Wisdom required

The violence which erupted last week in connection with a land dispute at Jenggawah, East Java, is truly regrettable. The destruction of state property and attack on officers, for whatever reason, only show that law and order are not as they should be and that people are inclined to be impatient, which causes them to easily take the law into their own hands.

Perhaps it is true that, as the State Minister of Agrarian Affairs/Chairman of the National Land Agency Soni Harsono claims, legal evidence establishes that the 2,800 hectares of land that is being disputed belongs to the state and is under the control of (the state-owned agricultural estate corporation) PTP-XXVII. For that reason the occupants have no right to claim the land as theirs.

Nevertheless, the fact that a number of generations of those people have lived there and tilled those lands for decades should also be considered in the efforts to come to a settlement. Nobody wants to be chased off his land, and certainly not farmers who till the land, which is their only source of sustenance.

An interesting solution has meanwhile been suggested by Gadjah Mada University sociologist Loekman Soetrisno, who proposed adopting the PIR (smallholders estate) pattern in this case. The occupants are given the HGU (commercial operation) rights, so that the land cannot be sold. The PTP provides guidance to the occupants to cultivate crops. In this way the occupants will not lose their land while PTP's tobacco production will not be hampered.

The old approach of looking for suspected masterminds or scapegoats seems no longer appropriate.

-- Bisnis Indonesia, Jakarta