Jeremy Wagstaff, Legok – The inhabitants of this flyblown hamlet are angry. They are angry about rising prices, the lack of jobs, and lingering government corruption, says village headman Effendi bin Musa. They are even annoyed with the ineffectiveness of Mr. Effendi himself, he concedes. But what really made the feathers fly was the price of chickens.
Last month, several hundred villagers, including some children and pregnant women, descended on the Cempaka Pam poultry farm on main street and spent the day looting. They waded across paddy fields, pushed down the main gate and climbed over wobbly fences, then made off with an estimated two to six chickens apiece, the farm's foreman says.
The reason? The farmowner looked like he was going to break with tradition, Mr. Effendi says, and not distribute cheap chickens and eggs ahead of an annual religious festival. "I sympathize with the people," the headman says, and "besides, I don't want to become a target myself."
Sweeping phenomenon
This may look like a strictly local squabble, far removed from the big-city sit-ins against President Habibie in Jakarta, and last month's killings among Muslims and Christians on the eastern island of Ambon. But it is part of a sweeping phenomenon in Indonesia's countryside that suggests social breakdown there is crossing a new threshold. Nationwide, police tick off a list of cocoa plantations, shrimp farms and teak forests that have been raided in recent months, over issues such as disputed land ownership and perceived heavy-handedness by officials. In central Java, one priest reckons that every plantation in his parish has been plundered.
Incidents like the Legok spree have ramifications echoing in Jakarta, an hour's drive from the chicken farm. The countryside is home to nearly half of Indonesia's work force. It is also home to some of the few industries – cocoa and palm oil, for instance – that are surviving and sometimes thriving amid the economic crisis.
Of course there have been angry outbursts in the countryside before. Last July, some 2,000 hectares of East Java coffee farms were looted, forcing farmers to appeal for military protection (farmers blamed local gangs). And earlier last year, a group of farmers in the mountains of West Java invaded a golf course and planted banana trees and cassava; a decade earlier, they had been evicted from the land. But those early incidents were relatively isolated.
Traditionally, villagers are slower than city dwellers to take law into their own hands. For one thing, it is hard to go on an anonymous looting spree when everybody in town knows you. But it is more than that. For decades, by controlling government jobs and spending down to the lowliest decisions, the old regime of former President Suharto maintained rigid control over the fabric of rural life. Jakarta had a hand in nearly everything: Choosing the village headman, getting villagers to use cement instead of mud in building their homes, even what kind of rice they could plant. The result: an obedient community steeped in resentment.
Now that fabric is coming loose. "People were bitter before, but now they feel stronger. Power has gone from the top and has been released everywhere, " says Indonesian anthropologist Bambang Rustanto.
Nationwide disintegration
The disintegration is already having nationwide effects. Along Java's main northern highway, so many trucks have been robbed while passing through the rice fields and villages bordering it, that police are under orders to shoot suspected hijackers on sight.
It is also changing the way villages like Legok work. Village headmen – an elected post that is part mayor and part government watchman – have been kicked out of their jobs by the hundreds by dissatisfied villagers since former President Suharto stepped down last May. In the district of Tangerang, around Legok, for instance, the homes of four headmen have been attacked in the past month alone.
Mr. Effendi says he hasn't felt those kinds of job pressures. He still walks proudly through the village, swapping greetings with locals and patting their children affectionately. But he is feeling the pinch. For example, he notes that villagers often traditionally look to him for financial help. But his main source of official income (a 10% commission on any land sales in his village) is drying up. No one has exchanged land in the past six months, he says.
"People see me as someone who can solve their problems," says the 34-year-old father of three. "I'd like to help, but I can't, as I have to survive myself," he says. "I'm confused."
When things do get out of hand in the countryside, it is usually provoked by something minor. In Legok, farm foreman, Arimun (who like many Indonesians uses only one name), got the first whiff of trouble when locals started hanging around his gate ahead of the festival of Idul Fitri, a key Islamic date when a month of fasting ends in elaborate feasting. The 3,000 or so inhabitants of Legok and two nearby villages were accustomed to receiving chickens cheap, since the factory – the only village business that employs more than a handful of people – was set up 20 years ago. "They started yelling at me, 'When will you start selling us chickens? If you don't we'll attack the farm,' " Mr. Arimun recalls.
In the early hours of the day of the spree, off-duty policeman Sgt. Sonani, who moonlights as a security guard at the chicken farm, turned up outside the front gate at the request of his boss. The presence of the stocky man with the gold wristwatch and tinted glasses would usually have been enough to intimidate residents. But this time, witnesses say, it didn't help.
When one youth – no one seems willing or able to say who – decided to scale the two-meter brick wall, the dam broke. "It was the one guy that made the others follow," says Mr. Effendi, who that morning had decided to take up a position at a food stall across the mud-track road.
Free-for-all looting
With that, it degenerated into a free-for-all for much of the day. Sgt. Sonani was left sprawling in the dirt after being jostled, scratched and heckled.
One of the few villagers to admit participating in the spree is Sobih, an out-of-work driver who says he joined only reluctantly. "From having my first-born to having my 13th child, I've not stolen a thing," he says in his house, a stone's throw from the farm. But "when I saw everyone coming out with chickens under their arms, I worried there weren't going to be any more to buy. So I helped myself to four."
Family members and neighbors crowding round the door nod sympathetically at his tale. But unfortunately Mr. Sobih, who looks at least a decade older than his 34 years, was too slow. Emerging from the farm around noon, he says he was stopped by Sgt. Sonani and asked to put down the chickens, which he did. He claims Sgt. Sonani gave him a kick anyway. (The policeman declined to comment, but other witnesses agreed with Mr. Sobih's account of the incident.)
The kicking galvanized the looters, several witnesses say. They resumed their spree in earnest, despite the arrival of a truckload of soldiers around that time. "They were still at it at four o'clock," Mr. Effendi says.
Mr. Arimun, the farm foreman, worked out that 1,450 of his 8,000 charges were missing. A month later police said they have made no arrests. "There were hundreds of people who stole our chickens. It might be hard to catch all of them," says one of the farm owners.
Still, everyone involved finds someone to blame. The village headman says the farm owners broke an unwritten contract to help the villagers, who Mr. Effendi says have had to endure the "smelly" farm. Mr. Arimun also criticizes his bosses – they were "arrogant," he says. But he also blames the villagers. "It's not because they're poor or starving. They're just lazy, and take advantage," says Mr. Arimun. He himself hails from another part of Java.
Good intentions
The farm owners blame themselves: They were too generous before, they reckon. "Our good intentions lead to crime," says one of the owners, who goes by the name of Johnny. He confirmed that cheap birds were being phased out this year.
Police take a more evenhanded view. "People aren't afraid of the security apparatus, as they will do anything to eat," says Jakarta police spokesman Lt. Col. Zainuri Lubis.
Yet it isn't that black and white, even in Legok. There isn't enough work for men like Mr. Sobih, who watches the trucks he used to drive rumble past him every day to a sand mine several kilometers down the road. But there are some jobs for young women. A few kilometers in the other direction, a factory that manufactures shoes for Nike just hired 1,000 women. It reinforces the message in several recent World Bank studies, which have suggested that Indonesia's rural areas may be better equipped to cope with the downturn, thanks to dollar-earning export commodities and dismantling of government monopolies on some agrarian industries.
A week after the Legok looting spree there isn't much left to see of the session: a few dented and vacant chicken coops, some fence planks askew, a number of chickens running around the neighborhood which may or may not have come from the farm, and plenty of feathers.
But there has been other fallout. Villagers now can buy five broken eggs for 1,000 rupiah (11 US cents) – before the riot they got only three – and the farm owners have drawn up a list of villagers deserving charity, Mr. Effendi says. "It should be enough to keep things quiet until next year," he says.