Radicals may stir up conflict in Mamasa: ICG

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The International Crisis Group (ICG) has warned that radicals outside Mamasa regency may try to exploit the recent bloody conflict in the regency on April 24 that claimed the lives of five people.

The Indonesian government must act quickly to head off new trouble in Mamasa regency, West Sulawesi, or risk an outbreak of serious communal conflict, according to Sydney Jones, an ICG senior official. "The conflict is essentially administrative, but it is widely perceived as religious," said Sidney Jones, the crisis group's Southeast Asia project director.

The dispute goes back to the splitting of Polewali Mamasa into Polewali and Mamasa regencies in 2002. A spate of conflicts between those in support of and opposed to the split have occurred in the area since 2000 and resulted in several fatalities. But because of the complicated details of the original dispute are not widely known, and because Mamasa is majority Christian and the villages in which opposition was initially concentrated are majority Muslim, the conflict is widely misunderstood in Indonesia as communal, according to the ICG's latest release available to the media. There are indications that radicals from nearby Poso may have come into the area to stir up trouble. The site of serious communal violence from 1998 to 2001 and sporadic trouble ever since, Poso has been an incubating ground for terrorism. Several of those implicated in the September 2004 bombing in front of the Australian embassy in Jakarta were Poso veterans.

A repeat of this pattern in Mamasa must be prevented at all costs, according to the ICG release.

The ICG suggested that the underlying dispute in and around Mamasa be addressed urgently. The ICG said that Mambi and Aralle districts within Mamasa regency, which are opposed to being incorporated into Mamasa regency, cannot be administered directly by the provincial government indefinitely, and the issue of which regency will administer each village or sub-district must eventually be addressed. A resolution will have to take into account patterns of land ownership that do not correspond with village administrative boundaries.

Either the central government will have to intervene to offer incentives to the villages to join with Mamasa and to ensure the viability of the new regency; or local leaders will have to sit down with a map to redraw regency boundaries in a way that meets local aspirations as far as possible without completely defying geographic logic, according to the ICG.

Another option is that the existing division will have to be enforced, with extra security forces on the ground to prevent further conflict, according to the ICG.

Implementation of any of these solutions will require a long- term commitment of time and resources, the ICG said.

Mamasa is a case study of what can happen in Indonesia's decentralization process when there is no clear procedure to resolve a dispute, when the central government is too beset by other problems to find and implement solutions, and when the law is not promptly and transparently enforced against those who perpetrate violence, according to the ICG.

Until now, the short-term cost to the provincial and central governments of failing to resolve the Mamasa problem has not been significant, but recent events underline the dangers of allowing a low intensity conflict to continue unresolved.

"Earlier conflicts in Ambon and Poso proved to be superb recruiting mechanisms for jihadist organizations," said Sydney Jones.