Keywords

Introduction

On 11 March 2019, after several days of demonstrating outside government offices in Riau’s provincial capital Pekanbaru, representatives of the village Koto Aman were finally invited for a hearing with both the governor and the district head. This meeting took place no less than 12 years after villagers started to voice their complaints about PT Sekarbumi Alam Lestari (PT SBAL). This palm oil plantation had, the villagers claimed, taken 1500 hectares of their land. To recover this land, villagers had organized several large demonstrations and on three occasions they had blocked the entrance to the plantation. They had succeeded in attracting the attention of President Joko Widodo, who had promised to look into their case. This gave community leader Dapson an opportunity to present the villagers’ claims to Riau’s highest authorities. Newspapers later recorded his words in the following manner: “We ask the governor, with humility, as a representative of the community, to be wise and sensible in resolving this issue in a fair and wise manner. We are tired of receiving promises, sir. For years we have struggled and have never received anything real or certain, apart from promises” (Monitor Riau, 2019).

In this chapter, we analyse how rural Indonesians involved in land conflicts formulate their claims vis-a-vis companies and the government. The statements that community leaders like Dapson make during demonstrations and hearings, provide an extraordinary, yet largely unstudied window onto prevailing political norms and, consequently, onto the character of citizenship in Indonesia. Given the ‘legal and institutional pluralism’ (Sikor & Lund, 2009) shaping land conflicts, these articulations of claims by citizens like Dapson reflect both an assessment of what kinds of discourse are effective in Indonesia’s public sphere (i.e. ‘what works’) as well as an assessment of the kinds of norms and values that might legitimize a claim (i.e. ‘what is fair, or right’). These articulations provide an avenue to move beyond often rather elite-centred studies on political ideology in Indonesia and focus, instead, on the ideas and norms of ordinary Indonesians. Indonesia’s authoritarian New Order regime propagated a corporatist ideology which envisioned the state as a benevolent father and emphasized social harmony and obedience (Bourchier, 2015). By focusing on the discourse of ordinary rural Indonesians, we can assess whether, and to what extent they do, in fact, still subscribe to or are influenced by the New Order’s interpretation of citizenship, as some analysts (Bourchier, 2019; Mietzner, 2012; Warburton, 2016) have suspected.

The conflicts sparked by the rapid expansion of palm oil plantations—doubling almost every decade—provide a fruitful opportunity for such an inquiry. Throughout Indonesia communities are engaging in demonstrations, hearings, court cases and, occasionally, violence to protest against land grabbing. Employing a large collection of articles describing protest events involving ten conflicts between rural communities and palm oil companies, we ask: how do rural Indonesians formulate their grievances, how do they legitimize their claims vis-à-vis companies and local authorities, and what moral registers are reflected in these legitimations?

To address these questions, we analyse 66 online as well as printed newspaper articles containing interviews with community representatives concerning ten such palm oil conflicts, often taking place on the sidelines of demonstrations or road blockades. Such newspaper statements are particularly apt to study political norms and discourse because of their public nature. In contrast with comments made during private interviews with researchers, these newspaper statements reflect strategic considerations of community spokespersons about which discourse is most effective for drawing support and to legitimize their claims. We filtered out third-party statements in order to focus solely on the discourse of community members. To identify and contextualize this material, we made use of our recent collaborative effort to document the trajectories and outcomes of 150 conflicts between palm oil companies in Riau, West Sumatra, West Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan using interviews, government and NGO reports as well as the newspaper archives from 2009 to 2018 of four regional newspapers (Padang Express, Riau Pos, Kalteng Pos and Pontianak Pos). For this article, we selected ten of these conflicts (Berenschot et al., 2022a for the full analysis of 150 cases) which all involved similar grievances about companies having taken community land without consent (we excluded conflicts involving grievances about pollution, profit-sharing or labour issues) and for which we had at least four newspaper articles. For these ten cases, we collected and analysed newspaper articles containing interviews with community representatives, often taking place on the sidelines of demonstrations or hearings with politicians.

We find that the political discourse adopted by protesting rural Indonesians is marked by a remarkable absence of both conceptions of citizen rights as well as notions of social justice. Protesting rural Indonesians tend to adopt a discourse that, like Dapson above, is not only very modest and polite, but also tends to articulate claims in terms of social obligations and customary land rights while rarely invoking laws, regulations or conceptions of fairness or justice. We suggest that this discourse not only contrasts sharply with land conflicts in other countries but also with the discourse that rural Indonesians employed in the 1950s before the advent of the New Order. This modest and relatively ‘rightless’ discourse is, we propose, a consequence not only of power imbalances and the weak legal protection of land rights of rural Indonesians, but also of the 1965 political genocide and the subsequent authoritarian New Order regime, which succeeded in eliminating notions of social justice, especially over land (re)distribution, from public debate and political discourse.

This essay proceeds as follows. We will first discuss our approach to studying the discourse that communities employ when engaged in land conflicts with companies. After a short introduction to the nature of land conflicts between companies and communities in Indonesia, we explore the discourse that communities employ to make three types of claims: their actual claim to land, their demands concerning government involvement, and their claims in response to the criminalization of protest leaders. We end by proposing our explanations for the particular discourse that we encountered.

Studying Claim-Making in the Context of Plural Normative Registers

Citizens involved in land conflicts can engage in ‘discourse shopping’ (Biezeveld, 2004) in the sense that they avail of a range of different normative registers to legitimize their claims vis-à-vis companies and local authorities. Studies of land conflicts in Indonesia have tended to emphasize a normative register involving customary (in Indonesian: adat) land rights (Berenschot & Afrizal, 2022) as communities often legitimize their claims by invoking the norms and rights associated with (local) customary rule systems (Davidson & Henley, 2007; Dhiaulhaq & McCarthy, 2020). Alongside this adat-based discourse rural-Indonesians might also adopt a legal discourse involving a strategic usage of state laws and citizen rights (Berenschot et al., 2022a, 2022b). In this vein, Lund (2020) has argued that the tenuous and contested nature of land ownership in Indonesia has stimulated both communities and companies to engage in a strategic invocation of laws and procedures in order to give land claims an ‘air of legality’. The literature on contentious politics and resistance in Southeast Asia highlights yet another type of normative discourse: James Scott, for example, argued that a prevalent normative register concerns a ‘subsistence ethics’ centring on economic and social needs and shape moral standards and discourse. Peasants in Southeast Asia are, according to Scott (1977: 7), not so much concerned with ‘how much is taken’ but rather with ‘what is left’. Discussing peasant protests, Scott argues that “[i]t was the smallness that was left rather than the amount that was taken (…) that moved peasants to rebel” (Scott, 1977: 11).

Given this availability of different normative registers to inform the discourse that rural Indonesians might employ to legitimize their (land) claims, some analytical distinctions are needed to identify and compare the usage of these different registers. To that end, and taking inspiration from studies of claim-making and citizenship elsewhere (Holston, 2008; O’Brien & Li, 2006; Rodan & Hughes, 2014), we propose that four different normative registers can be identified: rights-based, customary land-rights (adat-) based, needs-based and justice-based.

With ‘rights-based’ we refer to claims that are motivated and substantiated with references to legal provisions and formal state regulation. Describing such claim-making of communities in China, O’Brien and Li (2006, 3) coined the term ‘rightful resistance’ to capture the way in which communities strategically invoked laws and regulations to discipline local powerholders: “In their acts of contestation, which usually combine legal tactics with political pressure, rightful resisters typically behave in accord with prevailing statutes [and] use a regime's policies and legitimating myths to justify their challenges”. Similarly, in Vietnam, Kerkvliet observed that “villagers typically claim local officials are violating laws and regulations” (Kerkvliet, 2014: 39) while a study on the ‘rightful resistance’ of land-related protest movements in India and Brazil also concluded that their discourse involved “highlighting gaps between constitutional principles, laws, and national policy directives and their nonimplementation or violation on the ground” (Schock, 2015: 500). These studies highlight that rural protesters regularly take their grievances to court, combining “legal tactics with political pressure” (O’Brien & Li, 2006: 3).

With ‘adat-based’ we refer to the above-mentioned claims to land that involve an invocation of customary or indigenous land rights—i.e. claims to land that are substantiated by invoking local traditions in managing access to land. With ‘needs-based’ we refer to claims that are legitimated by invoking the importance of land for sustaining livelihoods (Holston, 2008: 240–245). This includes a discourse that reflects Scott’s ‘subsistence ethics’ by referring, for example, to how the loss of access to land generates hardship and poverty. Lastly, with ‘justice-based’ claims we mean claims that are substantiated in terms of ideas about fairness and justice in ways that are not related to legal provisions (or adat) but rather to alternative, non-legal notions of what is fair and morally just. Rodan and Hughes (2014: 12, 4) argued that such claim-making is particularly salient in Southeast Asia. They define such ‘moral ideologies’ in terms of “conformity to received codes of behavior [that] assumes pre-eminence in evaluating the conduct of power holders. This includes the recasting of cultural identity, ethical thought, and religious teaching”. Such a discourse thus involves the invocation of social norms as well as ideas of social justice and solidarity.

This categorization of four types of framing of claims is admittedly rough and somewhat overly schematic. Yet, as we hope our analysis will show, this categorization can help to analyse not just the recurring elements in this discourse but also help to identify the elements that are conspicuously absent.

A Brief Introduction to Land Conflicts in Indonesia

Before embarking on our exploration of the discourse that rural communities employ, we briefly introduce the character of these land conflicts. An important root cause of these conflicts concerns Indonesia’s weak land tenure system and particularly the way in which the Indonesian state curtails the land rights of Indonesian citizens (Afrizal, 2007). Building on Dutch colonial laws, after independence the Indonesian state has designated vast areas of its land—currently encompassing around 63% of Indonesia’s territory— as forest areas (kawasan hutan), which consequently fall under Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) authority. In these areas, Indonesian citizens cannot obtain formal ownership of the land, while land-titling as well as registration of public ownership records in non-forest areas is limited. With this limited registration of (and access to) formal land ownership, most rural Indonesians are forced to rely on customary law and more informal methods of land registration to organize their land dealings. This restricted land ownership has served the Indonesian state and its ruling elites well: the Indonesian state can claim control over large swaths of territory and, consequently, it can provide this land to (palm oil or timber plantation) companies in the form of concessions. It is a public secret that those in control of awarding these concessions—local politicians as well as local and national bureaucrats—are extracting considerable rents from companies (KPK, 2016; Gecko Project, 2017)—which constitutes an important reason for why these elites are so reluctant to strengthen the land rights of ordinary Indonesians. This situation inevitably sparks conflict: the Indonesian state is providing companies with concessions for land on which rural Indonesians have been living and working for generations. Affected communities feel that their land is being stolen from them, while their legal position is actually weak. In contrast, palm oil companies have a firm legal basis for appropriating land while communities lack formal land titles and, hence, stand relatively little chance in court.

To address this problem, both the Indonesian government as well as the palm oil industry have prescribed two types of solutions. On the one hand, companies are required to obtain informed consent from affected communities before commencing operations. This includes an obligation to provide monetary compensation. Secondly, companies incorporating community land into plantations are required to set up profit-sharing schemes, often referred to as inti-plasma schemes in Indonesia. Here the inti refers to the company share, while plasma refers to the part of the plantation (currently around 20% of the total land ceded by communities) provided to communities. Communities are in theory entitled to all the profits from plasma land minus the expenses the company incurred in planting and cultivating the oil palm trees. Both these ‘solutions’ turned out to be a major source of conflicts. As we discuss in greater detail elsewhere (Berenschot et al., 2022a), companies often obtain community consent in a very haphazard manner, focusing their efforts (and inducements) on getting a signature from the village head while often neglecting to involve the rest of the community. Not infrequently this means that affected individuals get no, or very little (between 80 and 250 dollars per hectare) financial compensation. Similarly messy is the implementation of these joint-venture schemes. Often, companies renege on their promise to provide the community a share of the profits from plasma, or this scheme is implemented in a highly non-transparent manner leaving communities with very little profit.

These grievances generate lengthy conflicts: during (on average) 11 years communities engage in demonstrations, road blockades, public hearings, press conferences and occasional court cases to pressurize companies to cede to their demands (Berenschot et al., 2022). As our own research as well as a range of case studies have documented (Afrizal, 2007; Colchester & Chao, 2013), communities tend to fail in these efforts as land is rarely returned to them, while companies rarely meet demands for (more) monetary compensation or the provision of promised plasma land.

This intractability of palm oil conflicts should be understood in the light of Indonesia’s highly clientelistic political system, which incentivizes palm oil companies to engage in collusive exchange relations with state officials in order to navigate regulatory procedures (Aspinall & Berenschot, 2019). Indonesia’s democratization process after the fall of Suharto (in 1998) and the availability of democratically elected members of local parliaments (DPRD) and, since 2004, district heads have provided protesters with new avenues to advance their grievances. Yet at the same time these new, competitive elections have intensified the relationships between politicians and business actors. In return for campaign donations, elected politicians help palm oil companies to circumvent existing regulations including protections of citizen rights.Footnote 1 Indonesia’s highly clientelistic politics thus greatly complicates the resolution of conflicts. It is frequently argued that Indonesia’s democracy is an ‘oligarchy’ since many politicians are either wealthy entrepreneurs themselves, or reliant on such rich campaign donors (Ford & Pepinsky, 2014). An important effect of these close collusive relationships between business actors and political elites is the weak regulatory capacity of the Indonesian state. As a range of critical reports has documented, companies often operate without proper licences, fail to fulfil to obtain community consent, and do not respect environmental regulation, because they know that such violations have relatively little consequences (Gecko Project, 2017; Greenpeace, 2021).

This broader context—particularly the curtailed nature of land rights and the weak regulatory capacity of the Indonesian state—can help explain why, as we explore in the next section, laws and notions of citizen rights figure relatively rarely in the discourse that rural Indonesians employ to reclaim their land.

Claiming Land Ownership

We start by examining how communities articulate and legitimize their claim to land. In all ten cases, the communities claimed that palm oil companies had engaged in land grabbing and taken control over land that was theirs. For example, in West Sumatra, the adat community Tanjung Manggopoh complained that the company PT Mutiara Alam had taken 2500 ha of community land in 1988. They have struggled since then to recover this land. In West Kalimantan, communities tried to prevent the company Sinar Sawit Andalan from converting their land into a plantation without paying any compensation. In some cases (such as PT RASR, PT SBAL and PT BPK) communities demand that the company return their land to them, but in most cases they settle for more modest demands of financial compensation (uang ganti rugi) and profit-sharing to compensate for the loss of land. So how do communities formulate and legitimize such land claims?

In Table 31.1 we provide for each of the ten cases that we studied an overview of all the statements of community members that we found in the newspapers that involved an explicit claim to land, employing the distinction between different normative registers we developed above. As it turned out, even these ‘most explicit’ land claims are often highly implicit as an effort to legitimize a land claim is often absent.

Table 31.1 Community representatives formulating land claims
Full size table

This table yields a number of surprising conclusions. A first observation is that community representatives rarely offer elaborate legitimations for their claim to land. Of the 51 analysed statements directly involving a claim to land, 23 do not offer any legitimation beyond simply claiming ownership. Given the above-mentioned tenuous legal status of land ownership in Indonesia, this is remarkable: in such a situation one might expect more discursive activity to strengthen legally weak claims to land ownership. In that light, it is similarly remarkable that community representatives rarely talk about their claims in terms of citizen rights and, relatedly, government regulations. The word ‘right’ does figure in 11 of these claim statements, but when the term ‘rights’ is used, this is rarely accompanied by an effort to articulate specific rights and their legal basis. A number of the quoted community representatives do talk about ‘getting their rights back’ (kembalikan hak) or ‘claiming our rights’ (menuntut hak) but these phrases do not seem to refer to any particular notion of formal citizen rights, let alone regulation. Instead, in most instances such formulations simply seem to be alternative formulations for stating a claim to land. In other cases (as in the cases of PT Mutiara Agam and PT Sinar Sawit Andalan), the spokespersons actually seem to be referring to customary land rights rather than citizen rights. This highly limited ‘rights-based’ discourse resonates with the fact that community representatives rarely invoke government regulations or laws: in all 51 statements that we examined for this study, community representatives mentioned a letter written by a district head only twice, while they never mentioned laws or government regulation.

In short, compared to the literature on ‘rightful resistance’ that emphasizes the regular invocation of rights and laws in other countries, the discourse of communities involved in land conflicts in Indonesia reported in newspapers rarely revolve around regulations or explicitly articulated notions of rights. Such an observation also stands in remarkable contrast with Lund's analysis in his book Nine-tenth of the Law, where he argues that the tenuousness of land tenure in Indonesia has sparked elaborate attempts to bestow property claims with an ‘air of legality’ through a strategic reference of law. The aim of such ‘legalisation’, Lund (2020: 6) argues, is “the successful persuasion that a claim to land and other resources is legal (…) with reference to the law”. Our tentative explanation for why we did not find this postulated importance of ‘legalisation’ in our material is that Lund focuses mostly on more better-off actors in peri-urban Indonesia who—in most cases—actually maintain or have obtained control over land. —For rural Indonesian ‘have-nots’—who have just lost their land to palm oil companies and who harbour a considerable distrust towards legal institutions because of their corruptibility and tendency to side with corporate interests—the law tends to be perceived as a foe rather than an ally. Such perceptions of (and experiences with) legal institutions makes a legal discourse much less attractive.

A second observation concerns the relative absence of both justice-based and needs-based justifications of claims to land. The interviewed community representatives do not invoke wider conceptions of justice, and we encountered only one reference to how and why they need this land for their livelihoods. A particularly remarkable feature of the newspaper statements that we examined—including those discussed further below—is the absence of a broader discourse emphasizing notions of fairness and justice in how access to land is organized. These newspaper statements suggest that rural Indonesians do not articulate land conflict issues in terms of a violation of ideas about social justice. This is remarkable not only in comparison with land struggles elsewhere, but also in comparison with earlier periods of Indonesia’s history. Indonesia had a strong communist movement particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, that successfully promoted a redistribution of land, using a discourse that was full of references to the notion of social justice and equality.

The discourse that we encountered in our newspapers is a far cry from the much more radical visions of land distribution promoted by Indonesia’s communist movement. The absence of ideas of social justice in our newspaper articles provides further evidence that the political genocide of 1965—in which an estimated 500 thousand people suspected of being communists were killed, and the communist movement was crushed—and the subsequent New Order propaganda has been very effective in cleansing political discourse in Indonesia from visions about social justice, equality or fairness (Hadiz, 2006). As Lucas and Warren (2013: 14) describe, during the peak of the New Order era, rural landholders faced the risk of being considered “antidevelopment”, “subversive” or “ex-communist” if they attempted to exercise their right to refuse any land acquisition for ‘development’ purposes. As a result, most people surrendered their land rather than risk being subjected to intimidation or attack. This labelling of people propagating land rights as ‘communist’ continued in post-Soeharto era. As the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) wrote in a press release in 2016, sometimes activists who are advocating land rights and redistribution were accused by state apparatus (notably from military background) of being communists or attempting to resurrect communism in Indonesia (YLBHI, 2016). Our material suggests that rural Indonesians involved in land conflicts seem to lack (access to) a discursive repertoire about social justice, and that the fall of the New Order in 1998 has not (yet) led to a revival of a discourse that was much more common in the 1950s and the early 1960s.

In that light, it is similarly remarkable that communities formulate their claims to land in relatively modest and polite terms. The community spokespersons ‘request’ (meminta) the return of their land (PT RASR) or ‘request when clarity about monetary compensation can be given’ (PT SCP) and they ‘ask PT GAL to suspend their activities’. These spokespersons do use harsh words for the behaviour of companies (‘dirampas’, ‘dicaplok’, ‘diserobot’: all words referring to expropriation). Their complaints concern the significant loss of land and sources of livelihoods. Yet such grievances do not translate into strongly worded claims. The claims that community leaders voice are generally quite modest, as the studied communities do not refuse the arrival of the plantation and they tend to focus on asking for relatively little monetary compensation—from our study, it appears that communities receive between Rp. 500,000 (about USD 35) per hectare in 2004 to Rp. 2 million (about USD 140) in 2014, with twenty to forty dollars added for land planted with cash crops such as rubber (Berenschot et al., 2022). Furthermore, these modest claims are also formulated in very modest terms. The community representatives rarely ‘expect’ or ‘demand’ something from governments or companies. Instead, they tend to ‘ask’ (meminta) for it, and they do not come across as particularly angry about the fact that such requests have gone unfulfilled for so long.

This peculiar discourse—polite, relatively devoid of both notions of social justice and references to laws—can be partially attributed to the strong power imbalances that characterize these land conflicts. In most cases, communities simply lack the contacts, resources, skills and legal opportunities to force these powerful and wealthy companies to accede to their demands, and their discourse reflects this reality. But this discourse also needs to be interpreted in light of the reliance of communities on informal mediation to settle these conflicts. As litigation and formal complaint procedures are ineffective avenues, communities tend to use their demonstrations and the accompanying discourse mainly to get companies to engage in negotiations. This partly explains the modest and polite tone that community spokespersons adopt and, as we document elsewhere (Berenschot, 2022a), the relative lack of violence from protesting community members towards companies (while company security and police are more commonly violent against protesters). Because of this reliance on mediation and, relatedly, support from local authorities, communities face incentives to maintain good relations and open lines of communication with both company representatives and government officials.

Claiming Government Support

An important feature of the strategies that communities employ is that communities attempt to get the local government to investigate their claims and, subsequently, pressurize the company on their behalf. As direct negotiations with companies tend to fail, and as litigation is often not an option, communities tend to pin their hopes on getting local governments to take up their grievances. The hope is that local authorities either cancel plantation licences (which rarely happens) or they agree to organize and chair mediation sessions with the company. We found this kind of government-led mediation sessions is, in fact, the most commonly pursued conflict-resolution strategy, taking place in five of the ten cases we studied. This government-centred strategy is observable in both the protests and the discourse that communities employ. Many community demonstrations take place in front of government offices, and the main message of these protests does not concern grievances about company behaviour, but rather claims about how the government should respond to such grievances.

A number of examples can serve to illustrate how communities express such claims for government involvement. In the case of the conflict between villagers of Tiku V Jorong, Tanjung Manggopoh and PT Mutiara Agam, villagers demonstrated in front of the office of the district head of Agam district, allegedly coming close to burning down this office. Journalists quoted community leaders as follows: “We request [minta] mr. District Head to take sides with the community. [Please] cancel the decision letter made by the District Government team of Agam District in the past which said that our territory was included in the concession permit (HGU) of PT MA”. In the case of PT AGU, community members expressed a common frustration about a lack of follow-up from the local government: “During the meeting in October 2012 it was agreed that a team [of local officials] would come to the location [to collect facts] related to the land conflict and farmers, but in reality there has not been any follow-up” (Radarbarito, 2012). In the case of PT KMP, community members stated that “we hope [mengharapkan] a firm stance from the Sambas Regency Government regarding this long-standing issue. Due to the history in Sambas Regency to this day, the Sambas Regency Government has never dared to take a firm action against violations committed by the company [engaged in] the expropriation of community land. We claim our land back” (Tribun Pontianak, 2018).

A somewhat special example concerns the conflict with PT SBAL—the case with which we started this article. To pressurize PT SBAL the community had made use of an election campaign visit of President Jokowi in late 2018 to extract a promise that he would look into the matter. Four months later, the community invoked this symbolic support from the president by staging a demonstration in front of the Provincial Parliament (DPRD) and National Land Agency (BPN) of Riau Province, where they stated that “we came here to collect the promise of President Jokowi. He promised that he would finish the case of land grabbing perpetrated by PT SBAL. This promise still rings in our ears (…) but until now, the promise has remained a promise. There is no proof [of action]” (Gunawan, 2019; JawaPos, 2019).

While such claims for government support are somewhat different from claims to land, they reflect a similar pattern. This similarity goes beyond the once more very polite language of communities ‘requesting’ and ‘urging’ their government. Here too we can observe an absence of a broader discourse about government duties or (its task to further) social justice. And again a legal discourse is absent. Instead, remarkably, community representatives tend to legitimize their claims by invoking social norms—such as the need to fulfil a promise (in the case of PT SBAL) or to implement a previous agreement (in the case of PT AGU). When communities demand the local government to end corporate violations (as in the case of PT KMP), they do not elaborate on what government regulations prescribe but rather use language like berani (dare) and tindakan tegas (firm action) which again appeals to social norms about desired behaviour rather than legal or procedural norms. With such statements, communities pressurize local authorities not on the basis of what formal procedures or laws might prescribe, but rather on the basis of prevailing social norms.

Claiming Fair Treatment

As we discuss in detail elsewhere (Berenschot et al., 2022a), a noticeable and worrying feature of palm oil conflicts is that they often lead to the arrest and imprisonment of community leaders. In the 150 conflicts that we studied, we documented 789 arrests involving 63 (or 42 per cent) conflicts. The prompt police action in response to minor or sometimes even fabricated violations of villagers stands in stark contrast with the tolerance of local authorities towards the (licence-) violations of companies. These frequent arrests often seem to take place at the behest of palm oil companies, as they serve to discourage protests and sap the mobilizational capacity of communities.

These arrests often lead to demonstrations of communities against the criminalization (‘kriminalisasi’) of their leaders. The statements made during such protests provide another interesting window onto the discourse driving land conflicts. Let us, for example, return to in the case of SBAL with which we started this article, involving 1500 ha of disputed community land. After organizing several successful demonstrations to demand the return of this land, community leader Dapson was summoned for interrogation by the local police. When Dapson refused to report to the police station, he was arrested and charged with sedition and inciting disturbances. In response, the community started to a minor occupation by setting up tents inside the plantation with signboards saying “Give us back 1500 hectares of land, drive PT SBAL away from Koto Aman” and (in reference to the above-mentioned promise of Jokowi and the foreign ownership of PT SBAL, “Mr. President, you were duped by Riau officials, Riau officials became foreign stooges”. During these protests, community leader Anton was quoted as follows: “The people of Koto Aman Village will continue to stay in this place until there is clarity on the land, and demand the Riau Police to release the (…) field coordinator, Dapson, who has been arrested and secured at the Riau Police, which has not yet been granted”.

In the case of PT Sintang Raya in West Kalimantan, villagers faced a similar challenge. In this case, a key community leader (the village head) had also been arrested after organizing several protests. This arrest prompted residents of the six villages surrounding the plantation to organize a big demonstration in front of the office of the district head. They demanded the return of the land, but also complained about the unfairness of the arrest of their village head. One villager was quoted as saying, “How can PT Sintang Raya, which does not have a permit, employ the law against our village head. Meanwhile, residents who want to file a legal process always end up losing. Obviously this is a form of oppression”. And another villager said, “We can’t fight back, because we're always being bullied. We can only cry in our hearts. That is why we ask for the protection [perlindungan] of the West Kalimantan Police Chief” (Pontianak Post, 2011).

A third conflict involving arrests of community leaders, concerns PT Sinar Sawit Andalan (PT SSA). In a hearing with officials of regional office of the Ministry of Law and Human Rights (Kemenkumham), Sofian, a community activist as well as a lecturer at Kapuas University, stated that since PT SSA started its operation, 60 villagers have been jailed after being accused of harvesting palm oil bunches from the disputed land. “Companies evict community rubber lands as if there is no law to take action against them, but if residents destroy oil palm plantations, the authorities are quick to arrest them, regardless of the juridical and social aspects”, said Sopian. “There are many things that have happened, there is kongkalikong [collusion] between the government and companies [which results in] the buying and selling permits, and the falsification of environmental impact assessments” (Post Kota Pontianak, 2015).

These remarks from villagers protesting against criminalization provide another illustration of the limited role of laws and notions of rights in the discourse driving land conflicts in Indonesia. These complaints concern very clear violations of citizen rights, as such arrests serve to prevent citizens from exercising their right to protests. Furthermore, these arrests seem to have questionable legal grounds likely made up at the behest of (and with bribes from) palm oil companies. Yet community spokespersons do not discuss these arrests in terms of violations of rights or laws. Instead, villagers either emphasize their powerlessness (‘we are always bullied and we can only cry in our hearts’ and ‘we ask for protection’) or they choose to highlight the double standards of local authorities who tolerate the frequent violations of palm oil companies while being quick to arrest protesting villagers.

With such emphasis on double standards, villagers do articulate a certain notion of procedural justice. Yet even such an argument they convey in a remarkably restrained manner: villagers are acutely aware that this differential treatment is often due to bribes from palm oil companies but rarely say so in newspapers. During our interviews such villagers regularly shared observations about how companies obtain the support of local authorities by paying regular ‘incentives’ as well as campaign donations (Berenschot et al., 2022a). Yet these observations are rarely aired publicly: we did not encounter such accusations of bribing in our set of newspapers, while collusive exchanges are only sometimes subtly hinted at. Sopian’s statement above—about the ‘kongkalikong [collusion] between government and company—is the most explicit reference to such practices that we encountered (and it is formulated by a relative outsider, a university lecturer). There are no direct accusations of corruption, nor do villagers demand that such practices are investigated. This reluctance to express such accusations is likely due to fear that such accusations might backfire and lead to harassment, lawsuits for defamation and even arrests.

In short, in response to the arrests and intimidations of community leaders we also do not encounter many indications of a rights-based discourse, and villagers remain relatively modest and restrained in the formulation of their grievances.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we used newspaper articles to analyse the discourse rural Indonesians employ to express their grievances against palm oil companies and local governments. Focusing on ten conflicts between palm oil companies and communities involving complaints about land grabbing, we focused on their formulations of three types of claims: the actual land claims, the claims for government involvement and the claims concerning the criminalization of protest leaders. These different claims all reflected a similar discourse. In contrast to the literature on ‘rightful resistance’ elsewhere (Kerkvliet, 2014; O’Brien & Li, 2006) and studies highlighting the strategic invocation of laws in Indonesia (Lund, 2020), we found that references to laws and regulations as well as citizen rights are relatively absent in the statements of spokespersons of communities involved in land conflicts. When the word ‘right’ was used, the term mostly referred to customary land rights. Furthermore, we found that such leaders rarely invoked notions of justice and fairness to substantiate their claims. Instead, interviewed community representatives more commonly invoked social norms concerning, for example, the need to fulfil promises or to address the helplessness of the community.

Similarly remarkable is the modest and polite tone with which community leaders formulate their claims. These villagers have many reasons to be angry: their land has been taken away, it takes years before their grievances are taken seriously, and local authorities tend to side with companies while companies regularly renege on their promises. And yet community representatives opt for rather polite requests to governments and companies to take up their grievances. The general picture that emerges from this study of newspaper statements is not one of assertive rights-claiming, but rather of a subtle playing on notions of social obligations.

We propose two explanations for this particular discourse driving palm oil conflicts. Firstly, both the modest tone and the relative absence of rights-based discourse should be attributed to the considerable power imbalance characterizing palm oil conflicts. Rural communities not only lack the financial prowess, the legal skills and the influential connections that palm oil companies have, they are also hampered by the weak legal standing of their land claims and, consequently, the unavailability of effective formal conflict resolution mechanisms such as courts, to address their grievances. Faced with such considerable challenges, the strategy that most rural communities adopt, revolves around getting both companies and local authorities to participate in informal mediation which, they hope, might lead to a negotiated settlement and improved monetary compensation for the loss of land (Berenschot et al., 2022a). The discourse that we described in this paper, is attuned to this strategy. Rural Indonesians are, by and large, not engaging in ‘rightful resistance’ because citizen rights, state laws and, hence, a rights-based discourse are, in this context, rarely effective tools to secure a favourable outcome. Instead, communities opt to adopt a modest, polite tone and avoid harsh accusations (of, for example, corruption) because the cultivation of the goodwill of both company representatives and local authorities is, in this context of relative powerlessness, perceived as more effective.

A second explanation for this particular discourse lies in Indonesia’s history. Both the 1965 genocide as well as the subsequent authoritarian New Order regime have cleansed political debate in Indonesia from sustained attention for issues related to social justice, equality and, relatedly, land rights. After 1965 there has not been a strong progressive movement to draw attention to such issues, while the propaganda disseminated by the New Order—with its emphasis on harmony and citizen duties rather than rights (Bourchier, 2015)—served to discourage the propagation of a discourse about, for example, what a ‘just’ system of land tenure and land rights might be.

The consequences of this history are observable in the discourse that we examined in this paper. Particularly since the fall of the New Order an impressive movement has been campaigning for agrarian reform (Bachriadi et al., 2013; Peluso et al., 2008). Yet our findings suggest that this movement has not been very successful in disseminating its ideas and discourse to rural communities. While palm oil conflicts offer plenty of reasons to frame grievances in terms of social (in)justice, we found that rural communities rarely formulate their grievances in this manner. Nor did we encounter broader notions of how and why Indonesia’s current legal framework related to land is unfair or undesirable. It seems that rural Indonesians do not have access to, and rarely hear about, a discursive repertoire that would allow them to present their grievances in terms of ideas about social justice. In that sense, the New Order lives on.