Wisdom required

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