Rights commission proposes agrarian dispute committee
A. Junaidi, Jakarta
The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) and a number of non-governmental organizations (NGO) suggested on Tuesday that a national commission to deal with agrarian conflicts be set up.
"We will soon meet with President Megawati Soekarnoputri to convince her of the urgency of this commission," Komnas HAM member Amidhan told reporters after a seminar on the need for an agrarian disputes resolution commission.
Amidhan acknowledged that Komnas HAM was unable to settle land disputes across the country due to its lack of expertise, staff and powers.
He said the new commission, if established, would need to be an independent body with retroactive authority.
The rights body and the NGOs, including the Indonesian Forum for the Environment (Walhi), the Agrarian Reform Consortium (KPA), the Ecology and Community-based Law Reform (HuMA) group, and Bina Desa, have drafted a presidential decree on the establishment of the commission.
The draft, which consists of 15 articles, stipulates that the commission would be entitled to resolve land disputes dating back as far as 1967.
It also provides that the commission must set up an agrarian court to resolve land disputes fairly within one year after the submission of the case.
Syaiful Bahari of Bina Desa said conflicts between farmers attempting to reclaim land that had once been theirs and was now being used for plantations, and the companies that claimed ownership of the plantations, would become a major problem in the future.
"If fair solutions are not find, conflicts will erupt in the near future. The commission should be made responsible for dealing with this problem," Syaiful said.
Rikardo Simarmata of HuMA said the proposed commission, like Komnas HAM, should be allowed to take up cases that arose before the law was enacted as many land conflicts between members of the public and the state had their roots in what happened in the past, especially after 1967.
"During our discussions, many suggested that the commission be empowered to handle cases occurring even before 1967. However, based on our data, most of the cases arose from 1967 onward," Rikardo said.
During the era of the country's first president, Sukarno, in the 1960s, many poor farmers across the country were awarded grants of state land under the land reform program.
After 1966 and the rise of the New Order regime under president Soeharto, a lot of land was forcibly confiscated by military officers and reclassified as state plantation land.
The fall of Soeharto in 1998 did little to reduce the number of land disputes between poor farmers and companies backed by the state.
Over the past two years, Komnas HAM has recorded many human rights violations involving land disputes across the country, including major outbreaks of agrarian strife in Bulukumba, South Sulawesi, Garut in West Java and Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara.
Since the onset of the economic crisis in 1997, thousands of squatters have been evicted for illegally occupying vacant land.