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Transmigration Programme

Indonesia's Transmigration Program is an initiative to move landless people from highly populated areas of Indonesia to less highly populated areas of the island nation. In practice this has meant moving Javanese (mostly Islamic) to areas of including Papua, Borneo, Sumatra, and Sulawesi among others.

Critics of the program have accused the government of Indonesia of trying to use these migrants to replace native populations. In the past two decades the government has moved more than six million people from the crowded central Indonesian islands.

Many of the areas receiving transmigrants contain large tracts of southeast Asia's remaining rain forests - as more people were shipped to colonize the outer areas, more ancient cultures and forests tended to be cleared for the new settlers.

Considerable conflict and controversy, including violent conflict has been created by this program. These conflicts has caused the World Bank to withdraw its support of this program, though Indonesia has recently announced its desire to fund and accelerate these programs itself.

Aims

The Indonesian government claims the policy had the following aims:

1. 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 demographic development;
2. to alleviate poverty by providing land and new opportunities to generate income for poor landless settlers;
3. to exploit more effectively the "potential" of the "outer islands".

Under Suharto the program gained the aims of regional development, nation-building and national security, while increasing massively in size. The World Bank, ADB and bilateral donors funded the program with huge amounts of money in the 1980s.

History

The policy was started by the Dutch in the early 20th century, and continued by the subsequent Indonesian governments.

In August 2000, after the Asian financial crisis, the Indonesian government officially cancelled the general (large scale) transmigration program, funding no longer being available to underwrite it.

Criticism

1. Indonesia's outer islands contain some 10% of the world's remaining rainforest and the transmigration programme has been an important institutional source of pressure on natural forests;
2. The program is accused of having a political agenda to control the indigenous population of the outer islands (e.g. in West Papua, East Timor, Kalimantan);
3. Transmigration has violated customary (adat) land rights and is aimed at the forced assimilation of indigenous people and forest dwellers;
4. The program was an economic disaster, increasing national debt, and, in some years costing some 30-40% of the entire budget for the outer islands (in the 1980s resettlement costs were approximately US 7,000 per family)
5. Transmigration failed to alleviate poverty, instead, it simply redistributed it, leaving many transmigrants worse off due to inadequate planning and site preparation, poor access to markets and neglect of soil and water properties indispensable for a prosperous agricultural economy;
6. The number of transmigrants is not enough to substantially reduce population pressure on Java;
7. The program has created massive environmental problems.
8. It has caused violent conflict in some areas.