Trouble in Paradise

Parang Tritis, Indonesia - On a sandy hill under the blazing Central Java sun, the relocation plot looks more like a prison camp than part of a housing development. In most places, only the foundations of the new houses have been laid--squares and rectangles of rock embedded in the blackish sand. Achmad (not his real name), who expects to be ordered by the government to move into his new "home" any day, leans against the well he has dug and shakes his head.

"There was enough money for the foundations and the well. We have gone into debt for the rest." Unlike many of his neighbors, Achmad has built walls for his house--but they are already starting to crack because he could only afford low-quality cement. He points to a cluster of houses on the beach below. "They are all brothels. It isn't good for the children here."

Achmad doesn't want to move. He has lived and worked on a small strip of Parang Tritis beach, on the south coast of Java, for nearly 10 years. The spot is a popular recreation area among students and families from the city of Yogyakarta, about 40 minutes away. When they tire of strolling in the scorching heat --they don't swim because of vicious currents that regularly claim lives--the tourists go to the little cafes run by Achmad and his neighbors for food and drink. It isn't the kind of outing advertised in Indonesia's glossy tourist brochures which are designed to attract foreign visitors. But it serves the people of the area well.

Late last September, the government told the people of Parang Tritis they had to move. The local government chief, the Camat, didn't say why, and when Achmad and the 29 other families slated for eviction asked, they got an odd and unsatisfactory response: "Ask God."

Since then, first rumors and then newspaper reports revealed what seems to be the real reason for the impending ouster. A rich artist from Yogyakarta wants to build a luxury hotel in a paddy field just behind the people's homes. Such projects are popular in Indonesia: a fancy hotel that promises to create jobs and bring in the foreign exchange needed to service the country's $48 billion debt. The hotel itself won't use much of the land along the beach, but "developers" view the houses and shelters there as an eyesore that will obstruct the ocean view. Once the houses are gone, the local tourists fear the beach will be closed to them too, so that foreign guests in the new hotel can have the sand to themselves.

Though it is isolated, the Parang Tritis case is important. It is the kind of thing that often happens to small communities throughout Indonesia. The government uproots local people, poor but surviving, in the name of "development." Often, as in Parang Tritis, no one tells the people why they have to move or gives them enough money to make a new start somewhere else. In the rural areas, laws and rights that exist on paper often do not apply. Whatever development does take place is not likely to benefit those whose lives it interrupted. And, most of the time, nobody outside the community ever hears about the human cost of the "development" project.

At first, the government offered the residents of Parang Tritis no compensation at all--they were simply told to leave by mid- November 1990. After they protested, pointing out that they had been given permission to move to the beach by a government- appointed village head eight years earlier, they were offered the materials to build new homes. Only when they kept up the pressure did the government finally offer money--750,000 rupiah (about $400)--to help each of the 30 families move.

It seemed an enormous sum--more money than most of the families earn in a year. Still, some of the villagers resisted. They do not like Bolong, the new area where they have been told to move, because it is too far away from the shore to attract the tourists on which their businesses depend. They also wanted the government's guarantee that if they are forced to move, their title to the new land will be secure. They do not want to be shunted aside again.

When the villagers resisted moving, Achmad and others say, the government warned them they might become candidates for "voluntary" migration to Indonesia's remote outer islands instead [see "Uprooting People, Destroying Cultures: Indonesia's Transmigration Program," Multinational Monitor, October 1990]. Then soldiers began coming around, one or two at a time, to ask why the people on the beach refused to move. In the end, Achmad and his neighbors agreed to go.

As it turned out, however, the money offered by the government was not enough to pay for the new houses. Salim (not his real name), one of the few who moved to Bolong, says he has spent 4 million rupiah (about $2,100) so far building a new house. For a family that earns about 50,000 rupiah a month, it is a huge amount. Still the house is just four walls around a dirt floor, with no roof.

Even Hadi Harsono, the former government official who gave the people the original permission to move to the beach, scoffs at the sum the government paid. "It is not compensation. It is a consolation prize." He says he told his boss that he disagreed with the way the villagers were being treated. In August he was fired, but says he doesn't know why.

Parang Tritis differs from other displacement cases in one important respect: the residents are still fighting the eviction plans.

Student activists from Yogyakarta, who read about the proposed evictions in the local paper have been an integral part of the resistance. Deeply critical of the Indonesian government and driven by a fervent desire for social and political change, the students see Parang Tritis as an example of all that is wrong with Indonesia's burgeoning international tourist industry. "The issue is not compensation," says one student. "It is tourist development as a whole." The students' broad ideological goals might not square perfectly with the bread-and-butter demands of the people on the beach. The students urge the villagers simply to defy eviction, but some of the people are more concerned about getting more money in case they lose their fight and are forced to move. So far, however, it has proved an effective alliance. Late in 1990, most of the villagers joined the students in a protest march to the governor's office. About 1,000 people showed up. They were soon joined by soldiers and state security officials who took a lot of photographs in a very obvious way. The evictions were put on hold--but a new deadline is expected any day. Nobody knows what will happen if the villagers continue to resist. But Hadi Harsono, talking with the student leaders one afternoon, said he felt they were doing the right thing. "If you don't protest, you will keep being trodden down."

- Samantha Sparks

Monopoly Makers

The U.S. Congress weakened an important component of U.S. antitrust law at the close of its 1990 legislative session. The Antitrust Amendments Act of 1990, which passed with little debate and scant public attention, makes it easier for competing corporations to share members of their boards of directors. Many antitrust advocates believe the amendments to the Clayton Antitrust Act may significantly increase price-fixing and other anti-competitive business practices.

Opposition to the Antitrust Amendments Act was minimized by other provisions which antitrust advocates viewed more favorably. The new Act prohibits competing companies, in most instances, from sharing top officers as well as directors.

The original Section 8 of the Clayton Act, adopted in 1914, prohibits board members of one company from sitting on the board of any substantial competitor. It was intended to prevent any two corporations from using interlocking directorates to gain control over a given market, which would allow them to fix prices.

Proponents of the 1990 amendment claim that there is a scarcity of qualified director candidates and argue that the law's flat prohibition of interlocks greatly exacerbated the problem. "The pool of individuals with the ability, the time and the inclination to serve as outside directors is limited and is evaporating," Martin Coyle, vice president of TRW, Inc, told the House Subcommittee on Economic and Commercial Law.

To address this alleged scarcity, the amendment loosens the Clayton Act's strict definition of competitors. Under the original Section 8, for instance, a large conglomerate with a small division in a given market would be prohibited from sharing directors with any company in that market. The recently passed amendments, however, create several loopholes in the original tight definition.

The amendments raise the minimum net worth for corporations to fall under the law's jurisdiction from $1 million to $10 million, and they stipulate that both corporations must exceed that threshold. The Antitrust Amendments Act also establishes three "safe harbors" in which corporations may elude the law's strict prohibition of interlocks. Corporations will now be exempt from the regulation if: 1) the competitive sales of corporations which seek to employ a shared director are less than $1 million; 2) the competitive sales of either corporation are less than 2 percent of its total sales; or 3) the competitive sales of each corporation are less than 4 percent of its total sales.

Some argue, however, that Section 8 should have been maintained intact, since even small portions of a corporation's sales can have significant economic impact. James Ponsoldt, a law professor at the University of Georgia, who also testified in the House hearings, told Multinational Monitor that "Even if the overlap represents a small percentage of each company's profits, they might have 40 percent of the market."

This possibility, Ponsoldt says, should have been reason enough to preserve the original Section 8, especially since there was no compelling reason to change the law. He dismisses claims about a shortage of qualified directors. "People who share a common perception of the public good know there is no shortage of qualified directors," said Ponsoldt. "Obviously what they mean by 'qualified' is people who have the same approach to business" that they do.

- Nadav Savio