State domination leads to 'disguise resistance'

State domination leads to 'disguise resistance'

SURABAYA (JP): The domination of the state and its apparatus
in national development has given birth to "disguised resistance"
by the people, a scholar says.

Hotman Siahaan, a staff lecturer at Airlangga University's
School of Social and Political Sciences, said yesterday that
people resort to various forms of "social protest" as a way to
cope because the bureaucracy, rather than inspiring them, chooses
to "mobilize and coerce" them into joining its development
programs.

"The people protest in order to survive and to subsist,"
Hotman said, defending his doctorate dissertation before a panel
of professors who later gave him "very satisfactory" mark.
Cultural observer Prof. Umar Kayam and human rights campaigner
Prof. Soetandyo Wignjosoebroto acted as his promoters.

Hotman based his thesis on his research on 130 smallholder
sugarcane farmers in 17 villages in Papar, Kediri regency.

He found that 59 percent of the farmers joined the government-
sponsored intensification program of sugarcane plantations
because they were "mobilized". A total of 24 percent of them were
"coerced" into joining, while another 17 percent volunteered.

"The same thing happens to many other government programs.
Mobilization and coercion are more often used than ways which
would invite people to participate," he said.

Through Presidential Decree No. 9 in 1975, the government
changed the tradition of farmers renting their land to sugarcane
factories. The farmers were told, instead, to plant their own
sugarcane and sell the crop to the factories.

Problems, however, arose because the program was implemented
through coercion. The farmers also had to contend with the
difficulty of obtaining bank loans, of paying illegal levies, as
well as other violations of regulations perpetrated by government
officials and the sugar companies.

The farmers then "resisted" in various ways, both openly and
in a covert manner, including selling their land to richer
farmers, burning their own crops, and even killing a village
chief who forced them into joining the program.

Hotman then told the panel of judges that the hegemony of the
state has spread to all other sectors, including politics,
economics and social development.

"Various forms of social protests, including the free speech
forum (held by supporters of ousted Indonesian Democratic Party
leader Megawati Soekarnoputri to criticize her rival Soerjadi) is
an example of how the people resist the state's hegemony."

The farmers' resistance was initially born out of a need to
survive and subsist. However, with the strengthening of ideology,
their resistance could develop into "people power" of such a
magnitude as to enable people to stand up against the state's
domination, he said. (15)