By Brian Kelly
In Kupang, West Timor, I noticed a huge crowd of Timorese-looking people staying in a losmen in the city. They appeared to be villager types — not the sort you would normally see at a hotel — and had an air of transience about them.
Wondering what they were doing in Kupang, I asked one of the women. "Transmigrasi", she smiled in explanation. "Transmigrants? Why?" I asked, surprised; I thought transmigration was a one-way affair to fill up less populated areas. I had just returned from East Timor, where I met many transmigrants from Java, Sulawesi, Bali and Kalimantan.
"We go to Sulawesi", she replied, her smile fading a little, "for jobs, better life". She glanced uneasily at two Balinese men, who might have been guards, standing some distance away watching us. Used to the presence of mata-mata — spies — from my previous travels in East Timor, I realised she felt uncomfortable, said good day and walked away wondering.
Later on, at sunset, when the children were playing and bathing in the sea, the women cooking and the men chatting, I talked to more of the transmigrants. This time, no guards were watching.
An elderly man said 30 of them had been forced to leave their homes. To save the families from being split up, the rest of their families had joined them. Thus, with the children, there were almost 100 people in this group destined for Sulawesi. Not all of them were East Timorese, he said; some were from West Timor and some from Flores.
There was a lot of land in Sulawesi, a woman told me, and the families would be given new houses. Having been uprooted from her village, the woman seemed very excited about the prospect of settling down again.
I went for a walk and, staring out across the sea, thought about these 100 people, just a small portion of those already transmigrated, who were about to embark on new lives in a strange country. I knew that Indonesia was carrying out a transmigration program, but had thought it consisted of moving Javanese and other Indonesians into the less populated East Timor and West Papua (Irian Jaya).
Dealing with the police and the Indonesian military, ABRI, several times a day is unavoidable whilst on the road in East Timor. During my travels there, I had met a lot of Sulawesi transmigrants working for ABRI. Military officers, intelligence agents and the numerous battalions of soldiers are invariably transmigrants from Sulawesi, Java, Bali or Kalimantan, and sometimes from Flores and West Timor.
But I hadn't known that East Timorese civilians were also being transplanted into a different country. Sulawesians being promised housing and land or jobs migrate en masse to East Timor, and East Timorese being promised jobs and a better life migrate en masse to Sulawesi.
What could be the purpose of this transmigration program? The reason might be to vastly increase the number of Indonesians in East Timor and therefore decrease the percentage of East Timorese, to reduce the effects of Falintil and the organised resistance movement.
The Indonesian government knows that if the number of Timorese living in East Timor is reduced and the number of Indonesians increased by transmigration, it will be more difficult for the East Timorese to fight for independence.
While there, I spoke to hundreds of Timorese as well as transmigrants and can confidently say that the reason the struggle for independence is alive and well is because practically the whole East Timorese community do not want integration with Indonesia, but independence.
Inside East Timor I arranged no clandestine meetings with anyone, but by chance met dozens of people, young and old, who told me they were working in the organised clandestine movement and with Falintil. These spontaneous encounters occurred on average once or twice each day.
They occurred so frequently because the majority of East Timorese are actively involved in clandestine activities. Of course, clandestine means anyone suspected of having anti-integration leanings, or of being sympathetic towards guerillas or youths working in the clandestine front.
Another good reason for the Indonesian government to increase the percentage of transmigrants in East Timor is because it fears that a referendum might be unavoidable. If there is a referendum, Indonesia could try to include all the transmigrants' votes; it would be not an East Timorese but an Indonesian-Timorese referendum. According to the Timorese people working in the clandestine front, if there is a referendum, it must be an East Timorese one.
The Indonesian transmigrants continually arriving and living in East Timor are not ethnically, culturally or historically similar to the East Timorese. West Timorese people are never moved into East Timor or vice versa; ethnic groups of one area are always moved to an area where they will have no cultural or historical identification. This, one Kupang businessman explained to me, is to prevent people from developing or sustaining notions of separateness or difference from other Indonesians. This is needed to maintain Indonesia's "unity", he said.
It appears that the government is trying to turn Indonesia into a "melting pot" where eventually there will be no distinct ethnic groups or cultures and therefore no risk of demands for independence. I believe this is an impossible aim in East Timor, having seen how widespread and strong is the desire for independence and how organised the independence movement.