219. Report Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency1
Indonesian Land Problems: A Political Time Bomb [portion marking not declassified]
Overview
The regime of President Soeharto, already under domestic fire for its political and economic shortcomings, faces increasing restiveness in rural areas because of disputes over land control. Soeharto’s political opponents, largely concentrated in urban areas, hope to exploit the land issue but have established few links with the peasantry. If they manage to bridge the gap, the land issue could become the catalyst for widespread unrest in Indonesia and threaten stability in this largely agrarian nation.
[Page 726]Land use problems are partly a consequence of population pressure, particularly on the overcrowded island of Java, but they also are a byproduct of government rural development schemes and the bureaucracies they spawn. The situation is worsened by land-grabbing on the part of the urban military and civilian elite who use their positions to acquire land in their ancestral villages or to speculate on land near sites of prospective government projects. In some villages, such outsiders, in connivance with local officials, control a major portion of the cultivated land.
Growing landlessness on Java has caused massive migration to urban areas and contributed to the erosion of traditional communal values and to the alienation of villagers from the government. Government attempts to prevent any activity at the village level by political organizations other than the government party, GOLKAR, may prevent political challenges over the short term while setting the stage for broader social and political upheaval. The only village centers to evade central government control are Islamic religious and educational institutions, traditionally a focal point for political activism under the guise of religious concern.
The deterioration of conditions in rural Indonesia has contributed to the recent spread of millenarian religious sects preaching the evil of the present age. Although still apolitical, in the past such movements have sometimes adopted antigovernment themes. The Soeharto government is concerned that its political opponents may try to exploit these sects.
The government has no policy to deal with land problems nor any functioning mechanism to settle the increasing number of disputes. Land reform is an emotional issue with the present leadership because the Communist Party used land reform in the 1960s as a slogan to mobilize the peasants against many of the same groups who now control the government. The government is thus quick to attribute any criticism of its handling of the land issue to Communist agitation.
Those who would be most threatened by any implementation of land reform are the very people Soeharto depends upon for support. Moreover, Soeharto himself is a large landowner and would not wish any scrutiny of how much land his family controls or how they acquired it. He would prefer to continue handling land issues with ad hoc, patchwork solutions in hopes this will be enough to prevent the rural situation from getting out of hand. His close advisers, however, speculate that the opposition may use land reform as a rallying cry during the national election campaign in 1982.
Land issues cut across many lines and could provide the glue to unify Soeharto’s critics. Government unwillingness and inability to deal with the fundamental causes of the land problem have highlighted [Page 727] more basic inadequacies of government institutions, focused attention on the corruption of the courts, and cast renewed doubt on the Army’s self-proclaimed role as protector of the peasant. Because Soeharto himself has linked settling land issues with improving rural conditions, he has made land reform a legitimate subject for public debate which will make it difficult to prevent the opposition from using it as a political weapon. This, and government stalling on land legislation, increases the possibility for rural violence.
Land disputes will spread in the next few years as Soeharto’s opponents seek to use peasant discontent as a political weapon for the 1982 general elections. Over the short term, these local disputes are unlikely to lead to a major rural revolution, but rather will become a more important factor in urban politics. Over the long term, government unwillingness to come to grips with land-related issues risks creating major socioeconomic pressures in rural areas that could cause nationwide instability and, combined with increased political opposition in the cities, threaten the regime itself.
[1 line not declassified]
[Omitted here is the body of the report.]
- Source: Central Intelligence Agency, Office of Support Services (DI), Job 81T00208R: Production Case Files, Box 3, Folder 9: Indonesian Land Problems: A Political Time Bomb. Confidential. This paper was produced in the National Foreign Assessment Center. The overview is unclassified, but the larger report is marked Confidential.↩