Indonesians ‘translocated'

Press, 14 February 1986, Page 17

Indonesians ‘translocated'

From the foreign staff of the ‘Observer*

An alliance of environmental and human rights groups is pressing for an international aid and financial boycott of Indonesia’s “transmigration” programme under which the Indonesian Government hopes to move millions of people , primarily from the densely populated islands of Java and Bali to other, nore lightly populated regions. Friends of the Earth, Survival International and an Indonesian human rights group, Tapol, are spearheading the protest They claim that the transmigration programme — perhaps one of the largest proposed relocations of populations in — is causing damage and devastation to human, animal and plant life. The programme, they charge, takes no account of the often delicate ecology in many of the regions and has been embarked upon without any thought of human consequences. It is, they say, counter to the environmental guidelines of the World Bank and, as such, should not quality for World Bank funds.

The protestors have also taken their campaign to Britain’s Overseas Development Administration, asking for a public accounting of how British aid funds to Indonesia are being spent This pressure comes at a delicate time for the British Government as the Defence Ministry, according to reports from. Djakarta, is negotiating the 'sale of about 600 Scorpion armoured vehicles to Indonesia. Indonesia’s anti-communist military Government is an important customer for British weaponry, having already bought Rapier missiles and », Hawk jet aircraft r

Human rights activists recently seized on the news that Indonesia had converted a squadron of Hawks, sold as trainers, to ground attack capability ready for use against guerrilla independence movements in East Timor and! West Papua. And it is West Papua — the Indonesian half of the Island of New Guinea — which is of special concern to the campaigners. Most of the Javanese and Balinese migrants are put into a smallholder estates scheme in West Papua aimed at increasing Indonesia’a cash crop exports.

One of the national plantation companies, controlled from Djakarta, has a monopoly as buyer of the smallholders’ harvest and co-ordinates land clearance. Many locals complain of high-handed decisions by the company, which, they say, has expropriated land from them without compensation and left them without enough scope for their own planting, hunting and fishing.

Many smallholders have found that they simply cannot survive on their plots and have had to take work as labourers for the plantation company which pays them the equivalent of $1 a day — far short of a living wage. The protest alliance has told the O.D.A that whole tribes are in danger of extinction in West Papua, a tendency likely to be much accelerated if Djakata car-

ries out its aims to re-settle a further 700,000 outsiders in the province during the next five years. The native population of West Papua is about 1.2 million. The existence of the Operas! Papua Merdeka (OPM Movement for an Independent Papua), which has moved from defence of local culture to armed struggle, has given Indonesian officials a brush with which to tar all complainers in the province about transmigration. Many West Papuans go along with the changes on the land for fear of being rounded up as O.P.M. sympathisers, while others flee across the mid-island frontier to refugee camps in Papua-New Guinea, formerly administered by Australia. Yet others slip away into the jungle

and swamps with the O.P.M. fighters. Bound up with the human damage is destruction of the environment, which has already become evident in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sulawesi (formerly Celebes) and Sumatra. There are also many instances of transmigration having failed even on its own terms, with inadequately supported newcomers abandoning their settlements and returning to Java and Bali, or swelling the slums in small towns on outlying islands. Worst of all for the rain forest, others have turned to uncontrolled slash-and-burn agriculture in order to survive, thus spreading destruction of habitats and danger to species beyond the official settlements. It is time, say the campaigners, for the world to take note of what is happening — and call a halt Copyright — London Observer Service.