Land Mafias in Indonesia

ABSTRACT:

In Indonesia, “land mafias” (mafia tanah) proliferate, alongside mafias that cluster around other commodities and state functions. We analyze the composition, character, modes, and sources of resilience of Indonesian land mafias, noting similarities with formations elsewhere, especially India. While taking care to avoid reifying the category, we view land mafias as opportunistic networks, or assemblages, of diverse actors including land brokers, investors, lawyers, gangsters, bureaucrats, law enforcement officers, and politicians. Their goal is to harvest rents from the transfer of ownership and control over land. They feature two elements: first, reliance on coercion (not always physical violence but always entailing transfer of property without freely-given consent, often via fraud or manipulation); second, institutional amorphousness crossing the state-society boundary. We analyze four modes of land mafia operation, though their nebulousness defies easy categorization. In explaining land mafia resilience, we acknowledge Indonesia’s property boom as a driver, but note that the ubiquity of mafias points to a more fundamental explanation: a variety of state formation involving pervasive engagement by state actors in illegal behavior in collusion with wealthy private actors. Mafias are central to Indonesian state formation, rather than aberrations. Feedback loops that incentivize illegal behavior make land mafias difficult to eradicate.

KEYWORDS:

• land conflict
• mafia
• criminality
• corruption
• land administration

Introduction

One day in April 2019, in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta, two land dealers visited the house of an elderly woman, located in a high-class residential area, and offered to buy it from her. Before the transaction was complete, these buyers told the woman they needed to borrow her land certificate for the property, in order to prove its authenticity at the local Land Office (Badan Pertahanan Nasional, BPN). They promised they would transfer payment as soon as the office had authenticated the certificate. With certificate in hand, they instead secretly attained a purchase document for the land (Akta Jual Beli (AJB) Tanah) from a notary who was part of their conspiracy.¹ Soon after, they registered their “purchase” at the Land Office and obtained a new certificate issued in their own names. Next, they sold the woman’s house to another buyer, at a good market price. This was not the only case of fraud this woman experienced. She would have similar experiences with two other properties, before she realized that she was dealing with different individuals who were in fact part of the same conspiracy. She reported these cases to the police, in April 2019, November 2020, and January 2021.² It was only after her son, a former diplomat, deputy-minister, and spokesperson in the Yudhoyono administration (2004-2014), raised his mother’s experience on social media³ in February 2021, attracting the attention of the public and even of current President Joko Widodo, that the police responded with a proper investigation, resulting in several prosecutions.⁴ Those punished, however, were all non-state actors; none of the government officials allegedly involved in the case were affected.

For many journalists in the national media, this case was emblematic of the influence of the “land mafia” (mafia tanah) in Indonesia. The national police agreed, announcing that they had investigated thirty-seven similar cases since 2020.⁵ State officials in the National Land Agency said that by 2017 BPN had provided information to the police on 244 cases involving land mafias, and in 2019 reported sixty-four more cases.⁶ In fact, the BPN revelations show just how slow police work is, when compared to the rampancy of the manipulation. Even so, over subsequent years, ministers and other national leaders have made elimination of the land mafia a frequent theme. President Joko Widodo himself, for example, has described land mafias as a major impediment to his goal of ensuring that all landowners possess certificates proving legal title, and has called on officials to “clobber” (gebuk) them.⁷

In fact, land mafias are not the only type of mafia frequently identified as operating in Indonesia. It seems that mafias are ubiquitous in the country, with media focusing attention, from time to time, on the rice mafia, petroleum mafia, sugar mafia, oil palm mafia, beef mafia, cooking oil mafia, and fertilizer mafia, to name just a few.⁸ These mafias tend to cluster around trade in commodities in which the state plays a significant regulatory role, such as through subsidies, price controls, or import licenses. But there are mafias in other spheres as well, perhaps most famously the judicial mafia, through which litigants can use the assistance of case brokers (makelaar kasus) to bribe prosecutors and judges in order to fix court cases in their favor,⁹ a project mafia, which is clustered around procurement of public works contracts,¹⁰ and an education mafia that zeroes in on state schools.¹¹

“Mafia” (mafia), in the Indonesian context, not a rigorous analytical concept: it is a “category of practice” rather than a “category of social analysis.”¹² We should therefore be cautious about loading the term with too much coherence or reifying it. Even so, usage in Indonesia is largely consistent, with the term mostly denoting collusive networks that cross the public-private boundary (i.e., there is typically some abuse of state office involved) for the purpose of private profiteering and involve some element of violation or manipulation of formal rules. People invoke the term “mafia” when they wish to highlight these patterns of behavior, and to underline their illicit and illegal character, with the result that there is considerable overlap with cognate terms, such as corruption (korupsi) and collusion (kolusi).

Indonesia is not the only country in which people discuss the presence of land mafias. Similar phenomena are visible in many developing and middle-income countries, including Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, and Cambodia.¹³ Accounts of the land mafia in India (where the same term is widely used), parallel our analysis of the operation of Indonesian land mafia particularly closely.¹⁴ The overlap of criminality, politics, and economics in India implied by the widespread use of this term—Indian observers sometimes speak of a “Mafia Raj,” or rule by mafias¹⁵—also closely matches the Indonesian experience.¹⁶

This article departs from these starting points to address a series of question about Indonesia’s land mafias. We first examine the composition and character of land mafias, explaining how they differ from traditional mafias and from related groups such as land grabbers. Second, we explain typical modes of operation associated with land mafias, and third, ask why land mafias are so pervasive and seemingly so irradicable. Our analysis draws partly on cases covered by the Indonesian media, but also on the lead author’s decades of research and advocacy on land maladministration and land conflicts.

We argue that, as with similar land mafias in India and elsewhere, and as with the other mafias that proliferate across Indonesia, these land mafias are not in fact traditional mafias, in the sense that they are not coherent and hierarchical criminal organizations. Instead, they are amorphous and opportunistic networks that bring together diverse actors including land brokers, lawyers, government officials, law enforcement officers, investors, and politicians. The composition of a land mafia in one city or rural location will never be quite the same as another elsewhere, and they change and adapt over time. Land mafias are so fluid and changing in form that they can be described as assemblages, characterized as having structures that are “always open and provisional.”¹⁷ Nor is the basic business model of a land mafia that of a protection racket, as in a traditional mafia.¹⁸ Instead, land mafias are “coercive rentier networks” that seek to derive windfall profits from arranging the transfer of ownership and control over land.¹⁹

While the character of these networks varies greatly across time and space, two features are always present. In the first place, there is always an element of coercion, insofar as the mafia seeks to transfer ownership of property without providing market-rate compensation and without seeking the freely-given consent of the right holder. This coercion does not always involve physical violence or the threat of it—though that certainly can be present. Equally if not more common is an element of legal manipulation illustrated by our opening vignette. This can involve, for example, falsification of land titles or other documents, or simultaneously selling a property to more than one buyer. Second, the network always crosses the state-society boundary and engages actors who exercise authority within the state, for instance, in order to manipulate land records or provide protection (beking) for the property seizures taking place.²⁰

Finally, with regard to why this form is so pervasive, while we acknowledge that Indonesia’s property boom has been a driving force in the growth of land mafias—providing an incentive for their growth by increasing the value of the rents available for seizure—the ubiquity of the mafia form across numerous sectors of the Indonesian economy where there is an element of state regulation, in good times as well as bad, draws our attention back to viewing land mafias as indicative, above all, of a broad pattern of state formation that involves widespread collusion across the public-private divide and routine violation of formal rules.

The Mafia: classic and contemporary usage

The term “mafia” arose to describe groups of families who controlled territory and operated organized crime rackets in Sicily, emerging alongside Italian unification in the nineteenth century.²¹ Initially, for wealthy Sicilians, the mafia was “a new system of private protection for securing their land and property.”²² The mafia created a form of local order, using violence to defend wealthy actors’ economic interests against their rivals. More than simply taking advantage of the state’s inability to enforce order, the mafia also attracted elements of the state apparatus who became involved in the violent protection services they provided. Over time, the mafia “did not annihilate the State but rendered its apparatus subservient to … . vested interests.”²³ In the hands of the mafia, violence and crime became an industry.²⁴

To some extent, both the state and the mafia perform similar functions, namely providing services, especially security and protection.²⁵ Just as the state collects taxes in exchange for these services, the mafia does, too.²⁶ Because they operate in similar ways, and work in similar domains, relations between the mafia and the state apparatus can range between conflict and accommodation. State and mafia are often interconnected and mutually substituting.²⁷ Actors within the state apparatus can cooperate with a mafia, or turn a blind eye to it, in exchange for a share of the benefits obtained from the mafia’s operations.²⁸

If initially the core business of the mafia was providing protection to willing customers, this soon evolved into a true protection racket involving illegal collection of taxes, regardless of whether people targeted wanted protection or not. Later still, in Italy and elsewhere, mafia activity extended to legal sectors, from production to services, and trade to finance.²⁹ For instance, as mafia groups built links in the world of official politics, they became able to exercise control over public contracts, gaining access to public funds.³⁰ In short, a classic mafia operates in two worlds and along two separate dimensions: in the legal and illegal, and through politics and economic life. The unique characteristic of a mafia is not simply its criminality, but that it operates “in the border zones of public and private domains.”³¹

Traditional mafias, in the form of organized criminal gangs with political links and running protection rackets, still exist in many countries. In Indonesia there is a diverse ecology of groups of coercive actors, colloquially known as preman (thug/petty gangster)³² who gain much of their income from providing protection services or engaging in extortion through activities such as controlling parking, providing “security” at locations such as markets, transportation hubs, entertainment districts, and construction sites. Their activities also shade into the overtly criminal (such as gambling, prostitution, and narcotics) at one end and the legal (such as running construction projects or campaigning for political candidates) at the other. Typically registered as youth or social organizations, and sometimes serving as a major source of informal employment for young men, preman groups enjoy numerous connections with the state, including the police and military, as well as with politicians, who often turn to them to help organize their election campaigns and to provide security at events and muscle for intimidating rivals.³³ Land mafias often use preman groups to intimidate landholders and enforce property transfers, strengthening land concentration in the hands of property developers, plantation companies, and other purchasers of land.

Land mafias share similarities with and distinctions from traditional mafias. The greatest difference is that land mafias “are in the business of violating rather than protecting property.”³⁴ They extract rents from land transactions by coercively attaining land at discounted prices. But land mafias share much of the organizational porosity of traditional mafias, maintaining extensive subterranean connections to the worlds of politics and state authority, and operating freely across the private-public divide. State officials can be involved at almost any stage of land mafia activity, from providing information about targeted land and facilitating fraudulent land registration to forcibly evicting dispossessed landholders. Pervasive government corruption allows manipulation to occur at every stage. In fact, arguably the most basic function of the land mafia in the process of land acquisition is collaborating with public authorities to transform illegally acquired land into a legal possession. In some cases, it is government officials who act as the land mafia. Using their official authority and their unofficial networks, such officials can mobilize their subordinates in the state apparatus, as well as preman, to control the process of land acquisition for private gain.

Over the last decade or so, land grabbing has been a major focus of research both internationally and in Indonesia.³⁵ In the scholarly literature, the term “land grabbers” is used to refer to parties who gain control over land by enforced seizure, especially on a large scale, for various forms of economic investment and production.³⁶ Land grabbing is usually associated with activities such as mining, agribusiness, industrial parks, housing estates, urban commercial facilities, tourism, infrastructure, and energy production.³⁷

Land mafias function more like intermediaries, brokers, or agents who gain control over parcels of land to sell or transfer to investors in such sectors. They are thus often part of the land grabbing process, typically extracting rents from it, rather than ending up as ultimate owners.³⁸ Even so, for investors seeking land, using the services of a land mafia which acts as an intermediary often makes the acquisition process easier. It saves them from having to deal directly with the parties who own or control the land, and they avoid direct involvement in the violence and manipulation used to acquire it. The mafia can transform the status of illegally controlled land into a legal commodity, keeping investors’ hands clean. Meanwhile, much of the contentioius politics that occurs around land grabbing in Indonesia in fact takes the form of protest and resistance against mafia land grabs.

Land markets and maladministration

While the ubiquity of the mafia form in Indonesia suggests that Indonesian land mafias should not be viewed in isolation, we also acknowledge that particular features of land governance in Indonesia are conducive to their emergence. In the first place, and most obviously, the booming market for land—driven by industrial expansion, urban growth, plantations, infrastructure, and other purposes, has produced intensified commodification of land and growing absentee land ownership.³⁹ Numerous analysts have pointed to very rapid increases in land prices, especially in urban and semi-urban areas, over recent decades, albeit with occasional busts as well as booms.⁴⁰According to the Indonesian Investment Coordinating Board (Badan Koordinasi Penanaman Modal, BKPM), the price of industrial land in 2020 averaged USD 225 per square meter, higher than in the five Southeast Asian countries that are the country’s major competitors for foreign investment.⁴¹ The country’s land market thus provides ample scope for speculation and windfall profits, especially for actors with insider knowledge and/or access to authority over spatial planning, land licensing, or sales.

Another source of the land mafia is the rampant maladministration that has long been observed in Indonesia’s system of land registration. Research conducted by the Indonesian Ombudsman in the early 2000s, for example, revealed that abuse of power, actions taken without a legal basis, and arbitrary decision-making were all common forms of maladministration engaged in by bureaucrats in land offices and local governments.⁴² Numerous other analyses both before and since have repeatedly demonstrated that bureaucrats directly involved in the land administration system, as well as the officials and politicians who are their superiors, routinely engage in rent seeking by exploiting the complex bureaucratic machine that regulates land ownership and control.⁴³

The complexity of Indonesia’s system of land administration is another contributor to mafia activity. Indonesia uses a negative system (negatief stelsel) of land registration. In such a system, any information about ownership and control over the land will be recognized as legally valid, so long as there is no other legal evidence contesting that claim.⁴⁴ Documented evidence of land rights provide strong proof for a legal case, but these rights are not absolute, and may be contested by parties with rival evidence. The registration process is overseen by officials of the National Land Agency (Badan Pertahanan Nasional, BPN), who examine both juridicial evidence of land tenure (in the form of documents) and physical evidence (in the form of measurements and mapping carried out by Land Office officials, along with approval from owners of adjacent lands) before issuing a certificate of ownership. Juridicial evidence can come in many forms, including documents issued by the government prior to the enactment of current land registration regulations in 1961,⁴⁵ a deed of land sale-and-purchase made by an official public notary, an inheritance letter, a grant, letters attesting to land tenure written by village, sub-district, or district government officials,⁴⁶ or a court decision if the land has previously been the subject of a dispute. Corporations also need to show various location and operation permits issued by central or local governments, depending on the location and scale of the land use.

The very fact that there are so many forms of evidence of land tenure – and so many issuing authorities – facilitates abuse. In a dispute over land ownership or control, any party can challenge the rights of an existing landowner or occupier by showing contrary evidence. Then it is up to the Land Office or a court to decide to whom the right belongs. Competing claimants typically have recourse to a mulitiplicity of tokens and documents demonstrating their rights, the goal being to pursue a process of legalization in which claimants try to “bestow upon a rule or claim an air of legality.”⁴⁷ This system generates strong incentives for members of land mafias and others to engage in various forms of manipulation to obtain fraudulent proof of control or ownership over disputed land and to bribe judges or other state actors to reach favorable decisions.⁴⁸

At the same time, the land registration system is also vulnerable to abuse because it has produced a situation in which much land is owned or controlled by people who lack formal legal certainty or evidence of their rights. Part of the problem is that a negative system requires the holder to actively register their land at the Land Office, which is then supposed to check the validity of the evidence of the land rights being registered and conduct a physical inspection before issuing a certificate. The active role of the land registration officer in checking the validity of the land rights is frequently a source of maladministration, with such officers routinely bypassing procedures on behalf of land registrants who pay bribes.⁴⁹ Moreover, the process of registration is costly, with most costs (such as for surveying, mapping, and taxes) paid by the registrant, forming a barrier to registration for poor people.⁵⁰ The end result is that most landowners in Indonesia have not registered, let alone certified, the land they control and/or own.⁵¹ Without registration and certification, their land rights are very weak, making them vulnerable to targeting by mafias.

A related problem is that many landholders occupy land that is officially classified as state land (Tanah Negara). This situation is a legacy of the principle of Domein Verklaring (free state domain) that was part of Dutch colonial agrarian law. The Domein Verklaring principle stated, “all lands that cannot prove its private ownership [eigendom], is the domein [owned by] the State.”⁵² Postcolonial national agrarian law revoked the domein principle and replaced it with a state right to control (Hak Menguasai Negara) principle. This means that all lands which cannot be proven to be privately owned are under control of the state, and the state is expected to manage these lands for the purpose of achieving social justice and prosperity. But state officials frequently interpret this as equating to state ownership. The origins lie in history. While the colonial state did not recognize community lands (where rights were derived from customary law) as private property, it did recognize that traditional owners – whether as a community or individuals – had legal standing as the subject who held or owned the property (bezitter). But cadastral maps of land registration described these lands as state land (lands domein) without recording any of these community rights. Cadastral maps today still show no trace of the historical rights of local people in these areas, effectively facilitating long-term erasure of these rights.⁵³

Currently, around 160 million hectares are classified as state land, including around 121 million hectares which are classified as state forestry lands. Most of this land has been certified for commercial and non-commercial use.⁵⁴ The vast majority of this state land has been traditionally owned or cultivated by local communities for generations, but these communities have had great difficulties in registering these lands with private ownership status. The result is that many communities lack clear legal title to their land. Government officials at both the central and district levels can relatively easily transfer state land to other actors, such as plantation companies and developers. For decades, many of the bitterest land conflicts in Indonesia have been triggered by such transfers.

This combination of circumstances—a heated property market, complex registration procedures with multiple points of entry for would-be claimants, weak formal title over large areas of land, and a system of land administration long rife with abuse—produce a context conducive to organized mafia networks.

Land mafia profiles and modes of operation

Land mafias in Indonesia take many forms. Some are relatively permanent networks, while others are temporary operations that take advantage of a transitory opportunity. The former usually involve land brokers, businesspeople, and land speculators who cooperate with preman groups and state officials.⁵⁵ The latter usually occur when state officials opportunistically take advantage of their positions to gain inside knowledge of spatial planning, land use changes, or other opportunities to reap windfall profits by buying up land targeted for development.⁵⁶ In everyday life, members of land mafias are land brokers, property developers, businesspeople, politicians, bureaucrats, police and military officers, lawyers, real estate agents, leaders of mass organizations, and true gangster bosses. It is this fungibility that provides land mafias with the character of greatly varying assemblages of distinctive actors, networks, and behaviors. Even so, it is possible to identify several characteristic methods in the workings of the land mafias.

The first and the most basic mode, fraudulent acquisition, involves acquiring fraudulent but legally validated evidence of ownership or control over contested land. This can involve fraud in the purchase of a property, as seen in our opening vignette. A variant involves manipulation or bribery at the village level, in order to obtain proof of landholding from village government officials on behalf of people who are not actually the landowners or landholders.⁵⁷ This proof, typically documents of land holding issued either by a village, sub-district, or district government, is then used to process land registration at the local Land Office to obtain a certificate. Another variant involves collaborating with officials at the Land Office, who issue a land certificate while bypassing required procedures such as a physical inspection and presentation of juridical evidence.⁵⁸

Whichever of these mechanisms is used, the end result is that double or even multiple certificates can be issued for the same plot of land. These new certificates are often called “original but fake” (asli tapi palsu) certificates, or seritifikat aspal, referring to the fact that they are issued by the correct, authorized agency but without following the legal process.⁵⁹ The mafia then uses these certificates as proof of land ownership when selling the property to third parties. Of course, attaining these fake certificates would be impossible without the involvement of the corrupt land officers who issue them. According to research conducted by the Indonesian Ombudsman in the early 2000s, seventy-one percent of maladministration cases in land deals involved dispossession by the issuance of such certificates.⁶⁰

The second mode, court-sanctioned manipulation, is an extension of the first, in that fraudulent obtainment of aspal documents generally occurs but is accompanied by the mafia using the courts to obtain control over the targeted lands. The land mafia uses lawyers, relying not only on their legal expertise but, more importantly, their networking skills and connections in the legal profession to launch civil suits to gain control over land via court action. Such cases often begin in lower courts but can go all the way up to the Supreme Court. Apart from relying on skilled lawyers pleading their case in court and on aspal juridical proofs concerning the property, land mafias usually win by bribing judges and other court officials. In short, the land mafia connects with the judicial mafia.⁶¹ Once a court decision on disputed land is declared final and legally binding, it can be brought to the Land Office in order to proceed with issuance or change of a certificate.

It is not uncommon for such court cases to be mere performances, in which the land mafia concocts a case involving people who are not in possession of the land and then uses lawyers who seem to be on different sides (the plaintiff and the defendant) to “fight” each other in court. In such cases, all the mafia really needs is a final court decision leading to the issuance of a certificate that allows them to legally evict the people who actually live or work on the land—who are typically not even parties to the court case. For instance, a property entrepreneur who wants control of a plot of land might choose to sue not the residents, but some other party who claims to have control over the land but who is not in fact a rightful party, either. Whoever wins, the residents end up getting evicted.⁶²

A third mode involves direct and violent assertion of control over state lands.⁶³ If there are tillers present, they are intimidated or evicted by force. To expel them, the mafia mobilize their own or specially hired preman, or they rely on state connections to mobilize forces linked to local government officials, the police, and/or military units.⁶⁴ To attain recognition of their claims in such cases, mafias also cooperate with local government officials, land administration officers, and judicial offcers. One common pattern occurs when a district and/or provincial government decides to release or transfer lands that were previously under the control of a large plantation company for the purpose of resolving a land dispute with tillers. The land mafia use their political connections in government and in the local political elite to seek a share (jatah) of the disbursed land, despite not being a party to the original dispute. Once the mafia gets a share, they move to forcibly evict the land cultivators who actually have stronger claims over the ex-plantation land concerned.

Sometimes, the manipulation goes even further, with the mafia secretly mobilizing local people to occupy part of the targeted state land in advance of a legal decision on its status. These occupiers are like infantry units tasked with going ahead of the main force to establish a beachhead. The result is that, when a conflict occurs, the parties to the conflict include, on the one hand, a group of mafia-backed land occupiers and, on the other, the formal land holder, such as a plantation company. When de facto control over the land by the mafia is converted into de jure control with the issuing of the correct paperwork (e.g. after a court case), the mafia generally allows the occupants to remain on the land until either the mafia or the ultimate purchaser needs it, in exchange for compensation. As a result of such practices, it is not uncommon for two separate groups of occupants to assert rival claims over the same land, with gangster groups controlled by different mafias deployed to help each side.⁶⁵

In some cases, after they take control of land, developers/speculators/brokers/mafia will pressure local government officials to change spatial planning rules to allow their favored development projects to proceed.⁶⁶ Changing the spatial zone – for example from an agricultural zone into a residential, commercial, or industrial zone –increases land values. The huge profits that can arise as a result often means that rival groups of gangsters linked to separate land mafias will come into conflict.⁶⁷

A fourth mode, brokered acquisition, involves operations to control lands, either state or private, in which local land brokers play the dominant role. Numerous local terms are used to describe these land brokers, such as biyong (used in certain areas in West Java) and maclaren (used in parts of Central and East Java).⁶⁸ Land brokers are motivated primarily by the commissions they earn from land deals, and they often act as uncoordinated local agents by trading in insider information about impending land use changes and development plans. Sometimes, brokers are used as the agents or sources of information for larger-scale property developers who orchestrate land mafias.⁶⁹ At other times land brokers operate on such a scale that they constitute a land mafia themselves, using force, commiting fraud, and working with local authorities to acquire control over large areas of land before selling it off. The ultimate buyers are diverse, ranging from wealthy urbanites who want land in rural or suburban areas and property developers building housing estates to private corporations seeking to set up industrial projects and even government agencies building infrastructure.

If the targeted land is privately owned, land brokers will sometimes act as mediators between sellers and buyers (while often reaping windfall profits because of insider knowledge of impending spatial planning changes). When land acquisiton occurs on a large scale, it is more likely that intimidation and coercion will be directed at landowners to pressure them to relinquish their land. In such cases, the land brokers typically cooperate with local law enforcement officials, or they recruit and mobilize preman to put pressure on landholders. Often, land brokers are themselves gang leaders. If the targeted land is legally classified as state land, these brokers cooperate with the relevant government agencies or parties that are the formal landholders in order to get them to relinquish control, typically by providing compensation in the form of bribes.⁷⁰

In fact, it is also quite common that brokers using land-mafia methods are themselves politicians or local officials.⁷¹ Three recent prominent land deals, two involving private energy projects in Java and another involving an airport city project in North Sumatra, are examples of extensive involvement by politicians and other state officials.⁷² In the Java energy projects, land acquisition began with a number of zoning changes, which allowed politicians and government officials who had advance knowledge of these changes to engage in land speculation.⁷³ Through their henchmen, they bought community-owned land at very low prices, or took advantage of ongoing land transfers, before reselling this land to investors. Again, coercion often occurs in such cases, because government officials have relatively easy access to forces and resources they can use to intimidate local people to sell their land at a low price.⁷⁴ The airport city project in North Sumatra involved large-scale mafia orchestration of a regional development plan, spatial zone policy changes, reclamation of dormant plantation lands by military-owned economic institutions, and unusually quick responses to requests to certify the land being transferred to brokers. When landowners and users refused to give up their rights, police and military were deployed to evict them.⁷⁵

Such cases show that involvement of state officials in land mafias is often more systematic than a focus on manipulation of legal title at the point of issue, or on involvement of security forces in evictions, would suggest. State officials’ ability to manipulate spatial plans, or even simply to gain advance knowledge about changes in them, their control over state lands, their authority to direct budgets for infrastructure projects, and their multiple other sources of authority over land markets, often make them key actors in land mafias. Land acquisition for government projects is thus often especially attractive for land mafia activity because corrupt bureaucrats tasked with land acquisition can manipulate project budgets to purchase land well above market prices. For this reason, cooperation with land brokers and/or land mafias is standard operation in many government land acquisition projects.⁷⁶

The above descriptions are somewhat schematic and are certainly not exhaustive. In practice, it is possible to observe mafia methods that involve numerous variations in or combinations of mechanisms from the four modes sketched above. Such variations are of secondary importance: the most important thing to note is the interplay of interests and mutual support among actors from varied backgrounds, including land brokers, investors, businesspeople, gangsters, and government officials. By their nature, land mafias in Indonesia are highly amorphous, and typically engage with or consist of all of these elements.

The entrenchment and ubiquity of land mafias

Various explanations have been offered for the presence of land mafias, and of cognate phenomena, in Indonesia and elsewhere. Michaal Levien, for example, in his illuminating study of Indian land mafias, argues that “neoliberalism and land mafias are mutually reinforcing.”⁷⁷ He argues that India’s booming land market and the deepening class inequality generated by neoliberal policies have facilitated the entrenchment of land mafias in that country. For Tanya Li, the root of the pervasive mafia system in Indonesia’s oil palm planations is the pernicious political ecology of oil palm: “Indonesia’s plantations are routinely violent because of the forms of life they destroy, the resources they monopolize, the futures they preclude, and the set of material, social and political relations they enable and fix in place.”⁷⁸

The fact that mafias in Indonesia proliferate across so many segments of market activity and state life, however, suggest that we should not put too much weight on sui generis explanations for the land mafia. One such explanation, for example, might emphasize the design of Indonesia’s system of land administration. As we have indicated, certain features of this system—notably its potential to produce multiple sources of legal evidence of ownership—facilitate the operation of land mafias. But even if these features were to be improved by reforms, there would still need to be some element of state regulation of land registration which would likely be subject to manipulation and abuse. Likewise, while booming land prices certainly motivate land mafia activity, especially in and on the peripheries of urban areas, the fact that mafias proliferate in so many sectors of the economy, in good economic times as well as bad, suggests that there is a more fundamental feature of Indonesia’s political economy at play.

Some more generic explanations do hold appeal and point toward a more convincing account. Certainly, the fact that mafias so frequently form around nodes of state intervention into or regulation of markets suggests that explanations that focus on the role of the state are obviously highly relevant.⁷⁹ Social and political inequality are also key: Indonesian land mafias typically target the poor and facilitate accumulation by wealthy actors with political connections and power.⁸⁰ Indeed, they may be viewed as facilitating a form of primitive accumulation, with owners of capital collaborating with other elites to gain control of land, dispossessing less powerful actors who have prior and stronger legal claims.⁸¹ They do so in a context in which few powerful actors in Indonesia’s political system have incentives to defend or promote the interests of poor or marginalized groups, for reasons we return to in a moment.

Building on such observations, we argue that, fundamentally, Indonesian land mafias need to be interpreted as one part of a much broader pattern of state formation, in which state officials and wealthy private economic actors routinely collude across the state-society divide for the purpose of rent-seeking and economic accumulation. When doing so, they regularly violate or evade formal regulations. Asking what causes and sustains Indonesian land mafias is, in some senses, the wrong question insofar that it draws attention away from the wider ecology of which land mafias are just one component. Certainly, in a state such as Indonesia, “the involvement of state officials in illegal activity is both ubiquitous and a matter of public knowledge.”⁸² As we have shown, land mafias are connected to, and supported by, similar formations in other domains of state and economic life, such as judicial mafias, politically connected gangster groups, corrupt networks within the police and military, and the world of politics. They are part of a far-reaching ecosystem of state illegality.

Social scientists routinely struggle to describe systems in which personal connections and rent seeking proliferate, using an array of terms such as closed access systems, patrimonialism or neo-patrimonialism, patronage, clientelism, and corruption.⁸³ In the Indonesian context, several scholars have popularized the term “oligarchy” to depict the fusion of state authority and private wealth that has come to dominate the contemporary political order, with much of their work explaining how rent-seekers use public office for private gain.⁸⁴ The large body of work indicated by the proliferation of terms points to how commonplace the fusion of state power, private economic wealth, rent seeking, and informal networking are, both historically and in the present. Recognizing this helps us to view land mafias and cognate phenomena as relatively normal formations, rather than the aberrations or deviations they are frequently depicted as being by academics, journalists, and government officials.

Observing how land mafias operate as part of wider systems, moreover, helps draw attention to how such systems are sustained. It is not simply that the informal patterns of behavior embedded in land mafias and similar formations become normalized in each particular sector in which they operate. That is certainly the case, as much land mafia activity in Indonesia occurs brazenly and in the open. More importantly, the various inter-connected sub-systems interact to constitute a self-sustaining whole.

An obvious potential source of remedy for land mafia activity would be pressure for reforms emerging from within the political system, and from elected politicians in particular. The fact that Indonesia’s current president, ministers, and other senior officials have from time to time condemned land mafias indicates that politicians are not only aware of the problem but also have an inchoate sense of the potential political benefits they could gain from taking action to reduce mafia activity. However, there are strong countervailing pressures that arise from a blurring of the public-private divide deep inside the political system. In Indonesia’s highly clientelistic political landscape, politicians who wish to be elected find it difficult to avoid engaging in very costly political practices such as vote buying and other forms of patronage politics.⁸⁵ These practices blunt the appeal of programmatic politics, including campaigns based on serious endeavors to clean up the state bureaucracy. The massive costs incurred on such campaigns give an advantage to wealthy candidates, and drive others into the arms of donors, especially those who want to gain influence with the government to further their own economic interests. Members of land mafias, and the developers who benefit from their activities, have incentives to gain access to political power to further their profiteering. Politicians in turn need the economic resources that property developers and mafias can provide, as well as the grassroots networks that land mafia and related groups such as preman offer. Land mafia backing of politicians in elections is thus commonplace.⁸⁶

By the same token, bureaucrats in a system in which is it necessary to pay bribes to secure promotion or avoid postings to dead-end jobs also benefit from collaborating with land mafias. Police and military officers operate under similar systems of incentives, and the incessant fear that this or that land mafia has the backing of a powerful political or security figure is a further impediment to their elimination.⁸⁷ Politicians, bureaucats, and police officers who try to break out of these systems often find themselves alone, under-resourced, and unable to compete with their colleagues for electoral victories or promotions. Overcoming the land mafia, in other words, is likely to require much wider political, bureaucratic, and legal reforms because the roots of mafias are dispesed widely through the political system.

Conclusion

When they respond to public concerns about land mafias, or when they deal with actual cases, senior Indonesian government and law enforcement officials often single out individual acts of wrongdoing. For example, in their public statements, they often focus on land mafias when these attain land by force or deception.⁸⁸ Or they zero in on the practice of falsifying land documents and, therefore, on the presence of maladministration in land offices, among public notaries, or in village and sub-district government offices.⁸⁹ Often, they attribute these actions to the misbehavior of oknum—an Indonesian term that describes a person who, as an individual, abuses their office or deviates from their institution’s rules.⁹⁰ By depicting the problem in this way, officials draw attention away from the spread, penetration, and persistence of land mafias across varied levels, terrains, and legal and administrative arenas. Indeed, as we have alluded to above, the very use of the term “land mafia” often functions to underline the criminality and deviance of the acts so described, distancing them from the everyday worlds of business, politics, and state administration in which they are embedded.

We have proposed a different style of analysis in this article. While we recognize that there is acute maladministration in Indonesia’s land titling system, we see this problem not as being caused merely by design or implementation problems, and certainly not only by the malfeasance of isolated individual officials. Such problems are present, but maladministration in land management is linked to systemically corrupt behavior by many members of the land bureaucracy, law enforcement apparatus, and judiciary, and is carried out in conjunction with, or at least for the benefit of, a wide array of investors and landowners. These behaviors are not merely deviations from Indonesia’s system of land administration, they are embedded in its heart. Moreover, they do not arise purely as a result of problems in the administration of land, standing in isolation from other sectors of the market and state administration, but are emblematic of a much wider pattern of state-society relations, in which powerful public and private actors regularly collude to evade or violate formal regulations in order to capture rents from a wide variety of economic activities.

Our approach, in stressing the deep roots of land-mafia practices and their entrenched nature, suggests that while particular reforms to the land administration system might incrementally chip away at the problem, they are unlikely to resolve it without wider structural change. In particular, elimination of the mafia system “requires a state more committed to protecting the poor and marginalized than to facilitating accumulation by the wealthy and powerful.”⁹¹ At this juncture in Indonesia’s history, the prospects for a dramatic shift in this direction are not particularly bright, not only because of the entrenched nature of the problems, but also in light of current processes of autocratization,⁹² which include an undermining of anti-corruption institutions.⁹³ These processes are likely to strengthen the hands of powerful elites and further restrict public space for critics of the system, or for poor people defending their access to land.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Colum Graham and the two anonymous reviewers, for their very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this research was provided by the Supporting the Rules-Based Order in Southeast Asia (SEARBO) project, run by the Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University and funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The opinions expressed here are the authors’ own and are not meant to represent those of ANU or the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Notes on contributors

Dianto Bachriadi

Dianto Bachriadi is a researcher at the Agrarian Resources Center (ARC), a non-government research institute focusing on agrarian, development, and social movement issues based in Bandung, Indonesia. He is also a lecturer at the Graduate School of Diplomacy, Paramadina University, and in the Graduate Program of the Faculty of Agriculture, Padjadjaran University. He has conducted research and advocacy on land and agrarian conflict cases since the early 1990s.

Edward Aspinall

Edward Aspinall is a professor and head of the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University. He has research interests in various aspects of Indonesian and Southeast Asian politics, including democratization and political representation, clientelism, and social movements.

Notes

1 Detiknews 2021a.

2 Tribunnews 2021a and 2021c; Detiknews 2021c.

3 Tribunnews 2021b.

4 Detiknews 2021a, 2021b, and 2021c.

5 Detiknews 2021b.

6 Rita, Rahayu and Yogatama 2021; Kontan 2019.

7 Kementerian Sekretariat Negara 2022.

8 Cf. Graham 2020; Li 2018; Suryowati 2014.

9 Butt and Lindsay 2011.

10 Tidey 2013; van Klinken and Aspinall 2011.

11 Widoyoko 2011.

12 Brubaker 2002, 166.

13 Cf. Junaidi 2012, Malik 2014, Nadim 2014, Nee and Bora 2014, Kay and Mangi 2017, The Himalayan 2020, The Express Tribune 2020, The Indian Express 2021, and The Pioneer 2021.

14 See especially Levien 2021.

15 Michelutti et al. 2018.

16 Aspinall and van Klinken 2011.

17 Crockett Thomas 2020, 70.

18 Protection rackets are widespread in Indonesia, and they often participate in the land mafias, but they are not constitutive of them.

19 Levien 2021, 161.

20 Cf. Levien 2021, 163.

21 Blok 1974; Catanzaro 1992; Gambetta 1996; Dickie 2004; Santoro 2011.

22 Catanzaro 1992, 6.

23 Blok 1974, 96.

24 Diego Gambetta has described the mafia as “a specific economic enterprise, an industry which produces, promotes, and sells private protection” (Gambetta 1996, 1).

25 Grossman 1995.

26 Tilly 1985.

27 Blok 1974, 97.

28 Anderson 1995; Gambetta 1996; Blok 2008. According to Annelise Anderson, it is “the nature of mafias” to be “always involved with corruption of the legitimate government” (Anderson 1995, 48).

29 Anderson 1995; Gambetta 1996; Blok 2008.

30 Anderson 1995, 49.

31 Blok 2008, 12-13.

32 This term originated from the Dutch vrijman (free man).

33 Mudhoffir 2021; Ryter 1998; Wilson 2006; 2015.

34 Levien 2021, 162.

35 Cf. see Borras and Franco 2011; Bachriadi and Suryana 2016.

36 Magdoff 2013.

37 Cf. Zoomers 2010; Borras and Franco 2011, 2012; Fairhead, Leach and Scoones 2012; White 2012; Magdoff 2013; Sassen 2013; Reerink, 2013; Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Kader 2019.

38 The boundary between mafias and investors can also be highly porous, with investors, including large property companies, often engaging directly in mafia-type behavior. See for example recent reports of bribes allegedly paid by a senior executive of the Lippo group, a major property developer in Indonesia, in connection with the Meikarta development in Beksasi, on Jakarta’s eastern fringe (Trianita and Lazuardi 2019). See also Sud 2014.

39 Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; De Souza and Koizumi 2020, 6; MacAndrews 1986, 68; Srinivas et al. 2015; Suhendar and Kasim 1996, 117.

40 Cf. Simarmata 1997, 220; Firman 2000 and 2004; Ilyas 2000; Hasanawi and Winarso 2018; Rahardjo and Marhaento 2018; Simorangkir 2018; De Souza and Koizumi 2020; Rahayu, Yogatama and Sulistyawaty 2021; Bank Indonesia 2021a and 2021b.

41 These five countries are Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. See Yuliot 2020, 14.

42 Bachriadi, Bachrioktora, and Safitri 2005, 127-132.

43 MacAndrews 1986; Simarmata 1997; Bachriadi, Bachrioktora, and Safitri 2005; Srinivas et al. 2015.

44 Perangin 1986, 98, Harsono 1997, 430-431.

45 This is usually in the form of documents known as a Letter C, kikitir, or even proof of land tenure issued by the former colonial government,

46 In the form of a land letter or a letter of land cultivation/occupation.

47 Lund 2020, 6, emphasis in original.

48 One common technique is to seek (manipulated) formal evidence of landholdings from village heads and other local officials.

49 Bachriadi, Bachrioktora, and Safitri 2005.

50 Cf. MacAndrews 1986; Simarmata 1997. The largest expense in the land certification process is the tax, namely the Fee for Acquisition of Land and Building Rights (Bea Perolehan Hak atas Tanah dan Bangunan, BPHTB), which in most cases amounts to five percent of the purchase price of the land/building minus the non-taxable selling price of the object (Nilai Jual Objek Pajak Tidak Kena Pajak, NJOPTKP). Not all acquisition of land rights will be subject to the BPHTB, however: for example, there is no BPHTB for inherited land. Ordinary people often find it hard to attain information about how these fees are calculated.

51 In February 2021, the General Secretary of the Ministry of Agrarian and Spatial Planning stated that around seventy-two million plots (57.2%) of the country’s total 126.2 million parcels of land were certified. One cause of the slow rate of certification is that the government tends to certify only private lands that are not the subject of disputes. Many disputed lands exist within areas claimed as state land.

52 Article 1, Agrarisch Besluit.

53 Harsono 1997, 45.

54 Around 10.2 million hectares, according to the National Land Agency, are large-scale plantations with the commercial use right (HGU) status held by private corporations. See Kompas 2021a.

55 Aditjondro 2001, 147; Tempo 1999, 2010, and 2012; Reerink 2013; Wilson 2015, 221-224; Paraqbueq 2019; Silalahi 2020

56 Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Kader 2019.

57 Rifa’i 2021.

58 Cf. Paraqbueq 2019; Kompas 2021a; Tribunnews 2021d; Rita, Rahayu and Yogatama 2021.

59 For a discussion of the use of aspal documents in irregular migration, see Ford and Lyons 2011.

60 Bachriadi, Bachrioktora and Safitri 2005, 137.

61 Bachriadi, Bachrioktora, and Safitri 2005; Rinaldi, Purnomo, and Damayanti 2007; Martini 2012.

62 Cf. Ernes 2021a, 2021b, 2021c.

63 This could be land controlled or held by local people or abandoned state land, though often spreading out to subsume private land located near the targeted state land.

64 Reerink 2013, Pardede 2021.

65 In 2014, the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights received a report from a local farmers’ organization in North Sumatra about tensions between them and a land occupation group controlled by a mafia, and about a battle that occurred between two groups of uniformed gangsters who fought over lands located nextdoor to their own. Physical violence between the warring groups went as far as acts of kidnapping and killing.

66 Safitri 2014 and 2017; Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Kader 2019.

67 Tempo 2010; Wilson 2015, 221-224; Pardede 2016; Silalahi 2020.

68 A description of the origin of the term biyong and of how this group operates in rural areas as land brokers can be found in Ari 2012. The term maclaren is a derivation from the Dutch makelaar (broker). See Bachriadi and Suryana 2016, 584, 590.

69 Cf. Levien 2021, 174.

70 See for example a description of a mafia-government orchestrated attempt to shift control over parts of relinquished state-owned plantation lands in north Sumatra in Pardede 2016 and 2021.

71 Safitri 2009, 2010, and 2014, 66-68; Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Kader 2019, 22-24; Tribun-Bali 2019.

72 For detailed analyses of these projects, see Safitri 2009, 2010, and 2014; Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Kader 2019. As Commissioner in the National Human Rights Commission, Bachriadi was involved in responding to two of these cases and had access to a confidential investigatory report regarding the land deal manipulations and human rights violations involved.

73 Bachriadi and Suryana 2016; Safitri 2017.

74 Bachriadi and Suryana 2016, 584-585.

75 Kader 2019; Komnas HAM 2015; Suhartono, Hidayat and Swaldi 2015.

76 A number of cases of land mafia involvement in acquisition for government projects in Jakarta were reported as major news stories in Koran Tempo in 2021. See Koran Tempo 2021. For North Sumatra cases, see Tribunnews 2020a.

77 Levien 2021, 178; see also Levien 2018.

78 Li 2018, 329-330.

79 Even if, like Levien, we are skeptical that deregulation is a solution, in part because mafias in other areas of Indonesian social and political life (such as procurement) have proven to be extremely adapatable when confronted with new regulatory arrangements. Cf. Tidey 2013; van Klinken and Aspinall 2011; Widoyoko 2011.

80 Khan 2002; Levien 2021.

81 Khan 2002, Mudhoffir 2021.

82 van Klinken and Aspinall 2011, 2.

83 Fukuyama 2014, Mungiu-Pippidi 2015; North, Wallis and Weingast 2009; Khan 2002; Persson, Rothstein, Teorell 2013; Stokes et al. 2013.

84 See especially Robison and Hadiz 2004; Winters 2011.

85 Aspinall and Berenschot 2019; Muhtadi 2019.

86 For an example of where this came to light see Gecko Project and Mongabay 2018; for a more general application of a similar argument to deforestation and dispossession broadly, see Berenschot et al. 2023.

87 Reerink 2013; Baker 2015.

88 Tribunnews 2020b, 2021e; Ernes 2021a and 2021b; Detiknews 2021c.

89 Kabarnotariat.id 2020; Amalia 2021; Novika 2021a and 2021b; Kompas 2021b; Yogatama, Rahayu, and Sulistyawaty 2021; Rahayu, Yogatama, and Sulistyawaty 2021.

90 Laksono 2022.

91 Levien 2021, 176.

92 Power and Warburton 2020.

93 Butt 2019.