Migration in eastern Indonesia

Migration in eastern Indonesia

This is the first of two articles on the political impact of
migration in eastern provinces, prepared by Riwanto Tirtosudarmo,
a researcher at the Center for Social and Cultural Studies, the
Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

JAKARTA (JP): Eastern Indonesia, a region of distinct natural
beauty with a heterogeneous population and diverse cultures,
became a topic of public discussion among academics and
development specialists after the government announced in 1990
that it would pay more attention to the development of the
region.

Generally speaking, the New Order government's official
statistics clearly indicate an increase in people's welfare in
eastern Indonesian provinces. However, the social and economic
inequality between regencies and groups of the population is also
increasing.

Like in other parts of the country, the social tension and
political conflicts that have intensified in several places in
eastern region over the last five years are strong indications
that genuine sustainable development is not taking place there,
proving that the ideology of development adopted by the state in
the last three decades has failed.

About two decades ago, a Dutch geographer, Milan J. Titus,
argued that interregional migration in Indonesia reflected
different degrees of social and economic development between
regions.

Titus' findings significantly demonstrate the need to examine
the process of uneven development in Indonesia, particularly the
forces which have given rise to such a development process, and
which seem to be perpetuating it.

Major studies on migration in the country, however, have
tended to overlook the social and political dimensions and
emphasized more the demographic and economic aspects of
population mobility.

This article attempts to look beyond these conventional
approaches. The unequal power relations between central and
provincial governments will be elaborated as a crucial factor in
explaining the social and political structures that contextualize
migration in the eastern region.

The ramifications of migration, as reflected by the disparity
of economic activities between regions as well as between
different groups of population, indicate that political and
cultural integration is still far from being resolved in the
region. Recent communal conflicts between the population of
different ethnic groups and religions in Maluku and West
Kalimantan, for example, obviously indicate accumulated social
resentments among the locals and the migrants from a different
ethnic background.

The final part of this article will discuss the prospect of
alternative regional development approaches, which convey the
heterogeneity of the political and cultural aspects of the
people.

During the New Order reign, the national political system,
which was highly centralistic and tightly controlled by then
president Soeharto and the military, directly influenced the
relationships between the central government and provincial
administrations. In 1974, the government promulgated Law No. 5,
which designated the legal framework for the role and authority
of provincial administrations.

According to the law, provincial administrations exercise only
powers that have been granted to them by the central government.
The national government, represented by the Ministry of Home
Affairs, has the responsibility to supervise and support all
development activities carried out in the provinces.

In 1976, the government established local Development Planning
Boards (Bappeda) to strengthen the provincial administrations'
capability in planning and coordinating development programs. In
theory, Bappeda should perform a number of functions, such as
formulating basic regional development plans, coordinating
planning among sectoral line agencies, drafting regional
development budgets and monitoring as well as evaluating
development activities at the provincial level. In practice,
however, what neatly seems to be bottom-up planning, does not
really take place. The actual planning still largely follows a
top-down process. Development programs and projects at the
provincial level are mostly designed and planned by the National
Development Planning Board (Bappenas) and various ministerial
offices in Jakarta.

The primacy of population sizes as the major criteria for the
allocation of provincial budgets not surprisingly ensures that
the largest proportion of the budget pours into Java.
Furthermore, this imbalance is reinforced by the lack of an
incentive criterion, such as tax efforts, and the failure to
consider regional potential in fund allocations. The financial
transfer from the center to the regions plays no significant role
in reducing the existing regional disparity, particularly between
Java and the outer islands.

The implications of the New Order government's bureaucratic
arrangement, particularly on the suppression of local people's
political participation, are very obvious. The political sphere
of society at the regional levels is very limited and the local
people are marginalized.

A recent study by a research team of the National Institute of
Sciences (LIPI) indicates that the central government's regional
autonomy project conducted in 1996 mainly dealt with the
technical administrative aspects of regional autonomy and clearly
would not have a significant effect on existing center-regional
relationships.

At the provincial level, resentment of being "economically
squeezed" by the central government is also prevalent among
people in the provinces rich with natural resources, such as
Aceh, Riau, North Sulawesi, Irian Jaya and provinces in
Kalimantan.

The flourishing polarizing sentiments, originating from ethnic
and religious self-identification, perhaps are also natural human
responses to the current climate of political uncertainty.

A more anthropological observation on local society and
culture suggests that the imposition of the Village Law of 1979
significantly transformed the remaining local social institutions
based on (adat) customary laws. However, the push for integration
and unity was not without opposition from local adat society,
religious groups and other interest groups. But the political
authority and military strength of the central government ensured
the relatively smooth implementation of the policy.

Adat, in people's minds, is not a means to preserve ethnic
identity but is perceived as a means to maintain their cultural
and moral legitimacy in the face of dominant external state and
culture. People's responses, within any local group, in fact,
provide a forum for the constant reformation and reconstitution
of adat and group identity within the wider political and
economic environment.

A recent national gathering of adat leaders representing about
50 different ethnic groups in Jakarta reflected the increasingly
significant role of indigenous people in national politics.

The unequal relationships between the state and civil society,
as well as between the center and the regions, however, have been
strongly questioned following the collapse of the Soeharto regime
in May 1998. A new political equation is apparently on the
horizon, and its implication for a future path of regional
development is therefore inevitable.

In terms of population size, according to the 1995 Intercensal
Population Survey, eastern Indonesia comprises only 13.3 percent
of the country's total population. From a national demographic
perspective, eastern Indonesia comprises nine provinces -- those
located in Sulawesi, the Maluku islands, Irian Jaya (formerly
West Papua) and the Nusa Tenggara islands.

Population density varies. Maluku and Irian Jaya, for example,
together are the least densely populated areas in Indonesia. In
1995, the density of population in both the Maluku islands and
Irian Jaya was only eight people per square kilometer, as
compared to 850 in Java and an average of 95 throughout
Indonesia.

Javanese dominate the bureaucracy in Jakarta and they,
therefore, perceive the eastern provinces as empty land. Such a
perception was apparently behind the decision in the 1980s to
redirect the transmigration policy to those provinces. The
decision to move transmigrants to eastern provinces significantly
contributed to an increase in the transmigration budget because
the transportation costs became very expensive.

The impact of the central government's decision to bolster the
transmigration program in the eastern provinces is clearly shown
by the positive net migration trends since 1980 in designated
destination provinces, such as Irian Jaya, Maluku, Southeast and
Central Sulawesi. In-migrations apparently also play an important
role in the relatively high annual population rate of growth in
those provinces. On the other hand, in provinces like North and
South Sulawesi, as well as in West and East Nusa Tenggara,
negative net migration has also contributed to the low level of
annual population growth in those provinces. As a result of the
collapse of oil prices in the mid-1980s, the national budget for
the transmigration program was drastically cut back, thereby
substantially reducing the number of transmigrant families that
had originally been planned for resettlement.

Window: Major studies on migration in the country, however,
have tended to overlook the social and political dimensions and
emphasized more the demographic and economic aspects of
population mobility.