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.