Land-love strong among villagers

Land-love strong among villagers

A complaint lodged recently by North Sumatran farmers with the House of Representatives over their land, which is being appropriated for a plantation, is indicative of the acute and ever present land issue found throughout the country. Sociologist Kastorius Sinaga points out the strong land-love phenomenon of villagers as one of the factors behind the recurring issue.

JAKARTA (JP): The struggle for land reclamation launched by poor farmers from the Parbuluhan village in Dairi Regency, North Sumatra, has drawn much public attention. As recently reported, the farmers are still continuing their campaign over their rights to over 1300 hectares of communal land which is being acquired for a huge plantation.

Viewed from a development perspective, the farmers' resistance seems to be counterproductive. The existence of an agro- industrial plantation in this remote and underdeveloped village will afford a long and glowing list of benefits. This is considered as a sine qua non of progress and much will undoubtedly be achieved, including new jobs, more productive land and the beginning of other income generating activities.

This is the reason why both the Jakarta-based agro-industry company and development bureaucrats regard the farmers' resistance as resistance to change, which is similar to a resistance to developmental progress.

Therefore, it is interesting to scrutinize those factors which usually give rise to the farmers' resistance to development with respect to land release.

In recent years, cases related to land conflicts, particularly those followed by resettlement plans, have emerged in a number of urban and rural areas. In spite of different project objectives, displaced villagers always demonstrated a similar attitude, namely, resistance to any project for a dam, reservoir or plantation.

This widespread attitude led observers to believe that resistance to land release as well as to involuntary resettlement, especially induced by development plans, is not a particularly recent phenomenon. Rather, as argued by a noted sociologist from the World Bank, Michael Cernea, such an attitude is a normal or even an expected phenomenon.

However, factors leading to their resistance differ from one case to another. In some cases, external factors in the form of alliances between the affected groups and external parties, such as NGOs, play a dominant role in the emergence of a protracted resistance movement. In other cases, internal factors come to the foreground as the predominant cause of the resistance.

In line with the perspective of internal factors, the roots of the resistance movement among urban dwellers are manifestly different from those in rural communities. In the case of land release or forced resettlement in urban areas, the degree of individual deprivation in the form of "sudden" losses of property rights and of "security" over minimal subsistence led to collective resistance.

Land

For rural communities, resistance movements to land release plans are deeply rooted in existing local cultures and social beliefs about the meaning of land. With this in mind, one of the well-known reasons for resistance to development in rural areas is the love-of-land and love-of-birth-place phenomenon.

Of course, this sense is quite possibly a universal human characteristic. But it is most particularly significant for the traditional societies like those in rural areas. The love-of-land phenomenon takes on a significance far greater for rural societies than for their urban counterparts, where land is viewed as just another "commodity" to be sold and bought.

We can understand why Opung Lira Simbolon, one of the farmer delegates from the Parbuluhan village, sobbed when he said, "We don't want compensation, no matter how much the company is willing to pay. The land has been handed down through generations and we intend to pass it on to our grandchildren" (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 22, 1995).

For Parbuluhan's villagers, and for almost all of Indonesia's rural inhabitants, land signifies a place around which all of their activities revolve. For the villagers, who are predominantly farmers, their land is not only their main productive base but, more fundamentally, it is the root of their culture, history and collective identity. In the Batak area, where Parbuluhan village is located, the name of a village is usually adopted from the family name of a clan, and the land symbolizes a collective existence or clan identity.

The land, where the villagers live now and that is to be confiscated for a project site, was handed down over generations. The villagers perceive their land to be a holy place where their ancestors are buried. The farmers resistance expresses a defensive attitude, whose origin lies in local beliefs and their own history and mythology.

All these can play an important hindering or encouraging role in resisting outside interference. Moreover, if unjust treatment in the form of intimidation, arrest, military-led physical force are used to release the land, as experienced by the Parbuluhan villagers, resistance might turn into a radical protest movement.

Thus, all related parties, particularly the government, should be aware of and careful in handling the resistance movement now being launched by the Parbuluhan villagers and avoid the search for a "scapegoat".

The writer is a lecturer in the Social Sciences Postgraduate Program at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta.