Conflict in diversity

The government of President Abdurrahman Wahid faces an acute dilemma in dealing with the aftermath of violence in Sampit and other Central Kalimantan towns in the vicinity. More than 50,000 settlers from Madura have been forced to flee the area in the wake of ethnic cleansing by the local Dayak people.

The government now has to decide whether to send the Madurese back to Central Kalimantan, or to resettle them, either in their original home villages on Madura island or elsewhere in the archipelago. Either option has risks, not only for the refugees themselves, but more importantly, for the future of this nation.

Sending the refugees back to Central Kalimantan would almost guarantee genocide of horrific proportions. That was also the reason why they were evacuated by Navy ships in the first place. The Dayak people, having carried out an effective campaign to drive the Madurese settlers out, have vowed never to accept them on their land again. The Dayaks made clear their contempt for the Madurese during their campaign -- beheading Madurese and parading their heads in the streets before the hordes of Indonesian and foreign journalists. No guarantee from the military or police would be sufficient to ensure that the Madurese would be completely protected if they ever returned to Sampit.

But not sending the Madurese back would not only be logistically challenging, it would also send the wrong signal to the hundreds of ethnic groups across the archipelago.

Logistically, the government will have difficulty in quickly finding new homes for these refugees. They join hundreds of thousands of other people who have been displaced by violent conflicts which erupted in various provinces over the last three years, including East Timor (now an independent state), Maluku and North Maluku, Aceh, Central Sulawesi and West Kalimantan. If anyone should be resettled, these longtime refugees should have first claim before the fresh batch of Madurese from Central Kalimantan.

A far more serious problem to this option of resettling the Madurese rather than sending them back is that it is making a complete mockery of the concept of Indonesia as a nation state, and particularly of the state logo Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (Unity in Diversity). In fact, this option, if carried out, would only encourage other ethnic groups who, like the Dayaks, may have an axe to grind, to launch their own ethnic cleansing campaign.

We have already seen various ethnic groups, who like the Dayaks feel they have been marginalized by the economic progress of the past 50 years or so, asserting themselves politically.

Areas that have been the target of the past transmigration (resettlement) policy are particularly prone to ethnic conflict. Like the Madurese in Central Kalimantan, transmigrants were given land and generous government funding to start a new life in the settlements. Many eventually succeeded in business and in jobs to the point of edging out the local people. These settlers also occupy land which many local people still claim as theirs. This condition does not bode well for cultural and ethnical harmony.

One columnist in this paper aptly describes transmigration as internal colonization with all the potential for conflicts between settlers and the original inhabitants. That makes virtually all provinces outside Java vulnerable to the kind of conflicts we have just witnessed in Sampit.

But even in Java there are ethnic groups who feel they too have been left out of the country's economic progress, like the Banten people, who have now won their own province separate from West Java. Here in Jakarta, the Betawi have been pushed further and further out of the ever-booming capital city.

What we see in Sampit is only one of many illustrations of what 50 years of misrule can do to a nation. While politicians and experts seem to have an explanation about why the violence erupted, no one has any real practical solution. There is no fast and easy answer to the problem. We cannot undo 50 years of mismanagement, or of our failure in nation building, in one day.

Yet, the future of the concept of Indonesia as a state hinges on how the government resolves the aftermath of the Sampit violence. A single wrong move from the government could turn the state motto from "unity in diversity" into "conflict in diversity". If that happens, Indonesia's days are numbered.