Resolutions for reconciliation

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.