The transmigration of people from one island to another in the East Indies archipelago had its origins with the Dutch colonialists. Stemming from the Dutch “Ethical Policy” towards its colonies, it was introduced in 1905 to relieve overcrowding in Java by moving people to the less densely populated areas like Kalimantan and Sumatra. The Dutch transmigration program was not fully implemented and thus had little impact on alleviating Javanese overcrowding. It was under the Indonesian Republic however that the program was reworked, first by Sukarno, and later refined by Suharto and extended to its furthest eastern territory.

The acquisition of the New Guinea territory (known variously by the Indonesians between 1963 and 2001 as Irian Jaya and Irian Barat) from 1963 was a godsend for the vexing dilemma of overcrowding. This applied overwhelmingly in Java but also in Madura, Sulawesi and Bali, and transmigration provided surplus land for poor, landless Indonesians. The policy has seen more than a million Indonesians resettle in West Papua either as sponsored Transmigrasi or as ‘spontaneous’ arrivals*.

The genuine practicalities of the goal of population easing aside, the ideological underpinnings of the government’s transmigration policy focused on the goal of assimilating indigenous people so as to forge a single, national identity (consistent with how the government sees Indonesia – as a unitary state) [‘West Papua Information Kit’, www.utexas.edu]. The Transmigrasi program was meant to absorb local Melanesians into Indonesian life, economy and culture (‘Indonesisation’). The heavy-handed approach and blatantly discriminatory practices of the government have had the opposite effect, serving only to sharpen the Papuans’ sense of their racial and cultural distinctiveness from the Asian newcomers [D Gietzelt, ‘Indonesization of West Papua’, Oceania, 59(3), March 1989].

This sense of Papuan alienation from the centre was compounded by demographic factors, the steady, systematic rise in transmigrants has eventually made the indigenous population a minority in its own land**. The Papuans with their Christian or traditional native beliefs also found themselves outnumbered by a Muslim majority, an additional cultural gulf between the two ethically diverse groups.

With the transmigrants taking up residency in the province, especially in urban regions and around the mining and timber regions, the new jobs in construction, in extractive processes and in forestry have been distributed heavily in favour of the newcomers resulting in the marginalisation of the urban Melanesians in West Papua (previously I referred to Freeport Copper and Gold’s key role in this marginalisation).

The opportunities flowing from resource exploitation went hand in hand with Jakarta’s policy of transmigration in Papua. The government seized the Papuans’ adat (customary land by right) to exploit the minerals and timber therein, at the same time decimating Papua’s rain forests and spreading deforestation. The consequence of all this upheaval was to deprive the traditional highland Irianese forest-dwellers of their only source of income. Uncompensated, they were forced to move to lower-lying poorer quality areas which were conducive to ill-health.

Despite the government’s repeated claims that, under the province’s new Special Autonomy status, Papuans would benefit from the transformation of society promised by economic development, the reality has been that the indigenous population has continued to be the excluded sector of society, denied status (the stigma of ‘primitiveness’, as tagged by no less an international personage than JFK, persists), missing out on the opportunities of employment and education, and finding themselves the primary target of the state security apparatus [J Munro, ‘The Violence of Inflated Possibilities’, Indonesia, # 95 (April 2013)].

In financial terms alone, the resettlement project has come up short. In the mid-1980s transmigration was costing the Indonesian government US$7,000 per family, constituting an economic disaster which has had the effect of worsening Indonesia’s national debt. And despite the scale of the transmigration to Papua, the objective of reducing Java’s population pressure has not been successful, as the island’s current (2015) population of in excess of 141 million indicates [MA Sri Adhiati & A Bobsein (Eds), ‘Indonesia’s Transmigration Programme – An Update’, (Jul 2001) www.downtoearth-Indonesia.org].

President Widodo formally ended the policy of transmigration to the renamed provinces of Papua and Western Papua in June 2015, but the required action has been all too late – the transmigrants have taken root in Tanah Papua in significantly large numbers and the program has already taken a heavy toll on the indigenous Papuans and their relationship with the central authority.

* the Indonesian government has been quite guarded when it comes to revealing the actual number of transmigrants to the politically sensitive provinces of Papua and West Papua.

** the change in the ratio of Papuan to transmigrant resident is striking – in 1971 non-Papuans formed only 4% of the province population, by 2004 it was 50/50 – such was the escalation in transmigration (by 2010 it was 51/49 in favour of non-Papuans) [research by Ir YA Ukago/J Elmslie & C Webb-Gannon, cited in S Tekege,’The Intentional Annihilation of the Indigenous Peoples of Papua by the Government through Transmigration Approach’, West Papua Media Alerts, www.westpapuamedia.info]