THERE is no end to the tricks up the sleeve of the Joko Widodo regime to hijack land owned by the people. After failing to evict residents of Rempang Island, Batam in the Riau Islands, from land ready to be transformed into an ecotourism project, the government changed the rules of the game: it offered a sweet deal that could well leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

Jokowi issued Presidential Regulation (Perpres) No. 78/2023 on the Handling of Social Impact Towards Land Reserved for National Development. The ruling, signed on December 8, 2023, revised Presidential Regulation No. 62/2018. The new ruling could very well be a bulldozer ready to tamp down land owned by the people to turn into a commercial zone in the wrapping of a national strategic project.

The new ruling, among other things, offers reimbursement to people evicted from their land. Requirements to obtain the compensation, in the form of a package or relocation, was also eased. Compensation would be provided to anyone who had sat on a plot of land for a minimum of 10 years.

At a glance, the new regulation looked like it was advantageous to Rempang residents who had lived on the land for decades, from parent to offspring. All the while, the Rempang residents had no land ownership documents because the government kept putting the paperwork off. In the old ruling, only residents showing proof of ownership had right to a compensation. With the new ruling, Rempang residents holding no land certificate now had chance to also obtain compensation.

The problem was, besides oversimplifying matters, the new regulation is riddled with hidden ‘land mines’. The people of Rempang had previously refused to be evicted by the Rempang Eco-City project not for purely compensation reasons. They had fought tooth and nail to stay on their plots because they refused to be uprooted from their customary land and the accompanying ancestral traditions. Thus, whatever sweet compensation offered was obviously an erroneous solution towards this agrarian conflict.

For certain residents who refused to budge for compensation, the new regulation also held potential hiddens traps. The central issue is, the minimum 10-year residential requirement for eligibility of compensation is still subject to adjustment by the governor. In other words, even if residents could provide proof of residence, the government through governor policy could simply grab the plot with no compensation whatsoever.

And it is not only residents of Rempang who are now vulnerable to eviction. The new regulation is an umbrella ruling for provision of land for all projects labeled national projects. Such a legalistic approach, namely the demand to show certification, has made people vulnerable to eviction from all land of their ancestors. Meanwhile, only a small handful of customary land is yet acknowledged and recognized by the government.

As noted by the non-profit Customary Region Registration Body, of a total 1,336 customary region maps (comprising 26.9 million hectares), only 219 customary region maps (3.73 million hectares) have obtained recognition and the acknowledgement of regional administrations. In other words, there are still a total of 23.17 million hectares of customary land as yet unrecognized.

Using Presidential Regulation No. 78/2023, customary lands as yet unacknowledged by the government are land plots owned by the state. Under the pretext of national projects, the government can with ease give up land belonging to the ‘state’ to third parties, alias investors. This ruling obviously goes against the grain of Constitutional Court decision No. 35/2012, that separates customary forest from state forestry.

But at the moment, what does the government care about Constitutional Court decisions?