Democratisation and social movements in Indonesia

The contributions of rural social movements to rural democratisation were emphasised in a collection of studies edited by Fox (1990). He proposed that specific attention be given to the importance of rural social movements in the process of democratisation, because “many discussions of regime transition tend to concentrate on political elites and national political institutions, focusing secondarily on urban social movements and rarely at all on rural social movements” (Fox 1990: 3).

Rural democratisation, here, is:

“[A] long and difficult process that involves struggles to build rural social and political organisations capable of representing the diverse interests of the rural poor and amplifying their voices in public policy processes… [and] to increase state accountability to previously excluded or marginalised members of the rural population, especially the landless poor and rural women … [and] deploying strategies for effectively claiming rights as well”
(Franco 2007: 1).

Various case studies of rural unrest in Indonesia, particularly during the New Order period, generally focused on the resistance of rural villagers, as the so-called “victims of development”, to the violent repression of the regime. Those cases showed local people evicted from their land for various “development projects” without fair compensation (See, for instance, Lucas 1992 and 1996; Stanley 1996; Djuweng 1996; Bachriadi 2002 and 2004; Fidro and Fauzi 1998; Bachriadi and Lucas 2001; Suryaalam 2003; and Situmorang 2005). Some attempts to explain social and pro-democracy movements during the New Order period and the post-1998 transition to democracy have little to say about (let alone any in-depth analysis on) these pro-rural social movements and their significance. (See for instance Eldridge 1995, Uhlin 1997 and Aspinall 2005.) Even less attention has been given to the politics of the rural social movements that emerged during the New Order, or to these movements’ contribution, either to the political formation and policy changes or to processes for democracy both at local and national level up. Lucas and Warren (2000) and Peluso, Affif and Fauzi (2008) have briefly emphasised the significance of these “pro-rural” movements in decision-making processes at a national level, but there is little explanation of how these organisations have built their political power.

The “pro-rural movement” in Indonesia is important in populist politics. Its contribution to the process of democracy is particularly important for two reasons. First, even though all kind of leftist political and grassroots activities, both urban and rural, were banned during the New Order, protests, campaigns and advocacy around land issues did take place. Some scholars say that mass-based organisations in rural areas were mostly destroyed (See, for instance, Fauzi 1999, Aspinall 2004 and 2005, Boudreau 2004, and Farid 2005). But they fail to recognise that the protests which have occurred since the 1980s against land evictions have rebuilt and consolidated a foundation for rural mass-based organisations. These, in turn, have continued to play an important role in Indonesian rural politics until the present. Second, the emergence of some “autonomous” local peasant organisations that generated this rural social movement, and which mostly relied on collective land occupation as a strategy, have used their political power significantly to intervene in political processes democratically at both local and national level. These are substantial political processes that were cited in many studies of the post-Suharto transition to democracy, as noted by Harriss, Stokke and Tornquist (2004: 25-26).

Authoritarian developmentalism and collective land claims actions

Current landlessness and limited access to land and natural resources is one of the heritages of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia and were caused generally by three colonial agrarian policies. The first was that all lands were divided into two categories of ownership through the “domein verklaring” principle. In one category all land was formally recognised as being individually owned, known as eigendom, and in the other category all land was owned by the state. The second colonial policy was on land allocation for the development of big plantations, particularly on state-owned land. The third was a policy on the formation of “state-forest” (Peluso 1990, 1992; Peluso and Vandergeest 2001).

1 This paper is part of the Rural New Politics – Rural Democratisation Research Project of the Transnational Institute (TNI), 2006-2009. In Indonesia, this research was conducted through the Agrarian Resource Centre (ARC), Bandung. The author would like to thank Hilma Safitri and Wisnu Adhi (“Timbul”) of ARC for their assistance with the fieldwork and case writing. Thanks to the International Development Studies Programme at Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, Canada, as well for organising a “writeshop” in which the author participated as a summer visiting fellow in July 2007. The author would also like to thank to Jennifer Franco, Saturnino “Jun” Borras Jr, Bridget O’Laughlin, George Mezaros, Longgena Ginting, Francis “Kiko” Issac and participants in the first round of the Rural New Politics International Workshop for their valuable comments and input on an early draft of this paper.
2 Researcher at the Agrarian Resource Centre (ARC), Bandung, Indonesia.
3 Field work in West Java and Bengkulu was carried out between December 2006 and May 2007.