Radicals may stir up conflict in Mamasa: ICG

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.