Transmigration program

The Dutch government of Indonesia was the first to give national importance to the resettlement program in the middle of the 19th century, pursuing several goals at once. The program was supposed to reduce the poverty and overpopulation of the island of Java , redistribute labor to the peripheral islands in order to better use the natural resources of the outer islands and strengthen their exploitation. Indirectly, the Dutch also sought to weaken the influence of Portugal in the eastern part of the Indonesian archipelago. The fact is that the indigenous population of the eastern islands was converted by the Portuguese to Catholicism long before the Dutch arrived. Moreover, the population of many of them ( Flores , Timor , etc.) was quite loyal to Portugal and offered some resistance to the Dutch Protestants. The resettlement of Muslim Javanese in the eastern regions of the country, the Dutch government sought to destroy Catholic hegemony in the east of the country.

After gaining independence, the new Javanese government continued the Dutch transmigration course in an even more active form. The official goal of planned migrations, as before, was to redistribute labor resources and relieve pressure from the overpopulated southwestern islands. In fact, strong authoritarian power, represented mainly by ethnic Javanese Muslims, also sought to strengthen control over peripheral islands that have a non-Javanese, often also Christian majority, and weaken separatist tendencies on previously independent (before the Dutch came) islands.

During the program, migrants from Java , to a lesser extent from the islands of Bali and Madura , moved to the islands of New Guinea , Kalimantan , Sumatra , Sulawesi and smaller archipelagos. Criticism of the program intensified.

In 1969 , the World Bank supported the resettlement program ^[1] , which began financing transmigration programs in Indonesia, for which about 0.5 billion were allocated. ^{[ what? ]} . But a wave of criticism soon rose up against the Indonesian government, associated with a sharp change in the religious composition of the population, an attempt to manipulate Muslim immigrants, and the beginning of bloody clashes between ethnic and religious groups (for example, Sampita Massacre 2001).

With the beginning of the program, the mass extinction and systematic crowding out of the small Moluccan languages ​​also began, as the official state language policy was aimed at establishing the Indonesian language as the only means of interethnic communication, education and a tool for universal modernization of a unitary country. Education began to be carried out only in the Indonesian language; bans on the use of indigenous languages ​​were introduced in elementary schools. ^[2] . Equally important was the relatively low cultural and economic level of the immigrants, who first of all started cutting down the equatorial forests in a new place, leading the islands to an ecological disaster. Moreover, the resettlement of Muslims to new places was not accompanied by the state program of family birth planning. In fact, the population explosion one by one began to cover all the islands of the country. Moreover, in Java itself, a high natural population growth was preserved, which means that it was not possible to reduce the population density on the island. This once again gave critics a reason to reflect on the real motives of the government, suspected of seeking to Islamize the country.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the volume of resettlement decreased significantly, but did not stop. Every year, according to official government statistics, at least 60 thousand people continue to move to the peripheral islands, in reality the figure can reach 100 thousand. Since the late 2000s, the volume of migrations has increased slightly again, especially with regard to relocations to Papua .