4 - Emerging options for the recognition and protection of indigenous community rights in Indonesia

Summary

Indonesia marked its seventieth anniversary as a nation in August 2015, although those 70 years are but a moment in the history of the archipelago. During the short period in which it has been a unified nation, Indonesia has undergone dramatic transformation—from charismatic leadership in a politically chaotic landscape in the 1950s and early 1960s, to 32 years of authoritarian rule in the period to 1998, to one of the world's largest and most vibrant democracies. Yet, while the Indonesian state has matured politically, fundamental challenges of equity and social justice remain. Estimates place the proportion of Indonesians living below or just over the poverty line at around 40 per cent (World Bank 2015), while conflicts over land ownership and access to natural resources continue to rise (Komnas HAM 2015).

The year 2015 also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the anti-communist massacres of the mid-1960s, which still haunt Indonesia today. Despite growing calls from many Indonesians for accountability and reconciliation, it is clear that, 50 years on, those in a position to lead this process remain reluctant to take steps to come to terms with the enormity of what happened during that period. The multi-decade struggle of indigenous communities in Indonesia to gain recognition of their col-lective rights, and the reluctance of the state to act on their demands, may well be a central legacy of this time.

While Indonesia's founding constitution has socialist leanings, reflected particularly in the way land is regulated, and although Law 5/1960 on Basic Agrarian Principles contains numerous provisions to promote equity and social welfare, there is perhaps no other democracy in the world that has done so little to actually recognise and provide land rights and natural resource security to its people. Currently, only a fraction of Indonesia's 180-million-hectare land base is titled, making the securing of land for local people and indigenous communities a central component of Indonesia's unfinished social equity agenda.

The national government awards formal land titles exclusively to individuals, even though Indonesian society is largely grounded in collective (though not always egalitarian) forms of enterprise and governance. The irony of resource allocation during Suharto's 32 years of military rule was that Indonesia's socialist origins were used to justify the control of the state over the allocation of access to natural resources and to restrict access to a privileged few.