Statistics debate

I felt relieved to read Leo Suryadinata's letter "On ethnic Chinese" again published in The Jakarta Post on Nov. 25, 1998, in which he denied saying that the ethnic Chinese were not a minority but the third largest ethnic group in Indonesia. As readers might recall, it was this absurd claim that prompted me to protest in the first place (my letter on Nov. 16).

The basic difference between Leo Suryadinata's list of ethnic groups shown in his letter and my list is of course that his represents the situation in 1930, while mine is meant to indicate today's position based on data adjusted from the 1930 census. I should point out that there has been a significant decrease in the population share of Java and Madura from 67 percent in 1930 (namely 42 million out of 63 million for the whole country) to 58 percent today. Much of this 9 percent decrease (about 18 million people in terms of today's population) should be attributed to a lower population growth among the major ethnic groups on Java and Madura, because only a small proportion of the decrease (amounting to a few million people) could be ascribed to transmigration projects. This is the reason why I have adjusted the population of the major ethnic groups outside Java slightly upward and correspondingly decreased the figures for the ethnic Javanese, Sundanese and Madurese. However, for reasons unknown to me, Leo Suryadinata's list did not include the Malays, while his rather small figure for the Bugis (2.6 percent) is probably because he did not include the Makassarese. Anthropologically, the Bugis and Makassarese are normally combined in one group, as they were on my list. At any rate, I believe the ranking order of the main ethnic groups as shown on my list is largely correct for today's situation.

As regards to the claims made by Sia Ka Mou (the Post, Nov.20), he said that according to a census by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 1995, the number of ethnic Javanese was 67.4 million, Sundanese 25.2 million and Minang 4.3 million. I have three comments to make. First, there was no census held in 1995. Second, the figures given cannot possibly be ethnic populations because since independence ethnicity simply has not been included in all censuses. Third, I know most certainly that the 4.3 million figure quoted by him is the 1995 estimate of the population of West Sumatra province only, which is a lot less than the total number of the Minang people. As a result of the centuries old tradition of emigration, slightly more than half of all Minang people live outside West Sumatra today.

While we are still on the subject of claim and counter claims which seem to be in vogue, I would like to mention an interesting claim made by Anom Surya Putra in his article End to anti-Chinese prejudice (the Post, Nov. 26). Although his English is rather tortuous and rather difficult to follow, but I think what he was trying to say was that Sunan Ampel, Raden Patah and Sunan Kudus, three men well-known in the history of early development of Islam in Java, were actually Chinese men who came from Yunan province. I am no expert in this field, but according to Ensiklopedi Islam (1994), volume 5, pages 173-184, Sunan Ampel was born in Aceh in 1401, with the original name of Raden Rahmat, while Raden Patah was born in East Java in the 15th century and was a son of Prabu Wijaya, a king of Majapahit. As for Sunan Kudus, he was born in Kudus, Central Java, also in the 15th century, with the original name of Jaafar Sadiq. I would appreciate it very much if Anom Surya Putra, not someone else, would care to clarify the different versions in the Post and prove that he is right and the encyclopedia is wrong.

MASLI ARMAN

Jakarta