Resolutions for reconciliation

Ivan A. Hadar, President, Indonesian Institute for Democracy Education (IDe), Jakarta

Social conflicts in many parts of Indonesia are still continuing. However, the scale and intensity of the conflicts tend to have decreased, enabling systematic and integrated recovery efforts. But the difficult implementation of peace agreements such as that for Poso in Central Sulawesi and Ambon in Maluku, have been attributed to similar approaches like humanitarian emergency aid targeted toward the effects or impacts of the violence.

The ineffectiveness of local governments has also been a weakening factor of such agreements, apart from the fact that peacemaking and reconciliation processes tend to involve only a selected few minority of local elites, without an adequate participation of the grassroots people and communities who are the real victims of the violence.

Reconciliation is a must and yet it merely remains a means toward concrete rehabilitation of social life, otherwise reconciliation will only end in the return of distrust.

The transitional dimension of such efforts is not only to open up truth and reconciliation, but to establish the dimension of truth and resolution to encourage people out of the fear in facing their future. This includes, of course, a mixture of both common approaches of truth and reconciliation and also truth and justice, as is the experience of the Baku Bae peace movement in Maluku. We could learn from the South African experience but also from the justice approach of the Nuremberg trials following World War II.

Conflicting parties should reconcile, in the first place, to re-build social strength, strong enough to uphold legal enforcement when selective identified culprits are held responsible by a court of justice. This will hinder impunity, which has weakened the major social and political fabric of our whole society.

In this framework, the emphasis and the balance, however, will be put on the resolution aspects. This will give people concrete hopes and maintain their trust, restore dignity, and lead to implementation of the rehabilitation process with maximum participation.

The methodology of this reconciliation relies on the inevitable fulfillment of public participation. This process starts from positive matters that have existed among the people. In Ambon, the Muslim community, for example, has begun to make attempts to consolidate opinion by holding a "Grand Conference" the first of its kind, which was attended by about 1,000 participants from all over the province. The Christian community has also held such meetings. In this most difficult area of conflict, there is a real need to also focus on intra-community support for recovery.

In North Maluku, a series of meetings were convened to encourage reconciliation amongst conflicting parties. The following are some of the significant resolutions reached at this series of meetings:

* Peace is the final asking/giving price of the communities represented in the meetings.

* Solutions must be found to return persons displaced by conflict to the villages from where they had fled.

* It is essential that trade be resumed between Muslims and Christians (safe passage guaranteed for Muslim traders to enter Christian areas and vice versa);

* Security is to be guaranteed by the Indonesian Military and cooperation amongst Muslim and Christian communities is to be fostered in order to set up security systems, which will be established in the form of joint commands posts.

This is to also reduce the bad impact of rumors and mis- information which have can have an adverse impact on the situation. The media, for example, despite some progress, is still more or less divided along the sectarian lines and has been provocative in its coverage of events.

There remains the need to increase cross-community contact, to build trust and expand neutral zones. Civil society groups and NGOs along with the village governance structures can play an important role in this by working at the community level.

Based on this, while maintaining continuous, communicative monitoring and control, any activity has legitimate grounds to materialize among social and political life. One of the imperative tasks is to proceed with legal enforcement as the precondition of, and at the same time a strengthening process for reconciliation. The sustainability of the reconciliation process will be fortified by the execution of legal processes.

Workshops and training for legal processes and basic human rights are among the possible activities which could gradually create a climate of safety and recovery that is most important for returning to a sense of normalcy, in which law is credible and becomes a basic moral principle of everyday life.

Also, fact finding processes could trace back violations of human rights in the conflict areas: To prepare the execution of criminal law as far a human rights violations are concerned, to restore public trust in the supremacy of law.

Assistance and monitoring towards law enforcement conducted by government officials (police, government attorneys and courts), would help develop a check and balance system for post-conflict rehabilitation.

Promoting religious-ethnic diversity and increasing the capacity of the communities to negotiate differences and changes are critical for achieving social cohesion and maintaining peace. Working to secure this peace calls for a holistic and system-wide perspective on society, one that seeks to understand the interrelationship of many players and processes.

It is important to recognize that simply replicating or restoring pre-conflict situation will be insufficient, for two principle reasons.

First, the conflict will have irrevocably changed social relations -- things cannot just proceed "as normal", because "normal" relies on a set of relationships and a level of trust that can no longer be taken for granted.

Second, it is essential to avoid re-cultivating the root causes of the conflict. If social and economic inequalities and differences in power and the ability to influence decision-making were part of the original cause of the conflict, then these things have to be addressed or violence will recur.

Communities emerging from acute turmoil thus have different needs from those of a stable society and require the reordering of normal priorities and the establishment of new ones.

The practical opportunities for reparation, rehabilitation and reconstruction need to be made available to each community. This means that the more that is invested in reestablishing normal social infrastructure in broad terms, the more successful programs are likely to be. This includes restoring broad social infrastructure such as schools and women's groups.