Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

upcoming investigation: Is it worth to pursue land
reform program that has required large amount of
people’s resources, like the Philippine case as compared
to Indonesia? Or, do Indonesian agrarian transformation
circles really need to rush for legal recognition of land
occupation? What kinds of follow-ups for agrarian
reform in each country could be properly addressed
accordingly?
Rule of Success?
Lessons learned for fruitful land redistribution remains
in the paramount importance of policy struggle in
public arena how to make state actors and society actors
to work together for it. Public practices refer it mostly
to either by putting pressures (administratively) to the
government actors to demand for their accountability,
and padlocking their venues, or legal battles against
landlords in the Philippine case or land controllers in
Indonesia. However, vehement pressures, once it is
timely, are unquestionably required for the success of
peasant social movement to be directly conducted with
occupying targeted area and other tilling-related activities
(planting, harvesting, dwelling), with more dangerous
risks. The consciousness to conduct such action would
only be possible after peasants affirm themselves that
they have every reasons, in all aspects of existing human
endeavours for justice (human, social, political, legal,
historical) that the opportunity for it remains open
albeit very tight and tedious, and that the risks are
fully managed and accounted carefully, employing all
possible human capacity, and certainly with readiness to
shoulder the consequences if really inevitable. However,
the minimum (!) efforts suggest that all this “rule” of
success matters only if the constitutional guarantees
have been set in advance as it is evident in the politics
of agrarian struggle of the Philippines. There is a
minimum opportunity with heavy emphasis that could
be put on continuous pressurising dialogues with the
relevant, direct authorities, while developing arguments
and group’s integrity.
Back to Essence of Agrarian Human Condition
The land certificates have been focused in the Philippines
as an important token for the struggle to get the lands,
as the Philippine case studies show, yet more clearly the
odd appears in the Tarlac case. This typical Philippine
phenomenon of land transfer may become a trap in
the whole agrarian reform process. In the meantime,
in Negros Occidental, I found a phenomenon that
although more land certificates have been available for
peasants, no organizing activities have been initiated by
any intervener. In fact, no agrarian reform programs
SOCIAL JUSTICE, HUMAN RIGHTS AND CIVIL SOCIETY
371
could be successful without those inevitable organizing
activities. While in Indonesia, I see the actual land
occupations without any single piece of recognition
from the government. Even many of them are not
certain about their past legal documents. They have
nothing but oral records from mouth to mouth of their
ancestors. Individual land certificates, in the midst of
open market, are prone to be sold away. Things get
worse for the customary communities in the outer
Indonesia. However, surprisingly, the peasants really till
the land and earn a living out of it, unless it is certainly
not worth living on the occupied lands. Indeed, the
working capacity of the NGOs anywhere—particularly
in this case it refers to the Philippines—is limited
compared to the millions of peasants in the countryside
who have not been intervened for organizing activities
and the follow-ups would have to be more selective.
Even so, this observation emphasises that the peasant
organizing activities, while framing social movement
with cultural bases (religion), remain the most important
for the implementation of agrarian reform anywhere to
ascertain the process. Any certificate could be surely
useful for supporting human socio-political life, but
only as far as the essence remains how to employ it in a
politically correct, good purpose-oriented manner.
Democratic Extent and Human Condition
The historical consciousness of the Philippine peasants’
struggle may not be easily transferred to Indonesian
peasantry. The range of political constellation of
each is quite different and sometimes incomparable.
Agrarian reform in the Philippines has much become
a tool of the government to gathering people’s votes
that the genuineness of the reform may be seriously at
stake. While in Indonesia, agrarian reform is formally
still rejected because the state simply tend to ignore
it while comparatively having less people’s capacity to
participate. Anthropologically, probably, the state in
Indonesia behaves like the pitiless big landowners in the
Philippines, while the state in the Philippines like the
unreliable politicians in Indonesia. The commonality
of ‘fortifying myth’, the guarantee for success, quoting
David Meyer (2001), for social movement likely
remains in the same manner of the injustice and rural
destitution. While imagining comprehensive agrarian
reform, Indonesia may nevertheless learn about how
political extent for democratic changes has been made
possible at least in the past that we would better maintain
than losing it. Once in 1971 peasants, students, labour
forces, teacher associations, and other pro-democracy
supporters were able to create mass mobilization chains,
padlocking arguments with the Senate in Manila for
over two months before the formation of the DAR.
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows