The openMovements series invites leading social scientists to share their research results and perspectives on contemporary social struggles.
The author's photographs. All rights reserved.Mbak Gunarti, one of the women
leaders of the peasant struggle of Kendeng came back last month to Indonesia,
in the island of Java where she lives among her Samin people, after having spent several
weeks in Germany. There she attended the May 1 protest holding the banner “Save Kendeng”. She
also met with the executive committee of the multinational company HeidelbergCement – the
world’s second-largest cement producer. It had claimed to be ready to build
Donald Trump’s Mexico wall, before withdrawing the offer[1].
In Indonesia, it is part of the cement group, Indocement, which along with
other on-going cement and mining projects has been destroying the region of
Kendeng, located on the northern coast of central Java. Teeming with subterranean rivers, mineral springs and
limestone, this region is a geological area, which supplies in water both the
locals and the greater region of Java[2]. Peasantry is
for them a spiritual practice that is aligned to a Javanese cosmology.
It is also where the Samin people live, a peasant community that has
resisted state rule since the colonial era through civil disobedience,
non-violence, and self-organization. Cultivating the land is part of their
identity. They claim it allows them to be self sufficient, independent from the
state or the system of exploitation. More than just work, peasantry is for them a spiritual
practice that is aligned to a Javanese cosmology – according to which humans
are responsible for constantly ensuring and readjusting an equilibrium between
the world and the cosmos. By working the land with love, they thus interact
with nature, ancestors, spirits and divinities. It is on such a basis that the
Samin people have established themselves since the nineteenth century as an
autonomous movement, free from state politics or ideologies[3].
“Save Kendeng”
For decades, they have faced serious discrimination
for not sending their children to school or for refusing to adopt any
monotheist religion imposed on people by the State. But today, the Kendeng
movement has given their spirit a new political relevance, as they’ve organized
peasants throughout the region, crosscutting through cultural differences on
common grounds of peasants’ resistance. The Samin people started struggling
against cement projects more than ten years ago, in 2006, when the national company
Semen Gresik set up a plan to establish a factory in the district of Pati. They
obtained a first victory in 2009, when the entrepreneurs finally decided to
“postpone” their industrial project. But in 2014, the national company started building
a new factory in Rembang, another district of Kendeng, under a new name – PT Semen Indonesia. That’s when
the Rembang peasants joined the struggle.
It has since then attracted a great deal of attention
for its self-managed organization and independence from NGOs. Artists,
intellectuals, and activists from numerous backgrounds have come to support the
movement while learning from the people who make it up. In the age of
globalisation, this land struggle also became a cultural resistance that
reinvented traditions and built new imaginaries through arts and spirituality.
Punk musicians – such as the famous band Marjinal – started
composing songs based on old Mother Earth prayers. Islam became reinvigorated
by Javanese mysticism, allowing people to give new meanings to their religion
that contest dominant frameworks. The Kendeng movement has thus become a kind
of anti-capitalist ontology that renews Samin teachings in global times.
That’s also what the filmmaker Dandhy Laksono showed
in his film “Samin versus Semen”, which was screened in 10 German towns during
Mbak Gun’s visit in Europe. There, she campaigned alongside local activists to
“Save Kendeng”. The screenings were accompanied by numerous protests, where
people put their feet in cement to
express their solidarity with the Kendeng struggle. This powerful and
theatrical action has indeed become the symbol of the movement, which performs
new forms and methods of political resistance.
Women
performing resistance
The women of Kendeng first caught attention when they
protested in front of the Presidential Palace in 2016. For a week, they sat
down dressed in their beautiful traditional batik
clothes, with their feet buried in buckets of cement. Known as the
“ibu-ibu” – which means both “women” and “mothers”, they’ve embodied the
movement’s vision of non-violence and spiritual ecology. For a week, they sat down dressed in their beautiful
traditional batik clothes, with their
feet buried in buckets of cement.
These women put the emphasis on what they are
defending, rather than what they’re fighting against. Re-embracing their
responsibilities as mothers and wives, performing their bodies in the public
space made their struggle a public concern. It is a struggle for life and future
generations: how will their households survive if there is no more water? How
will they take care of their children and ensure them a good life?
For many years, the women were on a daily basis at the
forefront of struggle. In Rembang, they launched a permanent occupation – through
a system of rotation – of a protest tent set up at the entrance to the gigantic
industrial site. This reinforced solidarities within the communities, as the
women made the private political. The struggle entered into family relations
and transformed them. While the Kendeng movement didn’t aim to take on patriarchal
structures, the fact is that the struggle has enabled them to break down some
barriers and uplift certain norms through a sense of togetherness. The women
also made the tent feel like “home” – a place where people cook, eat, sleep,
sing, pray, discuss and invent new ways of thinking. It became the door to
another world, where the impossible is made magic.
While embedded in everyday concerns, the women gave
the struggle a mystical dimension. Their performances contributed to creating a
stage in reality which bridges the sacred with the profane. Their protests in
Jakarta alternated between everyday conversations, light and joyful, with
prayers, chants and tears – as if their performances gave women the possibility
to go beyond their individual beings, and tap into the collective and symbolic
body of Mother Earth. These women put the emphasis
on what they are defending, rather than what they’re fighting against.
Once, they blocked the road leading to the gigantic
industrial site, with a sit-down by the tent. Face to face with the
authorities, they started dancing and chanting together, calling out to the
powerful spirits of nature. Another time, they unbuttoned their shirts. Speaking
to us, one of the women recalls how in Javanese traditions, women expose their
breasts to put spells on people. The consequences were immediate: some
policemen got fired; others had accidents, one even died.
The struggle of Kendeng has also been violent. A few months ago, in March 2017, Bu Patmi
(Mother Patmi), who had been involved since the very beginning, died during a
protest in Jakarta. For the second time, peasants cemented their feet: this
time, the women along with men and activists. When Bu Patmi removed her feet
from the cement, she felt dizzy and nauseous; the blood had coagulated. Her
death sparked great emotion throughout the archipelago. From the island of
Sumatra to Papua, numerous organisations of women, workers, peasants, students
and indigenous groups manifested their solidarity with Kendeng by putting their
“feet in cement” as well. Such an action revived the memories of the far too numerous
deaths and other oppressions that haunt Indonesia’s contemporary history.
Reclaiming
democracy
For a while, an alliance with the president Joko
Widodo – “Jokowi” seemed almost within reach. “He’s like us”, said one the
peasant, while wearing a tee shirt with the face of the president, like a new type
of Obama. Jokowi had campaigned on a break with past politics and the heritage
of the New Order regime (1965-1998). Boasting about his peasant origins, he
claimed to speak to “the people”. Once elected, he also made it possible for
people wearing sandals to enter the Presidential Palace. “He understands
us. If we wore shoes, we would look like
clowns”, the peasant also explained. On
the walls of his wooden house, with furniture he had carved himself, one could
see a photograph capturing a memorable moment: in August 2016, when the
peasants sat at the table of the president, who promised them that he would
cancel the industrial plant in Rembang. In February
2017, he implemented a new law, which re-legalized the construction of the
cement factory.
It was a first step towards a victory which should
have happened in October 2016 – when the Supreme Court suspended the construction
permit of the enterprise PT Semen Indonesia, as it violated the environmental
protection laws that designate the Kendeng region a “geological area”. The
governor of Central Java, Ganjar Pranowo, first accepted this decision. But in February
2017, he implemented a new law, which re-legalized the construction of the
cement factory. In the meantime, a “pro-cement” nationalist group set fire to
the tent in December. It was in the context of such injustice that the peasants
protested last March, in front of the President Palace. Jokowi received Mbak
Gun – the woman who was in Germany last month. But this time, he shifted responsibility
for the Kendeng case to local authorities.
Mas Gunretno, the Samin leader of the movement – also
the brother of Mbak Gun – told us: “We are not struggling against the state,
but for our freedom”.
But when the state starts infringing on their freedom,
they answer back. They reclaim democracy, as embedded in the unfinished story
of decolonisation. In a vehement letter addressed to the president, the
peasants wrote collectively last March 2017:
“Mister President, when we protest in villages, in
provincial capitals and in the country’s capital, we are always bothered by
threats and violence. We really are ‘orang desa’ (country people), far from big
cities. Maybe it’s hard for you to imagine that we work close to the earth,
outside and sweating from morning until night.
When we come now to protest in front of the
Presidential Office or the National Palace, we are circled by the police, the
army and officers – who spy on us and shoot us one by one. We feel as if we
were wild animals that had to be captured so they wouldn’t do any harm (…) But
this building is no longer that of the Dutch East Indies, Mister President.
This old building, which we have reached, is now a symbol of Indonesia’s
independence. We are citizens who are very proud and worthy to be peasants,
Mister President.”
They added:
“Mister President, we know that the majority of
government employees are at your service, as state functionaries. However,
those who have been disturbing our lives and despising our human dignity,
breaking the unity of our peasant people in the Kendeng mountains, and blame us
as if we were bad people – those are precisely heads of governmental offices, functionaries
of the highest rank, university professors with the best education. Most of
them know the law, yet it has become the law and its jurisdictions that have
been betraying the people”.
Here we see the central idea that the “people” know
more about what they need for their country than do the experts and technocrats
that manage it.
Freedom of the
mind
Since the beginning of the
movement, one of the challenges has been to prove that the construction of the
cement factory is illegal and based on falsified data. Environment policies
require that industrial projects be validated by the Environmental Impact
Assessment (EIA) – which in Indonesian refers to AMDAL (Analisis Mengenai
Dampak Lingkungan). But in the case of Rembang, this report produced false
information. As early as 2014, the commissioner of the National Commission of
Human Rights (KOMNAS HAM), Muhammad Nur Khoiron declared that this was a
violation of human rights. He also underlined the national dimension of the
problem: “Conflicts between local populations and enterprises that follow AMDAL
agreements don’t only occur in Rembang, but also in other regions”[4].
Facing this reality, the
Kendeng peasants built alliances with several groups of environmental
organisations, scientists and lawyers. They also engaged in a series of
geological explorations, in order to scientifically refute the legitimacy of
the AMDAL report.
This was also the occasion to
venture into the discovery of their territory. Using headlamps, cameras and
hand phones, one of the missions was to descend 20 metres into a cave in order
to find an underground river, while filming the performance. “The struggle
taught us to do so many things”, said Mas Joko Priyanto who also leads the movement.
Their quick thinking and willingness to learn gives full meaning to the Samin
saying, according to which: “Nature is our school, and we are all the
professors of one another.” “Nature is our school,
and we are all the professors of one another.”
In a similar way that the Samin children do not attend
an official school, the education of the Rembang peasants involved in the
struggle rarely goes beyond the elementary level. Yet when we meet them, they
reveal a deep wisdom and understanding of the world, through which they
distinguish their intelligence from a scholarly or institutionalized knowledge.
Here, culture isn’t an individual property, nor a title that serves as an added
value in the marketplace of power and economics. Culture is something alive,
which circulates, gets reinvented and strengthens everyday relationships. The
Kendeng struggle has helped to amplify this, allowing many talents to develop
according to different skills and personalities. While they keep working in the
field, people have become filmmakers, spokesmen, mediators, communicants,
illustrators, and teachers.
In that way, their movement reveals how science acts
as a battlefield, polarizing two opposing visions. The peasants teach us a
freedom of mind and a reappropriation of collective intelligence, which breaks
through alienation and grows with the world. While they keep working in the field,
people have become filmmakers, spokesmen, mediators, communicants,
illustrators, and teachers.
With the world
Before concluding, I’d like to recall an anecdote.
Last year, in August 2016, soon after the peasants first met with the
President, we were spending a joyful evening in the “tent”, at the entrance to
the industrial site. More than 90% of the factory was already built, and the
mountains were already widely destroyed by the roads, the gigantic plant and
the nearby mine.
As we watched, late at night, the ongoing,
back-and-forth movement of trucks that were actively building the factory, the
Kendeng struggle suddenly seemed impossible. What could they do, facing the
inexorable power of capital and time? As I was focused on watching the trucks,
Mas Joko Priyanto changed the direction I was looking in. He pointed to the sky filled
with beautiful stars, then to the rustling jungle. I understood that they have
the world of nature with them, and that makes them stronger than anyone. In
some way, this movement happens in a space and time of endless possibilities.
Now finished, the factory was originally supposed to
be inaugurated in April 2017. We are now in June, and the peasants are waiting
for the results of a final environmental report. People say that this time, the
scientific team should be objective, and expect that Jokowi will make his final
decision based on the report – which should one again prove the Rembang factory
to be illegal. But 5 trillion Indonesian rupiahs (about 376 million dollars)
have already been invested in the gigantic project, sprawling across 850 hectares
in the middle of the forest. The peasants keep repeating that they’ve struggled
against the project from the very beginning, and that such an amount is nothing
compared with the damage that will be caused in the future. The entrepreneurs
have on their side led a campaign saying that the factory would create more
jobs and respect green standards of globalisation. The “people” know more about what
they need for their country than do the experts and technocrats that manage it.
It is impossible to know at this moment how the
situation will evolve in the coming months, but it’s under pressure. In April 2017,
the former intelligence chief Sutiyoso, a retired three-star army general, was
appointed the top commissioner of PT Semen Indonesia. Meanwhile, the peasants
keep struggling with the same constancy. For them, such a project is simply
impossible because it violates the very principles of the world order. And they
will continue their struggle to the very end, with their bodies and souls. As
Bu Murtini told us: “I’m always ready, at any hour of the day and of the
night”. With an unshakable and mystical confidence, they often claim they are
not scared of death. But we must also get ready for the worst-case scenario. Forced
displacements and violent conflicts due to land grabbing or the opening of
gigantic industrial sites have become common in Indonesia. They have already
killed so many people, whose names have been erased from our memories. “Rembang melawan, Rembang menang” – Rembang struggles,
Rembang wins.
As we are writing these
lines, the peasants of Rembang are building a new spot that will replace the
tent, this time made of bamboo. On Facebook, we read “Rembang melawan, Rembang
menang” – Rembang struggles, Rembang wins. In some way, the ongoing struggle is
already a victory in itself. That has also been the way the Samin people have
never lost a battle, throughout history. They’ve always been able to readjust
and find new strategies to defend their land and spirit. The Kendeng movement
is a new challenge in global times.
Note: An earlier and longer version
of this article was published on May 15 2017 in French “Les pieds dans le
ciment: la lutte des paysans de Kendeng” on the website Mémoires des Luttes.
[1] « Who will build
Trump’s long promised border wall ? » published on March 05 2017,
http://www.dw.com/en/who-will-build-trumps-long-promised-border-wall/a-37816935
[2] « Dirty
Cement : The Case of Indonesia » by Anett Keller and Marianne
Klute, first published in the German edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, 13 October 2016. An English version can be found
on : https://th.boell.org/en/2016/12/09/dirty-cement-case-indonesia
[3] « The Samin Movement and Millenarism », A
Korver, 1976 first published in : Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 132 no: 2/3, Leiden, 249-266.
Available on line.
[4] “Komnas HAM: Pembuatan Amdal
Pabrik Semen di Rembang Langgar Ham”, Kompas.com,
December 2 2014.
How to cite:
Sakasi, A. (2017) In Indonesia, the peasant struggle of Kendeng , Open Democracy / ISA RC-47: Open Movements, 11 July. https://opendemocracy.net/alice-sakasi/in-indonesia-peasant-struggle-of-kendeng
