Forced Migration Exacts Toll on Areas’ Social Balance

Over the last few months, simmering tensions have exploded into horrifying and bewildering violence in a string of Indonesian provinces, threatening the June national elections, as well as the stability of Indonesia itself.

In West Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo, a local photographer took pictures of dismembered bodies with their hearts cut out, and CNN videotaped boys playing soccer with a decapitated head. In Ambon, Christians and Muslims who had lived peacefully together for years have killed each other with spears and machetes, and have burned churches, mosques, homes and entire villages. In East Timor, Aceh and Irian Jaya provinces, others have met unspeakable deaths.

More than 1,000 Indonesians have died in the bloodletting, the victims of nationalistic movements, religious and ethnic tensions and growing poverty that has turned unemployed young men into bands of roaming criminals and, some say, provocateurs who have a stake in destabilizing Indonesia in order to protect vested interests.

“There is still more that holds Indonesia together as a nation than pulls us apart,” said an Indonesian human rights activist in East Timor. “But things are clearly out of control. And neither the government nor the military seems to have the will or the ability to restore security and civility.”

There is no single cause for the eruptions, sociologists say. But they agree that one important factor in the convulsions that grip parts of Indonesia is the past policy of forced relocation--or transmigration, as it is called here--of people from the country’s crowded main island, Java, to more remote and sparsely populated areas. The shift upset traditional ethnic, religious and economic balances.

An Unnatural Migration Pattern

The controversial policy began under the colonial Dutch in the 1920s, often carried out with no concern for ethnic sensibilities, and was promoted in the 1960s by former President Suharto. The World Bank was among the international funders of transmigration in Indonesia, a Muslim-dominated country with more than 300 ethnic groups.

Social structures were altered. In the Moluccas island chain, for instance, the Christian Ambonese were privileged citizens under the Dutch. The newcomers were Muslim, who gradually took over the economy and became a new elite favored by Jakarta, Christians say. Religious rioting in and around Ambon, the Moluccas’ major city, has claimed 400 lives and resulted in the flight of 75,000 ethnic Bugis back to Sulawesi island.

There has also been natural migration outside government control, such as that of the Madurese from islands off Java to West Kalimantan, where the new settlers became aggressive traders and came to economically dominate the indigenous Dayaks and Malays. Last month, the natives turned on the first-generation settlers.

After his house was burned and his neighbor decapitated, Amidi, a 31-year-old Madurese farmer, gathered up his wife and child and fled into West Kalimantan’s tropical forests, pursued by a mob of ethnic Dayaks and Malays and a pack of their howling hunting dogs.

“We were hunted like pigs,” Amidi told an Asiaweek reporter. Unlike some of the 30,000 people who have fled West Kalimantan recently, Amidi and his family survived--they spent a week hiding in the jungle, eating bark and snakes--and were picked up by an army patrol and taken to a refugee camp run by the military on the island.

The migration of Javanese also upset delicate balances in East Timor, a Portuguese colony that Indonesia unilaterally annexed in 1976. The Timorese ended up as second-class citizens in their own land as the Jakarta-supported settlers controlled the best jobs, the professions and the economy. Thousands of the settlers have hurried back to Java in the wake of killings that have plagued East Timor since early April.

East Timor--where a 30-foot-high statue of the Virgin Mary towers over Dili, the capital--is predominantly Roman Catholic. Most Javanese are Muslim. But unlike Ambon, Timor’s root cause of violence is nationalism, not religion. The province will vote Aug. 8 on whether to remain part of Indonesia, with greater autonomy, or become independent.

“While large influxes of outsiders create a latent potential for explosive conflict,” said Jeffrey Winters, an expert on Indonesia at Northwestern University, “it is important to realize that in nearly every instance of violence now rocking Indonesia, there are signs of provocation and engineering by civilian and military elites.

“Rumors are started, conflicts are ignited, and logistics are sometimes supplied to raise what had been merely simmering tensions to a boil. This is a sign of fragmentation within the [Jakarta] regime and within the military.”

Many analysts, like Winters, see the hand of the ousted Suharto--or at least his allies--and the military behind Indonesia’s worst sectarian violence in decades. These forces have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, the reasoning goes, and igniting violence is one possible way of derailing the June 7 election and justifying the military’s continued prominent role in the affairs of state.

Security Forces Keep Low Profile

Violence also has spiraled out of control in parts of Indonesia because many of the rioters are common criminals and because the once-revered army has been weakened by disclosures of widespread human rights abuses. Its response to many outbreaks of violence has been to stand idly by, while the police response has been to go into hiding.

Now very much on the defensive, the 500,000-strong security forces make little attempt to protect the innocent, and in some cases--such as East Timor--have armed unruly paramilitary groups to help provide “security.”

In addition to East Timor, Aceh and Irian Jaya have been racked by violence spawned by independence movements, which have become emboldened by the military’s weakness. The government has acted to defuse separatism by offering East Timor autonomy and by shifting significant political and economic power from Jakarta to the provinces.

But with the economy in dire condition and no strong central authority in place since Suharto left office almost a year ago, many Indonesians feel threatened--by the lack of security, by joblessness, by anyone who is different--and with no one to restrain them, their fears have taken the form of rage and violence.

The minority ethnic Chinese, the most economically successful group in this nation of 212 million people, have been the victims of Indonesia’s mob violence in the past. In May, when more than 1,000 people died in riots in Jakarta that led to Suharto’s downfall, Chinese shops were burned and ethnic Chinese women were systematically raped. In the latest outbreak of violence, however, the ethnic Chinese have been largely spared.

Part of the reason lies in the fact that the fearful ethnic Chinese community has deliberately taken a low profile. Many of its members left the country during last year’s riots and have not returned.

According to local newspaper reports, 25,000 ethnic Chinese have left Indonesia in advance of the June elections. And they have moved $80 billion out of Indonesia, costing the country $500 million a month in reduced spending, the reports said.

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Shifting Populations

Most transmigration is from densely populated islands in the southern portion of Indonesia to less crowded areas to the north and east. Over the past quarter of a century, 7 million of the nations 212 million people have been resettled.