No peace without justice

No peace without justice

By Elizabeth Collins

PALEMBANG (JP): "No longer do we enjoy life/There's no bright
hope for tomorrow/Attacked by garbage, polluted air above/Our
land is now full of haunted villages.

"Society has begun to feel skeptical/Security men still wield
an iron fist/Life is hard, searching for a mouthful of rice/
Because sprouting crops are attacked by pollution."

These verses (pantun) were composed by a fisherman living in a
village downstream from the paper and pulp factory of PT Tanjung
Enim Lestari (PT TEL), which was opened in Muara Enim, South
Sumatra, in January 2000.

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, PhD is Director of Center for Southeast
Asia Studies, Ohio University, USA.