Acehnese demarcate land without govt
Nani Afrida, The Jakarta Post, Banda Aceh
Zamzami, 52, a resident of Lamjabat village, Meuraxa district in Banda Aceh, has a new task. As a former village administrative chief, he has been asked by residents to help them demarcate their land.
"As I am a former village administrative chief, they probably believe that I know about the land ownership situation in this village," Zamzami told The Jakarta Post.
Zamzami only uses an ordinary 30-meter measuring tape for the purpose. His other tools are a piece of paper and a ballpoint pen to sketch the plan of residents' houses. He has some experience as he once attended a course on agrarian matters that dealt with land boundaries before the tsunami.
Residents have decided to demarcate the land by themselves without waiting for the National Land Agency (BPN). The BPN has only conducted land surveys on a few villages in the three months since the disaster swept away homes and other key markers, one of them the Lampoh Daya village in Jaya Baru district.
Specifying the boundaries of a plot of land is now a difficult process. Lamjabat was completely razed by the tidal waves and it is hard to distinguish where a farm or a house once stood, let alone the boundaries.
"Landowners actually measured their parcels of land themselves just after the tsunami, but in most cases inaccurately. For example, a section of the road that was once the main village road was claimed by some people," said Zamzami.
"Usually a quarrel will ensue if they inaccurately claim land. It is important for all concerned parties to be present when we measure," said Zamzami.
Lamjabat lost almost 1,500 of its 1,700 pre-tsunami population. As a result, most of the plots of land no longer have an owner. The task of Zamzami and the residents is to trace the legal heir to the land.
"This is no easy task because we have to be very careful not to hand over the land to the wrong person," he said.
Besides decimating hundreds of thousands of lives in Aceh, the catastrophe also devastated 57 percent of Banda Aceh's land area, 70 percent of which is considered unfit to live on now.
The municipality has also reported that 33,954 residential houses had been severely damaged by the earthquake and tsunami. Almost half of the land ownership documents and certificates were lost or destroyed.
The whole land issue will be a big task for the government. BPN claims it has received 2,500 reports on losses of land documents and certificates by residents.
"Those who reported to us have not brought along with them the documents because they have lost them in the disaster," said head of the BPN office, Razali.
Although he tried to be optimistic, Razali could not hide his anxiety about a possible dispute over land ownership. The disputes could be in the form of land inheritance or land boundaries without ownership titles, or even land which had been piled with debris and garbage like in Lhok Nga and Krueng Raya areas. "There's only one way to resolve the problem, that is by involving the community leaders," he said.