State-led initiatives to resettle dominant ethnic groups in ethnically distinct peripheries are at the heart of many conflicts. State-organised migrants, sometimes called transmigrants, often receive preferential support from the state, gaining access to land at the expense of nativeFootnote 1 populations, who may perceive migration as internal colonialism. In response, natives may take up arms to protect what they feel is theirs and push out migrants, who may themselves utilise violence to defend or expand their claims. The result is ‘Sons of the Soil’ (SoS) conflicts, which are said to comprise over one-third of all ethnic conflicts, including secessionist, terrorist, or communal violence.Footnote 2 While the importance of state-sponsored migration as a root cause of armed conflict around the world is clear, how, when and why such dynamics play out is more opaque. There is a tendency to over-predict the link between transmigration and violence.
Asia is home to a range of transmigrant conflicts where the state's relocation of the country's dominant ethnic group sparks native resistance. This characterisation is largely accurate in the cases of western China, eastern Bangladesh, southern Thailand, southern Vietnam, and the southern Philippines. This article suggests that despite conventional wisdom, no Indonesian conflict clearly conform to this model. Home to what is arguably the world's most extensive organised population movements and a range of violent ethnic conflicts, experts routinely cite transmigration as the heart of such upheavals. However, there is no clear link between state-led Javanese transmigration and ethnic conflict in Indonesia.
Based on primary fieldworkFootnote 3 and secondary sources, this article hopes to challenge and clarify the link between transmigration and conflict in Indonesia. We first provide some definitions and discuss the logic of transmigrant conflicts, surveying examples from Asia. Second, we provide some background on transmigration in Indonesia, a programme that continued for over a century under a variety of regimes. Third, we make the bold contention that Indonesia has not had any transmigrant conflicts, showing that most recipient areas have remained peaceful. We examine cases where rebels and activists have wrongly invoked transmigration and show that it is spontaneous migration from nearby areas that has led to most conflicts in the archipelago. We conclude by looking at some implications of these findings. While rejecting arguments that transmigration is responsible for significant violence, this article should not be seen as a defence of transmigration. Indonesian transmigration has contributed to environmental degradation, a loss of indigenous lands, and corruption, with few obvious benefits. If transmigration has not clearly led to armed conflict, this suggests a need to rethink the types of migration that may generate violence, as well as the role of the state in trying to prevent such an outcome.
Transmigration and violence in Asia
Nations have long expanded through state support for resettling populations in sparsely inhabited ethnic peripheries. This was true of Rome's military colonies right through to the ‘settler colonies’ of Canada, the United States, southern Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. Meanwhile, ‘internal colonialism’ refers to state-organised population movements within recognised borders in an effort to consolidate national identity.Footnote 4 Settler societies and internal colonies share common features and challenges pertaining to the coexistence of core/periphery and of diverse indigenous and migrant collectivities.Footnote 5
Transmigration, then, should be seen in this light, as an age-old form of expansion and consolidation. Transmigration refers to the movement of state-sponsored migrants from populous regions into sparsely populated, ethnically distinct peripheries within territorial borders.Footnote 6 States make land available to settlers at the expense of native communities, providing money, supplies, and land to encourage the settlement of what they see as more loyal, economically productive peoples. Upon resettlement, the state recognises and protects the property of its settlers. States have mixed reasons for demographic redistribution. Some relate to the country's core, relieving population pressures and undermining rebellion among the majority, while others relate to receiving areas, with migration helping to spark economic development, dilute nascent rebellions, and build nations.
While typically seen by the state as a way to quell rebellion, organised migration has also generated armed conflict between new arrivals and local populations. James Fearon and David Laitin suggest that one-third of ethnic conflicts can be characterised as ‘Sons of the Soil’ (SoS) conflicts, which involve ‘conflict between members of a minority ethnic group concentrated in some region of a country, and relatively recent, ethnically distinct migrants to this region from other parts of the same country’.Footnote 7 They contend that SoS conflicts will escalate into violence when the state actively supports in-migration and sides with the migrants against the local population. The authors suggest that such conflicts ‘have occurred mainly in Asia’, providing examples from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Thailand, Bangladesh, China, and Indonesia.
Asia is indeed home to a variety of cases that can be understood as transmigrant conflicts. For instance, the Chinese state has encouraged the populating of its peripheral minority regions, including Tibet and Xinjiang, with Han migrants.Footnote 8 After a century of in-migration, Han Chinese have grown from being only 5 per cent of Xinjiang's population in 1941 to 40.5 per cent in 2010 — approaching a majority, if temporary migrants and security forces are taken into account.Footnote 9 In southern Thailand, state-supported Thai migration has led to considerable demographic shifts, with Thai leaders demanding ‘loyal Thai blood’ in Patani.Footnote 10 While the bulk of Thai migrants have populated the upper south, the Muslim lower south has also seen the rise of ethnic Thais to become 15 per cent of the local population. The most significant case of transmigration as internal colonialism, generating substantial violence, is in the southern Philippines. Mass migration from Christian islands has made Muslim Moros and indigenous Lumads minorities in Mindanao. While transmigration began under Spanish and early American rule, the Commonwealth era in the 1930s expanded migration, with Christians opening up ‘virgin land’ with state support in order to ‘populate [Mindanao] as quickly as we can’.Footnote 11 The result is that over 60 per cent of Mindanao is now Christian Filipino, with Moros and Lumads falling to under 30 per cent and 10 per cent of the island's population, respectively.Footnote 12 This demographic shift was a key factor in the rise of Moro secessionism. One of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front's core concerns has been land rights, protecting Muslim territory from further Filipino expansion, and working to gain back some lands taken by migrants, what is known as Muslim ‘ancestral domain’.Footnote 13
These are fairly clear cases of transmigrant conflicts, in which the state has supported the country's dominant ethnic group to resettle in minority areas, often sustaining armed conflicts. This said, even these cases are not totally straightforward. Patani is also home to native Thais with local roots, as not all ethnic Thais are recent migrants. While some writers have framed the conflict in terms of ‘a massive transmigration of Thai-Buddhists’,Footnote 14 Malays still represent over 80 per cent of Patani's population and are not about to become a minority. In Mindanao, many migrants are from the Visayas, not from dominant Tagalog-speaking Luzon; moreover, much of the migration has been spontaneous. While state forces have relocated former rebels from Luzon, provided security, and colluded with Christian migrants, many migrants have arrived and spread without state support. These caveats aside, we can understand these and other conflicts in Asia to be largely about native communities clashing with organised migrants or vice versa.
Other oft-cited examples of transmigrant conflicts come from the Republic of Indonesia, home to one of the world's most extensive transmigration programmes. Rodolphe De Koninck rightly suggests that relying on the peasantry as a territorial spearhead of the state has ‘reached its broadest expression in Indonesia’.Footnote 15 The extent of Indonesian transmigration is not in doubt, but its link to armed conflicts is less clear, despite writers consistently framing Indonesian cases as transmigrant conflicts. Fearon and Laitin refer to several, including Papua, Aceh, and East Timor. They suggest that Papuan secessionism arose because transmigrants have become property owners and threaten to make Papuans a minority in their own lands.Footnote 16 To what extent can we attribute Indonesia's numerous violent conflicts to state-led resettlement of Javanese, the country's dominant ethnic group? The next section provides some background to the country's extensive transmigration programme and shows how the link between transmigration and violence has become conventional wisdom.
Indonesia: Transmigrasi and violence
The Indonesian archipelago has a long history of migration and resettlement, including Malay traditions of merantau.Footnote 17 Interestingly, the ethnic groups involved in modern transmigration lack strong migratory traditions, as Java and Bali are known for their intensive rice agriculture, not regional trade.Footnote 18 This changed in the 1880s, when Dutch plantations in Sumatra began to recruit Javanese and Sundanese workers. By the early 1900s, colonial authorities began preparing transmigration sites and establishing credit banks. Transmigration continued to expand in the 1930s, and by the end of 1940, over 200,000 settlers had been relocated under the Kolonisatie programme, with nearly 70 per cent (or 140,000) settling in Lampung, especially in the town of Metro, Kolonisatie's largest project.Footnote 19 At independence, both President Sukarno and Vice President Hatta prioritised transmigration as integral to nation-building, resettling 390,000 persons in fifteen years.Footnote 20 This included Javanese peasants, but also former soldiers and rebels, as well as labourers returning from Dutch Suriname. Although transmigration policies changed considerably over time, there have been common features across diverse regimes, with Dutch colonisers and post-independence politicians all agreeing on some form of resettlement. This is partly due to demography: almost two-thirds of Indonesia's more than 200 million people inhabit the crowded ‘Inner Islands’ of Java, Bali, and Madura, which make up under 7 per cent of the country's land area. Meanwhile, the other third of the population is spread out across thousands of sparsely populated islands.
It was under the New Order, however, that transmigration reached its zenith, becoming ‘a social engineering project of monumental proportions’.Footnote 21 President Suharto, development-minded technocrats, and the army saw transmigration as a panacea for a variety of the country's challenges.Footnote 22 During the first five-year development plan (Repelita I, 1969–74), 182,000 persons were relocated; this expanded to 544,000 during the second plan (Repelita II, 1974–79) before exploding to almost 2.5 million during the petro-boom under the third plan (Repelita III, 1979–84). In each of the two subsequent plans, transmigration relocated over one million persons, despite a fall in oil revenue.Footnote 23 While these numbers were typically inflated, with bureaucrats including spontaneous migrants and failing to subtract returnees, the relocation of over five million state transmigrants remains a monumental feat. The Indonesian state was hardly alone in this megaproject. In 1974, the World Bank became a key supporter of transmigration, providing grants, loans, and expertise in the name of economic development. The effects of transmigration on Indonesia's nation-building can hardly be overstated. According to the Director General of the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, 88 of the more than 500 Indonesian regencies were established through transmigration.Footnote 24Figure 1 shows the geographic spread of transmigrants and their relative demographic weight in host regions at the height of the programme (1970–85).
Transmigration 1970–1985 as proportion of the 1980 provincial population
With the fall of the New Order, state-led transmigration ceased for the first time in a century. The transmigration office remains, but it mainly caters to the needs of people who have previously relocated rather than recruiting new migrants. Transmigration Act No. 29, 2009 shifted the focus from agriculture to urbanisation, setting as its main goal the dispersion of economic strength throughout the archipelago via the creation of new urban areas or ‘growth poles’ (KTM, Kota Terpadu Mandiri or integrated independent cities, or KPB, Kotawasan Prepotan Baru or new urban areas in the newest act).Footnote 25 This said, migration continues independently of state programmes. With decentralisation, district heads have worked with palm oil plantations to bring thousands of settlers from Java to the Outer Islands in a system reminiscent of nineteenth-century Dutch practice.Footnote 26
The broad category of ‘transmigrant’ masks several distinctions. The clearest category is official, general (umum) transmigrants — those recruited, resettled, and supported by the state. In Lampung province, for instance, every general transmigrant was given two hectares for farming and a quarter of a hectare for their government-provided house, along with a certificate for their land and food for one year.Footnote 27 Alongside such transmigrants were ‘spontaneous’ migrants, some of whom relocated on their own, but found state support in receiving areas (swakarsa migrants), while others received no state support whatsoever (spontan migrants). The latter were often associated, directly or indirectly, with state policies, as transmigrants have acted as catalysts for spontaneous migration, setting in motion a process of chain migration. For every officially sponsored migrant, it is estimated that ten migrants relocated without state assistance.Footnote 28 Since the late 1970s, sites have also included local transmigrants — i.e., second or third-generation transmigrants resettling as family land became too small. While most state transmigrants were Javanese peasants and their families, for whom transmigration represented a form of land redistribution, other forms of migration involved the resettlement of entire villages destroyed by natural disasters or displaced by megaprojects and conflicts.
There were, of course, many problems associated with state transmigration. The programme did not have the expected outcome of reducing population pressures in the Inner Islands, but instead only slowed population growth. The costs associated with relocation were significant, approximately US$15,000 per family by the 1980s, contributing to an already bloated national debt.Footnote 29 The programme was plagued by weak infrastructure and poor planning, with many new villages located in remote areas with few roads and no electricity. Upon arriving at their new homes, farmers found poor tropical soils. Such problems led to several criticisms. While Western experts tended to applaud transmigration in the 1970s, by the 1980s, opinion had shifted considerably. Environmentalists criticised the rapid deforestation in the Outer Islands linked to transmigrant sites and labour;Footnote 30 anti-globalisation critics targeted the World Bank and Western governments for supporting transmigration;Footnote 31 and others focused on human rights, in many cases, that of indigenous peoples for whom access to expansive lands was fundamental to maintaining traditional livelihoods. While the loss of indigenous territory matters in its own right, it was the threat of armed conflict on the part of disgruntled SoS that attracted the most significant attention.
Commentators have put transmigration at the core of Indonesia's many violent conflicts. An extensive 1989 study of inter-provincial migration to Lampung concluded that tensions were most likely to arise ‘between traditional societies and great projects (i.e., transmigration projects) imposed from outside by an authority over which the local system has no power’.Footnote 32 In Christian areas, commentators expected tensions with Muslim Javanese transmigration.Footnote 33 During Suharto's New Order, critics predicted violence against transmigrants if they were to lose the protection of the authoritarian state.Footnote 34
For many scholars, the surge in SoS and communal conflicts following the fall of Suharto corroborated this claim. Writers suggest that the ‘long-term impacts’ of transmigration have included ‘communal fighting in West Kalimantan … anti-Christian riots … and separatist campaigns for independence after years of human rights violations in Aceh and Irian Jaya’.Footnote 35 More so than other types of population movements, scholars believed there was something inherently incendiary in state-organised population movements of a country's largest ethnic group. By virtue of their close relationship with the organ that masterminded their relocation, Javanese state-organised migrants were often considered unofficial agents of the New Order. The increasing presence of Javanese migrants in Indonesia's peripheries was commonly referred to as ‘Javanisation’. Some scholars argued that Javanisation was more than a demographic transformation, it also referred to a process of cultural hegemony. Critics alleged that transmigrants incrementally transformed areas inhabited by non-Javanese cultural groups into their own image via the extension of Javanese beliefs, values, and modes of living. Scholars maintained that ‘the Indonesian nation is conceived through a Javanese imaginary, where political power rests largely with the Javanese elite and where Indonesia's traditions are seen through a Javanese lens.’Footnote 36 The dominance of an ethnically diverse country by one particular group was seen by some as internal colonialism and was especially contentious in regions like Papua, which had little contact with the country's core until recently.Footnote 37 In this light, transmigration was seen as a tool of Javanisation, with the goal of transforming Indonesia into a nation-state, one transmigrant at the time.Footnote 38
Scholars have pointed out that transmigration has concentrated on ‘problematic regions such as Aceh, erstwhile East Timor, Papua, as well as regions with international borders’.Footnote 39 The Norwegian Refugee Council suggested that ‘the main causes of displacement’ from violent conflicts ‘are related to the transmigration programmes undertaken under Suharto's reign’.Footnote 40 Activists have been even more vociferous, suggesting that transmigration is intended to ‘control the indigenous population of the outer islands (e.g. in West Papua, East Timor, Kalimantan)’, as ‘placing transmigrants in areas where independence movements were strong — such as West Papua, Aceh, and East Timor — was a tool of Jakarta's “internal colonialism”’.Footnote 41 The Minority Rights Group in the United Kingdom describes transmigration as a programme of ‘forced migration’, and an underlying cause of Indonesia's many armed conflicts.Footnote 42
That state-led transmigration has stoked violence throughout Indonesia has become conventional wisdom. The problem is, no cases actually conform to this model. It is not that migration has been irrelevant in several conflicts, but instead that state transmigration of Javanese is not to blame. The following section reviews major cases where state-led Javanese transmigration allegedly resulted in conflict. First, we look at conflicts in which the scale and importance of transmigration have been exaggerated. We then shift to conflicts where migration was a major cause of violence, although we differentiate between general (umum) state transmigrants and spontaneous migrants. We then focus on two potential exceptions, each involving entire villages relocated from disaster areas. While a paradigmatic case of transmigration and home to several forms of political violence, Indonesia lacks major conflicts fuelled by state-led transmigration of a dominant ethnic group.
Unsettling conventional wisdom
It is often forgotten that the areas home to the most extensive transmigration resettlement have experienced some of the least violence in the country.Footnote 43 From the Dutch era through to the end of the New Order, the vast majority of transmigrants went to Sumatra, specifically South Sumatra, North Sumatra, and Lampung. The fact that almost all transmigrants were resettled in relatively peaceful areas challenges the claim that transmigration focused specifically on trouble spots in an effort to dilute rebellion. In fact, officials kept trouble spots off transmigration lists, thus the focus on southern Sumatra in the 1970s, adding them as potential transmigration sites only after violence had subsided.Footnote 44 Even then, to avoid tensions, planners often selected sites created from marginal land, away from local majorities.Footnote 45 This was the case in Papua, where many Javanese transmigrant sites were low-lying swamps without a history of human settlement.Footnote 46
Transmigration has been criticised as a thinly veiled tool of Javanisation — whether understood as the extension of Javanese cultural hegemony or the marginalisation of local populations. Transmigrants, most of whom were from Java, were expected to reproduce their social and economic structures in their new locations in hopes that ‘modern’ Javanese practices would diffuse and replace ‘backward’ local systems.Footnote 47 However, if transmigration's purpose was to Javanise — or, since most Javanese are Muslim, to Islamise — the country, why were transmigrants also selected from Sunda, Bali, Madura, Lombok, or among Javanese Christians? Daniel Benoit and Olivier Sevin provide a rare critique of the Javanisation thesis, observing that the only ‘Outer Island’ with a significant Javanese population is Sumatra, which is up to one-quarter Javanese, while the percentage of Javanese elsewhere ranges from 7 per cent in Kalimantan to 2 per cent in Maluku, the Sunda Islands, and Papua.Footnote 48 In fact, only in Lampung, located at the southernmost tip of Sumatra and which we will return to below, did the Javanese eventually become a majority. While the range of ethnic groups involved does not eliminate the fact that transmigration is part of nation-building, it does suggest that nation-building is not synonymous with Javanisation. It also suggests that transmigration is actually intended to relieve pressure from populated sending areas.
East Timor and Aceh: Manufacturing transmigrant conflicts
Writers have incorrectly identified transmigration as a core feature of some conflicts. In East Timor, some writers have identified migration as a grievance leading to the country's divorce from Indonesia and eventual independence.Footnote 49 They suggest that ‘large numbers’ of poor and middle-class migrants came to East Timor under Indonesian transmigration.Footnote 50 John Taylor suggests that ‘transmigration and birth control appeared to go hand-in-hand, inextricably linked in the military plan’.Footnote 51 But East Timor was never a major transmigration site and migration was not integral to the conflict. Lacking the expansive lands and resources of Sumatra, Kalimantan, or Papua, the tiny, arid half-island remained inhabited mostly by East Timorese. Estimates of the number of transmigrants in East Timor vary widely. One scholar estimates that, by 1998, East Timor was home to only 1,634 Balinese and 1,212 Javanese Catholics, the latter group wielding disproportionate bureaucratic influence.Footnote 52 This number reflects official, not spontaneous, transmigration. Jacques Bertrand suggests that ‘many migrants came to settle in East Timor …. Yet, only a few hundred families migrated … under the auspices of [the transmigration] programme.’Footnote 53 He notes that East Timorese resented more the arrival of Bugis traders, who came to dominate trade and were targeted in a series of riots in the 1990s.Footnote 54 Other sources suggest that upwards of 15,000 transmigrants settled in East Timor, about 2 per cent of East Timor's total population.Footnote 55 At the furthest extreme, Peter Carey cites an NGO estimate that East Timor was home to 180,000 to 250,000 transmigrants, a number which is difficult to substantiate.Footnote 56 Throughout Indonesian rule, despite fears of transmigration, Javanisation, and even Islamicisation,Footnote 57 East Timor remained over 90 per cent Catholic.Footnote 58 In criticisms of transmigration, it is often forgotten that the destruction of East Timor was carried out by Indonesian soldiers working with ethnic Timorese militias, gangs of young men co-opted by Indonesian security forces through employment initiatives (funded, in part, by the Department of Transmigration).Footnote 59 There are many outrages to choose from in East Timor, but mass migration is not one of them, and it did not play a major role in the conflict.
At the other end of the archipelago, there is also a belief that Javanese transmigration lies at the heart of the Aceh conflict. While Javanese were indeed targeted by the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement, GAM), their roles in the conflict have been misunderstood. Authors routinely refer to ‘large-scale transmigration’ to Aceh,Footnote 60 part of the Javanisation of the Acehnese people.Footnote 61 For Tania Murray Li, transmigration to Aceh and Papua was ‘clearly part of a central government scheme to “integrate” the nation’.Footnote 62 At the height of the conflict, Aceh Governor Abdullah Puteh suggested that peace would first require repatriating Javanese transmigrants.Footnote 63 And it is true that Aceh received Javanese transmigrants and that they became involved in the conflict. But their numbers were limited, they did not primarily settle in Acehnese areas, and their involvement in violence was more a product of rebel scapegoating and nation-building than it was popular resentment.
Aceh received a relatively small number of Javanese transmigrants, arriving over several decades and settling almost entirely in the non-Acehnese interior. Anthony Reid insists that, compared to other conflict areas, Aceh has ‘remained remarkably homogenous’.Footnote 64 Similarly, Indonesian economists insist that Aceh ‘has never been a major transmigration recipient’.Footnote 65 According to the 2000 census, 300,000 of Aceh's 4.2 million people are Javanese, about 7.3 per cent of the provincial population. Given that over 100,000 Javanese fled rebel violence, the peak of Aceh's Javanese population was about 10 per cent. This can be compared to Aceh's neighbouring province, North Sumatra, which is 33 per cent Javanese. Javanese first arrived in Aceh under the Dutch, bound almost entirely for the agriculturally rich Central Highlands, home to indigenous Gayo communities. Between 1950 and 1972, 1,000 transmigrants and 20,000 spontaneous migrants arrived in Aceh, by far the lowest of any Sumatran province. Under the third five-year plan (1979–84), Aceh received 10,771 transmigrants families, one-quarter of the number bound for Riau or Lampung (East Timor received 50 families).Footnote 66 Almost all arrived in Central Aceh, Southeast Aceh, South Aceh, and southern subdistricts of East Aceh, all sparsely populated areas dominated by ethnic minorities.Footnote 67 They did not settle in ethnic Acehnese areas, which were densely populated, home to extensive rice cultivation, and considered politically unstable.
Despite Acehnese areas not actually witnessing Javanese transmigration, GAM sought to eliminate all ethnic Javanese from the province from the rebellion's inception in 1976. Rebel leaders frequently rallied against their homeland being ‘confiscated and divided among Javanese settlers’.Footnote 68 For one GAM Commander, Javanese are ‘like Chinese in Malaysia. We cannot let them just take over’.Footnote 69 During GAM's initial uprising, separatists held village meetings promising to expel the Javanese, but the rebels were weak and villagers expressed support for Javanese residents.Footnote 70 After 1999, GAM was able to act on its promises, attacking Javanese and leading to a mass exodus of over 150,000 into North Sumatra.Footnote 71 The exodus was painful for Javanese families: ‘We tried to stay in Aceh, but GAM killed people, so we fled to Tamiang, then Langkat. We live on a rubber plantation, but this is not an official village.’Footnote 72 According to one Javanese Islamic leader, ‘When GAM said to leave, I was surprised they would talk like this to an ulama. But the title Teungku did not matter, only race [suku] did.’Footnote 73 GAM justified ethnic cleansing in terms of preserving Aceh for the Acehnese, even though they were largely expelling Javanese from non-Acehnese areas, where Gayo and Malay communities defended their neighbours and were as likely to perceive ethnic Acehnese as migrants.Footnote 74 Defenders of the rebels justified ethnic violence as part of ‘a war of survival’Footnote 75, targeting Javanese civilians because they are ‘not indigenous’.Footnote 76 There is no evidence, though, that Javanese migration was a problem for anyone but GAM leaders. When Javanese residing in Acehnese-majority villages in Aceh Besar were attacked, neighbours donated food and money, hid their possessions, watched over their homes, and later welcomed some back.Footnote 77 In transmigration areas, Gayo residents report cordial relations and significant intermarriage.Footnote 78 While it is true that ethnic Javanese transmigrants were targeted in the secessionist conflict — the sole major example of anti-Javanese violence in the country — framing transmigration as a cause of the Aceh conflict is fundamentally misleading. The presence of Javanese transmigrants was hardly a causal factor in this conflict: given their relatively small numbers and areas of settlement, they were not a source of grievance for ordinary Acehnese.
SoS conflicts and spontaneous local migration
While neither the violence in East Timor nor Aceh was fundamentally about migration, the following conflicts were. They did not, however, involve ethnic Javanese and they did not involve state transmigrants. Instead, they involved spontaneous migrants from nearby islands whose distinct forms of resettlement and particular economic niches created tensions with locals. In fact, each of the cases below was home to Javanese transmigrants, but despite outbreaks of anti-migrant violence, locals did not generally target ethnic Javanese.
As in East Timor and Aceh, the conflict in Papua is a secessionist struggle. Unlike East Timor and Aceh, Papua has been a major transmigration site, despite the pledge made by Foreign Minister Subandrio in 1963 that it would not be settled by Javanese or other Indonesians.Footnote 79 Restrictions on free movement into Papua were officially lifted following the 1969 Act of Free Choice, and migration to Papua doubled from 5,000 in 1971 to 10,000 in 1972.Footnote 80 While early transmigration focused almost exclusively on Sumatra, this changed in 1977 when Papua became a major transmigration site, with plans to bring approximately 20,000 households or about 100,000 people within five years.Footnote 81 Repelita IV (1984–89) raised that target to approximately 138,000 households or 700,000 persons; had it been successful, this plan would have resulted in a 50 per cent increase in the total provincial population.Footnote 82 These were projections though, with the reality of Papua's rugged terrain, remoteness, and complex ethnic landscape challenging state planners. Still, studies suggest that close to 200,000 transmigrants relocated to Papua between 1964–2000,Footnote 83 most settling in Sorong, Manokwari, Merauke, and other lowland regions.
While state transmigration to Papua has now ceased, spontaneous migration continues. Of the two types of migration, Rodd McGibbon contends that spontaneous transmigration had the greatest demographic impact in Papua, as ‘for every transmigrant that relocated to the province from 1970 to 2000, nearly three unsponsored migrants also relocated there’.Footnote 84 Altogether, state transmigration and spontaneous migrants have drastically affected Papua's demographics. The proportion of migration in the region increased from 4 per cent of the total population in 1971 to 35 per cent in 2000, and based on 2010 demographic trends, migrants/non-Papuans are expected to become the majority by 2020.Footnote 85 These dramatic changes have led Papuan activists to fear that the Papuan people may face the same fate as Australian aboriginals.Footnote 86
Yet it is not transmigrants who are targeted by Papuans in times of conflict, but spontaneous migrants from South and Southeast Sulawesi. In the early 1980s, there were 31,000 migrants from Sulawesi (known collectively as BBM: Butonese, Bugis, and Makassarese) living in Papua; by 2000 this number had ballooned to 100,000.Footnote 87 McGibbon emphasises that migratory threats — especially spontaneous migration from Sulawesi — were at the heart of the Papua conflict, fuelling resentment and shifts in identity.Footnote 88 While clashes remain sporadic and small, largely owing to considerable ethnic fragmentation,Footnote 89 riots have targeted ethnic Bugis, whose control of markets has angered indigenous Papuans far more than the remote agricultural settlements populated by Javanese. Throughout West Papua, ‘migrants from South and Southeast Sulawesi were targeted more than the Javanese’, as spontaneous migrants ‘came in greater numbers and constituted the greatest threat to Papuans’.Footnote 90 Richard Chauvel notes that Javanese farmers did not generate conflict, while migrants from Sulawesi bound for cities and resource extraction sites have become larger concerns for unemployed Papuans.Footnote 91 Even the bureaucracy, elsewhere dominated by ethnic Javanese, is staffed by Christian Kai islanders from Maluku.Footnote 92 So while Papua has seen chronic violence against migrants, the groups targeted are spontaneous migrants from Sulawesi and Maluku, not transmigrants from Java, who despite their numbers and Muslim faith, have stood apart from violence.
The ethnic conflicts that rocked West and Central Kalimantan between 1996–2001 were also linked to native–migrant tensions. The sparsely populated region was a major transmigration recipient in the 1980s, with 70,000 families settling in Indonesian Borneo in 1979–84.Footnote 93 Estimates suggest that, by 2010, 23 per cent of Central Kalimantan's population was of Javanese origin, as the province was home to massive swampland conversion into rice fields.Footnote 94 However, the ethnic conflicts in Kalimantan at the end of the New Order were fought by native Dayak and Malay communities against the Madurese, who were not state-sponsored but were spontaneous migrants.Footnote 95 Dayak militias attacked spontaneous Madurese migrants, leaving unharmed nearby Javanese transmigrant communities.Footnote 96 Jamie Davidson shows that transmigration was not a major factor in the riots, as most Madurese were not state-sponsored and most transmigration sites were located far from violence.Footnote 97 He explains the riots in terms of an earlier mobilisation of anti-communist Dayak militias, groups that aspired to dominate local politics and flex their muscle after the fall of Suharto by targeting ethnic Madurese. The Madurese had first arrived under Dutch rule as soldiers and labourers, and continued to move to the area independently and steadily over a century. While the Javanese were perceived as polite and lived in separate agricultural settlements, the Madurese were seen as gruff and settled alongside Dayak and Malay communities, competing with them for land and jobs.Footnote 98 For decades, Madurese and Dayak youths were involved in skirmishes that spiralled into riots, and at the end of the New Order, these conflicts grew even larger, with many Madurese pushed out of Kalimantan. Throughout the violence, Javanese were not targeted, despite the anti-migrant rhetoric espoused by Dayak and Malay militias. While much of the Kalimantan conflict was about migration, it was not a transmigrant conflict.
Ethnic violence in Sulawesi and Ambon witnessed similar dynamics. In Central Sulawesi, Javanese transmigration fuelled some early clashes with Christian villagers. However by the 1980s, there were a series of low-intensity conflicts involving spontaneous migrants, mostly ethnic Bugis buying land for plantations. With the fall of Suharto, rural conflicts erupted throughout the region. According to one report, the conflict sites were typically ‘villages with high concentrations of spontaneous migrants (mainly Torajan or Bugis) or resettled locals (primarily Rongkong)’.Footnote 99 Despite the presence of Javanese in urban areas and rural Javanese villages, conflicts in Sulawesi have involved spontaneous local migrants. A similar story is found in Ambon. While also a recipient of transmigrants from Java, the ethnic conflict which erupted at the end of the New Order was rooted in competition between local Christians and spontaneous migrants from southern Sulawesi. Christian Ambon was home to a colonial administrative and military class, and had long dominated Indonesian bureaucratic ranks. The ascent of Muslim communities jeopardised Ambonese power within the Indonesian state. Many Ambonese feared what they saw as the Islamicisation of the country, or at least the rise of Muslims at their expense, and transmigration clearly fuelled these fears. Javanese transmigrants, although Muslim, were not central concerns though and were not part of the conflict that erupted in 1999. Ambonese Christians instead clashed with spontaneous BBM migrants who had entered local markets and bureaucratic ranks. Gerry van Klinken cites Maluku's governor, who attributes the conflict to the Islamicisation of the bureaucracy and ‘local feeling against “newcomers” from Sulawesi, who are aggressive small business entrepreneurs’.Footnote 100 Muslims from Sulawesi had long migrated to Maluku, but their numbers grew under the New Order. For Jacques Bertrand, ‘most migration to Maluku was spontaneous’, as ‘Bugis and Butonese moved in and took control of commerce’.Footnote 101 Again, despite anti-migrant, anti-Muslim sentiment among natives, militants did not target Javanese, reserving their anger for other migrants who were more visible and challenged them for economic supremacy.
Transmigrants and violence: Some exceptions
The above cases involved migrants, but none centred on state-led transmigrants or ethnic Javanese. We found two cases of violence, however, which do register on one count, involving transmigrants resettled by the state. The first case is North Maluku. In the late 1980s, almost 60,000 transmigrants were sent from Java to Maluku, representing about 3 per cent of the provincial population. Given the delicate balance between local Christians and Muslims, this led observers to predict conflict.Footnote 102 And conflict did come at the end of the New Order; however, it was a result of tensions between indigenous Christian communities and Muslim Makianese relocated from a nearby island after a natural disaster destroyed their homes in 1988. Disputes over land and local jobs led to significant violence between Kao and Makianese groups, violence which evolved to take on religious significance. Again, Muslim Javanese transmigrants in the immediate area were spared.Footnote 103 So while the conflict in North Maluku did involve a community resettled by the state, these were refugees from a nearby area; Javanese transmigrants stood apart from the violence.
A similar story is found in Lampung. In 1920, Lampungese were the dominant group, approximately 64 per cent of the population. The latest census figures indicate that the Javanese now represent 62 per cent of the population, while the Lampungese population has been reduced to a mere 12 per cent.Footnote 104 Of any province, Lampung should be a prime candidate for transmigration conflict. While the province has seen some tensions between natives and migrants, the relationship is mostly harmonious. One study shows how improved links to Java have transformed native society, allowing young women to gain access to factory jobs in Java and return home with new-found social power.Footnote 105 Despite some tensions, the region is relatively stable and native Lampungese continue to fare well in electoral competition both at the local and provincial levels.Footnote 106
Recently, however, Lampungese mobs attacked and killed 14 Balinese transmigrants and forced hundreds to evacuate from Lampung after four Balinese youths were accused of harassing local girls and failing to respect local customs. The banal trigger for this transmigration conflict stems from the growing resentment of Lampungese towards Balinese transmigrants. Most of these Balinese transmigrants had relocated to Central and South Lampung following the eruption of Mount Agung in 1963. More than other transmigrant groups, Balinese were said to possess a ‘strong attitude with regards to the ownership of the land’.Footnote 107 They started buying their co-villagers' land at a premium price, which resulted in the creation of Balinese-only villages. Having consolidated their land, they became relatively successful farmers and appeared better off than local people or Javanese transmigrants, stirring jealousy. The presence of ‘cultural irritants’ — e.g., the construction of Hindu pura (temples) and the wearing of ‘revealing’ traditional clothing — added to the tensions and explained why Balinese but not necessarily Javanese transmigrants were targeted. A respected local Lampung leader suggested that the recent conflict between Balinese and Lampungese villages could potentially evolve into a wider clash given that ‘we as natives of Lampung won't stand still and let our brothers fight a battle alone’.Footnote 108 ‘Bonded by a similar birthright [and] fed up with the Balinese’,Footnote 109 native residents asked for their expulsion from the district, ‘possibly to Kalimantan Island or South Sumatra province’, or promised more violence.Footnote 110 Once again, Javanese were present, but have remained outside of the conflict. It is crucial to note that in both these cases, the transmigrants that have been targeted are from villages relocated due to natural disasters, arriving with a strong sense of cohesion and engaging in diverse economic activities.
Implications
While state-led resettlement of dominant ethnic groups to minority areas is often a source of violent conflict, the relationship between transmigration and violence is over-predicted. Several cases in Asia can be understood as transmigrant conflicts, with Han Chinese settling Xinjiang, ethnic Thais moving to Patani, and Filipino Christians dominating Mindanao. Despite being the paradigmatic case of state transmigration as well as several bloody native–migrant conflicts, and despite prevailing wisdom, Indonesia is not home to a single clear case that conforms to this model. None revolves around state-led relocation of Javanese, a fact which challenges theories of conflict rooted in ‘Javanisation’. This article noted that the major transmigration sites have been peaceful. Some conflicts have been wrongly attributed to transmigration. East Timor did not experience a large-scale influx of transmigrants, and the tensions that arose involved spontaneous migrants from nearby islands. Aceh was home to rebel attacks on Javanese transmigrants, but transmigration was limited, they had not settled in Acehnese districts, and GAM used the idea of internal colonialism to justify ethnic violence.
We then looked at several conflicts which revolved around migration. In Papua, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and Maluku, Javanese transmigrants were largely unaffected by anti-migrant conflicts, as natives targeted spontaneous migrants who were economic competitors. North Maluku and Lampung provide two partial exceptions, where violence has involved state transmigrants, although neither has involved nearby ethnic Javanese. Even then, it is worth pointing out that these exceptions — along with most of the violence targeting spontaneous migrants — took place immediately after the fall of Suharto, well after the heyday of transmigration. The idea that merely moving people from the core of a country to its periphery necessarily results in violence is essentially primordialist, over-predicting cultural clashes and downplaying the potential for cooperation and the importance of the larger political context.
Our goal has not been to suggest that transmigration was successful or that it should be restarted. Others have compellingly argued transmigration's other negative impacts, such as environmental degradation, agricultural failures, immense costs, and injustices to native communities.Footnote 111 It is conceivable, too, that transmigration could trigger violent conflict in the future, and it is likely that it has caused tensions which have stopped short of violence. For now, causing armed conflicts should not be included as a criticism of Indonesian transmigration.
An important finding of this study is that spontaneous migrants have generated far more resentment and violence than have state transmigrants. This is an important addition to the SoS literature, as authors such as Fearon and Laitin do not explicitly differentiate between types of migrants, but doing so may reveal new patterns of native–migrant conflict. In Indonesia, state transmigrants were often sent to remote areas cleared for them, and were generally poorer than spontaneous migrants.Footnote 112 As an official from the Ministry of Transmigration explains: ‘Transmigration is a programme for the poor, whereas spontaneous migrants already have some wealth accumulated and have more skills.’Footnote 113 Apart from receiving land certificates, state transmigrants have limited social and economic means. In the words of a Lampungese leader: ‘The migrants who come here, they are not investors, they don't bring money and technology. They exploit the land, and do that very fast.’Footnote 114 Meanwhile, spontaneous migrants arrive continuously in search of jobs and wealth in areas that have not been preselected, usually urban areas in which they expand alongside native communities. Their comparative wealth has allowed them to buy land from local landowners, who in turn often have to labour on their former land to make ends meet. Bertrand rightly notes that migration alone does not spark conflict, but can do so when migrant populations displace locals in terms of trade, small businesses, and politics.Footnote 115 While Javanese transmigrants tended to be poor farmers, spontaneous Madurese, Bugis, Ambonese, and other migrants worked to dominate local trades and compete with natives in the marketplace, presenting a greater source of grievance to local communities.
The importance of migrants' economic endowments in determining whether they become the object of local violence suggests that it is not transmigration itself that is a source of conflict, but the arrival of ‘dominant migrants’ — i.e. migrants who are better educated than the local population, possess wider political and economic connections, and may or may not belong to the country's dominant ethnicity.Footnote 116 The socioeconomic disparities existing between spontaneous migrants and SoS explains why Papuans and Ambonese Christians have occasionally resorted to violence vis-à-vis the more competitive BBM migrants, but not towards the Javanese transmigrants who have little in terms of wealth. In a poor agricultural province like Lampung, however, possession of land certificates is enough to grant Balinese and Javanese transmigrants a substantial advantage over local Lampungese and result in tensions, often over land, the prized economic good in Lampung.Footnote 117 The fact that class and ethnicity interact and intersect in all of the cases reviewed indicates a need for a more nuanced understanding of the class dynamics of migration.
Operating outside the aegis of the state, spontaneous migrants possess greater latitude to relocate wherever they choose, heightening economic competition with locals; however, without a powerful ‘backer’, they are simultaneously more vulnerable to nativist attacks, thus generating a vicious circle where grievances and opportunities combine to make spontaneous migrants a greater cause for (and target of) armed conflicts than transmigrants. Falling under the authority of the Local Transmigration Office, transmigrants are required to follow official guidelines. However, spontaneous migrants largely operate under the radar. As one local Lampungese summarised, governing issues are rendered more complex with spontaneous migrants, as they think: ‘It is Indonesia, it is my country. I can do anything I want with the land.’Footnote 118 State transmigration involves planning to find the most appropriate sites, educate migrants, and explicitly gear resources towards development,Footnote 119 whereas little or no planning goes into spontaneous migration, leading to migrants settling in forbidden areas such as National Parks and Reserves. The two exceptions, in which transmigrants have been involved in conflict, help show this. In North Maluku and Lampung, entire villages suddenly relocated en masse after natural disasters have clashed with natives, given the migrants' strong identities and competition with locals in various trades. Meanwhile, Javanese transmigrants, who have generally not been involved in such violence, consist of poor farmers resettled in remote regions, and have been left alone.
That spontaneous migration has led to more conflict than state transmigration is important today, as Indonesia has ended official transmigration while spontaneous migration continues. This does not bode well for the future. It also brings into question the potential role of the state. While transmigration offers a simple narrative, in which the state is a clear antagonist, spontaneous migration offers a more complex story. Authorities may be criticised if they support spontaneous migration, but the absence of state involvement may present equal problems. For defenders of indigenous communities, it is not clear if policies limiting the rights of citizens to relocate, the sort of authoritarianism often criticised in China, may be the best way forward. There may yet be a role for the authorities in ordering migration by selecting sites and economic sectors to limit the spread of SoS conflicts.
