Indonesia’s Population Relocation: The High Costs of Failure : Resettlement: Attempts to mimic the pioneer movement of America’s Old West have proved a bust.

Reclining on a metal bed in the shade of his home, Johannes Duande Sanbas tried valiantly to look happy but had the washed-out visage of a sick man.

“Life is very good here,” Sanbas told a visitor. “It’s just this malaria. I’m sick. My wife is sick. Our children are sick--one already died from malaria.”

Sanbas is a modern-day homesteader, a pioneer who left the overcrowding of his native Java for the opportunity to have his own farm. The Indonesian government paid to send Sanbas to ARSO 2 camp, which lies near the border with Papua New Guinea, about 2,000 miles from home and in an area with some of the worst malaria in the world.

For the past 30 years, the government in Jakarta has attempted to disperse the population of Java, which has 60% of Indonesia’s 168 million people, to the isolated and less-populated islands in the archipelago.

In theory, at least, the plan was meant to be like America’s 19th-Century homesteading program: Give a man a small farm on vacant land and let him achieve prosperity by the sweat of his brow. All the farmer needed to qualify was good health and a belief in God.

Nearly 30 years after the transmigration program was introduced as one of the most ambitious population relocation programs of modern times, 4.5 million people have been resettled from overcrowded areas such as Java and Bali to sparsely populated regions such as Sulawesi, Kalimantan and Irian Jaya. Now, however, the government is cutting back and altering course after a series of embarrassing failures.

“We confront many problems and difficulties, both at the planning stage and with both implementation and supervision,” said Minister of Transmigration Martono, who like many Indonesians, uses only one name.

Perhaps the most spectacular failures of the program are visible here in Irian Jaya, a California-sized province in the far eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago.

The costs of the program have been enormous, up to $27,000 to move each family and get them settled.

In southern Merauke, for example, several thousand settlers were sent to set up camps in places where there is water only six months a year. In other areas, the soil is so bad that crops won’t grow. Many of the farms are so remote that they cannot get what meager produce they have to market.

Here in northern Irian Jaya, the camps are only about 30 miles from the provincial capital of Jayapura, so conditions are much better than in the south. Apart from the malaria and homesickness, the settlers professed happiness at the change.

“I’m growing mangoes, coffee, coconut palms and bananas,” said Sanbas. “So long as I’m healthy and can work, things are pretty good here--much better than in Java.”

Like other transmigrants, Sanbas was given about five acres of land, one for his house and four for his farm, as well as seed and food to live for the first year. Government bulldozers had literally clawed the land out of the swamp and forest.

According to officials of the World Bank, which has recently cut its assistance to the transmigration program from $660 million to $500 million because of the lowered expectations, surveys show that about 80% of the transmigrants say they are happy in their new lives.

But the government’s original goal of halting the population growth of Java has clearly failed. It now concedes that family planning is the only sensible course for the island.

Without a demographic goal, the government has adopted a plan of using transmigration as a means for the economic development of the less-populated areas of the country.

“We have a shortage of manpower, so we’re putting the emphasis on developing skills in these areas,” Soedjino Hardjosoetowo, deputy minister for transmigration, said in a recent interview.

The government had planned for 550,000 new families to be moved in the coming five-year period, but now says it is putting those plans on hold while it tries to develop the communities where migrants have already settled. Only 400 families are scheduled to move to Irian Jaya this year, compared to more than 5,000 last year.

In this way, the ministry hopes to avoid any more embarrassing new mistakes such as the 1,500 homes that were built in western Irian Jaya and then abandoned as uninhabitable.

Deputy Minister Hardjosoetowo said another strategy that the government is pursuing is to encourage so-called “spontaneous” transmigration, in which the government provides land to migrants but not the costs of moving.

One goal is obviously to save money. The ministry says the budget for transmigration is closely tied to the world price of oil, which is Indonesia’s largest export commodity. Prices have been at near record lows for two years.

The program is also emphasizing tree crops such as coconut palms rather than previous rice fields because of past difficulties in getting rice to grow in areas with climates different from those in Java.

The transmigration program has also been widely criticized for ignoring the local people and their culture while helping other Indonesians, mainly Javanese, make a new life.

In many areas, the settlers live virtually cut off from the surrounding population, which remains hostile to the new arrivals because of all the assistance the newcomers receive. In an extreme case at one of the Arso transmigration camps, 20 people were killed by bow and arrow attacks last year.

Now, according to the ministry, one-third of all places in the camps are being reserved for local people to help ease the assimilation process for both the migrants and the local people. One aspect that the government seems hesitant to discuss is the political ramifications of transmigration. For example, the locations of the transmigrant camps in Irian Jaya seem designed to act as a buffer between the Irianese people and Papua New Guinea, where a local insurgent movement is based.

“The transmigration program is falsely referred to as a program for the ‘colonization’ of receiving islands in the archipelago,” minister Martono said recently. “It might more accurately be referred to as a program to ‘Indonesianize” all islands.”

Thus, when schools are set up in the transmigration areas, the courses are all taught in the national Indonesian language rather than the many local languages. Teachers and other civil servants sent out also tend to come from Java.