This study has been started from a small question found in the cultural characteristics of the Indonesian villages. There are the lights in front of each house which brighten
the road and help people pass by safely. The origin of theses lights come fr...
This study has been started from a small question found in the cultural characteristics of the Indonesian villages. There are the lights in front of each house which brighten
the road and help people pass by safely. The origin of theses lights come from the torch in front of the house in order to prevent looting by thieves in the colonial period of Indonesia. These torches started in order to keep their own village have turned into the electric lights by the village development policy of Suharto system.
But there were problems all expenses of electric light have been charged to village people. Suharto system has developed the villages just like this way. To reduce the development costs, they mobilized the residents and let them bear some part of project expenses. And they started to control the village. In this Suharto's strategy of village control, the organizations which performed the function of residents mobilization and surveillance were RW, RT, PKK of village organization. Besides PKK, RW and RT were the traditional self-organizations of village without special relation to central government. But Suharto succeeded in establishing the dependent political relationship between the government and the village utilizing these traditional self-organizations of village.
The changes of this dependent relation have faced new phase after the collapse of Suharto systems in 1998. Particularly the decentralization policies which guaranteed regional autonomy contributed a lot to derive the change of hierarchical political relations between the country and the provinces. The interesting thing is that village people are still spending their money for lightening the electric lights despite this change. And in this context, they are still following the programs designed by Suharto system even after the democratization.
Reviewing this background, this study hereby throws two questions. First, why are the village people still switching on the light in spite of weakening the state control and interference turning into democracy after collapse of authoritarian regimes? Second, are RW, RT, PKK of Suharto which controled the village still performing their functions of country control tools without democratic changes? The purpose of this study is to solve these questions related to the democratic consolidation of Indonesia. Most studies about Indonesia democracy in spite of investigating various targets and aspects have overlooked the villages the general publics are participating directly in politics. And few studies about the Indonesia village have selected RW, RT, PKK as the analysis units. So this study overcoming this kind of academic bias will contribute to examine the democracy of Indonesia from various angles.
The time range has been divided into two phase of Suharto system and post democratization. The survey of the village politics under Suharto system has been performed based on the existing literature and the testimony of persons experienced who participated in the organization at that time. And the case study of village politics after democratization has been researched focussing on Susukan village(Kelurahan) located in central Java in Indonesia. In this study, the field research by ethnographic approach has been done and those research skills such as participatory observation, conversation and interview have been used.
Reviewing the survey result briefly, RW's activities have been signicantly weakened after democratization. And the residents who are participating in RT and RT PKK are reusing these two organizations for village autonomy. But there also have been found continuous phenomenon that these two organizations are performing the assistant roles for the country affairs. In conclusion, the reason why RT and RT PKK which were the control organization in Suharto system has not disappeared is because those are set up based on the tradition of Indonesia village, while Suharto just utilized that tradition to control the village. But now as the government control disappear, the village organizations are re-generating their own autonomic function to activate the horizontal political participation of the residents and public discussions. Therefore, RT and RT PKK are performing the positive roles for the democratization of village politics as Indonesia village lamps are lightening for the safe of their neighbors.
Finally, this phenomenon shows indirectly that Indonesia can grow to consolidated democratic country.