|
Jakarta
Post
Elizabeth
Collins
Under
the New Order, a small group of military and civilian elites closely
associated with Soeharto monopolized the exploitation of natural
resources, including forest, mining and plantation industries.
Throughout lowland South Sumatra, corporations owned by Soeharto
cronies and members of the Soeharto family or multinational corporations
were granted concession to the use of vast areas of forest lands
for industrial forest estates and palm oil plantations.
The villagers in the area of the PT TEL concession say that they
were never consulted about the confiscation of their land. They
were simply told they could become laborers working for the company
on road and infrastructure construction and in transport.
Like other corporations given concessions in South Sumatra, PT TEL
used military forces for security and to intimidate villagers who
resisted the takeover of land. Protesting villagers were accused
of being communist (PKI) because opposing development was tantamount
to being communist.
As villagers realized that they would be impoverished because what
they could earn as unskilled laborers was much less than they had
formerly earned from their rubber trees, opposition to the PT TEL
factory grew.
What began as a conflict over land broadened in 1997, when the environment
organization WALHI-Palembang reviewed the environmental impact report
of PT TEL and reported that the factory would dump chlorine-a waste
product from the process of bleaching the wood pulp-into the Lematang
River, which was the local water supply.
That same year, forest fires swept across lowland South Sumatra
causing massive air pollution and destroying many small rubber plantations
cultivated by villagers.
Satellite data showed that most of the "hot spots" were
located on industrial forest estates, including those of the MHP,
the supplier of PT TEL. This was due to the fact that forest disturbed
by lumbering and the maturing trees (acacia) planted on timber estates
burn more quickly and intensely than natural forest.
When local villagers plant rubber trees, they maintain the largest
trees in the forest and mimic the natural layering of the jungle
by planting coffee or other crops (such as pepper) under the rubber
trees and ground crops below.
The cases of PT TEL and MHP are only two out of 136 cases of conflict
over land that have been registered at the office of Governor of
South Sumatra. Throughout lowland South Sumatra, villagers who lost
their land during the last 10 years of the Soeharto regime have
been impoverished.
They have withdrawn their children from universities and training
institutions and are worried about how they will support their families.
They say with some despair, "We will become a villages of thieves."
Since the overthrow of Soeharto in May 1998, protests have escalated.
When compensation was finally paid to those whose land was taken
by PT TEL, the villagers protested because the amount had been reduced
by 25 percent from what had been promised.
They accused the now former Muaraenim regent, Hasan Zen, and the
now former South Sumatra Governor Ramli Hassan Basri, of corruption.
On Jan. 8, 1999, thousands of residents from six villages
surrounded PT TEL's new factory in a demonstration that lasted eight
hours.
The
threat of violence hung in the air. Kemas Muhammad Amin of the Palembang
chapter of the Legal Aid Foundation expressed the hope that South
Sumatra government would pay attention to the conflict before violence
erupted.
In
November 1999, the High Court in the province announced a preliminary
finding that there was no evidence of corruption on the part of
the regent, the Governor, his family, or Cendana (Soeharto's family)
in the acquisition of land by PT TEL.
This news led to a large demonstration at the office of the Provincial
Attorney General in Palembang. A delegation of villagers also went
to the office of the Attorney General, Marzuki Darusman, in Jakarta
to present as evidence of corruption the contracts that they had
signed with PT TEL and affidavits stating that they never received
the amounts promised.
In December 1999, protests at PT TEL's new factory turned violent.
Demonstrators hurled molotov cocktails at the logs piled outside
the factory. Trucks used for hauling logs were damaged. Military
security forces were called in.
When PT TEL finally opened the factory in January 2000, villagers
living on the banks of the Niru River, a branch of the Lematang,
said that PT TEL dumped smelly, untreated waste into the River during
the night. They said that after their fish catch had plummeted,
and they had to dig wells for drinking water because they could
no longer drink water from the river.
From the perspective of PT TEL, the company's Muara Enim factory
is a development project of great benefit to the Indonesian nation.
A representative of PT TEL pointed out that where formerly there
had been "unproductive land," there was now a factory
with jobs. He denied that PT TEL had ever been responsible for pollution
of the Lematang River. He concluded that the protests against PT
TEL were due to unrealistic demands by local residents, because
PT TEL could not supply enough jobs for everyone. He urged the government
to be strong to protect factories and their employees, so that investors
would feel secure.
Throughout South Sumatra, the pattern of conflict is similar. Villagers
write letters to local and national government officials protesting
confiscation of land and loss of access to communal forest resources.
When this fails to bring action, they mount peaceful protests at
government and corporate offices and accuse local government officials
of corruption.
Next, protests over environmental damage emerge, and finally protests
over low wages and labor conditions on palm oil plantations.
In
February 2000, several hundred representatives of farmers' organizations
from South and North Sumatra met with the Director General of the
Department of Forestry and Plantations in Jakarta. They were promised
that within one month their cases would be settled. Nothing has
happened since then. The government's failure to act has fueled
the resentment and frustration of peasants.
The conflict over land is tending to polarize society in South Sumatra.
Corporations resist negotiation with villagers and accuse NGOs of
encouraging anarchic tendencies among the villagers. Villagers have
seen that corporations can be brought to the negotiating table when
there is mob action against corporate property, as in the case of
PT TEL, or under the threat of violence.
NGOs are often powerless to restrain desperate villagers. Increasingly
both protesters and security forces feel justified in resorting
to violence. Government officials and security forces justify
violence as necessary to reestablish respect for law and order.
Student activists and protesting farmers justify violence on the
grounds that otherwise their protests are ignored.
However, there is another way to look at this conflict. Among
villagers in conflict with multinational corporations there is a
demand for a return to customs, or adat, and the system of marga
and pasirah (abolished in 1974).
Even in a village where 80 percent of the residents are voluntary
transmigrants who moved to a relatively unpopulated area of South
Sumatra from Lampung in the 1970s, people advocate a return to adat
rights.
This suggests that adat means something more than the "traditional
rights" of indigenous people. When pressed to explain what
aspects of an idealized past they seek to institute, villagers emphasize
three themes.
First, a return to adat means respect for traditional individual
and collective land rights. Second, villagers emphasize their responsibility
to their ancestors and descendants, most particularly their responsibility
to provide their children with a livelihood through education and
inheritance of rights to land.
Third, a return to adat implies environmentally sound and sustainable
cultivation of the land. Villagers point out that corporations were
responsible for major forest fires in 1997 and have contributed
to polluting the rivers, threatening the future welfare of all.
A return to adat for these villagers means a sense of responsibility
for the world in which one lives. This is contrasted with what local
people see as the refusal of multinational corporations to take
responsibility for the environmental and social effects of their
operations.
The villagers must be made partners in planning for socially and
environmentally responsible regional development.
Elizabeth
Collins, a faculty at the Center
for Southeast Asia Studies, Ohio University, USA.
|
