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)