Frontier constellations: agrarian expansion and sovereignty on the Indonesian-Malaysian border

Abstract

Borderland regions in Southeast Asia have increasingly been reimagined as resource-rich, unexploited ‘wastelands’ targeted for large-scale development schemes for economic integration and control. Common and overlapping features of these regions are processes of resource extraction, agricultural expansion, population resettlement and securitization, and the confluence of these dynamic processes creates special frontier constellations. Through the case of the Indonesian-Malaysian borderlands, I explore how processes of frontier colonization through agricultural expansion have been a recurrent product of Indonesian development and security policies since the early 1960s. I argue that frontier development accelerates and intensifies when national discourses of security and sovereignty and state-led agrarian expansion intersect along national borders. The study generates new insights into how contemporary state-capitalist processes of agricultural expansion in the borderlands of Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia are justified through discourses of national sovereignty and notions of ‘untamed’ and ‘wild’ resource frontiers. I highlight the multiple meanings and notions associated with regions where resource frontiers and national borders interlock. The study offers an explanation of how frontiers as discursive constructs and material realities play out along national borders.

Keywords:

• agrarian expansion
• frontiers
• borderlands
• resettlement
• sovereignty
• security
• Indonesia

The author thanks Christian Lenz, Jason Cons, Zach Anderson, Christian Lund, Derek Hall, Tania Li, Nancy Peluso and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and insightful comments.

Notes

¹Data presented in this study were collected during 25 months of field research in the West Kalimantan borderlands in the period 2002–2012. Interviews were conducted with a wide array of local and national actors ranging from state officials, politicians, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), entrepreneurs and local elites (community heads and tribal heads) to local peasants and plantation workers. Interviews were triangulated with data from government reports and newspaper clippings. The field research was academically sponsored by Tanjungpura University, Pontianak, with permission from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and the Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology (RISTEK), Jakarta. The conclusions drawn here are not necessarily those of the above agencies; the author alone is responsible.

² Badan Nasional Pengelola Perbatasan or BNPP. Among the members of the BNPP are the Indonesian military commander, the national chief of police, the head of the State Intelligence Agency, the head of the Coordinating Agency for Surveys and Mapping and relevant governors. The home minister is assigned as head of the BNPP (Perpres 2010a).

³The same year, the agency received no less than 149 billion rupiah (USD 15.5 million) to coordinate the development of the border regions. The following year the government allocated 2.8 trillion rupiah to the project (USD 316.4 million), an increase of 2000 percent (Jakarta Post 2011a).

⁴On the island of Borneo, the Indonesian-Malaysian land border constitutes 1840 kilometers transcending the two Indonesian provinces of West and East Kalimantan.

⁵Dayak is an umbrella term for the indigenous population of Kalimantan.

⁶Decree of the Ministry of Agriculture, 1 November 1967 (HPH No. Kep/79/11/1967).

⁷Yamaker was also given 224,000 hectares of forest in neighboring East Kalimantan. Combined with the concessions in West Kalimantan, this added up to more than 1 million hectares (Obidzinski et al. 2007).

⁸Surat Keterangan, Dewan Pengerus Yayasan Maju Kerja, No. 165/Kep/P.Y/X/1980.

⁹Interviews with Dayak community heads, June 2007.

¹⁰ Badan Pengendali Pelaksanaan Pembangunan Wilayah Perbatasan, BP3WPK.

¹¹Interviews with Dayak community members, September–October 2002.

¹²During the Suharto regime, the military was encouraged to uphold a dual function (dwifungsi) as both defense force and social force in civilian politics (Crouch 2007). For example, in the province of West Kalimantan, all governors and district heads were appointed within the military. The military was present in all layers of society.

¹³“PT” stands for “Perseroan Terbatas” (Indonesian: Limited Liability Company).

¹⁴Interview with Dayak community head, March 2007.

¹⁵Interviews with district official, October 2002.

¹⁶Perhutani used to be a Java-based operation specializing in teak and mahogany (Peluso 1992).

¹⁷During the post-Suharto ‘illegal’ logging boom in the borderlands, the military, although not visibly, was engaged in the timber business, mostly receiving benefits for keeping their eyes shut (interview with timber broker, February 2003). See also Jakarta Post (2012).

¹⁸To understand such activities only as ‘subversive’, however, is to oversimplify the relationship between border communities and the state. Agents of the state, like the military, often collude to maintain such subversive activities because of the economic benefits they bring. As argued by Walker, ‘State policy itself may lend tacit support to some of these activities, not as a matter of official and publicly declared goals, but in its practice and uncodified modus operandi … ’ (1999, 105–6).

¹⁹The rapid and immense decentralization reforms put into motion in 1999 resulted in a huge number of new laws that were often inconsistent with existing legislation, and district governments often interpreted these new laws very differently from the central government in Jakarta (McCarthy 2004).

²⁰Interview with military officer, November 2005.

²¹During a visit to China in July 2005, the Indonesian President signed an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) for the construction of Chinese financed infrastructure projects along the border between Indonesia and Malaysia, the first step in the creation of the 1.8-million-hectare oil palm plantation corridor along the border to be reserved for Chinese, Malaysian and national investors. While the Chinese Development Bank would provide capital assistance to the Chinese companies, it was estimated that an additional 40–50 companies would be selected to invest, including the Sinar Mas group in partnership with the Chinese CITIC (China International Trust and Investment Corporation) Group (PTPN 2006).

²²Interview with district official, November 2012.

²³Interviews with Dayak community heads and environmental NGOs, February–October 2007.

²⁴Lesley Potter mention that strong NGO lobbying in local communities has long discouraged investors from expanding plantations into the border area. Securing land is considered too ‘complicated’ (Potter 2011, 183).

²⁵Interviews with Dayak community members, February–October 2007.

²⁶Interview with district official, March 2007.

²⁷PT Buana Tunas Sejahtera, PT Sentra Karya Manunggal, PT Khatuliustiwa Agra Abadi, PT Kapuas Indo Palm Industri, PT Sawit Kencana Kapuas and PT Citra Nusa Indonesia. Each company has a 20,000-hectare license (interview with district official, July 2007).

²⁸In the 2005 plan for the grand border plantation, the Sinar Mas Group was highlighted as a key player that could attract the required Chinese investment capital (Wakker 2006).

²⁹Interview with Dayak community member, August 2007.

³⁰Interview, district assembly member, March 2007.

³¹Interview with Dayak community head, February 2011.

³²Interview with Dayak community head, February 2011.

³³Interviews with Dayak community members, January–June 2011.

³⁴Interview with district official, June 2007.

³⁵A majority of the Dayak communities inhabiting the border hills still reside in longhouse settlements and practice swidden agriculture, practices considered archaic and anti-development by government and private companies (Ahmad et al. 2009).

³⁶Interviews with plantation workers and field observations, January–June 2011.

³⁷Interviews with Dayak community members and district military personel, January–June 2011.

³⁸Interviews with District military personnel, March 2011.

³⁹Interview with Dayak customary head, May 2011.

⁴⁰Interviews with Dayak community members, January–June 2011.

⁴¹The Dutch colonial government first introduced transmigration from densely populated islands like Java to low-density areas in order to provide a reliable workforce for their plantation schemes in the outer islands like Sumatra. It has been applied in a similar way by successive Indonesian administrations ever since (Hardjono 1988).

⁴²Simultaneously with the incursion of military ‘transmigration battalions’, more than 70,000 rural Chinese Hakkas occupying stretches of the West Kalimantan borderlands were accused of being communist sympathisers and forcefully resettled away from the border (Soemadi 1974). Similar resettlements of Chinese Hakkas took place on the Malaysian side of the border (Yong 2006).

⁴³Interviews with retired military personnel settled on the border, February–October 2007.

⁴⁴Interviews with Dayak community members, February–October 2007.

⁴⁵In the previous year, 2005, a research unit from the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration published a book on a development model for transmigration in the border regions accentuating national security and plantation development (see for example Puslitbangtrans 2005).

⁴⁶KTM = Kota Terpadu Mandiri.

⁴⁷In 2012, the first 361 families were settled along the West Kalimantan border as part of the transmigration program (Kemenakertrans 2012).

⁴⁸For a discussion of the KTM transmigration schemes in Central Kalimantan see Potter (2012).

⁴⁹The district of Kapuas Hulu is one of three pilot sites in West Kalimantan of 10,000 hectares each already gazetted for the KTM (interviews with district officials, October 2011).

⁵⁰Examples of recent mega-schemes along the West Papua border include the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate (MIFEE) (Ito et al. 2011). Furthermore, military transmigration schemes have a long history in the West Papua borderland as part of military ‘territorial management’. The schemes involve both retired and active members of the armed forces and their families. They are buffer settlements, used to quell West Papuan separatist movements and their access across the border (Budiardjo 1986).

Additional information

Michael Eilenberg is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology in the Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on issues of state formation, sovereignty, autonomy, citizenship and agrarian expansion in frontier regions of Southeast Asia. He is the author of At the edges of states: dynamics of state formation in the Indonesian borderlands (KITLV Press, 2012). In 2011–2012 he was a Visiting Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, and in 2013 a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California, Berkeley. Email: [email protected], web: www.eilenberg.dk