Decentralisation and Conflict in Indonesia

Singapore/Brussels  |   3 May 2005

The Indonesian government must act quickly to head off new trouble in Mamasa district, or risk an outbreak of serious communal conflict.

Decentralisation and Conflict in Indonesia: The Mamasa Case,* the latest briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines this remote area of West Sulawesi, where violence erupted on 24 April. Though losses from that incident were comparatively low -- five people killed and five houses burned -- the risk of escalation is now great, because radicals from outside the immediate area may try to exploit the situation.

"The conflict is essentially administrative, but it is widely perceived as religious", says Sidney Jones, Crisis Group's South East Asia Project Director. "Such perceptions increase passions and risks alike".

The dispute goes back to the splitting of an old district into two new ones in 2002. But because the complicated details of the original dispute are not widely known, and because Mamasa is majority Christian and the villages in which opposition was initially concentrated are majority Muslim, the conflict is widely misunderstood in Indonesia as communal.

There are indications that radicals from nearby Poso may have come into the area to stir up trouble. The site of serious communal violence from 1998 to 2001 and sporadic trouble ever since, Poso has been an incubating ground for terrorism. Several of those implicated in the September 2004 bombing in front of the Australian embassy in Jakarta were Poso veterans.

A repeat of this pattern in Mamasa must be prevented at all costs. This means addressing the underlying dispute in and around Mamasa, and urgently. But what to do? The sub-districts of Mambi and Aralle cannot be administered directly by the provincial government indefinitely, and the issue of which district will administer each village or sub-district must eventually be addressed. A resolution will have to take account of patterns of land ownership that do not correspond with village administrative boundaries.

Either the central government will have to intervene to offer incentives to the villages to join with Mamasa and to ensure the viability of the new district; or local leaders will have to redraw district boundaries in a way that meets local aspirations as far as possible without completely defying geographic logic; or the existing division will have to be enforced, with extra security forces on the ground to prevent further conflict. Implementation of any of these solutions will require a long-term commitment of time and resources.

Mamasa is a case study of what can happen in Indonesia's decentralisation process when there is no clear procedure to resolve a dispute, when the central government is too beset by other problems to find and implement solutions, and when the law is not promptly and transparently enforced against those who perpetrate violence.

Until now, the short-term cost to the provincial and central governments of failing to resolve the Mamasa problem has not been significant, but recent events underline the dangers of allowing a low intensity conflict to continue unresolved.

"Earlier conflicts in Ambon and Poso proved to be superb recruiting mechanisms for jihadist organisations", says Jones. "Preventing another eruption of communal conflict is essential".