Changing patterns of mobility, citizenship and conflict in Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Mobility and migration are inherent ingredients of Indonesian cultures. In an archipelago with thousands of islands of various size, character and nature, mobility is an important means to make a living and to survive by migration. The right to free movement in Indonesia is constitutionally granted. It can create mobility and give expression to equal citizenship rights at the same time as it can trigger the enforcement of borders among cultural groups and the ethnification of local and regional politics. Mobility thus always comes along with immobility. Physical mobility of one group of people might cause immobility of another group or it might create cultural and political immobility in the same group. In places such as Eastern Indonesia, people have developed reciprocal means to integrate newcomers. Whereas the immigrants are usually disadvantaged citizens with regards to land and customary rights, those living in the area for generations have nonetheless become integral parts of quite peaceful local settings, one way or the other. The advancement of decentralization, democratization and direct elections of political representatives can lead to political empowerment, the promotion of ethnicity as election capital and changing patterns of belonging. This paper illustrates these ambivalences by looking at mobility in Indonesia more generally and how changing national policies and laws lead to reinterpretations of mobility patterns and trigger changes in relations between local population groups and existing mechanisms of cultural and political inclusion and exclusion. Butonese migrants in Maluku will here serve as a case study.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• citizenship
• decentralization
• ethnicity
• elections
• Buton
• Maluku
• Indonesia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Adat is an expression used throughout Indonesia for particular sets of traditions and customary law that govern the way of life of specific groups of people. Masyarakat adat is a society that lives according to adat norms.

2. For a variety of interpretations and analyses on the phenomenon in Eastern Indonesia and beyond, see the special issue of Indonesia and the Malay World 36 (105), edited by Ian Caldwell and David Henley (2008).

3. ‘Central Maluku’ in this paper does not refer to the administrative unit (except when stated otherwise), but to the central part of the Moluccan archipelago that is divided into North, Central and Southeast Maluku.

4. As part of state-supported transmigration programs between 1969 and 1999 almost one hundred thousand people migrated to Maluku, more than half of them to Central Maluku. Given a total population of two million (in 1999 Maluku and North Maluku were still one province), this amounts to almost 5%. The majority came from Buton and Java and was Muslim. There are no figures on spontaneous migration. Estimates range from 50,000 to 200,000 (Regional Office of the Ministry of Transmigration and Forest Settlers Province of Moluccas, Retrieved 22 February, 2016, from http://www.websitesrcg.com/ambon/transmig.htm).

5. Palmer (2004, p. 89) estimated that 160,000 Butonese had to flee. According to the secretary of the Butonese organization KKBSW (Kerukunan Keluarga Besar Sangia Wambulu, Unity of the Big Sangia Wambulu Family) in Ambon City in 2011, approximately 70% of them returned back to Maluku after a while.

6. For a more in-depth discussion of the ambivalences of decentralization, see e.g. Bräuchler (2015).

7. See General Explanations (Penjelasan Umum) of UU 32/2004, Section I, No. 10 (Desa).

8. For the complex negotiation processes in local communities about how to define adat and tradition in their places, see e.g. Bräuchler (2010, 2015).

9. Generally, the notion of indigeneity is highly problematic in Indonesia (Bowen, 2005; Bräuchler, 2015, p. 150). Here, I consider those people in Central Maluku (including the islands of Ambon, Lease and West Seram) as indigenous, who already inhabited the area long before the arrival of European traders and colonial powers, and that claim to originate from a mountain called Nunusaku on the mother island Seram. The migrant populations in Central Maluku, most prominently the Butonese, some of whom have been living in Moluccan villages for generations, are not considered to be adat people either from the perspective of local (indigenous) communities or according to the new decentralization law.

10. I am here drawing on parts of a published chapter (Bräuchler, 2015: chapter 5) in order to add a new perspective on the implementation of decentralization by contrasting the depiction of the Butonese as ‘second-class citizens’ with their more optimistic depiction as the winners of decentralization. I thank Lusi Peilouw for her critical reading of that chapter and for help in complementing the sections essential for the argument of this paper.

11. I thank Lusi Peilouw for sharing her insights into PILKADA dynamics in Maluku more generally (including reference to Qodir) and election details in West Seram more specifically.

Additional information

Funding

This research project was kindly supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.