Pengungsi — Indonesia's Internally Displaced Persons

Indonesia currently has one of the largest groups of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) of any nation in the world. This paper assesses the scale and patterns of such movement in Indonesia as at the beginning of 2002. It begins by assessing conflict as a cause of internal migration and shows how such movement was significant during the first two decades of independence in Indonesia. The current patterns of movement of IDPs in Indonesia are then outlined with the main origins being in the Outer Island provinces of Maluku, East Timor, Aceh, Central Sulawesi, Central Kalimantan, Papua and West Kalimantan. Around half of the current 1.3 million IDPs are housed in “refugee camps,” often in crowded and unhygienic conditions. Several of the expulsions of IDPs have come from areas where there have been earlier influxes of migrants, especially transmigrants of Java-Bali origins and the so-called BBM (Bugis, Butonese and Makassarese from South Sulawesi), with different ethnoreligious backgrounds than the native residents. The release of central control following the fall of the Suharto regime and the onset of the financial crisis have seen simmering newcomer/native, ethnic, religious and economic tensions rise to the surface to create the large scale expulsions. The Indonesian government has put forward a strategy to “solve” the IDP problem by the end of 2002. This is assessed and some of the medium and long-term implications of the movement discussed.