Resettlement and the politicization of ethnicity in Indonesia

Abstract

Bu Sri and Pak Yatno are from the province of North Sumatra. In 1991 the couple paid an agent Rp. 400,000. (approximately US$ 194.00)1 to assist them in illicitly obtaining land in a transmigration site in Sumatra intended by the state for resettlement of Javanese transmigrants. For this sum the agent escorted them to Jakarta where he helped them to obtain false ID cards and other documents required to pose as Javanese and as eligible candidates for the transmigration program. Just two weeks after their departure from Sumatra, Bu Sri and Pak Yatno joined hundreds of settlers on board one of the ships used to transport transmigrants from Java to Sumatra. According to informants, of the sixty families on board who were settled in the transmigration site where I conducted field research only two were Javanese; the remaining fifty-eight were Sumatrans who had gone through the same process as Bu Sri and Pak Yatno in order to transmigrate. This story illustrates one of several strategies used by Sumatrans hoping to obtain land in one of the government's resettlement sites in Sumatra. Indonesia's transmigration program is one of the largest state-directed resettlement programs in the world. Under its last Five-Year Development Plan (Repelita V, 1989/90 1993/94) the government targeted approx imately two and a half million people to be relocated from the archipe lago's densely populated inner islands Java, Bali, and Madura to the more sparsely populated outer islands (Departemen Penerangan Republik Indo nesia 1994:19-29). In this paper I would like to focus on the implications of this large-scale resettlement for the negotiation of identity, difference, and political locality. In particular, I will examine the role of state allocation of resources in politicizing categories of ethnic identity. Research findings are based on two years of field research conducted between December, 1991 and April, 1994.2 This was a dual-site project