JAKARTA, Suara Pembaruan Daily – October 12, 2004 – Weak coordination among government agencies has caused land issues in society to remain unresolved and has led to new conflicts. In addition to conflicting regulations, land issues have so far been reduced to administrative problems.

The ambiguity of policies and regulations has opened up opportunities for land mafia practices.

This was conveyed by the Director of Spatial Planning and Land, National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) Sujana Royat, at an International Conference themed “Land and Natural Resource Control in Indonesia Under Change: Revisiting Various Responses”, in Jakarta, on Monday (11/10).

According to Sujana, the weak coordination is mainly caused by unclear land regulations and policies. This condition results in the majority of land issues in society never being resolved.

“Every year, an average of 15,000 land cases occur in Indonesia, but only about 10 percent of them can be handled. This is due to weak coordination as it is not supported by clear regulations. Moreover, some bureaucratic leaders are not too concerned about matters outside their scope of duties, although they are closely related,” he said.

It is explained that there are currently 12 laws related to land issues in Indonesia, but they tend to contradict each other. For example, the Forestry Law with the Basic Agrarian Law.

Even worse, there are bureaucrats who limit land issues to mere administration handled by the National Land Agency (BPN). However, land issues require coordination between agencies and the interconnection of policies.

The team is coordinated by the Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs with the aim of facilitating interagency coordination in designing more comprehensive and simplified land management.

He said, Bappenas has proposed that all regulations be amended and a new regulation be drafted to govern land management, but this is difficult to realize.

Therefore, one of the regulations that still needs to be maintained is Law No. 5/1960 concerning Basic Agrarian Principles (UUPA). He also rejects efforts to revise the law which only reduces the regulation and leans towards land liberalization.

MPR IX

In the same place, the Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, Abdul Hakim Garuda Nusantara, also questioned the Decree of MPR RI No. IX/MPR/2001 concerning Agrarian Reform and Natural Resource Management. The MPR Decree, which is a political consensus of the reform era to refine land management policies, tends to be contradictory and has the potential to cause conflicts.

The Decree actually shows the failure of national leaders to produce a consensus in the field of land and should not be used as a basis for further land management regulations.

One of the recommendations from the Decree has given birth to a Draft Law on Agrarian Resources which has not been thoroughly discussed by the government and the DPR to this day.

Hakim also explained that it is necessary to further formulate that land-related violations are violations of economic rights over natural resources with the category of serious violations. He realizes that this discourse still needs to be operationalized so that it does not remain just an aspiration. (H-12)