Hasyim Widhiarto, Jakarta – The government's effort to regulate land ownership dated back to 1945, soon after Indonesia gained independence from its Dutch rulers.
The aim of the policy at the time was to narrow the gap in land possession within society so as to prevent an individual owning implausible tracts of land.
The first attempt was made by the Home Ministry with a case in Banyumas, Central Java, when it scrapped the status of "tax-free" villages across the area. The villages, known locally as perdikan (free) villages, previously enjoyed exemption from land taxes normally paid to leaders of the local kingdom.
The late Selo Soemardjan, a University of Indonesia sociology expert, said such privileges were granted to villages whose founders had given "considerable service" to a kingdom or a sultanate.
With such a privilege, the offspring of the village founders also inherited the right to be the village head as well as possess most of the land in the area.
The policy to eliminate the privilege was then institutionalized a year later when then vice president Mohammad Hatta signed the 1946 Law on the Abolition of Tax Free Villages.
Under the new regulation, landlords in perdikan villages were required to hand over a half of their land to the government, which then distributed it to poor farmers.
Two years later, the government issued another law that authorized the distribution of land previously owned by more than 40 Dutch sugar companies in Yogyakarta and Surakarta, Central Java, to local farmers and villagers. The measures, however, did not stop there.
In 1958, the government introduced another land reform policy by issuing a law enabling local farmers to take over 1.15 million hectares of land on Java and Sulawesi, and redistribute it to locals. The land had been sold by Dutch colonialists in the 19th century to foreign private investors,
The law was then followed by the issuance of the 1960 Basic Agrarian Law, which finally abolished all agrarian laws made during the Dutch colonial period. Under the law, every farmer in the country, for example, was to have a minimum of 2 hectares of land.
The land reform and redistribution program initiated by the Old Order regime, however, ran sluggishly following the fall of president Sukarno after the attempted 1965 coup.
According to the National Land Agency (BPN), the government, between 1961 and 2005, could only distribute 1.159 million hectares of land to around 1.5 million families through various programs, including transmigration and the distribution of nucleus core estates.
"Perhaps it happened because his [Sukarno] successors considered the program to be leftist," Agrarian Reform Consortium (KPA) chairman Usep Setiawan said.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono finally relaunched the land distribution program in 2007, again with the intention of improving people's welfare. BPN head Joyo Winoto said the government would redistribute 9.25 million hectares of land to citizens during the 2007-2014 period.
"As many as 8.15 million hectares of land will be taken from the country's production forest areas while the remaining 1.1 million hectares will come from other types of land, including idle and deedless land," Joyo said.
Despite the ongoing land reform, the government, however, submitted in December last year a land acquisition bill to the House of Representatives – a move that has been condemned by many agrarian activists.
"Once ratified, the [land acquisition] bill will give more power to the government to evict more people in the name of public infrastructure development. It will, of course, become a major setback to our land policy," said Usep.
According to the KPA, only 45 percent of 85 million land plots in Indonesia had legal deeds, including land belonging to tribal communities, in 2008.