GELOMBANG BARU REFORMA AGRARIA DI AWAL ABAD KE-21

Versi awal naskah ini pernah disampaikan pada beberapa forum di tahun 2007-2008, dan terakhir sebagai makalah pada Seminar “Agenda Pembaruan Agraria dan Tirani Modal”, dalam Rangka Konperensi Warisan Toritarianisme: Demokrasi dan Tirani Modal, Kampus FISIP UI – Depok, 5 – 7 Agustus 2008. Revisi atas naskah yang disajikan penulis pada acara “Kajian dan Evaluasi Reforma Agraria 2008”, Badan Pertanahan Nasional Republik Indonesia (BPN-RI), Jakarta, 29 Maret 2008.  Dimuat pula sebagai “Gelombang Baru Reforma Agraria di Awal Abad 21” in Persembahan kepada Si-Emak (Guruku): Permasalahan Seputar Tanah, Nurhasan Ismail, Nindyo Pramono, Moh. Mahfud MD, Siti Ismijati Jenie, Gunawan Wiradi, and Noer Fauzi (Eds). Jogjakarta: Fakultas Hukum UGM, 2009. Pp. 111-149.


Noer Fauzi Rachman*)

 

 “… pemecahan masalah tanah merupakan suatu syarat untuk perwujudan yang sempurna dari aspirasi-aspirasi kebangsaan negeri-negeri Asia Tenggara; dan bahwa hal itu, untuk sebagian besar, merupakan kunci bagi pembangunan ekonomi dan reorganisasi masyarakat yang berhasil.”

 (Eric Jacoby 1961:253)[1]

 

Pengantar

             Agenda penguatan akses rakyat pada tanah dan kekayaan alam dengan mengubah struktur agraria biasanya dikenal dengan istilah Reforma Agraria (bahasa Spanyol), atau dikenal juga dengan nama agrarian reform (bahasa Inggris) atau pembaruan agraria (bahasa Indonesia). Agenda Reforma Agraria ini pada mulanya adalah agendanya gerakan rakyat yang berakar pada pengalaman penderitaan petani sebagai mayoritas rakyat (pedesaan) di bawah rezim kolonial dan paska-kolonial. Penderitaan petani yang kronis itu bersumber dari politik agraria penguasa kolonial untuk penguasaan wilayah (negara kolonial), dan perluasan sistem produksi dan ekstraksi komoditas-komoditas baru (untuk perusahaan-perusahaan kapitalis skala dunia). Keresahan agraris hingga berbentuk pemberontakan-pemberontakan lokal dapat dipadamkan dengan operasi-operasi represif singkat, peperangan panjang maupun pengendalian melalui organisasi pemerintahan kolonial yang baru, termasuk dengan bentuk penguasaan tidak langsung (indirect rule) melalui elit-elit feodal pribumi setempat.

Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movements in Indonesia

 


Nancy Lee Peluso, Suraya Afiff and Noer Fauzi Rachman (2008) “Claiming the Grounds for Reform: Agrarian and Environmental Movement in Indonesia,” Co-authored with  Journal of Agrarian Change 8: 2/3: 377-407.   http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2008.00174.x

Abstract

This essay examines the convergences, tensions and mutual influences of agrarian and environmental movements in Indonesia and their connections to transnational movements under state-led development and neoliberal governance regimes. The authors argue that environmental movements of the last quarter of the twentieth century affected the strategies, struggles, mutual relations with, and public discourses of resurgent agrarian movements in diverse ways. Environmental movements had significant influences on national policy, law and practice within a decade of their emergence under the state-led development regime of President Suharto. Environmental activists used the appearance of technical ‘apolitical’ concerns to their advantage. They mobilized at multiple scales, targeting laws and other institutions of state power at the same time as organizing the grassroots. The repression of the Suharto regime forced agrarian reform activists underground, while environmental issues were mainstreamed. Agrarian movements in Indonesia today, under a decentralized regime dominated by neoliberal policies, have faced new opportunities and constraints due to national and transnational influences of environmental and agrarian reform discourses and networks. We show how these influences have changed the political fields within which Indonesian agrarian movement groups operate: forming, shifting and struggling over critical alliances. 

Keywords: agrarian movements, environmental movements, agrarian politics, environmental politics, Indonesian movements

Introduction

        This essay argues that the trajectories and strategies of ‘new’ agrarian movements need to be understood in relation to those of environmental movements and the positioning and power relations of both sets of movements within shifting political economic conjunctures. We focus on the alliances and divergences between movements in Indonesia and how these have changed under transformed and transformative political economic circumstances since the 1970s when the modern ‘environmental movement’ began. Indonesia is an interesting case to reflect on broader trends, as it helps demonstrate that these shifting alliances and conflicts do not derive from transnational forces alone. Rather, we suggest that they depend as well on the temporal and political economic origins and histories of the respective movements, on the types of land contested, on the politics of access to those lands and on the emergence of what Hajer (1993, 1995) has called ‘discourse coalitions’, that dominate discursive spaces. Going beyond this view of discourse as discursive space and into the realm of practice and institutions, we also examine the articulations of discursive and institutional practices of government and non-government, transnational, national and grassroots organizations involved in Indonesian agrarian and environmental struggles and movements.

        These shifting coalitions across environmental and agrarian movements, and indigenous peoples’ organizations with interests that might articulate with either or both, help us further understand Christodolou’s (1990, 112) thesis that ‘agrarian reform is the offspring of agrarian conflict’. Specifically, we argue that the forms coalitions take in the contexts of particular agrarian conflicts have lingering effects, even when movement groups move on and follow new, more separate trajectories. The diverse effects of different conflicts are particularly evident in Indonesia, where a number of key agrarian conflicts generated very different kinds of coalitions and helped produce new political opportunities in subsequent periods. Agrarian conflict in the 1960s, for example, did not lead directly to agrarian reform (Husken and White 1989; Farid 2005).

        An important issue here is how the realm of the agrarian is defined. This is particularly important in understanding resurgent agrarian movements in Indonesia today, as the primary landlord targeted is a state ‘environmental management’ institution – the Ministry of Forestry. The state’s expropriation of millions of hectares of land with the creation of a national forest puts forestry right at the heart of most agrarian struggles in Indonesia, though these have taken different forms in different parts of the country (see e.g. Bachriadi and Lucas 2001; Li 2007). In this essay, we include apparently environmental conflicts over access to and control over forests and certain anti-dam campaigns in our use of the term agrarian conflicts, because these have engaged issues of rights to and use of agrarian land. Contestations take place within more broadly defined ‘agrarian environments’ (Sivaramakrishnan and Agrawal 2003), a term which recognizes that such sites were not always separated into discrete discourses and domains of ‘forestry’ and ‘agriculture’. Indonesian agrarian movements and their transnational connections are of significance because of the particular historical and political moments from which they have emerged and the forms they have taken. The massive drive to repeasantization1 through land occupations and the formation of new rural organizations have taken place after over 30 years of depoliticization and structural violence since the largely rural massacres of 1965–66 (Cribb 1990) and subsequent, systematic land expropriation by Indonesian state agencies and their cronies in the private sector (Fauzi 1999; Farid 2005). The new agrarian movements have been concurrent with the efforts to make decentralization work and the ‘thickening’ of civil society (Robison and Hadiz 2004; Hadiz 2004a, 2004b). Those particularities make Indonesian agrarian movements unique and yet important to understand as they were constrained in their ability to connect with transnational networks until the late 1990s. Under the repressive ‘New Order’ regime, the name by which the Suharto regime was known for 32 years (1966– 98), Indonesian environmental and agrarian movement actors often expressed a compulsion to retain a face of solidarity, despite some critical ideological differences.

        The Indonesian case also demonstrates that state power has remained important, though in new institutional forms and ways, in the transition from stateled (including but not only authoritarian) development to a political economy dominated by neoliberal policy (see also, Borras 2004). Indeed, it is the involvement of state actors and institutions within the various coalitions formed across and within environmental and agrarian movements that often has determined their relative ability to literally gain ground – spatial zones of influence recognized by local, national and international actors and institutions.

        That state power has remained important under changing global regimes was most evident in the gains of the environmental movement, occurring slowly but surely under Suharto. The intersections of state power and the history of discourse coalitions are also reflected in many environmental justice groups’ willingness to work within the confines of forest law in CBNRM (CommunityBased Natural Resource Management) and social forestry projects. Here, ‘access to’ forest land rather than ‘private or communal rights’ to forests are seen as justice accomplishments, even though these were not enough for more radical agrarian reformers who have demanded full land rights, including excision of lands currently under the formal jurisdiction of state forestry institutions.2 In ways reminiscent of earlier environmentalist strategies, since Reformasi some agrarian movement groups have started working with government, trying to form coalitions with sympathetic district and national parliament members and government land managers. This had been impossible earlier, as farmer/peasant organizations were criminalized and repressed in the wake of the anti-left campaign and the agrarian violence that brought Suharto to power in 1966.

        Also affecting the histories of Indonesian agrarian and environmental movements and their mutual constitution were the ways each formed relations with a nascent Indigenous Peoples’ movement. Like the environmental movement, a major motivating factor for this movement came from international activity and grabbed Indonesian activists’ imaginations in the mid-1990s after the UN declared 1993 ‘The Year of the World’s Indigenous People’.3 However, this movement has to be understood as not only an artefact of transnational movement politics but as a historically grounded set of institutions whose participants, practices and policies found ways of expressing their political positions through articulations with transnational and national discourses (Li 2000, 2001; Moniaga 2007). It has been alternately claimed by and allied with environmental and agrarian justice advocates.

        Resurgent agrarian movements today show the effects of these historical tensions and the emergence of new ones. As centralized state power declines, and with it some of the gains of conservation, decentralization, democratization and the increasing hegemony of neoliberal policy and practice have generated new splits in the environmental movement. This is reflected in new alliances between Big Conservation and capital and changes in the alliances between environmental justice organizations and agrarian reformers. While these are changing the coalitions on the ground, a new state-led agrarian reform initiative launched by the National Land Agency (NLA), the Ministry of Forestry (MoF) and Indonesia’s president has once again made the state a critical site of contestation over agrarian reform. 

        Contemporary agrarian movements aim to change state policies and their implementation (Webster 2004, 2; Moyo and Yeros 2005). Peasant associations and movements are shaped by state policy and practice and various forms of class formation and accumulation, as well as by other movements and the political fields they help to create (Buechler 2000, 78; McKeon et al. 2004; McMichael 2005). The transnational dimensions of campaigns and advocacy, of knowledge exchange and communication, and new types and goals of collective action have produced new political and cultural spaces nationally and transnationally (Routledge 2004; Edelman 2005; see also Keck and Sikkink 1998). Environmental movements, because many of them operate in the realm once thought of as ‘agrarian’, are particularly important to understand. While some work has begun on these relations, a great deal remains to be unpacked (Edelman 1999; Franco and Borras 2005, 2006; Kowalchuk 2005).

....

Link for free and full access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1471-0366.2008.00174.x

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Footnotes

  •  ‘Peasant’ here refers to small farmers and land occupiers who have no land outside occupied areas. The word, ‘petani’ in Indonesian translates into either ‘peasant’ or ‘farmer’. Agrarian activists in the 1990s explicitly chose to translate it into ‘peasant’ in English for its more radical connotation.
  •  Mia Siscawati, personal communication, 2006.
  •  It was extended for a decade.
  •  

    DEMI KREDO AGRARIA, Mengungkap Andil The Agrarian Reform Gurus from Bogor



    Noer Fauzi Rachman*)

     Naskah yang didedikasikan untuk acara Perayaan 70 tahun Prof. SMP Tjondronegoro. Institute Pertanian Bogor dan Sajogyo Institute, Bogor 07 Mei 2008

    The fundamental importance of the Agrarian Creed is reflected throughout recorded history 

    The Agrarian Creed, used and abused in political propaganda, is so strongly rooted in the minds of the people that it has become their yardstick for the success or failure of the new national government 

    The immense task remains … of finding the shortest and most effective way to release the energies needed for development and it is here that the continued pressure for a realization of the Agrarian Creed may prove a most valuable instrument.

    (Erich H. Jacoby, 1971:88, 90, 92)

     

            Mula-mula saya menikmati amal budi baik pak Tjondro sebagai seorang penganjur Reforma Agraria. Ya, karya-karya beliau bersama Pak Sayogyo dan Pak Wiradi telah menjadi bahan bacaan, perdebatan dan bagian tak terpisahkan dari cara belajar OTODIDAK generasi kami. Kami adalah salah satu buah dari kerja dan pengadian panjang dari mereka yang bolehlah kami juluki mereka dengan nama the Agrarian Reform Gurus from Bogor.[1]

            Betapa tidak. Di ujung Pendahuluan dari buku Dua Abad Penguasaan Tanah pak Tjondro berseru bahwa “… ketekunan Indonesia untuk mencari pemecahan yang tuntas (tentunya yang dimaksudnya adalah terhadap masalah penguasaan tanah, NFR) perlu lebih dirangsang. Semoga peredaran luas buku ini dapat menyumbang ke arah tersebut” (Tjondronegoro 1984:xvii).  Buku yang terbit di kala kami masih menjadi mahasiswa tingkat awal itu benar-benar telah menggoda, merangsang alam pikiran kami. Kami membelinya dan membaca isi buku itu beberapa kali. (Ya, karena buku itu beberapa kali hilang, mungkin karena demikian banyak diminati tapi mahasiswa enggan atau belum sanggup beli, jadi kepunyaan teman dipinjam dan tidak dikembalikan!).  Kami mendebatkan, menuliskan komentar hingga merujuknya ketika kami menulis karya kami sendiri, baik untuk bahan latihan dan kursus bagi para pengerak rakyat maupun terbitan di koran, majalah, jurnal dan buku (Cf. Bachriadi 1997, Fauzi 1997, 1999, 2003).[2]

            Bukan hanya merangsang alam pikiran kami,[3] tapi juga buku itu telah mengkerangkakan arah kami BERGERAK – demikian kami menyebutnya pada waktu itu. Ini lah yang kemudian kami kenal dalam teorisasi gerakan sosial disebut sebagai masterframe  (Cf. Goffman 1974, McAdam et al 1986, Snow and Benford 1992, Snow 2004). Sebagai masterframe, Reforma Agraria kemudian menjadi semacam tema pengikat dan penggerak (rallying theme) yang terus kami geluti baik dalam proses pendidikan, perencanaan strategi, membangun jaringan, hingga kampanye maupun advokasi kebijakan publik. 

    Dari Okupasi Tanah menuju Pembaruan Agraria: Konteks dan Konsekuensi dari Serikat Petani Pasundan


    Noer Fauzi Rachman*)

    _________________________________________________________________________________ 

    Final draft naskah  “Dari Okupasi Tanah menuju Pembaruan Agraria: Konteks dan Konsekuensi dari Serikat Petani Pasundan”, in Dua Abad Penguasaan Tanah, Pola Penguasaan Tanah Pertanian di Jawa dari Masa ke Masa. S.M.P. Tjondronegoro and Gunawan Wiradi (eds).  Edisi Kedua. Jakarta: Penerbit Obor, 2008. Pp. 433-482. Naskah ini merupakan perluasan dari makalah "The New Sundanese Peasants' Union: Peasant Movements, Changes in Land Control, and Agrarian Questions in Garut, West Java" yang disajikan pada Workshop on “New and Resurgent Agrarian Questions in Indonesia and South Africa”, The Center for Southeast Asia Studies & The Center for African Studies Friday, 24 October 2003, Institute of International Studies Conference Room 223 Moses Hall, University of California at Berkeley. http://repositories.cdlib.org/cseas/CSEASWP1-03. Dengan judul yang sama, dengan versi yang sedikit berbeda, makalah tersebut itu dimuat pada tahun 2005 di Jurnal Analisis Sosial No. 9(3):51-77. 

    _________________________________________________________________________________

    “The political mobilization and organization of
     the rural landless and near landless 
    is a necessary condition for land reform; but it is not a sufficient one”
    (Solon L. Barraclough, 1998) [1]

     

    Pendahuluan 

    Serikat Petani Pasundan (SPP), suatu organisasi massa petani yang terbesar di Jawa Barat, sepanjang bulan Agustus – September tahun 2003 mengalami kesibukan yang luar biasa. Mereka harus menghadapi suatu “operasi gabungan” dari Polisi Daerah Jawa Barat, satuan Brigade Mobil, Polisi Resor Garut, Polisi Hutan Perhutani dan aparat Balai Konservasi Sumber Daya Alam (BKSDA), yang bertujuan mengusir para petani penggarap dari lokasi yang ditetapkan sebagai kawasan konservasi dan hutan lindung atau hutan produksi Perhutani.  Operasi yang diberi nama Operasi Wanalaga Lodaya[2] ini berlangsung semenjak 11 Agustus 2003, dan berakhir 23 September 2003,[3] melibatkan 387 petugas, terdiri dari 320 Polisi dan 67 Polisi Hutan (Polhut),[4] dan dipusatkan pada tiga bentang kawasan hutan, yakni Talagabodas, Papandayan dan Sancang – di mana pada semua tempat ini petani-petani yang tergabung dalam SPP menduduki dan menggarap tanah yang sebelumnya dikuasasi oleh Perhutani dan/atau BKSDA. Ini adalah operasi resmi yang terbesar yang pernah dihadapi SPP. Untuk wilayah Gunung Papandayan saja, di desa Sarimukti kecamatan Pasirwangi, pada tanggal 11 Agustus 2003, jam 09.00, operasi ini mendatangkan “aparat gabungan dipersenjatai lengkap dengan senjata laras panjang dan pistol juga peta lokasi”, dan “pada malam tanggal 12 Agustus 2003, aparat gabungan sudah membuat Tenda Penampungan untuk kepentingan operasi di tiap-tiap lokasi”.[5]  Bisa dibayangkan ketegangan yang terjadi di desa itu: pasukan seperti itu hadir di desa yang jumlah penduduknya kurang lebih 4.300 jiwa/964 Kepala Keluarga. 

    Masalah Agraria sebagai Agenda Bangsa

    Sebuah Esai Pengantar

    Noer Fauzi Rachman

    Indonesia tanah yang mulya, Tanah kita yang kaya

    Di sanalah aku berada, Untuk selama-lamanya

    Indonesia tanah pusaka, Pusaka kita semuanya

    Marilah kita mendo’a, Indonesia bahagia 

     

    Suburlah tanahnya, suburlah jiwanya, Bangsanya, rakyatnya, semuanya.

    Sadarlah hatinya, Sadarlah budinya untuk Indonesia Raya

     

    Indonesia Raya Merdeka, Merdeka, Tanahku, Negriku, yang kucinta

    Indonesia Raya Merdeka, Merdeka, Hiduplah Indonesia Raya

    … 

    Indonesia tanah yang suci, Tanah kita yang sakti 

    Di sanalah aku berdiri, M’jaga Ibu Sejati

    Indonesia tanah berseri, Tanah yang aku sayangi

    Marilah kita berjanji, Indonesia abadi 

     

    Slamatlah tanahnya, Slamatkan putranya, pulaunya, lautnya, semuanya

    Majulah negerinya, Majulah pandunya untuk Indonesia Raya

     

    Indonesia Raya Merdeka, Merdeka, Tanahku, Negriku, yang kucinta

    Indonesia Raya Merdeka, Merdeka, hiduplah Indonesia Raya

     

    (Lagu kebangsaan Indonesia Raya, Stanza ke-II dan ke-III)

     

    Lagu kebangsaan Indonesia Raya dikumandangkan pada setiap upacara resmi di sekolah maupun kantor-kantor pemerintahan, setiap awal dari dimulainya televisi, maupun pada awal acara-acara olah raga dan pemberian penghargaan pada sang juara.  Sayangnya makna yang mendalam atas rasa kebangsaan jarang dihayati para pelantun dan pendengarnya. Yang umum diketahui hanyalah stanza ke-I dari lagu itu, tapi stanza ke-II dan ke-III  jarang diketahui, disana terkandung makna yang mendalam mengenai status keberadaan manusia, tanah-air dan bangsa Indonesia sebagai kesatuan hubungan yang abadi, dan hubungan itu dijaga keabadiannya melalui ketetapan bersama untuk “Suburlah tanahnya, suburlah jiwanya, Bangsanya, rakyatnya, semuanya”; dan juga untuk “Slamatlah tanahnya, Slamatkan putranya, pulaunya, lautnya, semuanya.”