Noer Fauzi Rachman
a Keynote address by Noer Fauzi Rachman at University of Minnesota's Seminar on "60th Anniversary of the Bandung ConferenceL From the Non-Aligned Movement to Global South Solidarity?", Tue, 02/17/2015 - 4:00pm, 1210 Heller Hall.
https://archive.icgc.umn.edu/events/4564/60th-anniversary-bandung-conferencel-non-aligned
“The peoples of Asia and Africa are now animated by a keen and sincere desire to renew their old cultural contacts and develop new ones in the context of the modern world.”
(Final Communique of the Asia-African Conference, 1955)
An Opening
Showing a series of pictures from Asia Africa Conference with Waljinah "Tanah Airku Indonesia" (9 minutes 22 second)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nldXHtLmZH8
Thank you for having me here. I am honored to be a part of 60th anniversary of the Bandung Conference. Surprisingly the title of this event: “From the Non-Aligned Movement to Global South Solidarity?” with a question mark at the end precisely and brilliantly captures the points that I would like to make and to engage today in conversation with all of you.
Therefore, before I proceed with my talk, I would like to share my gratitude to Professor Michael Goldman who is very brave, because he is taking a risk asking me to deliver the keynote for this event. His book, Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization, that has inspired many scholars critical of development in the sense of financialization of the “third word, and its critique,” has been a textbook for some of us in social movement studies. I also want to thank Professor Diyah Larasati, who is known among her peers as a transnational feminist and a fierce—“seemingly” Marxist—post colonial theorist. This hospitality—being a part of this event—actually has been giving me a different kind of pressure, particularly how to make my talk “engage” in honoring both Professor Larasati’s political desire as a comrade in the space of transnational scholarship and Professor Goldman’s critics of development and internationalization while still ensuring that this event will embrace the spirit of the Bandung conference with its notion of solidarity, as articulated by Sukarno, to be a collaborative engagement on internationalism and the possibilities of revolutionary thinking.
I also thank the Institute of Global Studies, the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at University of Minnesota, many other departments such as Dance Program and MIRC, and many invisible labors for their support of my presence.
I. Micro Politics: Nation States and Bandung.
I am an activist who was mostly work underground during Suharto regime, mobilizing peasants in Indonesia since 1990. I also an interlocutor Critical Agrarian Studies in Indonesia. With that characterization of my praxis and its identity, I have a genuine confession to make to you, a warning about—perhaps—the lack of contemporary discourse on solidarity and other forms of global engagement theory, or far worse security studies, because we are talking about the “international.” Therefore, I would like to invite you to think about the spirit of Bandung through a different kind of imagination; namely a tactic, a strategic visioning of the so-called new globalized interconnectivity of the everyday in many places. This everyday in many places, once defined by Soekarno, the first president of Indonesia and the leader of the Bandung Conference, as a characterization that has many differences, but is also, he suggests, a space to engage through our detestation. By this, he was reminding the audience about the issues of race and colonialism.[1] In today’s engagement I will expand this notion of race and colonialism through the mapping of a new kind of global cooptation, commodification, and interculturalism in the language of global designs of internationalism. Also, I will address the surrender of that spirit of resistance—as it has been considered a form of radicalism of the now—of our time.
Today’s commemoration is also another example of such dreams, but in different space/place that also provokes/convinces limits and possibilities.
I have to open with the idea of ‘commemoration,” so that we share the possibility of our remembering, one that has been perhaps different, but marking that counter point of possibility. As if I am a guest, my body is in limited access, but still now I am here, so how then do I speak all of that to you, including the notions of “limit” and access. Are we, or could we, imagine a similar reference of this particular context that I am talking about, especially when the limits of particularity arise from the specific question of “Otherness” as famously Edward Said suggests?[2] Or Translatibility that I borrow from Shaden Tageldin work.[3]
As we celebrate the 60 years of Bandung, as that particular marker of remembering for us especially, the knowledge of the global south—displaced—continues to be a new hope; often the part of the globe that has been free from being colonized creates new characteristics in the matter of the dependency complex, be it financialization and/or other forms of militarization. I argue that the language of discrimination then, as Soekarno pointed out at the Bandung event, exists and persistently prevented us from working together until today.
Therefore, I stand here with you, to commemorate the event with particular attention to how this engagement enables us to dream and create possibilities. I will deliberately offer playfulness in this conversation by making a new and old historicity of exchange as a form of timeless event, but reformulated anew. For example, consider how crisis (i.e. social ecological crisis) is a chaotic and stubborn example of this kind of old and new reformulation of relationships—the cooptation, the localization of global designs of disasters, let us say through agrarian politics. This claim I intentionally created without making the government into a new state order free from responsibility, while also pondering the global responsibility of their accesses and expenditures.
Thinking these relationships, which are often defined by many different positionalities or power structures that are embodied within governmentality, I question that new kinds of relationships from the colonizer and the colonized, not only as a form of colonial memory but of how then the engagement with the wound at the present time and possible future occurs.
Let us consider the global north (in the now, where we are at this point/in this room) and in reverse where I am from, the global south. This relationship emerges at one point as a collage of collaborative militarization in 1965 when many rural peoples were killed in massacres and massive changes to the notion of natural resource extractives regime; urbanism and industrialization took place that also failed to create tangible livelihoods. So the language of development, and the new kind of extractive regimes in natural resources (for example), seems to further dispossession.
This obviously is not what we seek, but it is the dominant paradigm of exchange in the new language of globalization. The text then, Soekarno’s speech, brings one thing: that Soekarno introduced and inspired me in what I call
“decolonizing unequal global paradigm”, which implies the decolonizing method in engagement and exchange.
In using this term, I borrow what Walter Mignolo offers in terms of the decolonization of knowledge. He suggests that “decolonization” during the Cold War (e.g., the struggle for decolonization in Asia and Africa) and the meaning of decoloniality today is different. During the Cold War, decolonization referred to national indigenous struggles to expel the colonizer from their territory and build their own nation-state. It became also a project of states that gained independence. The Bandung Conference of 1955 was that moment when modern/colonial nation-state building was in process, in making. A moment where the Indonesia process was highlight and disrupted by massacres as the cold war policy of the International affected tremendously both citizenship building and agricultural sustainability. India and Indonesia were already liberated, but Algeria and Nigeria, for example, attained independence after the Bandung Conference, in 1962 and 1960 respectively.[4]
In thinking about this decolonization I see a journey of thinking, a separation from dominate order, a resistance and rebuilding of strength, or a revisitation of the relationship with equal rights as a form of an exchange. Decolonization as Soekarno offers also deals with producing a “counter narrative,” a claim that the right to determine dignity because, as some scholars have argued, “colonialism did not end with formal independence”[5]
I want to begin by referring to the specific text that I have to chosen to play in my imagination. I place this archival text differently within the historicity of the event, as a form of inspiration and a dream. This text, which profoundly grounds my thoughts, is to Soekarno’s speech “Let a New Asia and a New Africa Be Born”. He narrates:
“We are often told ‘colonialism is dead’. Let us not to be deceived or even soothed by that. I say to you, colonialism is not yet dead. How can we say it is dead, so long as vast areas of Asia and Africa are unfree?
And I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.”
This text was a magnificently crafted oration, both ideologically and strategically, that opened the Asia-Africa Conference on April 18, 1955, and now I am referring to it as an inspiration for the strength inherent in claiming and in forming resistance to what Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou suggest in the notion of an act as affected by injustice.[6] But also beyond that, it is a form of manifesto. A condemnation. Not as a form that can be an “in” and “out” identity, rather as a continuation of dedication. It is an expression of alliances through detestation.
(show a piece of Soekarno Speech in Youtube - 2 minutes and 22 seconds)
President Sukarno Opening Speech at, the Bandung Conference, 1955, Indonesia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRIch247vb8
This is a form of “departure,” taking the form of “ruin” or “detestation,” in which puts the language of marginality to a form of resistance and an imagination of alliances.[7] Many scholars who study Soekarno’s political biography have argued that the formation of his anti-colonialism gesture and his thinking on decolonization/freedom (kemerdekaan) was built on his foundational defense speech Indonesia Accuses! against his arrest at the colonial court, because it feared that PNI (the National Political Party under Soekarno), which had became larger, was a threat to the establishment of colonial order.[8] This “fear” anxiety and relationship among the dominant and colonized bridges and continues at this point that I am speaking, although we are all aware of different kinds of mechanisms, as almost all that were colonized are already independent. Yet, as we witness, this independence is not a guarantee of freedom from colonialism.
II. Ecological Crisis: A New Form of Empire
To respond to the presence of the Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA)/Asean Economic Community’s (AEC)[9] plan and the critique of its existence, I will dedicate this following section’s focus to land dispossession and global design in order to voice anxiety, or rather as a form of reminder, for us to critically engage with the so-called global paradigm network. This condition of injustice, characterized by discriminatory laws and lack of access for peasants and the poor to their sustained livelihood, has been an illness, a chronic disease, caused by inhuman action resulting from the collaboration between the local and the global. It is an impact that creates real conditions, and it is a new form of colonialism. This internationalism that appears in different formations of oppression, is the language—the co-opted language of so-called development—that I would like to explore today.
The AEC plan will be implemented in December of 2015, and although many are pessimistic in regards to the launch, the AEC envisions the following key characteristics: (a) a single market and production base, (b) a highly competitive economic region, (c) a region of equitable economic development, and (d) a region fully integrated into the global economy. This plan is furthering the struggle that I have mentioned, and exists as a kind of community based impact, a collective suffering because of peasants’ vanishing access to their land.
Specific examples for this are land grabbing and systematic agrarian conflicts that impact a community where the license (ijin) is released by state agencies (including through offices under the Ministry of Forestry, the National Land Agency, or the Ministry of Mining and Energy) for the right to the use of land or forest areas for mining, plantation, or forestry projects. This kind of license is the base for many corporations to force people out, creating dispossession and displacement. This specific condition is also affected by the policy (created by a new measurement of “democracy”) known as decentralization. This decentralization has resulted in provincial and districts leaders/institutions also being able to issue land/forest/mining license to exploit use the land or territory, and this license (ijin)in public knowledge often comes to be a part of the exchange cost during elections. I argue this process of licensing is made possible by the conception of “state property” a continuation of colonial law and practice of state territorialization. The colonial and post-independence state territorialization are similar.
a) The State claims all lands considered ‘no body’s land’ as state property.
b) The establishment of the boundaries of land declared as state property in order to assert state’s control over land, resource and territory.
c) The categorization of the state property based of their functions, for example to divide and allocate the use of forest territory into productive forests, conservation forests, convertible forests, etc.
d) The exercise of bureaucratic power and authority to produce licenses for corporate entities for mining, forestry or plantation projects, etc.
e) The exercise of State penal power to criminalizes the existing peoples’ access to their land, resource and territories in the area claimed as state property, or those which already under the control of corporate entities.
The mechanics of land grabbing are simple. People’s lands, firstly, are categorized as state land, and through this categorization ministers, governors, or district heads deploy their legal authority to allocate the land for business entities through license (ijin). When the license holder decides to work on the ground, by the help of bureaucracy and police officers, or sometime military officers, they exclude forcefully people’s actual access to the land. Then, in its turn they start to change the land use to produce global commodity through a capitalistic mode of production.
This particular mechanism, that allows central and local governments to issue licenses, has resulted in a speeding up of productivity in the economic sense, as the licensing project provides global access to maximize production, which is itself a commodification. It is very clear that the effect is degradation of livelihood itself for the particular region, and here we are clearly seeing a mapping where the people themselves have to face a scarcity of the particular item being produced and reproduced. Because of this web of need, much infrastructure is also prepared to refine the process of production. Therefore many roads, airports and transportation systems have been built to accommodate the project. This infrastructure also requires space/place, and therefore furthers the displacement operating on the peasants side; the people who surround these natural resources are being pushed farther away. Currently, this phenomenon reaches the permanent outcome of loss of access to their land, but at the same time it promotes a different kind of concern in the agrarian politics of the 21st century that often has nothing to do with the complicated survival method and pressures at the global south; since the disruption of that particular agrarian concern was initiated during colonial times and continues in the post-colonial context. This new kind of colonialism is the form of capitalism with massacres where the same colonized space that has been free/independent was restructured through the language of neoliberal development.
Thus, it is the emergence of new internationalism and deterritorialization that we should critically engage with how to face its consequences, included to the so-called “deagrarization”. Let say, the national agricultural census of 2013 shows that the total number of agricultural households decreased dramatically in ten years. In 2013, the total number of agricultural households was 26,13 million. There are about 5 million differences compared to the result of national agricultural census of 2003. In rhetorical expression, I will say that in ten years (since 2003 to 2013) Indonesia lost one agricultural household for every minute. On the other hand, agricultural corporate entities grow exponentially.
Many peasant families in Indonesia who depend on this kind of resource (agricultural as a source of income) have been displaced and can no longer provide themselves sustainable income. This occurrence actively creates massive numbers of poor citizens. These poor citizens then become the lowest rank in society. Further, the villagers that used to independently own their land have suddenly become cheap labor, the so-called “surplus population”.
Here I argue that the creation of space for such collaborative modes, which in this case is the dispossession, displacement and furthering of mechanisms of oppression, creates a specific set of machines I call “killing through policy,” while the new kind of racism, as Soekarno suggests, is found in the formation of cheap labor for the new corporate projects.
This phenomenon, where many peasants have been made dead, the change in status from land owner to an unskilled labor force, and the creation of the poor are on the rise because of the changing of infrastructure that is strongly attached to the genealogy of the colonizing machine. Further, the modern notion of creation through urbanism is empirically similar to what has been mentioned as the death of peasantry by Hobsbawm in his writing: Age of Extremes, the Short Twentieth Century (1994). Also, as suggested by Philip McMichael (2012) in his entry “Depeasantization” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, the signal of the macro identity is the death of the peasant in the creation of marginality through spatial conditions such as the village versus the city.
Closing Notes
In closing my presentation today, I would like to return to the question of why then we, as a society located in multiple facets of differently recognized historicity of oppression, with visible and invisible tensions, cannot simply just embrace the idea of liberal and neoliberal inclusivity, of “flat” similar space, and of modern civility. In focusing on the Indonesian case, on Soekarno’s dream when he gave his speech offering that freedom is a bridge; as he said, crossing that bridge is where our continuing to be present as a new kind of citizenship (in this global space) will emerge. Therefore my question to you is, when systematic discrimination operates like this, destroying the most fundamental coexistence of humans—as in this new form of colonialism—how then can solidarity, as a form of engagement with our different geographical historicities, even be imagined as a dialectic of possibility.
Thank you.
Minneapolis, February 17, 2015.
[1] The following is the quotation from Sukarno’s Opening Speech for the Bandung Conference: “All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world.”
[2] Edward Said (1977) Orientalism. London: Penguin.
[3] Shaden Tageldin, Disarming Words. Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, 2011.
[4] “Decolonial Options an Artistic/ AestheSic Entanglement: An Interview with Walter Mignolo”, in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, Vol 3. No 1, 2014, PP. 196-212.).
[5] Savigliano, Marta E. (1995) Tanggo and Political Economy of Passion. Colorado: West View Press.
[6] Butler, Judith and Athena Athanasiou (2013) Dispossesion: the Performative in the Political. Cambridge: Polity Press.
[7] Hakim Abderrezak in “Burning the Sea: Clandestine Migration Across the Strait of Gibraltar in Francophone Moroccan “Illiterature” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies
Volume 13, Issue 4, 2009
[8] See Paget, Roger K (Ed) (1975). Indonesia accuses!: Soekarno's defence oration in the political trial of 1930. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[9] The AFTA was agreement was signed on 28 January 1992 in Singapore by six members countries of Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), i..e. Thailand, Singapore, Phillipines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei. Now AFTA comprises the ten countries of ASEAN (plus Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar). The ASEAN Leaders adopted the ASEAN Economic Blueprint at the 13th ASEAN Summit on 20 November 2007 to serve as a coherent master plan guiding the establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community 2015. See: the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint,http://www.asean.org/archive/5187-10.pdf (last accesses on February 15, 2015)
