Regions to decide on transmigration
Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The government will focus its transmigration policy on facilitating the migration of people whereby, instead of Jakarta, the regions will decide what they need and when.
Minister of Manpower and Transmigration Jacob Nuwa Wea said last Monday that his office was still completing the changes necessary to adjust the once top-down policy of transmigration with a now decentralized government.
"The system we're developing is one where we ask the regions first whether they need migrants or not. So they make the suggestions to us, we no longer decide," Jacob told reporters on the sidelines of a public discussion on transmigration on Monday.
Likewise, he said, the government would ask the regions with an oversupply of workers how they could help meet other regions' needs. "We'll be acting as a facilitator," he said.
He added the government had raised its transmigration budget to more than Rp 600 billion (about US$67 million) in 2002 from Rp 520 million in 2001.
Since regional autonomy took effect in 2001, regencies and mayoralties have greater authority to manage their economies, and may receive a greater revenue share from their natural resources.
But Indonesia's population spread is uneven. Statistics in 2000 show that some 59 percent of Indonesia's more than 210 million people live in Java. While Maluku and Papua account for one-fourth of the country's total area, only 2 percent of the country's population live there.
Speakers at the discussion said the decentralized economy had widened opportunities for the migration of skilled workers.
"It's a matter of supply and demand; this will make migration flow naturally," said economist Didik Rachbini of the Institute for Development of Economics and Finance (Indef).
He said skilled workers were in demand in regions that experience a surge in economic activities.
"Cities in regions that perform better than those in Java, will attract workers," he said.
Since the transmigration program was introduced in 1970s, some 2.2 million families have moved and cultivated new lands in remote areas across the archipelago. They now live in some 3,500 villages, 35 of which have grown into regencies or cities.
Over the past two years alone, some 39,000 families or 153,000 people were resettled or were given new jobs through transmigration.
But a representative of the country's second largest Muslim organization Muhammadiyah, Watik Pratigna, said under Soeharto, transmigration was used to strengthen his rule over the vast archipelago. "Politics and security were the drivers behind Soeharto's transmigration program," he said, without elaborating.
For decades Jakarta had been deciding the flow of migrants, often without concern for the interests of the host regions.
Participants in the discussion blamed the mass migration of mainly Javanese Muslims to predominately Christian provinces in eastern Indonesia for contributing to religious tensions.
Similar tension also flared in West Kalimantan, where in September 2000 hundreds of Madurese migrants were killed in ethnic clashes with the local Dayak and Chinese communities.
Jacob said that among the problems arising from regional autonomy was the refusal by several regions, such as Papua, to accept migrants. Responding to such rejections, he plans to allow locals to gain ownership of some of the land allotted for the migrants.
"If need be, we'll grant 60 percent (of the land) to the Papuans and the other 40 percent to the newcomers," he said.
The government would also mix the ethnic groups of migrants coming to one area, he said.