'Pribumi' review essential

'Pribumi' review essential

By Harkiman Racheman

MEDAN, North Sumatra (JP): The ongoing outbreaks of bloody
riots in various parts of the country, often culminating in the
slaughtering of fellow pribumi (indigenous) people, seem to have
shaken certain commonly accepted assumptions regarding
indigenousness and nonindigenousness.

A number of critical people have presumably started
questioning who the indigenous people of Indonesia really are and
on what grounds are such an implied racist categorization or
classification based.

The numerous recent sociopolitical calamities suggest that it
is, in fact, hard for us to define the word pribumi at the
present time. The reason is because the myth of indigenousness,
in the sense of one's naturally secured racial privileges
acknowledged nationally, seems too good to be relevant now.

The huge numbers of native Indonesians fleeing Ambon in Maluku
and East Timor, for instance, has clearly indicated that those
people traditionally deemed as pribumi are no longer considered
as such.

The word pribumi, which is synonymous with bumiputra (the sons
of the land), therefore, needs to be readdressed or reconsidered,
so that its shift in meaning may be clearly identified and
subsequently appreciated.

During the New Order era, the word pribumi was construed
largely in terms of certain ethnicity and its relation to a
particular geography. A person was regarded as pribumi only if he
could relate his ethnic background and geographical place of
origin to one particular area of Indonesia.

Although this could no way guarantee material security or
special state protection for any indigenous community (note, for
instance, the unbearable sufferings of the peoples of Aceh, East
Timor and Irian Jaya), such a discriminatory classification
system by the now-defunct New Order government nevertheless
seemed to have gained wide indisputable acceptance from among the
pribumi masses.

However, recent incidents heavily characterized by an overtone
of separatism, especially those which occurred following the
dethronement of Soeharto from the New Order administration, have
critically rechallenged or requestioned the old conception of the
indigenousness itself.

In other words, even within the circle of pribumi Indonesians
themselves there is no lack of disagreement with regard to who
deserves to be referred to as pribumi and who should be treated
as non-pribumi (read "migrants").

In fact, even an indigenous person (who is traditionally
considered native to the place of his origin) will not be too
readily accepted as a native son in another part of the country.
A Javanese or Batak person, for example, will always remain non-
pribumi whenever he is found in the East Timor province.

Perhaps, this is only showing us too obviously that what we
used to believe so deeply as our fully fledged nationalism is, in
fact, a vulnerable thing, if at all entirely existent.

In an independent multiethnic Indonesia, this hollow
nationalism, as it were, took the form of a political compromise
forced back upon the people in a top-down manner by the ruling
regime, rather than the manifested aspiration from the entire
populace.

For certain reasons, for instance, the natives of the Maluku
province have deliberately thought of their fellow Indonesian
migrants (who have long lived and procreated in the region) as
nonnatives. The worst is when these people have been severely
mistreated for the reason that they do not ethnically or
geographically belong there.

In the media, it has been widely publicized how the migrant
natives from other parts of the country, such as the Buginese,
the Butonese, the Makassarese, the Javanese and the Sumatrans,
have fled from this province because of fear or the Ambonese's
threats despite their long history of being "Ambonese" themselves
through and through. All of a sudden, the issues of
indigenousness and nonindigenousness have resurfaced as two
endangering, as well as self-conflicting, realities.

Ben Anderson's analysis seems to have strengthened the
impression of such ethnic discrimination. In his recent visit to
Indonesia, he asserted that the Ambonese riots and the resulting
exoduses were primarily due to the central government's
mistreatment as well as the migrants' extreme exploitation of the
locals, who have not done equally well on the economic front.

With those socioeconomic as well as political grievances in
the background, made worse still by the government's arrogance of
power, destructive divisive sentiments or outbursts could no
longer be reserved or held back. All these culminated in a hatred
volcano which vomits out antimigrant or antiminority lava, to put
it figuratively.

It must be realized that the word pribumi has, in fact, a
negative implication. This word can best be compared to
"primitive", a word which almost always has a negative meaning
because it has been used by Westerners to refer biasedly to those
"inferior" nonindustrial, nonverbal cultures of the rural Orient.
Similarly, in the everyday use of the word, pribumi negatively
implies a tyrannical majority ruling oppressed minority groups.

Within this connection, Habibie's postpresidential appointment
statement that a pribumi, rather than a person identified with a
certain race or religion, is someone who puts the interest of the
country before his own community or himself, may, therefore,
confuse the already murky meaning of the expression.

Despite his verbalized determination to abolish the New
Order's racial discrimination policy, by attaching another sense
to an otherwise conventionally accepted meaning of the word,
President Habibie has, in fact, contributed a serious semantic
confusion. Therefore, we ask ourselves: Is Soeharto pribumi or
half-pribumi?

Departing from the Ambonese turmoil, we learn that what we
understood, or though we did, by the word pribumi is a dominant
group of locals and radicals claiming, one-sidedly, to be the
sole tyrannical rulers over other ethnic groups.

In the meantime, the non-pribumi consist of all those
migrants, regardless of their ethnic background or geographical
origin, who have found recently their lives miserable due to the
mounting intimidation, potential conflicts and open practices of
cultural genocide by the pribumi.

In our everyday lives, the word pribumi has always been used
in favor of a particular mass of people but, unfortunately, to
the disadvantage of other minority groups. During last year's
mid-May riots, for example, the houses or buildings marked with a
signboard Milik Pribumi Asli (belonging to real natives) would go
unharmed, while those without quickly turned into a flood of
fire.

In addition to that, certain practices in the spheres of
economy, politics and culture can be mentioned due to age-old
racial prejudices that pribumi have toward non-pribumi.

In the economic realm, pribumi businesspeople mythologized as
weak and vulnerable are sharply distinguished from nonnative
businesspeople who are pictured unproportionally as overly strong
and fully funded. The consequence is that this dramatized
economic disparity would give a pretext to the government's
(including that of Habibie) deliberate affirmative action
policies based on pribumi-favoring grounds.

It is not surprising that in his article Indonesia and
Malaysia Face Racism Allegations years ago, sociologist Arief
Budiman had to say that "a public policy that discriminates
against the Chinese in order to alleviate the poverty of the
indigenous people" constitutes an unacceptable state of racism.
(The Jakarta Post, April 19, 1996).

In the political sphere, pribumi is always taken to mean a
group of native Indonesians who have an unquestionable right to
participating formally in the political decision-making process,
especially that which has a pervasive impact on the whole of the
populace, while non-pribumi constitutes those members of minority
groups who are structurally sidelined in order to become
political orphans. It is to be regretted that this is still
continuing to happen despite popular political figures' curse on
the injustice caused.

In the cultural domain, pribumi cultures have been funded,
nurtured and developed, while nonnatives' customs and traditions
have been severely prohibited. The hard evidence to this is the
implementation of Presidential Decree No. 14/1967, which
disallows Chinese-Indonesians from observing their traditional
beliefs and cultural festivals.

For many years, nonindigenousness has seemingly given a
justification for members of the dominant majority to abolish
Chinese cultural and religious observances. Perhaps, in exactly
the same way as that which the Ambonese have been accused of
doing to the migrant Muslims.

Considering the enormous politicking and engineering which has
gone into the word pribumi, and realizing just how much
destruction that has entailed, we may well have to abandon the
word all together, except, perhaps, for a limited use in cultural
research. Thus, this modified language usage may help unify all
different ethnic components in our society.

What seems worth popularizing in this reformed era may well be
the expression Bangsa Indonesia (Indonesian). (Compare this with
the phrase Anak Bangsa [son of the nation] frequently used by
Amien Rais of the National Mandate Party). There is no doubt that
this word has now become an important entry to the new vernacular
of modern Indonesian nationalism. The reason is because this all-
embracing phrase will most probably bring together all ethnic
groups throughout the Indonesian archipelago.

And, if we are determined to lay a firm foundation for a post-
election (June 7, 1999) Indonesia, it may be essential that we
bury once and for all the wrong conceptualization of pribumi and
non-pribumi as local dictators who seem to have claimed their
right to rule over their vulnerable countrymen.

The writer graduated from Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand. He is currently a Medan-based freelance writer and
university teacher.