Govt revamps transmigration ministry

Govt revamps transmigration ministry

JAKARTA (JP): Minister of Transmigration Siswono Yudohusodo is
revamping his office, creating a new directorate general to lead
the campaign to encourage more people to migrate from one place
to another.

Siswono told reporters on the eve of the 45th anniversary of
the first government's transmigration program that he is dividing
the Directorate General for Mobilization and Development into
two: The Directorate General for Mobilization and Placement and
the Directorate General for Guidance and Transmigration
Communities.

The plan, he added, has been approved by President Soeharto.

He said the officials to head the directorates have not yet
been chosen.

After the restructuring, the ministry will have three
directorate generals. The other one will be the Directorate
General of Settlement and Environment.

One of the main tasks of the director general for mobilization
and placement is to lead the campaign among particularly
sedentary ethnic groups to develop a taste for migration in
search of a better life.

"The migrating habit must not be limited to Batak, Minang and
Bugis peoples," Siswono said, referring to ethnic groups
respectively from North Sumatra, West Sumatra and South Sulawesi.

"The Sundanese, the Javanese, Madurese, the Balinese and the
Sasak must all be encouraged to develop a similar culture," he
said. This, he added, will encourage more people to migrate
rather than wait for government's encouragement.

The transmigration program is an ambitious project to resettle
millions of people from the islands of Java, Bali and Lombok to
other lesser populated islands in the archipelago.

The sedentary attitude of the people in these three islands
however has made it difficult for the government to encourage
people to join the transmigration program, in spite of promises
of a better life and financial incentives from the state.

Other factors are the lack of coordination and the lack of
"understanding" which can affect international assistance to the
program, the minister said.

He said the government is also campaigning to attract more
skilled people to join and help the development of economically
backward areas such as Irian Jaya, the Mentawai Islands in West
Sumatra, Kalimantan and Maluku.

Siswono said that today's commemoration will be used chiefly
to contemplate on the shortcomings of the transmigration program
after the first batch of settlers was sent to South Lampung
on Dec. 12, 1950.

He said one of the problems with the transmigration program in
the past was that it had been too bound by its own targets to
shift as many people as possible, often at the expense of
quality.

This, he explained, had boomeranged back on the government's
program during the Fourth Five Year Plan in 1984-1989 because
many settlers returned to their old homes with horrible stories
of their experiences.

During that Five-Year Plan, the government resettled 750,100
families compared to a target of 750,000 families.

Learning from that experience, the government moderated its
target in the Fifth Five Year Plan to 500,000 families, and even
then only 265,259 of were resettled, he said.

In the current Sixth Five Year Plan which began in April last
year, the government has set a target of resettling 600,000
families.

Since 1950, the transmigration program has sent around 1.9
million families to more than 3,000 resettlement sites, and
parceled out more than 1.9 million hectares of land. (anr)