The fall of the New Order dictatorship in May 1998 was a time of great hope for rural Indonesia. In the weeks following Suharto’s resignation, tens of thousands of peasants organised movements to occupy the land plundered during the dictatorship. They were not stealing this land, but simply taking back what the country’s bureaucratic and economic elite had expropriated in the name of development, in order to build golf courses, industrial estates, palm plantations, tourist complexes and mining companies. In rural Indonesia, the 80s, the years of the “Asian Miracle”, had seen investors systematically grabbing all the available natural resources. According to Indonesian law, the country’s resources are under State control and are to be used for the welfare of its people. The Suharto regime decreed that development was the nation’s most pressing priority, so the expropriation of the land, water and marine resources which had for generations been used by peasant and indigenous peoples was justified in the New Order’s rhetoric as being in the interests of the people. Anybody who opposed this was branded as a traitor to the nation, and punished as such (unsurprisingly, under the circumstances, Indonesians soon understood the danger implicit in the term development, which has now lost the positive connotation it still retains in other countries). Thus, under the developmentalist doctrine, the financial power of national and foreign investors was further shored up by the legal and military weight of the State, which responded to resistance to the expropriations with violent repression.
The significant level of corruption in the alliance between the political, bureaucratic and economic elites is undeniable, but it is important to underline the ideological consistency underpinning a political project which resulted in the monopolization of the archipelago’s resources by a bureaucratic and capitalist minority. Under the customary law of the various peoples on the archipelago, the natural resources are used by the local community for its physical, cultural and religious needs. Anybody who clears a piece of ground (‘opening the forest’) can lay claim to its use for himself, his family and the generations to come. If this person leaves the land or does not cultivate it, he loses all claims to it and the community then has the right to redistribute the land among its members. Therefore, the resources have no value in the capitalist sense of the word, for the simple reason that they cannot be traded.
The Indonesian State’s land expropriation effectively negates customary law, replacing it by a modern-style national law. Only thus can natural resources gain trading value and begin to feed into the process of wealth accumulation. Indonesia’s staggering economic growth throughout the 80s and up until 1997 (with an average annual growth rate of 6.1% during the period 1980-1990 and 7.6% during the period 1990-1995) was mainly down to this “turning to account” of the archipelago’s natural resources, which necessarily meant plundering the possessions of the peasant and indigenous peoples. By way of example, a direct link can be established between the spectacular growth of the palm-oil processing industry in Indonesia and the increase in the area planted with palms in Sumatra, Sulawesi and Borneo, which went from 673,000 hectares in 1990 to over 3 million hectares in 2004. Control of this land was wrested from the peasant and indigenous communities. So it was that in 1985 the inhabitants of Desa Huta Padang in the Asahan district in North Sumatra found their land being taken over by the company PT Jaya Baru, which had just built a palm-oil processing factory in the neighbouring town and now needed raw material to feed into it. For recall, palm oil is exported to manufacture, amongst other soaps and margarines, “bio” fuel which some would like to replace oil.
The conflict between customary law and capitalist development can only be fully understood by reflecting on the status of property in traditional societies and in the modern world. Here I would draw upon Hannah Arendt’s analysis (The human condition) which stresses the fundamental opposition between the appropriation process so characteristic of the modern world and the idea of property in a traditional context. Traditionally, property “means private ownership of a piece of the collective world” (Arendt). For peasants in traditional societies, it is indeed true that land is not bought; rather, one belongs to the land, lives on it, and lives from it, and it is this fact of belonging to the world which makes an individual into a fully-fledged member of a political community. The notion of being able to appropriate land without cultivating it destroys this idea of “being together in the world” (and the political community which depends on this) because the individual who owns the land no longer belongs to it and those who live on and cultivate the land do not own it. This is illustrated by the fact that the farm workers who work on plantations never form a village community as such, and nor do they really mix with the communities in the place where they are working. In Sungei Kopas in North Sumatra (series of interviews, beginning of July 2006) the workers at the Bakrie Sumatera Plantations (PT BSP) only work in the plantation for a few months, the time needed to earn enough money to be able to go “back home” where their family lives and where, at the very least, they own the land which their house is built upon. In Sungei Kopas they are housed in huts outside the village and do not participate in local community life at all. They even have a separate church from the rest of the villagers for their Sunday worship.
Contrary to what deep-rooted prejudice would have us believe, customary law ensures much greater protection of property than modern day title deeds do, although these are intended to provide stability in a fundamentally unstable world. Under customary law, the community guarantees its members with an inviolable right to the use of the land (and any individual who leaves the land de facto leaves the community). Under the modern system, the title deeds (“appropriation” deeds) are at the very most a legal tool allowing investors to seize resources simply by paying a financial consideration. Tanak Awu (Lombok) is a classic example. In 1995 the inhabitants refused to surrender their land (which they owned the title deeds for) so that it could be used to construct an airport. The State paid financial compensation (at a rate fixed by the State itself) into a bank account, then took this payment to be irrefutable proof that the peasants had transferred their property.
Taking over property by appropriation is one of the essential conditions for capitalist development, given that “any private ownership will always hinder the development of social ‘productivity’, so all private property considerations should be rejected in favour of ever-accelerating social wealth” (op. cit. Arendt, p. 109). Developmentalist States actively pursuing the transition from a traditional society towards a modern capitalist society use this principle of wealth accumulation in order to support and, when necessary, directly carry out the expropriation of peasant and indigenous populations. Under the New Order, the Indonesian State needed to start off by obliterating customary law in order to achieve its developmentalist aims. It allowed customary law to hold sway in a few minor issues of ritual, but ruled it out in any cases involving agrarian resources.
The Indonesian peasants who began to reoccupy land from 1998 implicitly recognised the primacy of customary law over formal law. Interviews carried out in 2003 and 2006 show how insistently these peasants invoke their rights as a justification for their acts, as though the tyranny of an empty stomach could never be considered as a sufficient justification. Most village communities jealously guard the documents which prove that the inhabitants have paid their land tax for many years. Moreover, the only land the peasants occupy is that which the elders remember in detail. The Indonesian peasants who participate in this occupation firmly believe that they are within their rights to do so. And so they are, according to customary law.
At the end of the dictatorship, thousands of village communities simply returned to work their land. Aided by police disorganisation, economic chaos and political and administrative anarchy, many did achieve a long-term reoccupation of expropriated land. Peasant unions, already in clandestine existence in West Java and North Sumatra since the beginning of the 90s, gained considerable strength by establishing themselves at national level (the Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions, the FSPI, was created in July 1998) and supporting the peasants’ struggles wherever they occurred. The debate on the distribution of agrarian resources, which had been supplanted by agricultural modernisation policies (the green revolution) and pioneering fronts (transmigration programme) since the end of the 60s, was at last able to return to the forefront of the political arena.
The elections of Gus Dur then Megawati Sukarnoputri in 1999 and 2001 were a source of great hope for the peasants. In 1999 Gus Dur declared that 40% of the state-controlled land was to be redistributed. There was also talk of doing away with the two large public forestry and agriculture companies (PTPN and Perhutani, which had taken over the colonial plantations and which were the clearest embodiment of the alliance between the business world and the state). From 2001 onwards, in the wake of pressure from the peasant unions and many NGOs, the agrarian reform issue was placed on the parliamentary agenda. However, the Parliamentary Decree on Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management, adopted in November 2001, whilst stating the need for to redistribute land more fairly and respect the peasants’ fundamental rights, did not call into question developmentalism as an option, nor the prevalence of modern national law over customary law. Therefore, to the astonishment of several observers, the Federation of Indonesian Peasant Unions strongly opposed this decree. It called instead for the application of the 1960 agrarian law (UUPA 5/1960) which was adopted during the Soekarno presidency and places great importance on respect for customary law (paragraph 5) and the social, rather than economic, function of land ownership (paragraph 6). Between 1963 and 1965 the powerful Indonesian Peasant Front (BTI, close to the Indonesian Communist Party) was able to use this law to redistribute tens of thousands of hectares of land to poor peasants. But as soon as Suharto came into power in 1966, the UUPA, although never officially repealed, was effectively done away with and the BTI was banned (an estimated 200,000 members of the party are believed to have been assassinated during the months of terror between October 2005 and autumn 2006). Since then, the hard truth is that agrarian reform has gone unheeded in Indonesia.
Thus, both Gus Dur, deposed in 2001, and Megawati, incapable of truly challenging the alliance between the bureaucratic and business worlds, were a disappointment. The 2004 election victory of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY), a member of the military backed by the former dictatorship party (GOLKAR) was a clear sign of Indonesian disillusionment with liberal democracy, which tolerates the freedom to express opinions but not any challenge to the foundations of the economic system. At least with SBY things are clear: like Suharto, he favours a programme based around the reinstatement of a strong central State which is the guarantor of economic growth. His credo is development, and his success is measured by the GDP. In May 2005, following a clear logic, he adopted a decree facilitating land expropriation measures in instances of “public interest” (Kepres 36/2005). And nothing has changed: in Indonesia, public interest is always equated with development.
Those who believed that setting up democratic institutions could resolve the conflicts of interest in Indonesia must now admit that they were wrong. The violation of human rights is not linked to the type of regime but rather to the inherent violence involved in the expropriation of agrarian resources and the proletarianisation of indigenous and peasant populations. It is hardly surprising, then, that the methods used by the “democratic” regime to hound out recalcitrant peasants are strikingly similar to those used by the New Order. On 30 May 2006 in Cisompet (West Java) dozens of houses were burnt down by henchmen of the national plantation company (PTPN). On 16 March 2006 in Sungei Kopas (North Sumatra) over 150 police opened the way for dozens of bulldozers to raze the villagers’ crops; at the beginning of July, three peasants were still in prison. On 18 September 2005 in Tanak Awu (Lombok) police fired into the crowd of peasants who were demonstrating against their expulsion, seriously injuring 37 people; at the end of August 2006, 9 peasants were still in prison. On 21 July 2003 in Bulukumba (South Salawesi) police fired at peasants resisting expulsion by the company PT PP Lonsum, killing four. Tragedies like these occur every week in Indonesia. But today’s peasants are better organised and more aware of their rights then they were before the 1998 Reformasi. Moreover, the employment situation in the industrial and services sectors does not allow for the “gradual transition” experienced by Europe in the 50s and 60s (although I would in no way deny the violation that European peasants suffered by being expelled from the countryside because of economic pressure and the moral discredit assailing their activity). Since Indonesian peasants have no alternative but to work the land in order to eat, they are putting up resistance. And all the police, militia and bulldozers matter little, because the peasants have nothing to lose.
Therefore, institutional democratisation will have no effect: so long as the developmentalism is the aim, expropriations will continue, in order to build a tourist complex here, or extend a palm plantation there. The struggle waged by Indonesian peasants and indigenous people against land expropriation is a struggle against development. They are not fighting for human rights or against injustice; they are fighting to survive. But since their survival is incompatible with capitalist development, this will be a fight to the death. In the west, there can no longer be a shadow of doubt: capitalism has triumphed (see La fin des paysans, Henri Mendras) and in order to reconstruct a free society we must first shake off our mental chains. But in Indonesia, Mexico, and all the so-called “transition” countries, peasant civilisations still exist and resist. All our hopes now rest upon their ferocious struggle for their land.