Sitting approximately 100 meters from the shoreline, Kang’s village was destroyed in the July 17, 2006 tsunami. Before the tsunami, Kang and eighteen other villagers worked for a private company on a nearby five-hectare palm tree plantation as extractors (tappers) of sugar from the trees.
A tapper could work on about 40 coconut trees. Every month each worker gave approximately two kilograms of palm sugar to the company as payment for using the land. Foreign-owned companies own most of the buildings still intact.
Now, as Kang explained, this tract of land is in dispute. “This land by legal status is owned by the state. Sixteen households were allowed to settle on the land, counting my family. The village apparatus also gave authorization to the people to stay. Whenever there were troubles, the apparatus would be responsible to solve them.”
Pointing toward another place on the side of the area where he used to live with his neighbors, Kang said, “The land on that side is also owned by the state. We once cleared the land because it looked uncultivated. Then people started planting crops like peanuts and others. When they obtained the first harvest, a man from city claimed the land and produced the certificate.
“We have the evidence that we always occupied the disputed land. Look at those coconut trees at the end,” Kang said, motioning to several trees an average of two meters tall. “We had planted them before the man from the city claimed the land.
“We are confused with the land issue. We had applied for the land certificate claiming the area long before the man from the city arrived. We waited, and we didn’t get the approval for a long time, while this man got the certificate of approval immediately,” he continued.
Kang and the other tappers began the process of obtaining a title to the land three years ago, even going up to higher levels of the government. But before the process could be completed, the tsunami hit, leaving the question of ownership unresolved.
One time another man wanting part of the land approached the tappers and offered them each one million Indonesian rupiah (U.S. $108) for a half-hectare. Everybody rejected the offer because the compensation wasn’t sufficient for the land and their houses. According to Kang, the villagers were reluctant to leave the place where they carried out their daily routines and worked as tappers. And they relied on their sole income from the palm trees.
According to YEU, more than sixty-seven percent of the families living in the Cikembulan IDP camp have no definite status on land ownership, and almost sixty-nine percent have no certainty about their income.
These disputes over the land have left Kang disenchanted. During the chaotic political situation in the 1960s, his family had migrated from Kebumen in Central Java to this area to start a better life. With the additional physical devastation the tsunami wrought on the land where he lived, one would expect Kang to feel defeated. But he has tried to find the meaning in it. “This calamity was God’s will. It could happen anywhere on earth. We should not be afraid of it. There must be a grand message behind it,” he said. |
