Triana Kurnia Wardhani

Triana Kurnia Wardan is chair of the National Secretariat of Seruni, a mass women’s organisation that promotes women’s rights and gender equality through organising, research, and campaigns and advocacy in Indonesia.

APWLD interviewed Triana in January 2021 and below is her story.

Joining the women’s movement

From 2003 to 2007, I studied Agriculture at the University of Brawijaya, East Java. Right after graduation, I joined Seruni Indonesian Women’s Organisation.

In the beginning, I was part of the regional leadership team engaged with provincial-level organisations. In 2017, after our first congress, I became the secretary-general of Seruni.

When I joined the women’s movement, Seruni focused only on rural and peasant women. But after our first congress in 2017, we widely expanded our constituencies to include women workers, indigenous women, and fisherwomen. We grew our movement in Indonesia from rural women to also include urban women. Regardless, our focus is still on rural women, as most Indonesians live in rural areas.

Through the movement, I learned about the situation of Indonesian women, especially the rural women, since approximately 70 per cent of Indonesia’s population lives in rural areas. Most of them are poor peasants and peasant labourers. 

How do we change the situation, the backward semi-feudal agriculture situation?

Growing together with APWLD

My first contact with APWLD was during the third Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (APFF) in 2017. APWLD impressed me because, during APFF, I met many feminist organisations from the Asia-Pacific region, learned about women’s issues in their countries, and how the women’s movement developed in their countries.

I wanted to learn and understand more about Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) as a methodology for organising women, especially those from rural areas, and understanding their situation and issues. I applied for FPAR and the workshop to research particular issues faced by Indonesia. We have repeated forest fires because palm oil plantations burn the land every year for replanting. There is a huge forest fire every five years or so. It is getting worse, impacting our members, especially those in Sumatra and Kalimantan. 

FPAR involved improving skills, especially the skills to involve women in meetings and raise their voices and developing methods to make women speak up for themselves. I learned a lot about organising for the women’s movement, which is our responsibility to develop, not only in Indonesia but also across Asia-Pacific and the globe. 

It was useful to learn how to inspire campaigns and actions throughout the Asia-Pacific region and ensure that FPAR could be applied across this region by women’s organisations, including those that are not APWLD members, such as Rupari or Progress, which already use the methodology for their advocacy work.

APWLD encouraged my commitment to being the focal person for the Breaking Out of Marginalisation (BOOM) programme. I have been with the BOOM programme organising committee since 2018, where learned about feminist solidarity. We are like sisters. I feel I have a new, warm, and kind family in the BOOM programme.

The class issue in Indonesia

All Asian countries are plagued by globalisation, fundamentalism, militarism, and patriarchy (GFMP). Women suffer the most. The GMFP framework of analysis is crucial to analysing the situation of women, especially those from rural areas. 

We also have the methodology to analyse the status of women. We are always researching to see and understand the situation of women and find ways to change those situations by involving them in the movement and having them join organisations for their rights.

We analyse the situation of women based on their social class. In the rural area, in the peasants’ class itself, we analysed that there are three groups or major groups that we could organise. There were poor peasants, peasant labourers, and peasants holding minimal land and had to sell their labour cheaply to the landlords. From these groups were the women that Seruni could organise.

The GFMP framework and strategies effectively address women’s problems, especially in rural areas, and help us see the structural barriers facing them. Women plantation workers are categorised as workers by most labour organisations; however, the GFMP framework and the framework of our own reveal the layered oppression facing them: they are actually peasants deprived of their land and forced to sell their labour cheaply.

Landless women peasants are drastically underpaid; thus, they take on work that could have been easier and more efficiently done by machines because their labour is incredibly cheap. This is the backward semi-feudal agriculture production we face in Indonesia. Because the plantation workers are mainly landless peasants without formal education or training, they are stuck with underpaid unskilled jobs, and advanced technology is rarely adopted on plantations. This is a predicament for our peasants and plantation workers as well as our agriculture.

This is how we analyse the issue and why we consider plantation workers as belonging to the constituency of peasant organisations, especially that of women peasants’ organisations. The GFMP framework helped us see the complexity of the situation and the structural barriers facing the peasants, especially those who work in plantations. I hope that the GFMP framework will add a class perspective. Our priority, women from the most exploited lower class, makes us realise the importance of class.

Ways moving forward

We need to reach out to the Asian-Pacific countries that need our support and solidarity so we can grow our campaign and support the organisations and movements in different countries.

In the Philippines, they face so many challenges, from red tagging to killings, so we should give more attention and assistance to them. Difficult times call for solidarity. If we neglect them just because of geographical boundaries, we could have the same thing happen to us and be left without regional support.

APWLD should give more attention to young women and provide more support to organisations whose constituencies include young women, to improve their skills further. We should develop praxis-oriented workshops, programmes, or training for them, like what we did in Serang, Banten, and Jakarta. We can bring young women from urban areas to rural areas for them to see the situation of rural women under the domination of feudal patriarchy, globalisation, and terrible administration to sustain our movement and improve young feminists’ knowledge and skills for activism and movement-building.