Reconciliation: Not just ending the violence

Ignas Kleden, Sociologist, The Center for East, Indonesian Affairs, Jakarta

The development of conflict resolutions are at a critical juncture and face serious challenges that stem from the changing conditions of local communities, in the volatility of national politics, as well as in the conservative attitude of international foundations and institutions.

First, "traditional conflict-resolution institutions" turn out to function by settling problems within the scope of local customs such as land, marriage, cultivation arrangements and traditional rituals and festivals. Traditional institutions are, however, not prepared to cope with problems arising from conditions outside the scope of such local customs.

In that sense, the initial problems originating from the changing social division of labor between the Muslim and Christian population in Ambon becomes alien to local tradition and cannot be dealt with satisfactorily by adopting the usual traditional procedures.

For many years there has been a tacit agreement between Muslims and Christians in Ambon that the former are in charge of trade and business whereas the latter take care of the local bureaucracy. This change in the social division of labor during the last years of Soeharto's regime was not solved through traditional institutions; first, because the population of Ambon is heterogeneous, and second, it was alien to local tradition.

The same can be said of the conflict between migrants and locals. Migration from Java and Madura to Kalimantan and Central Kalimantan in particular, can be traced back as far as 100 years ago. For many decades, the presence of the new immigrants did not bring about any serious conflict with the locals. This is because migration before the New Order was spontaneous -- the number of migrants was small and they felt obliged to adjust themselves to local habits.

Migration in the New Order era was planned and conducted as a program of transmigration. The program was usually understood as a political measure to alleviate overpopulation in Java. It was not understood and treated as a program to integrate the incoming newcomers with regional and local development.

Transmigration was for many years only a "push project" of Jakarta, but not a "pull project" of the regions.

Migrants usually arrived in large numbers and were provided by the government with land, technology and capital. In a sense, they were more privileged in comparison to the locals. This has been a latent factor that has led to the build up of resentment between both sides, which had been controlled during the New Order era through political repression.

The move away from political oppression in 1998 gave ample opportunity for hurt feelings to surface. Any trivial incident has now become enough for an outburst of violence.

Second, the term "local conflict" tends to be misleading, as if everything that has led to the conflict originated under local conditions. This is not the case with many regions in Indonesia due to the excessive centralism of Jakarta for three decades. For so many years, there were no regions, there were only peripheries of the center.

There were no proper local leaders, only representatives of the central government in Jakarta. Any local conflict now cannot be seen separately from the conflict of interests between the local elite and the national elite in Jakarta.

As it turned out, there were no local elite who were really based locally, because they were only part of the political elite in Jakarta. The governors of two newly founded provinces in East Indonesia, North Maluku, and Gorontalo in North Sulawesi for example, are by all means not members of the local elite.

Abdul Gafur and Fadel Mohammad are Golkar Party members who have grown up and come of age politically in Jakarta, and have now been dropped into the regions. Solving local conflicts presupposes, to a certain extent, solving conflicts among the elite at the national level.

Third, the implementation of regional autonomy faces some unprecedented situations. The unexpected development of regional autonomy has originated partly due to the intentional deviation conducted by government officials for vested interests, and partly due to the misperception of the main goal of regional autonomy, both among government officials, as well as among people in the communities.

The risk of the proliferation of provinces and regencies that appears likely to continue, is not based on public administration considerations, but rather on ethnic or cultural inclination. This will bring about new difficulties, because in the modern political history of Indonesia the division of administrative territories has never coincided with cultural or ethnic divisions.

The petrifaction of ethnic and provincial sentiments, the misperception that regional autonomy is identical with the absence of control from higher governmental institutions, and the latent resentment toward centralism of the Jakarta government could lead to narrow-minded parochialism that is ethnically based, religiously defined and culturally motivated.

There are reasons to be afraid that the tendency toward regional closeness and exclusiveness could increase if no serious action is taken by both the government and members of civil society to bring up the clear political message that the process of democratization can never go hand in hand with a closed society. Besides that, in the face of globalization, every tendency toward territorial closeness is likely to lead to conflict.

Fourth, in dealing with regional conflicts and conflicts originating in the implementation of regional autonomy, a serious reorientation of the attitude and policy of international foundations and international institutions is badly needed.

It is no use to try to deal with regional conflicts that get out of hand at very short notice with a bureaucracy that still identifies conflict resolution initiatives with development projects.

The latter can be planned in a period of time according to standard bureaucratic procedures, but the latter can only be undertaken with more willingness for quick decisions, which can only be evaluated on the basis of its accountability rather than on its feasibility. In the meanwhile many people die in the time it takes to fill in the project application form.

Besides that, assistance aimed at pushing for the implementation of regional autonomy cannot be narrowed down to the mere reform of local public administration.

Doing this without taking into account the social aspects of regional autonomy will result in little progress. Is regional autonomy a matter of government reform or a matter of democratization of society at large, or a matter of both?

To push for reform of local public administration, without doing anything to renew the political culture at the communal level will result not in the decentralization of national politics -- but rather in the shifting of centralism at national level to centralism at the local level, the symptoms of which are more than visible for the time being.