The Future of Carok
On the resource end of the scale of contributing factors, tobacco cash cropping has transformed the economy and the landscape in East Madura. Spreading from south-central Madura, the expansion of cultivated area over the last fifteen years has stimulated extensive land clearing and intensified pressure on land, fodder and especially water resources.
Since 1990, machine pumping from wells and reservoirs for watering tobacco has further extended cultivation and created new conflicts between upstream and downstream farmers and between pump owners and their clients.However, since 1990, there have been profound generational changes in the leadership of a number of villages due to new government requirements that all village chiefs be conversant in the national language, Indonesian. Sons of former village chiefs or neighborhood heads have come into their offices with considerably more formal education than their fathers, and a greater willingness to interact with the subdistrict apparatus, including police and military. In some areas, curbing the activities of thieves (or at least forcing them to limit their operations to outside the village) has reduced one major source of conflict and carok. In one village, long considered the nest of thieves of the Sumenep district, a corrupt village head was replaced in 1990 by his son, who immediately embarked on a vigorous mission to clean up his village. He and his aides have since broken up many violent disputes in progress, and brought the sides to sit down and iron out their differences. As an example of a discernable trend, it provides some hope that a new generation of leaders can find effective local forms of conflict resolution.
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