Transmigration program
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Indonesia's Transmigration program was an initiative to move landless people from densely populated areas of Indonesia to less populous areas of the archipelago. This meant moving people from the islands of Java, Bali, and Madura to areas including Papua, Kalimantan, Sumatra, and Sulawesi.
The stated purpose of the program was to reduce poverty and crowding on Java, provide opportunities for hard-working poor people, and to provide a workforce to better utilize the natural resources of the outer islands. Critics of the program accused the government of Indonesia of trying to use these migrants to replace native populations, and to weaken separatist movements. The program was a cause of considerable controversy and conflict, including violence between settlers and indigenous populations.
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History
The policy was started by the Dutch colonial government in the early nineteenth century to reduce crowding and to provide a workforce for plantations on Sumatra. The program diminished during the last years of the Dutch era, but was revived after independence in an attempt to alleviate the food shortages and weak economic performance that were a major feature of the Sukarno era.
Under the President Suharto, the program continued and was expanded to send migrants to more areas of the archipelago. At its peak between 1979 and 1984, 535,000 families, or almost 2.5 million people, moved under the transmigration program. It had had a major impact on the demographics of some areas; for example, in 1981 sixty percent of the three million people in the southern Sumatra province of Lampung were transmigrants. The World Bank, Asian Development Bank and bilateral donors funded the program with huge amounts of money in the 1980s.
Beginning in the 1990s, there were violent conflicts between transmigrants and indigenous populations; in Kalimantan, hundreds were killed in fighting between Madurese transmigrants and the indigenous Dayak people.
In August 2000, after the Asian financial crisis and the fall of the Suharto government, the Indonesian government officially cancelled the large-scale transmigration program, funding no longer being available to underwrite it.
Aims
The stated purpose of the program, according to proponents in the Indonesian government and the development community, was to move millions of Indonesians from the densely populated inner islands (Java, Bali, Madura) to the outer, less densely populated islands to achieve a more balanced population density. This would alleviate poverty by providing land and new opportunities to generate income for poor landless settlers. It would also benefit the nation as a whole by increasing the utilization of the natural resources of the less-populous islands.
The program may also have been intended to encourage the unification of the country through the creation of a single Indonesian identity to augment or replace regional identities; whether this change would be desirable remains hotly disputed in Indonesia.
Criticism
Indonesia's transmigration program was the target of extensive opposition, particularly from indigenous populations in the regions where transmigrants settled. Some foreign and domestic observers also criticized the program's intentions or implementation.
Many indigenous people saw the program as a part of an effort by the central government on Java to extend greater economic and political control over their region, by moving in people having closer personal ties to Java. This was particularly resented in areas such as Papua that had an active movement to end what was seen as an unwanted military occupation by Indonesia. The government agencies responsible for administering transmigration were often insensitive to local customary (adat) land rights.
Transmigrants were also blamed for accelerating deforestation of sensitive rainforest areas, because of the greatly increased population in formerly sparsely-populated areas. Migrants often moved to entirely new "transmigration villages," constructed in regions that had been relatively unimpacted by human activity.
The program was also not consistently beneficial for the migrants. While they had access to substantially more land than would be possible on their home islands, the soil of most of the outer islands is not nearly as fertile as the volcanic soil of Java and Bali. Despite major government spending—in some years thirty to forty percent of the entire budget for the outer islands—promised investment in transportation, water, and education was lacking.
See also
Further reading
External links
- Indonesia - World Bank Admits Transmigration Failures (http://www.signposts.uts.edu.au/articles/Indonesia/Population/383.html), Martin Colchester, 1994. Report on settler-Dayak confict in Kalimantan.
- Kalimantan's Agony: The failure of Transmigrasi (http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/kalimantan/), American CNN news report, 2001.
- "Indonesia's transmigration programme: an update (http://dte.gn.apc.org/ctrans.htm), 2001 report by "Down to Earth," a UK-based organization working on Indonesian environmental issues. Many details on the Suharto-era program and the changes since then. DtE is highly critical of transmigration.
References
- Hardjono, J. 1989. The Indonesian transmigration program in historical perspective. International migration 26:427-439.
- Hollie, Pamela. 1981. Jakarta fights overcrowding Bali and Java. The New York Times January 11.
- Rigg, Jonathan. 1991. Land settlement in Southeast Asia: the Indonesian transmigration program. In: Southeast Asia: a region in transition. London: Unwin Hyman. 80-108.
- MacAndrews, Colin. 1978. Transmigration in Indonesia: prospects and problems. Asian Survey 18(5):458-472.