan kekuatan pengguling Gus Dur?
Even though SPP’s occupied lands in Garut district (around 5.000 ha) are not a large percentage of the extensive territory of Garut district (being less than 5%) the occupation and cultivation of this land has been perceived as a significant problem by the plantation and forest managers. At a meeting of top district officials on March 2001 in the Garut district offices, held specifically to deal with the situation in the plantations and national forests, it was noted that:[10]
1. Of 12 (active) plantations, 6 have experienced land seizures—2 [of these are] government estates and four private corporations. This has caused Dayeuhmanggung Plantation (PTPN VIII) to experience losses of some Rp. 4.7 billion.
2. As a result of the illegal logging in the forest districts around Gunung Papandayan, a disaster in the form of a mudslide has covered the sub-district of Cisurupan. The unprecedented event has produced a layer of mud that is knee-deep, and seems to have produced ecological damage of incalculable cost.
3. The reason for these seizures has generally been the loss of “idealism,” an outcome of the lengthy economic crisis and the difficulty of making a living, … These depressing conditions have been taken advantage of by “provocateurs” who promise to struggle for justice and truth for the little people; they have given rise to an uncontrolled and emotional mass movement which has a priori refused every solution suggested by the government.
4. All legal-formal government efforts to handle these security problems appear to be unable to motivate the people living around the plantations and the state forest lands, and so we support/will assist in the operations to capture the provocateurs.
How have the political opportunities been seized? This paper has argued that to explain how the SPP movement has seized opportunities and responded to them with the land occupation actions at the village level, we have to rely on the mediating role of framing processes that are facilitated by the role of some NGO and student activists, in conjunction with the political opportunities seized by the movement itself. Bagiamana faktor jawar-jawara garut yang kesohor itu? Ingat garut juga dikuasai jawara hitam yang gentayangan sampai kepelosok-pelosok pedesaan dan pegunungan. After the newspapers widely covered President Wahid’s statement on “stolen land”, some NGO leaders – including this author nah ya kan kamu jadi pemain sampingan -- who directly heard the president’s statement felt that this was “the moment of truth” that they were looking for. Some of them felt that this was the moment where land occupations would be a real-life example of what they had learned about “agrarian reform by leverage”[11], in particular, meaning land claiming and occupations by grassroots initiatives. The “agrarian reform by leverage” was a topic that had been discussed since the mid-1990s in activist circles, especially with NGOs and students involved in KPA (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria). Since the New Order regime was still in power at that time, KPA had initiated and published various analyses on agrarian conflicts and structures in various regions and sectors in Indonesia, then critically analyzed national agrarian politics/policies, as well as promoted new national policies to address land disputes and to implement agrarian reform.[12] For the grassroots and the NGO groups, they had specially promoted “agrarian reform by leverage” by conducting workshops, trainings, action research, and by publishing practical manuals on that topic. When the authoritarian regime declined in 1998, KPA produced three communiqués for their members to explain the situation and suggest some practical guidance. In the third communiqué (KPA, 1998) clearly stated that KPA “urge to its members, participants, and sympathizers, and any social forces that have worked to implement agrarian reform in Indonesia to:
At that “moment of truth”, NGOs and student activists around KPA’s circle -- with a very enthusiastic attitude had copied thousands of clippings of the presidential statement, brought these into villages, and discussed them with the movement’s local leaders about workable strategies and techniques to deal with the various local political opportunities.
The phenomena that the author describes here clearly indicate the significant roles of local leaders, students, and NGOs activists to create the collective action frames, and in their turn to seize political opportunities. From various literatures of social movement studies (Morris et all, 1992, McAdam et all, 1996; Tarrow, 1998; Giugni and Mc Adam, 1999; Benford and Snow 2000; Meyer and Mickoff, 2004 Baca juga Allain Turraine. Konsepnya lebih memungkinkan untuk membuka perspektif subyek pelaku social movement karena ia memasukkan urusan subyective resistance di dalamnya) one can see that the collective action frames dignify and justify the movement, the organizational structures that link the movement’s center to its base, and the main collective actions that ensures sustained interaction with power holders. These are factors that, combined in a particular time and space, are playing together to create political opportunities. It is the opportunities that define the way in which the movement finds their success or failure. Kiersi (1995:170) develops a diagram to clarify the relation between political opportunity to facilitate the success or failure of movements, as can be seen in figure 2.
If the political opportunity structure creates more repression to the actions, the movement will be demobilized.Coba kamu baca buku Friction karya Anna Tsing. Di situ mungkin potret ulah kawan-kawan lebih nampak. The moment when SPP moved was the period when the repressive apparatus of the state was in an unconsolidated and uncertain situation. The national and regional political arenas had been taken hostage by elections, maneuvers of political parties around political successions, tension between the president and the parliaments, demilitarization of politics, separation of the police from the army, and tension between the national government and regional governments, etc. However, despite all of the above, transition into a liberal democracy has still not yet taken place. After the authoritarian regime declined, the state machineries are almost dysfunctional. This situation continues to create favorable conditions for NGOs to develop some alliances with some politicians, and also by using state procedures, to promote a new People’s Consultative Assembly decree on agrarian reform. Playing in this corridor, SPP mobilized some 10,000 peasants, from Garut, Tasikmalaya, and Ciamis Districts, to demonstrate at the ad hoc committee meeting of the National Peoples’ Consultative Assembly Working Group which held a national-level workshop at a Bandung hotel to discuss this decree on September 15, 2001. They were blocked by a police line at Cicalengka, a small city some 30 km from Bandung and Garut. Negotiations then took place at two locations, on the road to Cicalengka—between the leaders of SPP with the police; and in Bandung between NGO activists who were participants and resource people in the workshop, and the legislators participating there. Subsequently, it was decided that the leaders of the ad hoc committee would go out to where the peasants were in Cicalengka, rather than having a group of farmers go into Bandung. When they got to Cicalengka, the committee chair from the Peoples’ Consultative Assembly, Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, Rambe Kamaruzzaman, in front of the masses promised to resign if the decree was not passed.
SPP’s active influence on the People’s Consultative Assembly Decree did not stop there. When the People’s Consultative Assembly had its annual meeting on November 7, 2001, a group from SPP mobilized about 1,000 people to demonstrate in Jakarta, and to give voice to the need for the People’s Consultative Assembly to pass the decree on agrarian reform.[13] Through these actions, SPP showed itself to be in support of the new People’s Consultative Assembly Decree No. IX/2001 on Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management.
The issuance of the Decree No. IX/2001 had strategic meaning for SPP. Clear statements of article 5 (1) of the Decree gives direction to the President and the parliament to:
Directions for agrarian reform policy are:
a. Conduct research on legislation relating to agrarian policy to synchronize inter-sector policy …
b. Rearrange control, ownership, use and utilization of land (land reform) that is equitable by noting land ownership by the people, both in rural and urban areas.
c. Conduct data collection on land through inventory and registration of land control, ownership, use and exploitation in a comprehensive and systematic process in the framework of land reform implementation.
d. Settle conflicts relating to agrarian resources arising to this time while at the same time anticipating potential conflict in the future …
e. Strengthen institutions and their authority to conduct agrarian reform and to settle disputes relating to agrarian resources.
f. Ensure the availability of funding for programs of agrarian reform and for the resolution of conflicts relating to agrarian resources.
Since 2001, land reform was returned to the official stage. This decree is a directive from the People’s Consultative Assembly (Dewan Permusyawaratan Rakyat or MPR) of the Indonesian Parliament, which has met annually since the end of the New Order, to the law-making People’s Legislative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat or DPR) and to the President with a legal standing that lies somewhere between a constitutional and national law. Such decrees are produced when introducing any potential law.
Initiative to revive agrarian reform since the fall of Suharto has also been fueled by a sharp debate around agrarian law, especially the debate about this People’s Consultative Assembly Decree No. IX/2001 on Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management. The debate centers on whether Decree No. IX will be beneficial or dangerous for the agrarian reform movement. The Consortium for Agrarian Reform (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria or KPA),[14]working with a number of NGOs in the NGO Working Group for Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management,[15] believes that the decree can be used as a tool to extend the effects of the peasant movement and push the government to implement agrarian reform. At the same time, the Indonesian Federation of Farmers’ Unions and its supporting NGOs view the decree as dangerous, a potential entryway for a neo-liberal agenda, with potentially negative implications in abrogating the Basic Agrarian Law of 1960—which until now has provided the legal basis for the implementation of land reform.[16] This paper will not enter into the debates raging around these legal agendas. But, the paper will show how SPP movement seize this moment as an opportunity to empower their position. Everywhere that there were land dispute cases, local SPP leaders used the decree to justify their land occupations. At that time, at the local level the decree has became a powerful tool to fight against their opponents – such as plantation and/or forest managers – and to negotiate with the local bureaucracy and the police.
The SPP movement has influenced political processes not only in villages where they work, but also at the district level. In August 2000, a coalition between KPA with YAPEMAS creatively seized a new political opportunity that comes from the decentralization policy as mandated by Law No. 22/1999 on Regional Government.[17] The law clearly states that a district-parliament is more powerful than a district-government. The consequence of this is a very real possibility of power struggles between the district-parliament and the district-government. According to Lay (2000), this possibility stems from (a) the inclusion of new members who are not from the same socio-economic groups as entrenched local government leaders – and who might not share the same views, use the same language and symbols – i.e., individuals who are not the traditional “partners” of the local bureaucratic elite. Disagreement was almost unheard of under the previous system, when the legislative and executive members of regional government all derived from (or who quickly integrated into) the same ruling “clique.” Currently, there is a multiplicity of voices and viewpoints represented in the parliament that will inevitably lead to a measure of disagreement and conflict; (b) Many of the new generation of politicians hail from the NGO and student movements, who experienced discrimination and suppression during the New Order period. A measure of residual enmity from that era still pertains; (c) Many of the new politicians represent social groups who were marginalized or victimized during the past three decades, and their attitude toward more entrenched political actors is often influenced by bitter experience; As well (d), the new generation of politician tends to view their elite counter-parts in the bureaucracy as thieves and rogues, who cannot be trusted; Meanwhile, (e) most of the bureaucrats and officials from the executive branch are far more experienced at the “rules of the game” and political maneuverings than their counterparts in the legislature, and can be contemptuous of what they view as inexperienced upstarts.
In that situation, KPA and YAPEMAS have approached district-parliament chairpersons to address the learning needs of district-parliament members, i.e. discrepancies between district-parliament’s authorities defined in the law and the capacity of district-parliament’s members to perform, in the context of potential power struggles between district-parliaments with district-governments. In August 2000 district-parliament chairpersons agreed to implement a joint training-workshop with KPA and YAPEMAS in order to develop capacity of all parliament members to understand new decentralization laws and regulations and to develop district level policies on village government and land dispute issues.[18] The training program was designed to address discrepancies between the authorities that they have based on the new decentralization law, and real capacities that they can perform. In the training workshop sessions, many district-parliament members were quite angry about what they perceived to be the central government’s problem, such as land disputes, which they had “inherited” as a result of the decentralization law. They felt that Garut district had enjoyed none of the benefits of the government’s programs and policies, but were left “holding the bag” when the system ceased functioning. Another primary agenda of the training program was to address public discontent with the village government system or Desa which was perceived to be authoritarian and oriented toward the national bureaucracy.
Two months after the parliamentary training program was completed, the district-parliament of Garut formed two special commissions, responsible for Land Conflict Resolution and Village Government Reform, respectively. The Village Government Reform Commission began its work first, studying and discussing a packet of draft district-regulation that had been prepared by the district-government. The Special Commission joined together with KPA and YAPEMAS to conduct a workshop to revise and improve the draft regulation. Two fundamental changes that were introduced into the language of the new regulation, as mandated by law No 22/1999, were (1) that the village or Desa is an autonomous entity, not structurally linked to the state government hierarchy; and (2) the formation of the village council, or Badan Perwakilan Desa whose members are to be elected. These changes were very much in keeping with the campaign undertaken by YAPEMAS and KPA to foster democratic institutions at the grass-roots level. Soon after the draft regulation was passed into law, many SPP local leaders submitted their nominations to run for village council members. In the ensuing elections, SPP members were able to win a majority of seats in some 30 of the nearly 300 Desa in Kabupaten Garut. This alone was not enough to counter the inherent conservatism of village government in the region. In fact, conflict soon developed between some of the bureaucracy-oriented village heads and the village council, which led to stagnation and gridlock in many villages. These conflicts will probably reach a climax when the current village heads term expires, and new elections will be held. Only once these conflicts are resolved, will it become possible to alter the outlook and behavior of village government in the Garut region.
The Special Commission on Land Dispute Resolution developed its operational framework at a workshop on Land Dispute Resolution held in November 2000. The process began with identification and investigation of outstanding cases, followed by an analysis of the factors that caused the conflicts in the first place, and that prevented their successful resolution. They encountered three basic types of conflict: (i) Conflicts between local farmers and the State Forestry Company (Perum Perhutani); (ii) Conflicts between farmers and commercial plantation firms (both private and state owned); and (iii) Conflicts between citizens and the National Land Board, mostly cases of manipulation and graft. The commission members were motivated by the awareness that if left unchecked, these conflicts would continue to erode the government’s legitimacy in the eyes of local communities. They were, however, also acutely aware of their limitations, particularly in the era of regional autonomy, given that the most powerful stakeholders in these conflicts – most prominently the Ministry of Forestry and National Land Board – were national government agencies. Under law, regional governments have no authority over contracts that have been granted by national government agencies, until the contract period expires. The role of district-parliament and government were further weakened when the government issued Presidential Decree No. 10 of 2001, perceived by many local politicians as being a retraction of district governments’ autonomy in managing land rights. The new decree basically annulled district governments’ authority as set out in Paragraph 7 of the 1999 Law No. 22 on Regional Government. In spite of the fact that the Special Commission on Land Dispute Resolution can not produce any specific district policies, their political role to register people claims over plantation and forest land and to assist local people to access those claimed lands are a significant achievement to empower SPP’s movement. They have became one of SPP’s important allies in the district-parliament.
IV. Conclusions and some future directions
This paper has explored constitutive factors and dynamics of Serikat Petani Pasundan or the Sundanese Peasant Union, the biggest agrarian social movement in West Java, Indonesia. The paper focuses on the mechanics of interfacing the movement within its various contexts. These analyses have found the changing opportunities that were used by the movement’s main collective action, i.e. land occupations. In the process, SPP has become a showcase, a real-life example of resurgence of rural social movement in Java, a theme that has been discussed since the mid-1980s within NGOs circles, especially in KPA (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria). More than just serving as a “showcase” however, one which emerged out of many years of conversations about “agrarian reform by leverage”, the leadership of SPP (all educated activists) is now in an excellent position to influence the entire spectrum of Indonesian NGOs who are looking for ways to support and promote land reform.[19] While many NGOs in Indonesia have been trying to learn about policy advocacy (Topatimasang, 2000; Fauzi and Zakaria, 2001), SPP has already provided an example of how to be involved in organizing advocacy processes and to reap the fruits thereof.
In analyzing the SPP case, this paper has been guided by some arguments from so called political process perspectives anchored by McAdam, Mc Carthy and Zald, (1996). This paper explored the historical setting out of which the movement emerges, and the ways in which the movement found it various platforms, and achieved their successes and failures so far. The first conclusion in this paper has explained how the SPP movement found that land occupations as their main collective actions at the village level, have to turn on the mediating role of framing processes that are facilitated by the roles of local leaders, NGOs, and student activists, in conjunction with the political opportunities seized by the movement. The land occupations as a particular type of action could find local resonance if they are positively facilitated and supported, or at least not repressed, by powerful configurations. The roles of academic activists are obvious in seizing the political opportunities, directing the organization and framing jangan lupa juga dalam ngadalin kerja gerakan the collective actions. The academic activists and their organizations have become one of three crucial forces in forming future of the SPP’s movement. Kasus korupsi di KPU yang isinya akademisi mestinya membuat kita berpikir ulang mengenai siapa tuh akademisi. The other forces are (i) SPP’s members which are directed by their practical needs to improve their family livelihood and their strategic interests to gain more power in the local level; and (ii) SPP’s tactical-political alliances with some district parliament members and their political parties.[20]
The second conclusion argues that the emergence of SPP not only was created through various significant political opportunities structures created by democratic transition agendas, but also by various opportunities created by the movement activities as well, i.e. those of NGOs, students, and local leaders. This paper also found that, as clearly noted by Jenson (1998: 2-3), “the theoretical differences and connections between these opportunities created by the movement activities and the political opportunity structure are not clear. A first confusion is that “opportunities” appear in two places in the causal argument. They are both variables which account for mobilization and the product of mobilization itself. A second confusion is that the political opportunity structure is treated as a factor external to the world of movements, while opportunities created through action are found primarily inside the world of movements.” Yang mengherankan kenapa peranan lembaga dan gerakan kegamaan lenyap dari bumi pasundan dalam tulisan ini?
The author very aware about criticism over the political opportunity theories (Goodwin and Jasper, eds, 2004).[21]In line with Kowalchuck (2005:256), I also concur with Suh (2001) that “opportunities may be overlooked, exaggerated, or distorted by leaders in their framing, but not fabricated out of thin air. Movement leaders responded to real changes in relative opportunities for the land and debt campaigns.” Kowalchuk (2005:257) also expose her disagreement with Goodwin and Jasper (1999) that expose “contradictory evidence and hypotheses about the impact of political opportunities make this theoretical perspective a house of cards. I do not share this appraisal. In my view, there is more to be gained from efforts to refine political opportunity theory, especially in conjunction with the mediating role of framing processes, than from abandoning the paradigm. As the attention of scholars and activists turns increasingly to movements in the global south, for example, it becomes both increasingly possible and necessary to understand how national and international political processes are subjectively assessed in SMOs and social contexts outside the traditional geographic focus of these two paradigms.” In line with the Kowalchuk’s invitation, this paper has explored three broad sets of interactive factors in analyzing the emergence and development of social movements, i.e. (1) The structure and process of political opportunities and constraints confronting the movement; (2) The forms of organization (informal as well formal), available to social mobilizers; and (3) the collective processes of interpretation, attribution, and social construction that mediate between opportunity and action. Ada soal dari para pemimpin gerakan yang pendek umurnya adalah ketidak mampuan mereka menggenerasikan kekuatan moral sosial mereka. Dalam kasus Koel Karo di India yang gerakan bertahan paling panjang, kita menemukan betapa hebatnya presiden gerakan itu mampu melahirkan ritual-ritual untuk menghidupkan terus-menerus kekuatan moral mereka. Bahkan pergantian presiden gerakannya ditentukan di ata liang kubur pendahulunya segala.
The Serikat Petani Pasundan movement is not only became a notable example of the resurgence of rural social movements in post-Soeharto Indonesia, but also became a showcase for what Hart and Peluso (2005:195) indicate as “the emergence of a new cadre of scholar-activists in Indonesia, intensely engaged in bringing together theory and practice and forging new understandings that bear directly on illuminating the possibilities—as well as the limits—on agrarian change.“ As a part of the scholar-activist in the SPP movements, our main task is to produce movement-relevant knowledge. I share with Bevington and Dixon (2005) that a key test of movement-relevant knowledge production is whether it is read by activists and incorporated into movement strategizing.[22]
The SPP’s movement still in the very beginning phase. For next future direction, I think it is very important for the SPP’s movement to adopt a recommendation from McKeon, Watts and Wolford (2004:5) that “peasant associations in the contemporary period must be seen in relation to the capitalist divisions of labour (the specifics of the agrarian question in the twenty-first century) associated with the neoliberal restructuring of the post-1980 period; it alerts us to the complex ways in which such associations are shaped by the state, foreign donors and local forms of class interest and accumulation.” Last but not least, I think it may be a larger study -- requiring more effort, thought and reflection -- to deeply assess how the SPP’s movement situates themselves under the current epoch: neoliberal capitalism.[23]
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**) Noer Fauzi Rachman had been chairperson of Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria (KPA, the Consortium for Agrarian Reform for 7 years (1995 – 1998 and 1998 – 2002). KPA (Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria) is a national network of NGOs that was formed in 1995. Originally, the consortium consisted of more than 65 NGOs and POs (People’s Organizations) in the main islands of Indonesia. As a national network, KPA took on a mandate to strengthen people’s organizations, conduct policy advocacy and promote agrarian reform. Since the 2001, he had been chosen as part of the Dewan Guru of Serikat Petani Pasundan (Teachers Council of the SPP), and was deeply involved in creating educational programs and institutions for SPP’s local leaders and children. Now, he has been PhD student in University of California Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Division of Society and Environment. Noer Fauzi Rachman may be reached at noer@nature.berkeley.edu.
[1] Until 2002, KPA’s Resource Center collected data from local and national newspapers and also from KPA members’ reports. Since 1970-until 2001 in Indonesia, there were at least 1,920 land dispute cases, covering more than 10,512,938.41 hectares which affected more than 622,450 households. Of course, these numbers are subject to discussion because of data limitations and biases in collection methods, but the data were used by KPA to campaign for the centrality of the land disputes that happened as the consequence or outcome of development in Indonesia. For pattern and distribution of the cases, see Bachriadi,(2004) and Bachriadi, Bachrioktora and Safitri (2005), all in Bahasa.
[2] There are huge academic works around the killings. For early bibliographical review see Cribb, 1990. For review of recent works, see Cribb, 2001 and Cribb, 2002.
[3] In his recent work, Farid (2005) suggest to, “think of the great upheaval of 1965–66 as one of those epoch-making moments when, to quote Marx, ‘great masses of people are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence’. I do not wish to suggest that capitalism in Indonesia began in 1965.Well globalisation started for Inodnesia and the world right at this time. See John Pilger’s filem: The New Rulers. Indonesia is where the old imperialism meets the new. One should understand primitive accumulation as something which, besides forming the starting point of capitalism, returns again and again, as the basis or basic precondition which is necessary for further phases of capital accumulation. It recurs particularly in a time of crisis when it becomes an obstacle to the reproduction of the system.”
[4] Beginning in 1981 until 1997, the Indonesia Legal Aid Foundation, (Yayasan Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Indonesia /YLBHI), has been one of most famous NGOs in Indonesia,. They had produced yearly human right reports containing descriptions of violations of human rights cases. Since the 1984 edition, they have annually included a special chapter on land issues. See: Yayasan Lembaga Bantuan Hukum Indonesia, 1981; 1983; 1984; 1986; 1987; 1989; 1990a; 1990b; 1991; 1992; 1993; 1994; 1997),. All in Bahasa Indonesia.
[5] For a detailed account, see Lukmanudin (2001) in Bahasa Indonesia
[6] For a detailed account, see Bachriadi (2002) in Bahasa Indonesia.
[7] In their report, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International Report (1998) write “Agustiana Suryana, 32, a community organizer in Garut, West Java, was sentenced to eight years in prison on subversion charges in December 1997. A former economics student, he was charged with being the intellectual mastermind behind riots in Tasikmalaya, West Java, in December 1996, involving mostly Muslim youth, that left four dead and over a hundred buildings destroyed or damaged, including eleven churches. The riots stemmed from a protest over the torture of Muslim teachers by the Tasikmalaya police after the son of a local police officer was punished at a Muslim school. The prosecution had scant evidence against Agustiana, who was detained on January 8, 1997 and held incommunicado for three weeks. He was not in Tasikmalaya on the day of the riot, and it appeared that the prosecution based the charges on the fact that since 1993, Agustiana had helped organize demonstrations by farmers and workers over land disputes and wage issues respectively. At the time of his arrest, Agustiana was also a deputy secretary-general of the United Indonesian Democratic Party (Partai Uni Demokrasi Indonesia, PUDI) the party founded by former prisoner of conscience Sri Bintang Pamungkas.” See: http://www.hrw.org/reports98/indonesia/indo1-1.htm
[8] This 2002 estimation was made by YAPEMAS which is an NGO supporting SPP Movements. The actual total number of SPP members is higher. They only count the SPP members that already control land that they cultivate.
[9] See for example: Kompas and Republika headlines, May 24, 2003 (in Bahasa Indonesia).
[10] This meeting was held at the Praenger Hotel in Bandung on 28 March 2001. The minute was signed by Lt. Gen. (ret.) DR. (Hc) H. Mashudi and H. Aboeng Koesman acting as Garut elders; Drs. H. Dede Satibi as Garut District head; Drs. H. Iyos Somantri, as head of Garut’s regional assembly; Drs. H. Dede Suganda Adiwinata, as chairman of the Association of West Java Plantations; and Ir. H. Sugiat, as director of State Plantation Companies VIII.
[11] The “agrarian reform by leverage” concept was introduced by an Indonesian distinguished scholar, Gunawan Wiradi from Powelson and Stock (1990), see: Wiradi, (1997; 2001) in Bahasa Indonesia.
[12] See Lucas and Warren (2000; 2003) for broader issues on agrarian problem and initiatives to revive agrarian reform agendas in Indonesia.
[13] For detail reportage, see http://www.tempo.co.id/harian/fokus/76/2,1,15,id.html, in Bahasa Indonesia.
[14] Consortium for Agrarian Reform or Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria (KPA) is a national network advocating an agrarian reform agenda. Since 1999, KPA, along with other NGOs and peasant unions, has promoted a draft People’s Assembly Decree on Agrarian Reform. See http://www.kpa.or.id/.
[16] This debate unfolded in Kompas, Indonesia’s largest national newspaper. See Idham Samudera Bey, "Lonceng Kematian UUPA 1960 Berdentang Kembali - Menyoal TAP MPR No IX/MPR/2001," Kompas, 10 January 2002; Dianto Bachriadi, "Lonceng Kematian atau Tembakan Tanda Start? Kontroversi seputar Ketetapan MPR RI No. IX/MPR/2001 - Komentar untuk Idham Samudra Bey", Kompas, 11 January 2002; Idham Samudra Bey, “UUPA 1960 Lebih Baik Dibandingkan RUU Pengelolaan Sumber Daya Alam” Kompas, 10 May 2003. All in Bahasa Indonesia. See also Anton Lucas and Carol Warren, “The State, The People and Their Mediators, The Struggle over Agrarian Law Reform in Post New Order Indonesia”, Indonesia, no. 76, October 2003.
[17] Law No. 22/1999 on regional government replacing law No. 9/1974 on regional government and law No. 9/1979 on village government. One of the most important aspects of the previous system of government was the extension of government control to the village level, embodied in Law No. 5 of 1979 on Village Government. Under Law No. 22 of 1999 on Regional Government, villages now have the right to remove themselves from the state structure to become more autonomous and democratic units, For a larger account on the village autonomy and democratization under decentralization policy in Indonesia, see: Antlov (2004).
[18] KPA believes that democratizing decentralization involves redefining the roles and performance of district- parliamentary bodies. KPA’s approach to this is through capacity development of local parliament members, carried out in conjunction with grass-roots community organizing. The strategy set out by Zakaria et.al. (2001:126-127) comprises the following steps: (i) collaboration with district-parliamentarians to accurately assess constraints, opportunities, resources, and capabilities. This is intended to produce an awareness of capacity-building needs, and a willingness to take necessary steps to address these needs. The process stresses engendering a willingness (and an ability) to analyze and support the wishes of local communities; while (ii) increasing local communities’ access to parliamentary members and processes, so that the parliamentary body becomes more responsive to the needs and desires of its constituents. Forging strong ties between local communities and their legislators is a key component of this strategy. For critical analysis on the relationship between decentralization and democracy, see: Hadiz (2004). Yang jadi sola polisi itu bergerak macam burung terbang ke mana ada swah siap panen. Mereka tidak bergerak dengan nalar kritis.
[19] In 2002, when KPA conducted its third national meeting, Agustiana, the General Secretary of SPP, was elected to serve as the chairperson of KPA’s Board.
[20] The author thanks Dianto Bachriadi (personal communication, Nov 2005) for emphasis on these points.
[21] There are debates that were released by Sociological Forum 1999 Vol 14 (1) between Goodwin and Jasper with Tilly (1999), Polleta (1999), Tarrow (1999), Meyer (1999), Kopmans (1999) and Jaswin (2004). Goodwin and Jasper, eds (2004) compiled those debate and adds some new materials from Polleta, Kurzman, Steinberg, Flaks, Gould, Ganz, McAdam , Morris and Ferre and Merrill.
[22] Bevington and Dixon (2005:22) write that “key test of movement-relevant research is whether it is read by activists and incorporated into movement strategizing. If one’s goal is to produce useful information for movements, but the movements are not using this research, it is incumbent on the researcher to ask why. Is the research exploring questions that really matter to movements? Are important issues being overlooked in the research process? Is feedback from the activists being incorporated sufficiently into the research conclusions? And are these findings being made available in a form, style, and location which is accessible to activists outside of the academy?”
[23]For a seductive framework on this topic, see: Moyo and Yeros (2005)
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