/REPEAT//POLITICS-INDONESIA: ‘People Power’ to Some, Mob Rule to Others

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Kafil Yamin

JAKARTA, Aug 18 1998 (IPS) - Angry residents had long resented the head of their village in Kuningan, Sidaraja, who had parceled out key public posts to his children, cousins and nephew.

So in the months since Suharto’s ouster, which lifted a decades- long gag on dissent, they forced the chief to resign. “Suharto is not the only one to practice nepotistic leadership. Our village head did the same. So he should resign,” argued a resident in Kuningan, located west of the Indonesian capital Jakarta.

In Gintungreja village not too far away, protesters this month forced village head Hartoyo to stand under the sun from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., till he admitted to misuse of funds.

In Tangerang, also on Java island, hundreds of Babakan Asem villagers carried a big coffin in front of the regional administration office to protest the village head’s sale of 10,000 square metres of cemetery land for his own benefit.

M. Buang, the village head, had issued certificates for the cemetery land which was later sold to a businessman. Several public land had also been converted to his private property.

Across the Indonesian archipelago, powerful local chiefs in the countryside are finding themselves casualties in the tidal wave of ‘reformation’ spreading in the country. Indonesians are venting pent-up anger against those they believe to be abusive officials.

“Accusations against village heads can always be placed in the present political mainstream — the purge of what is popularly called KKN (the Indonesian acronym for corruption, collusion and nepotism),” said Djadja Ahmad Badja, head of the Village Council Bureau.

Disgraced village heads are often those involved in illegal sale of public property, mostly land. Some imposed illegal levies, raised funds illegally, committed graft or fabricated documents.

Thousands of village heads on Java island, for instance, have been forced to step down in recent months as communities reject leaders they believe are tainted with corruption or other misdeeds.

Many are believed, rightly or wrongly, to have benefited from or colluded with the Suharto regime or his ruling Golkar Party, whose grip on villages had made its political supremacy unchallenged for three decades.

In West Java province alone, at least 79 village heads have stepped down and thousands others are expected to follow soon, according to West Java Village Council Bureau. Other sources put the figure at hundreds. In many areas, elections have had to be held to avoid power vacuums in village administration.

Village heads are directly elected by the people, but this has not guaranteed democracy or total respect for popular will because their endorsement comes from regents, who are Golkar members.

“During the (Suharto’s) New Order reign, a village candidate could not win election before he pledged that he could secure at least 80 percent of votes for Golkar,” said Dr Kusnaka Kantaprawira, a sociological expert with Bandung’s Padjadjaran University.

“Village heads’ loyalty to Golkar had never been based on genuine political aspiration of the village community, but on money, career, and force,” he said.

And though the Suharto government in 1987 imposed the so-called ‘floating mass’ policy to insulate villages from excessive politicking, the reverse actually happened.

Golkar benefited hugely from this policy. Calling itself a “functional group” and a not political party, Golkar was free to forge political connections with village heads through the state bureaucracy — and thus tighten its grip on village heads. This cultivated dirty politics and bred corruption at the local levels of government, Kantaprawira believes.

Golkar’s support had cemented many village chiefs’ supremacy, but old ties to the party have become a liability, even a threat to physical safety, in the post-Suharto era.

Some in fact warn of excesses in the wave of reform sweeping Indonesia’s villages, saying calls for change could very easily yield to a thirst for vengeance that could bring about violence.

In the case of the Gintungreja village chief whom residents ordered to stand under the sun until he agreed to return a certain amount of his wealth to the people, Soeopriono, a member of the Cilacap legal aid team, said: “They (protesters) have crossed the line. That is a blatant abuse of human rights.”

In some cases, villagers have harassed defiant village heads through midnight phone calls, threats of violence and sabotage of village administration. A few weeks ago, hundreds of village heads in Banjarnegara regency marched to demand protection, saying they were innocent of accusations being hurled against them.

“They, who claimed themselves reformists, threatened my family, damaged our home and looted our belongings,” said Hermanto, head of Simbang village.

Endang Suhendar, senior researcher at the AKATIGA social research centre, says Indonesians are not surprised by the irregularities attributed to the village heads. The reason, he says, lies in a political culture that breeds it.

“From the very beginning, a village head candidate knows that he eyes the village head post for money. And people accept it by receiving payoff from the candidate they support,” he explained.

Village heads spent a lot of money to win a post that brings with it the privilege of having ‘tanah bengkok’ or sizable plots of land that they can rent to other parties or work themselves.

“So the first programme a village head-elect launches is to get back the money he spent during the election campaign. And the next programme is to enrich himself. The following programme is to (enrich) his family, relatives, cronies,” Suhendar said.

Some village heads are giving up so easily, saying they have invested too much in their positions.

Ara Hidayat, head of Lagadar village in the outskirts of Bandung, is accused of illegally selling public land and receiving bribes from textile factories to allow the illegal dumping of waste.

Said Ara: “If they want me to step down now, they should put 50 million rupiah (3,600 U.S. dollars) on my table now. That’s the amount I spent during the campaign.”