Jakarta – Some 1,000 Indonesian farmers on Tuesday rallied peacefully in the national parliament complex here to demand land reform and the return of farmlands forcibly taken over by the Suharto-era government.
"Return our land that has been forcibly taken over by conglomerates," read a banner waved by the protestors from the Union of Indonesian Farmers.
They also urged authorities to release fellow farmers arrested over land disputes and said the state was still intimidating them in several areas in Central Java, West Java and Sumatra. "Stop intimidation and violence against farmers," the protestors said in a statement.
The reforms demanded by the protestors include freedom to organize, fair distrubution of farmlands, freedom from both civilian and military intimidation and protection from "capitalists." The protesters also demanded that the People's Consultative Assembly, the country's highest lawmaking body, draw up a land reform bill when it convenes for its annual session in August.
Under the 32-year rule of former president Suharto, state and private companies linked to military officers and politicians often used force to obtain land at cheap prices.
Suharto was forced to resign in May of 1998 amid political and economic upheavals. The Suharto government also branded as communists those farmers who stood up for their rights by protesting and forming unions.
Some 300 of the protesting farmers had earlier in the day picketed the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) building to voice their demands. One protestor at Bappenas, who identified himself as Sayuti, said courts trying land disputes had always been biased in favor of the government and the financially and politically powerful elite.
"The verdicts have always sided with a small group of powerful people," Sayuti, a farmer from West Java district of Tasikmalaya, told AFP. He said most of Indonesian farmers own very small plots of land and many others were hired hands, cultivating other people's farmland for small wages.
The current government of President Abdurrahman Wahid has since conceded that there had been many cases in the past where the government had unfairly appropriated land. In May, Wahid ordered state companies to return 40 percent of any land currently under dispute with local residents, to the local population in the form of equities.