Political demography of integration

Political demography of integration

By Riwanto Tirtosudarmo

The following is the second of two articles on national integration.

JAKARTA (JP): The New Order view of transmigration as a means to achieve national integration was explicitly stated for the first time at a transmigration seminar in 1970. Even though the issues of national integration and national unity had been discussed since the early years of independence, their importance reached new heights during the 1956-58 regional rebellions.

The decisive role of the military in ending the rebellions was a major factor in reshaping the role of military leadership on the national political scene. In addition, national integration has become the key issue and the prime concern for the military leaders, whose power was further consolidated by the political chaos of 1965.

The conceptual links between transmigration policy and national integration, according to a senior staff member at the National Defense Institute -- the think tank of the Ministry of Defense -- should be viewed from a geopolitical and geostrategic perspective.

Transmigration policy is an effort, method, and means to achieve geographic-integration, which is a basic condition for the unity of the nation, to improve the people's welfare and awareness, and provide an opportunity to utilize natural resources.

Achievement of geographic-integration, on the one hand, will protect the nation from centrifugal tendencies, and on the other hand, strengthen centripetal forces. Geographic integration is also a medium to build understanding, friendship and cooperation with other countries.

From the point of view operational defense, transmigration supports the Popular Defense and Security System in order to resist the threat of subversion, infiltration and invasion from abroad, particularly through the provision of human resources. Thus in the view of the military, geographic integration, in which transmigration policy plays an important role by providing human resources, is a necessary condition for national integration.

Population mobility and employment data, as revealed by population censuses and labor force surveys during the last two decades, clearly have indicated that the mode of population mobility is strongly associated with the broader socioeconomic processes instigated by government policies.

A marked shift from predominantly planned or assisted migration to voluntary population movement occurred in the mid- 1980s as the government's capacity to finance transmigration program was declining. Yet as the data shows, from the mid-1980s up to early 1990s, population movements continued to increase.

This movement apparently is related to the process of labor reallocation from agriculture to non-agriculture, stimulated by a drastic change in the economy's growth regime from import substitution to export promotion. In addition, a large number of migrants have moved beyond the nation's boundaries, particularly to Malaysia, as they perceived that more job opportunities were available in neighboring countries.

In the last twenty five years, politics has become highly regulated and strongly dominated by the President, evidently in contrast to the economy which tends to be liberalized. Such incongruity has created a climate of uncertainty among the population, particularly the educated and intellectuals, who believe that it is impossible to liberalize the economy without deregulating civil and political rights. A major concern, due to the lack of political checks and balances, is a process of uncontrolled accumulation of economic power in the hands of a few people.

Over the last 25 years, the New Order's economic development program has elevated the people's level of economic prosperity. The proportion of the population living under the poverty line, according to official statistics, has been reduced considerably. Yet, the widening income gap, as shown by independent economists, is the underlying cause of the people's grudges. It is not surprising that a feeling of being economically squeezed by the central government is found among people in the rich natural resources provinces such as Aceh, Riau, North Sulawesi and Irian Jaya (Sondakh, 1994).

The primordial sentiments, originating from ethnic and religious self identification, also may be a natural human reaction to the uncertain national political and economic climates. The flourishing of quasi-intellectual associations, based on religion, such as ICMI (Moslem), PIKI (Protestant), ISKA (Catholic), PCHI (Hindu), ICBI (Buddhist), in the last five years supports the parochial and sectarian tendencies among the educated urban-based population.

Nazli Choucri, another political scientist from MIT, argues that for a nation, security, stability, and social cohesion in the comprehensive sense encompass the ability to adapt to a changing environment and to adapt at a cost that is deemed acceptable and affordable by society. Such adaptation, she further noted, begins most fundamentally with the meeting of social demands. These demands are defined initially, and most critically, by the configuration of the population and its overall characteristics.

The link between population and conflict is not a new phenomenon. Conflict is a central feature of all political behavior, at all levels of human interaction, and the prominence of population variables in shaping political behavior places population issues and conflict in close proximity.

When conflict becomes violent it truly threatens the social fabric. In the case of Indonesia, given the archipelagic nature of the country, as well as its ethnic and religious plurality, the most serious population variable which has a strong probability to create conflict is population mobility. The regional variations in population growth have apparently resulted from regional in-migration differential rates rather than from the natural population increase.

As clearly shown from various demographic sources, population mobility to outer island provinces, such as Irian Jaya, East Timor, Maluku, East Kalimantan, Riau and Aceh has increased remarkably since the mid-1980s. The increase in the volume of population mobility, as mentioned earlier, is essentially the logical consequence of surplus labor and secondly the opening up of economic growth centers, particularly in urban areas in several provinces.

In this regard, recent conflicts between migrants and the local populations in eastern Indonesia's provinces strongly indicate that ethnicity and religion have intermingled with economic and political factors. The indigenous population in eastern Indonesia generally has a lower human resource endowment and has clashed with migrants from western Indonesia who have relatively higher human resource capacities.

After independence, regional resentment of the national government occurred in two periods: the 1950s and 1990s. Interestingly, they reflect different political and ideological features. Maley (1995) shows that the regional rebellions in the 1950s, such as PRRI-Permesta in West Sumatra, South and North Sulawesi, DI-TII in West Java, were able to destabilize the political agenda of the central government, but did not aim to separate their regions from the Indonesian nation.

However, the organizations behind regional unrest in the 1990s, particularly in Aceh (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka), Irian Jaya (Organisasi Papua Merdeka) and East Timor (Fretilin), despite only having a little effect in influencing national integration and central government hegemony, had their own ideological basis and a secessionist nature attempting to form a separate government.

Looking from a national perspective, it seems that the perceived threats, particularly while President Soeharto is in supreme control, are unlikely to materialize in destabilization of national integration and the political stability of the country. Yet, as President Soeharto gets older, the process of transferring political power is becoming vulnerable. In such an uncertain future, various centripetal factors, emanating from primordial sentiments based on region, race, ethnic, religion, economic classes and social groupings are clearly flourishing. The jolting process of power transfer from Soeharto to his successor will easily provoke the perceived into real threats to political stability and national integration.

Sustainable development, after all, is a matter of democracy. A genuine democracy, essentially the presence of political checks and balances, hardly exists in Indonesia. The flourishing of primordial sentiments, clearly indicated by the formalization of the quasi-intellectuals associations based on religion, shows a sectarian tendency among the educated population at the national level.

At the regional level, as is occurring in eastern Indonesia's provinces, particularly Irian Jaya and East Timor, proved that provincialism, ethnicity and religion cannot easily be submerged if economic achievements are not equally distributed, particularly between indigenous and 'opportunist' migrants.

The various changes in political-demographic configurations at the national and the regional levels, among the educated elite in urban centers, as well as at the grassroots level in rural areas and the periphery, undoubtedly are red flagging the popular demands for a more democratic development approach from the ruling elite.

Fulfillment of the people's democratic demands and aspirations is a formidable national task for the government. A genuine effort towards the realization of the people's democratic aspirations is the basis of sustainable development and the only solution to the problem.

The writer is a researcher at the Center for Population and Human Resources Studies at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. This article is an abridged version of a paper which appeared in the Indonesian Quarterly. Vol.23, No.4, Fourth Quarter, 1995.