Uma politics

Front matter

NUEL HORO, SH VEL HORO

An ethnography of democratization in West Sumba, Indonesia, 1986-2006

Jacqueline A.C. Vel

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

I Introduction Sumbanese election campaign 1 Making democracy work 3 Outline and arguments 6 Sumba in Indonesian context 7 Neo-patrimonialism in a democratic state 7 Widening world of the local elite 10 State, power and the forms of capital 10 Tradition and authority 12 Space and time 13 Individuals and networks 14 Political class 16 Uma economy and Uma politics 18

II Sumba and the state Sumba: geography and subsistence 23 Population 28 History of state formation on Sumba 30 State and Sumbanese Christianity 35 State as career: Umbu Djima and the forms of capital 41 The state as bureaucratic procedures 47 The state as economic sector 49 Social cleavage 51

Preface

Democracy cannot be implemented overnight. Democratization is more than ‘just’ the introduction of a series of policy measures or new laws in countries previously ruled by authoritarian regimes. Instead, it is a lengthy, contextualized and often unpredictable process in which elements of democratic regime according to plan or theory articulate with long-established patterns of governance and politics in a specific society. This book describes that process in West Sumba, in Eastern Indonesia and asks the central question of how local leaders exploit the opportunities created by changes in the national political context and how these changes are reflected in the specific stylistic nature of Sumbanese politics.

In Indonesia, on 21 May 1998 President Suharto stepped down from office, marking the start of a new period in Indonesian history in which the country would be transformed quickly into a democracy. Studies that describe the political history of this period show a sequence of the most salient features of what was first called ‘a transition to democracy’. The first studies centred on the financial crisis in 1998 and Reformasi (Budiman, Hatley and Kingsbury 1999) and concentrated on the end of the New Order and hopes for the future.

The reorganization of the regime caused uncertainty regarding not only who would be in charge nationally, but also in each region or district. Governors and district heads, unsure of support from the centre and local forces, used their new freedoms of speech and organization to voice their interests and grievances. Moreover, the economic crisis had impoverished many families and had forced the state to restrict the number of civil servants, resulting in intensified job competition and changes in the rules governing that competition.

The first three years after the demise of the New Order sadly became a period of widespread violence in Indonesia. Many instances of ‘small town wars’ (Van Klinken 2007) were described by researchers who had engaged in long-term studies of particular areas and now witnessed peaceful coexistence transform into inter-group violence. One general conclusion of these collected studies is that local elite had a large role in producing the violence and mobilized mass support by emphasizing religion and ethnicity. This type of political violence occurred in West Sumba’s capital town Waikabubak in

Preface

November 1998. There, Christians fought each other when ethnic sentiments were manipulated during a district power struggle.

Violence not only destroyed lives and homes, but also initial optimism about democratization. Scholars dropped the term transition and focused on the actual practices of local politics in different regions. In 2000, the political discourse focused on a new development: decentralization, as it was called from a central perspective, or regional autonomy, the current term employed in Indonesian districts. The devolution of decision-making power in many domains of governance and the creation of autonomous district budgets brought a radical change for politicians and bureaucrats at the district level. Studies about the initial reactions in these districts were published in several volumes. These cases reveal an array of opportunities for local leaders, including the creation of new districts, a process that occurred in West Sumba.

The academic volumes mentioned here are all thematically focussed and gather empirical data about various regions in Indonesia. Such comparative analysis enables thematic conclusions, but it does not connect the sequence of events in one context. From the perspective of local politics, declining authority of the New Order state, political violence, creating new districts and free elections are not separate subjects. This book describes this sequence and its main actors in West Sumba, presenting an ethnography of democratization. Watching the events of the last decade in West Sumba, one can see continuity in the persons who dominate the district political arena and in the image of the state as the main provider of salaried employment and the route to upward mobility. Conversely, changes appear in the style and direction of district politics, the increasing role of new actors like businessmen and political party board members, increased status of the office of bupati and growing public participation in politics.

When I was in Sumba in 2002, I decided to write this monograph. I have advanced the subjects and arguments that I present in chapters of this book in earlier papers and articles (Vel 1992, 2001, 2007, forthcoming), but they tell much more about politics in Sumba when analysed together, in a sequence, over a longer period of time and with more background than can be included in academic articles. This was my first reason to write this book.

My second motivation to write this book is presenting Sumba in academic literature differently from the image created by well known anthropological literature about this island. This book presents an analysis of local political tensions at the level of island-wide politics, rather than within the smaller world of the domain or linguistically defined ethnic group as was the case for most anthropologists who wrote about Sumba. This study, on the other hand, focuses on the interface between Indonesian national politics and modern Sumbanese political arenas, where the main players speak Bahasa

Preface xi

Indonesia, are relatively well-educated, have travelled to other areas and are usually proud being both Indonesian and Sumbanese. It is this mixture or articulation used in contemporary political practice that I try to grasp and that makes this book a different study about Eastern Indonesia.

I came to Sumba for the first time in July 1984. My husband and I were assigned to work for a development organization of the Christian Church of Sumba, and came to stay at least four years. As graduates of Wageningen Agricultural University we were both trained to be development experts, yet as soon as we arrived in our new home village Lawonda, we found that we were the ones in need of advice. Living in a place without facilities such as electricity, running water or wells, fuel, shops or a marketplace, we had to learn and participate in the local means of survival. Our neighbours taught us about reciprocity and the tricks of a barter economy. Meanwhile, the staff members of Propelmas, our development organization, discussed with us how our program activities could contribute to permanently improving the lives of the people in the area of central Sumba, where Propelmas was located. Much later, I wrote my dissertation about this experience and about the subjects that were most important for me at that time: The Uma-economy: indigenous economics and development work in Lawonda, Sumba (Eastern Indonesia) (Vel 1994). The chapter in this book about village politics is based on field data from the 1980s. It includes a case study and reconsiders arguments I advanced in an article published in 1992 (Vel 1992).

Six years later in 1990, we left Sumba after a week-long farewell party organized by the people of Lawonda, who had divided themselves into all kinds of practical committees for fetching water, cutting meat, receiving guests, pounding coffee, serving drinks, et cetera, with half of the village staying in our house day and night. After such a definite farewell — with many promises to meet each other in heaven — I felt I could not come back for a long time. It took until 1998. Two major events brought me back to Sumba at that time: the end of Suharto’s rule and my new position at the University of Amsterdam. My new colleagues, Willem van Schendel, Leo Douw and Henk Schulte Nordholt, motivated me to take up research in Indonesia in the field of modern Asian history, given that in May 1998, the month in which president Suharto stepped down, a new period in Indonesian history had begun. I was deeply curious to see what had changed lasting the previous eight years on Sumba and to assess how the changes at national level affected Sumba. I returned to Sumba in November 1998, when the Asian financial crisis engrossed mass attention, but in Waikabubak, political changes, rather than the economic emergency, caused feelings of upheaval and led to mass violence in the streets of this capital town.

Political changes were not the only developments that affected life in xii Preface

Sumba. Between 1990 and 1998 the network of electricity was expanded in West Sumba, and from then on people outside the capital town could watch television. The TV programmes became increasingly informative, and after 1998, during the period of Reformasi, they included open, public discussions about local and national events and politics. Two senior staff members of Propelmas had started their own NGO and in November 1998 they organized for the first time ever on Sumba a day of protest against domestic violence. These events exemplify the amazing transformation in the political climate of Anakalang, the small town close to Lawonda.

In 1999, the national parliament passed the law of decentralization in Indonesia, a new political configuration of the state that would greatly influence events in Sumba. From 2001 onwards, districts like West and East Sumba would be autonomous regions, with district budgets provided by Jakarta that the district government could spend according to its own wishes. In Sumba this meant a three to fourfold increase in the local government's budget. Two chapters in this book discuss the new opportunities provided by decentralization and their consequences. One such opportunity was the ability to create new districts. For example, a number of Sumbanese in Jakarta, Kupang and Sumba started a movement to create Central Sumba, and they dreamed about for their future kingdom. Yet, after three years of campaigning that did not bring direct success, attention flawed because the Minister of Domestic Affairs decided that all activities and decisions regarding new districts would be postponed until after the elections. From early 2004 until the end of 2005 local politics concentrated on the elections.

Every time I visited Sumba, my friends in Anakalang, Waikabubak and Waingapu immediately updated me on these new developments. Local politics had become much more exciting since the 1980s. During the New Order period, there were extremely localized politics in neighbourhoods or villages that were conducted mostly in traditional style; for example, conflicts were settled by ceremonial exchange and land issues fell in the realm of adat elders. Also during the New Order, the state was, overall, a top-down bureaucracy with flows of funds that would reach Sumba according to decisions made in Jakarta or Kupang. Since 1998, and even more since regional autonomy was effectuated and complemented by direct elections, the state has become localized and embedded in everyday society. The local elite — landed aristocracy, higher state officials and church leaders — of the New Order has now expanded into a larger political class. It consists of about 10 percent of the population in Sumba who earn their livelihood from state resources, through salaries or through assignments they get from government institutions, and their relatives who share their households. They have a high standard of living, and build new houses and facilities in the capital town and along the main roads of the island. The majority of the population is excluded from this

Preface xii class that controls the state’s resources, and as a result they have only very limited access to the benefits of regional autonomy.

With decentralization, government policies have the potential to be adapted to local circumstances. A published example of such an effort with regard to Sumba is the study by experts of the National Statistics Service to identify contextualized poverty indicators (Betke and Ritonga 2004). Eight years after my dissertation was published, the book suddenly became popular in Sumba since it was one of the only academic books about the island that was potentially useful for policy makers hoping to situation their policies within a localized framework. In Waingapu, the growing number of students at the Wira Wacana Christian School of Economics (STIE Kriswina) — a branch of the Satya Wacana University in Salatiga — convinced me that the audience for books about culture, economics and politics on Sumba is increasing. This was the third reason to write this book, although I realize that the academic and foreign language will limit Sumbanese readership.

The last reason is a personal debt owed to my best teacher of Sumbanese politics, Gany Wulang. He was our oldest colleague during the years in Lawonda, and had over 25 years of NGO activist experience. When I was in Anakalang in February 2003, he challenged me to start writing about what he called ‘the black economy of Sumba’. Convinced that events on Sumba could only be understood by analyzing the dynamics of the black economy, he had started to collect data and write about illegal logging, deals between police, traders and state officials, and corruption. In March 2003, he passed away and imparted the mission to write about back-stage Sumbanese politics to others, including me. I hope this book begins to fulfil that mission and inspires foreign and Sumbanese scholars, state officials and activists to take up this subject and look beyond the normative, using a contextualized approach to understand and respect Sumbanese culture.

Acknowledgements

This book has been over 20 years in the making, if I start counting from my first field notes about power struggles and elections. So many people have contributed through their stories, comments, and conversations that it is impossible to acknowledge them all properly by name. I want to thank all who shared their thoughts and knowledge about Sumba with me during the period we lived in Lawonda, and afterwards, from 1998 until 2007.

Henk Schulte Nordholt, Willem van Schendel and Leo Douw encouraged me when I started working in their Modern Asian History group at the University of Amsterdam to continue my research on Sumba. Through many informal discussions and by co-teaching courses with me, they taught me to see events from a historical and political perspective. This made me see Sumba in a different way than when we were engaged in rural development work. I am very grateful to them. I want to thank Willem van Schendel and Mario Rutten for giving me the opportunity to do the research in Sumba which has subsequently formed the basis for writing Chapters V-VIII. Supervising Johan Bokdam for his MA thesis and field work in Sumba was one of the nicest parts of my work during the last years I worked in Amsterdam, because Johan showed great diplomatic style in his field research among parliament members in East Sumba. Thanks to him for sharing his results and analysis with me.

I thank Frans Hiisken for asking me to be one of Argo Twikromo’s copromotors. Argo’s research in East Sumba deepened my knowledge of a very traditional part of the island. Argo turned out to be a great colleague, a Sumba enthusiast and researcher, and I want to thank him for the many discussions and joyful trips together in Sumba, Jakarta and in Yogya.

In Sumba, so many people helped me to create this book by telling their stories about local politics, inviting me to their homes and offices, discussing the issues for hours and preparing food and drinks for me and my companions, and I would like to thank all who are not mentioned by name here. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Ibu Dorkas M. Riwa, Wiyati ws. and Gany Wulang, Jonas Siahainenia, I.G. Made Raspita and Sofia A. Djuli, Pak Ande, Manasse Malo, and last but certainly not least to Pak Siliwoloe Djoeroemana, his daughter Dhani and her husband Stepanus Makambombu.

xvi Acknowledgements

Beginning in 1984, my research in Indonesia was sponsored by the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands (Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland), Wageningen Agricultural University, the University of Amsterdam, the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Modern Indonesia Program of Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden, and the Van Vollenhoven Institute of Leiden University. To all these institutions I am most indebted. I presented parts of the chapters of this book at various seminars, workshop and conferences, organized by the Department of Agricultural Law of Wageningen Agricultural University, the University of Leiden, the KNAW-SPIN! research program ‘Social security and social policy in Indonesia’ in Nijmegen and Amsterdam, the Indonesian Institute of Science (Lembaga IImu Penelitian Indonesia) in Jakarta, Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies in Leiden and Jakarta, the KNAW-SPIN research programme Indonesian-Netherlands studies of Decentralisation of the Indonesian ‘Rechtstaat’ (negara hukum, rule of law), and its impact on ‘Agraria’ (INDIRA) in Jakarta, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, and International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden. I want to thank the institutions and the convenors for inviting me, and thank all the participants at those events for their valuable comments and suggestions.

For many years the following people have been significant mentors, commenters, colleagues and friends who helped me in the process of writing this book: Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann, Adriaan Bedner, Johan Bokdam, Siliwoloe Djoeroemana, Maribeth Erb, Ireen Hoogenboom, Webb Keane, Gerry van Klinken, Roald Maliangkay, and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Their comments improved my analysis and text considerably.

Heartfelt thanks go to Janet Hoskins and Gerry van Klinken for their perceptive readings of the completed manuscript and suggestions for revision. I also owe thanks to reviewers and editors of parts of the book that were published as articles: Benedict Anderson, Joshua Barker, Franz von Benda- Beckmann, Deborah Homsher, Ireen Hoogenboom, Eva-Lotte Hedman, and Gerry van Klinken.

Alice Wright, Jonathan Zilberg and Harry Poeze (the latter of KITLV Press) receive my thanks for polishing the language of the manuscript and making the last corrections, and Marjan Groen for taking care of the lay out.

Finally, I offer thanks to my husband, Laurens van Veldhuizen, and my sons Roel, Micha and Sofian. From the very beginning and even before 1984,

7 Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences) Scientific Programme Netherlands-Indonesia.

Acknowledgements xvii

Laurens was my best friend in discussing anything about Sumba. Whenever I could not remember why I was working on and writing this book, he reminded me and encouraged me to do so, and created the domestic sphere in which writing this book was a joy. When we all went together to Sumba in 2002, our sons stimulated us by asking many open and often critical questions which made us rethink many issues concerning Sumba and to explain them to a next generation audience. Their comments make my work stronger.

Some parts of this book were part of articles that have been published previously. I thank the editors and publishers of the articles listed below for permission to include a revised version in this book:

‘Umbu Hapi versus Umbu Vincent; Legal pluralism as an arsenal in village combats’, in: F. von Benda Beckmann and M. van der Velde (eds), Law as a resource in agrarian struggles, pp. 23-44. Wageningen: Agricultural University. [Wageningen Studies in Sociology 33].

‘Tribal battle in a remote island; Crisis and violence in Sumba (Eastern Indonesia)’, Indonesia 72:141-58.

‘Pilkada in East Sumba; An old rivalry in a new democratic setting’, Indonesia 80:81-107.

‘Creating a new district in West Sumba’ in: Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken (eds), Renegotiating boundaries; Local politics in post Soeharto Indonesia, pp. 91-120. Leiden: KITLV Press. [Verhandelingen 238.]

Introduction

Sumbanese election campaign

It was a month before the official beginning of the campaigns for the April 2004 parliamentary elections in Indonesia. I had just attended a session of election-lessons (sosialisasi pemilu) presented by the KPUD (Komisi Pemilihan Umum Daerah, Regional General Election Committee) in one of the rural districts of East Sumba. The KPUD chairman discussed the various rules of the election, such as, no campaigning outside the permitted period, no rallies in churches or government buildings (to demonstrate the lack of involvement of the clergy or local government), and no buying votes by political parties. He also explained why these were necessary for a truly democratic process.

On the same day, Lukas Kaborang who was a former Golkar district head and the current chairman and primary candidate of the PPDK (Partai Persatuan Demokrasi Kebangsaan, Party for Democracy and Welfare) organized a large meeting on the field next to Waingapu’s largest Protestant Church. The banner over the podium called the meeting ‘sosialisasi’, suggesting that this meeting was similar to the one I attended, which was organized by the General Election Committee to explain the electoral procedures. A band playing popular music opened the programme. Then Lukas Kaborang gave a brilliant speech to explain his party’s positions and why PDK was the best choice. He emphasized that PDK stood for ‘Partai Dengan Kristus’ (’The Party with Christ’) and, as if he were a professional Protestant minister, he preached about the farmer who sowed seeds (Luke 8:1-15) and used other Biblical parables.! The conclusion of each parable was that voting for PDK was the right thing to do for every good Christian, and therefore for every modern Sumbanese. After Kaborang’s speech the whole audience was invited to share a meal of rice and meat in order to stress the idea that ‘we are one big PDK family’.

This event combined elements of traditional rituals, Christian rhetoric

1 See the Bible: Mathew 13:1-9.

and New Order style and jargon to create an extremely successful campaign strategy in the contemporary Sumba, a region which is very much part of Indonesia, with a population educated for centuries in Christian schools and churches who are united by traditions and ceremonial gatherings. Lukas Kaborang? appealed to the rural contingent of his audience by recounting the parable about the farmer and sowing seeds, and stressing that he regarded agriculture as the main economic sector of Sumba. He also appealed to the urban youth by having the band open the programme. He had no reservations about using Christ’s name for party politics and about breaking KPU campaign rules. He was confident that his status as former bupati provided him with sufficient impunity. He had no reservation about representing a new political party either; he started his political career with the Christian political party Parkindo in the 1960s, was forced to switch to the ruling party Golkar in the 1970s because of his status as a government official, and he then retired as bupati in 2000. The new party PDK offered him its top position in East Sumba and the opportunity to compete with his main rival, the present bupati of East Sumba who was the first candidate on the Golkar list for the April 2004 elections.

The banquet at the end of the gathering was particularly effective in persuading those who might have doubts about Lukas Kaborang’s affections for Sumba, since he had lived most of his life in Kupang on Timor. A shared meal creates unity and appeals to norms of reciprocity. On the 5 April 2004 Kaborang was elected as a member of the district parliament in East Sumba. His party, which participated in the election for the first time, received six seats out of the 25 total, beating the party of incumbent president Megawati, the PDI-P (Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan, Democratic Party of Struggle). It became the second strongest party after Golkar. The PDK victory, however, was not a national phenomenon, since the party did not reach the necessary electoral threshold for the national parliament. The victory in East Sumba instead seemed more a personal success for Lukas Kaborang than a victory for the political party that put him at the top of its list.

This description illustrates how a very experienced politician in Sumba can ‘translate’ elements of democratization in local ways and symbols in order to make his efforts in trying to gain a powerful position in the district more effective. It also shows how democracy works in practice depends on how democratic institutions and elements are incorporated in local political culture.

2 I thank Johan Bokdam who interviewed Lukas Kaborang on 7 July 2004, and was willing to share this information with me.

Making democracy work

Since the end of the Cold War, democracy has been widely advocated all over the world. Democracy literally means ‘rule by the people’, and freedom and equality are its essential values.’ In the early 1990s there was considerable optimism that democratization would become a world wide phenomenon and bring to end all authoritarian regimes. According to Freedom House,4 between 1990 and 1995, the number of electoral democracies (defined as countries that choose their leaders in relatively free and fair elections) rose from 76 to 117 (Plattner 2005:5). Then, a period of global stagnation in democratization began. This was designated in scholarly debate by Larry Diamond (1996:20) as ‘the end of the Third Wave’, in reference to Samuel Huntington’s term for the rapid post-Cold War proliferation of democracies. Still, today democratization remains high on the agenda of international institutions like World Bank and IMF, as part of the ideology of neo-liberalism, which maintains that a market-driven economy with less state involvement would create new opportunities for citizens and more prosperity for countries as a whole. International institutions were actively involved in promoting democracy, convinced that it was the best possible system of governance and useful as a universal blueprint for good governance and that it could be applied to any country, from Cambodia, to East Timor to Afghanistan. Such an approach seems to be based on a modern version of the colonial model of the world in which new territories are seen as blank areas on the map in accordance with the myth of emptiness (Blaut 1993:15), as if there is no local tradition of governance at all. It reflects the optimism that leads diplomats and governance consultants to believe democracy can viably succeed all over the world.

In East Timor, which is not far from Sumba, installing democracy turned out to be not as easy as the United Nations had hoped. The East Timorese had been struggling for independence from Indonesian control and occupation for 24 years, and gained self-determnation in 1999. The questions about what form of government should the new nation have prompted the UN to send a large apparatus of staff to East Timor in order to establish democratic institutions and train locals in their operation. These outside experts introduced a completely new political system and did not pay much attention to the existing patterns of traditional leadership and governance, which has subsequently led to a clash of paradigms (Hohe 2002).

As a whole, Indonesia is also experimenting with a domestic process

3 In a democracy ‘political power is authorized and controlled by the people over whom it is exercized, and this in such a way as to give these persons roughly equal political influence’ (Pogge 2002:146).

of ‘installing democracy’. The activists, who in 1998 demonstrated against Suharto’s regime and demanded his resignation from the presidency, called for the end of the New Order regime and putting democratic reform at the top of the political agenda. Yet, as many other countries whose authoritarian regimes were replaced by democratic systems in the 1990s have found out, ‘toppling dictatorships is an easier task than building functioning democracies’ (Plattner 2005:6). What emerged in many instances of democratic transition was a wide range of democracies that differ on a qualitative scale, forming a grey zone of ‘pseudodemocracy, semidemocracy, electoral (or competitive) authoritarianism and illiberal democracy’ (Plattner 2005:6). Each country in democratic transition apparently has its own path of democratization, quick or slow, partial or more complete; the relevant question for these cases, therefore, is what factors shape that specific path? Historical, cultural and political factors have to be taken into account in answering this question. Thomas Carothers (2002) even argues that we have reached the end of the transition paradigm, questioning its basic assumptions. His critique argues against the assumption that the underlying conditions in transitional countries, such as, their economic level, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic make-up, socio-cultural conditions, or other ‘structural features,’ are not major factors in either the onset or the outcome of the transition process (Carothers 2002:8). Searching for a way to incorporate these structural features, he argues:

Aid practitioners and policy makers looking at politics in a country that has recently moved away from authoritarianism should not start by asking ‘How is its democratic transition going?’ They should instead formulate a more open-ended query ‘What is happening politically?’ (Carothers 2002:18.)

This book focuses that general question for one region of Indonesia, West Sumba. Since 1998 there has been many legal changes in Indonesia promoting democratization. Decentralization, which has brought about regional autonomy, and democratic elections are the most important changes that have been enacted through the end of the period covered in this book, January 2006. A single, national, legal process of democratization was installed in over 400 different districts (kabupaten) across the country. Each of these districts has its own local history of governance, its own cultural characteristics pertaining to notions of power and leadership, and its own wealth (or poverty) in natural resources. These all have a large influence on political interests. Indonesian districts also share a history of state intervention, first by the Dutch colonial state, and since independence, by the national Indonesian state, including the Suharto regime’s attempt to unify the governance structures throughout the country. With the enactment of law 5 of 1974 regarding regional government and law 5 of 1979 regarding village government, both district and village administration have been turned into uniform agents of the central government (Schulte Nordholt and Van Klinken 2007:11). One of the main demands of the reform movement in 1998 was to reverse this process and let people have local political participation.