'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.