Skephi opposes Siberut resettlement
Skephi opposes Siberut resettlement
By Stevie Emilia
JAKARTA (JP): The Indonesian Network for Forest Conservation
(Skephi) warned yesterday that the government's plan to open
resettlement areas on Siberut Island off the coast of West
Sumatra could destroy the local culture altogether.
Rasyid Harsuna Lubis of the group's community development
division said the plan, announced this week, would further
marginalize the 25,000 islanders rather than bring them into the
fold of modernization as the government intended.
Rasyid, who spent six years on a community development work in
Siberut, underlined the islanders' strong suspicion against
newcomers, an attitude they developed because of past bitter
experiences with outsiders coming to exploit the island.
He warned that forcing the resettlement plan could lead to
physical clashes between the islanders and the newcomers.
"We cannot agree to the plan because the islanders have
difficulties in mixing with outsiders," he told The Jakarta Post.
"They have learned from past experiences that newcomers always
tried to exploit them, to hurt them," he added. He cited as an
example the time when loggers came to the island and felled the
timber from areas that belonged to the islanders.
Such is the islanders' suspicion that even Skephi was not
welcomed when it came to the island in 1993 to carry out a
community development project on behalf of the Ministry of
Forestry, he said. "It's hard to say whether we've made progress
in the project because of the islanders' rejection."
Minister of Transmigration Siswono Yudohusodo announced on
Tuesday that President Soeharto has given the go-ahead to the
plan to revive an old plan to open settlement areas in Siberut.
The resettlement program on the island was shelved in the
1980s because of objections from environmental organizations who
felt that the move would destroy the tribes' culture.
Siswono said recent studies found these concerns were not
founded and that bringing in settlers could in fact help bring
the islanders, who still live in a stone-age era, into the fold
of modern civilization.
The minister added that the President had asked him to proceed
with the plan with caution and take into account the
environmental and cultural impacts.
According to a recent traveler to the island, some semblance
of modernization has touched north Siberut where people eat rice,
wear clothes and shoes and children go to school and money is
used as their medium of exchange. But in the south, people still
wear only a kabid (loincloth), eat sago, practice barter economy,
use bows and arrows to hunt and invite a kerei (shamans) to
communicate with the hereafter.
Rasyid warned that forcing modern civilization on the Siberut
community would destroy their culture.
It could lead to an even greater isolation because there is
unlikely to be any social intercourse between the islanders and
the settlers, he said.
"This will be just like another Timika," he said, referring to
the copper mining town that had been established in the middle of
the jungle in Irian Jaya, another region where the local people
were still living in stone-age period.
Rasyid suspected that something else was behind the
government's move other than the concern about the state of
backwardness of the islanders.
He said he heard that two politically-connected figures have
been seeking to obtain concessions to open up palm oil
plantations on the island, using settlers as their workers.
On the studies referred to by Siswono, Rasyid said they were
"too shallow" to be taken seriously.
"The people who conducted the studies did not do a thorough
investigation of the Siberut community. They didn't explore every
part of the island," he said, adding that the questions asked in
their survey used terms which the islanders could not have
understood.
Rasyid questioned Siswono's assertion that the Siberut
islanders were in a state of backwardness. "What does
backwardness mean? Ask the same question to the islanders. Do
they feel that they have been left behind?" (31)