John Bala

John Bala is an Indonesian legal aid specialist whose methods for reconciling local tradition with modern law are helping indigenous people and the state to agree on distributing and using land.

John Bala has created a legal aid society that specializes in resolving conflicts between indigenous communities and local governments. Neither side has an ideal record on using land, with corruption and overuse of authority on the part of the state and discrimination and communal conflict among the people. John has created a new civil-society function that works in detail with communities involved in conflict to discover exactly where and how conflict arises and then facilitates solutions that are recognized at the district and provincial level. In general, traditional land-management systems reserve different areas of land for different uses—different types of agriculture, hunting, ritual use, and environmental protection. When a state or private enterprise moves in and finds that no one has any title to the land it wishes to use, it begins clearing and cultivating indiscriminately. Suddenly it is confronted with angry citizens, and conflict—sometimes brutally violent—often ensues. In a decade of community-level work with peoples in eastern Indonesia, John learned that these explosive situations can be detected and defused. John introduces a process through which people map their land use practices and then propose to the state where and how they might share. While areas marked off for ritual use may be strictly off limits to development, land allotted to less critical functions may be offered in compromise.

Through this process, democratization of land tenure begins in two ways. First, communities begin to document their tenancy in order to file for individual and communal land holdings. This is a significant departure from the prevailing system in which a local chieftain alone is recognized as the owner of land. This is a potentially radical and disruptive activity which naturally brings to light injustices in traditional land-holding systems. For example, tradition prevents women from holding land, though in practice they reap and sow for their survival. John introduces a legal or quasi-legal framework in which to interpret such practices. Now the community has a stake in reconsidering such traditions—does the collective benefit of formalizing women’s right to land, and thus accounting for the land in negotiation, outweigh whatever benefit is perceived in sticking to tradition.

John has built this system in East Nusa Tenggara Province, the islands that stretch from Flores to Timor. He now plans to introduce its principles and procedures to counterpart organizations throughout Indonesia.

Both traditional and modern social system erect barriers to sustainable land use for indigenous people in Indonesia. Whatever pre-colonial injustices existed were amplified by the Dutch and Portuguese policies of selecting and propping up favored local leaders. When the Indonesian state took shape and began to exert influence over more remote islands, the policy was preserved, but complemented by a state bureaucracy with ultimate authority over all land issues. State and private-sector interests determined land-use policy throughout thirty years of the New Order regime’s economic development program, ceding communal lands to extractive industries, cash-crop plantations, and the military. The state routinely appropriated land for these purposes.

The rights of local and indigenous people are often ignored due to several interrelated problems: 1) although existing local regulations oversee land use and space management in a wise way, they are often feudalistic; 2) low education levels and the inaccessibility of public records and other information conspire against communities, which are often misinformed by officials; 3) the people are not used to being involved in modern organizations, so they don’t have bargaining power or the ability to speak out; 4) the people also don’t establish networks between themselves and others who may be more competent, such as NGOs or universities or the media. Furthermore, Indonesia is a nation of islands, many of which are quite remote from the others, causing communication difficulties among communities and contributing to lack of information.

The end of that authoritarian era and the decentralization of state power have awakened public concern over land conflict, among dispossessed as well as the growing civil-society structure that supports them. Generally, however, there has been little innovation around the thorny issues of land distribution. Some, but clearly not all, cases can be fought in the courts. Neither the legal system nor the legal-aid movement has been able to take on these issues in a systematic way nationally. On Java, farmers and their supporters are making some progress in negotiating land reclamation to avoid violent conflict. The situation for indigenous people is somewhat different. Urgent environmental activism tends towards protest rather than negotiation. Promising initiatives are helping people and the Forestry Department, for example, arrive at conservation agreements in and around national parks. But the general problem—bringing indigenous land rights up to date in an effective and realistic way—still demands the social sector’s creative attention.

Land conflicts are widespread, diverse and often complicated. As John began to familiarize himself with the variety of conflict in his home province, East Nusa Tenggara or NTT, he realized that there would be no single solution. He wanted to create a service that could work on two levels simultaneously, both within communities and in dialogue with legal and bureaucratic systems. Neither would suffice without the other.

John’s experience in the province had taught him that indigenous people—neglected, abused, treated as the “other” on their own land—are not terribly receptive to outside sympathizers parachuting in with quick solutions. Long-term relationships were needed. John therefore set about making a network of community-based organizations. Each in its own way would touch on land issues, responding to local issues and conflicts. Some were existing organizations, such as farmers cooperatives, that John helped to develop and orient towards more constructive, less confrontational methods. Others were brand-new organizations that John and his staff spent many months with, coaching, mentoring, riding the waves of success and failure that accompany the start-up of any organization. Today his organization, LBH-Nusa, which was founded in 1998, has partner citizen groups in ten of the fifteen districts of NTT, comprising dozens of small and medium-sized community groups.

After establishing rapport with the local people, John’s team leads participatory social mapping of the region and social research. This helps the community to identify the local customary laws regarding land use, such as forest management, state regulations governing activities of private logging companies, and the state policy for conserving the bio-diversity of conservation areas. Mapping often gives more precise definition to conflictJohn then facilitated stakeholders in the region, including representatives of the local community, a private logging company, and the regional government to come up with an alternative win-win solution in managing the resources. These parties made an agreement and John took this opportunity to further the process for establishing a new district level policy. He and his colleagues have drafted the policy which is currently being studied by the local legislature.

Citizen “learning nodes” have become John's distinctive idea for empowering a strong civil society, given the fact that there is already local potential available such as community based organizations, indigenous knowledge for alternative conservation practices, and experience in working with the policy makers. In ten districts of NTT, John has organized seven such nodes involving a total of fifty-four different community groups and eleven coalitions of CSOs. Each node has made its own progress according to the local potential available and different problems encountered. For example, there are learning nodes focused on issues such as non-violent means for reclaiming plantation land, sustainable forest management based upon local knowledge, developing effective community organizing skills, and others. Through a network of learning nodes John provides channels for all communities to learn from each other.

John’s next challenge will be to take his success at the provincial level and apply it for national impact. He sees that the idea and the methods can permeate counterpart organizations, but that his own legal aid society will probably stay focused on NTT province. Indigenous people and their land problems are so varied throughout the country that it would be unrealistic to expect that John himself could reproduce the entire learning process—which took ten years in one province—at the national level. Anyway, today his products, techniques, and provisional successes are tools for instruction. He already participates in a national working group on indigenous people, which gives him access to counterpart organizations across the country. Law faculties at regional universities have proven to be good partners in NTT. He is now working on manuals that will enable law students to initiate similar projects in other places.

John was adopted at a young age and raised by a policeman and his wife. During his childhood living in police family complexes, John witnessed violence and injustice toward detainees carried out by the police, the very people meant to insure justice. These early experiences, and the awareness of injustice they inspired, lead John to pursue an education in law, which he did, graduating from the Law Faculty of Cendana University (Kupang) in 1993. As in his earlier years in secondary and high school, he was a leader at university, chairing the Student Senate and participating in student activities relating public interest law. Following a devastating earthquake in Flores in 1992, John organized student volunteers to help the communities most severely affected by the disaster. He stayed with the effort for two years, as he was interested in long-term rehabilitation of the community, not in a quick in-and-out relief effort that would result in partial recovery only.

Upon graduating, John wanted to see the situation of small, poor communities in Flores, and to understand more fully the spectrum and function of the citizen efforts that supported these communities. He thus signed on as a volunteer with a large, well-known citizen organization in Flores, SANRES: Foundation for the Welfare of Flores. His background in law equipped him with the skills he needed to oversee the advocacy efforts of the Foundation and of another organization, INSIST in Yogyakarta. Later, he worked in the island area of Pulau Babi, where he involved the community in assessing their needs and then in designing proactive ways of relating to the government and to industry. These experiences, and the perspective they gave rise to, contributed to John’s founding NTT Legal Aid Society in 1998.