Monday, July 23, 2012
Transmigration Program: 19 provincial and 18 district government / signature in front of City Cooperation
JAKARTA - At
least 19 provincial and 18 district / city government agreed to support
and cooperate in improving the Transmigration program.
The agreement was marked by the signing of the inter-regional cooperation (Army Chief of Staff) the provincial and municipal / county for development between regions in the transmigration sites.
According to the minister Muhaimin Iskandar, through the mechanism of Army Chief of Staff, the transmigration program is designed based on the needs and potentials of each region.
"This cooperation is used as an instrument of integration needs and desires of the area of origin to the destination in the implementation of resettlement," he said, Sunday (15/07/2012).
The Government, he added, hoping Army Chief of Staff in the field of migration may create an increase in social welfare and equity in the sending and receiving migrants, as well as the community around the site.
Army Chief of Staff transmigration signing was witnessed by Director General of Manpower and Transmigration Area Development Coaching Jamaluddien Malik representing the minister and the Governor of South Sulawesi, Syahrul Yasin Limpo on Thursday, July 12th and in North Toraja.
Muhaimin said that based on the directed migration of development that can be used as one development scheme.
"The construction of resettlement areas is not only based on the spatial and certain commodities, but also simultaneously empower the surrounding community," he said.
For the 19 provincial migration involved the cooperation of five provinces, namely West Java, Central Java, East Java, Yogyakarta, and Lampung.
There are 14 provinces placement area, including West Sumatra, Bengkulu, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, North Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, Gorontalo, and the Moluccas.
Regarding the 18 areas involved in this partnership, comprised of 10 districts / cities of origin, such as Pesawaran, North Lampung, Bogor, Sukabumi, Purwakarta, and Surakarta.
In addition, there are eight district / city areas such as transmigration objectives Kaur, Kubu Raya, Gunung Mas, Bulungan, Luwu Wajo, Luwu North, and South Konawe. (Bass)
_________________________________________________________________________________
http://matanews.com/2009/06/23/prabowo-galakkan-transmigrasi/
Vice Presidential candidate (running mate) Prabowo Subianto promised a
massive resettlement program for farmers on the island of Java to get a
wider agricultural land as well as to process millions of hectares of
land that are still displaced.
The promise was delivered Prabowo when answering a question from a farmer in the village Wonobodro dialogue, District Blado, Batang, Central Java, on Monday night, about the concept of empowering poor farmers in Java if you later win the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election of 2009.
According to Prabowo, every farm workers are given the opportunity to follow the transmigration program with a modern agriculture and have a minimum of two acres of land so that farmers can improve the life of his family. "Transmigration later made even better with the support of modern agricultural technology, so if accompanied by hard work will achieve better welfare," he said.
However, he cautioned, improving the welfare of farm families must also be accompanied by the Family Planning program (KB) which limits the number of kids just enough so that two agricultural land continues to shrink. "Indonesia's territory is not likely to grow, so people must be willing to join the family planning program so that ownership of agricultural land per family does not continue to shrink," he said.
In the dialog, the former Reserve Command is asking people to vote for Megawati-Prabowo a Nation to change Indonesia into a strong and dignified nation. "The change was decided only five minutes when selecting in the voting booth, so do not get one vote," he said.
Earlier, Chairman of the DPC Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) Batang, Bambang Bintoro, optimistic voice for the couple Megawati-Prabowo Subianto in the region will reach a minimum of 65 percent due to the popularity of the couple's ever-increasing number one ahead of the 2009 Presidential election.
"It's hard work of all cadres, including thousands of volunteers, officials, presidential counselor, who worked hard to convince the mission Mega-Pro as well as providing a correct explanation of the BLT and Raskin who campaigned for other couples," said Bambang, who is also the Batang Regent.
Running mate Prabowo Subianto dialogue with farmers in Batang also attended by Chairman of the DPP and the PDIP Tjahjo Kumolo two candidates elected from party Gerindra, and Rachel Maryam Jamal Mirdad. (* Z / a)
__________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1990/10/marr.html#Carolyn
October 1990 - VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 10
I N D O N E S I A
Uprooting People,
Despite objections by
human rights and environmental organizations, the Indonesian government
and the international lending community defend and continue the controversial
transmigration program which moves poor farming families from the crowded
islands of Java, Bali and Madura to less densely populated islands of the
archipelago. Human rights organizations charge that the program destroys
indigenous communities, and environmentalists focus on its ecological devastation,
including deforestation. The Indonesian government dismisses these concerns,
arguing that transmigration is necessary to reduce over population and develop
undeveloped territories, and asserting that everyone benefits from the
program.
The government claims that families participating in the transmigration program do so voluntarily. Indeed, as its supporters describe it, the government's offer is very attractive. In theory, participants receive two hectares of land, a house and the basic necessities which enable them to build new, more prosperous lives in settlements with schools, health facilities and access to markets. The conditions in which transmigrants actually live, however, are less appealing. They are sent to Sumatra, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sulawesi, the Moluccas and most controversially, the disputed territories of West Papua referred to as "Irian Jaya" by the Indonesian government) and East Timor where the land is infertile and there are few or no facilities. Most find their living conditions worse than on their native islands.
There is little public criticism of transmigration within Indonesia, where the government ruthlessly suppresses democratic organizations and press freedoms and imposes harsh prison sentences on those who dare question Indonesia's presence in those disputed territories. President Suharto's 25-year-old military regime tolerates no dissent.
Millions of people have already been resettled under transmigration, the world's largest resettlement program. And the program is growing rapidly. According to official data, between 1950 and 1986, 698,200 families (about 3.5 million people) were moved, most of them to Sumatra. In 1985, Indonesia intensified the program and announced a five-year transmigration target of 750,000 families (3.75 million people). When critics voiced objections, the transmigration department backtracked, saying, "We are realizing that it may now be impossible to achieve this ambitious target, because of unpredictable budgetary constraints and related problems." Nevertheless, the lack of funds was overcome by encouraging the participation of self-financing transmigrants. The target for the current five- year plan (1989-1994) is 550,000 families (2.5 million people), requiring an estimated 4.5 million hectares of land.
Population transfer or territorial management?
In 1987, Indonesia's Ministry of Transmigration claimed, "Transmigration is the name of the Republic's bold program to help spur the development of the sprawling island nation and give its poorest families the chance to own their land and significantly improve their living standards." It went on to list the aims of the resettlement program: to encourage development; raise living standards; generate new jobs; increase food and tree crop production; relieve population pressure; control environmental degradation; and foster greater national interdependence.
In fact, internal documents of the government's transmigration department acknowledge that transmigration does not achieve its publicly stated goals: it makes virtually no dent in the population pressure on Java and it exacerbates the country's environmental degradation instead of reducing it, as forests are destroyed to make way for the new sites.
The Transmigration Ministry does not mention, however, one of transmigration's most important goals: national defense and security. The World Bank makes the same omission in its justifications for continued funding. But at home, Indonesian officials have been very clear about it. In 1989, for example, Defense Minister General Murdani said that transmigration is not only concerned with population redistribution but is "related to the importance of territorial development," which means "spreading out human resources as a defense and security potential." Transmigration Minister Lieutenant General Soegiarto also included strengthening defense and security when he described the program's purpose. In practice, this means resettling ethnic Javanese in sensitive border areas. The government also plans to populate border sites with retired army personnel. One such settlement was established in 1986 on the island of Natuna, located in the China Sea between Borneo and Vietnam. And according to the head of the provincial transmigration office, 500 retired army families will soon be sent to the Malaysian border in West Kalimantan.
Voluntary?
Transmigration promoters say the program is voluntary. But an official in the province of Aceh described transmigrants as "poor people who were thrown out of Java like rubbish." Indeed, some of those who end up at transmigrant sites, including beggars and vagrants, have been rounded up in some of the larger cities and bundled off to transmigration sites. One site established especially for this category is on the island of Buru, where thousands of political prisoners were sent in the wake of President Suharto's 1965 anti-communist reign of terror.
As part of a campaign to "modernize" Jakarta, government officials confiscated the vehicles of the becak (trishaw) drivers who throng the streets of many Javanese cities, and sent the drivers to start new lives as farmers on other islands. Some families join the ranks of transmigrants after natural disasters such as floods and volcanic eruptions destroy their land, while others--such as the families displaced by the World Bank-funded Kedung Ombo Dam in Central Java--are coerced into joining to make way for large-scale development projects. In Gresik, a major industrial zone of Java, people living on land earmarked to accommodate the expansion of a chemical plant have been offered transmigration as an escape from the increased pollution.
But the bulk of transmigrants are drawn from landless and poor farmers. On Java, where 60 percent of Indonesia's population lives on only 7 percent of the total land area, the population density is one of the highest in the world. Still, industrial and tourist projects gobble up more and more land, exacerbating the land squeeze and accelerating the marginalization of poor farmers. Transmigrants are lectured about the scarcity of land in Java and Bali as a justification for transmigration, while big business interests with ties to the Suharto family announce plans for luxury tourist resorts, golf courses, industrial estates and chemical complexes. Transmigration is primarily a "safety valve," designed to defuse pressure for the redistribution of land and for political change.
A catalogue of failures
A recent survey by a French consultant found that 80 percent of sites fail to improve the living standards of transmigrants. Even Indonesia's Transmigration Minister, Lieutenant General Soegiarto, admits that conditions in 903 sites throughout Indonesia concern the government. Similarly, the World Bank acknowledged this year that the expectation that transmigrants would raise their household incomes through the introduction of cash crops has not been met. The Bank reports that agricultural support services and supply of inputs are "inadequate;" access roads are "of poor quality and inadequately managed;" and the general management and coordination of the program is "weak."
The Indonesian daily, Kompas, recently outlined the problems faced by transmigrants on one of the earliest sites. Settlement began in Kurik, in the southern part of West Papua, even before the territory had been officially incorporated into Indonesia. Here, where the soil is rock-hard in the dry season and waterlogged in the wet season, the meager crops that can be grown are likely to be devoured by pests.
Women usually fare worse than men when families transmigrate; they have no part in the decision to transmigrate, and they receive no training or preparation for the move. Typically, the men are forced to leave the site, often for months at a time, to find work after the government support has run out. The women must stay behind to tend the plot and look after the children. Kurik, however, was an exception. There the women left the site--with the blessings of their husbands--to become prostitutes in the town.
Many transmigration sites have been abandoned altogether. One woman, living in makeshift accommodations in the provincial capital after leaving a settlement, says "the land was too acidic to grow crops and there were so many mice." She and other "failed " transmigrants eke out a living as rubbish recyclers. Others live on the rubbish dump itself. These people are not calculated in the rate of return to Java, which signifies the failure of the program and which is officially at least 15 percent.
Government spending on transmigration was cut during the mid-eighties slump in the price of oil, Indonesia's major foreign exchange earner. Falling revenues from the oil sector and the spiralling foreign debt left fewer funds for the program. A plan to save money by encouraging transmigrants to pay their way to the site (370,000 of the current 550,000 families target is for these so-called "spontaneous" transmigrants) was introduced and the program was directed away from the original food crop model to state-run or private plantations and processing projects for export.
Transmigrants working on these projects, which were first introduced in the mid-eighties, are given a house and 0.25 hectares for growing subsistence foods and are required to work on a plantation as wage laborers. After a number of years, the transmigrants are supposed to gain ownership of plantation plots and from then on sell their produce to a processing plant. In reality, projects rarely reach this stage; instead transmigrants are exploited as cheap labor.
The government responds to the failure of many sites by blaming the transmigrants themselves. Last year, Vice President Sudharmono told transmigrants in South Kalimantan who appealed to him for funds to improve their site that they should use their own skills and resources. "Don't rely only on the government and don't wait for divine intervention to overcome your problems," he said. Sudharmono surely would not approve, however, of the increasingly popular survival tactic which the transmigrants have developed on their own: families register as transmigrants, receive free government supplies for the six-month period, and then sell their land, return to Java and re-register as transmigrants to begin the whole cycle again.
Transmigrants as colonists
The families which are thrown out of Java and Bali are not the only ones to suffer. The indigenous communities and the environment at the transmigration sites are also victims of the program.
The government claims that the islands are appropriate sites for the new settlements because they are "virtually empty" or "underpopulated." But it is no accident that the population density is lower than in Java; the rainforests there cover thin soils which cannot sustain intensive agriculture without the massive and unsustainable use of fertilizers. The indigenous peoples of these islands have evolved strategies to live in and from the forests without destroying them, but they are being displaced by transmigration settlements. They are losing their land because the Indonesian government refuses to recognize their traditional land rights. And their indigenous cultural heritage is threatened with extinction by the large influx of outsiders.
Some indigenous groups have responded militantly to the invasion of their territory. A government official in Aceh expressed particular pity for transmigrants who he said had been "thrown out of Java," and were now being chased out of Aceh too--in fear for their lives. A recent upsurge of separatist violence in the province, where, alongside the military and police, transmigrants have come to symbolize Javanese domination of this fiercely Islamic region, has prompted thousands of settlers to abandon their sites. The violence is partly inspired by Acehnese opposition to the large mining, gas, oil and pulp and paper projects which are exploiting Aceh's resources but which are controlled by Jakarta. Many Javanese transmigrants in Aceh have returned to Java with all their portable possessions to escape attacks by the Free Aceh Movement.
Attacks on transmigrants have also been reported at the Arso transmigration site close to the Papua New Guinea border in West Papua, where the transmigration program is widely seen as a direct attempt to outnumber the indigenous inhabitants. The indigenous people's resentment is justified; outsiders identify their traditional land as suitable for transmigration, clear their forests, destroy their sacred sites and deny them their basic needs. Then the government gives them the "choice" of joining a transmigration site where they will live as a minority group.
The notion that indigenous people am "backward" and "primitive" informs the policy of the Social Affairs Ministry, the government ministry reponsible for their interests. If not relocated directly on transmigration sites, many communities are resettled in transmigration-style accommodations locally, under the development program for "isolated tribes."
As "local transmigrants," they are expected to learn what are considered advanced agricultural techniques from the Javanese newcomers, whose intensive farming methods are generally not suited to the vastly different soils and climatic conditions of the islands.
The prejudice against traditional forms of agriculture runs deep; the government blames shifting cultivators for forest destruction despite the fact that they have used the land in a sustainable manner for generations. The same prejudice is found in the international community; before leaving to take up his post as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, John Monjo told the Committee on Foreign Relations that some of the residents of West Papua, "are virtually stone-age people ... [who] might do better" if they were able to live with Javanese and Balinese transmigrants who are "fairly advanced in their farming techniques."
Indigenous communities regard transmigration as a major threat. In the submission to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, the Netherlands-based West Papua Volksfront said, "it is because of the transmigration projects and activities of transnational corporations that Papuans are forced to leave their ancestral homeland... Jakarta's homogenizing approach to development, i.e. the creation of a centralized state, poses a threat to the lifestyle and culture of the Papuans and therefore creates antagonism and social unrest."
The World Bank � propping up transmigration
Despite the plethora of criticisms and problems, the World Bank has invested a total of US$500 million in the transmigration program since 1976. Campaigners have long sought to pressure the World Bank and other donors to withdraw their support, but the money keeps rolling in. In response to criticism, the Bank has limited its funding to the improvement of existing sites. But this simply enables the Indonesian government to spend more of its transmigration funds on establishing new resettlement sites.
Indonesia also collects large amounts of bilateral support for the program. Canadian funds are directed to transmigration in Sulawesi. German money funded a transmigration site improvement scheme in East Kalimantan, and Japan donated tractors and pesticide sprayers for sites in Sumatra. The UK government Overseas Development Administration has carried out a land satellite mapping project to identify suitable sites for transmigration.
Cheap labor
With the support of the World Bank, the Indonesian government is relying more heavily on transmigration as a component of its efforts to develop the non-petroleum sectors of the economy. Transmigrants are increasingly used as cheap labor, just as Javanese were exploited by the Dutch colonial administration under kolonisasi, the forerunner of the transmigration program which procured labor to work on plantations in Sumatra. Two hundred thousand families are destined for plantations under the current five-year plan. The transmigration department also plans to send 40,000 transmigrant families to work on new-style timber estate projects, 90,000 to fisheries and 40,000 to tertiary industries.
How successful these plans will be is uncertain. In March, transmigrants working on an oil-palm estate in Central Sulawesi protested about wages too low to buy basic necessities, and in East Kalimantan hundreds of transmigrants abandoned their sites to seek work elsewhere, as they could no longer survive on the wages paid by the company.
More certain are the effects of plantations, timber estates and other massive development projects on indigenous communities, since they deprive indigenous people of their subsistence resources. Recently, yet another product was made available for commercial exploitation. Sagindo Sari Lestari, a company owned by Indonesia's most powerful timber tycoon, Bob Hasan, has been licensed to process sago � a staple food of many indigenous peoples � for export from a 45,000 hectare concession in Bintuni Bay, West Papua. The government will bring 200 transmigrant families to the site to work for the company.
International parallels
Indonesia garners support for the resettlement program from many countries which have implemented similar plans. In a recent meeting with Transmigration Minister Soegiarto, Japan's ambassador to Indonesia praised the transmigration program and likened it to Japan's own scheme to resettle its northernmost island, Hokkaido, in the last century. Indonesia has also drawn parallels between transmigration and the homesteading program of the western United States a hundred years ago. Officials say the United States was "knitting together a continent and developing underutilized land into one of the most productive areas of the world." But these complimentary comparisons fail to point out that in each case, resettlement was achieved at the expense of indigenous people � the traditional owners of the land. Like the indigenous Ainu of Hokkaido and the Native American communities in the United States before them, the indigenous people of the Indonesian islands are in danger of annihilation.
Carolyn Marr works in London on a project, managed by Survival International, which monitors environmental and development issues in Indonesia.
__________________________________________________________________________________
This document, is one example of how the indigenous peoples of Maluku perform activities of their lives in the mountains, and the brothers can think about what would happen, if the necessities of life in the communities concerned are not conserved for the benefit of the interdependence of living among the community of nations needs daily in their nature. Given that we all depend on the nature of natural and not on high-rise buildings to be processed into food and clothing.
The felling of trees by logging without reforestation and erosion, badlands, and the dominance of a place for people forced out of the area occupied indigenous lands and expel the Moluccas without respecting indigenous peoples of Maluku with a run to dominate the system, as well as the imposition of ideology simultaneously on the system of government , to eliminate the history of the Moluccas, and try to obliterate native peoples of Maluku in their own lands with a subtle manner through a system of government transmigration of Javanese Islam / Indonesia.
MOLUCCAS: GENOCIDE ON THE SLY - Indonesia's Transmigration and Islamisation Program: http://www.michr.net/moluccas-genocide-on-the-sly-ndash-indonesiarsquos-transmigration-and-islamisation-program.html
Every system in the country of Indonesia, is coming from Jakarta, where the majority of the nation's government is controlled by a genetic mixture of Javanese and Arab Islam / Indonesia, they argued to the international community that Indonesia is a state based on Pancasila and 1945 Constitution, but the fact the government deeds Javanese Islam / Indonesia is the link as described below:
Of all the Indonesian president to use military and police as a slave state for their political crimes can be achieved, as there are 2 in the state ideology of Indonesia
http://souisapaul81.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/of-all-indonesian-president-to-use.html
Please brothers and sisters around the world to focus on Human Rights Issues only,I'm not asking you to be come one of the political member's to solved this problems, and please do not offended by the words of Islam, but together we could fix this matter with peace as brothers and sisters of the world, because what ever that happened and what has been said, it is according to the truth it self. Thank you and may God bless us all in the truth it self.
The agreement was marked by the signing of the inter-regional cooperation (Army Chief of Staff) the provincial and municipal / county for development between regions in the transmigration sites.
According to the minister Muhaimin Iskandar, through the mechanism of Army Chief of Staff, the transmigration program is designed based on the needs and potentials of each region.
"This cooperation is used as an instrument of integration needs and desires of the area of origin to the destination in the implementation of resettlement," he said, Sunday (15/07/2012).
The Government, he added, hoping Army Chief of Staff in the field of migration may create an increase in social welfare and equity in the sending and receiving migrants, as well as the community around the site.
Army Chief of Staff transmigration signing was witnessed by Director General of Manpower and Transmigration Area Development Coaching Jamaluddien Malik representing the minister and the Governor of South Sulawesi, Syahrul Yasin Limpo on Thursday, July 12th and in North Toraja.
Muhaimin said that based on the directed migration of development that can be used as one development scheme.
"The construction of resettlement areas is not only based on the spatial and certain commodities, but also simultaneously empower the surrounding community," he said.
For the 19 provincial migration involved the cooperation of five provinces, namely West Java, Central Java, East Java, Yogyakarta, and Lampung.
There are 14 provinces placement area, including West Sumatra, Bengkulu, South Sumatra, West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, East Kalimantan, North Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, Gorontalo, and the Moluccas.
Regarding the 18 areas involved in this partnership, comprised of 10 districts / cities of origin, such as Pesawaran, North Lampung, Bogor, Sukabumi, Purwakarta, and Surakarta.
In addition, there are eight district / city areas such as transmigration objectives Kaur, Kubu Raya, Gunung Mas, Bulungan, Luwu Wajo, Luwu North, and South Konawe. (Bass)
_________________________________________________________________________________
http://matanews.com/2009/06/23/prabowo-galakkan-transmigrasi/
Monday
July 23, 2012 | 15:31:42
July 23, 2012 | 15:31:42
Prabowo and Transmigration
Prabowo Subianto / ist
The promise was delivered Prabowo when answering a question from a farmer in the village Wonobodro dialogue, District Blado, Batang, Central Java, on Monday night, about the concept of empowering poor farmers in Java if you later win the Presidential and Vice Presidential Election of 2009.
According to Prabowo, every farm workers are given the opportunity to follow the transmigration program with a modern agriculture and have a minimum of two acres of land so that farmers can improve the life of his family. "Transmigration later made even better with the support of modern agricultural technology, so if accompanied by hard work will achieve better welfare," he said.
However, he cautioned, improving the welfare of farm families must also be accompanied by the Family Planning program (KB) which limits the number of kids just enough so that two agricultural land continues to shrink. "Indonesia's territory is not likely to grow, so people must be willing to join the family planning program so that ownership of agricultural land per family does not continue to shrink," he said.
In the dialog, the former Reserve Command is asking people to vote for Megawati-Prabowo a Nation to change Indonesia into a strong and dignified nation. "The change was decided only five minutes when selecting in the voting booth, so do not get one vote," he said.
Earlier, Chairman of the DPC Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) Batang, Bambang Bintoro, optimistic voice for the couple Megawati-Prabowo Subianto in the region will reach a minimum of 65 percent due to the popularity of the couple's ever-increasing number one ahead of the 2009 Presidential election.
"It's hard work of all cadres, including thousands of volunteers, officials, presidential counselor, who worked hard to convince the mission Mega-Pro as well as providing a correct explanation of the BLT and Raskin who campaigned for other couples," said Bambang, who is also the Batang Regent.
Running mate Prabowo Subianto dialogue with farmers in Batang also attended by Chairman of the DPP and the PDIP Tjahjo Kumolo two candidates elected from party Gerindra, and Rachel Maryam Jamal Mirdad. (* Z / a)
__________________________________________________________________________________
http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1990/10/marr.html#Carolyn
October 1990 - VOLUME 11 - NUMBER 10
I N D O N E S I A
Uprooting People,
Destroying Cultures
Indonesia's Transmigration Program
by Carolyn MarrThe government claims that families participating in the transmigration program do so voluntarily. Indeed, as its supporters describe it, the government's offer is very attractive. In theory, participants receive two hectares of land, a house and the basic necessities which enable them to build new, more prosperous lives in settlements with schools, health facilities and access to markets. The conditions in which transmigrants actually live, however, are less appealing. They are sent to Sumatra, Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sulawesi, the Moluccas and most controversially, the disputed territories of West Papua referred to as "Irian Jaya" by the Indonesian government) and East Timor where the land is infertile and there are few or no facilities. Most find their living conditions worse than on their native islands.
There is little public criticism of transmigration within Indonesia, where the government ruthlessly suppresses democratic organizations and press freedoms and imposes harsh prison sentences on those who dare question Indonesia's presence in those disputed territories. President Suharto's 25-year-old military regime tolerates no dissent.
Millions of people have already been resettled under transmigration, the world's largest resettlement program. And the program is growing rapidly. According to official data, between 1950 and 1986, 698,200 families (about 3.5 million people) were moved, most of them to Sumatra. In 1985, Indonesia intensified the program and announced a five-year transmigration target of 750,000 families (3.75 million people). When critics voiced objections, the transmigration department backtracked, saying, "We are realizing that it may now be impossible to achieve this ambitious target, because of unpredictable budgetary constraints and related problems." Nevertheless, the lack of funds was overcome by encouraging the participation of self-financing transmigrants. The target for the current five- year plan (1989-1994) is 550,000 families (2.5 million people), requiring an estimated 4.5 million hectares of land.
Population transfer or territorial management?
In 1987, Indonesia's Ministry of Transmigration claimed, "Transmigration is the name of the Republic's bold program to help spur the development of the sprawling island nation and give its poorest families the chance to own their land and significantly improve their living standards." It went on to list the aims of the resettlement program: to encourage development; raise living standards; generate new jobs; increase food and tree crop production; relieve population pressure; control environmental degradation; and foster greater national interdependence.
In fact, internal documents of the government's transmigration department acknowledge that transmigration does not achieve its publicly stated goals: it makes virtually no dent in the population pressure on Java and it exacerbates the country's environmental degradation instead of reducing it, as forests are destroyed to make way for the new sites.
The Transmigration Ministry does not mention, however, one of transmigration's most important goals: national defense and security. The World Bank makes the same omission in its justifications for continued funding. But at home, Indonesian officials have been very clear about it. In 1989, for example, Defense Minister General Murdani said that transmigration is not only concerned with population redistribution but is "related to the importance of territorial development," which means "spreading out human resources as a defense and security potential." Transmigration Minister Lieutenant General Soegiarto also included strengthening defense and security when he described the program's purpose. In practice, this means resettling ethnic Javanese in sensitive border areas. The government also plans to populate border sites with retired army personnel. One such settlement was established in 1986 on the island of Natuna, located in the China Sea between Borneo and Vietnam. And according to the head of the provincial transmigration office, 500 retired army families will soon be sent to the Malaysian border in West Kalimantan.
Voluntary?
Transmigration promoters say the program is voluntary. But an official in the province of Aceh described transmigrants as "poor people who were thrown out of Java like rubbish." Indeed, some of those who end up at transmigrant sites, including beggars and vagrants, have been rounded up in some of the larger cities and bundled off to transmigration sites. One site established especially for this category is on the island of Buru, where thousands of political prisoners were sent in the wake of President Suharto's 1965 anti-communist reign of terror.
As part of a campaign to "modernize" Jakarta, government officials confiscated the vehicles of the becak (trishaw) drivers who throng the streets of many Javanese cities, and sent the drivers to start new lives as farmers on other islands. Some families join the ranks of transmigrants after natural disasters such as floods and volcanic eruptions destroy their land, while others--such as the families displaced by the World Bank-funded Kedung Ombo Dam in Central Java--are coerced into joining to make way for large-scale development projects. In Gresik, a major industrial zone of Java, people living on land earmarked to accommodate the expansion of a chemical plant have been offered transmigration as an escape from the increased pollution.
But the bulk of transmigrants are drawn from landless and poor farmers. On Java, where 60 percent of Indonesia's population lives on only 7 percent of the total land area, the population density is one of the highest in the world. Still, industrial and tourist projects gobble up more and more land, exacerbating the land squeeze and accelerating the marginalization of poor farmers. Transmigrants are lectured about the scarcity of land in Java and Bali as a justification for transmigration, while big business interests with ties to the Suharto family announce plans for luxury tourist resorts, golf courses, industrial estates and chemical complexes. Transmigration is primarily a "safety valve," designed to defuse pressure for the redistribution of land and for political change.
A catalogue of failures
A recent survey by a French consultant found that 80 percent of sites fail to improve the living standards of transmigrants. Even Indonesia's Transmigration Minister, Lieutenant General Soegiarto, admits that conditions in 903 sites throughout Indonesia concern the government. Similarly, the World Bank acknowledged this year that the expectation that transmigrants would raise their household incomes through the introduction of cash crops has not been met. The Bank reports that agricultural support services and supply of inputs are "inadequate;" access roads are "of poor quality and inadequately managed;" and the general management and coordination of the program is "weak."
The Indonesian daily, Kompas, recently outlined the problems faced by transmigrants on one of the earliest sites. Settlement began in Kurik, in the southern part of West Papua, even before the territory had been officially incorporated into Indonesia. Here, where the soil is rock-hard in the dry season and waterlogged in the wet season, the meager crops that can be grown are likely to be devoured by pests.
Women usually fare worse than men when families transmigrate; they have no part in the decision to transmigrate, and they receive no training or preparation for the move. Typically, the men are forced to leave the site, often for months at a time, to find work after the government support has run out. The women must stay behind to tend the plot and look after the children. Kurik, however, was an exception. There the women left the site--with the blessings of their husbands--to become prostitutes in the town.
Many transmigration sites have been abandoned altogether. One woman, living in makeshift accommodations in the provincial capital after leaving a settlement, says "the land was too acidic to grow crops and there were so many mice." She and other "failed " transmigrants eke out a living as rubbish recyclers. Others live on the rubbish dump itself. These people are not calculated in the rate of return to Java, which signifies the failure of the program and which is officially at least 15 percent.
Government spending on transmigration was cut during the mid-eighties slump in the price of oil, Indonesia's major foreign exchange earner. Falling revenues from the oil sector and the spiralling foreign debt left fewer funds for the program. A plan to save money by encouraging transmigrants to pay their way to the site (370,000 of the current 550,000 families target is for these so-called "spontaneous" transmigrants) was introduced and the program was directed away from the original food crop model to state-run or private plantations and processing projects for export.
Transmigrants working on these projects, which were first introduced in the mid-eighties, are given a house and 0.25 hectares for growing subsistence foods and are required to work on a plantation as wage laborers. After a number of years, the transmigrants are supposed to gain ownership of plantation plots and from then on sell their produce to a processing plant. In reality, projects rarely reach this stage; instead transmigrants are exploited as cheap labor.
The government responds to the failure of many sites by blaming the transmigrants themselves. Last year, Vice President Sudharmono told transmigrants in South Kalimantan who appealed to him for funds to improve their site that they should use their own skills and resources. "Don't rely only on the government and don't wait for divine intervention to overcome your problems," he said. Sudharmono surely would not approve, however, of the increasingly popular survival tactic which the transmigrants have developed on their own: families register as transmigrants, receive free government supplies for the six-month period, and then sell their land, return to Java and re-register as transmigrants to begin the whole cycle again.
Transmigrants as colonists
The families which are thrown out of Java and Bali are not the only ones to suffer. The indigenous communities and the environment at the transmigration sites are also victims of the program.
The government claims that the islands are appropriate sites for the new settlements because they are "virtually empty" or "underpopulated." But it is no accident that the population density is lower than in Java; the rainforests there cover thin soils which cannot sustain intensive agriculture without the massive and unsustainable use of fertilizers. The indigenous peoples of these islands have evolved strategies to live in and from the forests without destroying them, but they are being displaced by transmigration settlements. They are losing their land because the Indonesian government refuses to recognize their traditional land rights. And their indigenous cultural heritage is threatened with extinction by the large influx of outsiders.
Some indigenous groups have responded militantly to the invasion of their territory. A government official in Aceh expressed particular pity for transmigrants who he said had been "thrown out of Java," and were now being chased out of Aceh too--in fear for their lives. A recent upsurge of separatist violence in the province, where, alongside the military and police, transmigrants have come to symbolize Javanese domination of this fiercely Islamic region, has prompted thousands of settlers to abandon their sites. The violence is partly inspired by Acehnese opposition to the large mining, gas, oil and pulp and paper projects which are exploiting Aceh's resources but which are controlled by Jakarta. Many Javanese transmigrants in Aceh have returned to Java with all their portable possessions to escape attacks by the Free Aceh Movement.
Attacks on transmigrants have also been reported at the Arso transmigration site close to the Papua New Guinea border in West Papua, where the transmigration program is widely seen as a direct attempt to outnumber the indigenous inhabitants. The indigenous people's resentment is justified; outsiders identify their traditional land as suitable for transmigration, clear their forests, destroy their sacred sites and deny them their basic needs. Then the government gives them the "choice" of joining a transmigration site where they will live as a minority group.
The notion that indigenous people am "backward" and "primitive" informs the policy of the Social Affairs Ministry, the government ministry reponsible for their interests. If not relocated directly on transmigration sites, many communities are resettled in transmigration-style accommodations locally, under the development program for "isolated tribes."
As "local transmigrants," they are expected to learn what are considered advanced agricultural techniques from the Javanese newcomers, whose intensive farming methods are generally not suited to the vastly different soils and climatic conditions of the islands.
The prejudice against traditional forms of agriculture runs deep; the government blames shifting cultivators for forest destruction despite the fact that they have used the land in a sustainable manner for generations. The same prejudice is found in the international community; before leaving to take up his post as U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, John Monjo told the Committee on Foreign Relations that some of the residents of West Papua, "are virtually stone-age people ... [who] might do better" if they were able to live with Javanese and Balinese transmigrants who are "fairly advanced in their farming techniques."
Indigenous communities regard transmigration as a major threat. In the submission to the UN Working Group on Indigenous Peoples, the Netherlands-based West Papua Volksfront said, "it is because of the transmigration projects and activities of transnational corporations that Papuans are forced to leave their ancestral homeland... Jakarta's homogenizing approach to development, i.e. the creation of a centralized state, poses a threat to the lifestyle and culture of the Papuans and therefore creates antagonism and social unrest."
The World Bank � propping up transmigration
Despite the plethora of criticisms and problems, the World Bank has invested a total of US$500 million in the transmigration program since 1976. Campaigners have long sought to pressure the World Bank and other donors to withdraw their support, but the money keeps rolling in. In response to criticism, the Bank has limited its funding to the improvement of existing sites. But this simply enables the Indonesian government to spend more of its transmigration funds on establishing new resettlement sites.
Indonesia also collects large amounts of bilateral support for the program. Canadian funds are directed to transmigration in Sulawesi. German money funded a transmigration site improvement scheme in East Kalimantan, and Japan donated tractors and pesticide sprayers for sites in Sumatra. The UK government Overseas Development Administration has carried out a land satellite mapping project to identify suitable sites for transmigration.
Cheap labor
With the support of the World Bank, the Indonesian government is relying more heavily on transmigration as a component of its efforts to develop the non-petroleum sectors of the economy. Transmigrants are increasingly used as cheap labor, just as Javanese were exploited by the Dutch colonial administration under kolonisasi, the forerunner of the transmigration program which procured labor to work on plantations in Sumatra. Two hundred thousand families are destined for plantations under the current five-year plan. The transmigration department also plans to send 40,000 transmigrant families to work on new-style timber estate projects, 90,000 to fisheries and 40,000 to tertiary industries.
How successful these plans will be is uncertain. In March, transmigrants working on an oil-palm estate in Central Sulawesi protested about wages too low to buy basic necessities, and in East Kalimantan hundreds of transmigrants abandoned their sites to seek work elsewhere, as they could no longer survive on the wages paid by the company.
More certain are the effects of plantations, timber estates and other massive development projects on indigenous communities, since they deprive indigenous people of their subsistence resources. Recently, yet another product was made available for commercial exploitation. Sagindo Sari Lestari, a company owned by Indonesia's most powerful timber tycoon, Bob Hasan, has been licensed to process sago � a staple food of many indigenous peoples � for export from a 45,000 hectare concession in Bintuni Bay, West Papua. The government will bring 200 transmigrant families to the site to work for the company.
International parallels
Indonesia garners support for the resettlement program from many countries which have implemented similar plans. In a recent meeting with Transmigration Minister Soegiarto, Japan's ambassador to Indonesia praised the transmigration program and likened it to Japan's own scheme to resettle its northernmost island, Hokkaido, in the last century. Indonesia has also drawn parallels between transmigration and the homesteading program of the western United States a hundred years ago. Officials say the United States was "knitting together a continent and developing underutilized land into one of the most productive areas of the world." But these complimentary comparisons fail to point out that in each case, resettlement was achieved at the expense of indigenous people � the traditional owners of the land. Like the indigenous Ainu of Hokkaido and the Native American communities in the United States before them, the indigenous people of the Indonesian islands are in danger of annihilation.
Carolyn Marr works in London on a project, managed by Survival International, which monitors environmental and development issues in Indonesia.
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This document, is one example of how the indigenous peoples of Maluku perform activities of their lives in the mountains, and the brothers can think about what would happen, if the necessities of life in the communities concerned are not conserved for the benefit of the interdependence of living among the community of nations needs daily in their nature. Given that we all depend on the nature of natural and not on high-rise buildings to be processed into food and clothing.
The felling of trees by logging without reforestation and erosion, badlands, and the dominance of a place for people forced out of the area occupied indigenous lands and expel the Moluccas without respecting indigenous peoples of Maluku with a run to dominate the system, as well as the imposition of ideology simultaneously on the system of government , to eliminate the history of the Moluccas, and try to obliterate native peoples of Maluku in their own lands with a subtle manner through a system of government transmigration of Javanese Islam / Indonesia.
MOLUCCAS: GENOCIDE ON THE SLY - Indonesia's Transmigration and Islamisation Program: http://www.michr.net/moluccas-genocide-on-the-sly-ndash-indonesiarsquos-transmigration-and-islamisation-program.html
Every system in the country of Indonesia, is coming from Jakarta, where the majority of the nation's government is controlled by a genetic mixture of Javanese and Arab Islam / Indonesia, they argued to the international community that Indonesia is a state based on Pancasila and 1945 Constitution, but the fact the government deeds Javanese Islam / Indonesia is the link as described below:
Of all the Indonesian president to use military and police as a slave state for their political crimes can be achieved, as there are 2 in the state ideology of Indonesia
http://souisapaul81.blogspot.com.au/2012/05/of-all-indonesian-president-to-use.html
Please brothers and sisters around the world to focus on Human Rights Issues only,I'm not asking you to be come one of the political member's to solved this problems, and please do not offended by the words of Islam, but together we could fix this matter with peace as brothers and sisters of the world, because what ever that happened and what has been said, it is according to the truth it self. Thank you and may God bless us all in the truth it self.
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