Tribal people must plan own future: Senior official

Tribal people must plan own future: Senior official

JAKARTA (JP): Tribal peoples in Indonesia must play an active
role in planning their own future, while the role of outsiders is
merely to provide them with various options, a senior official of
the Ministry of Education and Culture said yesterday.

"Outsiders should only provide them with the necessary
knowledge and technology, supplying a wide range of choices from
which the tribal peoples can choose," Director General of
Cultural Affairs Edi Sedyawati said. "The people must always be
given the opportunity to choose," Edi stressed.

Edi, an archeologist by training, was addressing a meeting on
indigenous peoples which focused on the Suku Anak Dalam tribe.

The Anak Dalam live in three regencies in the Jambi province
of Sumatra: Batang Hari, Sarolangun Bangko and Bungo Tebo.

For years the government has tried to integrate the Anak Dalam
people into the modern world.

Ignatius Setyoko, the Director General of Social Welfare
Promotion of the Ministry of Social Services, said that, of the
25.9 million people in Indonesia who live below the poverty line,
1.2 million belong to isolated tribes.

Officials and non-government researchers have pointed out that
the existence of the Anak Dalam, who live in the forest and
depend on the forest for their livelihood, is now being
threatened as forest concessionaires encroach on their
traditional land.

Setyoko said yesterday that isolated communities in Jambi
number 1,814 families or 7,623 people.

The government has been encouraging these families to settle
in one place as forested land disappears. This has proven
difficult because, by custom, these people move from one place to
another within the forest.

Responding to difficulties in "integrating" communities which
are considered backward, Edi said that not all aspects of
traditional cultures need to be changed.

"For instance, the Javanese no longer believe in the divinity
of their kings, but they still adhere to certain rituals," she
said.

Edi was discussing two reports from government bodies on the
Anak Dalam, one from the Jambi office of the Provincial
Development Planning Board, and another from the Jambi office of
the Ministry of Social Affairs.

She stressed that any move towards change should come from the
tribal communities themselves.

"If modernization must involve the Anak Dalam, the best and
most durable (form) would be if the desire to change came from
them," she said, adding that sensitive and patient facilitators
must support such wishes on the part of tribal peoples.

Edi cautioned against efforts to use indigenous peoples as
tourist attractions. "We must be very careful...Preserving a
people as a backward community and displaying them as an
attraction is degrading to human dignity," Edi told The Jakarta
Post.

A few non-government organizations also participated in the
meeting. R. Yando Zakaria and Djaka Soehendera of the Institute
for Social and Cultural Analysis said there was a need to
recognize customary laws.

"All folk laws should be elevated in status to become national
laws, even though they apply in certain social systems only," the
researchers argued. This would guarantee that customary rights
would not be forced to succumb to new national laws, they said.
(anr)