Jakarta, Indonesia -- Frustrated by government restrictions on campus politics and by widespread apathy among their peers, a small group of Indonesian university students are trying a new approach to activism. Fanning out into villages across this rapidly industrializing archipelago, they are taking the lead in helping farmers protest the loss of their land to development projects.
The students’ effectiveness is uncertain at best, and their activism contrasts with prevailing trends at the universities. Some observers say the government’s strong distaste for campus activism has inhibited many people in higher education.
The student-led farmers’ demonstrations are springing up across the islands of Bali, Java, Lombok, and elsewhere in Indonesia. Typically, a band of students filters into a village where a land dispute has been brewing.
“We get to know the people there, so there is an emotional bond,” says Rinda Desianti, coordinator of the Student Defense Committee in Yogyakarta.
Then, she says, the students organize small groups of villagers to discuss protest tactics and review their concerns about fair compensation and relocation. The students also have been bringing farmers to Jakarta to meet with political leaders.
Student leaders say the protests are aimed at capturing public attention through the national press. In that way they hope to cast doubt on President Suharto’s development strategy, which they say does not include adequate consultation with the people affected.
Thus far the protests have resulted in few concrete gains for the villagers. In Indonesia, power is concentrated in the executive branch and the military, and the parliament is largely ineffectual. The farmers have used their own meager resources to come to Jakarta, usually making the exhausting trips by boat and bus. On returning home they have often faced tough questioning by the local authorities.
Response to the students among many of Indonesia’s non-governmental organizations, which have also tried to help the villagers become more self-sufficient, has been mixed. While acknowledging that students gain valuable experience in working with villagers, leaders of the organizations question the students’ impact.
“Usually the intervention of the students gives the farmers more courage,” says Kartjono, director of Bina Desa, a group involved in rural education. “The problem is, the students have no holistic design. There is no strategy for the benefit of the people. It is a very middle-class strategy-publicity.”
Aswab Mahasim, director of the Society for Political and Economic Studies, a Jakarta research institute, calls the students’ strategy “very weak.” Moreover, he says, “the prospect of a broader political coalition becomes less possible simply because the issues are too local.”
While that may be true, past government efforts to neutralize campus political activity seem to have left the current generation of student activists with few alternatives.
In 1974, violent student demonstrations against Japanese aid and Indonesian development policy led to the imprisonment of student leaders and a crackdown on the press. In 1978, after students demanded that President Suharto refrain from serving a third term, student leaders were again imprisoned.
After those upheavals, a new Minister of Education and Culture, Daoed Joesoef, imposed a controversial policy called “Campus Life Normalization.” Student councils were abolished, other student organizations were placed under strict control of university rectors, and on-cam pus activitism was banned. Mr. Joesoef, who is now chairman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a private Indonesian organization, developed the policy to stop political parties from manipulating students.
“The politicians wanted the students to become their soldiers,” he says. “I didn’t like that.”
After studying for more than eight years at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he received doctorates in economics and international relations, Mr. Joesoef says he developed a vision of the Indonesian university as a place where students concentrate on reading and writing, and scholars devote themselves to teaching and research.
Students should analyze political concepts before becoming active politically, Mr. Joesoef maintains. “The mind first,” he says, “then the action.”
Despite those ideals, “Campus Life Normalization” provoked widespread opposition and led to Mr. Joesoef’s departure from the Cabinet in 1982. But while the present Education Minister, Fuad Hassan, has a reputation for being more tolerant of dissent -- and a new system of student senates has been adopted -- the basic restrictions on student politics remain.
As a result, many Indonesian scholars point out, the universities today are largely places of student and faculty passivity.
“For the government, `Campus Life Normalization’ has been almost too successful,” says M. Amien Rais, chairman of the international-relations department at Gadjah Ada University in Yogyakarta. “I’m worried that campus life is so quiet. How can you expect new leaders when there is no creative life, no political thinking?”
Adds Dorodjatun Kuntjoro Jakti, associate dean of economics at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta: “We’re facing a new generation that doesn’t know about the protocol of building institutions. I don’t see any attempt to organize opinions.”
Says Sofian Effendi, director of the Population Studies Center at Gadja Mada: “One complaint of my colleagues is that it’s very hard to generate, or stimulate, student participation in class discussion.”
Mr. Effendi says a similar lethargy afflicts most faculty members.
Campus newspapers, which in the 60’s and 70’s were lively outlets for dissent, have also been tamed.
In 1985, faced with limited options for political expression on campus, students in Yogyakarta, Bandung, and other areas began forming off-campus “study groups,” where they eagerly took up critical writings on Indonesia by foreign scholars. Some of the works were banned by the government.
Later, however, some students spurned the small-group discussions as “elitist,” and most of the groups vanished after three Yogyakarta participants were imprisoned in 1988 and 1989.
Today in Yogyakarta there is a lingering sense of regret over the loss of the discussion groups.
Last October, the Suharto government imposed the severest sentence ever on a student leader. Bonar Tigor Naipospos, a master’s-degree candidate in sociology at Gadjah Mada, received an eight-and-a-half-year jail term for allegedly airing “communist” ideas in discussion groups and for promoting the banned works of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a novelist linked to the Indonesian Communist Party of the 1960’s.
Communism has been taboo in Indonesia since 1965, when a coup attempt led to a purge of suspected communists and their relatives.
Speaking with a reporter recently during a clandestine prison interview, Mr. Naipospos insisted that he had not advocated communism, but had merely called for critical thinking among his peers.
“Students are a trigger for structural change,” he said. “It’s not only a matter of changing the people in power, but changing the system -- in economics, politics, and culture.”
Mr. Naipospos’s friends among Indonesia’s minority of student activists have practical reasons of their own for getting involved with displaced farmers: By themselves, the students cannot muster enough support for their own rallies, nor can they turn to study groups or the campus press as outlets for the expression of activist philosophy.
Last year, in a move to liberalize the “campus normalization” policy, the Ministry of Education and Culture provided for the creation of student senates. But student leaders are skeptical.
“These senates only serve the purposes of campus bureaucrats,” says Ms. Desianti of the student committee in Yogyakarta. “They don’t represent student aspirations. They are only a means to divide the student movement.”
Harsja W. Bachtiar, head of the Education Ministry’s agency for research and development, says students are mistaken in their suspicion. “If they want to develop student activities,” he says, “it’s important to make use of the existing regulations, which provide for more academic freedom.”
Mr. Bachtiar adds that students in many provincial universities have accepted the new senates, but that resistance remains among students in Jakarta and other cities.
Other observers, however, say the new senates are unlike the relatively autonomous student councils of the 1960’s.
Back then, recalls Mr. Kuntjoro Jakti of the University of Indonesia, himself a former student leader, students who wanted to organize a campus activity simply had to make a “courtesy call” on the rector. Today the students “have to ask permission for everything, even issuing posters.”
Recently some students and lecturers at the Kristen Satya Wacana University got into trouble over a poster showing a giant caricature of military and government officials driving villagers off their land.
At first, members of the group were questioned by the police and the poster was banned. Later, two students from Satya Wacana were arrested and have been detained for more than a month.
Ashadi Siregar, director of a foundation-supported journalism program in Yogyakarta and a former student activist, says the government is determined to stop students from connecting with people.
Adds M. Amien Rais of Gadjah Mada: “The campus is supposed to be in the forefront, to give social criticism,” he says. “If the campus is dead, then the society is also dead. If we don’t begin to push the democracy, nobody will.”