A HISTORY AND CELEBRATION OF OXFAM S LAND RIGHTS ADVOCACY WORK IN POST-TSUNAMI ACEH, INDONESIA, by Robin Palmer Mokoro Ltd

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1 A HISTORY AND CELEBRATION OF OXFAM S LAND RIGHTS ADVOCACY WORK IN POST-TSUNAMI ACEH, INDONESIA, by Robin Palmer Mokoro Ltd 00 Executive summary 2 PART ONE: BACKGROUND 7 01 Introductory thoughts 8 02 Why did Oxfam focus on land rights in Aceh? 9 03 Some Indonesian context Some timelines for advocacy in Aceh, Links between Oxfam s programme and advocacy work The culture of engagement with authorities, and of working with other agencies and with communities Daniel Fitzpatrick s first report on land rights 25 PART TWO: KEY ADVOCACY ISSUES Thematic issues: Local land cases RALAS Resettlement Renters and squatters The barracks Women s land rights Land administration 81 PART THREE: AFTERMATH The views of others on Oxfam s land rights advocacy Future directions? poverty reduction, land reform, palm oil and Green Economic Development, post-conflict work? Lessons from the Aceh land rights advocacy experience References Appendix: Chronology of land and property rights work in Aceh

2 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This report is in three parts; background, key advocacy issues, and aftermath. It is written by a former Oxfam Global Land Adviser who has been a public admirer of Oxfam s land rights advocacy work in post-tsunami Aceh, Indonesia. So it is not a formal evaluation, rather a history and celebration of some outstanding work and a contribution to Oxfam s historical and institutional memory. Oxfam decided to work on land rights in Aceh not, as I had previously imagined, because of a chain of centrally driven events from Oxford, including an early 4- country scoping study by Shaun Williams of post-tsunami land and property rights, but because Lilianne Fan, newly appointed Advocacy Coordinator in Aceh, listened to Acehnese communities and NGOs and it was they who identified that land was a critical issue demanding attention. Context: It was hugely important that a new government came to power in Indonesia just two months before the tsunami. It was very different from its brutal, militaristic predecessors, and it quickly set about bringing an end to the secessionist conflict which had plagued Aceh for 30 years. A peace agreement was signed with GAM (the Free Aceh Movement) in August 2005 and subsequent events resulted in free elections and a new Provincial Government of Aceh, and with Aceh enjoying an unprecedented degree of economic and political autonomy within Indonesia. Among other things, this allowed enormous space for agencies such as Oxfam to engage in advocacy work with the new, very inexperienced government. In fact, Oxfam staff have enjoyed extraordinary access to the new government, on occasion working in government institutions, including the ministerial level Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency, BRR, for months. Oxfam s land rights advocacy work has been situated within six broad phases: no clear authority, January - March 2005; a period of consultation, March - July 2005; the peace agreement, August 2005; engaging on national policy, September September 2006; demonstrations and their aftermath, September - December 2006; new openings, January - December The links between programme and advocacy work in Aceh have been complex, and it took time for the advocacy work to gain the appreciation and support of senior management. But it is striking that an advocacy post was created as early as February 2005, though its origins are still shrouded in some mystery. In March 2006 a small policy unit was set up designed to be strategic and research based, and this progressed in 2007 into the current well-endowed Policy and Advocacy Unit (PAU). Oxfam s advocacy work in Aceh has been characterised by a very strong culture of engagement with authorities, with other agencies and with communities. Lilianne Fan believed that Oxfam had to (1) use the new political space available and take advantage of the changes happening, but also create new space; (2) engage people in a way that convinced them that they shared our vision and highlight areas of common interest; and (3) recognise that things in Aceh had changed, and give change an opportunity to take hold. 2

3 An example of working with other experts and agencies was the early collaboration with the Australian academic and Indonesian law specialist, Daniel Fitzpatrick. His UNDP/Oxfam report on land rights in mid-2005 helped point the way for advocacy work on national issues and he subsequently wrote four policy papers for Oxfam on renters and squatters, resettlement, women s land rights and land administration. Part two focuses in detail on seven major, inter-connected issues which have featured strongly in Oxfam s land rights advocacy work: (1) local land cases, (2) RALAS the World Bank-funded Reconstruction of Aceh Land Administration Systems project, (3) resettlement, (4) renters and squatters, (5) the barracks, (6) women s land rights, and (7) land administration. Local land cases have been the bedrock of Oxfam s land rights advocacy work from the beginning and continue to be almost 3 years later. This arose through the time honoured practice of listening to communities about their concerns. Oxfam took some of these cases to the authorities to try to resolve specific problems. There were early successes at Lhoong, Aceh Besar, and Lamno, Aceh Jaya. Later, Kurniawan (Oxfam s Advocacy Officer) started to pull together a network of mostly local NGOs which became the Joint Land Advocacy Working Group (JLAWG). This has taken up a number of high profile cases, more than one involving the military, another a palm oil company. The RALAS project has been characterised by tensions between BPN, the National Land Agency, and the World Bank over what kind of surveying was appropriate after the tsunami (community driven or wait for the usual experts?) and the speed of distributing the certificates, and between the project and local NGOs over how seriously the latter were being treated. Oxfam initially engaged quite strongly, with training of staff, many joint meetings and a focus on monitoring, and tried to hold RALAS accountable to the World Bank s own gender best practice guidelines, but RALAS failed even to record gender-disaggregated data. There remains some uncertainty about the future of RALAS, which was supposed to issue 600,000 land titles within three years. Resettlement, and who is entitled to it, has been a thorny issue since the tsunami and, in terms of implementation, remains so. It was to be voluntary; with tsunami victims having choices about where to move to. Oxfam was part of an inter-agency Land Task Force, set up in November 2005, which drafted resettlement guidelines, but these were shot down by a key official of BRR, the reconstruction agency, for being too community driven. By mid-2006 it was clear that renters and squatters were being discriminated against and Oxfam advocated strongly on that. In September there were violent demonstrations in the barracks, which led BRR to change its policy and to sack its obstructive official. Oxfam had pressed for a community-based delivery of land for resettlement, but BRR said this was too difficult and instead opted for a huge government-run resettlement programme for renters with a real risk that many new houses might never be occupied. Oxfam has engaged with this process to try to improve it once it became clear that BRR was going ahead anyway. 3

4 Renters and squatters were initially discriminated against as beneficiaries and one of the great triumphs of Oxfam s land rights advocacy work in Aceh has been to focus on these forgotten, neglected people (hardly mentioned in the original Master Plan) and keep banging away on this at the policy level until it was resolved more favourably. Daniel Fitzpatrick s research, in identifying the numbers involved, was critical. Oxfam launched a multi-pronged strategy, including lobbying the office of UN Special Envoy Bill Clinton and TV, radio and press briefings. BRR changed its policy in January 2007, and renters and squatters became eligible for land and housing assistance from BRR. The barracks have been a hugely divisive issue because of their use in counterinsurgency by previous Indonesian governments. So old Indonesian hands in Oxfam were reluctant to contemplate working in them, yet it is there that the reservoir of vulnerability has always been and where most renters and squatters are found. BRR announced its intention to close down the remaining barracks by mid- 2007, later by the end of 2007, but Oxfam and other agencies on the Barracks Working Group argued that this made little sense because the housing to which people were moving was incomplete. They also urged that people be given 30 days notice when barracks were being closed (decommissioned). In its technical work, Oxfam is concerned to reduce public health risks, as some barracks are starting to fall apart and nobody is renovating them, and also to sustain its advocacy work until proper housing solutions are reached. In late October 2007, some 5,000 families remained in the barracks; by late January 2008, the figure was just over 2,000. Women s land rights are always critical and the gender dimensions of access to land and housing have been a significant underlying theme in all Oxfam s land rights advocacy work in Aceh. This is not surprising in a complex legal context of a mix of Shari a, adat (customary) and statutory law, of significantly more women than men dying in the tsunami, of difficult issues around inheritance and guardianship, and of conservative social and cultural pressures against women emerging after the tsunami. Oxfam has supported a range of innovative legal awareness work through local and international NGOs and welcomed BRR s joint land titling policy for land acquired for resettlement. Daniel Fitzpatrick s policy paper on women s rights to land and housing focused on inheritance and documenting land rights and recommended joint titling under the RALAS project. Oxfam will continue to engage with BPN on this and to support local NGOs working in his area. Land administration is another of Daniel Fitzpatrick s policy papers, which makes detailed recommendations on how it could be strengthened and improved. Many of the key institutions were degraded by the tsunami and the conflict. He notes there are risks in providing funds to institutions that at times may be lacking in transparency so it is essential that the government assistance recommendations be complemented by civil society-based monitoring and advocacy mechanisms. Much in this area will depend on what happens to the RALAS project and the degree of reform of the provincial land administration system under the new Aceh Government. Some broadly highly favourable views by others of Oxfam s land rights advocacy work have been compiled during research for this report and these are set out in section 9. John Clark, once Oxfam s chief policy adviser, now a key figure in the 4

5 World Bank, noted that it showed the value of linking the micro with the macro, of building the policy analysis and advocacy on very close connection with some of the most vulnerable people in the province. Daniel Fitzpatrick appreciated the multiplicity of advocacy tools which Oxfam brought to bear, for example on renters and squatters, which in combination became very powerful. He also argues that if you re going to have an advocacy strategy and feed in data, it is very effective if no one else has that data, and that if Oxfam is going to have successful advocacy, it must have the capacity to follow through, otherwise it could really hurt itself. Future advocacy directions for Oxfam are likely to involve working closely with government on the implementation of some of the recommendations in Daniel Fitzpatrick s policy papers, further work on local land disputes through the Joint Land Advocacy Working Group, but also working on broader issues of poverty reduction and economic development closely related to the plans of the new Aceh Provincial Government. So Oxfam is supporting work on Participatory Poverty Assessments and engaging with government plans for land reform and small-holder plantations. Since November 2007, Oxfam has been part of a small core group working on the Governor s Green Economic Development and Investment Strategy, formally launched at the Bali Climate Change Conference on 12 December In this engagement, Oxfam has drawn heavily on the land administration policy paper, has argued the need to ensure that people s land rights are protected in the process of identifying or acquiring state land for plantation development, and that the Strategy be developed through a process that allows for the active engagement of local stakeholders. Oxfam has not hitherto been allowed to do post-conflict work in Aceh for fears that the public which gave so generously to the tsunami appeal might not welcome this. Even high level lobbying by Barbara Stocking, Oxfam s Director, to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) failed to change this position. Many in Aceh strongly contested this view, while many local NGO partners of Oxfam of course make no such distinction. Oxfam will finally be able to support local NGOs and local authorities through a new livelihoods programme focusing on post-conflict areas. Some of the lessons learned from the Aceh experience with relevance to other postdisaster situations include the need to: have a general understanding of the dynamics, recent history, context and culture of an area, but without coming with too many preconceived ideas; understand the mandate of your organisation and whether it will be there for longer than just the emergency period; talk to as many groups as possible, especially direct victims, as it s important to understand what they see as priorities, but also talk to a wider group, including local civil society organisations, academics, government, and other international agencies who have been around for a time, to understand what the critical dynamics are and the challenges they re facing. They will have a longer term view, as they re embedded in the society; look at where gaps may be emerging; think of doing advocacy around issues where you can have a longer term effect, not just do the IDPs have enough water or food?, and look at areas where you could really make a change for the longest term possible and look at the levers of change which you could affect; 5

6 cast your net wide from the very beginning; help people to see what opportunities are available; always see yourselves as agents as change. This advice and this approach seem to this writer to offer really important lessons to others who may seek to engage in advocacy work in future post-disaster situations. 6

7 PART ONE: BACKGROUND 7

8 01 INTRODUCTORY THOUGHTS In November 2006, at the World Bank s headquarters in Washington, DC, I introduced a presentation on The Struggle for Land Rights in post-tsunami and post- Conflict Aceh. It was given by Lilianne Fan, Oxfam International s Senior Policy Coordinator for Aceh and Nias. I told the audience that I believed that Lilianne s advocacy work is by far and away the most significant contribution which Oxfam has made to the people of Aceh and most certainly the best value for money. It was a message I repeated to countless Oxfam audiences whenever the opportunity arose. I was then Oxfam GB s Global Land Adviser. I have since retired, after 20 years with Oxfam, and am now attached to an Oxford-based group, Mokoro, through whom I have continued to work from time to time on land rights. So when Ian Small and Lilianne Fan asked if I would like to come to Aceh to spend a month writing up the history of their land advocacy work since the tsunami, I replied that I couldn t think of anything that I would rather do. It has been an absolute joy working with Lilianne and her hugely impressive colleagues in the Policy and Advocacy Unit (PAU) 1 recording some of this history. Clearly I am not an unbiased source and this is not a formal evaluation. Rather, it is an attempt to do justice to, and celebrate, some really exciting, innovative and strategic work which Oxfam has every reason to feel proud of, and thereby contribute to Oxfam s historical and institutional memory. I have endeavoured both to record some of that work, principally through the testimonies of key people within and outside Oxfam, and, more challenging because the Aceh context is so particular, to tease out some lessons from these experiences, which might usefully be drawn upon in post-disaster contexts in the future, both by Oxfam and by others. In a piece of work I did for the Legal Resources Centre of South Africa in 2001, 2 I was asked to hold a mirror up to us on its post-apartheid work on land and housing. That too was hugely impressive work. I d like to think that I have also held a mirror up to Oxfam s land rights advocacy work in Aceh. Robin Palmer Mokoro Ltd Banda Aceh, Bulawayo and Botley November - December Iwan Amir, Jane Dunlop, Kurniawan, Muba Simanihuruk, and Luke Swainson. 2 Robin Palmer, Lawyers and Land Reform in South Africa: A Review of the Land, Housing and Development Work of the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), Cape Town and Pretoria: Legal Resources Centre, South Africa, August

9 02 WHY DID OXFAM FOCUS ON LAND RIGHTS IN ACEH? I thought that I already knew the answer to the question why did Oxfam focus on land rights in its initial advocacy work in Aceh? My answer had always gone like this. A conversation took place in Geneva on 5 January 2005, just 10 days after the tsunami disaster in the Indian Ocean. It was suggested off the record to Oxfam International by a UNOCHA official that we might want to take a close look at land and property rights in the affected areas. These issues, it was felt, might well become a major headache during the reconstruction phase, when the risk of tourism developers moving in on people s homes will increase and it was feared that people s land rights might be completely ignored in the immediate UN and government responses. 3 So, on 7 January 2005, I (then Oxfam GB s Global Land Adviser) was asked by Phil Bloomer (then OGB s Head of Advocacy) to look at this today, and give it 1-2 hours to see if this is something we should/could look at. It took rather less than two hours of Internet searching to convince me that very serious issues were indeed at stake, and that the rights of poor and vulnerable communities could well be at risk during post-tsunami reconstruction. But, on reflection, why did I not myself initiate this? I had, after all, considerable experience of humanitarian work (including managing the managers of Oxfam programmes in wartime Mozambique and Angola). Yet all my work on land rights had been conducted within a non-humanitarian framework and it had never occurred to me that it could be otherwise. 4 In the event, under a grant from OGB s Research and Learning Fund (RALF), I asked Shaun Williams to carry out a short scoping review to identify key issues in order to help Oxfam and hopefully others respond most appropriately and effectively in both programme and advocacy work. Shaun is a vastly experienced land rights specialist, who had previously worked for Oxfam in a land study programme in Cambodia, and was familiar with many of the complex land rights issues in Asia. Inevitably, given the limited time, his review was quick and dirty, a snapshot of an evolving process. It covered pre- and post-tsunami property rights, made recommendations, and suggested opportunities for advocacy. Some of us believed that this review would be just the beginning of Oxfam s engagement on these critical issues. Somewhat naively, I had hoped that it would be possible for Oxfam to publish Shaun s review, which was completed in March, entitled Getting Back Home: Impact on Property Rights of the Indian Ocean Earthquake-Tsunami Sophie Nussle, OI Geneva, to Oxfam International Tsunami Advocacy Group, 6 January I reflect on this in Uncharted territory: Land, conflict and humanitarian action: report of a conference, 7 February 2008,

10 Shaun s study emphatically established the need for and feasibility of investment in reparation, securing and enhancing the property rights of survivors to help those who were already living with poverty to get back home so as to avoid the risk of being locked out of sustainable livelihoods forever. But it necessarily contained an analysis of political factors which posed threats to poor people s land rights in Aceh and elsewhere, and it was ruled that this was too sensitive to publish in Oxfam s name as it might threaten our programme in Aceh. With the wisdom of hindsight, I should have anticipated this. Subsequently, Shaun airbrushed the report of its specific Oxfam content and the copyright was transferred from Oxfam to him in July. It was subsequently published by UNHCR in February Meanwhile, on Friday 28 January 2005, just 3 weeks after my encounter with Phil Bloomer, I attended the first in a series of Amnesty International lectures on land rights in the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford. It was given by the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, who spoke about the ravages of the mining industry in Papua New Guinea. I shamelessly exploited the opportunity of question time to announce that Oxfam had just commissioned a rapid scoping study of land and property rights in the tsunami-affected countries of South-East Asia. If there is anyone in the audience who could help us with this, I said, please come and talk to me after the lecture. A number of people did so, but the one who made the greatest impact was Lilianne Fan. She said that she knew a thing or two about Aceh (which was a massive understatement) and that she was studying for a PhD at Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford. We arranged to meet on the following Monday, 31 January, and then immediately for her to share her considerable knowledge with Shaun Williams. Within a month Lilianne had became an Oxfam colleague and went to Aceh in an imaginatively-created post as Advocacy Coordinator. I imagined, when introducing Lilianne to a World Bank audience in November 2006, that this post had contained a focus on land and property issues. It seemed logical, given the context of Shaun s scoping study, and the fact that Oxfam did subsequently focus on land rights advocacy in Aceh. But, as I learned when conducting this study in Aceh in October / November 2007, that was not the case. The real reason was and it is a far, far better reason that land became an issue for Oxfam because it was raised by Acehnese communities themselves, and also by some of the legal aid groups in Aceh, when Lilianne and her colleague Afiffuddin went around listening to people in the early months of So it was a bottom up, rather than a top down decision. One final footnote. As I came more and more in contact with Lilianne s work, I did my very best in a variety of ways to try to ensure that she remained in Aceh. This involved pestering senior managers to try to help them understand the importance of her work. Also, in arguing with her Oxford supervisor to release her from her PhD, I said that: 5 New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper

11 Lilianne is not doing any old job in some normal context. She is playing a really critical role as interlocutor between a range of different actors from local communities through to the World Bank. I believe that this work is now maturing and that Lilianne, because of her particular range of skills and experience, is critical and that the time is also critical - when some of the old structures and constraints have been removed or shaken and new things are, perhaps briefly, possible (cf. South Africa 1994, when, many would argue, the moment was lost). 6 To the World Bank audience, I described our meeting in the Sheldonian theatre as a fateful encounter. Lilianne and I both believe it to have been so. 6 Robin Palmer to Eva-Lotta Hedman, 30 November

12 03 SOME INDONESIAN CONTEXT The impacts of the tsunami and subsequent earthquakes which struck Aceh, Indonesia, and other parts of the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004 with such devastating force have been extensively recorded. Loss of land to the sea, devastation of huge areas of land, and destruction of property were combined with huge loss of life, massive displacement and loss of land records. Many government officials were among those who perished. 7 The tsunami hit a province in which a 30-year conflict between the Indonesian Government and the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) was still continuing. To a large extent, Aceh had been cut off from the rest of the world because of that conflict, though tens of thousands of Acehnese had fled to neighbouring Malaysia. Much of its recent history had been characterised by violence, by atrocities and the rapacious behaviour by the Indonesian army, the TNI. Both sides in the conflict had plundered economic resources such as timber. This grim history played out in curious ways in the responses to the tsunami. There was profound mistrust from some circles, including local and international NGOs, of the intentions of the Indonesian military. There were some fears that it might exploit the tsunami by seeking to take over territory controlled by GAM, and specifically that it would deploy barracks (baraks), which had a long history of being used for counter-insurgency in Indonesia, as a way of controlling the supply of logistics by populations to GAM. There was huge controversy over the use of the barracks, including within Oxfam, where old Indonesian hands urged that Oxfam have nothing to do with them. Similar voices were heard from human rights organisations. 8 This was perfectly natural for people who had been in opposition mode for so long. But, as Ian Small, Oxfam s Senior Programme Manager in Aceh and a firm supporter of using barracks recalled (interview 17 October 2007), Within 6 weeks, the Indonesian Government had begun to put over 60,000 people under tin roof with wood shelter... while the international community had done nothing... They got it right and we were all wrong! 7 The Indian Ocean tsunami disaster killed over 150,000 people, damaged or destroyed over 200,000 homes and displaced over 500,000 in Indonesia alone. In the worst-hit province of Aceh, almost all land-related records were damaged or destroyed. Large numbers of boundary markers were obscured or obliterated. The National Land Agency (BPN) lost most of its buildings, and up to 30% of its staff. At least 15,000 land parcels remain under water, and as much as 7000 ha of land have been irretrievably damaged by the effects of mud, salt, sand and erosion. Daniel Fitzpatrick, Managing Conflict and Sustaining Recovery: Land Administration Reform in Tsunami-Affected Aceh, Oxfam International Policy Paper, April 2008, For a typical example, one UNOCHA official on 5 January 2005 said off the record, that in his opinion the Indonesian government were using the Tsunami to punish the people of Aceh; and that is was very possible they would try some kind of encouraged migration to Aceh from other parts of Sumatra (or other islands) to take the place of the Aceh people who died - and of those who are - or will be - in camps. Even the vastly experienced Indonesian legal scholar, Daniel Fitzpatrick, who will feature prominently in this report, held similar views at this time. See his Let Them Return Home: Displaced Acehnese Now Face Fears of Dispossession, Canberra Times, 20 February

13 The essential point and it relates strongly to the history of Oxfam s 9 advocacy work was that Indonesian politics had changed profoundly. A new reforming government under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) had come to power just two months before the tsunami which was very different in character from its brutal, militaristic, corrupt predecessors. Among other things, it was determined to do right by the suffering people of Aceh. It signed a peace agreement with GAM in August 2005, and then, after much negotiation, agreed the final terms of a Law on the Governance of Aceh (LoGA) in August This allowed a great deal of political and economic autonomy for Aceh, 10 allowing GAM to withdrew its demand for independence. TAPOL, a UK-based organisation advocating for democracy and human rights in Indonesia, observed that Aceh had suddenly gone from years of being a place of desperation, deprived of any space for democracy to becoming arguably the only place in the Indonesian republic where political participation can blossom, where local political parties and aspirations have become possible and where decentralisation has real meaning. 11 In December direct local elections were held for the posts of Governor and District Heads, and in February 2007 a new Provincial Government of Aceh (covering 19 districts), including former members of GAM (the post of Governor and 7 districts), came to power. TAPOL wrote that the 30 years of war and conflict have substantially affected the political views and perceptions of the Acehnese. They have become more critical than voters elsewhere in Indonesia and have also developed a strong desire for reform, self governance, and a say in running their own economy. 12 Aceh s lead is expected to have significant political repercussions across Indonesia in the future. 13 The critical point is that when Lilianne Fan took up the post of Advocacy Coordinator for Oxfam International in late February 2006, she was about to start work in a context wholly different, in terms of the potential and space for advocacy, from what had gone before. She had both the good sense and the political maturity to recognise this. 9 Throughout this report Oxfam refers to the Oxfam International programme in Aceh and Nias. 10 Under the LoGA, Aceh stands to receive 70% of revenues from its oil and gas resources, 80% of forestry, fishery, mining and geothermal energy revenues, and an additional 2% of the central Government s General Allocation Funds for 15 years and 1% for the following 5 years. 11 Peace Process Still on Track, TAPOL Bulletin No. 182 (April 2006). 12 Resounding victory for democracy in Aceh, TAPOL Bulletin No. 185 (January 2007). 13 This was certainly the hope of a group of Papuans at a Refugees Studies Centre workshop I attended in Oxford in October See Eva-Lotta E. Hedman (Ed), Dynamics of Conflict and Displacement in Papua, Indonesia, RSC Working Paper No. 42, September (A collection of papers developed in conjunction with a one-day workshop held on the 26th October 2006 at St. Antony s College, Oxford). 13

14 04 SOME TIMELINES FOR ADVOCACY IN ACEH, On undertaking this task, one of my first actions was to sit down with Lilianne Fan and ask her to reflect back over her two and three-quarter years in Aceh and to identify the different periods which had influenced and affected Oxfam s advocacy work on land rights. She identified the following 6 distinct phases. 1 st phase no clear authority, January - March 2005 When Lilianne arrived in Aceh in late February 2005, there was still no clear local authority. Activities were led by the central government in Jakarta, with little local government involvement. The Governor of Aceh had been arrested just before the tsunami, and as a result it was not clear who was in charge at the Provincial level. Nor was it clear how long agencies would be allowed to stay; originally they were supposed to leave by March 15. There were sectoral UN meetings taking place and there was some symbolic engagement at the highest level. There was, however, some early advocacy around the question of the barracks, in which Ian Small (then Oxfam s East Asia Regional Humanitarian Coordinator) was very much involved (see 08.5 below). No one knew at that stage where the IDPs were going to go and thus where to establish programmes. Oxfam believed that people should have options, whether to stay in the temporary camps, move into the barracks which the government was building, or even try to go home, where that was possible. 2 nd phase a period of consultation, March - July 2005 In early March 2005, there were consultations at the university on the development of a blueprint for reconstruction. This was also led by the central government, but involved the local university, civil society groups, and even people from local communities. This was a shrewd move on the government s part and it received good advice. There were so many sensitivities about Aceh precisely because of its history. This made the central government conscious that it needed to handle Aceh properly and genuinely involve the people in the recovery process. This was a real testimony to the leadership of the government, and it led in March to the publication of the Master Plan for the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction of Aceh and Nias and the setting up of the Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Agency for Aceh and Nias (Badan Rehabilitasi dan Rekonstruksi untuk Aceh dan Nias, or BRR). It was initially supposed to just focus on Aceh, but the launch of the Master Plan was delayed after the Nias earthquake occurred. The Master Plan itself was finalised in Jakarta as it was led by BAPPENAS, the National Planning and Development Agency, and all the legal processes for establishing BRR were also done in Jakarta as BRR was established as a ministerial level agency, but it soon became clear that future initiatives would be taken in Aceh. A former minister, Pak Kuntoro, was put in charge of BRR. This was a real innovation, the first time that a central government agency at ministerial level had been set up outside Jakarta. Many of the systems BRR set up, such as decentralised financial procedures and monitoring, were highly innovative. BRR was also very serious in ensuring that community participation took place. Within a few months, with the Master Plan launched and the BRR established, it was clear that agencies could stay. At this time, sector were still being coordinated through the UN-facilitated working groups (Shelter, WatSan, Livelihoods, Child 14

15 Protection, etc). For Oxfam s advocacy team, this was a time for getting out into the field, talking to as many people as possible, finding out from them what the key issues really were, and developing a clear advocacy strategy. When the BRR became operational by the end of June, suddenly you had someone to talk to and to lobby. This was also a time when communities started deciding they would try to go home, quite spontaneously. The Master Plan had initially suggested a coastal buffer zone (akin to those in India and Sri Lanka), but this was retracted, which demonstrated that government was serious about listening to communities (though it did later mean that some houses were built in unsafe or unsuitable places). 3 rd phase the peace agreement, August 2005 A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by the Government of Indonesia and by the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) in Helsinki on 15 August This changed things radically and demonstrated a real seriousness on part of Acehnese, from the top down, to lay down their guns. There was no resistance to this from the military, even when all 30,000 non organic troops had to leave Aceh, and there were no incidents at all, which was surprising, as the military had been deeply engaged in illicit economic activities. Since then, the military has been respectful for the most part (although there have been a number of cases of military officers clashing with villages and security forces being overly heavy-handed with suspected criminals). Lilianne wanted Oxfam to use the opportunity of the peace agreement to look at post-conflict work, as well as land rights, in its advocacy strategy, but this was not agreed, principally because Oxfam Indonesia country team had judged that this would be too political and too sensitive. She would have liked to have been able to say to the government that Oxfam was interested in supporting it in facilitating the return of former GAM fighters and in socialising the Memorandum of Understanding. There were no proper guidelines on how to deal with the returnees, and it became a real problem, with Oxfam staff not knowing who these people were, or really understanding the local dynamics. Lilianne would also have liked to mainstream conflict sensitivity into the existing tsunami programme design and implementation. There is an important lesson here that in such contexts one should ideally seek to engage in both post-disaster and post-conflict work. In retrospect, Oxfam might have been more creative at this stage (see 10 below). 4 th phase engaging on national policy, September September 2006 By the end of 2005 it was becoming clear what type of policies BRR was designing and where the focus of the reconstruction programme would be, and even clearer that some social groups were being left out such as renters and squatters and people facing resettlement. This was a key phase. John Clark, onetime Oxfam s chief policy adviser, now World Bank adviser on donor coordination to BRR, played a pivotal role, advising BRR on how to hold policy dialogue. This was the time when a few organisations, mainly working in the housing sector, including Oxfam, started talking about land issues. This was through the Shelter Working Group (SWG), facilitated by UN-Habitat, as well as housing policy roundtables facilitated by BRR. The SWG and other agencies (especially UNDP, UN-Habitat, and AusAid) started to engage BRR, saying that you really need to have a policy on resettlement, and we are happy to sit with you, form an ad hoc group, and develop draft guidelines for 15

16 you. This happened from September - December 2005, and Daniel Fitzpatrick (then a consultant to UNDP) was very much involved. This was also when Oxfam started thinking about developing its 4 policy papers (on resettlement, renters and squatters, women s land rights, and land administration, authored by Daniel Fitzpatrick). Everyone thought that the resettlement guidelines would be accepted by BRR, as it (in the person of Ibu Erna, Director of Land) had been involved from the beginning, Instead, they were rejected by its new Housing and Settlement Deputy, Andy Siswanto, who was a key player but who proved very difficult to work with and remained so all through This unexpected rebuff pushed Oxfam to work harder, to make solid arguments, gather evidence and suggest clear policy options. It was a difficult period, but there was good work on the ground, in Lamno and elsewhere, mostly the work of Afiffuddin, in getting people to work together, negotiating, lobbying and taking specific cases up to BRR. This was case work advocacy, but Oxfam at the time lacked the capacity to undertake research to solidify it. There was a success in Lhoong sub-district of Aceh Besar in October 2005, with the payment of compensation to land owners by the Bupati (mayor) of Aceh Besar for the provision of land to two villages in need of relocation. This was the first time that this had happened in post-tsunami Aceh. Oxfam told BRR that these things were happening on the ground and that it should design a policy to respond. Internally, Lilianne continued to argue the need to have research capacity to strengthen the advocacy work. Senior managers in Aceh and Bangkok were responsive to this, and there was by now a greater recognition of the value of the advocacy work. So when she returned from leave in July 2006, it was as Senior Policy Coordinator, with research as the focus of a newly established policy unit. 5 th phase demonstrations and their aftermath, September - December 2006 In September 2006, 2,000 people residing in the barracks demonstrated in front of the BRR headquarters. They were people who had been left out of housing assistance, or had lost land, or had no land before the tsunami. They had been affected by BRR s ineffective policy; BRR Regulation 21/2006 offered renters and squatters cash compensation rather than land and housing assistance. Agencies were then under a lot of pressure to deliver on housing, but very few were looking at the thousands of families who still remained in the barracks. BRR s thinking began to shift after the demonstrations, though this did not become apparent until December. By then Daniel Fitzpatrick had key recommendations on renters and squatters ready, and Oxfam used the visit of President Bill Clinton, UN Special Envoy on Tsunami Recovery, to push these issues. There was also influential pressure from Eric Morris (the United Nations Recovery Coordinator) of UNORC, who was very passionate about this blind spot of the barracks issue. Oxfam held a press conference on a recent briefing paper on land rights, distributed a widely used video clip for the international media, and then did two path-breaking radio phone-in programmes on renters and squatters on Radio Baiturahman. This was at the invitation of the Irish Red Cross. When they had attended the Oxfam press conference, they said they had been getting many calls on their community radio programme about renters and squatters, but did not know what to say to them. They also invited Pak Wisnubroto, BRR s Director of Programmes and Planning to explain the renters and squatters policy. He was very open and transparent, and this was when Oxfam first stated to see that BRR was rethinking its policy and that there was suddenly an opening. BRR 16

17 was still not very clear about what revising its policy might mean in practice, so Oxfam used this as an opportunity to engage around the recommendations prepared by Daniel Fitzpatrick. At the same time BRR replaced Andy Siswanto with Pak Bambang Sudiatmo, who was, and remains, very keen to engage. 6 th phase new openings, January - December 2007 Things began to shift towards the end of In January 2007, BRR announced a revision of its renters and squatters policy and it took on board many of the Oxfam recommendations. BRR rang up Oxfam to say that the policy had been redesigned and it was now really interested in a policy that could offer housing to renters and squatters, but it needed an adviser to help with this. Daniel identified someone who could move quickly into BRR (whose mandate runs until May 2009). This was Jane Dunlop, who had been doing research for him on some of his policy papers. She started in February 2007 and worked within BRR for 6 months, covering issues such as renters and squatters, resettlement, housing and the barracks. It was a very positive experience and shifted everything. It demonstrated that Oxfam was really serious about helping BRR and not just interested in advocating from the outside. It has meant that BRR has been able to come to Oxfam informally over a whole range of issues. Similarly, Kurniawan, Oxfam s Advocacy Officer, was seconded for a month to the Aceh Reintegration Agency (Badan Reintegrasi Aceh, BRA), which said that this kind of work was by far the most valuable support it had ever received. No other international NGOs have used technical assistance in this way, though USAID and the EU have advisers in the Governor s Office. In February 2007, following elections the previous December, the new Provincial Government of Aceh, which included former GAM and civil society activists, started work. It will have the task of managing huge amounts of public finance. Oxfam has been listening to the new government s ideas on poverty reduction, palm oil, land reform, micro credit, investment, free education, and extension of health care, and has started to engage with it, most recently on its Green Economic Development and Investment Strategy. This has been very positive, but has also demonstrated the need for good analysis to ensure that its economic development policies are pro-poor. This new political environment is now shaping Oxfam s programme thinking and has allowed it to broaden out from the work on land rights to other issues relating to poverty reduction and economic development strategy, and to develop a long term timeframe looking at strategic issues which can have a wider and deeper effect on poverty. 17

18 05 LINKS BETWEEN OXFAM S PROGRAMME AND ADVOCACY WORK In theory, Oxfam s advocacy work anywhere in the world is always supposed to rest on the base of its programme work. The reality is often more complex. So it has been in Aceh, and this partly derives from the question of where the small advocacy team was to be located in the context of a huge humanitarian operational programme. This was an issue which has been ongoing, exacerbated by Oxfam s famous predilection for regular structural change, and by the constant turnover of senior and middle management. It is indeed somewhat surprising to find an advocacy post created at all in a disaster response on an unprecedented scale, especially as early as February So surprising in fact that no one is yet prepared to claim credit for it! Mona Laczo, Oxfam s East Asia Regional Media and Advocacy Coordinator at the time, remembers Very early on the idea floating around but I don't remember if I had to do any insisting. What I did though is I quickly pulled together a Job Profile, spread the word and quickly did an interview with 3 candidates. Lilianne Fan interviewed at 2 a.m. It was her choice and she insisted that it was OK, and I was shocked by how together she was even at that hour. So I hired her. And she signed a 1 year contract which nobody else dared to do at that time! 14 The recollections of Ashvin Dayal, then Oxfam Regional Director for East Asia, appear below Mona Laczo to Robin Palmer, 20 October Asvin Dayal, Regional Director, to Robin Palmer, 22 October 2007, said that he could not recall specifically why the post was created, but this is what he does remember: 1) Early on, probably about Jan 4th/5th when Jasmine [Whitbread, International Director] hit the ground, it was clear we had the need and the resources to have a holistic approach to the response which integrated communications, advocacy and policy work. 2) However, the first formal organagram on Jan 12th did not have her post (I checked my history for this!). I suspect at the time because the event was so media and advocacy heavy that we had global OI resources coming in, e.g. Geoff Peterson from OCAA. 3) At the time there were discussions taking place between myself, Mona Laczo and Richard Luff, the first SPM, on strengthening our policy advocacy capacity. 4) This was being augmented by the programme thinking - if you recall the first PIP was titled Enabling Options for Informed Choices by Tsunami Affected Communities or something like that, and of course land policy issues were going to be key (that's where the early work form you [Robin Palmer] and Shaun [Williams] was so helpful). 5) The precise moment at which Lilianne s specific role was created and how she was hired I cannot answer, but I think Mona would have been the recruiter. 6) Later, in March 2006, Ian Small, recognising the excellent work she was doing and the strategic nature of her networks, took her out of the communications / advocacy team and had the post report directly to the SPM as a kind of senior policy advisor. 18

19 Lilianne recalls that at the beginning she and her colleague Afiffuddin talked to the local programme staff as much as they could, certainly those who were out in the field every day. But they were listening to other groups as well. Once they decided that land rights were going to be an issue for Oxfam, they began to work with the shelter team. There was a lot of sharing, of attending meetings together. As the advocacy work developed, it became obvious that Oxfam needed to focus on the people who were being left out of the recovery work. When land issues were being discussed in BPN (Badan Pertanahan Nasional, the National Land Agency), she made sure that the shelter people came along. They also worked with the community development officers. She sent Afiffuddin out, and he would see all the land issues in the field, which the CDOs didn t necessarily. So they were working with the programme, accompanying it to find out about issues. Shelter was one of the most effective links; they were resources for each other and worked on joint advocacy. The shelter team began to look out for land issues and brought the advocacy team to places where there were particular questions. All of this was through local staff. But of course the advocacy team could not guarantee that the shelter team would provide concrete benefits for communities. They got into difficulties in Lhoong, where the Bupati of Aceh Besar said I ll pay for the land, but Oxfam must build houses. So this was a combination of deliberate, strategic land work but also some ad hoc local work. At that time (2005), the advocacy team felt really overstretched, whereas now (2007) they have more resources and far greater capacity. The advocacy work was not of course always grounded in programme work. They wanted the broadest possible scope, and used the programme as a way of getting into the field, but they had many other sources of information and often had to make visits to places outside the programme areas, because the land rights work had its own life. The Senior Programme Manager, Claude St. Pierre, came from Brazil, which has a huge advocacy programme, and he clearly recognised that advocacy needed to have its own networks. Once they felt the need to do more research and relationship building, they needed a bigger team and they could not simultaneously deliver to the programme. This led Ian Small (who replaced Claude St. Pierre as SPM) and Ashvin Dayal, Regional Director for East Asia, to agree around March 2006 to the setting up of a policy unity which would be strategic and research based, while leaving an advocacy person linked to the programme based in the Media and Communications Team. Kurniawan became that person in November 2006, while continuing to work on land rights work, until he joined the Policy and Advocacy Unit in August One strong link right across Oxfam in Aceh was work on the barracks (see 08.5 below) a really divisive issue but one on which a number of different teams could work. Ian Small, who had been an enthusiast for barracks in the immediate days after the tsunami, pushed hard for an operational response a barracks team to complement advocacy efforts, and this was agreed after the demonstrations by renters and squatters in the barracks in September Ever since then, there was been ongoing lobbying on policy issues relating to the future options of those still remaining in the barracks. 19