PLANTERS AGAINST PEASANTS VERHANDELINGEN VAN HET KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT VOOR TAAL-, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE 97 KARL]. PELZER PLANTERS AGAINST PEASANTS THE AGRARIAN STRUGGLE IN EAST SUMATRA 1947-1958 'S-GRAVENHAGE - MARTINUS NI]HOFF 1982 © Copyright 1982 by KoninklIjk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, Leiden, The Netherlands_ All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form. Printed in The Netherlands ISBN 90.247.6182.4 CONTENTS Introduction by Clifford Geertz VII Editorial Note XII List of Abbreviations XV List of Tables XVIII Chapter I The Negara Sumatera Timur and the Agrarian Issue 1 Chapter II The Republic of Indonesia and the Agrarian Problem 17 Chapter III The Indonesian Communist Party and the Agrarian Issue 30 Chapter IV The Agrarian Controversy in Sumatera Timur from the Time of Transfer of Sover- eign ty to the Tanjungmorawa Incident 47 Chapter V The First Ali Sastroamidjojo Cabinet and the State Commission for the Division of Estate Lands in East Sumatra (1953-1954) 83 Chapter VI Years of Mounting Frustration for the Planter (1955-1956) 110 Chapter VII The Nationalization of Dutch Plantations 147 Notes 171 Index 182 INTRODUCTION In social history, as in so much else, special cases often turn out to be the most deeply representative: Venice, Cairo, California. East Sumatra, whose evolution from commercial enclave to poli­ tical nightmare Karl Pelzer took as the subject of his last and finest work, is a most unstandard place. Nowhere else in Indo­ nesia, not even Central Java, did plantation agriculture develop so extensively, so resourcefully, so profitably, or so destructively. Nowhere else did Western interests and Indonesian ones clash so directly, harden so completely, and grow so unmanageable. Nowhere else did ethnic diversity, ideological contrast, and class difference crystallize into so convolute a form; nowhere else was local administration so thoroughly enfeebled by national politics; and nowhere else were the death throes of colonialism more clamorous, more visible, or more drawn out. It is Pelzer's great virtue to have seen all this and yet to have seen th at it exem­ plified a much more general process - the one that in dis­ mantling the East Indies assembied Indonesia. The beginnings of the story whose ending Pelzer tells here - the hapless struggle of the Dutch tobacco, rubber, tea, and oil palm growers to reestablish their enterprises in the supercharged political climate of revolutionary Indonesia - we re set forth in his 1978 volume Planter and Peasant, which traced the develop· ment of the East Sumatran plantations during the colonial period, and to which the present work, unfinished at his death, was originally designed to be the concluding section. From 1863, when Jacobus Nienhuys first came to East Sumatra to set up an experimental tobacco plantation of seventy-five hectares worked by a couple of dozen Chinese laborers imported from Singapore, to the eve of the Second World War, when the land formally allotted to commercial exploitation - Dutch, German, British, American - reached upwards of half a million hectares, the region was utterly transformed. By that time, more than sixty percent of the cultivated land was European controlled, three- VIn Planters against Peasants fifths of the population (itself quintupled) was javanese or Chinese, and the area had become the single most important source of export earnings in the archipelago - "the dollar land", as Pelzer, who is not much given to vivid statement, puts it, "of Indonesia". The changes he traced in that background work, which set the stage for the political pantomime he delineates here, were extremely diverse in kind. juridical changes in property law, technological changes in agricultural methods, economic changes in investment, marketing, and employment practices, political changes in authority relations, sociological changes in community structure, and cultural changes in self-definition proceeded along their separate courses, separately fueled. But they all converged in the end to a single crux, never neutralized and never resolved: land use. Seventy-five years of the most intense agrarian modern· ization produced the most classic of agrarian conflicts: determined enclosers vs. defiant squatters. The juridical issues - who had what sort of enforceable rights in what - were central to East Sumatran development from the beginning, and Pelzer gives more attention to them than to any other aspect of the matter, both in Planter and Peasant and in Planters against Peasants. The original granting of iII-defined, do­ as-you-will concessions by local rulers, with the nudging "ap­ proval " of the colonial government; the subsequent campaign by that government, conscience struck by what adventurism had wrought, to convert the concessions to properly drawn lease con­ tracts fixing rights in black-Ietter clauses; the Sisyphean effort to mediate between formalized Roman-Dutch concepts of real property and a host of highly particular folk-law views of prior claim and appropriate use that such a conversion entailed: all this formed the rhetorical frame within which "the agrarian struggle" took place, until populist nationalism provided another. If this sometimes lends a rather academical tone to Pelzer's discussion - all those briefs, directives, commentaries, codifications, and algemene beschouwz'ngen following one another into to oblivion of administrative history - and a sense of seeing things from the Governor's house, it is not because of a lack of feeling for con­ crete reality or some sort of partz" przs. It is a result of the simple fact that law and lawyers set, before the war and for a fair while after it, the general terms of public argument. In any case, the issues animating this clause and codicil dis­ course were anything but abstract, and Pelzer brings them out (again, some in this book, some in its predecessor) with biting Introduction IX clarity. On the technological level, there was the inherent con­ flict between labor-intensive plantation agriculture, particularly tobacco, and land-intensive shifting cultivation, which came to a head in a rising passion of debate over how much land the planters ought to leave to the indigenous population for sub­ sistence cultivation. On the economic level, there was the virtual­ ly exclusive reliance on international marketing, which led to an active dis courage ment (in the case of tobacco, to an outright prohibition) of small-holder involvement in commercial agri­ culture, and on imported labor, which led to a massive in flux of indentured workers, mostly Javanese. And on the politicallevel there was the peculiar three-cornered, he pressures me, I pressure you, you pressure him, bargaining relation among outback planters, petty sultans, and field-level administrators, which ex­ cluded the mass of the Indonesian population, indigenous and immigrant alike, from any role in policy making at all. By the time the J apanese invaded in 1942, growing mercantile crops on preempted land with articled labor had become an extremely difficult proposition. By the time they left in 1945, it had become an impossible one. Pelzer's concern in these final, broken-off pages of his work is to portray how the reality of this fact came at last to be clear to everyone - estate owner and civil servant, native ruler and nationalist politician, local farmer and intrusive laborer. The story of East Sumatra, violent, delusional, and Machiavellian by turns, between the end of 1946 when the Dutch returned and the end of 1957 when they were summarily dispossessed, is one of a gradually collapsing attempt to restore the unrestorable. The movement, beginning during the J apanese occupation but continuing after it, of thousands of squatters, most of them former estate laborers, onto the estates altered the whole nature of the land use issue. What had been a matter of allowing in­ digenous farmers to grow subsistence crops for a time under tight regulation on fallowed estate land became a matter of co ping with the occupation of large tracts of such land as private home­ steads by erstwhile field hands. The great migration, this one spontaneous, into the area, otherwise Muslim, of ambitious, well­ educated, Christian Bataks - Rhenish Lutherans, no Ie ss - from the interior highlands around Lake Toba as clerks, tradesmen, and minor professionals (as weIl as, to a degree, squatters too) which began in force right after the war and increased steadily thereafter, added yet another disturbing "foreign" element to the already explosive ethnic mix. The so-called "social revolution" of x Planters against Peasants early 1946, in which a large part of the Malay aristocracy was massacred and much of the rest of it imprisoned by Republican irregulars, destroyed the power of the native states. The rise of mass labor organizations, most of them Communist-dominated, provided for the first time a popular force of enormous con­ sequence. And the very Revolution itself introduced democratic concepts of citizenship and social rights equally inimicable to coloniallaw and tribal custom. The decade, 1947-1957, upon which Pelzer concentrates his attention in Planters against Peasants, was thus one ofthose times - more rare than the crisis-mongering nature of much of modern historiography would suggest - when one species of social order disappeared and other species formed. The Dutch attempt to reinstate the prewar legal regime in the federalist "State of East Sumatra" foundered in the face of ethnic conflict, class bitter­ ness, and nationalist radicalism. The efforts by the planters and the more accommodative elements in the Republic to remove the squatters and reenclose the estate lands led to a series of violent confrontations between estate tractors and hoe-waving peasants, to incessant maneuvering among highly ideologized peasant unions, social movements, and political parties, and to a string of standstill agreements with all the force of Mideast ceasefires. The growing militancy of Sukarno integralism - "one nation, one language, one people" - led to the projection of the East Sumatran conflict into the all-Indonesia stage.