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When Sundanese villagers carved “Tanah Rakyat†(People’s Land)
onto the fairway of the Cimacan golf course in 1998, shortly after the
official demise of the “New Order†regime of President Suharto, they
staked a claim against an unredeemed promise of the Indonesian
revolution. Land and the welfare of ordinary people have been intrinsic
to popular understandings of Indonesian nationhood since the
early years of the nationalist movement.At every significant juncture in Indonesia’s recent history, land issues
have played a pivotal role. “Land for the People†was the catchphrase
of the land reform movement and peasant actions supported
by the Communist Party (PKI) in the postrevolutionary period. Land
issues were at the heart of the intense political conflict that ended in
the anticommunist massacres of 1965–66 and the takeover by army
general Suharto. Three decades later, land conflicts contributed to the
overwhelming popular animosity that eventually ended Suharto’s authoritarian
rule.
Land tenure and access issues embody powerful tensions between
elites and popular forces, between regional interests and central government,
and between Indonesian national and transnational capital.
The foundational importance of the land question was expressed in
the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, arguably the most important piece of
legislation after the Indonesian constitution. Paradoxically this same
piece of legislation oversaw diametrically opposed policies of the Old
Order Sukarno (1950–65) and New Order Suharto (1966–98) regimes,
and remains today a contentious focal point in the struggle for social
justice by marginalized sectors of Indonesia’s population.
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