Kalimantan rejects Madurese migrants: Officials
Yuliansyah The Jakarta Post Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan
Traumatized by past ethnic killings, indigenous Dayak residents in Kalimantan provinces have rejected the resettlement of Madurese people in Kalimantan under the government's transmigration program this year, officials have said.
The Dayak people, particularly those living in Central Kalimantan, have agreed to accept migrants from all ethnic groups in the country except people from East Java's Madura island.
Head of the South Kalimantan manpower and transmigration office H.A. Munasib confirmed on Wednesday that people in his province, in particular residents in areas that border Central Kalimantan, wanted to exclude Madurese migrants from the resettlement program.
"Those who have set conditions for the government not to accept a certain ethnic (Madura) group are the people from Belawang subdistrict in the regency of Barito Kuala and surrounding (border) areas, where new migrants will be sent this year," he told The Jakarta Post.
Munasib revealed that the rejection was due to the Dayak' trauma over the 1999 deadly battles between them and the Madurese in the towns of Sambas and Sampit in Central Kalimantan.
Hundreds of people, mostly Madurese were killed and thousands of others fled to Java when the Dayak people took revenge on the minority migrant group in March 1999.
Similar riots broke out earlier in 1996 in West and Central Kalimantan between the Dayak community and the Madurese, leaving hundreds of people dead and thousands of others homeless after they were expelled from the provinces.
Thousands of Madurese refugees, who fled the ethnic unrest in 1999, are still languishing in camps in East Java. Many of them have said they want to return home to Kalimantan to start a new life with their brothers there.
Munasib said Kotabaru Regent Sjachrani Mataja had submitted a request to the South Kalimantan governor not to include Madurese people in the migrants due for resettlement in his district.
In his letter, Sjachrani requested that West Java migrants be sent to the Kotabaru town of Hampang for resettlement.
"I don't know what has prompted the regent to make such a proposal," Munasib said.
He said the provincial administration would gather inputs from the common people to determine their response to this year's transmigration program in South Kalimantan, especially concerning their readiness to accept participants from Java.
"We will later deliver this information to the central government for discussion," he added.
Munasib said that if the government was not able to avoid excluding Madurese among this year's migrants to Kalimantan provinces, it should at least reduce their number so as to respect the Dayak people's wishes.
He said around 400 families, half of them from Java, would be resettled in Hampang in South Kalimantan and the adjacent area of Barito Kuala in Central Kalimantan in 2003.
The remaining 50 percent of the settlers would be local poor indigenous people, he added.
It is hoped that local people joining the migration program would be able to better their life as they would receive houses and one year life insurance.
Last year, South and Central Kalimantan received around 800 families who migrated from Java and other provinces, Munasib said, adding there were no Dayak among them.
He said the central government has allocated around Rp 20 billion from the state budget to finance this year's transmigration program. The money is the same amount as the funds used to support the 2002 program.
Most of the funds would be used to finance the development of facilities in the resettlement areas, he argued.
"We don't want this program to fail. Therefore, the government will pay serious attention to the welfare of the migrants including improving facilities in their resettlement areas," Munasib said.