Collective Violence in Indonesia 9781626373099

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Collective Violence in Indonesia

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Collective Violence in Indonesia edited by Ashutosh Varshney

b o u l d e r l o n d o n

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Published in the United States of America in 2010 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.rienner.com and in the United Kingdom by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 8LU © 2010 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Collective violence in Indonesia / edited by Ashutosh Varshney. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-58826-687-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Violence—Indonesia. I. Varshney, Ashutosh, 1957– HM886.C627 2010 303.609598—dc22 2009042176 British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992. 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

vii ix

List of Tables and Figures Preface

1

2

3

4

5

6 7

Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview Ashutosh Varshney

1

Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia Ashutosh Varshney, Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, and Rizal Panggabean

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Conflict in Post-Suharto Indonesia: What Local Newspapers Tell Us Patrick Barron and Joanne Sharpe

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Ethnic Conflicts in Indonesia: National Models, Critical Junctures, and the Timing of Violence Jacques Bertrand

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Explaining Ethnic Violence in Indonesia: Demilitarizing Domestic Security Yuhki Tajima

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Local and National: Lynch Mobs in Indonesia Bridget Welsh

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Final Reflections: Looking Back, Moving Forward Patrick Barron, Sana Jaffrey, Blair Palmer, and Ashutosh Varshney

145 161 179 181 195

References The Contributors Index About the Book

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Tables and Figures

Tables 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 3.3 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

New Order and After: Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003, by Category Distribution of Ethnocommunal Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003: Provincial Distribution Collective Violence in Java, 1990–2003 Collective Violence in Java, Excluding May 1998 Anti-Chinese Riots in Jakarta and Solo, 1990–2003 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003: Distribution by Kabupaten/Kota Primary Violent Conflict Types Deaths from Collective Conflict by District, 2001–2003: Comparison of UNSIFR-2 and KDP/CCN Impacts of Resource Conflicts by Level: Flores, 2001–2003 Overview of Types of Keroyokan Keroyokan in Selected Provinces: West Java, Bali, Bengkulu, and South Kalimantan, 1995–2004 Keroyokan by Specific Selected Provinces Keroyokan Catalysts

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36 37 38 41 41 42 43 56 59 68 124 126 128 130

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viii Tables and Figures Figures 2.1

Spatial Coverage, UNSFIR Violence Dataset, Indonesian Provinces, 1990–2003 2.2 Deaths and Incidents of Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003 2.3 Madurese-Dayak/Malay Violence, 1990–2003 2.4 Anti-Chinese Violence, 1990–2003 2.5 Muslim-Christian Violence, 1990–2003 3.1 Deaths from Collective Conflict by Province, 2001–2003 3.2 Typology of Forms of Conflict/Crime 3.3 Forms of Impact by District, 2001–2003 3.4 Dominant Forms of Violent Conflict by Cluster, 2001–2003 3.5 Forms of Violent Vigilantism/Retribution Conflicts by Cluster: East Java, 2001–2003 3.6 Impacts by Actor Combinations for Violent Resource Conflicts: Flores, 2001–2003 3.7 Impacts by Actor Combinations for Violent Vigilante/Revenge Conflicts: East Java, 2001–2003 3.8 Impacts by Level for Violent Vigilante/Revenge Conflicts: East Java, 2001–2003 6.1 Keroyokan in Selected Indonesian Provinces: West Java, Bali, Bengkulu, and South Kalimantan, 1995–2004 6.2 Keroyokan Incidents by Province over Time 6.3 Incidents of Mobbing: Bali 7.1 Violent Conflicts in Aceh, January 2005–January 2009 7.2 Patterns of Routine Postconflict Violence 7.3a Postconflict Vigilantism 7.3b Rise in Postconflict Land Conflicts 7.4 Within-Case Analysis of De-escalation

25 35 38 39 39 57 60 63 64 65 67 69 70

127 128 129 154 155 157 157 158

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Preface

This book places the study of Indonesian political violence in a com-

parative framework. Although my earlier research focused on South Asia, as I started researching Indonesia in 2001 it became clear to me that several comparative insights emerging from the discipline of political science could be applied to Indonesia. After all, only a comparative approach could tell us how violence in Indonesia was different from violence in other places and also in which respects it was similar. New ideas and arguments, I thought, were likely to emerge from a systematic application of comparative methods. All of the chapters in this book, with the exception of Chapter 7, appeared originally as a special issue of the Journal of East Asian Studies (JEAS), for which I was a guest editor. I would like to thank the journal’s publisher, Lynne Rienner, for giving us permission to present our work in book form; Stephan Haggard, who as editor of JEAS expressed deep interest in our collective project and nurtured it with exemplary editorial meticulousness; and Ha-jeong Kim, managing editor of JEAS. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Benedict Anderson, who extensively commented on my writings and has helped me understand Indonesia better; Satish Mishra, who as head of the UN Support Facility for Indonesian Reconstruction (UNSFIR) recruited me to set up a database on Indonesian violence and always provided lively commentary; Hans Antlov, who as a program officer of the Ford Foundation in Jakarta showed great confidence in my ideas and methods and supported parts of my research in Indonesia; Aryeh Neier, who as head of the Open Society Institute, New York, vigorously supported my ef-

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x Preface forts to work on non-Indian materials with a generous grant; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, both of which provided fellowships to enable me to take my comparative work further; my colleagues at UNSFIR, especially Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Rizal Panggabean, and Bona Siahaan, who ably supported me; and Paddy Barron, Blair Palmer, and Sana Jaffrey, my intellectual companions in an evolving World Bank project in Indonesia. Finally, I thank Shruti Majumdar for her remarkably efficient research assistance. —Ashutosh Varshney

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Collective Violence in Indonesia

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1 Analyzing Collective Violence in Indonesia: An Overview Ashutosh Varshney

In 2001, using violent junctures in the life of a seventy-year-old

Indonesian as a metaphor for the whole nation, Benedict Anderson summarized the history of violence in Indonesia in a poignant manner: A seventy year old Indonesian woman or man today will have observed and/or directly experienced the following: as a primary school age child, the police-state authoritarianism of . . . Dutch colonial rule . . . ; as a young teenager, the wartime Japanese military regime, which regularly practiced torture in private and executions in public . . . ; on the eve of adulthood, four years (1945–49) of popular struggle for national liberation . . . at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; as a young mother or father . . . the cataclysm of 1965–66, when at least 600,000 and perhaps as many as two million people . . . were slaughtered by the military; in the middle age, the New Order police-state, and its bloody attempt to annex East Timor, which cost over 200,000 East Timorese lives . . . ; in old age, the spread of armed resistance in . . . Aceh and West Papua, the savage riots of May 1998 . . . and . . . the outbreak of ruthless internecine confessional warfare in the long peaceful Moluccas. (Anderson 2001, 9–10)

The chapters in this book, written by a new generation of scholars working on Indonesian violence, do not disagree with Anderson’s portrayal. But they do choose a different methodological path to sketch and analyze violence in Indonesia. Instead of focusing on the aggregate picture, these studies on the whole disaggregate violence and focus on variations,1 on the assumption that, following Gary King, Robert Keohane, and Sidney Verba (1994), studying variation in collective violence is one of the best ways, if not the only way, to explore causation.2 The varia1

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2 Collective Violence in Indonesia tions covered here are of various types: across space, across time, and in the forms of collective violence. While we cannot claim that we have fully sorted out the causes of Indonesian collective violence—a great deal more work is clearly required—we do take necessary steps in that direction. A second distinctive aspect of these writings is their comparative intellectual anchorage. Scholars of Indonesian violence have, on the whole, communicated with one another,3 but innovative research often emerges in a dialogue with other subfields, in an engagement with newer methods, in a critical encounter with recent theories.4 In studies of Indonesian violence, an intellectual engagement with debates emerging in other parts of the world, or with the evolving methods and theories in the field of ethnic conflict, is generally missing.5 As a result, despite its potential relevance, Indonesia has not been adequately incorporated into the larger body of theoretical and comparative literature.6 Indonesian materials on ethnicity and conflict are simply too meaningful to be left outside the emerging domain of comparative theory. Finally, these chapters also raise some new questions about the sources of information scholars of Indonesian violence tend to use. Comparative scholars on ethnic conflict have come to believe that newspapers, not government records, are the best, though not a perfect, source of information on collective violence. Is this true for authoritarian settings as well? If so, what kind of newspapers—national, provincial, or those at the subprovincial or district level—should scholars rely on? Indonesia’s “national newspapers” have focused mostly on the largest and most visible episodes of violence, the biggest riots, and selective acts of terrorism, leaving a lot that is analytically important out of their reporting gaze. We find that provincial newspapers are on the whole better than the national newspapers for tracking such large-scale violence. But the most important insight of these works is that subprovincial or district-level newspapers, rarely a favorite of “high scholarship,” are a better source for analyzing small-scale collective violence such as lynching, which can also end up taking a lot of lives. Once we look at this level and include small-scale violence in our overall figures of casualties, the amount of collective violence recorded in Indonesia goes up significantly. Research elsewhere might benefit from this insight emerging from the studies of Indonesian violence. For what might be called small-scale, or routine, group violence, local newspapers, despite not having star reporters and distinguished editors, may be the best sources of information.

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In the remainder of this introductory overview, I elaborate on these themes and touch on some allied matters as well. My attempt is primarily to bring scholarship on Indonesia in conversation with the arguments emerging in other parts of the world, and to initiate a systematic interaction between chronicles of Indonesian violence on the one hand and the theories and methods in the subfield of comparative ethnic conflict on the other. Indonesian violence needs theory, and theory in turn needs Indonesian case materials.

How Violent? Before turning to the causes of Indonesian violence, it is worthwhile to place the country in comparative perspective. How violent is Indonesia? Is it more violent than other societies? There is a consensus in the field that at higher levels of income, the incidence of collective violence, especially riots and civil wars, declines (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Horowitz 2001). This generalization is, of course, a statement about averages. It should not be construed to mean that high-income societies have no riots. US riots in the 1960s and 1990s and riots in the UK in the 1980s and in France in 2005 show that highincome societies are not entirely free from collective violence. But such societies have lower levels, and lower frequencies, of rioting. While the links between income and collective violence are not fully understood, a negative correlation is robust.7 It follows that Indonesian collective violence should be compared with patterns and magnitudes of such violence in low-income, or at best middle-income, countries. How good are the statistics on collective violence in such societies? While we do have some usable, if imperfect, datasets on civil wars, we do not yet have reliable cross-country datasets on riots, pogroms, and lynchings.8 Since the primary focus of the chapters in this book is on the latter, not on civil wars, we cannot be absolutely confident that for forms of collective violence that stop short of civil wars, Indonesia is more violent than other societies at the low- or middle-income level. Still, a few sensible comparisons with some, if not all, developing countries can be made. Also relevant are the materials from Western Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century, a period often used for suggestive comparisons with developing countries in the second half of the twentieth century.

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4 Collective Violence in Indonesia Lynching

Consider, first, lynching as a form of collective violence. A comparison of Indonesia and the American South during 1882–1930 is revealing. Sometime after the end of the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery, lynching of African Americans became common in the American South.9 Available studies suggest an annual average of a little over 100 lynchings during 1882–1930, or roughly one lynching every third day during those forty-nine years.10 These late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century US statistics pale in comparison, when juxtaposed with the evidence presented by Bridget Welsh on lynchings in Indonesia in this volume. Welsh studied only four of the thirty-six Indonesian provinces: West Java, Bali, Bengkulu, and South Kalimantan. “These provinces were selected because they were seen as less violent than others.” Still, and much to her astonishment, she found that in a mere ten years (1995–2004), over 5,500 people were victims of lynching in the four provinces, giving us an annual average of more than 500 victims. Can we estimate the total annual numbers of lynching victims for all thirty-six provinces of Indonesia in this ten-year period (and even more demandingly, for all provinces for a longer period)? Until further empirical research is done, there is, of course, no good way of doing this.11 Still, some revealing conclusions can be drawn. Even though, compared with Indonesia today, the United States had a smaller population during 1880–1930, the per capita lynching in Indonesia is almost certainly higher.12 Not only has Welsh studied only four out of thirtysix Indonesian provinces but, as noted earlier, these provinces were chosen because they were known to be low-conflict provinces. Unless we wish to make the unlikely argument that lynching as a form of collective violence was absent in the remaining provinces, the numbers killed in lynchings in the country as a whole for the period 1995–2004, or for a longer period, are bound to be significantly larger than Welsh’s estimates. In short, to punish theft, robbery, hit-and-run accidents, rape, adultery, and witchcraft, a very large number of Indonesians appear not to rely on the police or the law at all. Taking law into their own hands, they opt for the “popular forms of justice.” Indeed, Welsh also discovered that often the local police were informed ahead of time about planned lynchings, and they willingly acquiesced. Moreover, in a number of cases, if not all, leaders of the local communities were not only

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aware that preparations for lynchings were being made, but they also authorized the acts of lynching or participated in the rituals.13 Unless later empirical research surprisingly disconfirms the reasoning here, it is safe to argue that lynching as a form of punishment was not something that occurred primarily in Indonesia’s past (Colombijn 2002); it is also widely practiced in contemporary Indonesia, in contrast to the United States, where it has become quite rare.14 Religious Violence

Let us now turn to religious violence. Indonesian data can be fruitfully compared with the statistics available on Hindu-Muslim riots in India. Both countries have remarkable ethnocommunal diversity. Moreover, for most of their independence, they have also been low-income countries. Since the incidence of collective violence, as already argued, is (negatively) correlated with income, an India-Indonesia comparison is much tighter than a comparison of Indonesia with the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For India, Steven Wilkinson and I have constructed a dataset for the period 1950–1995 and provided evidence for over 7,000 deaths in Hindu-Muslim riots (Varshney 2002).15 For Indonesia, Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Rizal Panggabean, and I have documented more than 5,400 deaths in Muslim-Christian violence over a fourteen-year period, lasting from 1990 through 2003 (Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean, in this volume).16 Can something comparatively significant be said about religious violence in India and Indonesia? Let us first note that even if a period of forty to fifty years is covered for Indonesia, the number of deaths in Muslim-Christian violence— roughly 5,400 during 1990–2003—is unlikely to be larger than what we have for Hindu-Muslim violence in India (over 7,000 deaths during 1950–1995). Muslim-Christian violence is of recent origin in Indonesia, whereas Hindu-Muslim violence has a history of more than a hundred years. Indeed, given this difference in longevity and the political significance that such longevity conveys, it makes sense to suggest that in several if not all ways, Indonesia’s Pribumi (sons of the soil)–Chinese cleavage, not its Muslim-Christian cleavage, is conceptually similar to India’s Hindu-Muslim divide. Associated with frequent violence in history, the Pribumi-Chinese cleavage has been a master cleavage of twentieth-century Indonesia, just as the Hindu-Muslim cleavage has been one in twentieth-century India.17 In the future, Muslim-Christian differences may

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6 Collective Violence in Indonesia outstrip the Pribumi-Chinese animosities in significance, but that is not yet true in Indonesia. How does Indonesia’s Pribumi-Chinese violence compare with India’s Hindu-Muslim violence? In the fourteen-year period (1990– 2003) covered by Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean (in this volume), anti-Chinese riots claimed 1,259 lives.18 Could the number be as large as it is for Hindu-Muslim violence in India—over 7,000 deaths— if a larger swath of time were covered? We know that there was significant anti-Chinese violence during Indonesia’s independence struggle (1945–1949).19 More importantly, we also know that the anti-Chinese killings of 1965–1966, perpetrated as part of anti-Communist massacres, were massive and horrendous. While no clear estimation is available, there is a relative consensus that half a million people, including many Chinese, were slaughtered, making it the largest episode of violence in twentieth-century Indonesia (Cribb 2001a). Finally, there were massacres of the Chinese in West Kalimantan during 1967–1968. “Estimates in the written accounts of the number of Chinese massacred range from two to five thousand, although these figures exclude deaths that later occurred in detainment camps” (Davidson 2008, 68). If revolutionary violence during 1945–1949 is to be included on the Indonesian side, we should also perhaps incorporate on the Indian side the gruesome Hindu-Muslim carnage during India’s partition in 1947. Though available numbers are not precise, most scholars believe that roughly a quarter million people perished during the partition of India. Still, there is no parallel to the 1965–1966 slaughter in India’s postindependence history. At no point after India’s independence were half a million people massacred. Riots after the destruction of Baburi mosque in December 1992 and anti-Muslim pogroms in the state of Gujarat in 2002 were the biggest episodes of postindependence HinduMuslim violence. Each took slightly over 1,200 lives, mostly Muslim (Varshney 2002, 2002–2003).20 The master cleavage of Indonesian polity has arguably been much more brutal. How should we conclude? Even after these comparisons are made, I don’t think we can confidently say that Indonesia is more violent than other societies; a major point of our collective work is that the incidence of violence in many developing countries is either unknown or almost certainly underestimated. But regardless of what later comparisons might show, the scale of ethnocommunal violence in Indonesia does appear to be enormous. Anderson’s formulation about the experi-

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ence of violence that a seventy-year-old Indonesian is likely to have witnessed, or experienced, is largely correct, meaningful, and worthy of further exploration.

Variations In search of greater understanding, as already indicated, the scholars who have contributed to this book choose spatial and temporal variations in the incidence of violence over commonalities as their preferred method. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean seek to ascertain the distribution of all forms of collective violence short of civil war and test some existing theories of violence. Patrick Barron and Joanne Sharpe take the investigation down to the district level, asking whether violence is as spatially concentrated as Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean believe. Welsh asks whether it is possible to understand why some places experience lynching as a mode of “justice” and others do not, unless one probes local conditions. Jacques Bertrand concentrates not on spatial but on temporal variation. He compares those periods in Indonesian postindependence history that have been marked by large-scale violence with those that were peaceful and asks what systemic features explain why violence was so concentrated around the breakdown of the New Order but has declined since 2001. Yuhki Tajima’s primary, if not exclusive, focus is on temporal variation: why violence became so intense in the 1990s, compared to the 1980s. A Brief Methodological Detour

Before I present an overview of the substantive findings, we need to ask why there is such emphasis on variations in these writings. The answer is quite simple. Although their arguments about qualitative research are rooted in statistical theory, King, Keohane, and Verba (1994) have significantly altered the way qualitative research is done in contemporary political science. King, Keohane, and Verba contend that a case study of violence, or several case studies of violence, would not give us a theory of violence. Why should that be so? Why would a study of violence alone not generate an adequate theory of violence? What might explain this paradox? Here is how one can summarize the crux of the matter:

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8 Collective Violence in Indonesia Suppose on the basis of commonalities, we find that inter-ethnic economic rivalry (a), polarized party politics (b), and segregated neighborhoods (c) explain ethnic violence (X). Can we, however, be sure that our judgments are right? What if (a), (b) and (c) also exist in peaceful cases (Y)? In that case, either violence is caused by the intensity of (a), (b) and (c) in X; . . . or there is yet another factor (d), which differentiates peace from violence. It will, however, be a factor that we did not discover precisely because peaceful cases were not studied with the conflictual ones. . . . In short, until we study ethnic peace, we will not be able to have a good theory of ethnic conflict. (Varshney 2002, 6)

Since the publication of King, Keohane, and Verba nearly a decade and a half back, further methodological interventions have taken the debate forward. Arguments reviving case studies, or a quest for commonalities, have resurfaced, but their form has changed. Case studies may not fit well with statistical modes of inquiry, argues John Gerring (2006, 2007), but case studies remain the best way of understanding causal mechanisms (why A causes B), whereas statistical research, when done well, can at best give us causal effects (what the effect of A on B is). Large-n statistical research, which is the foundation of King, Keohane, and Verba’s arguments, typically has too many cases or observations. In and of its own, it does not allow scholarly intimacy with any of the empirical cases. As a result, we can’t quite figure out the process through which a given outcome occurs. And without understanding the process—what led to what—it is hard to sort out causal mechanisms. Moreover, studying similar cases is not without value. While it will not allow us to clinch arguments precisely for the reasons King, Keohane, and Verba identified, studying similar cases can knock down an existing theory or allow us to propose a theory that may be tested later.21 Amartya Sen’s theory of famines is among the best examples. Sen (1983) proposed a theory based on five famines; there were no nonfamines in his research design. Sen could not fully prove his argument about how famines represented entitlement failures, but the evidence he gathered was enough to knock down the conventional theory: that sharp declines in food supply cause famines. Moreover, a new theoretical idea—that entitlement failures cause famines—was put on the table for further investigation.22 What implications do these larger methodological arguments have for the studies of violence in Indonesia? First, studying violence alone may permit us to undermine existing theories and may even allow us to construct new theories, but we cannot be sure that our theories are right on the basis of commonalities alone. As Tajima in this book points out,

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Gerry van Klinken’s recent book falls in this category (van Klinken 2007a). Van Klinken only studies major acts of rioting, building no variations into his research design. Second, case studies will continue to give us a sense of causal mechanisms, but again we can’t be sure that the mechanism we identify in a case, or a set of cases, indeed produced the outcome observed, unless we select and study varying cases: cases of high violence versus low violence, or cases of violence versus peace. King, Keohane, and Verba may have underestimated the value of studies that compare similar outcomes, but their point about why variation is necessary for understanding causality—or to be more precise, “causal mechanisms”—remains valid. This intellectual background should explain why these writings are different from how violence used to be studied in Indonesia. They reflect the methodological zeitgeist of our times. However, despite sharing methodological concerns, these scholars do have important substantive differences, toward which I now turn. How Spatially Concentrated?

Though the levels of violence in Indonesia may be very high, Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean claim that Indonesia fits the comparative pattern of distribution noted in recent studies of violence elsewhere. As in India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the 1960s United States, collective violence in Indonesia is highly locally concentrated.23 Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean find that fifteen districts alone, holding a mere 6.5 percent of Indonesia’s total population in 2000, account for as much as 85.9 percent of all deaths in all forms of collective violence short of civil war. Barron and Sharpe disagree. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean based their figures on a reading of provincial newspapers. Barron and Sharpe coded district-level or subprovincial newspapers in twelve districts of two provinces—East Java and East Nusa Tenggara (NTT)—for 2001–2003 and discovered evidence of more widespread violence. Barron and Sharpe selected these provinces because they were generally viewed as low-conflict areas. Still, compared with Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean, they found “over three times as many deaths.” They also think Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean missed “thousands of deaths from collective violence.” Are Barron and Sharpe right? In a larger conceptual sense they are, but in a statistical sense some unresolved points require greater empirical scrutiny in the future. Let me explain.

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10 Collective Violence in Indonesia Provincial newspapers are the basis for the dataset constructed by Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean. If the speculation of Barron and Sharpe turns out to be right for the nation as a whole, it will be a damning critique of how even provincial newspapers, let alone national newspapers, covered collective violence in Indonesia. But it is worth pausing for a moment to ask: What can twelve districts in two provinces, covering an estimated 3.3 percent of Indonesia’s population in 2000, establish for the country as a whole? The Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean dataset covered fourteen provinces accounting for 72.4 percent of the country’s population. Indonesia now has thirty-six provinces and over 400 districts. Before we can extrapolate from twelve districts studied during 2001–2003, we need to know whether these districts were representative of Indonesia in general. At issue is a key conceptual matter, about which we have no empirical knowledge yet: Is small-scale violence, such as lynching, more common in lowconflict areas? If high-conflict areas have more riots and very few lynchings and, contrariwise, low-conflict areas have a lot of small-scale violence but very few riots, then it is quite possible that the twelve districts of Barron and Sharpe may not be generalizable to the country as a whole. One of the greatest challenges for conflict research in Indonesia, as elsewhere, is to sort out the relationship between small-scale violence and large-scale violence.24 No existing theory allows us to predict this relationship.25 However, in a deeper conceptual sense, Barron and Sharpe have made a compelling point. By systematically comparing—for the first time—the reportage in provincial and district-level newspapers, and showing that “provincial sources . . . picked up only 39 percent of deaths from group violence in our research areas,” they have empirically established what was at best a hunch before: that district newspapers are much better at reporting small-scale group violence than newspapers at higher levels of the polity. Evidence provided by Welsh (in this volume) lends further credibility to this argument. Barron and Sharpe make it abundantly clear that by relying on provincial newspapers, Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean underestimated the incidence of small-scale violence, if not of large-scale violence. Future studies of conflict in Indonesia, and possibly elsewhere, will have to pay attention to this finding. The sources one chooses should depend on the nature of the violence to be studied. Other than the argument about sources, a new substantive conclusion is also worth noting. As elsewhere, large-scale violence (riots and

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pogroms) may be heavily locally concentrated in Indonesia, but smallscale group violence (lynchings and intervillage brawls) is quite widespread. The overall magnitude of each kind of violence—small or large—may not yet be fully settled, but the variation in the pattern of distribution is no longer in doubt. Why the two patterns—concentration of large-scale violence and wider spread of small-scale violence—are different will require more investigation in the future. No theory in the field of ethnic conflict predicts this pattern. Macro Versus Micro

Bertrand critiques Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean as well as Barron and Sharpe. His basic argument is that a large-n statistical exercise that maps the distribution of violence in a finite time period focuses too much on the local factors and microprocesses, ignoring the “broader changes occurring at the macro-level.” According to him, one analytically fatal consequence of such emphasis is that large datasets are unable to explain the temporal clustering of collective violence in Indonesia: during the mid-1960s and around the breakdown of the New Order. Bertrand’s own explanation for why one gets these temporal spikes revolves around the notion of critical junctures. As in Bertrand (2004), he defines a critical juncture as a political period, when the basic features of a “national model” are renegotiated. At such moments, groups struggle for inclusion, or more frequently, for renegotiation of their terms of inclusion. They mobilize either violently, or through extra-institutional protest to renegotiate unfavorable terms, eliminate discrimination, gain greater recognition, representation or resources. States turn to address demands and mobilization through a mix of repression and accommodation. When the critical juncture comes to an end and institutions are stabilized, new terms of inclusion are in place, which define relations between ethnic groups and the state. (Bertrand, in this volume)

Pursuing self-admittedly a “historical institutionalist” mode of inquiry, Bertrand thus seeks to restore “structure” to the studies of violence. He calls attention to two critical junctures in the recent history of the nation: Suharto’s downfall in 1998, ending a thirty-year-long polity; and, before that, the embrace of Islamic groups by Suharto in the early 1990s, upsetting the multireligious balance of a Pancasila

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12 Collective Violence in Indonesia state and leading to serious Christian anxieties. “The emphasis on critical junctures,” he adds, “also explains why violent ethnic conflict diminished very significantly after the stabilization of the new regime. After the accession to power of Megawati Sukarnoputri in July 2001, the new regime became much more strongly entrenched and stabilized.” Thus, with new ethnic relations renegotiated, Indonesia, according to Bertrand, has entered a long phase of highly diminished large-scale violence.26 As a mode of inquiry, historical institutionalism is basically about the longue durée, about the continuation of obdurate historical patterns, and about changes in the basic rules of the game, given long-standing patterns. In a social science world increasingly preoccupied with rigor and method, a narrow inquiry is often favored, for it is easier to be rigorous about short time frames and sharply delimited problems. Longer processes or historically rooted underlying factors tend to get neglected, even if they are highly significant. Bertrand’s emphasis on broader processes should therefore be welcomed. Moreover, there is something fundamentally incontrovertible about the claim that after repressing Islam until the mid- to late 1980s, Suharto’s renegotiation with Islam in the early 1990s altered the basic political parameters of the system, thereby arousing new fears among certain groups, especially the Christians, and generating new confidence among other groups, especially the Muslims. In a number of societies, such fundamental alterations in group relations have led to violence. It should not be surprising that we have no evidence of serious MuslimChristian clashes in Indonesia before the mid-1990s. Suharto’s shift is thus most probably causally related to Muslim-Christian violence. And the clustering of violence around 1998–2001 also cannot but be connected to the breakdown of a long-lasting New Order. However, we need to ask a methodological question: Do large-n datasets necessarily direct explanation toward the microprocesses, ignoring macrotrends? Are they prone to such biases? Typically, large-n datasets map the distribution of a phenomenon— in this case, how violence was distributed over the years covered; over the forms it assumed (religious, ethnic, or economic; riots, pogroms, or lynchings); and over geographical spaces. Datasets are not about causes; they are a way to describe the empirical universe. Once the distribution of violence is ascertained, either causal inquiries are launched or some existing theories are tested. Causality firmly resides outside the dataset.

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Therefore, there is no fundamental contradiction between summoning a macroexplanation for violence and creating a dataset. Welsh, after collecting data in her four provinces for a period of ten years and identifying its varying distribution, argues that the causes of lynching “are national and local.” And after presenting patterns of violence, Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean argue: The notion of critical junctures—the decline and end of the New Order—is of great significance in terms of timing, but this systematic transformation did not produce collective violence everywhere. Group violence had local theaters. Some of the local questions that need to be explored systematically are: how the New Order upset a traditional local equilibrium of communities—communities rooted in traditional (adat) forms of governance—in the process of installing uniform, all-Indonesia forms of local institutions; how migration altered local equilibria; whether different ethnic or religious communities are integrated or segregated in different local settings; how the patterns of local governance have vastly varied; and how economic penetration of previously self-sufficient communities led to dramatically new results, marginalizing some communities and privileging others. (Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean, in this volume)

Thus, Bertrand and microresearchers can both be right. Temporal variation is best explained by macrofactors, but spatial variation is best analyzed when we pay attention to local processes. Macrofactors vary over time, but for any given point of time, macrofactors are, by definition, a constant for the entire nation or province, and a national or provincial constant cannot logically be called on to account for intranational or intraprovincial variations, as opposed to international or interprovincial differences. Anticipating this logical truth, Bertrand concedes that “an emphasis on critical junctures and institutional change . . . explains the emergence of clusters of ethnic violence, but it cannot in itself explain why violence emerges in some locations but not others” (Bertrand, in this volume). A more thorough explanation of Indonesian violence will clearly require both macro- and microexplanations. An Alternative Explanation for Temporal Variation

Tajima (in this volume) provides an alternative to Bertrand’s theory of temporal variation. Instead of emphasizing critical junctures, defined as something related to the basic properties of “national model,” Tajima

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14 Collective Violence in Indonesia concentrates on the changing role of the military. Taking his central cue from one of the principal theories of violence in the larger field of ethnic conflict, a theory that focuses on “state weakness,” and combining it with Indonesian particularities, Tajima argues: What is surprisingly absent from the Indonesianist literature is the role of the military. Where the military is mentioned, it is as an agent provocateur. . . . Given the central role of the military in both politics and security in Indonesia and the massive changes in state security forces during the transition from authoritarian rule, the lack of attention toward the military as a factor in communal violence is striking. This is even more so given the prominence of weak state capacity in comparative theories of ethnic conflict and civil wars. (Tajima, in this volume)

Whatever one’s normative position on how the Indonesian military deployed coercion and whether its coercive role was in the long term tenable, according to Tajima, we should not forget that rightly or wrongly, the military was the state’s preeminent apparatus for maintaining domestic order during the New Order. Even the police reported to the military. The military used excessive violence to put down disorder but, in the process, large-scale social violence was averted. One should emphasize that Tajima does not defend the military’s impunity but only tracks down its implications for social violence: “The idea that greater concerns over human rights led to ethnic violence by restraining the formerly repressive military is not to counsel against the adoption of human rights reforms in authoritarian regimes. Rather, it suggests that the manner by which political liberalization is achieved deserves greater attention from scholars and policymakers.” According to Tajima, starting in the late 1980s, three “liberalizing” developments progressively undermined the power of the military, opening up space for large-scale group violence. First, the rise of the human rights discourse in the international system led to increasing criticism of the Indonesian military. Especially after the 1991 massacre in Dili, even Suharto, unable to ignore international pressure, “dismissed two generals and court-martialed 19 soldiers involved in the affair” and subsequently established the National Commission on Human Rights. Second, in the early 1990s, serious differences emerged between the highest rungs of the military and Suharto. The clash led to Suharto clipping the wings of the military. And finally, in 1999, President Abdurrahman Wahid separated the military from the police, making the latter responsible for law and order. The police, however, were

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not ready to perform their new role. For decades, they had been dependent on the military and had no autonomous capacities of their own. This was precisely the time violence peaked in Indonesia. In short, rather than the abrupt changes in the national model disturbing the preexisting equilibrium between groups, it is the eroding power of the military and the incapacity of the police to fill the gap that, according to Tajima, explains the clustering of violence around 1998–2001. This argument, consistent with a Hobbesian view of security common in the field of international relations, is likely to generate a lot of debate in Indonesian circles.

Conclusion Displaying knowledge of the methodological and theoretical developments in the comparative field of ethnic conflict, the scholars assembled in this book craft original datasets and reinterpret Indonesian violence. Many gaps of understanding, of course, remain, and much more work will be required to take the emerging explanations further. But these writings set the stage for a systematic dialogue among theory, methods, and the specificities of Indonesian violence. Too important to be left out, Indonesia must return to the mainstream of scholarship on ethnocommunal conflict.

Notes For comments on an earlier draft, the author is grateful to Benedict Anderson. 1. Bertrand is a partial exception. He does not disaggregate violence as much as he seeks to explain why aggregate violence had such variations over time. 2. The emphasis placed on variation is, of course, not incontestable. See Brady and Collier (2004). 3. See, for example, Hefner (2008). Hefner reviews three recent books on Indonesian violence. As the term Indonesian violence suggests, the literature dealing with it should, in principle, intersect two kinds of works: those dealing with Indonesia, and those analyzing violence. Hefner’s review makes no reference to the main findings of the enormous literature on group violence that has emerged in different parts of the world. The judgment is entirely framed in light of Indonesian studies. 4. A great example of such innovation is a chapter titled “Creole Pioneers” in Anderson (1983). Anderson, originally a scholar of Indonesia, looked at nationalism in Latin America with his Southeast Asianist eyes, producing in-

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16 Collective Violence in Indonesia sights that could not emerge from within the Latin Americanist literature. Intellectually barging in from the outside—or what is sometimes called intellectual trespassing—has its conceptual and methodological benefits. 5. Recent works that have begun to incorporate insights emerging from non-Indonesian materials include Davidson (2008), Sidel (2006), and van Klinken (2007a). Also relevant is a book of essays that probes the relationship between political science as a discipline and studies of Southeast Asian politics (Kuhonta, Slater, and Vu 2008). 6. For an overview of the theoretical literature in the field, see Varshney (2007, 2003). 7. This does not mean that at higher levels of income, ethnic or racial prejudices in the functioning of the police and administration, or hate crimes among the citizenry, disappear altogether. Prejudices can indeed be shown to exist (Hattam 2007) and hate crimes also continue (Green, McFalls, and Smith 2001). But collective forms of overt violence tend to diminish. Before small tensions, clashes, and individually perpetrated hate crimes trigger riots, the police and administration intervene more often than not. 8. For civil wars, the COW (Correlates of War) dataset is most used. For a well-known use of the COW dataset, see Collier and Hoeffler (2004). The MAR (Minorities at Risk) dataset is also often referred to, but rarely used with confidence. The coding problems of the latter, as of now, appear to be formidable. Nonetheless, see Gurr (1993). 9. To be more precise, lynchings became more frequent after the so-called period of reconstruction. 10. The Chicago Tribune “began tracking lynchings in the late 19th century. It reported . . . 4,951 lynchings in the United States from the year 1882 through 1930. . . . Of the victims, 3,513 were black and 1,483 white; 92 were women and 76 of those were black. Eighty-two percent of the recorded lynchings were in the eleven [southern] states” (Howard 2007). 11. In a project in which I am currently involved with Patrick Barron and Blair Palmer, we are collecting statistics on lynchings for the period 1998–2008 for twenty-three provinces, covering nearly 80 percent of the Indonesian population. 12. One should also note that American lynching statistics cover only deaths, not injuries, whereas Welsh covers both. But even after enough subtractions have been made for injuries, Indonesian figures on lynching deaths would be considerably higher. 13. One should note that the state of affairs in the American South in the late nineteenth century was not terribly different. “In the South, those who participated in lynchings . . . were likely to be public officials, members of the Ku Klux Klan, the poor, and the working class” (Howard 2007, 392–293). 14. The 1998 “dragging death” in Jasper, Texas, of James Byrd Jr. is the last recorded lynching in the United States (Howard 2007, 396). 15. Though India, like Indonesia, has several religions, Hindu-Muslim violence is the primary form of religious violence in the country.

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16. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean wanted to cover as long a period in Indonesia as in India, but compared to Indian newspapers, Indonesian newspapers turned out to be less usable, reliable, and available. A great deal of double-checking was necessary. 17. Though the key texts on Indonesian Chinese do not use the term “master cleavage,” the following scholars in effect go in that direction: Coppel (2004), MacKie (1976), and Shiraishi (1997). 18. Not all of those killed were Chinese, even if the Chinese were the target of violence. It is not possible to generate a precise ethnic breakdown of deaths on the basis of newspaper reports. And police records, even if available, would not be reliable. 19. Under Japanese occupation (1942–1945), too, the Chinese were targets of violence. Such violence was perpetrated both by the Japanese and Pribumi (Heidhues 2003). 20. Though civil wars are not the focus of writings in this book, it is worth adding that India’s civil wars have also been less violent. For East Timor, scholars suggest that 200,000 people were killed, though the truth commission puts the number at 100,000. Having a population of about 750,000 in 1973, East Timor is a very small place. In no civil war in India, including the one in Kashmir, which had a population of over 7 million in 2001, have the numbers of those killed been so large. 21. For a fuller development of these methodological ideas and their implications for research in the field of ethnic conflict, see Hopf (2006), Laitin (2006), and Varshney (2006). These three essays were part of a special issue on David Laitin’s work, sponsored by the American Political Science Association. 22. Varshney (2008) analyzes the fuller implications of selecting only famines for Sen’s theory of famines. 23. See Fearon and Laitin (1996), Horowitz (1983), and Varshney (2002). 24. To buttress their claims, Barron and Sharpe also use the data from PODES, a survey conducted by the government of Indonesia. On conflict, it is worth asking whether the PODES data are reliable at all, because the survey administrators, representing the government, questioned village heads, not a representative sample of citizens. From the data so produced, it can’t be firmly established whether village heads gave strategic, or honest, answers. I helped write the conflict questions for PODES, but I did not know beforehand that the survey would be administered to village heads only. 25. Another technical statistical matter is worthy of brief consideration. It would have been, statistically speaking, quite stunning if Barron and Sharpe had found “three times as many deaths” in high-conflict areas such as Maluku, North Maluku, Central Kalimantan, West Kalimantan, and Central Sulawesi. The number of deaths in each of these provinces is very high; the discovery of three times, or even two times, as many deaths would have made an enormous difference to the overall numbers. In contrast, East Java and NTT are low-conflict areas. For 2001–2003, based on a reading of provincial newspapers, Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean found only twenty-three and twenty-

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18 Collective Violence in Indonesia two deaths in East Java and NTT, respectively, in acts of collective violence, whereas Barron and Sharpe found eighty-three and seventy-three, respectively. Isn’t the statistical base here too small to permit a serious claim about multiples (“three times”)? 26. Small-scale group violence may be another matter. Bertrand’s argument does not deal with small-scale violence.

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2 Patterns of Collective Violence in Indonesia Ashutosh Varshney, Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, and Rizal Panggabean

Since 1998, as the so-called New Order (1966–1998) came apart and

group violence in Indonesia flared up, some predictable questions have engaged the minds of scholars, policymakers, and civil society actors. How widespread is group violence in Indonesia? What forms—ethnic, religious, economic—has it primarily taken? Have the group clashes of recent years been significantly more frequent, or worse, than those in the late New Order period? Until recently, Indonesia lacked a statistical base to allow precise and professionally adequate responses to these questions. One often encountered an impressionistic contrast drawn between the chaos and violence of post-Suharto years and the stability and peace of the authoritarian New Order. Although the New Order had a remarkably bloody beginning in the massive anti-Communist killings of the mid-1960s, Suharto’s Indonesia came to acquire the image of a calm, well-ordered society in the 1980s and 1990s. An orgy of tumult, brutality, and violence ended the New Order in May 1998, but the image of a peaceful New Order returned in several quarters, especially as Indonesia started going through the teething irritations of a fledgling democracy. In some circles, comparisons were drawn between Indonesia and Nigeria, and the idea that Indonesia might become a “failed state” developed a constituency. According to a widely noted report, a “struggling state like Indonesia, whose weakness has allowed terrorism, corruption, and civil conflict to take root in alarming ways,” has performed only slightly better than the comprehensively failed states of Afghanistan, Haiti, and Somalia.1 Is this an accurate assessment? Is the image of a peaceful New Order, especially in its later years, correct? Is the violence of postSuharto years spread over most of the country, or is it locally concen19

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20 Collective Violence in Indonesia trated, leaving large parts of Indonesia relatively untouched? The last question is an important one. If group violence is locally concentrated and many parts of the country have remained peaceful, having at best small group clashes but no large-scale killings or wanton destruction of property, then the pessimism about the future of the country under a democratic dispensation is clearly less warranted. Indeed, in that case, patterns of Indonesian violence are no different from those identified elsewhere in the world, and the pessimism felt about Indonesia may have its roots in not placing the country in a systematic cross-country perspective. This chapter, the first step of a two-part study, reports the findings from our dataset for the period 1990–2003. The second part of the study, currently under way, will be more fully causal in nature. It will concentrate in depth on six cities—four for understanding the roots of Muslim-Christian violence, and two for examining the observable implications of such violence for Pribumi (indigenous)–Chinese relations. Of the four cities chosen for Muslim-Christian relations, two (Ambon and Poso) have had a great deal of violence in recent years and two (Manado and Palu) have experienced no, or very limited, violence. A similar pairing between the violence-ridden city of Solo and the peaceful Yogya, separated by a mere 60 kilometers, will probe PribumiChinese relations. This design owes its origins to a study of HinduMuslim relations in India (Varshney 2002) and is based on the premise that to understand the causes of violence, it is often good to study peace and violence together. Of course, what became an explanation for India’s Hindu-Muslim violence is now a hypothesis for Indonesia, to be tested and rejected if empirically invalid. Moreover, in the Indian study, variations across cities were the main object of analysis. In the Indonesian study, two kinds of variance, spatial and temporal, are at issue. We not only seek to explain why some cities had violence and others did not during a given time period; we also want to understand why cities with a long record of communal peace (Ambon, Poso) turned massively violent at a certain point. Our dataset is a result of approximately 10,000 hours of work done by a team of fourteen researchers, most of them based in provincial capitals. We were able to cover more than 3,600 incidents of violence, of which more than a quarter—a little over 1,000 incidents—resulted in over 10,700 deaths during the period 1990–2003. We believe we have been able to create the most comprehensive dataset on collective violence in Indonesia available to scholars, policymakers, and activists thus far.2

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Our attempt to be comprehensive, however, does not mean that we have been able to cover all acts of violence in Indonesia since 1990. We should specify what we have excluded, or had to exclude, from our dataset and why. First, we did not cover all forms of violence, only collective violence. We define the latter as violence perpetrated by a group on another group (as in riots), by a group on an individual (as in lynchings), by an individual on a group (as in terrorist acts), by the state on a group, or by a group on organs or agencies of the state. We did not cover violence between two individuals—attempted or actual homicides— unless they triggered a larger group clash. Our focus was on group violence, not on crime or violence per se.3 Second, we also had to confine ourselves to episodes of violence that fell short of secessionist wars. Even though the violence in Aceh and Papua would have been part of our definition of collective violence, we were unable to include it in our dataset.4 The insurgencies in these two provinces posed serious personal risks for our team and made systematic research in their provincial capitals impossible. There were sources of information in the national capital, but as we later show, the Jakarta-based sources are an inadequate substitute for the provincial sources on the ground. In other words, our database covers collective violence in Indonesia with the exception of those areas where a war of insurgency had been under way. Substantively, we reached three main conclusions. Of the three, the first two are relevant to the Indonesian debate, and the third is germane both to Indonesian discussions and to the larger comparative literature on ethnic conflict. The conclusions are: 1. There is no evidence that the late New Order (1990–1997) was peaceful. If we add to the findings reported in this article what we already know about the insurgencies during Suharto’s rule and the other forms of group violence in the 1980s, the most striking difference between the New Order and the post-Suharto period is not that one was peaceful and the other has had a lot of violence. Rather, the New Order often used state-perpetrated violence to bring order, whereas clashes between social groups have been much more common since 1998. 2. Ethnocommunal violence is not the most common form of group violence in Indonesia. It is episodic, not routine, but when it does take place, it is immensely deadly and claims many more lives than the other forms of group violence such as lynchings and village brawls. 3. Overall, collective violence in Indonesia is locally concentrated, as in several other parts of the world (Fearon and Laitin 1996; Varsh-

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22 Collective Violence in Indonesia ney 2002). A mere fifteen districts (kabupaten), holding 6.5 percent of Indonesia’s total population in 2000, accounted for 85.5 percent of all deaths in collective violence. This result requires that we not only take note of the national-level factors that might have led to violence, but also pay special attention to local factors that kept peace in most of the country, even as fifteen districts repeatedly burned. Large-scale group violence is not as widespread in Indonesia as is often thought. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section goes into the basic reasons for why a database was necessary, how it was constructed, what its limitations are, and how they might be remedied in the future. The following section outlines the existing theories of group violence in Indonesia and judges their applicability in light of our database. The next section presents a whole range of substantive results, concentrating on several questions: the level of violence before and after the end of the New Order and the types, relative intensity, and geographical distribution of the violence. The final section summarizes the conclusions.

A New Dataset: Why? How? As already indicated, the existing statistics on collective violence in Indonesia are highly sketchy.5 Like many other governments in the developing world, the New Order, ruling Indonesia for over thirty years, until 1998, did not ever publish any figures on deaths or losses in ethnocommunal violence. In what William Liddle has aptly called a “Hobbesian bargain,” the entire rationale for the New Order was its offer to Indonesian citizens of “prosperity and stability in exchange for acceptance of authoritarian government” (Liddle 1999, 37). Thus, other than seeking to deliver prosperity to the masses, the New Order also had an interest in showing that peace and order prevailed under their rule. Supplying honest data on group violence was contrary to a key regime objective. No statistics were ever provided. How can one, under such conditions, determine the basic patterns of violence in a society? Viewing newspaper reports as a source is about the only other option that is known to researchers. In 2002, following this idea, and on the basis of reports in two capital city news sources—primarily Kompas, supplemented by Antara—the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR) compiled the only all-Indonesia database (Database I hereafter) available for the

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late New Order period and the period after its collapse, covering the years 1990–2001 (Tadjoeddin 2002). How reliable were the newspaper reports used as evidence? Such a question is quite easily answerable in countries where the press is free. Not all newspapers may be trustworthy in such countries, but typically countries with a free press also tend to have a newspaper or two, which can be called journals of record. In the United States, the New York Times has long performed this role, and in India, until recently, the Times of India did. For Indonesia, it is sometimes argued, Kompas is a journal of record (Liddle 1999).6 Whether or not this claim is correct for the standard economic and political reporting, its validity, as we argue in this article, is highly questionable on ethnic or religious violence. Neither Kompas nor Antara reported any incidents of group conflict anywhere in Indonesia in 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1994 (Tadjoeddin 2002). From what we already knew, however imperfectly, the absence of group violence in these years appeared to be an artifact of government regulations. As a principle, the New Order did not allow press freedom in its more than three decades of existence. Indeed, on ethnocommunal issues, the government had a socalled SARA policy. SARA was an acronym for ethnic (suku), religious (agama), racial (ras), and intergroup (antar-golongan) differences. These differences were not to be discussed in the public realm. In other words, a database constructed from Kompas and Antara simply could not be viewed as reliable unless cross-checked. But how was this to be done? There are, of course, several ways of running reliability checks on newspaper reports. The most promising and timetested method is cross-checking the capital city news sources with reports in provincial newspapers. That is the path we chose. Toward Provincial Newspapers

Are provincial newspapers any more reliable than national newspapers on violence? The case for provincial newspapers is not entirely unambiguous.7 But a theoretical intuition buttressed the conjecture that reportage in provincial newspapers might be more accurate. We know from the available literature that a highly centralized system, as the New Order undoubtedly was, is better able to censor the capital city than the provincial centers and the hinterlands. No authoritarian system is equally authoritarian all over a country. Indeed, this is one of the greatest differences between authoritarian and totalitarian systems.8 The Suharto regime was always characterized as authoritarian, and rightly

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24 Collective Violence in Indonesia so. It did not have the Soviet-style, ideologically monolithic, totalitarian capacities, penetrating all aspects of social, economic, and political life in Indonesia. Unlike the Communist systems, all available nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were not politically obliterated. For example, two of the biggest NGOs—the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah—might have been pushed by the government, but they continued to be organizationally independent of the government for much of the New Order period (Hefner 2000).9 Interviews with the regional management of Kompas newspaper group confirmed our conceptual hunch.10 According to their own selfassessment, the provincial newspapers were likely to be better at reporting provincial violence than Kompas in Jakarta. Not only were the regional newspapers closer to the ground, but newspapers were not required, in principle, to send their reports to the information officer before publishing them. The New Order issued a “negative list” prohibiting certain kinds of reporting. This, in effect, meant that quite a lot of the regional reporting escaped the censors because reporting was not to be screened by the provincial authorities beforehand. There were thus good reasons to move toward provincial newspapers, but we thought another check was necessary. Our previous experience of gathering such statistics had shown that small incidents of violence tend to outnumber the larger riots by a huge margin, but it is the much fewer incidents of large-scale violence, not the more frequent smaller incidents, that basically determine the overall statistics in a dataset.11 Datasets on violence tend to have what might be called a bigincident effect.12 The implications were clear: if there were doubts about the veracity of reports appearing in provincial newspapers about big riots, it was important to subject such reports to what might be called a localknowledge check. Interviews with key local community actors, who tend to be well informed, would allow us to do that. This method was deployed for a number of big incidents once our team developed skepticism. For example, we simply could not convince ourselves that 8,000–10,000 people had died on the Maluku Islands during clashes in 1999–2001. This estimate, the most commonly cited in newspaper reports, has acquired the status of conventional wisdom. Through our methods, requiring local knowledge checks for violence of this magnitude, we could only reach a figure of 4,779. For us, generating statistics was also simultaneously an act of interpretation.

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Which Provinces?

Our research team covered fourteen provinces: Riau, Jakarta, Central Java, West Java, East Java, Banten, Central Kalimantan, West Kalimantan, South Sulawesi, Central Sulawesi, East Nusatenggara, West Nusatenggara, Maluku, and North Maluku. We chose these provinces because in Database I, they accounted for 96.4 percent of all deaths (Tadjoeddin 2002). According to the 2000 census, 72.4 percent of the Indonesian population lived in these provinces. Given such magnitudes, covering these fourteen provinces, as opposed to all twenty-eight provinces in 2003–2004, appeared to be the most rational use of our resources, time, and energy.13 Figure 2.1 represents the provincial coverage in our study. Further, following standard norms of large-scale empirical research, it also seemed sensible to rely on the argument that for Database II, the share of the remaining provinces in the overall death toll could be assumed to be 3.6 percent. Even if careful newspaper research in the remaining provinces was carried out, the odds that the magnitude of deaths was considerably higher or lower than 3.6 percent were miniscule. The remaining provinces were most unlikely to alter our allIndonesia projections seriously.

Figure 2.1 Spatial Coverage, UNSFIR Violence Dataset, Indonesian Provinces, 1990–2003

Included in Database I only Included in Databases I & II No data

Note: Map based on administrative boundaries from 1998.

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26 Collective Violence in Indonesia The details of our methodology are contained in Appendixes 2.1 and 2.2. We covered four categories of collective violence: (1) ethnocommunal (interethnic, interreligious, and intrareligious); (2) state versus community (attacks by government machinery on civilians and vice versa—so long as such attacks were not demonstrably for ethnocommunal reasons); (3) economic (conflicts over land, industrial relations, natural resources—so long as such conflicts were not unmistakably linked to ethnocommunal groupings); and (4) other (lynchings, intervillage brawls, etc.). A decision was also required on whether the conflicts should be categorized according to forms or according to substance or cause. The latter is nearly always tempting, but as conflict scholars have long known, it can be grossly misleading and can corrupt results irredeemably. Only research can establish the substance, or causes, of conflict. An assumed, or quickly established, cause cannot be the basis of coding. We must begin with the form that conflicts take and let later research determine the substance.14 Finally, we concentrated on deaths as the only indicator of the severity of violence. The other possibilities were (1) injuries, (2) violations of freedom, (3) property loss, and (4) internally displaced persons (IDPs). Statistically speaking, the ideal situation would have been to construct a composite index that incorporated all of the above. But unlike in the field of human development, where a composite human development index has been created and largely accepted, it has not been possible to construct such composite indices for ethnic conflict. There are at least three reasons why this is so. First, the data on injuries, property loss, and violations of freedom, if not on IDPs, typically tend to be unreliably collected. Second, it is not clear how to assign weights to the various components if multiple components are to be included in the index. How many injuries, for example, would be equal to a death, and why? Third, figures on death are more comparable across cases and time, while injuries always require further specification.15 The tragic finality of death makes the numbers on death more analytically usable.16 Caveats

Even with meticulous research, no researcher investigating a nationallevel database can vouch for complete accuracy with respect to each incident covered. Stated another way, after cross-checks with local knowledge, we can certainly get reasonable statistics but still cannot

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guarantee absolute precision.17 Such statistics, of course, may not be good enough to tackle all questions that may potentially come to mind. Some questions, for example, are always about fine gradations, while others are about broad trends and patterns. The method outlined above promises us advances on the latter, not on the former. Greater precision is possible in conflict research—but only in case studies or ethnographies—confined to one or two cases, one or two villages, or one or two districts (or a small number of them). While we do gain accuracy that way, we should note the well-known problem that it is impossible to know how representative or exceptional the village or district is that we have so deeply and accurately studied. In order for anyone to answer the latter question, a larger comparative picture is inevitably needed. That is what our dataset aims to provide. Ethnographers may be more accurate, but they can’t establish generalizability; the database builders may be less accurate, but they can present each case in its larger perspective. There are trade-offs here.

Existing Theories of Group Violence in Indonesia As is well known, large-n datasets are generally better at theory testing than they are at theory building. It is therefore possible to take a look at the available theories of collective violence in Indonesia and ask which ones our dataset finds plausible. Of the various theories of group violence that have emerged in the literature since the fall of Suharto, three can be tested with our dataset. The first is the popular view, not accepted by many scholars yet, that Indonesia under Suharto was on the whole relatively peaceful because it had the political, administrative, and military mechanisms to discipline eruptions of social disaffection, and it is the end of the New Order and the collapse of its disciplinary mechanisms that account for the violence of post-Suharto years. A second view focuses on a longer time period. Some scholars suggest that “violence is embedded” in Indonesian society and history. “The present violence is not simply, or not only, the legacy of the New Order” (Colombijn and Lindblad 2002, 3). The New Order was an instance of a longer historical tradition of violence. Finally, a third argument turns the first argument on its head, while not directly engaging the second. Violence, in this view, did not erupt after 1998 because the New Order’s disciplinary mechanisms collapsed; rather, violence was one of the fundamental pillars on which the New Order rested. In the end, the problem of legitimacy led to the col-

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28 Collective Violence in Indonesia lapse of the New Order and also left a violent trail. The New Order, in short, is itself the cause of the violence, both during its life span and after its death (Bertrand 2004).18 Let us take each view in turn and ask what our dataset, or other research, says about their validity. The New Order and Its Disciplinary Mechanisms

In July 2000, when Lorraine Aragon was doing research on MuslimChristian violence in Poso, she was repeatedly, and wistfully, told by some citizens of Sulawesi that “for thirty-three years under Suharto, Indonesia was a peaceful place, but now . . . there are disturbances everywhere” (Aragon 2001, 78). Whether or not this view is correct—and we will have more to say on this matter shortly—an analyst needs to know what mechanisms might exist between the purported causes and the observed consequence. What features of the New Order—political, military, administrative, ideological—could have produced the peace and stability? Aragon herself mentions the “military control mechanism that prevented expressions of . . . communal dissatisfaction” (Aragon 2001, 78–79). Tajima (in this volume) speaks of how, in 1999, the separation of a well-equipped military from the police, the withdrawal of the military from the civilian realm, and the handover of responsibility for internal law and order to an ill-equipped police created vacuums in the security environment on the ground, leading to a lot of violence between groups. Liddle goes a step further and gives the most plausible accounting of the possible mechanisms in the available literature: There is, particularly at the elite level, a strong Hobbesian streak in the modern Indonesian political culture: the belief that most Indonesians cannot be entrusted with extensive personal liberties or with the right to participate in political life on their own terms but must instead be persuaded or forced in their own interest to accept the superior wisdom of a paternalistic elite. In the late 1960s, as the New Order began to take shape, Suharto took advantage of this belief, offering prosperity and stability in exchange for acceptance of authoritarian government. (Liddle 1999, 37)

A “Hobbesian bargain” thus ensured peace: a heavily state-controlled society that accepted controls on freedom to avoid chaos and end poverty. In the argument above, Liddle is not necessarily laying out

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his own view but presenting the logic of the conventional wisdom that one often encounters in some elite or intellectual circles in Indonesia. In order for the core of this argument to hold, one will have to demonstrate that the New Order was indeed peaceful. Presumably, its early roots in the massacre of several hundred thousand Communists in the mid-1960s are not part of the argument, nor are the largely antiChinese killings in West Kalimantan in 1967–1973 (Davidson and Kammen 2002; Davidson 2008). Thus, for “the New Order was peaceful” argument to have any validity, we will have to start the empirical examination from the mid-1970s, not before. Was it peaceful after that? The evidence from the 1990s is contained in our dataset and analyzed in the next section. It shows considerable collective violence. The 1980s, not part of the dataset, present a gory picture, too. Theodore Friend’s account taps into new sources for the infamous Tanjung Priok incident (1984) and also goes into the trail of violence it touched off: After his fourth election (in 1983), Suharto . . . rejected . . . that social organizations religious in nature remain based on their religion and their respective religious beliefs. Instead he said, it was time for Indonesia to consolidate politically, accepting the national ideology, Pancasila, must become the sole basis of all social and political organizations. When the government, in 1984, sent to the Assembly five draft bills for that purpose, the port area of Tanjung Priok, in North Jakarta, felt especially challenged. Tanjung Priok was populated mostly by men, many of them young, out of school, and out of work. . . . At the urging of the lay preachers . . . this vulnerable group found a noble and uplifting goal in the defense of Islam. . . . On September 12, Amir Biki, a student activist in 1966, now prominent in Tanjung Priok, built up a crowd of 1,500 and led a march. . . . Army soldiers blocked the roadway. Armored vehicles and military trucks moved in to the rear, preventing retreat. The crowd surged forward. The soldiers fired into the crowd. . . . In half an hour, perhaps 63 (officials say 18: some say hundreds) were killed and many more severely wounded. (Friend 2003, 190–191)

Why kill so many by blocking both the front and the rear of a demonstration? General Benny Moerdani, the commander of the army at the time, explained: Toward the end of a generously long interview he appeared to answer a question I had not yet asked, about the management of the Tanjung Priok incident. “I am a soldier,” he avowed, uncued by me. “If I am told to shoot, I shoot.” I believe he was saying: No one could have

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30 Collective Violence in Indonesia ordered me how to handle Tanjung Priok incident except Suharto. (Friend 2003, 194)

Was this an isolated act of violence in the 1980s? Hardly. There followed a series of fires and explosions in Jakarta: Sarinah Jaya department store in suburban Kebayoran was burned to the ground. . . . Bank Central Asia branches were bombed, killing two. . . . [T]he Marine Corps dump on Jakarta’s outskirts began exploding, eventually destroying 1,500 houses, leaving fifteen dead and twenty six wounded. . . . As a continuing consequence of Tanjung Priok, in July 1985, fires in Jakarta destroyed a major shopping complex, a nine-story office building, and a building housing the state radio and television stations. Clashes arose between the armed forces and groups of aroused Muslims, most notably in Lampung, South Sumatra, in 1989. The estimates of death toll there ran from 41 to over 100. (Friend 2003, 192–193)

Islamic groups, even if peacefully protesting, were not the only targets of state-sponsored violence in the New Order. Labor strikers were also targeted. In Sidoardjo, south of Surabaya, in May 1993, 500 workers went on strike seeking to implement the East Java governor’s edict for a 20 per cent raise in wages. . . . The walkout awoke the local military and administration. . . . When thirteen co-workers were interrogated at military headquarters and forced to resign, a young female activist, Marsinah, exclaimed to another group of co-workers that she would take the District Military Command to court. That night she was abducted. On May 8, 1993, her body was found, raped and beaten. The murder had taken place at the army headquarters. (Friend 2003, 206–207)19

It should be noted that in our account in this chapter, we have not been able to include insurgencies in East Timor, Aceh, and Papua. It is widely accepted that the civil war in East Timor was especially brutal. “A figure of 200,000 deaths in East Timor as a result of the Indonesian occupation has become more or less entrenched as conventional wisdom” (Cribb 2002, 229).20 Since at no time did East Timor’s population exceed 800,000, the proportion killed is remarkably large. Had it been possible to include civil wars in our dataset, much greater violence would have marked our statistical account of the late New Order.

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To summarize, the overall picture is, first, not one of peace and, second, state-sponsored violence appears to be a principal mechanism of ensuring order, if not the only one.21 It should, of course, be noted that by virtue of their monopoly over coercion, even Weberian states in modern times have often used coercion to impose order. But the New Order state did not deploy coercion in a law-bound, Weberian style. Force was more brutally used.22 Violence Embedded in History and Culture?

Putting the New Order in a historical perspective, some scholars speak of the many episodes of mass violence in the country right through its modern history, arguing that group violence has a long lineage in Indonesia. The New Order was simply the newest link in a long historical chain. Lynching, or mob justice—an important form of violence in Indonesia—did not all of a sudden erupt after 1998: “In 1904 it was reported from the interior of Central Java that a thief caught red-handed by villagers did not come away alive. . . . Around 1909 witches in Poso (Central Sulawesi) were killed by a small group of young men. . . . In 1882 a pickpocket at the market of Pariaman (West Sumatra) was killed by bystanders. . . . In 1853 the Supreme Court ruled that inhabitants of a house who killed a burglar were not liable to punishment” (Colombijn 2002, 315–316). Others speak of the historical tradition in the Javanese community of “cattle theft, extortion, opium smuggling, violence and especially intimidation” as daily phenomena, and the Jago phenomenon, referring to “the local strongmen who, operating in the shadow of the official colonial government during the nineteenth century, in fact controlled the Javanese countryside” (Nordholt 2002, 39). Benedict Anderson also argues: Violence in 20th century Indonesia has never been the legitimate monopoly of the state. It has been deployed, under differing circumstances, with differing kinds of legitimation, by revolutionaries, middle classes, villagers, ethnic groups, corporate apparatuses, quasi-official gangsters, the CIA and so on. . . . It is . . . a manifestation of the absence of a Law by which monopoly could be generally justified. . . . Today after three decades of corrupt, cynical and arbitrary dictatorship, under which elites were completely immune to legal punishment, while judges, police, prosecutors, and even defense advocates treated cases simply as commercial transactions, or as political shows of force, very little of (legal) seriousness . . . exists, ex-

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32 Collective Violence in Indonesia cept among young intellectuals, professionals and middle class reformers. Nothing shows its general marginality better than the spread of vigilante justice, “mob attacks” on police stations and jails, and ever-increasing middle class demands for stepped-up security. These middle classes are quite aware of what has happened here and there to the Chinese, and how “structurally Chinese” they have themselves become. There is not much in modern Indonesian history to give them long-term assurances. (Anderson 2001, 18–19)

Anderson does not suggest that violence is embedded in Indonesian culture, arguing instead that it is the inability of the state to acquire—in the Weberian sense—a legitimate monopoly of violence that accounts for repeated acts of citizen violence. But the picture that emerges is one of frequent episodes of group violence in the modern history of Indonesia. To be sure, this is a much-needed historical perspective and these arguments are of great intellectual significance. But one serious reservation is in order. If collective violence in Indonesia is as locally concentrated as we argue here, then an intriguing question is left unresolved by this historical perspective. Why did a mere fifteen districts, which contain only 6.5 percent of Indonesia’s total population, have as much as 85.5 percent of all deaths in collective violence (short of civil wars) between 1990 and 2003? Why did so many either remain quiet or witness only small acts of violence? Clearly, even if the overall violence is great, the intra-Indonesian variation is so substantial that an argument about a “stubborn culture of violence” needs serious local or regional adjustments. The remarkable variations suggest that despite such history and despite the absence of a tradition of rule of law, large parts of Indonesia were able to live their life quite peacefully in the 1990s. Both mechanisms—those sustaining violence and those preventing violence—appear to have been present. Critical Junctures and the Violence of the New Order

The third argument focuses on the institutions of the New Order and seeks to show how at certain “critical junctures,” including, as it turned out, the 1990s, institutional change or its possibility led to a great deal of violence. This perspective also draws linkages between the violence of recent years and the institutions and policies of the New Order, suggesting how the authoritarianism of the New Order produced the violence that accompanied its demise and what followed thereafter.

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Jacques Bertrand (2004; also in this book) argues that the institutions of the New Order created profound social and political exclusions: Dayaks and Papuans on grounds of lack of modernity, the Chinese for lack of indigenousness, the East Timorese for historical reasons, and Islam on grounds of ideology. At a fundamental level, coercion is necessary to sustain such a variety of exclusions. Coercion, however, cannot keep a system going forever. Especially at critical junctures, violence in response to these exclusions, or in justification of them, is more or less inevitable. Critical junctures are defined by Bertrand as those moments when, due to a variety of reasons, a political system comes under strain and begins to lose, or loses, its legitimacy and when group dynamics— between the winners and losers of the existing system—starts to change. The New Order’s renegotiation with Islam in the early 1990s was one such moment, and it led to a change in Muslim-Christian relations. The declining legitimacy of the system by the mid-1990s was yet another moment of violent group renegotiation. A great merit of this argument is its focus on the institutional characteristics of the New Order and its ability to demonstrate how some groups were clearly excluded from the institutions of power and had no normal ways of reversing such exclusions. The group-specific nature of the argument allows it to show why only some groups were the targets, or perpetrators, of attacks; why violence was concentrated in some geographical regions of Indonesia; and why violence was not more generalized. The argument also gives a good account of the timing of violence. Our dataset, however, does raise some issues for this argument. If violence was locally, not simply regionally, concentrated, we would need to go beyond an argument that focuses entirely on groups and provinces. In 1998, the Chinese were targeted in some parts of Indonesia, not everywhere they lived—especially not in West Kalimantan, where a great deal of anti-Chinese violence took place during the decade after Suharto’s rise to power (Davidson 2008). Similarly, despite what should have been a changing relationship everywhere between Muslims and Christians as a result of Suharto permitting a greater role to Islam in the power structure, Muslim-Christian violence took place primarily in the Malukus, in parts of Central Sulawesi, and in some towns of Java. Much of Central Sulawesi and almost all of North Sulawesi remained quiet, in addition to several other parts where both Muslims and Christians live in large numbers. Once we recognize these particularities, in our analytic focus we not only will have to stress changes that the New Order brought about at a systemic level, or how exclusionary its policies with respect to

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34 Collective Violence in Indonesia some groups and geographical regions were, but we will also have to incorporate into our explanations the local differences existing within such regions or groups that presumably kept many towns or districts peaceful, even as violence broke out elsewhere in the region. Institutional factors at the national or regional level are best viewed as sparks, which were turned into fires in some places, not others.23 The transformation of sparks into fires would not have come about without some local-level factors, which need to be identified.

Results Let us first briefly note the differences between Database I (Tadjoeddin 2002) and Database II, the basis of our analysis here. Our hunch about the utility of provincial newspapers was right. For the period 1990–2001, in fourteen provinces, we have 10,402 deaths in Database II, more than twice as many as in Database I, where the total was 4,662 deaths. It should be clear that for conflict, if not for other subjects, Kompas cannot be viewed as a journal of record for all of Indonesia.24 National Trends

Let us now look at the broad national trends. Figure 2.2 shows the aggregate picture. The years 1997–2001 have been the most violent, but it should be noted that high levels of collective violence were in evidence more than a year before the May 1998 events that caught the world’s attention. The Madurese-Dayak conflict began in West Kalimantan in December 1996, acquiring huge proportions in 1997, killing over a thousand people.25 Let us now turn to a question already posed in the previous section: How much violence took place during the late New Order? This question, of course, raises a prior issue: If we treat 1990 as the beginning of the late New Order, when did the New Order really end—on May 22, 1998, when Suharto formally resigned, or on May 13, 1998, when virtually uncontrolled anti-Chinese violence erupted in several parts of the country, especially in the capital city? If we suppose that the May 22 resignation of Suharto ended the New Order, both formally and in actuality, then much of the May 1998 violence would have to be included in our assessment as part of the rioting that took place before the end of the New Order. But if we treat the May 1998 incidents as exceptional, for those were one of the principal immediate causes of the end of the New

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Figure 2.2 Deaths and Incidents of Collective Violence Figure 2 in Indonesia, 1990–2003 Deaths and Incidents of Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990-2003 1,000

4,000

900 3,500

Deaths 800

Incidents 3,000 700

2,500

500

2,000

Incidents

Deaths

600

400 1,500

300 1,000 200

500 100

-0

- 0 1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

Order, we will have to find another, more “normal” dividing line, as it were. There are no good and well-known theoretical ways of selecting a normal cutoff point on a matter like this. In the absence of a theoretically obvious dividing line, let us first see the results with various possible cutoff points (Table 2.1). If April 30, 1998, is taken as the cutoff point—before the exceptionally high violence of May 1998 erupted—the late New Order shares of deaths and incidents are 11.5 and 22.3 percent, respectively. If, however, we stick to May 22, 1998, as a dividing line, the late New Order share shoots up to 23.0 percent of all deaths and 23.5 percent of all incidents. Whichever cutoff one picks, the late New Order was simply not peaceful. Even the lower estimate—11.5 percent of all deaths—records 1,214 deaths and 707 incidents. We should also note that although enough care has been taken to make our statistics as reflective of the realities as possible for the 1990–1997 period, we know that Indonesia’s newspapers have been remarkably free since the end of the New Order

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36 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 2.1 New Order and After: Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003 Deaths Cutoff Points April 30, 1998 May 21, 1998

Incidents

Pre Percentage Post Percentage Pre Percentage Post Percentage 1,242

11.5

9,516

88.5

804

22.3

2,804

77.7

2,473

23.0

8,285

77.0

848

23.5

2,760

76.5

and that they were less free before. Thus, one has to take seriously the possibility that despite our best efforts, our figures for 1990–1997 could be an underestimate. Two more considerations are relevant for our assessment of whether the New Order was peaceful. First, we should also think of the violence not covered in this dataset. The civil wars in Aceh and Papua, and especially in East Timor, produced many deaths. In the 1990s, there were two particularly brutal episodes in East Timor. In one of them, “on 12 November 1991 Indonesian forces shot and killed between 100 and 180 East Timorese at a funeral in Santa Cruz Cemetery in Dili” (Cribb 2002, 228). The second episode consisted of a large number of killings and property destruction by pro-Indonesia militia, some allied with the Indonesian military, after East Timor voted for independence in August 1999 (Kammen 2001). Estimates of casualties after the independence vote vary from 1,200 to 1,500. In addition, approximately 550,000 people were forced to migrate.26 It is always hard to estimate the exact magnitude of deaths in civil wars and insurgencies. But we do know that, on the whole, insurgencies tend to be more violent than riots (Kalyvas 2006). According to an admittedly conservative estimate, “a rough estimate for the toll of deadly violence associated with Indonesia’s transition of 1998 is almost 19,000 victims, of which over half died due to communal conflict and most of the remainder in secessionist violence” (van Klinken 2007a, 4). The latter figures could well be higher. Second, as Bertrand (2004) argues, if the post-1998 violence is in large measure, if not entirely, a legacy of the New Order, the question of the formal share of the New Order in the overall collective violence is less important than its role in precipitating as well as perpetrating violence. In other words, the violence of the New Order, analytically

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speaking, did not end with its formal demise in May 1998. Its terrible effects continued even after its death. Disaggregating Violence

Let us now look at some specific features of the overall picture of violence. If we go by categories of violence—ethnocommunal, state versus community, economic, other—a striking finding emerges. Ethnocommunal violence accounts for only 16.6 percent of all incidents of violence, but its share of deaths is almost 89.3 percent. That essentially means that an ethnocommunal form of group violence is not very common in Indonesia, but when it does take place, it is much more deadly than other forms of violence. The incidence of economic and state versus community clashes is not far behind that of ethnocommunal strife, but the magnitude of deaths associated with them is a great deal smaller (Table 2.2). Within the category of ethnocommunal violence, some further distributions are noteworthy. Interreligious violence has caused the largest destruction of lives, followed by interethnic conflict. The three biggest takers of lives in Indonesia are Muslim-Christian, Madurese-Dayak/ Malay,27 and anti-Chinese violence, suggesting that these three have been the greatest cleavages of Indonesian society, at least since 1990 (Table 2.3).28 Two other patterns are noteworthy. While Madurese-Dayak riots, both in their frequency and intensity, were not affected by the end of the Suharto era in 1998 (Figure 2.3), the other two big cleavages show a contrasting pattern. There was very little deadly anti-Chinese violence after the fall of Suharto in 1998 (Figure 2.4)—the major exception being a rather big incident in Riau in February 2001, triggered by a gambling dispute.29 Contrariwise, as Figure 2.5 shows, most of the deadly Muslim-Christian strife took place after 1998. Did Muslim-Christian violence not exist at all before 1998? To be sure, there were many Muslim-Christian clashes before 1998. They have Table 2.2 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003, by Category Category

Deaths

Ethnocommunal State-community Economic Other Total (14 provinces)

9,612 105 78 963 10,758

Percentage 89.3 1.0 0.7 9.0 100.0

Incidents 599 423 444 2,142 3,608

Percentage 16.6 11.7 12.3 59.4 100.0

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38 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 2.3 Distribution of Ethnocommunal Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003

Ethnic Anti-Chinese Madurese-Dayak/Malay Other Religious (Muslim-Christian) Sectarian Intra-Muslim Intra-Christian Total Ethnocommunal Violence

Deaths

Percentage

Incidents

4,122 1,259 2,764 99 5,452 38 38 — 9,612

43 13 29 1 57 0 0 0 100

140 32 70 38 433 26 22 3 599

Percentage 23 5 12 6 72 4 4 1 100

Figure 2.3 Madurese-Dayak/Malay Violence, 1990–2003 Figure 3 Madurese vs. Dayak/Malay Violence, 1990-2003

1,400 1,256 1,200 1,004

Deaths

1,000

800

600 483 400

200 0

0

0

0

0

0

2

0

13

6

0

0 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Year

been recorded in the literature as well as in our dataset, especially the incidents in 1996–1997 in Tasikmalaya (West Java), Banjarmasin (South Kalimantan), Situbondo (East Java), and Ujung Pandang (South Sulawesi).30 Theodore Friend also notes that during 1992–1997, roughly 500 churches, an average of 100 churches a year, were burned (Friend 2003, 299). Muslim-Christian violence before 1998 led to very few deaths, but it inflicted a lot of damage on buildings and property, both private and public. Since 1998, a significantly large loss of lives has been added to the property destruction. Muslim-Christian violence, which

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Figure 2.4 Anti-Chinese Violence, 1990–2003 Figure 4 Anti-Chinese Violence, 1990-2003 1,400 1,228 1,200

Deaths

1,000

800

600

400

200 0

0

0

0

0

7

3

5

0

0

16

0

0

0 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Year

Figure 2.5 Muslim-Christian Violence, 1990–2003 3,500 2,888

3,000

Deaths

Deaths

2,500

2,305

2,000

1,500

1,000 500 171 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

5

0

13

56

14

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 Year

began well before the end of the New Order, is therefore not a post-1998 phenomenon. It simply changed its form after 1998, becoming more fatal. Whether or not Indonesia also had Muslim-Christian violence in the 1970s and 1980s remains unclear. Bertrand (2004) and Robert

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40 Collective Violence in Indonesia Hefner (2000) suggest the possibility that the rise of violence in the 1990s is linked to Suharto’s embrace of Islam and of Muslim intellectuals in the late 1980s. In a similar fashion, one can say that while antiChinese violence has a long tradition in Indonesia (Coppel 1983), its decline after May 1998 may well have something to do with the peculiar position occupied by the Chinese during the New Order. In Anderson’s well-known formulation, the New Order allowed the Chinese to flourish economically, but it politically marginalized them (Anderson 1990).31 We know from the larger comparative literature that such combinations of economic privilege and political marginality make a group extremely vulnerable: their riches are resented, but they have no political, legal, or institutional protection when resentments against their riches rise. Structural ambivalences of this kind have often been associated with explosive violence in several parts of the world: other than the Chinese under the New Order, the Indians in East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s are a case in point. While it would be foolhardy to predict that anti-Chinese violence has come to an end, the possibility that the end of a political system that gave the Chinese such an ambivalent position in the structure of political power and economic privilege has something to do with the recent decline is sufficiently analytically intriguing to require further thought.32 Provincial Distribution of Violence

The provincial distribution of group violence in Indonesia has two notable features. First, in terms of deaths, as is well known, North Maluku, Maluku, Jakarta, and West and Central Kalimantan have been the worst provinces, but it is less well known that these are not the provinces with the highest number of incidents (Table 2.4). Java has the highest number of incidents, mostly small. Java appears to have much more routine group violence than any other part of Indonesia. This may, in part, be construed as an artifact of Java’s size, which accounts for roughly 40 percent of Indonesia’s total population. However, it should be noted that a bigger province could well be more peaceful than a smaller one. Though elsewhere town size appears to have a positive relationship with violence (Varshney 2002), we have no theory or evidence to conclude that province size and violence are integrally connected. Second, as Table 2.5 shows, of all provinces, Java also has the largest number of incidents falling in the “Other” category (69.9 percent). The sheer size of a residual category in the Javanese case requires that we break it up and look inside. The three largest subcategories in

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Table 2.4 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003: Provincial Distribution Database II Province

Deaths

Percentage

North Maluku Maluku West Kalimantan Jakarta Central Kalimantan Central Sulawesi West Java East Java Central Java South Sulawesi West Nusatenggara Riau East Nusatenggara Banten Total

2,794 2,046 1,515 1,322 1,284 669 256 254 165 118 109 100 89 37 10,758

25.0 18.3 13.6 11.8 11.5 6.0 2.3 2.3 1.5 1.1 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.3 96.4

Incidents 72 332 78 178 62 101 871 655 506 223 198 165 55 112 3,608

Percentage 1.7 7.8 1.8 4.2 1.5 2.4 20.4 15.3 11.9 5.2 4.6 3.9 1.3 2.6 84.5

Table 2.5 Collective Violence in Java, 1990–2003 Category Ethnocommunal State-community Economic Other Dukun santet Intergroup/ intervillage brawls “Popular justice” Total

Deaths

Percentage

Incidents

Percentage

1,247 54 24 709 256 176

61.3 2.7 1.2 34.9 12.6 8.7

54 282 362 1,624 200 478

2.3 12.1 15.6 69.9 8.6 20.6

147 2,034

7.2 100

448 2,322

19.3 100

terms of death and incidents are dukun santet (killings of persons who allegedly practice santet/black magic), intervillage or intergroup brawls, and vigilante killings (called “popular justice” killings in our database). Indeed, if we wish to identify the routine forms of conflict in Java, another exercise seems to be necessary. We know that in terms of deaths, most ethnocommunal violence in Java took place in one week in May 1998, so to get more normal patterns of violence, we may wish to leave out the May 1998 incidents of Jakarta and Solo altogether. We do so in Table 2.6. Java’s primary everyday conflicts are not ethno-

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42 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 2.6 Collective Violence in Java, Excluding May 1998 Anti-Chinese Riots in Jakarta and Solo, 1990–2003 Category Ethnocommunal State-community Economic Other Dukun santet Intergroup/ intervillage brawls “Popular justice” Total

Deaths

Percentage

Incidents

Percentage

26 54 24 709 256 176

3 7 3 87 31 22

52 282 362 1,624 200 478

2 12 16 70 9 21

147 813

18 100

448 2,320

19 100

communal but are centered on santet, intergroup/intervillage brawls, and vigilante justice, accounting for 87 percent of all deaths. Indeed, if we treat santet killings as part of vigilante (or “popular justice”) violence—in that the person allegedly practicing black magic is killed by a group for bringing undue harm—then the share of vigilantism is even higher. In the existing accounts of group conflict in Java, the anti-Chinese violence and Muslim-Christian clashes, especially in 1995–1997, have dominated the discussion (Purdey 2006a: Mas’oed, Maksum, and Soehadha 2000; Sidel 2006). In Java, both of these conflicts, while fatal in a big way, are primarily episodic in nature, whereas santet, vigilantism, and intervillage and intergroup brawls are the routine forms of group violence. Given our earlier analysis, these conclusions also apply to Indonesia in general. Ethnocommunal violence is deadly, but episodic. District-Level Distribution of Violence

Disaggregating the results further, and going down to the district/city (kabupaten/kota) level, generates the most analytically intriguing finding of our statistical exercise. Fifteen districts and cities, holding a mere 6.5 percent of the population in 2000, had 85.5 percent of all deaths (Table 2.7). Fatal group violence in Indonesia is thus highly locally concentrated. Smaller acts of violence may be widespread, as is true in many parts of the world, but large-scale collective violence is not. This result is consistent with data on group violence in several other parts of the world: Africa (Fearon and Laitin 1996), Hindu-Muslim conflict in countries such as India (Varshney 2002), racial violence in the United

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Table 2.7 Collective Violence in Indonesia, 1990–2003: Distribution by Kabupaten/Kota Deaths

Population (2000)

Total

Percentage

Total

Percentage

11,160 10,758 2,410 1,322 1,229 1,097 655 632 455 428 425 311 168 149 132 73 59 9,545 1,615

100.0 96.4 21.6 11.8 11.0 9.8 5.9 5.7 4.1 3.8 3.8 2.8 1.5 1.3 1.2 0.7 0.5 85.5 14.5

4,270 3,608 60 178 24 190 32 115 4 16 8 6 12 15 19 6 5 690 3,580

100.0 84.5 1.4 4.2 0.6 4.4 0.7 2.7 0.1 0.4 0.2 0.1 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.1 0.1 16.2 83.8

206,264,595 149,309,365 432,295 8,389,443 526,556 190,511 210,780 523,122 556,684 454,449 631,773 147,509 186,922 111,385 328,379 152,649 508,676 13,351,133 192,913,462

100.0 72.4 0.2 4.1 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.2 6.5 93.5

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Percentage

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Indonesia Total 14 Provinces 1 Maluku Utara 2 Jakarta (5 districts) 3 Kotawaringin Timur 4 Kota Ambon 5 Poso 6 Maluku Tengah 7 Landak 8 Sambas 9 Pontianak 10 Halmahera Tengah 11 Maluku Tenggara 12 Buru 13 Bengkayang 14 Kota Ternate 15 Sanggau Total 15 districts Others

Incidents

Note: These data refer to conditions in 2000. The districts of North Maluku, Halmahera Tengah, Maluku Tengah, and Kotawaringin Timur have since split due to the formation of new districts.

43

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44 Collective Violence in Indonesia States in the 1960s (Horowitz 1983), Protestant-Christian violence in Northern Ireland (Poole 1990). If we place the districtwise disaggregation in Table 2.7 against the backdrop of Figure 2.2, two features of Indonesia’s violence stand out: its remarkable geographical variation and its temporal concentration around the end of the New Order. This juxtaposition suggests an important conclusion. The notion of “critical junctures”—the decline and end of the New Order—is of great significance in terms of timing, but this systemic transformation did not produce collective violence everywhere.33 Group violence had local theaters. Some of the local questions that need to be explored systematically are: how the New Order upset a traditional local equilibrium of communities—communities rooted in traditional (adat) forms of governance—in the process of installing uniform, all-Indonesia forms of local institutions; how migration altered local equilibria; whether different ethnic or religious communities are integrated or segregated in different local settings; how the patterns of local governance have vastly varied; and how economic penetration of previously self-sufficient communities led to dramatically new results, marginalizing some communities and privileging others.

Conclusion By way of conclusion, let us recapitulate the three larger findings of our dataset. First, to call the late New Order a peaceful period in Indonesia’s recent history is essentially incorrect. The New Order was at its heart an intrinsically violent system. The state used violence with impunity to impose stability. Violence between groups may have been lower before 1998 than after the end of the New Order, but state-perpetrated violence was substantial. Second, ethnocommunal violence was not a common form of violence in Indonesia during this period, but when it took place, it took many more lives than the more routine forms of violence, such as lynching. Third, contrary to popular conception, large-scale collective violence in Indonesia is not widespread. Such violence has high local concentrations. The fall of the New Order did lead to high degrees of violence, but many parts of the country were left untouched. The dogs that did not bark simply escaped the attention of the press, the activists, and the intelligentsia, distorting the picture of violence considerably. For an adequate understanding of group violence in Indonesia, attention needs to be paid not simply to national-level factors, such as the changing for-

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tunes of the New Order and the changing political dynamics at the national level, but also to local-level factors. Appendix 2.1 Template for Recording Each Incident of Collective Violence Record: Province: Kab./Kota: Subdistrict: Coding issues: Date: Killed: Arrests: Houses: Source: Coding issues 2: Category: Coding issues 3: Reported Cause: Local precipitating event: Militia involvement: Related to migration issue: Link with outside event: Types of arms used: Coding issues 4: Security reaction Fire shots: Arrests made: Prosecution: Conviction: Coding issues 4:

serial number text text text yes/no date number number number text yes/no text yes/no text text

Village: Neighborhood: Rural/Urban:

text text rural or urban

Duration in days: Injured: Shops: Public buildings: Source date:

number number number number dates

Subcategory 1: Subcategory 2:

text text

yes/no yes/no text text yes/no yes/no yes/no yes/no yes/no yes/no

Policing arrangement Police deployed: yes/no Army deployed: yes/no Other security yes/no forces deployed:

Narrative: Summary of incident (story) and explanation for coding issues

Appendix 2.2 Categories of Collective Violence 1. Ethnocommunal Subcategory 1 • Ethncommunal/ethnic • Ethnocommunal/religious • Ethnocommunal/sectarian 2. Separatist 3. State-community

Subcategory 2 (Anti-Chinese, Madurese-DayakMadurese-Malay, etc.) (Muslim-Christian, etc.) (Intra-Muslim, Intra-Christian, etc.)

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46 Collective Violence in Indonesia 4. Economic Subcategory 1 • Economic/land base • Economic/industrial relation • Economic/natural resources • Economic/others 5. Others Subcategory 1 • Others/dukun santet • Others/political parties and factions • Others/intergroup/village brawls • Others/terrorist violence • Others/“popular justice” • Others/between state agencies • Others/others

Notes For comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, we are grateful to Benedict Anderson, Hans Antlov, Patrick Barron, Jacques Bertrand, Harold Crouch, Jamie Davidson, Stephan Haggard, Allen Hicken, Donald Horowitz, Sidney Jones, Stathis Kalyvas, Webb Keane, Gerry van Klinken, Bill Liddle, Michael Malley, Satish Mishra, John Sidel, and anonymous referees. The errors that remain are ours. The funding for the construction of the database on which this chapter is based came primarily from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Jakarta. The grant was made to the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), which was our institutional base for the work. Part of the funding also came from the Open Society Institute and Ford Foundation. 1. Center for Global Development (2004, 7). This report was produced by a commission headed by two US members of Congress. It led to many articles in the press, including Martin Wolf (2004). It should be clarified that though most scholars of Indonesia did not identify with this characterization, some went even further, contemplating the imminent disintegration of the country. A leading historian of Indonesia wrote: “The Indonesian experiment . . . is under challenge today as never before, and all over the Asia-Pacific region defense analysts are pondering the question of whether the early 21st century will see the disintegration of Indonesia in the way that the late 20th century saw the disintegration of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. For the first time since the Second World War, there is a serious possibility that the extended archipelago . . . could be divided not into five or six states . . . but into a dozen or more” (Robert Cribb cited in Emmerson 2005, 26). For the debate about Indonesia’s territorial and national integrity in general, see the extensive discussion in Emmerson (2005). 2. There are two other datasets available. The first was based on an Indonesian government survey, PODES, for 2003 only, when questions about

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conflict were first asked by the government (Barron, Kaiser, and Pradhan 2004). The second dataset, created by the World Bank and based on the reading of local newspapers, focuses on fourteen districts in two provinces, East Java and Nusa Tenggara Timor, for 2001–2003 (Barron and Sharpe in this volume). Due to the number of years, the geographical areas, and the type of conflicts covered, there are important differences among the three datasets. That is why they do not answer the same questions equally well and are usable in quite different ways. 3. The World Bank dataset contains individual-on-individual violence as well. 4. For a whole variety of logistical reasons, we were also unable to cover East Timor, where an insurgency raged at varying levels of intensity between 1975 and 1999. 5. However, some of the major episodes of violence after 1998 have been well covered. In particular, the studies sponsored by the Human Rights Watch and the International Crisis Group give us valuable information. See also Davidson (2008), Purdey (2006a), Sidel (2006), van Klinken (2007a), and Wilson (2008). 6. Anderson presents a different view: “It is telling that the largestcirculation newspapers in Jakarta under the Suharto regime were controlled by Catholics and Protestants: the most easily intimidated and therefore the most tolerated. It was not long before the obsequious Catholic Kompas was quietly mocked as Kempes (flat, like a tire), and the Protestant Sinar Harapan (Light of Hope) as Sirna Harapan (all hope is gone)” (Anderson 2008, 49). 7. In commenting on our earlier draft, William Liddle questioned the reliability of provincial newspapers, citing their lower-quality staff, but Benedict Anderson argued that provincial newspapers were more reliable than their capital city counterparts on provincial matters. To quote Anderson, “Jakarta newspapers and TV have a deep-seated problem. This is that it is in the nature of these ‘national’ media to think that if they report something in the provinces it should have ‘national significance.’ Some boys fighting over girls in Mataram will not be mentioned by them, even if it leads to deaths, unless it can be said to be a ‘sign’ of something national. . . . That is why they do such a bad job of regional reporting” (Anderson, personal communication). Indonesia is, of course, not the only country where such scholarly differences on the reliability of newspapers exist. Be that as it may, it is best not to judge this matter theoretically but have empirical research address it. That is what we do later, starting with a conceptual conjecture. 8. The distinction between authoritarianism and totalitarianism was underlined by Kirkpatrick (1982). 9. Also, the early 1990s witnessed what came to be known as a period of relative openness, keterbukaan. This period came to an end in June 1994, when three major newspapers and magazines (Tempo, Editor, and Detik) were closed down after they reported disagreements at the highest echelons of government on policy (Bertrand 2004, 444). 10. These interviews were conducted in the Jakarta headquarters of the Kompas group of newspapers in December 2002.

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48 Collective Violence in Indonesia 11. Steven Wilkinson and one of us (Varshney) have created a dataset on Hindu-Muslim riots in India (1950–1995). It is publicly available at the InterUniversity Consortium on Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Ann Arbor, Michigan, http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-STUDY/04342.xml (Varshney and Wilkinson, 2005). 12. Consider an example. If in 80 percent of the incidents only one person per incident is killed, but in the remaining 20 percent of incidents, thirty (or more) people per incident are killed, then in the final tally, assuming an average of thirty deaths per big incident, the smaller incidents will account for a little over 10 percent of all deaths (80 in total of 680). However, if lynchings are as common as suggested by Welsh (in this volume), this conclusion, generally true in many parts of the world, may have to be modified for Indonesia. 13. The number of provinces has gone up since then. 14. In situations where the ethnic and religious classifications coincide, this procedure does create some obvious issues for resolution. When churches were attacked in Java during 1995–1997, was it a case of anti-Christian rioting or anti-Chinese rioting? There is a huge intersection between these two categories—Christian and Chinese—as also between Pribumi and Muslim, on Java island. Such problems can only be resolved through careful case studies. Until such time as that has been satisfactorily done, we should stick to the idea of forms of violence as a basis for initial classification. An attack on a church would be a sign of religious violence, not ethnic violence, until proven otherwise. For thoughts on the Chinese-Christian conflation on Java, see Sidel (2006). 15. Was it a small wound or a big one? Was someone incapacitated? Did the injury have serious psychological consequences? Until one can specify the nature of injury, the data on injury are not strictly comparable across cases, apart from being less meticulously collected. 16. People can be badly or mildly injured, but they cannot be a half or a quarter dead. 17. In other words, professional social scientists cannot promise the truth, but they can provide their best estimation of it. The situation is akin to what happens in a court of law. Only that claim is accepted that can be proved with evidence, even if the truth is different. 18. A fourth important theory is that the decentralization of governmental powers announced in 1999 led to large-scale communal violence (van Klinken, 2007a). Our dataset does show that violence reached its peak in 1999, but whether it can be causally linked to decentralization is something the dataset cannot test for. To test the theory, we will need, at the very least, a great deal of information on when decentralization was implemented in which parts of Indonesia. 19. The essays in Anderson (2001) provide further illustrations of violence in the 1980s. 20. East Timor’s Truth Commission finds 100,000 deaths as the more plausible figure. See Roosa (2007–2008). 21. Liddle (1997) argues that state coercion, persuasion, and exchange constituted the foundations of the New Order, not coercion alone.

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22. See, for example, Ryter (2001) and Kammen (2001). 23. For a fuller development of the idea of sparks and fires in ethnic violence, see Varshney and Gubler (2008). 24. It turns out that even for the island of Java, Kompas has seriously underreported violence. From the perspective of conflict, if not for other subjects, Kompas should be basically viewed as a newspaper covering Jakarta well. That is why only for 1998 did the two datasets come close on deaths: an overwhelming proportion of group violence took place in Jakarta that year. Whenever Jakarta’s proportions were lower in the total violence, the differences between the two databases were large. The other use of Kompas is as a supplementary check for very big incidents, such as those in Maluku or Kalimantan, if the regional newspapers do not have full archives or clear reporting and the incident was large enough to be treated as something of national significance. This is especially relevant to Maluku, where after January 1999, the local press ceased to be neutral and newspapers became either Christian newspapers (for example, Suara Maluku) or Muslim newspapers (for example, Ambon Ekspres, which was born in June 1999 after Muslims of Ambon realized that they needed a paper to represent their concerns). 25. For a comprehensive treatment of the 1996–1997 Madurese-Dayak violence, see Peluso and Harwell (2001) and Davidson (2008). For a comparison of East Kalimantan’s peace and Central Kalimantan’s violence, see van Klinken (2002). 26. As cited in Webster (2007–2008, 589). These estimates are based on East Timor’s Truth Commission report. See also Roosa (2007–2008). 27. For how Malays got involved in what was essentially a MadureseDayak conflict, see Davidson (2008). 28. It should be noted that during the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta in May 1998, many non-Chinese, trapped in malls, were killed. Thus, the reported number of those killed in May 1998 here includes both Pribumi and Chinese. By anti-Chinese riots, we do not mean that all those killed were Chinese. For details, see Purdey (2006a). 29. In Selat Panjang. Based on Riau Post, February 11, 2001, we can say that after a gambling dispute, many Chinese houses were burned and many Chinese killed. Our estimate is sixteen deaths. Hundreds of Chinese fled to Karimun island. The city of Selat Panjang was “dead for ten days” due to the destruction caused. 30. Mas’oed, Maksum, and Soehadha (2000). This research effort was led by Loekman Soetrisno at the Gajah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Also see Sidel (2006). 31. Anderson (2008) provides further reflections on this formulation. 32. For the most detailed account of anti-Chinese violence during 1996– 1999 and the legal changes in the position of the Chinese since 2000, see Purdey (2006a). 33. See also Bertrand (in this volume).

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3 Conflict in Post-Suharto Indonesia: What Local Newspapers Tell Us Patrick Barron and Joanne Sharpe

Responding to conflict in Indonesia requires an understanding of its

distribution, forms, and impacts. The fall of Suharto’s New Order government in 1998 was accompanied by an upsurge in violent unrest, including interethnic and interreligious communal conflict, violent local conflict, and a reenergizing of old center-periphery struggles. A rich literature on Indonesian conflict has developed, with case studies and cross-case volumes (Bertrand 2004; Sidel 2006; van Klinken 2007a) being joined recently by a small number of large-n quantitative studies. Yet limitations to the comparability of data across time and space, and limitations to the definitions of violence used, have meant that key questions on the levels, forms, impacts, and causes of the various forms of violence, and the ways such forms are related, remain unanswered. This chapter is part of an emerging literature that seeks to understand conflict through the compilation and analysis of datasets that record conflict incidents reported in newspapers (see also Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean, and Welsh in this book). The Varshney study, which was commissioned by the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), tracks communal conflicts in fourteen provinces over the 1990–2003 period and offers the most accurate empirical picture of conflict’s impacts in Indonesia to date. However, the extent to which the data can be used to understand variations in conflict forms is restricted by its use of national- and provincial-level newspapers that are several steps removed from the localities where conflicts have actually taken place, and by its almost exclusive focus on larger-scale, group-based violence. Welsh’s study focuses on vigilante violence between 1995 and 2004 in four provinces. Yet its focus on one particular type of violence precludes analysis of what it is that drives different kinds 51

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52 Collective Violence in Indonesia of conflict from one area to another. This chapter describes an attempt to use local newspaper monitoring in two provinces (East Java and NTT) to track the incidence of violent conflict, including localized interpersonal forms; to show how different forms have different impacts; and to assess sources of variation. There are a number of key findings. First, the scale of violent conflict impacts is greater than previous estimates. We find levels of deaths from collective violence over three times that of the UNSFIR dataset. These figures still underreport conflict impacts because they exclude disputes between individuals, which are often a precursor to or symptom of large intergroup conflicts. Our dataset allows for analysis of such cases; if we include these incidents in a wider definition of conflict, the number of deaths doubles again and puts our estimates of conflict fatalities at over six times those of previous studies. We make a case for why such incidents should be included when mapping conflicts. Second, our data show that violent conflict incidence and impacts are more widely distributed than previously thought. The UNSFIR study showed deaths from collective violence as being concentrated in just fifteen Indonesian districts. We show significant impacts of violence in areas not previously considered conflict-prone. Third, our data show that forms of conflict vary from area to area and that these different forms result in differential impacts. Variations in conflict form and impacts necessitate consideration of the role of local factors in driving conflicts and suggest that approaches must be tailored to local conditions. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of using local newspapers to understand conflict in Indonesia. The use of subprovincial news sources captures more accurate estimates of conflict impacts than other methods such as provincial newspaper mapping or surveying. It can also provide a basis for a deeper understanding of variations in patterns of conflict across areas and provide insights into how we might respond to them. The chapter comprises four sections. First, we briefly outline our method. Second, we examine the results from our study and compare them with the UNSFIR dataset; this involves a discussion of what incidents we should include when “counting conflicts.” Third, we examine in more depth the data from our two provinces and consider explanations for variations in the forms and impacts of conflict. We conclude the article by considering the utility of local newspaper mapping and reflecting briefly on what our results tell us about conflict in Indonesia and how to address it.

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Methods Recent years have seen increasing efforts to construct quantitative datasets to evaluate conflict patterns and trends and potential causal factors. Initially these datasets focused on cross-country analysis of factors that explain whether countries experienced civil war or international conflict (Singer 1990; Wallensteen and Sollenburg 1998; Gurr, Marshall, and Khosla 2001; World Bank 2003). Over time, surveys have been used to construct subnational measures of conflict and to use the resulting data to explain intracountry variation through multivariate analysis (see Justino 2005 for India; Barron, Kaiser, and Pradhan 2004 for Indonesia; and Kalyvas 2008 for an overview of this literature). The development of such datasets and analyses is welcome. However, surveys run the risk of significant underreporting because of disincentives against highlighting what is usually seen as a negative phenomenon; also problematic is ensuring that all respondents understand what should be reported and what should not. At the same time, efforts have been made to use systematic recording and analysis of newspaper articles to examine patterns of conflict. Most influential has been the work of Ashutosh Varshney, who created a large-n dataset to measure trends in violent conflict in postindependence India (Varshney 2002; Wilkinson 2004). This work provided the inspiration for UNSFIR, which developed two national datasets for Indonesian conflict; the second dataset (UNSFIR-2), which improved on the first by using provincial as well as national news sources, estimated 10,700 deaths in the 1990–2003 period (Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean 2008).1 While this dataset is currently the most comprehensive available on collective violence in Indonesia, it is not without weaknesses. First, the data showed violence impacts as being highly concentrated in fifteen districts. Yet a number of other studies have pointed to the prevalence of deadly violence in other parts of the country. The government’s Potensi Desa (PODES) survey, which was conducted in 2003, found that 7.2 percent of villages had experienced conflict in the previous year, with conflict spread across the archipelago (Barron, Kaiser, and Pradhan 2004). More ethnographic studies backed up these findings, showing high levels of violence in a range of areas previously thought to be “nonconflict.” For example, fieldwork conducted in Lampung in southern Sumatra, a province not included in the second UNSFIR dataset, found high levels of violence, including the burning of villages, large-scale land disputes, and widespread vigilante lynchings (Barron and Madden 2004; Tajima 2004, Tajima, in this vol-

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54 Collective Violence in Indonesia ume). Other studies in areas such as Sumba (Vel 2001), which was included in UNSFIR-2 but for which significant impacts were not found, showed similar patterns. Studies by the International Crisis Group (2002, 2003a, 2003b) have also highlighted the problem of conflict and its impacts in Flores, South Sulawesi, Bali, and Lombok. That such outbursts of violence did not always make the news pages of provincial papers was not surprising. Many of the cases were in remote areas, where provincial newspapers often give priority to “interesting stories” (popular entertainment, political scandal, and the like) over harder news. In particular, interviews conducted with journalists as part of this study showed that where violence was recurrent, but where each incident was relatively small-scale, cases were unlikely to be reported in provincial papers (Barron and Sharpe 2005). There are also indications that the costs of conflict were higher than the UNSFIR data suggested. PODES, for example, recorded 4,869 deaths and 9,832 injuries for 2002 only; this was almost half as many deaths as UNSFIR-2 had recorded for a thirteen-year time period. Third, the field-based studies suggested that the full spectrum of significant violent conflict forms were not included in the UNSFIR dataset, in large part because of its exclusive concentation on incidents of collective violence, excluding violence between individuals. Our fieldwork showed that in places like Lampung, many of the violent incidents involved only individuals, yet they were manifestations of broader dynamics of intergroup contention. As we argue here, limiting the definition of conflict to intergroup disputes not only results in lower reported violence impacts but also negates a fuller examination of the myriad forms that violence can take and the links between such forms. As a result, we decided to put together a new dataset. Our approach builds on that of Varshney and his colleagues. However, it differs in a number of key respects. First, where possible, we used subprovincial newspapers, each covering a small number of districts, which we hypothesized would more accurately cover local conflict incidents.2 Second, we included conflict between individuals in our data. We make the case for such decisions in the next section. The downside of improving data accuracy and breadth was that for obvious reasons our geographic and temporal scope was more limited. Whereas UNSFIR-1 (using national papers) covered all of Indonesia, and UNSFIR-2 (using provincial sources) covered fourteen provinces, we limited our data collection to twelve districts in two provinces and to three years (2001–2003). This means that we cannot answer some of the questions the UNSFIR datasets address related to temporal variation.

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Our provinces of choice were East Java and NTT. These were selected for a number of reasons. First, while neither province has experienced unrest on the scale of Indonesia’s highest-conflict provinces— such as Maluku, Central Sulawesi, and Aceh—interviews with key informants in Jakarta and the provinces indicate that both areas frequently have significant levels of violent conflict. Second, to assess the commonalities, or differences, of conflict forms and impacts, we chose the provinces to be as different as possible, varying in population size, degree of ethnic homogeneity, dominant religious group, and level of provincial development. In East Java, newspaper data were collected on two clusters of districts (four districts on the island of Madura, the “Pamekasan cluster”; and three in the northeast of the province, the “Ponorogo cluster”). In NTT, data were collected on all five districts on the island of Flores. Data were gathered by two teams of researchers using seven local newspaper sources.3 Using a standardized set of codes and a standardized template, researchers collected and coded (by conflict type, location, impacts, actors, and interveners) every reported incident of conflict, using Louis Coser’s (1956) classic definition. These codes were guided by conflict typologies developed iteratively from and for use in a broader study for which our newspaper data collection was one part. The larger study examined the trajectories of local conflict and factors determining differential outcomes: violent or not. It then sought to see how a major World Bank community development project (the Kecamatan Development Program) affected such pathways and outcomes (Barron, Diprose, and Woolcock 2006). A team of twelve local researchers conducted six months of ethnographic fieldwork in the research areas, where they tracked conflicts in forty-one villages and developed approximately seventy conflict case studies. We were able to cross-check the findings from the newspaper datasets with evidence from the qualitative fieldwork, giving us a deeper understanding of the processes driving the main forms of conflicts in the dataset. We utilize the field evidence when looking more closely at different conflict forms in a later section. Conflict incidents were assigned one of five main conflict types (Table 3.1). Within each type, coding of a number of subtypes allowed for more precise analysis. The resulting data (the Kecamatan Development Program [KDP] and Community Conflict Negotiation [CCN] dataset), while limited to only two provinces and three years, provide an empirical base on which to test some of the assertions of Varshney and his colleagues—in particular the cumulative impacts of conflict in post-Suharto Indonesia and

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56 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 3.1 Primary Violent Conflict Types Physical resources Administrative

Political position and influence Vigilantism and retribution Other

Disputes over ownership, access to, and use of resources (natural or man-made; private, public, or communal) Disputes over management/procedure/service provision of government or donor-funded programs and public or private enterprises Competition over political power in state/nonstate, village/district level positions (usually relating to elections and political appointments) “Mob justice” or lynchings; violence motivated by revenge Residual conflicts not described by other categories (primarily domestic violence and other intrafamily disputes)

its distribution across areas. In the next section, we consider insights from the new dataset in relation to these questions. We then look closer at the distribution of conflict forms and their impacts as a starting point for assessing questions of causality and suitable responses.

Impacts and Distribution of Conflict in Indonesia: Insights from the Dataset Across the twelve districts studied, we recorded 275 deaths in the 2001–2003 period: 158 in the districts in East Java; 117 in the districts in NTT. How do these compare with the UNSFIR estimates? And what does this tell us about the scale and distribution of conflict in Indonesia? The Scope and Scale of Violence: Comparing the UNSFIR and KDP/CCN Datasets

In order to compare our data with those of UNSFIR it is necessary to ensure that the definition of what is included and what is not is consistent across datasets. The death totals cited in our dataset include all conflicts with fatalities, including those from disputes between individuals; the UNSFIR study records only incidents of collective violence except in cases where individual violence triggered a larger group clash. As such, it is not surprising that we found higher conflict impacts. However, as Figure 3.1 shows, even if we exclude incidents in our dataset that do not fall under the UNSFIR definition, we still find over three times as many deaths in our research areas as does the UNSFIR dataset. Indeed, further comparative analysis of the data reveals the extent to which the number of deaths reported in UNSFIR is significantly

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Figure 3.1 Deaths from Collective Conflict by Province, 2001–2003

90 80 70 60 50

KDP&CCN KDP/CCN UNSFIR UNSFIR-22

40 30 20 10 0 East Java

NTT

Sources: UNSFIR-2; KDP/CCN. Note: Data for our twelve districts.

lower than the number our method revealed. UNSFIR recorded 254 deaths in all of East Java over a thirteen-year period (1990–2003), only three times the number of deaths from collective violence that we recorded, despite the fact that the UNSFIR time period was over four times as long and we covered only seven out of thirty-seven districts, accounting for around 15 percent of the provincial population. More startlingly, UNSFIR picked up only eighty-nine deaths from collective violence over the fourteen-year period in all of NTT, only slightly more than we found on Flores alone, which accounts for 42 percent of the provincial population, in just three years. A number of conclusions can be drawn. The first is methodological. The provincial sources we used picked up only 39 percent of deaths from group violence in our research areas. It is clear that it is necessary to use local news sources to more accurately capture deaths from collective violence.4 There are also important implications for understanding the scale and scope of collective violence in Indonesia. The UNSFIR dataset se-

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58 Collective Violence in Indonesia verely underestimates the impacts associated with this type of violence. We can only show that this is the case for the twelve districts covered by our data. Yet the anecdotal and case study evidence, some of which we have cited, and the quantitative evidence from the PODES survey would suggest that the impacts of collective violence may also be seriously underreported in other provinces. The factor by which conflict goes uncounted is unlikely to be constant, so it is not possible from our limited data to project a more accurate death toll from conflict across Indonesia. Nevertheless, we recorded 111 extra deaths from collective violence in only twelve districts over just a three-year period, with none of our districts chosen because of an expectation that they were particularly conflict-affected. Indonesia has over 400 districts. We can safely assume that the UNSFIR data missed thousands of deaths from collective violence. A third related conclusion concerns the distribution of collective violence across the country. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean (2008) argue that group violence is not as widely spread in Indonesia as commonly thought: 85.5 percent of deaths occur in just fifteen districts containing 6.5 percent of the country’s population. Our data also show that there is significant variation between districts: four districts record twenty or more deaths each over the three-year period, with four recording two or less (Table 3.2). The number of deaths per 100,000 persons ranges from one or less in three East Javanese districts to eight in three NTT districts. Yet our data show significant impacts from collective violence in districts that UNSFIR did not find to be particularly conflict-prone, suggesting that violence is distributed more widely across Indonesia. If this is the case, causal explanations and planned responses must be adjusted. Including Incidents Involving Individuals?

The preceding analysis compares only deaths from collective violence, defined as conflict incidents that involve a group on at least one side. However, we also collected data on a range of conflict incidents involving only individuals. The use of a wider definition of violent conflict is justified theoretically and has practical application. In the Indonesian context, while many violent incidents are between individuals, closer examination reveals that many of these “individual conflicts” have a group basis. In order to understand the nature and extent of violent conflict in Indonesia, it is also necessary to consider such incidents.

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Table 3.2 Deaths from Collective Conflict by District, 2001–2003: Comparison of UNSFIR-2 and KDP/CCN

Ponorogo Madiun Magetan Sumenep Bangkalan Sampang Pamekasan Total East Java Manggarai Ngada Ende Sikka Flores Timur Total NTT

UNSFIR-2

KDP/CCN (excluding individualindividual incidents)

2 3 3 2 3 9 1 23 16 0 4 0 2 22

2 7 2 20 24 22 6 83 46 2 10 1 14 73

KDP/CCN (all incidents) 4 11 9 34 45 38 17 158 52 7 15 21 22 117

Sources: UNSFIR-2; KDP/CCN.

The classic criminology literature, and much written in the conflict studies field, has sought to erect boundaries between the notion of crime and conflict. The former is viewed as being executed by individuals (sometimes organized), while conflicts are usually defined in communal/group terms. Since crime and collective conflict are different sociological entities—with presumably different root causes and sets of actors—some have argued that it does not make sense to consider both within one study (Bertrand, in this volume). Yet there are considerable theoretical weaknesses to this dichotomy. Using the presence of a group actor as a proxy for conflict (as opposed to crime) is problematic because it conflates the parties to the violent incident with the nature of the contestation: whose interests are involved, and to what extent the groups’ identities or goals are implicated. Violent incidents are often manifestations of deeper underlying processes of contention. While particular cases of violence may involve only individuals, they may stem from deeper-rooted intergroup struggles over material and political resources. Figure 3.2 illustrates with examples of how analytically distinguishing between the nature of the conflict and the parties involved in a specific incident creates a typology of criminal/conflictual forms.

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60 Collective Violence in Indonesia Figure 3.2 Typology of Forms of Conflict/Crime Nature of conflict Interpersonal Parties involved in the violent incident

Group

Individual participants on both sides

Two people fight over a debt = individual expression of interpersonal conflict

A local kills a transmigrant = dyadic expression of group conflict

Multiple participants on at least one side

Individual hires thugs to beat another individual = act committed by a group

Interethnic riot = mass expression of group conflict

Which kinds of disputes should be included in a dataset of conflict in Indonesia? UNSFIR focuses primarily on those disputes in the bottom right-hand box—communal clashes—and to a lesser extent on those in the bottom left-hand box. The former are the most visible expressions of violence and tend to have the largest impacts. The defining criterion for inclusion is the nature of the parties involved (groups) rather than the underlying driver of contestation. Incidents in the top row (between two individuals) are excluded, except where they can be shown to have led to broader intergroup disputes. Because it is often difficult to determine from newspaper reports how such incidents are linked, very few of these made it into the UNSFIR dataset. By contrast, our research uses the nature of the conflict as a criterion for an incident’s inclusion in the dataset. As such, we include disputes in the bottom left-hand box as well as those in the two right-hand boxes.5 Should cases in the top row be included? Many would argue that those in the top left-hand box should not be: they are purely interpersonal—between individuals concerning individual interests. While many have made the point that these are also a form of conflict (Kreisberg 2003; Burton 1987; Fisher and Ury 1981; Hill 1982), they are clearly of a different nature from the broader intergroup disputes on which the conflict literature has focused. However, the inclusion of only cases involving at least one group, or cases where individual disputes can be shown to have directly triggered larger-scale violence, misses an important category of conflicts: violent incidents that only directly involve individuals, but in which group identities are implicated (those in the top right-hand box). In the Indonesian case, and presumably elsewhere, these disputes are important manifestations of broader intergroup dynamics of contestation.

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It is useful to draw on a few examples to illustrate. The fight between ethnically Ambonese and Bugis individuals in a bus station, which is said to have sparked the January 19, 1999, riots in Maluku, is a classic case of intergroup conflict expressed as a clash of individuals. This case is presumably included in the UNSFIR dataset, because the line of causality is fairly clear. Many of the cases of conflict we mapped in NTT and East Java involving disputes between individuals did not directly lead to outbursts of communal conflict but were nevertheless driven by communal identities. For example, many of the land disputes in NTT involved individuals. However, our ethnographic tracing of the cases showed that disputants attached importance to the land primarily because it was significant to the identity of their tribal group; economically, often land was almost worthless (Clark 2005; Gibson and Woolcock 2005). Similarly, in Pamekasan on Madura island in East Java, many of the recorded disputes were traditional carok duels. Such cases occur when a Madurese feels he has been insulted and the honor of his family called into question (Wiyata 2002). In Madiun, simply being a member of a rival martial arts gang is an invitation to personal violence. These cases are between individuals, yet they are expressions of offense to a group-based identity—be it the tribe, the gang, or the family. It is unlikely that such cases would be included in UNSFIR. A practical case can also be made for including violence between individuals, especially that which appears to be grounded in intergroup dynamics. Cumulatively, as we have already noted, such incidents have serious impacts: direct, in the form of deaths, injuries, and property damage, but also indirect, in their impact on social relations and economic production. Knowledge of the distribution of such incidents is important for those seeking to design measures to improve human security and social cohesion, which are fundamental for development. Including such incidents also provides a basis for understanding processes of conflict escalation. Conflict is cyclical; motivations for violence are grounded in the history of conflict in a particular area. There is a real need to understand the processes at work in the retaliatory cycles, which turn isolated—and relatively small-scale—incidents (such as a case of infidelity in Madura) into larger conflicts affecting entire villages and even subsequent generations. Mapping small disputes can help us understand why in some cases conflict escalates while in others it stagnates or is resolved peacefully (Barron, Smith, and Woolcock 2004). A quantitative dataset alone cannot do this, but it can provide a sampling frame for more in-depth comparative ethnographic process-tracing work to answer the how and why questions.

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62 Collective Violence in Indonesia Including individual versus individual violent incidents results in an extra 119 deaths. If we include such cases, we find over six times as many conflict-related deaths as does UNSFIR (Table 3.2). Of course, different forms and expressions of violence have different causes and will follow differing logics of action. Aggregating different sociological phenomena—for example, individual and group conflict—into one conflict measure, and then looking for common patterns or correlated explanatory factors, can lead to a misdiagnosis of causes (Bertrand, in this volume). In coding by actors—as well as other defining typological features such as what the conflict was about, the geographic area, the weapons used, and so on—our dataset allows for disaggregated analyses that can consider patterns related to specific forms of conflict. These data can be used to analyze exclusively groupbased conflicts, just as they can be used to look at only conflicts over land, disputes that resulted in five or more deaths, or cases in Flores alone. At the same time, it allows for comparative analysis of different types of conflict. In the next section, we use the full dataset (including violent incidents involving only individuals) to consider variation in conflict forms across areas.

Variations in Impacts and Forms of Violence While the frequency of violent conflict differs between clusters and districts, even stronger patterns of variation emerge from the forms of violence and types of impact observed in each district (Figure 3.3). The two are closely linked. Violent conflict in Madura (Sumenep, Bangkalan, Pamekasan, and Sampang districts), for example, is characteristically fatal. Together, 84 percent of all deaths in our East Javanese districts are recorded in Madura. In East Java, conflict is most deadly in Sampang, Madura, where 9.5 people died per ten violent conflicts. In contrast, violence in the Ponorogo area (Ponorogo, Madiun, and Magetan districts) rarely results in death—just 1.4 deaths per ten violent conflicts. Instead, conflict in the Ponorogo cluster characteristically results in property damage: 90 percent of property damage in East Java is recorded in Ponorogo and surrounding districts; in the Ponorogo cluster, 138 buildings were damaged per 100 violent conflicts, compared with only 16 per 100 conflicts in Madura, an almost ninefold difference. Further variation in conflict impacts is evident within clusters. In Ponorogo district itself, just seven properties were reported damaged, less than 3 percent of the East Java

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total. In contrast, Madiun district recorded 146 properties damaged, 64 percent of the East Java total, and eighty-nine buildings were damaged in Magetan (22 percent); 155 properties were damaged for every 100 violent conflicts in Madiun, and 159 in Magetan, compared with 23 in Ponorogo. In Flores, Manggarai stands out from other districts as experiencing the worst impacts of violent conflict. Manggarai has the lowest rate of violent conflict per capita, but where violence has occurred, the impacts have been extremely high, accounting for 44 percent of deaths and 47 percent of properties damaged. For every ten violent conflicts in Manggarai, 9.3 people are killed, making conflict in Manggarai between two and five times as deadly as in other Flores districts. Property damage in Manggarai rivaled Madiun and Magetan, with 154 properties damaged for every 100 violent conflicts, almost three times that of other districts in Flores. The presence of very different conflict forms in different areas is the primary explanatory factor for variations in the levels and types of violent impacts. There are marked patterns of variation in sources of conflict and the actors involved, with specific forms of violent conflict being con-

Figure 3.3 Forms of Impact by District, 2001–2003 160 140 120

80 60 40 20

Flores

Killed of Killed Sum

Source: KDP/CCN.

Pamekasan

Injured Sum of Injured

Ponorogo

Properties Sum of Alldamaged Property

Ponorogo

Magetan

Madiun

Sumenep

Sampang

Pamekasan

Bangkalan

Sikka

Ngada

Manggarai

Flores Timur

0 Ende

Number

100

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64 Collective Violence in Indonesia centrated in different areas. Each of these forms appears to have a distinct logic, tending to predictably lead to a given type of impact. Variation in Sources of Conflict and Types of Impact

As we noted earlier, conflict incidents were assigned one of five main conflict types: disputes over physical resources; disputes over administrative resources; disputes over political positions or influence; vigilantism and acts of retribution; and “other” conflicts, usually relating to domestic violence or other family conflict. Figure 3.4 shows the dominant forms of violent conflict for each of our three clusters. It is immediately apparent that sources of conflict are more varied in Flores than in East Java. Vigilantism/retribution is overwhelmingly the dominant type of conflict reported in East Java, responsible for 87 percent of violent incidents. It is also prominent in Flores, accounting for more violent cases than any other category, but a quarter (26 percent) of violent conflicts in Flores are related to physical resources. Conflicts over administrative issues and domestic/family violence (coded as “other”) also account for a larger proportion of violence in Flores than in either the Ponorogo or Pamekasan clusters. Figure 3.4 suggests that the prevalence of different types of violence in the East Java areas is similar. However, breaking down the vig-

Figure 3.4 Dominant Forms of Violent Conflict by Cluster, 2001–2003 Percentage of conflict types 0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

90%

Vigilantism & Retribution

Other

Clusters

Flores

Pamekasan

Ponorogo

Resources

Administration

Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

Position & Influence

100%

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ilante/retribution category further to examine the motivating factors behind the act shows that different conflict forms are present in the two clusters (see Figure 3.5). The only form of vigilante conflict occurring with similar frequency in both clusters is that related to humiliation or to retaliation for perceived loss of face. In Madura, violence otherwise occurs most frequently as a vigilante response to a theft, perceived witchcraft, sexual indiscretion, or other, usually vigilante-style responses where the stated motive was “revenge,” but for what was unclear. In the Ponorogo cluster, other forms of vigilante conflict prevailed, most notably incidents of “identity” clashes and “other” unclassifiable forms of vigilantism that appear to be linked to such identity clashes but for which lack of explicit information in the newspaper articles means they cannot be coded as such. Theft and sexual indiscre-

Figure 3.5 Forms of Violent Vigilantism/Retribution Conflicts by Cluster: East Java, 2001–2003

4a 4b

Witch doctor Witchdoctor

4c

Ninja

4d

Deviant

4e

Sexual indiscretion

4f

Murder

4g

Identity clash

4h

Damage to property

4i

Accident causer

4j

Vigilantism & retribution in response to...

Theft

Humiliation

4k

0

Other

5

10

15

Number

20

25

Pamekasan

Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

30

35

Ponorogo

40

45

50

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66 Collective Violence in Indonesia tion are also significant triggers for conflict in the Ponorogo area, although less so than in the Pamekasan cluster. This variation in the types of violent conflict in each district helps explain the distinct impact profile of each district, with different forms of violence resulting in different kinds of impact. In Madura, a large percentage of deaths and injuries stem from vigilante responses that target thieves and practitioners of black magic, and from conflicts arising from a perceived humiliation or loss of face. In the Ponorogo cluster, in contrast, the predominant forms of violent conflict (vigilante responses to offense against a person or group’s identity, or humiliation) result in injuries and property damage. In Flores, conflict over resources—in particular, communal land conflict—is responsible for a great deal of violence. The worst communal land conflict occurs in Manggarai district, and this explains the concentration of deaths and property damage there. Communal land conflicts in Manggarai account for a quarter of fatalities recorded across all of Flores (26 percent or thirty deaths) and much of the damage to property (41 percent or seventy-four buildings damaged). When communal land conflicts take place in Manggarai, they have phenomenally high impacts: every ten violent conflicts result in twenty-seven deaths, twenty-one injuries, and sixty-seven damaged properties. Manggarai also records significant fatalities associated with other types of resource conflict—namely, disputes over individual- or state-owned natural resources. All in all, resource conflict alone accounts for 35 percent of fatalities, 18 percent of injuries, and 75 percent of damage to property across Flores. Only in Sikka district do other types of conflict (vigilantism and domestic/family violence) have more serious impacts. Different Actors and Forms of Conflict

The different forms of violence that dominate in different areas and the resultant differences in impacts can be further understood by looking at the parties to the conflict incident, in terms of who they are and their proximity to each other. The actors involved (individuals, communal groups, or representatives of the state) were recorded for each incident in the dataset. We also looked at the level at which the incident took place, defined as where the actors came from. Conflict incidents could be between two or more actors within the same family, from the same village, from two separate villages within the same subdistrict, or from different subdistricts. Consideration of these variables gives us a better understanding of the dynamics of a given incident of conflict, and this,

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in turn, sheds more light on the distinct forms of conflict observable in different locations and the associated impacts. We illustrate by considering resource conflicts in Flores and different forms of vigilantism in East Java. In Flores, resource conflicts account for a large share of violent conflict impacts. Of these conflicts, those involving two groups lead to a disproportionate number of deaths, injuries, and damaged properties (Figure 3.6). Intergroup disputes accounted for 49 percent of resource conflict incidents in Flores but 75 percent of deaths, 74 percent of injuries, and 94 percent of properties. The level at which conflict occurs also affects the degree of impact. In Flores, resource conflicts occur most frequently between parties living in one village. However, higher rates of fatalities, injuries, and property damage are associated with intervillage conflicts (see Table 3.3). The qualitative fieldwork showed why these intergroup, intervillage resource conflicts often have such large impacts. Disputes between groups involve more people. By conflating identity with claims for resources, participants are less likely to see outcomes as negotiable,

Figure 3.6 Impacts by Actor Combinations for Violent Resource Conflicts: Flores, 2001–2003 80 70 60 50

Number

40 30 20 10

Ende

Flores Timur

Incidents

Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

Manggarai

Killed

Injured

Ngada

Properties damaged

Sikka

E = Indiv./Govt.

C= Group/Group

A = Indiv./Indiv.

C= Group/Group

B = Indiv./Group

A = Indiv./Indiv.

Other

F = Group/Govt.

E = Indiv./Govt.

C= Group/Group

B = Indiv./Group

A = Indiv./Indiv.

C= Group/Group

A = Indiv./Indiv.

C= Group/Group

B = Indiv./Group

A = Indiv./Indiv.

0

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68 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 3.3 Impacts of Resource Conflicts by Level: Flores, 2001–2003 Level of Resource Conflict

No. of Deaths per 10 Violent Conflicts

No. of Injuries per 10 Violent Conflicts

No. of Properties Damaged per 10 Violent Conflicts

7 20

12 25

10 57

Intravillage Intervillage Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

and hence conflicts tend to endure or escalate. Whereas most conflicts in East Java and NTT do not have an ethnic basis, 85 percent of communal land conflicts involved competing ethnic groups compared with just 14 percent of all cases of violent conflict in Flores. In parts of Flores, individuals are easily mobilized to participate in communal land conflicts for a number of reasons (Muda and Satu 2001; Prior 2003; Clark 2005). First, because land belongs to the clan rather than individuals under the adat (traditional) system, claims over land are often elevated into group claims. This means that land conflict occurs more frequently, because a dispute over any part of the land, however marginal, is likely to result in conflict. Second, processes of mobilization involve appeals by leaders to communal tribal identities that are rooted in historical cultural practices. In Manggarai, the tradition of perang tanding, or all-out battle, involves entire village populations waging war over land, with the result that large parts of villages are heavily vandalized or burned to the ground. As a result, conflict between groups or with institutions over communal land are the most deadly and destructive form of violence in Flores. As we have seen, vigilante action is the most serious type of violence in East Java. However, vigilante actions are targeted against different actors in the two areas and involve disputes at different levels. These different forms of vigilante action result in different forms of impact. Violence in Madura (the Pamekasan cluster) is most likely to be directed at individuals, in particular witchdoctors and thieves. These conflicts, which involve either two individuals or a group lynching an individual, together account for 85 percent of deaths and 89 percent of injuries from vigilante violence in the Pamekasan cluster. In contrast, vigilante attacks in the Ponorogo cluster are relatively more likely to involve groups (Figure 3.7) and often result in property damage; 196 buildings were damaged in intergroup vigilante clashes in the Ponorogo cluster.

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Figure 3.7 Impacts by Actor Combinations for Violent Vigilante/Revenge Conflicts: East Java, 2001–2003 180 160 140

Number

120 100 80 60 40 20

Pamekasan

Other

F= Group/Govt.

D= Govt./Govt.

C= Group/Group

B= Indiv./Group

A= Indiv./Indiv.

Other

F= Group/Govt.

E= Indiv./Govt.

C= Group/Group

B= Indiv./Group

A= Indiv./Indiv.

0

Ponorogo Cluster/Actor Combination

Incidents

Killed

Injured

Properties damaged

Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

Actors in violent vigilante conflicts in Madura are also more likely to live close to each other than in the Ponorogo cluster. Of all violent vigilante/revenge conflicts in the Pamekasan cluster, 50 percent occurred between actors who lived in the same village, and the majority of fatalities occurred in intravillage conflicts. In contrast, conflicts in the Ponorogo cluster took place between parties more removed from one another; in all three districts, conflict was most likely to have occurred between people from different subdistricts: 63 percent in Madiun, 58 percent in Magetan, and 60 percent in Ponorogo (see Figure 3.8). Distinct forms of vigilante conflict involving different sets of actors at different levels are thus present in the two East Java clusters, and these result in different kinds of impact: primarily injuries and deaths in the Pamekasan cluster and damaged property in the Ponorogo cluster. Again, we must turn to the qualitative fieldwork to understand better the nature of these conflict forms, why they take place, and why they result in the impacts they do.

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70 Collective Violence in Indonesia Figure 3.8 Impacts by Level for Violent Vigilante/ Revenge Conflicts: East Java, 2001–2003 140 120

Number

100 80 60 40 20

Pamekasan

Interkecamatan

Intervillage

Intravillage

Interkecamatan

Intervillage

Intravillage

Intrahousehold

0

Ponorogo Level/Cluster

Incidents

Killed

Injured

Properties damaged

Source: KDP/CCN dataset.

In the Pamekasan cluster, patterns of violence directed at individuals known to their attackers reflect traditional carok (dueling) culture and the high value Madurese ascribe to matters of self-worth and pride (tengka). Historic notions of carok have legitimized forms of violence in response to loss of face and perceived sexual indiscretions. In cases where a Madurese feels he has been insulted, particularly if he has been cuckolded, violent response is not only condoned but obligatory (Wiyata 2002). A case study collected during the fieldwork (Barnawi 2003) provides an example of how carok often works. Carok occurred following rumors that a man’s neighbor had “interfered” with his wife. In fact, the man had repeatedly stated that he did not believe the rumors of indiscretion between his wife and his neighbor. Instead, it was his family who forced him into action on the grounds that the entire family name had been sullied, not only by the alleged events but also by the man’s unwillingness to defend his honor. The man’s family confronted the al-

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leged offender and killed him, in a fight that resulted in two deaths and several serious injuries. In this case, tengka (pride or self-worth) took precedence over the truth. In recent times, carok norms have been extended to include vigilante action against thieves and other forms of mob justice. Mohammed Said (2003) argues that whereas carok once meant honorable dueling to resolve disputes, the term is used nowadays to disguise or justify essentially criminal behavior as acceptable cultural practice. The newspaper survey data reflect this: thirty-five incidents relating to vigilantism/ revenge over issues of humiliation/face loss are recorded, as are nineteen incidents related to (alleged) sexual indiscretion, where women or infidelity was the cause of an argument. Violence and killing in Madura tend to be between proximate parties and perpetrated by individuals or groups against individuals. In contrast, conflict in the Ponorogo cluster is more likely to take group form, and these conflicts are particularly likely to result in property damage: on average more than four properties are damaged for every incident. In the Ponorogo cluster, young men have historically been organized in groups centered on different martial arts ideologies. These martial arts or silat groups have their genesis as organizations of resistance against the Dutch in the early twentieth century. The two dominant groups (SH Terate and SH Winongo) stem from the same organization, Setia Hati, which split in the late 1940s. Membership in these groups, often driven by political competition at a higher level, has become an important social marker in the area. The groups are particularly strong in marginalized villages, where locals have unfulfilled hopes and expectations; the martial arts groups, and the cultural ideologies they embody, provide a social outlet that can free them from the mundane routine of their everyday lives (Probo 2003). Local leaders, anxious to utilize them for political and economic purposes, have facilitated organization. Norms of intergroup rivalry have developed into gang mentalities. High levels of property damage result because vandalism sprees on enemy turf are the dominant mode of retaliation and aggression.6 In Madiun district particularly, the vast majority of violent conflicts involve these groups in some shape or form. The two most frequent and violent forms of vigilantism in the Ponorogo cluster are identity clash and other (unclassified) types of vigilante violence, both of which describe clashes between youth from silat groups. The preferred mode of violence, as is evident from the newspaper data, is vandalism of property, whereby members of one silat group target the home or

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72 Collective Violence in Indonesia property of a member of another silat group; often the homes and businesses of neighbors and innocent citizens are also targeted as vandalism spreads. Toward Addressing Localized Violent Conflict

We have shown how different forms of violent conflict are dominant in the different clusters—and to a lesser extent that there is variation in these forms within clusters—and how these specific forms lead to different kinds of impacts. In the Flores cluster, and especially in Manggarai district, communal land conflicts result in the largest impacts, and these tend to take the form of deaths and property damage. In the Pamekasan cluster, carok conflicts between individuals or groups and individuals within villages account for the greatest impacts, generally in the form of deaths or injuries. In the Ponorogo cluster, intergroup silat violence, targeting properties, is most common. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to consider in any depth the factors that cause such variation in conflict form. Our analysis of the cases presented here shows a complex mixture of historical, cultural, and political processes at work in shaping patterns of violence in different areas. More in-depth fieldwork is necessary to develop causal explanations for why these forms developed and why conflicts in these areas are expressed in the ways they are—a task beyond the purview of any quantitative dataset. However, in showing that a small number of specific forms of conflict in specific locations are responsible for a large proportion of the violence occurring in East Java and Flores, our data point toward the importance of local factors in driving conflict. This, in turn, suggests that policy responses must be tailored to local conditions. In Indonesia and beyond, policies and programs to combat violence tend to assume commonality between conflict forms and responses needed. For example, a standardized toolkit for reintegrating former combatants is employed across different postconflict areas without a deep understanding of what drove a particular conflict (see Barron 2007). In Indonesia, donor and NGO projects to address conflict have tended to employ uniform approaches (such as conflict resolution and peacebuilding training, local economic development, and police reform) across different areas. Yet our research shows that different kinds of strategies will be more effective in some places than in others, because the forms of conflict and its impact vary so greatly between areas.

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Effective interventions targeting particular forms of local conflict would go a long way toward reducing the overall impacts of violence. In Madiun, for instance, a successful intervention targeting vigilante conflict between clashing identity groups and the “unclassified” vigilante violence could reduce property damage by up to 70 percent. Similarly, successfully curbing lynchings of alleged witch doctors and thieves would have a significant impact on fatality rates in Madura. Witch doctor killings account for 41 percent of all deaths in Sumenep and 38 percent of deaths in Sampang. Addressing underlying causes of land conflict in Manggarai is more complex, but resource disputes are overwhelmingly the most serious issues in Flores. If a solution were found, the conflict fatality rate in the district could be reduced by 58 percent.

Conclusion Our data have shown that violent conflict is prevalent in many areas of Indonesia not thought of as being conflict-prone. The finding of significant levels of violence in such areas indicates that previous assertions that violent conflict impacts are concentrated in a limited number of districts are off-mark. We have also shown that the cumulative impacts of conflicts in Indonesia are greater than previously thought. We estimate death tolls from collective violence at three times those of the UNSFIR study for our research areas, and a significantly larger toll if violent disputes between individuals are included. The data also demonstrate that there is significant variation in the forms violence takes across areas and that these different forms lead to different kinds of impact. Distinct forms of violent conflict are observable in different areas, accounting for a significant proportion of conflict impacts in the area in which they occur. This suggests that many of the causes of conflict are localized and show the limitation of theories of conflict that focus solely on national factors, processes, and actors. Given that the nature of violence differs at the local level and that the causes vary by location, policy responses must also be locally tailored. Put another way, policy and programmatic instruments that do not take account of the differences in the form and incidence of conflict at the local level are likely to be overly blunt. We have also shown how the use of local newspapers to map conflict can provide useful insights into the presence, impacts, and nature of conflict in Indonesia. Our data—while not without weaknesses— provide a more accurate portrayal of conflict in the areas they cover than the two previous preeminent attempts to map conflict: UNSFIR-2

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74 Collective Violence in Indonesia and PODES. The method allows for consideration not only of aggregate conflict incidence and impact, but also of patterns and characteristics of different conflict forms. Many questions cannot be answered by this study because of its limited geographic and temporal scope. Is, for example, episodic violence in high-conflict areas such as Maluku and Central Sulawesi underreported in previous estimates to the same extent as local conflict in East Java and NTT? What are the overall impacts of conflict across Indonesia? In what ways are the forms of conflict in higher- and lowerconflict areas different or similar? As Indonesia’s democratization processes consolidate, to what extent is violence receding, and how is this varying across areas? To start to get at some of these questions, we plan to expand the dataset to cover twenty-one provinces containing almost 90 percent of Indonesia’s population. This will be a multiyear project. However, such a system can aid our understanding of violence in Indonesia and help in the development of responses that enhance human security and promote peaceful development in the archipelago.

Notes This chapter is part of a larger study on local-level conflict and participatory development projects in Indonesia. For generous financial assistance we are grateful to the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), AusAID, the Norwegian Trust Fund, and the World Bank’s Conflict Prevention and Reconstruction Unit, Social Development Department, and Development Economics Vice Presidency. Valuable comments were provided by Luthfi Ashari, Samuel Clark, Rachael Diprose, Stephan Haggard, Karrie McLaughlin, Blair Palmer (especially on the third section of the chapter), Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, Ashutosh Varshney, Michael Woolcock, and two anonymous referees. Thanks also to participants at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia. Mohammed Said, Don dela Santo, Elisabeth Dua Soru, Getrudis Erni, Budi Santoso, Mirnawati Ladongga, Ambar Mawardi, Susan Mety, and Hafez helped create and clean the dataset. The views expressed in this chapter are those of the authors alone and should not be attributed to the World Bank or to any of the funding agencies. Addresses for correspondence are [email protected] and joanne [email protected]. 1. Estimates were generated by assuming that the share of deaths in the provinces not covered in UNSFIR-2 would be the same as in UNSFIR-1 (3.6 percent). This strategy is problematic, because it assumes consistent levels of underreporting of collective violence from province to province. Yet national newspapers are unlikely to have reporters distributed equally across provinces,

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and different areas will receive different levels of attention. Underreporting in UNSFIR-1 is thus likely to be greater in more remote and less politically important areas. This has important implications, both for the projections of deaths and for consideration of their geographic distribution. 2. Local conflicts can be distinguished from larger conflicts by (1) their impacts, with most incidents resulting in fewer casualties, and (2) the level at which they are concentrated, with most incidents taking place at the intra- or intervillage, rather than district or provincial, level. While the impacts of specific incidents tend to be relatively minimal and locally concentrated, cumulatively these local conflicts constitute a barrier to development and human security and, in some cases, provide the fuel for larger incidents of unrest. 3. For East Java, these were Jawa Pos (provincial) and Radar Madura, Radar Madiun, and Ponorogo Pos (subprovincial); for NTT, these were Pos Kupang (provincial) and Flores Pos and Dian (subprovincial). 4. In NTT, the provincial source (Pos Kupang, also used in the UNSFIR dataset) captured 33 out of 73 deaths (45 percent). The subprovincial sources (Flores Pos and Dian) picked up all deaths recorded in our survey. The provincial East Java source (Jawa Pos, also used by UNSFIR) picked up only 34 percent of the deaths in the sample (19 deaths total), while the sources below the provincial level—Ponorogo Pos, Radar Madiun, and Radar Madura—picked up 74 deaths (89 percent). (It is likely that the proportion of deaths picked up solely by subprovincial sources will be even higher, given that some of the data from these sources are missing for 2001.) Discussions with journalists and editors confirmed the point. Jawa Pos, for example, actively excludes conflict stories from the regions, with local news stories left to its local sister papers such as Radar Madiun and Radar Madura. Given the size of East Java, local conflict stories are rarely seen as newsworthy (i.e., of interest to the readership in the provincial capital, Surabaya). Again, for NTT sources, editors and journalists confirmed that readers in the provincial capital (Kupang) have little interest in reading about stories of village-level conflicts on a different island, and hence most such incidents go unreported in Pos Kupang’s news pages. We discuss issues of the reliability of local news sources in Barron and Sharpe (2005). 5. Some cases in the top left-hand box are also included. Our study attempted to distinguish between “ordinary crime” and conflict. This means incidences of ordinary theft and murder, for instance, are not counted. Cases where individual-individual violence occurred as a retaliatory response to perceived crimes or social transgressions do, however, fall within our definition. 6. Ponorogo district, where property damage was far less common than in neighboring Madiun and Magetan, is the exception. There, individual-individual clashes are the most common configuration, rather than intergroup silat battles. The qualitative research showed that this was largely because of leadership within the district. Silat culture is traditionally as strong in Ponorogo as it is in Madiun and Magetan, and all three districts are close to being ethnically, religiously, and historically identical. In 1999 and 2000, Ponorogo had a serious silat violence problem. However, it subsided, thanks largely to the efforts of the district police chief and district head. In 2001, these figures began holding regular

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76 Collective Violence in Indonesia meetings between silat group leaders, who agreed to hand troublemakers over to police for prosecution. This approach was successful because silat groups are highly organized and hierarchical, and once senior silat group figures took ownership of the problem, they were able to use their influence within the system (Probo 2003). We consider issues relating to the role of leaders and intermediaries in explaining differences in violence levels within clusters in Barron and Sharpe (2005).

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4 Ethnic Conflicts in Indonesia: National Models, Critical Junctures, and the Timing of Violence Jacques Bertrand

Beginning in the mid-1990s, there was a sudden rise in violent eth-

nic conflict in Indonesia. In the years immediately preceding the downfall of Suharto’s authoritarian regime, riots began to emerge in different parts of the country. The first major outbreak occurred in December 1996 between indigenous Dayaks and Madurese migrants in West Kalimantan. After the beginning of democratization, violent conflict escalated in several parts of the country, including most significantly in Central Kalimantan, Aceh, East Timor, Papua, Maluku, and Sulawesi. By the end of 2002, the violence had largely subsided in these areas, with the notable exception of Aceh. Against the backdrop of several decades of sparse and isolated ethnic conflict, this sudden surge requires explanation. Furthermore, the clustering of violent ethnic conflict constitutes a crucial component of the puzzle, which should be addressed for understanding its nature and timing. The wave of conflicts spurred the flourishing of academic publications devoted to explaining it. Yet, even more recent studies have not adequately addressed the question of clustering and timing. If violent ethnic conflict appeared to engulf the whole country, it remained nevertheless limited and, more importantly, declined about as rapidly as it had appeared. Moreover, in Indonesia’s postindependence history, there were periods when several ethnic conflicts erupted within a relatively short time, followed by long periods with no violent ethnic conflict. The period 1995–2002 was such a time, suggesting against this broader historical trend that violent conflicts were not independent

77

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78 Collective Violence in Indonesia from each other, thereby rendering single-case or microlevel studies very limited. Methodological and thematic choices have generated problems for identifying and explaining this clustering of violent ethnic conflict in Indonesia. Many studies that focus on microlevel factors fail to account for the broader changes occurring at a macrolevel that explain why violent conflicts occurred simultaneously. Others have chosen to broaden the scope of analysis of violent events to provide explanations of violence more generally. This has been the case with large datasets that have attempted to “map” violent conflict but, as a result, have diluted important explanatory factors linking specific subsets of conflicts, such as ethnic conflict. Some qualitative studies have included such diverse forms as state-perpetrated violence over time and involving criminal gangs or militias (Barker 2001; Kammen 2001), and killings perpetrated by masked “ninjas” against alleged sorcerers (Herriman 2006). Others have narrowed the focus of conflict to analyze a certain type, such as religious violence (Sidel 2006), or a particular local conflict, such as the Madurese-Dayak violence in Kalimantan (Peluso 2006). In many of these studies, crucial cases, such as Aceh and Papua, have been left out in the comparative frameworks that have been adopted and therefore could not identify the intensification of conflict in these regions that happened noncoincidentally with the rise of violent ethnic conflict in other parts of the country. After reviewing alternative studies and approaches that have emerged in recent years, I argue in this chapter that a historical institutionalist approach remains best able to explain the clustering of conflicts and the period of relative calm and stability that has replaced the period of numerous ethnic and religious conflicts of previous years. Changing institutional contexts at critical junctures created rising anxieties as well as opportunities to renegotiate group inclusion and status in the Indonesian state.

Violent Conflict: Definitional Scope, Exclusion, and Levels of Analysis Alternative studies of violent conflict have a number of limitations for explaining violent ethnic conflict, and particularly its clustering in limited time periods. This is due to three factors. First, many studies have chosen to broaden the definitional scope of analysis of violent events to provide explanations of violence more generally. By doing so, they

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cannot account for the fact that violent ethnic conflict has been clustered and that violence involving groups defined along ethnic lines was produced by sociological processes that differ from other forms of violent conflict. Second, while the scope of violence might have been broad in terms of its categories, many of the studies have excluded important cases, such as Aceh and Papua. In order to understand why there was an intensification of violent ethnic conflict after 1998, these cases need to be compared with events occurring in other parts of the archipelago, such as the eruption of violent ethnic conflict in Maluku and Sulawesi. Finally, many studies that focus on microlevel explanations fail to account for the broader changes occurring at a macrolevel that explain why violent conflicts occurred simultaneously. The timing of these conflicts was not coincidental. Definitional Scope

The adoption of a broad definition of violent conflict has conflated essentially different forms. Several studies have lumped together an analysis of violence between ethnic groups, which has grown in several cases into larger-scale conflict, with state-perpetrated violence or even more individual-based forms of revenge. By doing so, they give the impression that what needs to be analyzed is the pervasiveness of violence throughout Indonesian society. While often recognizing that the occurrence of violence should not be overstated, they nevertheless dilute some of the sociological processes explaining different forms by generalizing at a greater aggregate level. In some cases, collections have focused on violence as a broad theme and have yielded limited explanatory insights. Contributors to Charles Coppel’s Violent Conflict in Indonesia, for instance, look at the production of violence as an instrument or as a consequence of its repeated use under the New Order. A special issue of Asian Survey (July–August 2002), which looks at the violence of 1965–1966 as well as more recent violence, locates its sources in elite and military factionalism under the New Order regime. Robert Cribb (in Colombijn and Lindblad 2002) relates the violence in East Timor to a military subculture that was developed as a result of a sense of dominance and impunity during the New Order. Several studies argue that violence is a product of state-induced or state-supported violence, through the armed forces, militias, or criminal gangs. Benedict Anderson’s (2001) Violence and the State in Suharto’s Indonesia most strongly emphasizes this view and shows how this kind of practice was “normal” practice

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80 Collective Violence in Indonesia during the New Order (Anderson 2001; especially Barker 2001; Kammen 2001; Ryter 2001). Many contributors in Colombijn and Lindblad extend this kind of argument to practices stretching back to colonial times or the revolution. They emphasize the continuity of violent practices, such as certain fear tactics or the use of criminals to inflict violence (Frederick 2002; Liong 2002; Locher-Scholten 2002; Schulte Nordholt 2002). These approaches fail to explain, however, why violence was limited to certain groups and areas and not others, and why it was not pervasive. Although the New Order regime, or even the Indonesian state, might have contributed to producing violence, it does not explain the very strong intensification of violence after its demise—particularly of ethnic violence—nor why periods of violent conflict were followed by periods of relatively less violence (even if it was still present in everyday state management). The scale, extent, and types of violence are significant. Quantitative approaches, such as those adopted by Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean as well as Barron and Sharpe in this volume, introduce new methods to analyze the scope and intensity of violent conflicts. These approaches are useful for mapping the location and frequency of violent incidents and comparing their scale and intensity, measured by observable factors such as deaths. Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean in particular have corrected the impressionistic accounts of media reports that violence in Indonesia was pervasive over time and across the archipelago. Although Barron and Sharpe cast doubt on some of their findings and agree with studies emphasizing a deeper and more widespread violence, their insights are nevertheless limited for the moment to only two provinces. How incidents are recorded might also mask some of the processes that differentiate ethnic from other forms of violent conflict. First, there is strong variance between the two datasets in terms of the number of incidents. While Varshney, Tadjoeddin, and Panggabean record 3,600 incidents for the period 1990–2003, Barron and Sharpe note that the PODES survey (by the Indonesian government) recorded more than 4,872 instances of violent conflict for 2002 alone in Indonesia’s 69,000 villages. The World Bank dataset they present develops a preliminary database containing conflict data for fourteen districts in two provinces (East Java and Nusa Tenggara Timor) for the period 2001–2003. It broadens the scope even more by including “individual-individual” incidents, which therefore groups such varied types of sociological phenomena as large-scale guerrilla warfare, as well as revenge killings

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against thieves. Barron and Sharpe find a much larger number of incidents that are not picked up by the UN Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR) dataset, even after adjusting for differences in inclusion criteria of these incidents. In itself, the relatively low confidence of the mapping exercise means that we need to be quite careful about correlations using these datasets that may later be used to test causal processes. Second, incidents are not always independent from each other. The UNSFIR study records an “incident” at the subdistrict level and sometimes village level, while two incidents will be recorded if there is violence occurring in the same place more than twenty-four hours apart (Varshney, Panggabean, and Tadjoeddin 2004, 43). The World Bank study uses a similar kind of logic to record incidents. If they are analyzed as completely separate incidents, however, they risk creating significant problems of inference by assuming their independence. Correlations may ignore how one incident may well be affecting future incidents. It is again noncoincidental that most incidents are actually clustered in specific time periods. Whether one refers to the sudden jump in the Madurese versus Dayak conflict from two incidents in 1996 to 1,004 in 1997, or in the anti-Chinese violence from five in 1997 to 1,228 in 1998, the sudden peaks are not independent incidents (Varshney, Panggabean, and Tadjoeddin 2004, 27). They are, instead, part of a wave in which violence spreads. Each incident, in this case, actually has an important influence on the next and, more importantly, is related to broader processes that link these incidents to one another and create the conditions for violence to emerge and spread. This situation is different from that in years when a smaller number of incidents occur—incidents that may indeed be completely separate one from the other. Third, a similar limitation arises by placing too much emphasis on deaths, injuries, or property damage as measures of intensity of violence. Large-scale violence related to ethnic conflict has been the single most important type of conflict generating large casualties and destruction. A broader historical assessment of these conflicts reveals that they draw the most attention in the media and can be readily identified at different historical periods. The clustering and concentration of incidents indicates larger-scale conflicts, whereas attempting to decipher deaths, injuries, and property damage for “separate” incidents runs the risk of measuring factors other than intensity, such as the availability of weapons, the number of people involved in a physical clash, and the availability of medical facilities. For small numbers, therefore, differences in accuracy are likely

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82 Collective Violence in Indonesia to emphasize irrelevant factors as much as factors relevant to explaining intensity of conflict. Only when differences are significantly large can we make meaningful inferences about intensity of conflict. Exact reporting of deaths becomes a concern for quantifiable “truths” but is of little real usefulness for comparing differences in conflict intensities. The clustering of incidents is a much better indicator. So, while these datasets may usefully measure and identify differences that can explain microlevel processes to compare small-scale incidents, they are much more limited for identifying patterns over time and for identifying macrolevel processes that explain the noncoincidental emergence of large-scale ethnic conflicts at particular time periods. Finally, different types of violent conflict likely involve distinct sociological processes leading to the eruption of violence, so comparisons between types may yield poor or misleading results. It is not coincidental, for instance, that all of the larger-scale conflicts in Indonesia involved ethnic groups (which includes violence between religious groups as well). Both studies recognize this fact, but it is worth emphasizing in the context of explaining ethnic conflict in particular. Broad correlations linking all types of conflict might produce some broad insights of macroprocesses at work but can also mask important other ones. There are serious doubts that violence is a phenomenon that has its own causal processes independent of the sociological context that produces it. Conflicts involving ethnic groups, compared with those involving vigilantism, are likely to be linked to significantly different causal processes. Violent ethnic conflict involves the mobilization of ethnic identities in the process of triggering violent incidents. While there could be economic, social, or political conditions that are favorable to violence as a response to conflict in particular time periods, there are very specific and separate mechanisms that would make violence take an ethnic dimension rather than one where groups would be defined by landownership patterns, for instance, or village-based clans. The definition of target groups and the process of group formation along particular sociological criteria are crucial to understanding processes leading to the violent outcome, even if group mobilization is somewhat of a prior step to the violent episode itself (Horowitz 1985, 2001). Exclusion of Crucial Cases

Several studies miss the correlation between large-scale ethnic conflicts and high intensity of violence in Indonesia or, more importantly,

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the noncoincidental clustering of these conflicts because of the exclusion of some crucial cases. This occurs either because some important regions with violent ethnic conflict have been excluded from the analysis, or because the time period observed is too short. John Sidel (2006) provides a broad, comparative explanation of religious violence and its different forms from the mid-1990s to 2002, including riots in various towns of Java in the mid-1990s, large-scale conflict in Maluku after 1999, and, finally, terrorist bombings from 2000 to 2002. He links these shifting forms to the evolving status of Islam in the country, to its forms of politicization, and to changing class relations and state power. By focusing exclusively on religious violence, however, Sidel misses the noncoincidental eruption of conflict between Dayaks and Madurese in Kalimantan and the intensification of violence in Aceh and Papua, which occurred in the same time period. By excluding these cases, Sidel’s framework cannot explain why there was a noticeably dramatic intensification of conflict and violence in these regions at the same time as new forms of violence occurred across the archipelago, nor can it explain why such clusters of conflict occurred in the past. It cannot account for this kind of timing of violent conflict. Similarly, Gerry van Klinken (2007a) compares “communal” violence in several locations between 1997 and 2001. His analysis focuses on several large-scale ethnic conflicts, including violence between Christians and Muslims in Sulawesi and Maluku, as well as between Dayaks and Madurese in Kalimantan. He acknowledges the importance of democratization, particularly the accompanying decentralization, which created an important break with the past. He focuses mainly on how resource competition between elites became a dimension in some of these conflicts, within the greater context of the postdemocratization weakness of the state. However, he leaves out how ethnic identity became a resource for mobilization. Why, for instance, could religious identities be so easy for local elites to mobilize if it were not that tensions grew between religious groups in the context of the late New Order and the transition to democracy? Similarly, why were the Madurese targeted before the democratic opening? These questions require that one look more intensively at the broader context defining identities in the New Order, particularly how it projected the notion of an Indonesian nation, how it created winners and losers in its developmentalist discourse, and how a shift in favor of Islamic groups could create great uncertainties in a majority Muslim country where Christians had been protected in various ways during decades of authoritarian rule. Furthermore, van Klinken,

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84 Collective Violence in Indonesia by leaving out ethnic violence in Aceh, Papua, and East Timor and treating it as “secessionist” conflict, misses the noncoincidental intensification of these conflicts at the same time as these other “communal” conflicts erupted. The emphasis on decentralization and its effects on local elites also begs the question of why it has not continued to become a salient issue in other areas where ethnicity might have been activated. In the case of the UNSFIR dataset, which is broader than the World Bank’s or the PODES survey, the crucial cases of Aceh and Papua are also excluded. Had they been included, the relative share of incidents related to ethnic groups would have skyrocketed, given the sustained conflict in Aceh. Furthermore, this exclusion misses the important inference that these conflicts reemerged and became more violent at the same time as other violent ethnic conflicts erupted in other parts of the archipelago. There is also a temporal exclusion in the large datasets that prevents an observation of the clustering of violent ethnic conflicts in particular time periods. The UNSFIR dataset is realistically limited to the period of 1995–2003. Since the intensification of violent ethnic conflict occurred during this time, however, the study cannot observe the time limitation of this intensification and the fact that, when we look back at different historical periods, several ethnic conflicts turned violent at the same time, and over relatively short periods. The World Bank study misses these insights because it has focused on a much more microlevel analysis by measuring violent incidents in just a few, selected districts. Only if this analysis were extended to cover a much broader range of districts over long periods would it be able to observe the higher intensity of ethnic conflicts and their clustering over time. Level of Analysis

Studies emphasizing local factors are also limited because they do not explain why several conflicts intensified or erupted in the same, limited time period. Van Klinken (2001), for instance, argues that violence in Maluku was partly related to intraelite competition at the local level, among groups already organized hierarchically along religious lines. This competition, however, was prevalent long before the outbreak of conflict and ignores the fact that other religiously based conflicts erupted in other parts of the archipelago. Changes in the broader political environment interacted with these local factors to render Maluku particularly prone to violent conflict, but local factors in themselves were insufficient. Similar macroprocesses are missing from Jamie

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Davidson’s focus on elite competition in the violence of West Kalimantan or Lorraine Aragon’s analysis of contextual and historical factors that created factionalism and client groups, which were subsequently at the source of the violence in Sulawesi (Davidson 2003, 2008; Aragon 2001). A corollary argument focuses on elite manipulations of representation of violence. Nancy Peluso (2006), in the case of the Dayaks, argues that the image of the “Borneo headhunter,” stereotyped and reproduced in the media, as well as other forms of representation of the Dayak, contributed to the particular savagery in the deployment of violence against the Madurese. This explanation is most useful for understanding certain manifestations of violence but not its causes. Similarly, local elite actions to prevent representation of violence in Solo in 1998 as “anti-Chinese” might have helped defuse the violence to some extent, but they do not explain why violence began in the first place. The fact that violence was depicted as anti-Chinese in the May 1998 riots in Jakarta might have intensified the violence but certainly does not explain why there was violence targeting the Chinese in various localities (Purdey 2006b). This is not to deny that at the local level, as Varshney, Panggabean, and Tadjoeddin (2004) emphasize, some processes might create countervailing effects that prevent the outbreak of violence. Where violence does occur, however, and particularly if it happens in several places, macrofactors are crucial to understanding how these manifestations of conflict are linked. There were, for example, changing structural factors that, in the context of 1998, made violence against the ethnic Chinese particularly likely to happen, which explains why such violence did occur in several cities. Other studies also lack a systematic analysis of macrolevel factors that explain these violent events. Some studies, for instance, focus on cultural characteristics to explain either violence or some of its forms. Many chapters in Franz Hüsken and Huub de Jonge (2002) emphasize cultural characteristics—including cultural legitimation of violence in Javanese villages (Bråten 2002), long traditions of allowing young people to express themselves violently (van Dijk 2002), the carok traditional act of revenge among the Madurese (de Jonge 2002), and the acceptance of violence in certain contexts among the Balinese—as part of an explanation for the 1965–1966 killings in Bali (Eklöf 2002). Another study (Schiller and Garang 2002) suggests that violence between the Dayaks and Madurese in 1997 and 1999, in which a “red bowl” was reportedly passed among Dayaks prior to the initial massive attack on

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86 Collective Violence in Indonesia the Madurese, was partly a result of local Dayak adat (customary) beliefs. The authors stress the persistence of these beliefs despite decades of Christian missionization. All of these studies essentially focus on factors relating to local traditions and culture and therefore cannot account for the fact that such violence occurred in several cases. At best, they are compounded by similar localized explanations for violence in other locations of Indonesia, thereby producing a picture of a relatively violent “Indonesia” but without an adequate explanation of why this violence would have reached beyond the local context. Barron and Sharpe in this book argue that local factors are most important in driving violent conflict, but it is the nature of their data that leads to such a conclusion. The database is constructed precisely to capture a vast array of violent forms in local areas, so the data are likely heavily weighted toward very localized forms that have very little chance of developing into larger group conflict. Furthermore, because of the authors’ choice of provinces and localities, they have noted interesting differences in the types of conflict observed but have not captured forms that are clearly related to the violent mobilization of large ethnic groups. It is probably premature to generalize about the primacy of local factors much beyond the provinces and districts that they observe. When examining violent ethnic conflict in Indonesia, local factors are an important but not sufficient aspect of the explanation. Ethnicity is constructed, perpetuated, and manipulated through broader institutional structures and broader group interactions. How groups perceive each other, how they assess relative threat to the group’s interests, and how they reach decisions about engaging in violence are filtered through the broader context of how the state organizes, represents, and gives advantages to one group over another, and other broad institutional processes.

“Critical Junctures,” Institutional Change, and Conflict Violent ethnic conflict in Indonesia cannot be explained without examining broader macroprocesses.1 In particular, institutional change at critical moments in Indonesia’s political history is an important factor in explaining the clustering and timing of violent ethnic conflicts. From 1995 to 2002, there were a large number of violent conflicts involving various ethnic groups: clashes between Muslims and Christians in the

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mid-1990s across Java, some of which had anti-Chinese overtones; Dayak-Madurese conflicts in West Kalimantan (1997) and Central Kalimantan (2001); the eruption of a new Muslim-Christian conflict in Maluku (1999) and in Sulawesi (1999); and the intensification of conflict and resurgence of violence in Aceh, East Timor, and Papua (1999). Violent ethnic conflicts often occur in clusters at critical junctures of institutional change. Long periods of relative stability in ethnic relations are followed by short periods of intensification of several violent ethnic conflicts. Periods of institutional stability are occasionally interrupted, at critical junctures, by exogenous factors that suddenly change the institutional equilibrium that was previously in place. In the context of relations between ethnic groups, the institutions embody a particular “national model” that represents the basic principles upon which the institutional foundations are laid. This national model most often spells out these principles explicitly in constitutions (e.g., representing a single “nation,” a federation of “nations,” recognition of diversity within the state, etc.), but sometimes these are implicitly drawn. Institutional configurations, whether they are unitary states, federations, federacies, or other kinds of arrangements, have explicit and implicit ways of institutionalizing these national models. So-called national models, at the highest levels of institutionalization, have two primary effects on ethnic relations. First, they define criteria of inclusion and exclusion. Most often, these criteria of inclusion and exclusion are spelled out in citizenship laws, but they can also take on certain other forms, such as denial of recognition or of special permits and visas (particularly for long-term migrant workers or some refugee groups). Second, and more important, they define the terms of inclusion. On what basis are groups recognized? Are they constituent members of the nation? Are some groups included but marginalized in terms of their representation? Have groups been included by force, such as conquest or forced political settlement? At critical junctures, national models are renegotiated. Groups struggle for inclusion or, more frequently, for renegotiation of their terms of inclusion. They mobilize either violently or through extrainstitutional protest to renegotiate unfavorable terms, to eliminate discrimination, or to gain greater recognition, representation, or resources. States tend to address demands and mobilization through a mix of repression and accommodation. When the critical juncture comes to an end, and institutions are stabilized, new terms of inclusion are in place that define relations between ethnic groups and the state. Since this new outcome can result from a mix of new institutional compromises and

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88 Collective Violence in Indonesia repression, new tensions can be once again embedded in the institutional settlement. The beginning and end of the critical juncture are usually independent from the mobilization of ethnic groups and the later reduction in levels of conflict. Critical junctures occur because of exogenous shocks, such as regime transition or economic crises, that create momentary weakness for the state. During those moments, the future direction of the state is uncertain, and even the future of the national model can be questioned, such as in situations of revolution or radical political change. It is the uncertainty of the institutional change and the relative weakness of the state during this period, compounded by the tensions embedded in past institutional settlements on questions of inclusion and its terms, that render these critical junctures particularly unstable for ethnic relations. When the state is able to regain institutional stability and strength, the uncertainty of outcomes is reduced. This stabilization sets the stage for a new institutional configuration of terms of inclusion for ethnic groups. The state regains the ability to act decisively through negotiation, compromise, or repression. As an illustration, the Acehnese conflict actually was transformed from an earlier critical juncture during which Indonesia’s national model was being negotiated and when the Acehnese elite supported an Islamic version of the Indonesian nation. Later incarnations of the conflict, however, during the period of the Free Aceh Movement were devoid of an Islamist project and had been transformed, at later critical junctures, into a secessionist movement for the Acehnese people—into rejection of the Indonesian national model that forced the submission of Acehnese under an overly strong and centralist Indonesian nation. At each juncture, then, terms of inclusion are renegotiated and institutionalized in new ways. The last two critical junctures in Indonesia were periods of regime change. From 1958 to 1968, Indonesia underwent a period of tremendous institutional instability as liberal democracy was abandoned and a first authoritarian regime was established under President Sukarno’s Guided Democracy. This period, which was very unstable because of a power struggle between the armed forces and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), ended with a coup attempt by the PKI in 1965. In response, the armed forces seized power and proceeded to eliminate the PKI through a vast campaign that led to over 500,000 deaths in the subsequent year and finally to the stabilization of a new authoritarian regime under General Suharto’s leadership.

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These two periods of instability created uncertainties surrounding the future direction of the country and its national model and allowed groups to mobilize to change the terms of inclusion. In the late 1950s, this led to an intensification of ethnic conflict involving regionalist movements against the Indonesian state (in Sumatra and Sulawesi), as well as violence against the ethnic Chinese in the early to mid-1960s. When an authoritarian regime was established in the late 1950s, Indonesia’s original national model was reaffirmed and enforced primarily through repressive means. First, Sukarno and then Suharto reaffirmed the principles of the strong centralized unitary state, from which further administrative and fiscal centralization devolved in the subsequent decades. Second, they rejected an Islamic state and supported a Pancasila state, based on five principles, the most important of which established Indonesia as a religious but not an Islamic state. This particular pillar of the national model came under stress when Suharto flirted with Islamic political groups in the 1990s to bolster support for his weakening regime. Third, the strong developmentalist orientation of the regime dictated a hierarchically organized state structure to implement top-down policies and to “modernize” various groups. Some of this process involved marginalizing certain groups as “backwards” and “unmodern,” such as the Dayaks of Kalimantan, who were subsequently displaced to allow migrants and forestry companies—the “modern” sectors—to progress. Fourth, the regime defined through various policies a cultural component to the Indonesian national model, which included a national educational curriculum supporting statesanctioned views of history and evolution of the peoples of the archipelago, state-defined cultural characteristics of Indonesian people, and even labels of exclusion applied to the ethnic Chinese (as non-Pribumi, i.e., nonindigenous). A more recent critical juncture began with Suharto’s downfall in 1998. The regime began to weaken under a succession crisis that unfolded in the mid-1990s and a growing crisis of legitimacy. The Asian financial crisis of 1997 further weakened the regime, as Suharto and his cronies were blamed for the instability that it created. The regime finally collapsed in May 1998 after months of rioting. Much emphasis was placed in the media on the role of the financial crisis in creating conditions for the eruption of violent ethnic conflict. The riots of 1998, with violence against the ethnic Chinese being a component, relate partly to the Asian financial crisis. Violence against the ethnic Chinese has been a recurring phenomenon and overlaps with

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90 Collective Violence in Indonesia economic grievances. In the past, resentment against the ethnic Chinese lay in their strong role as middlemen in small towns across the country. They also acted as local moneylenders and were generally wealthier than non-Chinese in the same localities. Violence against the ethnic Chinese has tended to target stores and property, a clear sign that economic resentment is part of the rioting motive. In 1998, the violence was targeted as well against the extremely wealthy group of Chinese who built large economic empires under the patronage of the New Order regime. With the demise of the regime, these wealthy Chinese became targets of local resentment, and their houses and property were also targeted. Ethnicity overlapped with class resentment as violence spread against ethnic Chinese indiscriminately. They became the “target groups” in the sense that Donald Horowitz (2001) describes and were selected along ethnic lines even though many of the victims were not part of the wealthy class against whom the violence was targeted. More broadly, the riots of 1998 were much more widespread than those targeting ethnic Chinese. There were riots in many towns and cities of the archipelago at the worst of the crisis as subsidies were cut and food prices rose rapidly. Within the space of a few months, these riots contributed to the downfall of the regime. It would be erroneous, however, to attribute subsequent ethnic conflicts to the effects of the Asian financial crisis, for several reasons. First, these effects were overblown. There were some short-term shocks and swings after 1997, with some uneven effects. Poverty levels rose 18 percent from mid-1997 to the end of 1998, mainly because of rising food prices, particuarly rice. There was a swift recovery, however, so that by the end of 1999, poverty had returned to precrisis levels (Strauss 2004, 47; Suryahadi, Sumarto, and Pritchett 2003). Second, unemployed youths were often involved in various riots before and after the crisis. While there might have been a slightly higher number of these youths after 1997, there was nevertheless already a large pool of disenchanted young people well before the financial crisis, so their role in the subsequent violence was likely limited. Employment actually rose between 1997 and 2000, although primarily in secondary employment. Wages, however, declined substantially between 1997 and 1998, before recovering to precrisis levels by 2000. Interestingly, government employees and the self-employed saw their incomes rise during the period, while private sector employees retained a decline of around 10 percent from 1997 levels, confirming other studies that suggest that the hardest hit were middle-class and higher-income Indonesians working for private firms in Jakarta and other major urban centers. While it

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might have been temporarily more difficult for university and high school graduates to find employment in these sectors, it was already a very tight environment, and so unemployment was unlikely to have had very large effects (Booth 2000; Strauss 2004, 100). Third, the impact of the crisis was unevenly distributed across regions, and there was little corrrespondence to ethnic conflict. In an initial survey of the social impact of the crisis based on data for the second half of 1998 (focusing on employment, education, health, and other social indicators), Anna Wetterberg, Sudarno Sumarto, and Lant Pritchett (1999) found that the most affected areas were in various parts of Java, while the least affected included the provinces of Central Sulawesi and Maluku, where conflict between Muslims and Christians erupted in early 1999. However, Aceh and East Timor were included among the hardest hit in terms of welfare decline. West Kalimantan was also included but violence occurred there before the crisis, while Central Kalimantan, which saw violence erupt later, was not included in the hardest-hit areas. A later study confirmed that the impact on income inequality was most severe in urban Java and urban Sumatra. Within-province inequality rose significantly between 1993 and 1997, before the crisis, and mainly because of the growth of such trends in Riau, Jakarta, West Java, and East Java. Interestingly, among the three provinces of Kalimantan, West Kalimantan registered the highest level of income inequality, mainly around the city of Pontianak, where the crisis between Dayaks and Madurese erupted that year. Once the crisis began, however, it was found that the most severely affected were provinces in Java, while other provinces were much less affected. Although Banda Aceh was affected by a decline in gross domestic product (GDP), suggesting some negative impact in Aceh, it was not significantly different from other urban regions in Sumatra, and total income inequality did not vary significantly (Akita and Alisjahbana 2002, 209–213). When looking at between-province changes in inequality (based on non–oil and gas GDP), Jakarta and other provinces in Java also appear to have been most affected while many other provinces registered positive results. Irian Jaya (Papua), one of the provinces with the greatest intensification of ethnic mobilization, even registered positive growth in 1997–1998. On the whole, there is no clear correspondence between the provinces most affected by the crisis and the eruption of ethnic violence. The timing of the effects of the crisis constitutes a fourth reason for doubting that the financial crisis had a large impact on violent conflict. As already mentioned, poverty levels had rebounded by 1999. By the

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92 Collective Violence in Indonesia end of 1998, inequality figures were back to 1993–1994 levels (Akita and Alisjahbana 2002). While earlier trends in inequality seem to have contributed potentially to the eruption of violence in West Kalimantan between Dayaks and Madurese, this is the only case and it is prior to the financial crisis. Other conflicts, such as in Central Kalimantan, erupted only in 2001. Violent conflicts did erupt or intensify in 1999 in Maluku, Central Sulawesi, Aceh, and East Timor, but, as mentioned earlier, studies do not show a major social impact on some of these regions. As a result, it is most likely that the Asian financial crisis contributed mainly to the urban riots across Java and Sumatra preceding the downfall of the regime. The wave of urban riots, attacks on shops, and to some extent violence against the property of the ethnic Chinese correspond to the sudden rise in inflation, poverty levels, wage declines, and employment affecting middle-class Indonesians and many youths who likely participated in the violence leading to Suharto’s resignation. It does not correspond, however, to the eruption or intensification of violent ethnic conflict, either in its timing or its location. The financial crisis had a much more immediate impact in a very short time frame, whereas the timing that requires explanation for the clustering of violent ethnic conflicts begins in the mid-1990s before the onset of the crisis and continues until 2001–2002 after the effects of the crisis had been reversed. The downfall of the Suharto regime and uncertainties about future change were much stronger structural factors than the economic dislocation in triggering elite mobilization in favor of ethnic violence. The greatest impact of the financial crisis was mainly indirect, as it contributed to the downfall of the regime, which subsequently opened up uncertainties about future relations between ethnic groups in some areas. Given that the downfall was also partly due to factors independent from the crisis—namely, a rising crisis of regime legitimacy and succession crisis—the net effect of the financial crisis on subsequent large-scale violent ethnic conflict was limited at best. Alternative macrolevel processes, therefore, must explain the clustering of conflicts in this broader time period. As the regime democratized, instability settled in, characterized by demonstrations throughout the period leading up to elections and afterwards, uncertain relations between the president and the armed forces, factional divisions, and impeachment of the president. The critical juncture ended after Megawati Sukarnoputri became president in mid-2001. She was able to stabilize the regime by establishing a stronger ruling coalition and stabilizing relations with the armed forces, as new constitu-

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tional amendments were implemented and related legislation was passed, thereby leading to a new, relatively stable institutional environment. Several new violent conflicts erupted and old conflicts intensified after democratization. Violent clashes pitted Muslims against Christians in Maluku, and Dayaks against Madurese in Central Kalimantan. Riots targeted ethnic Chinese in Jakarta, and secessionist conflicts intensified in Aceh, East Timor, and Papua. Acehnese, Papuans, and Timorese all mobilized to gain recognition as nations seeking self-determination. The Acehnese had developed resentment over the high degree of repression, weak representation at the center, and lack of recognition of regional grievances that characterized their terms of inclusion within Indonesia. Papuans and East Timorese nurtured strong resentment at their forced integration into Indonesia under the New Order, thereby having had little say in the terms of inclusion. Christians and Muslims saw possibilities for reconfiguring relative power in Maluku, as fears among Christians were raised of Indonesia becoming more Islamic, while Muslims saw new opportunities to redress regional imbalances. The ethnic Chinese were attacked by violent mobs, once again scapegoated as they continued to be marginalized and differentiated under the New Order regime, thereby reinforcing anti-Chinese sentiments among the broader non-Chinese population. The democratic opening or changing institutional context created a new context through which groups perceived each other and the state. Well before 1998, local sources of conflict were filtered through the apparatus of political institutions that together constituted the terms of inclusion of various groups. Tensions arose out of this institutional settlement but did not lead to sustained ethnic violence because the state had a strong repressive apparatus as well as large patronage funds to appease at least some of the aggrieved elites. When the regime collapsed and democratization began, many aspects of the past settlement became open to renegotiation. There were opportunities for ethnonationalist groups to seek independence or greater autonomy. Marginalized groups could seek better inclusion and more respect for their needs. Islamists could reopen the question of the Islamic state. All of these changes produced perceived winners and losers and created uncertainties of outcome. Fears of changing power relations were high, and for other groups new opportunities could be exploited in this environment. Yet, some of these conflicts did erupt before 1998 and require further explanation. There are two processes that, although strongly present as a result of regime change, nevertheless had begun to have an effect prior to 1998. First and foremost was the dismantling itself of the

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94 Collective Violence in Indonesia New Order regime of President Suharto. For more than thirty years, the regime had enjoyed strong stability under a system of extensive patronage and repression by the military, with President Suharto clearly dominant. In fact, as William Liddle (1996) has argued, Suharto, although challenged on several occasions, nevertheless always reestablished and strengthened his power, arguably reaching its apex in the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, however, there were increasing signs that the regime would come to an end, as Suharto was aging and there was no clear mechanism for succession. There were frequent debates about succession, and already the vice-presidential selection for 1998 was being eyed carefully throughout the mid-1990s, as it was seen as much more significant since it could allow for the appointment of a successor. Amid this debate, Suharto kept silent, but the net effect was uncertainty surrounding the “end of regime.” There was a sense of the loosening of Suharto’s and the military’s grip, which raised anxieties among certain ethnic groups about their future status. Second, and related to the end-of-regime climate, was Suharto’s puzzling nurturing of Islamic groups after decades of repressing them. By the mid-1990s, the regime had clearly shifted its policy from previously excluding Islamic groups from the regime and from political organizations more generally to integrating them more systematically into the regime. Whether through the creation of the Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) or through the rapid rise of military officers considered to be devout Muslims, there was clearly a change of orientation in the regime. This change created new anxieties among Christians, who had benefited from protection in the previous decades, while Muslim groups saw new opportunities to gain power and move the regime in new directions. At the same time, the new empowerment of Muslim groups, largely seen as an attempt by Suharto to co-opt and use them, nevertheless gave the impression that he could no longer rely exclusively on his grip on the military to rule. As a result, these processes that would become much more significant and create much stronger reactions in 1998 were already rising in the mid-1990s, with effects on ethnic relations. Riots that broke out in several Javanese towns in 1996–1997 were the first signs of these growing anxieties, particularly between Christians and Muslims. That violence could break out showed the new confidence of Muslim groups, as they sensed that they might riot with impunity.2 It nevertheless remained limited in comparison with Muslim-Christian violence in Maluku and Poso after regime change. The one large-scale violent ethnic conflict before 1998 involved Dayaks against Madurese. Dayaks reacted to years of

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marginalization and sought redress by attacking the Madurese, who had become the most visible sign of change in Kalimantan as they had mainly migrated to the region during New Order rule. The timing is puzzling, since it occurred before regime transition. Nevertheless, anxieties about the future of the regime were already apparent, so it is likely that Dayaks acted proactively against the Madurese in this climate of growing uncertainty. More importantly, the scale of the violence was large, because in its early stages there was no intervention by the police and the military. This late reaction on the part of the forces of order constitutes a departure from past reactions of the regime to disturbances. Usually security forces would intervene swiftly, thereby demonstrating the full control of the repressive apparatus. The timing of violent ethnic conflict, therefore, did not completely coincide with regime change. While most of it did, either in the form of new conflicts or intensification of existing ones, a few emerged prior to the change. Nevertheless, some of the processes that led to rising anxieties were already present and did have some impact, even though to a lesser degree. The emphasis on critical junctures also explains why violent ethnic conflict diminished very significantly after the stabilization of the new regime. After the accession to power of Megawati Sukarnoputri in July 2001, the new regime became much more strongly entrenched and stabilized. The Megawati government was able to restore order, as well as institutional stability and predictability, thereby ending the unstable and transition periods of the Habibie and Wahid presidencies. The question of the Islamic state was settled, as the People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR) rejected a proposed amendment to this effect. The status of the ethnic Chinese was clarified, many discrimination measures were removed, and, more importantly—despite continuing corruption among the country’s political elite—the regime became less associated with large Chinese conglomerates. Peace agreements were reached in Sulawesi and Maluku, and commitments to enforce these agreements could be met by the government. Similar attempts to resolve issues were made in Aceh and in Papua with different degrees of success. In Aceh, a new peace agreement could be signed because of specific circumstances arising from the devastation of the 2004 tsunami but also because the government had maintained constant military pressure over the region. In Papua, a new phase of repression closed off the ability to remobilize as in 2000. Finally, fiscal and administrative decentralization, the creation of new provinces and districts, and special provisions in Aceh and Papua have redesigned very substantially the institutional

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96 Collective Violence in Indonesia channels available for groups to renegotiate their terms and means of inclusion within the Indonesian “national model.” After a period in which the implementation of these measures created more uncertainty than representative opportunity, their stabilization and effective implementation now create a new set of structural incentives and constraints. Again, the relatively sudden reduction or demobilization of conflicts since 2001 is not coincidental and can be best explained by referring to the stabilization of the institutional context. Uncertainties, fears, anxieties, or opportunities were created by the critical juncture that began to appear in the mid-1990s and ended only in 2001. This account can best explain the clustering of violent ethnic conflicts during this period, while framing it in relation to other periods of Indonesia’s history when ethnic conflict was also widespread. There are, however, limitations to an emphasis on critical junctures and institutional change. First, although these factors explain the emergence of clusters of ethnic violence, they cannot in themselves explain why violence emerges in some locations but not others. In the Indonesian case, analyzing the consequences of its national model and corresponding institutions allowed for the differentiation of sources of tensions for groups as different as the Acehnese, the Ambonese Christians, and the Dayaks. It could account for the changing institutional context that gave rise to conditions prone to an intensification of conflict, given the different conditions created by the opening of the critical juncture. Intensification, however, could take nonviolent forms. In some areas, other factors could dampen the propensity for violence despite rising uncertainties and heightened tensions. A comparison of cases where violence erupts with those where it does not reveals the causes of “triggers,” factors explaining eruption of violence as opposed to causes of conflict, which my study emphasizes by looking at structural conditions. Horowitz (2001) rightly differentiates these different levels of explanation in his groundbreaking analysis of deadly ethnic riots. These triggers can explain the specific timing of violent incidents in relation to immediate events. They miss, however, the broader changes that explain the emergence of critical junctures when many simultaneous conflicts appear for the first time, or increase in intensity, as occurred between 1995 and 2001 in Indonesia. This kind of timing takes a broader historical distance to analyze this specific period of violent conflict.3 Second, variance in outcomes occurs not only because of factors dampening violence but also because not all groups/regions will see tensions rise dramatically as a result of the changing institutional con-

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text and its uncertainty. In each of the cases, certain local factors were important contributors to the remobilization of conflict. Certainly, the changes at the national institutional level had differentiated impacts over these various conflicts, because local conditions vary. More ethnographic, local-based studies are better at identifying these processes. Nevertheless, field research showed consistently that several of these factors, in areas such as Aceh, Papua, and Maluku, were intrinsically connected to national-level changes, so that by avoiding a broader level of analysis, one misses an important aspect of the explanation.

Conclusion Violent ethnic conflict in recent years was clustered into a specific time period from the mid-1990s to 2002. Although a large number of studies have addressed these conflicts, only a focus on institutional changes and the national model at critical junctures can account for this clustering of events. A broader historical look at ethnic relations in Indonesia reveals two particularly salient aspects. First, there have been other time periods when several ethnic conflicts appeared simultaneously, thereby suggesting that any explanation of these conflicts should account for these particularly violent periods followed by stable, relatively peaceful ones. Second, the formation of an Indonesian national model, characterized by the concept of a single nation and secular but religious state, had lasting consequences on ethnic relations. Throughout different periods in which this model was reaffirmed, modified, and even intensified under the New Order regime, it created tensions for some ethnic groups. At critical junctures, these tensions were highly likely to erupt in violent conflict, particularly in 1998. The fall of the regime and its democratization created uncertainties about future outcomes and opportunities for groups to renegotiate their inclusion or at least the terms of inclusion. Groups that had been integrated by force during the Suharto regime saw opportunities to remobilize and demand secession or significantly greater autonomy. Those that had been marginalized, either through repression or displacement in the name of development, could demand redress. Tensions among Muslims and Christians in some areas also were high, since the New Order regime had changed the balance of power between the two groups and demands were being made to revisit the status of Islam in the polity. These sets of tensions were embedded in the institutional structures that the New Order regime had es-

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98 Collective Violence in Indonesia tablished, as well as the way in which it had implemented its vision of Indonesia’s national model. With its fall, the conditions were ripe for reopening terms of inclusion, in some cases through violent means. A historical institutionalist explanation of violent ethnic conflict draws attention to three processes that are missed by other approaches. First, it can best trace clusters of violent ethnic conflict at different historical time periods when critical junctures occur. Second, it links the emergence of such clusters to changing institutional environments that create uncertainties and opportunities for ethnic groups. The process of renegotiating their inclusion or its terms raises the probability of violent ethnic conflict. Third, it analyzes the tensions that are embedded in institutional configurations that are stabilized at the end of critical junctures and, in particular, that reflect specific “national models.”

Notes 1. This section is largely taken from Bertrand (2004). 2. Some interpretations go even further and suggest that the Suharto regime was actively supporting groups that would engage in such violence in order to justify subsequent repression (Hefner 2000). 3. In this instance, it is entirely likely that comparative studies of more local processes, such as Varshney, Panggabean, and Tadjoeddin (2004), can unveil factors that prevent the emergence of violence despite similar macroconditions increasing its probability.

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5 Explaining Ethnic Violence in Indonesia: Demilitarizing Domestic Security Yuhki Tajima

Numerous underlying factors have long driven ethnic and religious

conflicts in Indonesia. Cleavages between migrants and natives, between Javanese and outer islanders, and between Christians and Muslims have been made more salient by structural differences in the distribution of political and economic resources. Yet, despite the prevalence of latent tensions, communal violence was a relative rarity during much of Suharto’s New Order regime (1966–1998). Then, in 1996, incidents of communal violence between groups defined by village, ethnic, and religious identities began to climb precipitously throughout the country. The number and intensity of incidents increased steadily until the din of violence reached its peak in 2000, after which it declined as steadily as it began (Varshney, Panggabean, and Tadjoeddin 2004). To explain these patterns, scholars of Indonesia have dissected violence during this period into various subcategories of communal violence and antistate violence. Gerry van Klinken (2007) has classified communal violence into (1) large-scale communal violence, which killed hundreds and displaced tens of thousands at the district level or above; (2) localized communal rioting fought at the town or city level; and (3) social violence, which includes vigilantism (the lynching of thieves) and intervillage brawls. While explanations of these types of violence have provided insights into specific aspects of the violence during this period, there have been few attempts to draw connections between the categories. Although there are qualitative differences between these types, some of these appear to be differences in scale. Examining the similarities across different types of violence can be equally valuable analytically. Indeed, the sudden concomitant rise of 99

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100 Collective Violence in Indonesia each of these types of violence would suggest a common factor or set of factors that could contribute to our understanding of each type.1 In this chapter, I suggest that the key unifying factor explaining the different types of violence during this period is the withdrawal of the military from intervening locally. Increasing restraints on the military during the period of keterbukaan (political openness, 1989–1998) and the early Reformasi period (after 1998) altered the security environment and led to spasms of various types of violence. This chapter is organized as follows: First, I describe the historical background of the security sector in Indonesia and the changes in the role of the military beginning in the latter years of the New Order. Then I examine four examples of different forms of communal violence in Lampung and Central Sulawesi provinces to heuristically search for a common causal factor. I begin with an examination of a case of intervillage conflict that did not result in violence. I then examine two cases of lynchings in Lampung, one of which escalated into intervillage violence. In comparing these cases, I show how lynchings and intervillage violence may be linked by the common causal factor of a less interventionist military. Then, I turn to the case of Poso district in Central Sulawesi province to show that large-scale communal violence and intervillage violence may also be linked and caused by increasing restraints on the military.

The Existing Literature A number of scholars have offered explanations for a subset of the communal violence during this period. Van Klinken’s (2007) study on large-scale communal violence argues that political opportunity structures opened up for political entrepreneurs to exploit underlying conflicts, especially in areas of rapid urbanization. In a similar line of argument, Jacques Bertrand (2004) has argued that the changing political configurations that define the opportunities of various identity groups, especially Muslims, within the polity led to large-scale communal and separatist violence. In both of these studies there is little discussion as to why the causes of large-scale events should be treated separately from small-scale events. Indeed, each of the five large-scale episodes of communal violence began as localized communal violence or social violence. John Sidel (2006) splices the violence according to religious cleavages and argues that religious polarization, discourses of Muslim marginalization, and opportunities to reassert Islam’s place in the In-

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donesian polity set the groundwork for riots, pogroms, and jihadist violence. Given the similar patterns of nonreligious ethnic violence during the same period, however, a more general explanation that would connect different identity conflicts beyond just religious violence would seem appropriate. Furthermore, while Sidel’s national-level discursive mechanisms may help explain how polities become polarized and how conflicts between groups are defined, it is unclear how they translate into concrete street-level violence. In this book, Bridget Welsh examines the incidence of lynchings that emerged as a product of vacuums of power from decentralization and local norms of mob violence. Certainly the weakening of state capacity in certain locales is important in explaining communal violence. Although the legislation, in 1999, of decentralization may be a factor in the violence that followed, this argument is unable to account for the increase in violence that began in 1996, prior to decentralization. What is surprisingly absent from the Indonesianist literature is the role of the military. Where the military is mentioned, it is as an agent provocateur. While there is strong evidence that certain hard-line Islamic factions in the military conspired to provoke riots against ethnic Chinese and Christians to undermine reform-minded rivals in the military (Hefner 2000), it does not explain the ethnic violence that occurred in the far reaches of the republic. Given the central role of the military in both politics and security in Indonesia and the massive changes in state security forces during the transition from authoritarian rule, the lack of attention toward the military as a factor in communal violence is striking. This is even more so given the prominence of weak state capacity in comparative theories of ethnic conflict and civil wars.2 In the next section, I draw attention to the role of the military, not as an agent provocateur but as a shaper of the security environment.

History of Security Forces in Indonesia Since the military countercoup that installed Major General Suharto as president, the military was ensured a dominant position in Indonesian politics throughout the New Order. Its role was cemented in the dwifungsi (dual-function) policy in which the military would extend beyond its typical jurisdiction of ensuring national security into a new realm of promoting economic development and political stability. In practice, this entailed the military’s intervention into the legislature, bureaucracy, and regional government as well as the surveillance and re-

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102 Collective Violence in Indonesia pression of potential sources of regime stability, such as government critics and interethnic strife (Honna 2003). In the long tradition of putting down regional conflicts through military repression, the New Order used the threat of repressive force to back up its intolerance of retributive violence.3 This reflected the New Order’s concern that communal tensions could lead to destabilization. The Indonesian military’s 1988 strategic plan shows a clear policy to put down ethnic and religious strife because it was seen to threaten regime stability. That document emphasized “extreme groups that would try to use extra-constitutional means—instigation of mass riots, for instance—to further their political interests based on racial and separatist motivations” (Honna 2003).4 Communal violence was largely deterred through the military’s surveillance apparatus, Kopkamtib (Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order), which was established by Suharto in 1965 to gather intelligence about the sources of instability. This military body coordinated with the territorial commands, which arrested those they classified as subversive. When tensions between different ethnic or religious groups boiled over, the military could be deployed to prevent further escalations (Aragon 2000). From the beginning, Suharto established a reputation for using repression to achieve political ends, beginning with the militaryorchestrated killing of an estimated 500,000 alleged Communists and ethnic Chinese that followed the abortive coup of 1965 that led to Suharto’s ascent. Besides eliminating challengers to the new regime, this bloody episode served to establish repression as a credible instrument for effecting political order. During the New Order, the military would occasionally repress other perceived sources of instability. In response to spiraling crime rates in 1982–1983, General Benny Murdani launched the Petrus campaign, in which between 5,000 and 10,000 suspected criminals were killed and their mutilated bodies laid out in the streets (Barker 2002). The military violently repressed “extreme” religious groups, such as when it killed hundreds of Muslims during a protest in Tanjung Priok in 1984 and twenty-seven members of an Islamic sect in Lampung in 1989 (Honna 2003).

Increasing Restraints on the Military As the Suharto regime began to wane, it was challenged by internal infighting and external pressures to democratize. A key consequence was

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an increase in constraints on military intervention into local affairs. With a liberalizing media, a strengthening democratization movement, and increased international scrutiny of human rights abuses, the military was less able to employ repressive tactics to achieve its security objectives. One of the primary demands of prodemocracy demonstrators and reformers within the military was the end of the dwifungsi system through a withdrawal of the military from civilian matters and a mandate to focus only on noncivilian issues (Wahyono et al. 2001). In 1988, signs of tension began to appear between Suharto and his top military officer, General Benny Murdani, who was dissatisfied with Suharto’s choice for vice-president. This feud led Suharto to steadily curtail Murdani’s influence in the military by sidelining him and placing greater constraints on the military. In 1988, in order to undermine Murdani’s power base, Suharto dismantled Kopkamtib, the feared domestic intelligence agency. The effect of dismantling an organization whose name, according to General Daryatmo, could cause people to become “feverish even just hearing the name” (Honna 2003, 91) allowed more open debate of the policy of military repression. Then, in 1989, a speech by outgoing US ambassador Paul Wolfowitz in which he called for political openness (keterbukaan) led surprisingly to a debate initiated by a military faction in the lower house of parliament about adopting a policy of tolerating criticism of the regime, including the repressive role of the military (Honna 2003). Then, on November 12, 1991, the Indonesian military fired on hundreds of proindependence demonstrators in Dili, East Timor, leading to an outcry from foreign governments and international human rights organizations. In an unprecedented move during his rule, Suharto dismissed two generals and court-martialed nineteen soldiers involved in the affair. This was a dramatic departure from the free rein he had previously granted the military to deal with other security challenges. In response to heavy international pressure, Suharto then established the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in December 1993, which was set up, in part, to monitor the military’s human rights abuses. Although invoking human rights restricted his rivals in the military, it also had the effect of constraining his own previously unchecked powers. In 1996, under Suharto’s orders, the military and its paramilitary operatives cracked down on opposition party leader Megawati Sukarnoputri (daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno) by raiding and occupying her offices in anticipation of her party’s (Democratic Party of Indonesia) challenge in the 1997 elections and against the leftist party PRD (People’s Democratic Party), on anticommunist grounds (Ryter

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104 Collective Violence in Indonesia 2001). This led to criticisms from various retired generals, including the speaker of the parliament, Lieutenant General Wahono, who argued that repressive measures were no longer viable (Honna 2003). On the one hand, sensitivity about human rights issues led to a reduction in overt military intervention in civilian affairs. On the other hand, it had the unintended consequence of increasing reliance on proxy militias that could carry out repressive activities with a plausibly deniable connection to the military. Certainly the reliance on militarysponsored thugs (preman) during the crackdown on Megawati reflected some aversion to the overt use of repression and the convenient lack of accountability for militias and gangs.5 In East Timor, military-supported militias were used to terrorize civilians, leading to the rampage that claimed roughly 1,000 lives in 1999. In Lampung, a local gang was used by the provincial governor, Oemarsono, to disperse a large demonstration against the governor in 1998. A leader of this gang explained to me: I dispatched about 3,000 of our fighters to scare away the 7,000 protestors who were there. It was a great success. Now that it’s in the Reformasi era, everyone thinks they have the freedom to do whatever they want. We are here to make them understand their place . . . The police and [military] love to use us because we are able to do things that they are not able to do themselves. They have to worry about human rights and such things. So criminals and demonstrators are not scared since the worst that can happen to them is that they are sent to jail. If we catch them, though, we can kill them. (Personal communication, July 29, 2003)

Here the militia leader himself drew the link between human rights discourse, its effect on military policies, and the changing local security conditions. Indeed, the increase in the prominence of militias and gangs during this period suggests that the restraints against the military through human rights reforms were felt locally in terms of insecurity. By 1998, reformists within the military began reconceptualizing it as a purely military force rather than as a player in the civilian arena. On April 1, 1999, President Abdurrahman Wahid removed the police from military command, making the police directly report to the president (International Crisis Group 2001). In 2000, the parliament reinforced this separation by passing a law6 that stipulated that the police be removed from the military. Under this new arrangement, the military had sole jurisdiction over military security issues and the police had

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sole jurisdiction over civilian security issues (Wahyono et al. 2001). No longer were the police forces a subordinate younger sibling to the military; they formed their own independent bureaucratic structure. Law enforcement was thereby removed from the military’s portfolio, leaving the police to deal exclusively with crime and local security issues. The years of its reliance on military support and its lack of resources left the police extremely weak compared with other police in Southeast Asia. In 1999, the population-to-police ratio was roughly only 1,200:1, nearly five times the ratio in neighboring Malaysia and twice the ratio of the Philippines (Melialia 2001; Asia Week 1994). Although the Indonesian police’s responsibilities increased, there was not a corresponding increase in their capacity or resources. Unable to draw on the military for backup and without a significant increase in capacity, the police were ill equipped to deal with spirals of violence toward the end of the Suharto regime.

Case Studies Given the reliance on the military to repress destabilizing spirals of communal violence, to what extent did restraining the military affect security at the local level? To identify how the macrochanges in the military could lead to microlevel outcomes in security, I begin by examining a case in Lampung province in which communal conflict did not result in communal violence. Then I present two cases in which communal conflicts emerged during the transition period—examples of conflicts in which (1) lynching occurred and (2) intervillage violence broke out after a case of lynching. After the Lampung cases, I examine a fourth case—this one in the Poso district of Central Sulawesi, which was the site of large-scale communal violence. The data are based on three months of fieldwork in Lampung in 2003 and four months of fieldwork in Central Sulawesi in 2006, as well as secondary sources. I chose these four cases of communal conflict because they all experienced some form of communal conflict, and they also span the full range of outcomes of violence. I use these cases to heuristically explore possible causal factors that can explain communal violence (George and Bennett 2005, 23). Although each of these cases had outcomes of communal violence, there was variation both in the level of violence and in the processes that emerged following the breakout of violence and the practices that were adopted to prevent the recurrence of violence. Examining the chain of events that led to communal violence

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106 Collective Violence in Indonesia and the variation in the postviolence practices in these four cases can help to identify possible mechanisms that could explain the nationwide spike in communal violence. The key independent variable that I focus on is the speed of the police response to communal violence. The police response to communal violence was fastest in the first case in comparison with the other three cases. Background on Lampung

Lampung is a good case to examine as a province in which communal violence increased during the transition period; an abundance of underlying grievances laid the kindling for conflict, which was largely caused by dynamics from migration. Migration, both governmentsponsored and “spontaneous,” has been a key factor in many of the communal conflicts in Indonesia. A policy to relieve poverty on the overcrowded island of Java by subsidizing migrants from Java to less populated islands began in the early twentieth century through the Dutch Kolonisatie program, which was continued after independence through the Transmigrasi program (Benoit et al. 1989). Located on the southern tip of Sumatra and separated by a narrow strait from West Java, Lampung became the most common destination for migrants from Java. By 2000, migrants and descendants of migrants amounted to roughly 86 percent of the Lampung population (BPS 2000). Much of the migration was a result of the government-sponsored Transmigrasi program in which poor households from Java were provided land, capital, and other benefits to relocate to unoccupied government land and form their communities anew. Over time, many of the migrant communities fared better economically than indigenous communities, having engaged in more dynamic economic activities. These group inequalities led to tensions between migrant and indigenous groups in which Lampungese groups resented the seemingly preferential treatment given to migrants and the economic and political minority status assigned to the indigenous Lampungese. At the same time, migrant communities resented the high incidence of crimes committed by Lampungese against migrants. Further adding to tensions were competing sources of legitimacy over land tenure in which Lampungese claimed indigenous customary rights to land, while migrants claimed land based on government-issued land titles. But despite these underlying tensions, communal violence was relatively rare until it began increasing along with the violence in the rest of the country.

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Case 1: Blambangan Umpu and Umpu Bakti (Way Kanan District/Blambangan Umpu Subdistrict)

Blambangan Umpu is an indigenous Lampungese village lying in the district of Way Kanan. In 1982, the Transmigration Department designated a location adjacent to Blambangan Umpu as a transmigration site that became known as Umpu Bakti village. Before the government could move ahead with establishing the migrant village of Umpu Bakti, the Transmigration Department obtained permission to use the land from the traditional Lampungese village leader (called penyimbang) of Blambangan Umpu. Relations between the two villages remained amicable until plans emerged to establish the new district of Way Kanan out of the older district of North Lampung in 2000. Blambangan Umpu was designated as the site of the new district capital, which resulted in the construction of new district administrative offices and in an increase in business investment, causing land prices to appreciate. In Lampung, as in many parts of Indonesia, customary (adat) claims of land tenure have been at odds with formal land titles, particularly given the recent relegitimation of customary rights, which often has pitted migrants against indigenous groups (Henley and Davidson 2008). The appreciation in land prices in Blambangan Umpu led to the sudden salience of a previously unoccupied plot of land between the two villages. Members of Blambangan Umpu invoked their traditional claims to the land, while villagers from Umpu Bakti produced maps delineating their claims. In 1999, the conflict escalated when villagers from Umpu Bakti began cultivating the contested land and villagers from Blambangan Umpu attempted to demarcate the land with a tractor. Angered by this move, villagers from Umpu Bakti assembled and were encouraged by the village head to attack the Blambangan Umpu villagers. While the mob moved to confront the other village, the village head from Umpu Bakti called the police to have them intervene before the violence. As the mob from Umpu Bakti approached, villagers from Blambangan Umpu, surprised by the escalation, quickly assembled what men they could find to defend their village. Just as violence was about to break out, policemen and soldiers arrived to stop it from occurring. In this case, despite a source of contention that was enough to mobilize residents of two villages for violence against each other, the responsive presence of the security forces helped to avert violence. Expecting that the security forces would respond quickly and adequately,

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108 Collective Violence in Indonesia the village head from Umpu Bakti calculated that he could mobilize his fellow villagers to attack the other village without actually experiencing a violent clash. This case highlights the importance not only of the capacity and willingness of security forces to maintain security, but also of the expectations of the locals. Case 2: Negara Jaya and Negeri Besar (Way Kanan District/Pakuan Ratu Subdistrict)

In September 2000, two men from the rural Lampungese village of Negeri Besar stole a bag of sugar, tea, and coffee from a vendor in the neighboring migrant village of Negara Jaya. A bell rang out and villagers yelled “Thief!” A mob of migrant villagers captured and eventually killed the two thieves by stuffing bamboo rods down their throats. Some of the participants of the mob wanted to burn the bodies, but others were able to salvage them and take them to the police. The severity of the punishment was to try to deter future acts of crime. The police made note of the theft that prompted the killings but never investigated the lynchings, as they were seen as an accepted consequence of breaking the law. Word of the lynchings soon spread as angry villagers from the four Lampungese villages in the marga (a traditional Lampungese kinship grouping) gathered knives, sickles, and gasoline to avenge the killings. Before an attack could be attempted, the village leader appealed to the young men planning their attack to wait for him to attempt a negotiated settlement. The village leader told the crowd that if the negotiation failed, they could attack Negara Jaya. As leaders from each village prepared for the negotiations, pledges of fighters from ten to fifteen other migrant villages began arriving. In the event that no settlement could be reached, the fighting would resume, involving many more fighters from surrounding areas. Through the negotiations, the leaders of the two villages agreed on a settlement payment for the families of the two thieves. Although there was no formal agreement on managing future incidents of crime and communal violence, there appeared to be a shift in behavior by at least one side of the conflict as the village leader from Negeri Besar stated that his villagers had subsequently turned in a villager from Negara Jaya to the police whereas in the past they would have tried to beat him. In Negara Jaya, however, the village head speculated that lynching criminals was likely to persist since his villagers perceived that the lynching was effective in preventing further acts of crime.

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It is important to note the villagers’ expectations of the behavior of the security forces. In contrast to Case 1, villagers in Case 2 viewed the police as ineffective and corrupt. Rather than defer to police in deterring and adjudicating crimes, villagers had become accustomed to providing for their own security through vigilante means. Because of the spontaneity of the lynching and the diffuse police presence in the area, the police were unable to prevent the lynching. It was quickly clear to the village leaders that a larger security force that was capable of preventing an escalation of violence was unlikely to be deployed. As a result, the village leaders immediately entered negotiations to prevent the violence from escalating. The retaliatory attacks that were being organized were stopped by the village leader, not the police. He stated, “There was a truckload of police there, but there were too few of them to be able to stop 300 armed men” (Personal communication, June 24, 2003). With the threat of a widening spiral of communal violence, elites moved to deescalate the situation through negotiated settlement. The unexpected possibility of escalated violence then led villagers from Negeri Besar to complement the role of the police by turning in thieves to the police rather than lynching them themselves. Case 3: Jabung, Gunung Makar, and Mumbang Jaya Villages (East Lampung District/Jabung Subdistrict)

In December 1999, amid Lebaran Day celebrations, which marked the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, three youths from the rural majority Lampungese village of Jabung sped on motorcycles through the neighboring majority migrant villages of Gunung Makar and Mumbang Jaya. As they passed by, youths from Gunung Makar who were offended by the posturing yelled “Motorcycle thief!” knowing that the cries would summon villagers onto the road to capture and possibly lynch the Lampungese youths. A chase ensued in which two of the youths were captured and brought to the village head of Mumbang Jaya, who would decide on the punishment for the alleged theft. As the village head deliberated in his house, a mob gathered outside demanding that he release the captives so that they could burn them alive. Seeking to disperse the crowd, the village head asked the crowd to produce the victim of the alleged stolen motorcycle. When the crowd left, it allowed a group of villagers from Jabung to accompany the youths back to their village. As they rushed back toward Jabung, however, a larger group of

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110 Collective Violence in Indonesia villagers from Mumbang Jaya, Gunung Makar, and two other nearby migrant villages attacked the smaller group of Lampungese. In the melee, several of the outnumbered Lampungese were injured and one was killed. Responding to the killing, villagers from Jabung blocked roads, plotted revenge attacks, and stabbed a man passing through on his way to work in Gunung Makar. Police were soon deployed to the villages but lacked the capacity to maintain security with only a handful of officers. Soon, news of the violence spread, and the village head from Jabung received pledges of fighters from thirty other Lampungese villages from three other subdistricts in East Lampung, while seventeen migrant villages pledged fighting men for Mumbang Jaya and Gunung Makar. Instead of accepting the offers, however, the village head from Mumbang Jaya contacted the village head from Jabung to arrange a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The negotiations led to the agreement of a compensatory payment for the Jabung victim’s family, and an intervillage forum was established to which crimes would be reported to prevent future crimes and communal violence. Instead of lynching thieves from other villages, the thief’s own village head would be obliged to report his own villagers to the police to be punished. As in Case 2, the police were unable to react quickly enough to prevent the initial violence set off by the attempt to lynch the youths from Jabung. In contrast to the previous case, however, the initial violence set off retaliatory attacks that transformed a lynching into intervillage violence that threatened to draw in tens of villages aligned along ethnic identity. Although the police were nominally involved in the negotiation process, the violence was stopped when the village leaders from the two centrally involved villages agreed to restrain their villagers. The leaders of the villages feared that failure to reach a negotiated settlement could result in an escalation of migrant-indigenous violence that could overwhelm the capacity of the police to maintain security so that there was a real possibility that the violence could escalate into a case of large-scale communal violence. Cases 2 and 3 show that weak law enforcement can lead to lynchings. A comparison of Cases 2 and 3 with Case 1 shows how low-level violence can quickly morph into intervillage violence if security forces are not sufficiently quick or numerous. Given the ready volunteers from uninvolved coethnic villages, it is easy to understand why locals feared that the intervillage violence could quickly spiral out of control. With the possibility that minor incidents can escalate into much more significant cases of violence, it is useful to examine larger cases of

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communal violence. In the following section, I examine the initial process of escalating violence in the case of Poso to determine whether changes in security force policies can help explain the outbreak of violence in cases of large-scale communal violence. Case 4: Poso District (Central Sulawesi Province)

In Poso district, large-scale communal violence between Christians and Muslims since 1998 has claimed as many as 1,000 lives, displaced tens of thousands, and led to religious polarization that has continued to be stoked by intermittent episodes of unresolved shootings and bombings. Prior to 1998, a number of historical factors sowed tensions between migrant and indigenous groups and Christians and Muslims in Poso. Lying between the majority Christian population of North Sulawesi and the majority Muslim population of South Sulawesi, the district of Poso in recent years was roughly split between Christians and Muslims. The coastal population of Poso (as in many parts of Eastern Indonesia) reflected a higher portion of Muslims, while the highlands were dominated by Christians. Overlying these religious breakdowns were various ethnic cleavages as well. Groups indigenous to Poso dominated the highlands, while the coastal areas were increasingly home to migrants, mainly from the Muslim Bugis areas of South Sulawesi. From the Dutch colonial period, Christians had occupied a privileged position in the civil service. With the influx of Muslims into the region, however, the coveted civil service positions became increasingly occupied by Muslims. In 1998, tensions over the control of the civil service culminated during the competition for the powerful district head position, which carried the authority to distribute lucrative contracts and civil service positions (Aragon 2001). Observers of the violence in Central Sulawesi have described it as occurring in five phases: the first two appeared as city-level riots, the third was a dramatic escalation embroiling the whole district, the fourth saw a militarization of the conflict with the intervention of organized outside militias, and the fifth saw a transformation of the violence from open fighting to sporadic bombing and sniper attacks. I focus on the first three phases as they provide the most insight into how large-scale communal violence breaks out. The first phase of the violence began on December 24, 1998 (which coincided with both Christmas Eve and Ramadan), when a Christian youth scuffled with a Muslim youth in Poso City. Having sustained a knife wound on the hand, the Muslim youth took refuge in a

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112 Collective Violence in Indonesia mosque. Christian and Muslim leaders agreed that alcohol was the source of the problem and agreed to ban it during the month of Ramadan. Clashes broke out when Muslim youths started to ransack Christian Chinese stores that sold alcohol. Word of the clashes soon brought truckloads of Christian and Muslim fighters from the surrounding Christian highlands and Muslim coastal areas, escalating into widespread rioting. The first phase of rioting left roughly 200 injured and 400, mostly Christian, homes burned. Surrogates of the two rivals for the district head position (one was a Christian and the other a Muslim) were ultimately blamed for stoking and escalating the violence (Aragon 2001; Human Rights Watch 2002). The second phase began in April 2000, when a Christian youth stabbed a Muslim youth in the arm, which led fellow Muslims from the victim’s neighborhood to seek revenge against the attacker. The mob stabbed the Christian youth’s father in the back, setting off a spasm of violence that led to the displacement of thousands of Christians, seven deaths, and the burning of hundreds of their houses as well as churches and businesses. In dealing with the violence, the overwhelmed local police force called in reinforcements from the more heavily armed paramilitary police force (Brimob). The Brimob forces were themselves unable to control the rioters and ended up firing live ammunition at a Muslim mob, killing three. Muslim outrage led to the withdrawal of the outside forces, allowing rioting to resume unabated. At the same time, the violence was exploited to promote the installation of a key political officer; this time, it was the deputy district head. The violence continued until 600 army troops were finally deployed from South Sulawesi to reestablish security. Despite the increased presence of security forces, there were no investigations into the killings and rioting, which added to the sense that the security forces were unable to prevent violence and adjudicate crimes (Aragon 2001; Human Rights Watch 2002). In late May, the third phase began, during which Christians who had fled Poso City joined with highland Christian residents in retributive communal violence against Muslims. In total, hundreds of Muslims were killed over the next two months. The most severe instance was the killing of seventy Muslim men seeking refuge in the Walisongo Muslim boarding school. Only after it became apparent that existing security forces were insufficient to stop attacks were an additional 1,500 military personnel sent from South Sulawesi to quell the violence. Following an unsuccessful attempt at reconciliation by the government in August 2000, attacks on villages and farmers in their fields became commonplace. During this period, the weaponry and organization of

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violence became increasingly sophisticated as outside Islamic militias from Java, South Sulawesi, and Maluku entered (Aragon 2001; Human Rights Watch 2002). Discussion of Case 4 and Comparison with Lampung Cases

As the violence escalated in each of the first three phases, the pace at which coreligionists joined in the violence quickly overwhelmed the capacity of the security forces to contain it. In the first two phases of the Poso violence, an initial scuffle was followed by an escalation of violence along identity lines. Rather than relying on the police to adjudicate the initial incident, local residents resorted to attacking members of the other religious group. As in Cases 2 and 3, violence broke out first because of a lack of faith in the security forces in adjudicating grievances and escalated as in Case 3 because of slow and ineffective intervention against spirals of violence. During the first phase, some of the violence took place in front of the police barracks but was not stopped because the police lacked the ability to respond. In contrast, during the New Order in Central Sulawesi in 1988, violence between Christians and Muslims erupted in which a church was burned and fights broke out, but the military was deployed quickly and prevented the escalation of communal violence (Aragon 2001). During the third phase, some Muslims appealed to both the police and the military to protect them from the attacks of the Christian mobs. The security forces present were insufficient to prevent the Christian mobs from carrying out their attacks on Muslims. Local Muslims in Poso Pesisir, the coastal area west of Poso City, appealed to police and military personnel to stop the approaching Christian mob, but to no effect. Initially the police downplayed the threat, urging Muslims in Poso Pesisir not to panic and to stay at home. When the threat became more ominous, a police officer suggested that local Muslims form an ad hoc militia to defend themselves (Personal communication, February 22, 2006). When a Muslim man who would later form an ad hoc militia asked an army officer why the military did not intervene, he replied that with only ten ill-equipped soldiers, they lacked the capacity to repel a mob of hundreds of Christians and that the military “could not kill the [fighters] because of human rights” (Personal communication, February 22, 2006). This oral evidence suggests that the human rights reforms of the 1990s had reached through to the rank-and-file soldiers and had at least some concrete effect in restraining the military when they intervened

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114 Collective Violence in Indonesia against violence at a local level. This is not to suggest that the military earnestly began enforcing human rights, but rather to show how the restraints on the military as represented by human rights reforms had reached the common field officer. This parallels the experience in Lampung in which the increasing restraints placed on the security forces in Lampung led to a niche for ethnic militia to provide security services. As mentioned earlier, the leader of a migrant militia in Lampung noted that the new human rights concerns restrained security forces so that the security forces’ repressive activities were outsourced to his group. This helped them keep their repressive capacity while maintaining some plausible deniability that they were engaged in repression. As Lorraine Aragon (2001) argues, it seems clear that competition over district-level political offices was an important factor in mobilizing individuals for violence. However, the initial violence from the scuffles in the first two phases appears to have been more mundane than political in origin. It began much as in Case 3 in Lampung in which motives of revenge and ethnic solidarity instigated the initial violence. Only after the violence reached a certain level and the population was religiously polarized did political entrepreneurs enflame the tensions for political gain. An alternative argument from the literature on Hindu-Muslim rioting in India suggests that the security forces may have had the ability to stop the violence but were intentionally restrained by local politicians for political gain (Wilkinson 2004). The fact that the security forces were centralized bureaucracies controlled from Jakarta, not local politicians, and the fact that two of the alleged political provocateurs were arrested suggest that the violence did not emerge from an unwillingness on the part of the local politicians to tamp down the violence. Rather, the military’s lack of a prerogative and the police force’s lack of capacity are more plausible explanations for the weak response by the security forces. The lack of an adequate response by the security forces in quelling the violence also was instrumental in attracting outside Islamist militias during the third and fourth phases. Outside militias were attracted by news accounts of violence against Muslims. Some of these militias, often referred to as Laskar Mujahiddin, touted the overthrow of the secular state with a pan–Southeast Asian Islamic state. Another prominent militia from Java, called Laskar Jihad, advocated revising the constitution to establish Indonesia as an Islamic state. Laskar Jihad received support from members of the government and sought to buttress the security forces rather than compete with them (Human Rights Watch 2002). While these militias were motivated by their own political agen-

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das, it is unlikely that they would have found interest in the backwater district had Muslims not been attacked. In an interview with the leader of Laskar Jihad, Jafar Umar Thalib claimed that “the security apparatus did not try to stop the violence because they were worried about human rights and international pressure. . . . When the government did [intervene against the violence] we were able to leave both Ambon and Poso” (personal communication, March 15, 2006). It seems plausible that Laskar Jihad’s initial intervention into the Poso conflict was a result of the state’s lack of capacity to provide security for Muslims and the media attention the violence received following the killings of fourteen Muslims, mainly women and children, at Buyung Katedo.7 Jafar’s comment provides another example of a militia intervening in communal violence due to an inadequate response by security forces that was caused, as they claim, by human rights concerns that restrained the ability of the security forces to repress sources of communal violence.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that political liberalization, especially the expansion of human rights, increasingly restrained the military during the late New Order. I have suggested that this led to the unintended consequence of lifting the “lid” (Beissinger 2002) that worked to suppress latent communal conflicts. Thus, in the scholarship of democratic transition and consolidation, greater attention should be given to examining the conditions that determine whether democratic transitions are achieved peacefully or, rather, violently. Future work focusing on the causal mechanisms that explain variation in local outcomes of violence can help us elaborate a causal theory of communal violence during democratic transition. The cases have provided some suggestive directions for exploring the causal processes by which restraining the military can lead to an increase in violence. In particular, with its repressive capacity, the military actually prevented communal violence while often perpetrating violence of its own against citizens. When the military was restrained, violence was unleashed. The cases also suggest that it may be fruitful for future research to examine how local security is achieved by informal institutions. The cases have pointed out how insecurity can lead citizens to develop informal institutions that mediate interethnic relations. It has also suggested that insecurity can sometimes enable militias to establish themselves locally and further impact the security landscape locally.8 More scholarship on these informal re-

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116 Collective Violence in Indonesia sponses to insecurity can help develop a richer theory that connects security sector reform to local security outcomes. I have also sought to draw a connection between types of violence that have previously been treated—somewhat arbitrarily—separately. I show that large-scale communal violence may actually be special cases of lower-intensity communal violence common in Indonesia during the transition period. I call into question the empirical strategy of examining each “type” of communal violence separately. Such a strategy of examining one type of violence may suffer from selection on the dependent variable, which may identify factors that are not unique to the subset of cases examined. In particular, while van Klinken’s study on large-scale communal violence does allow for the heuristic exploration of a plausible theory of the violence, a more fruitful explanation of the violence would entail examining cases that vary in the level of violence. By introducing more variation into the comparative framework, we would be more able to identify why violence breaks out in some areas but not in others, and why some of the outbreaks escalate while others dissipate. Future work would benefit from examining the wider set of cases in Indonesia, including the large-scale cases in Poso, West and Central Kalimantan, Maluku, and North Maluku as well as the smaller, lesser-known cases. Since the initial security sector reforms restrained the military and sequestered the police from military command, the police and military have undergone some important changes. A backlash against security reforms due to the increase in communal violence allowed the military to resist the dismantling of the territorial command system (Mietzner 2006). To meet the increased demands of an independent force, the police have also received allocations to incrementally increase their force numbers over time (International Crisis Group 2001). Further research is needed to examine the effect of these more recent trends in the security sector on communal violence. Finally, the conclusion that greater concerns over human rights led to ethnic violence by restraining the formerly repressive military is not to counsel against the adoption of human rights reforms in authoritarian regimes. Indeed, cross-country evidence suggests that, although democratic transitions experience more violence, once the rocky initial period has been passed, democracies tend to be less prone to violent conflict (Hegre et al. 2001). At the local level, there is ample evidence that ethnic cooperation is actually a more likely outcome (Fearon and Laitin 1996). Thus, the findings presented in this chapter suggest that

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the process by which political liberalization is achieved deserves greater attention from scholars and policymakers.

Notes I wish to thank my informants as well as the local contacts that provided logistical support during my field trips to Lampung and Central Sulawesi. Special thanks to Arianto Sangaji, Vincent Lumintang, and NGOs Yayasan Tanah Merdeka, KPKP-ST, Wasantara, Domi, and Kamel. I gratefully acknowledge support from Harvard University’s Sinclair Kennedy Traveling Fellowship and the World Bank Jakarta’s Social Development Group. Robert Bates, Monica Toft, Roger Petersen, Steve Levitsky, Ashutosh Varshney, Scott Guggenheim, Syarif Hidayat, Robert Hefner, Chris Wilson, Patrick Barron, Rachael Diprose, and two anonymous reviewers have provided helpful advice on various parts of this project. 1. Van Klinken (2007, 3) poses this question for future research. 2. Posen (1993) argues that an ethnic security dilemma emerges when the state no longer has the capacity to provide security. Ethnic groups then often spiral into violent conflict when they cannot distinguish between defensive and offensive measures. Fearon and Laitin (1996) and Varshney (2002) explore the role of informal institutions in providing interethnic security where states do not. Wilkinson (2004) attributes ethnic violence to differences in the willingness of states in preventing ethnic violence, rather than their capacity to do so. 3. The Hindu-Buddhist empire of Majapahit occasionally deployed its naval fleet to put down recalcitrant vassal lords in the periphery (Ricklefs 1981, 15–18). 4. Ethnic and religious conflicts had long been parlayed into regional rebellions, such as in the Darul Islam rebellions in West Java, Aceh, and South Sulawesi; the PRRI rebellions in Sumatra; the Permesta rebellion in North and Central Sulawesi; the independence movement of East Timor; and the RMS rebellion in Maluku. 5. See Ryter (2001) for a description of the best-known gang affiliated with Suharto. 6. Law No. 7/MPR/2000. 7. Jafar’s account of Laskar Jihad’s withdrawal from Poso as a result of the security forces sufficiently providing security for Muslims may be ex post rationalization, as Laskar Jihad disbanded after the September 11 attacks drew intense pressure on the Indonesian government to crack down on Islamic extremist groups. 8. Ryter (2002, 2001) provides an excellent study of the changing role of Suharto’s Pemuda Pancasila gang.

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6 Local and National: Lynch Mobs in Indonesia Bridget Welsh

The prominent Indonesian writer Goenawan Mohamad highlights

an “ordinary” dimension of violence in contemporary Indonesia. Each murder shines a spotlight, and thousands of deaths are going on in the shadows. The mass media informs us of them, but the mass media also distances them. On such and such page in such and such a column of this or that newspaper, at this time in that program on television, an event, something of great profundity, has turned into a fact, something level, flat. And even savagery becomes level and flat, one dot in one row, a dot the same as all the other dots. . . . And suddenly we are aware that cruelty is not something distinct. No, we are not the wild, wild west. In the world recreated in John Wayne and Clint Eastwood films, death is a possibility for anyone, for no one monopolizes violence. In our world today anyone, casually, is a potential victim, and anyone . . . is a potential executioner. Cruelty crouches outside the door, ready to knock, asking to come in. (Goenawan 2002, 235–236)

Unfortunately, democratization did not bring about lower levels of violence; newspaper accounts describe incident after incident of killings, whether they are in traumatized Aceh or on the streets of the capital, Jakarta. Even in 2008, after two competitive elections and the expansion of the rule of law, local mobbing persisted. It is often missed in the study of violence in Indonesia. As other chapters in this book show, scholarly attention has centered on the conflict areas—Maluku, Aceh, Papua, and Central Kalimantan1—or on particular types of violence such as jihadi (religious

119

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120 Collective Violence in Indonesia vigilantes) or terrorism. Violence in ordinary communities has largely been ignored. In this chapter, I aim to refocus attention away from the headlines of conflict to the regular inside columns, or “dots” as Goenawan’s label suggests. The dot in question is keroyokan, or local mob violence. Understanding keroyokan involves studying this form of violence at the national as well as local levels. Drawing from a dataset based on material collected in four provinces, I trace the relationship between keroyokan and national political developments since 1995. The evidence suggests that the main factor contributing to increased levels of violence was the implementation of the decentralization policy of 1999. When the policy took effect, there were sharp spikes in local mobbing, due in part to the power vacuum in law enforcement/local bureaucratic institutions as well as the opportunity to carry out revenge (dendam). Changes in the pattern of law enforcement, patronage networks, and conflict resolution mechanisms were all transformed with decentralization and created conditions for increased levels of mobbing. Yet the national context does not account for the spatial distribution and different forms of local mobbing; it fails to completely capture the variation in mobbing. Local conditions provide a richer answer: the tacit, and sometimes explicit, approval of local elites of the use of mobbing, the acquiescence of local law enforcement to mobbing, and learned behavior of mob violence as conflict resolution (stemming from repeated patterns of violence in specific communities) affect the pattern of mobbing. Using a combination of national and local factors, I provide insight into the persistence of ordinary violence across Indonesia. Understanding violence at the local level is especially important, because the predominant pattern of violence post-1998 is changing from vertical state-induced to horizontal society-society violence (see Tadjoeddin 2000; van Klinken 2007a). My approach differs sharply from that of the other chapters in this book, in that I combine macro- and microlevel analyses of conflict. I show that in order to see and understand the dots, one has to adopt a more effective methodological lens, an ethnographic approach. This approach has been commonly used to study violence elsewhere but has little application in Indonesia.2 As such, my study combines a macrolevel quantitative approach with a rich microqualitative analysis, using both a dataset gathered from local newspapers and intensive fieldwork and interviews. It shows that an ethnographic approach is effective in illustrating how a conflict evolves and the critical catalysts that shape the form and level of violence. I begin with a discussion of

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mobbing and the methodology adopted to study this phenomenon. I then briefly describe the temporal, spatial, and substantive variation in mobbing in Indonesia and lay out the three local case studies of keroyokan. Turning to the causes of the phenomenon, I conclude by laying out the national and local factors at play, highlighting the needs for a synergy of approaches for an in-depth understanding of why and how local mobbing occurs.

Introducing Keroyokan Most Indonesians are familiar with keroyokan killings—a ritualized form of violence that involves the practice of an unlawful group, usually ordinary citizens, controlling and punishing crime usually in the form of a lynching or a severe beating. Newspapers reports, especially those in the tabloids, feature keroyokan regularly, and contemporary crime television shows often highlight cases of citizens taking the law into their own hands through “mob justice.” This “violent ritual,” to use Charles Tilly’s (2003) term, involves three components: a mob (massa); a violent entrepreneur (or more than one)—the mob leader(s)—who instigates and inflicts harm on the victim(s); and the victim(s), usually male, who may or may not be guilty of the alleged crime. The ritual follows a similar pattern: a small mob composed of men and women captures the victim (usually a male between the ages of 20 and 35), beats the victim to death or seriously injures him (sometimes after a shaming ritual), and then, in some cases, sets him on fire. Incidents include the beating of local thieves for simple things like stealing a shirt or a swallow’s egg to more serious crimes involving rape and witchcraft. The practice of keroyokan—literally in Javanese “the ripping apart of people”—goes beyond the narrower Western interpretation of the terms vigilantism and lynchings. Keroyokan should be understood to be an umbrella term that covers a diverse set of social phenomena and types of violence. Although the ritual is similar in that the three core elements—the mob, the violent entrepreneur(s), and the victim(s)—remain consistent, differences exist in the catalysts, social networks, and coordination associated with different incidents; the levels of brutality; the targets; and the social legitimation within communities where the incidents occur. It is important to understand how mobbing varies in form to fully appreciate why it occurs in specific forms in some locations and not others. The varia-

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122 Collective Violence in Indonesia tion in substance laid out typologically below is drawn from my analysis of over 4,000 cases of mobbing. The catalyst difference is straightforward—mobbing is motivated for different reasons. Mobbing can be spurred by incidents involving theft, by more serious robbery/extortion, by hit-and-run accidents, and by rape—all under the rubric of crime. A second rubric involves interpersonal relations that are provoked by acrimonious exchanges between individuals in a local community. Within this rubric are cases of intergang warfare, ninja killings (involving targeting of specific individuals for assault/assassination, usually involving the perpetrator disguising his or her identity), and revenge for personal harm—that is, alleged adultery, shaming, or conflict over property. A third rubric involves violation of societal norms. Victims are targeted if they are seen not to conform to the norms of local behavior, as manifested, for example, by alcoholism, mental illness, mental handicap, the practice of witchcraft, or other violation of local custom. Crime, personal acrimony, and norm violation broadly capture the range of catalysts of mobbing. A second substantive difference is the level of premeditation. This captures the depth of social networks and level of coordination that are involved in carrying out the ritual. The image of “running amok” has falsely created the impression that mobbing is always spontaneous.3 Many cases of keroyokan, especially those involving established personal relationships and norm violation, are systematically planned. The timing of the event, the rumors that are placed to discredit the victim, and the coordination among the violent entrepreneurs require systematized organization and coordination. To capture this variation, I distinguish between three levels of premeditation (low, medium, and high), which ranges from spontaneous responses to extensive organization over days, sometimes months. Incidents involving witchcraft, for example, are systematically premeditated, while cases of hit-and-run accidents are more reactive, more spontaneous responses of witnesses to the accident. Equally significant is the level of brutality. On the surface it may be difficult to distinguish between physically beating a person and burning the helpless victim alive. Here, too, there are subtle, but important, distinctions. In cases classified as “low” or “medium,” such as petty theft and hit-and-run accidents, the aim is to punish, not necessarily to kill. This is not to say that killing does not take place in these types of cases, but rather that the intentionality of serious injury is not as defined in advance. This pattern is most evident in adultery cases, where the practice of keroyokan can involve a shaming ritual. Rarely

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does keroyokan lead to death in these circumstances. This is differentiated from “high,” where participants aim to kill from the onset. Two outliers, labeled “very high,” that reach even greater levels of pain infliction are found in witchcraft and ninja cases. In these types of cases, the level of torture and physical bloodshed is considerable. In a Bogor morgue in August 2002, the level of pain inflicted on a victim was seen to be intensive; the decapitated body had the legs chopped off and no less than 100 slashes.4 The autopsy revealed that most of the slashes had occurred while the victim was alive. The head was burned, but the skull showed that it had been cracked open earlier while the victim was conscious. The autopsy report estimated that the victim had been tortured for over three hours before he died. Ninja killings follow a similar pattern. What appears to be occurring in these cases is the use of increased brutality to exorcise spirits from these witches or ninjas. A fourth substantive difference in keroyokan is the target, the victim. In almost all the forms of mobbing the victims are male, usually between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. The only cases involving women are witchcraft cases, in which the victims are usually older. In most forms of mobbing, the victim is known to the mob, an insider. Yet the high cases of petty theft usually target outsiders, not known to the mob (except in rural areas). Hit-and-run accident victims are almost always outsiders. The social legitimation of the different forms of keroyokan also varies and has important implications for repeated patterns of violence in a community. Most incidents involving norm violation (except local custom) and personal acrimony often trigger a vicious cycle of violence in a community. They are seen in the community as murder rather than community justice. In these cases, there are strong lingering perceptions that a moral code was violated and the incident of mobbing was not justified. In Tanggerang near Jakarta, for example, regular patterns of gang violence over territory spill over into the community, with shopkeepers and stall owners forced to choose sides and often inadvertently participate in the violence.5 Incidents involving local custom and crime are deemed to be the decision of the community as a whole and often do not provoke responses from the deceased victim’s family or social networks. This form of social legitimation deems the actions of keroyokan “acceptable” within the norms of the community. The acceptance or rejection of mobbing in a community leaves an imprint for possible future violence. These differences are laid out in Table 6.1, which shows that all keroyokan is not the same in substance. The form of violence varies con-

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124 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 6.1 Overview of Types of Keroyokan Catalyst

Premeditation

Brutality

Target

Social Legitimation

Low Medium Low Medium

Medium/high Medium/high Medium/high Medium/high

Male out/insider Male out/insider Male outsider Male out/insider

Community justice Community justice Community justice Community justice

Crime Petty theft Robbery Hit-and-run Rape Personal acrimony Revenge Gang warfare Ninja killing Norm violation Deviant removal Witchcraft

High/medium High/medium Medium

Medium Medium Very high

Male insider Male insider Male outsider

Assault/murder Assault/murder Assault/murder

High High

High Very high

Assault/murder Assault/murder

Local custom

High

High

Male insider Male/female insider Male insider

Community justice

siderably. It is important to lay out these differences in order to understand why mobbing occurs in some areas and not others, and to understand the implications on future violence in communities.

Understanding Keroyokan: Data and Research Methods This chapter is part of a study that focuses on four questions: How often is keroyokan occurring; what forms does the violence take; why is it occurring; and, especially, what can be done to prevent it? The research is ongoing, and this article represents a preliminary analysis of findings. The final project will include an assessment of areas within the provinces studied where keroyokan has not emerged, and show why these areas have escaped this type of violence. This article discusses the first three questions—the frequency, forms, and causes of keroyokan violence—drawing from the data in the four provinces and case studies. Drawn to the subject of vigilantism by the accidental witnessing of a decapitation in a coastal town in Banten in 1999 (Welsh 2001, 2003), I chose as my first challenge to compile a dataset that would capture the frequency of mobbing nationally. This challenge was especially difficult, since many cases of mobbing often go unreported, especially in rural areas. Although the research focus was on the period of the democratic transition (post-1998), I began the analysis in 1995 in order to examine how levels of mobbing corresponded to Indonesia’s democratization process. Faced with the challenge of poor records, confiden-

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tiality questions, and conflicting “truths” in recounting events, I compiled three different datasets.6 The most complete (which forms the basis of the macroanalysis) was gleaned from local newspaper accounts.7 Four provinces were chosen to capture national patterns. They were specifically selected for regional variation and in nonconflict parts of the country. The provinces, which represent each of the major regional zones of Indonesia, are the populous western islands of Java and Sumatra, the northern island of Borneo, and the eastern island of Bali. Within these zones, the provinces selected were reported to have some of the lowest levels of violence—that is, they were not hot spots of ethnic or religious conflict. The plethora of newspapers that emerged after 1998 facilitated the accounting process. The focus was on local crime reporting, especially in the tabloids, since this medium provided the most complete, albeit sensationalized, local coverage.8 Because many of these newspapers fail to keep copies of issues past a few years and most are not computerized, these records have gaps that go well beyond the oversights of painstaking scans over daily issues. As such, the numbers I report here should be interpreted as indicators of trends rather than completely accurate statistics. The dataset providing an indication of macrotrends was complemented by selected microlevel case studies and interviews focusing on specific incidents. Incidents were selected based on variation, and the areas were chosen based on the frequency of keroyokan cases. The aim was to compare the newspaper reports with accounts of at least two of the actors associated with an incident—the police officer, village leaders, mob participants, and family members of the victim. These local interviews provided insight into the different causes of mobbing in particular incidents. In total, thirty case studies were selected, with a minimum of six in each province. Here, too, there were shortcomings, especially with regard to cases during the New Order period in which witnesses often did not recall the exact details of the incident or constructed a new version to explain the event, which often did not mesh with the specific details in other accounts. Parallel “truths” of accounts coexist. Due to the time involved, most of the police officers were transferred outside of the area, requiring interviews in alternative locations. More often than not, however, their accounts were not available. Case studies in areas with high levels of migration, urban traffic, or transitory populations were also difficult to assess accurately. As memories faded with time, accounts varied even more widely over five years. Not surprisingly, most of the complete case studies are from 2000 onward or involve “well-known” cases in specific areas with rel-

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126 Collective Violence in Indonesia atively stationary populations. When possible, the local interviews were accompanied by interviews with journalists, local and national officials, nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists, and social leaders, all with the aim of providing a rich combined set of macro- and microdata to examine and compare national patterns of keroyokan. Three of the case studies are summarized here.

Patterns of Keroyokan: Temporal, Spatial, and Form Variation Local newspapers in the four provinces paint a disturbing picture of the frequency of mob killings. Newspaper accounts, detailed in Table 6.2, record 4,037 incidents involving 5,506 victims, from 1995 through 2004. Nearly a quarter of the incidents (23.7 percent) involved more than one victim. In one instance, in southern West Java in 2000, twentythree people were killed in an afternoon.9 The data are from a small cross section of Indonesia, so the total national figure is much higher. This is particularly significant since the four provinces were selected because they were seen as less violent than others, such as Central Kalimantan and East Java. Other research suggests similar, even higher, levels of mobbing in other parts of the country (Madden and Barron 2002). Figure 6.1 traces the number of incidents and victims in the four provinces over time and shows that the combined number of incidents/victims increased sharply after 1999 and has decreased since

Table 6.2 Keroyokan in Selected Provinces: West Java, Bali, Bengkulu, and South Kalimantan, 1995–2004 Year 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Total

Incidents 214 126 204 191 270 564 781 539 566 582 4,037

Victims 282 168 318 416 439 795 1,007 688 692 701 5,506

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Figure 6.1 Keroyokan in Selected Indonesian Provinces: West Java, Bali, Bengkulu, and South Kalimantan, 1995–2004 Keroyokan Over Time in Selected Provinces 1,200 1,000 Year

800 600 400 200

19 95 19 96 19 97 19 98 19 99 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04

0

Incidents

Victims

then. Yet, both the numbers of incidents and victims have increased since 1999, compared with the New Order period. The year 2001 is important as a pivotal turning point nationally in political conditions, the impact of decentralization. Table 6.3 and Figure 6.2 outline the pattern of keroyokan in the four provinces studied. They show that the levels of keroyokan vary considerably over the four provinces. West Java, with a higher population, not surprisingly has the highest number of cases, while Bali reports the highest number of incidents per capita. South Kalimantan and Bengkulu report lower frequency of incidents, with the smallest province of Bengkulu reporting the fewest. The pattern of the frequency of mobbing in three of the studied provinces—West Java, South Kalimantan, and Bengkulu, which reported the highest frequency of cases in 2001—corresponds to the pattern of the four provinces as a whole. In South Kalimantan and Bengkulu, the increase is less sharp than in West Java. Bali does not follow the broader pattern and reported the most cases in 1999. The spatial variation of mobbing highlights the need for incorporating national and local assessments to determine its causes. To illustrate the spatial variation within provinces, the incidents of mobbing from 1995 through 2004 in Bali are mapped below (Figure 6.3), weighted for district population. The eastern district of Bali, Karangasem, has the largest concentration of incidents, while cases in

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128 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 6.3 Keroyokan by Specific Selected Provinces Province West Java Bali Bengkulu South Kalimantan

Incidents

Victims

2,118 1,206 314 399

2,797 1,782 391 536

Figure 6.2 Keroyokan Incidents by Province over Time

800 600 400 200 0

19 9 19 5 9 19 6 9 19 7 9 19 8 9 20 9 0 20 0 0 20 1 0 20 2 0 20 3 04

Year

Keroyokan Victims by Province

West Java West Java Bali Bali South Kalimantan Banjir Masin Bengkulu Bengkulu

western Jembrana are rare. Both districts, which are rural and are a considerable distance from the economic and political center of the island in Denpasar, have extremely different patterns of local mobbing. It is this regional spatial variation that points to the need to examine local conditions in order to understand why mobbing occurs in some areas and not others. Coupled with the spatial variation are differences in the form of keroyokan found in specific localities. The macrodataset shows that the majority of incidents involve crime: petty theft (48 percent); hit-and-run accidents (0.5 percent); robbery, extortion, or drug pushing (21 percent); and rape (3 percent). Yet, many of the catalysts are acrimonious interpersonal conflicts, such as revenge over alleged adultery (1.5 percent) and shaming or conflict over land or water rights (5 percent). The personal revenge motive, dendam, lies at the heart of many incidents, especially in rural areas.10 Others involve the behavior of an individual who is deemed not to conform to local norms and who has been accused of inflicting harm on others. Such a person could be a drunkard, be mentally ill or mentally handicapped (2.5 percent), or be an inept practitioner of witchcraft. “Witch doctor” or dukun santet (6 percent) victims

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Figure 6.3 Incidents of Mobbing: Bali

Bali Share of Violence (%)

have allegedly harmed others in the community.11 Finally, some cases are tied to local custom and are carried out on the basis of a community decision to punish for violating custom. These cases are found in specific regions, such as eastern Bali or South Kalimantan. The variation by catalyst is shown in Table 6.4. The data show that there is a connection between the concentration of levels of mobbing and the forms of mobbing. For example, in Karangasem in northeastern Bali, there are four villages that have high concentrations of keroyokan over the ten-year period 1995–2004. In total, 122 people were killed through keroyokan in eighty-four incidents. The overwhelming majority of these cases (94 percent) involved local custom and contestation between villages over water rights, leading to a cycle of revenge between villages. Interviews in these villages reveal that leaders did not oppose the practice of keroyokan, and in fact encouraged the practice.12 In one case, one of the village priests, a local elder, was the violent entrepreneur. He was the key individual egging on a mob in at least seven cases. In a parallel example in Indramayu in Western Java, there are ten villages with high concentrations of keroyokan. In the ten-year period, there were eighty-four cases of mobbing in which 103 people were killed. The overwhelming majority of these cases involved petty crime and gang competition between villages. Here, too, interviews highlight the critical approval of local leaders in the practice of mobbing.13 Local village leaders described this practice as “normal” and appropriate for addressing social tensions. In one interview a local

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130 Collective Violence in Indonesia Table 6.4 Keroyokan Catalysts Form Petty theft Extortion Gang warfare Witchcraft Revenge Social deviant Local custom Rape Adultery Hit and run Ninja attacks

Percentage 47 21 9 6 5 3 2 3 2 1 1

leader claimed that mobbing was a “necessary pastime for young people to prove their value in the local community,” almost a rite of passage for social acceptance. While few local leaders actually participated in mobbing, in contrast to the villages in Karangasem, participants in the mobs interviewed reported that they were praised by village leaders for protecting their community and were given social status for their actions. The organization of these villages as “gangs” evolved over time and reflected growing competition between villages for access to economic wealth—namely, the export of labor to Malaysia and involvement in the prostitution trade. Rising wealth and competition in this area fueled a cycle of mobbing approved by local leadership.

Keroyokan Under the Microscope The substantive differences in keroyokan are perhaps best illuminated by drawing from the ethnographic case studies. I briefly describe here three incidents, drawing from interviews in these localities, each under a different rubric: personal acrimony, norm violation, and crime. Case 1: Revenge for Adultery

In the village of Gambut outside Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan, Lidya and Hip were caught by residents in a compromising situation, coming out of a rented room in the housing district of Pankaria on De-

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cember 29, 1998.14 Residents had been watching the couple for weeks. They planned to punish Hip for his violation of local norms. Lidya was married to a local businessman, an older man respected in the community. She had married her husband, Jako, when she was seventeen years old in an arranged marriage organized by her parents, who were also respected members in the community. Lidya’s beauty was well known, and Jako had waited for the earliest opportunity to marry her, offering bride price to secure her parents’ cooperation. Jako had by all accounts treated his young wife with devotion, showering her with gifts. His first wife had died in childbirth at the age of twentyfive, and he had waited over twenty years to marry again. Jako’s family described at length his longing for Lidya and his desire to have a family with whom to share his success. He had apparently watched Lidya grow up and bloom into a beautiful young woman, and when the moment was right, in mid-1997, he asked for her hand in marriage. The first few months of marriage were reportedly blissful, according to Jako’s sister. But by the end of that year, with no pregnancy on the horizon, tensions were developing in the household. It was at this point, in January 1998, that the young handsome Hip came on the scene. He was an outsider, born in Central Kalimantan, yet a distant relative to Jako’s neighbor, Atma. The neighbor agreed to take in the twenty-twoyear-old if he would help in the fields and around the house. Lidya and Hip soon met and fell in love. Hip reports that he fell in love with Lidya the first moment he saw her but held off showing his feelings. He claimed that it was Lidya, in a loveless marriage, who made the first move. The neighbors and Jako’s family, however, place the blame on Hip, the outsider, who in their view corrupted the “innocent” young woman. It turned out that Hip was actually married, with a wife back in Central Kalimantan. Jako was apparently unaware of the budding relationship in the first half of 1998. It was not until he went on a weeklong business trip in July that the affair began. Discreetly at first, Hip and Lidya began seeing each other. Hip “borrowed” a room from a trusted friend for the affair about half an hour from their residences. For six months, the affair deepened, during which Jako’s business travel became more frequent. Neighbors soon noticed Lidya’s absence from home. One morning in early December, Jako’s nephew Mat followed her and discovered the lovers’ hiding place. He shared the news with his mother, Jako’s sister, and a small group of “concerned” neighbors. For three weeks, neigh-

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132 Collective Violence in Indonesia bors and family members discussed what action to take, what message they could send to express their anger and disdain. The focus was on punishing the man, the outsider. Mat consulted with family, neighbors, and even local police officials on options. He reported that he told Lidya’s parents of the affair and pledged that he would punish Hip appropriately. Her parents gave tacit approval. Mat also reportedly met with the local policeman, essentially asking for permission to handle the situation on his own. Mat reports that the officer not only approved of the need for the family to take action first but also pledged his assistance in prosecuting Hip subsequently. He met with the local religious leader and village headman as well, who both called for punishment. Mat decided, however, not to tell Jako of the affair, fearing that the pain of discovery would be too much for him and possibly endanger Lidya. The community would act for him, Mat reported. They bided their time, as three neighbors took turns watching Lidya. It was the holiday season in this mostly Christian area. The moment of reckoning came on December 29, in the early afternoon. Lidya was followed into the Pankaria housing district. Mat reports that he was not the person who saw her in the room but knew “at once” that the time was right and that she was with Hip. He called the neighbors and his friends, amassing a crowd of over twenty people. Armed with sticks they shouted and surrounded the house, calling out to Hip, who appeared at the doorway dressed humbly in a sarong. They dragged him out of the house and systematically beat him. Lidya screamed but was rushed away by Jako’s sister and another female neighbor. The neighbors shamed and publicly humiliated Hip for violating his marital oath and the marriage of another man by parading him through the streets. The neighbors called out to Atma, Hip’s relative, who was asked to pledge that Hip was no longer welcome in the village; Hip was then turned over to the local police. He suffered two broken ribs and countless other minor injuries. Both Lidya and Hip were taken into custody for questioning, although Lidya was soon released. She and Jako moved out of the area, and Hip moved to the Pankaria district, where he still resides. Mat became the caretaker of Jako’s local business. Hip was released without charges, and his physical injuries healed. Case 2: Witchcraft

Nearly two years later, on August 24, 2001, in the village of Cimanggu Dua south of Bogor in West Java, a forty-five-year-old man known as

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Saprudin was killed after he was accused of dukun santet, or black magic.15 This incident has a level of premeditation similar to that of the adultery case but was much darker. Saprudin was born in Cimanggu Dua to a modest household of rice farmers. He was reportedly not a good student and regularly got into trouble in his early twenties. He settled down, however, when he met Siti, a woman who was raised in the city of Bogor. They married and Siti moved into the village. She was believed to harness mystical powers and began to teach the young Saprudin witchcraft. In 1998, Siti died in childbirth delivering a son who also died. The neighbors believe that when she died, she passed on her powers to her husband. Saprudin turned more to witchcraft in the years after her death, converting his talents into a profitable operation. He began to take on more requests, from removing spirits to inspiring jealousy and sickness. His reputation as a dukun santet grew exponentially. One event in particular, in early 2001, reportedly served to reinforce his power. Allegedly paid by a jealous husband, Saprudin cast a spell on the wife, who apparently turned overnight into a wife with unquestioned devotion to her husband. Saprudin’s success served to reinforce his zeal for witchcraft, and he began to engage more in animal sacrifice and other forms of black magic. In early August 2001, his neighbor Hussin complained about the stench coming from Saprudin’s house, apparently from the dead carcasses hung in his yard. Hussin described Saprudin with a sense of loathing, mixed with fear. Acting as the “violent entrepreneur,” Hussin met with the local religious leaders at the mosque. He sought out their advice on how to address Saprudin’s growing power; Hussin’s own small farm was negatively affected by the environment created by Saprudin’s witchcraft. Over the course of three weeks, Hussin brought key leaders from the village to see firsthand Saprudin’s residence and observe him from afar. The process of building social legitimation was a critical part of the planned mobbing; it was necessary to build collective support to carry out the ritual against the norm violator. Hussin’s wife, Sharifah, reported her fear of Saprudin, who in her view was able to bring the carcasses back to life, and whose eyes had turned from brown to green. Apparently rumors of Saprudin’s “evilness” intensified after he reportedly confiscated a soccer ball that came into his yard, scaring the children playing in the field near his house. The neighbors in the area palpably reported their fear of Saprudin’s powers.

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134 Collective Violence in Indonesia For three weeks, the momentum to remove Saprudin built, as religious and community leaders were brought on board. On the morning of August 24, twelve men entered Saprudin’s house after their prayers but before the victim regularly woke up. Taking care not to look into his eyes, they blindfolded him and dragged him out of the house. Outside a crowd gathered, armed with parangs (long knives). They systematically slashed him, beating him repeatedly. They beheaded him in order to release the spirit of evil in him. Mob participants then played a game of soccer with his head, turning over the head to the local children to join in the “game.” In recollecting the incident, Hussin describes the community’s acceptance of the removal of the local witch, whose practice in black magic violated norms. He recalls newspaper accounts of similar incidents in nearby areas, couching the mobbing incident in the context of enforcing moral purity called for by the local Islamic leaders in the community. Case 3: Petty Theft

In the sleepy area of Indramayu in northern West Java, the call for removing threats to the community took on another form.16 On March 18, 2003, Shaiful was burned to death in a mob led by his close childhood friend Osman. Shaiful was unemployed at the time of his death at the age of twenty-one. He had searched for work in the neighboring city of Cirebon but had not been able to secure a job. He had returned to his village in August 2002, where he lived with his sister Mariah. Shaiful began to engage in a series of small robberies in the community. It is not consistent in the accounts whether he had a drug problem, but it does appear that the petty theft was a regular occurrence. He stole a radio, a cell phone, and a wallet. Mariah cried in her recollection of the events as she laid out her frustration with her brother, who would not stop stealing. She talked about how she lost face in the community and how her family’s reputation was harmed. She described her helplessness in the first few months of Shaiful’s continued petty theft. Mariah sought out Osman, who grew up with Shaiful and was a schoolmate and neighbor of the family and a trusted confidant. Unlike his troubled friend, Osman had managed to secure a job in Cirebon. In January he returned to his home village and spoke at length with Shaiful, warning him that his actions would have to stop. Unfortunately, they didn’t. In mid-March, Mariah called Osman once again and asked for his help. She reported that Shaiful had tried to steal a neighbor’s bicycle

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and Osman needed to intervene. Osman returned home again and consulted with family, the local headman, and local religious leaders. It was collectively decided that Shaiful needed to be punished for his actions, that his theft was doing too much harm to others. Osman described at length his recollection of newspaper accounts of local justice and in his interview categorically pointed out that mobbing through burning had become a legitimate means to address crime. In his words, “Justice needed to be served.” When asked whether he opted for the state’s judicial system and local law enforcement, he scoffed and ridiculed these institutional options. He described the focused means by which he killed his childhood friend. On the evening of March 18, Osman and approximately five members of the community confronted Shaiful about his theft. His sister Mariah watched a few yards away. Shaiful confessed. Osman asked whether he was ready for his punishment and asked him to beg God’s and his sister’s forgiveness. Shaiful was petrified, recounts Mariah, and asked for forgiveness. At this juncture, Osman poured gasoline over Shaiful, who at this point was fighting to escape. He was held down by the mob. Osman lit a match and threw it on Shaiful. It went out before it hit his gasoline-soaked clothing. Three matches later, one caught. Osman, Mariah, and the crowd watched as Shaiful burned to death. With his burning, Shaiful would never enter heaven and would continually be punished for his crimes. Mariah cries when she tells this story but believes that this was the “right” thing to do. Osman reported that he has been part of more than five mobs and has played the violent entrepreneur role in three. His status as a moral adjudicator in the community rose. Keroyokan and Causes of Violence

Each of these cases shares the pattern of the common ritual. However, the form of mobbing was very different. The adulterer was spared, but the thief and witch doctor were brutally killed. All three incidents involved planning and consultation with local leaders, who gave tacit approval of mobbing. Yet, the level of state involvement remained minimal, as these events were shaped primarily by individuals in society, and the catalysts were quite distinct. The macrodata earlier pointed to the variation over time, space, and form of mobbing. The ethnographic case studies illustrate the variation in the form of mobbing in more detail and the personal nature of the killings. What then accounts for mobbing and the difference in lev-

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136 Collective Violence in Indonesia els, spatial distribution, and form? I argue that the answer lies in a combined national and local analysis. Research on violence in Indonesia has pointed to four sets of theoretical explanations.17 First, studies have pointed to the critical role of the state as perpetrators and catalysts for violence. Violence in the New Order period of Suharto (1965–1998) was seen to have its origins in the actions of the military, who have been blamed for carrying out violence.18 The critical role of the state has extended to the democratization period as well, where the state moved away from being the agent of violence to being an arena controlled by agents in society through electoral competition and checked by accountable law enforcement. The arguments here are twofold. Democratization ushered in a period in which the state was contested over, and violence was an outgrowth of this competition—often among local leaders with ties to national actors (see Aragon 2001; Bertrand 2004; Emmerson 1999; O’Rourke 2002; Wilkinson 2004). In another vein, the transformation of the state from military control in local areas to civilian policing created a vacuum in law enforcement, a weakening of state capacity.19 This change took place, it is argued, during the regime transition of 1998–1999. A second set of policies focuses on state policies rather than on the presence of the state itself. Among these explanations are the impact of the economic crisis and the mismanagement of the economy, and the introduction of decentralization. The former explanation ties violence to economic hardship, reminiscent of Ted Gurr’s (1968) relative deprivation thesis. Suharto and subsequent presidents of Indonesia, B. J. Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid, failed to revive the economy effectively, fostering conditions for crime and responses for “justice” by local communities.20 The second policy, of decentralization, points to the changing structure of institutions in the state, moving power from the center to the periphery.21 Decentralization was seen to exacerbate the power vacuum noted earlier, in that it intensified the problems of state capacity and also provoked tensions in peripheral zones, such as Aceh and Papua, as part of a disintegration of the Indonesian state. Both the critical role of economic conditions and the changing political structure were seen to contribute to violence post-1998. A third set of explanations focuses on societal actors and their interaction. Analysts describe the collective action and group dynamics that shape group relations. Collective action theorists point to the critical role of leaders within a group, network building, and common identity— usually ethnicity—in shaping violence.22 The framing of events, shaped by media and historical learning in a community, and the influence of in-

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dividual violent entrepreneurs as the major conduits that interpret the need for the use of force, lead to violence.23 Another parallel interpretation points to a common “violent” political culture, pinpointed as one that is willing to accept violence, as the factor underlying violence (see Colombijn 2002). In another vein, scholars point to the critical role of social capital—horizontal ties within a community—as an explanation for violence (see Varshney 2002). The focus is on the relationship within a community as either contributing to or causing violence. These explanations share a similar emphasis on societal relationships, although they differ in their emphasis on why collective action leads to violence. A fourth set of explanations focuses on individual behavior. Psychological factors might lead an individual defined in the context of mobbing as the “criminal type” to instigate and participate in mobbing, sometimes as a result of trauma.24 The idea of an individual running “amok” due to personal motivations is similar.25 Rational self-interest is seen as another motivation: the use of mobbing can evoke personal satisfaction in the form of revenge or can yield economic or, in some cases, social rewards.26 Explanations that center on state and government policies often are national in scope, while explanations that are societal can combine local and national causes. Individual-oriented explanations are inherently local, although they can occur in a variety of localities.

Local and National Synergy: Keroyokan Explained How then does the breadth of explanations of violence in Indonesia relate to keroyokan? The discussion earlier pointed to three major points of variation: temporal, spatial, and form. The macrodataset revealed that mobbing increased from 1997 through 2001 and then decreased. This pattern occurred in all of the provinces except Bali, which experienced the high point in violence in 1999. One of the major explanations of the variation in mobbing lies with what occurred in the three provinces in 2001, but earlier in Bali. A second important area of variation is spatial: Why is violence more intense in some areas than in others? What accounts, for example, for higher levels of violence in the district of Karangasem in Bali than in Jembrana? A third important area of difference is the form of violence. Why does mobbing take on certain concentrated forms in some areas and not others? I turn now to each of these three points of difference individually. Rather than cover the gamut of explanations of violence, I focus on iso-

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138 Collective Violence in Indonesia lating some of the consistent factors that stand out in explaining the variation. The temporal difference in levels of mobbing appears to be tied most closely with the implementation of decentralization policy.27 B. J. Habibie introduced this policy through Law No. 22 of 1999. The new pattern of regional autonomy set in place fundamental institutional transformations for local bureaucracies and gradually increased fiscal autonomy. This was coupled with measures that changed the military territorial command’s structure to increased civilian policing. These institutional changes took place while the political role of the bureaucracy was transformed from one loyal to Golkar, the dominant party during Suharto’s New Order, to varied political allegiances, both triggered by new laws in 1999. Political pluralism emerged within the bureaucracy as part of the gradual democratization process. The institutional impact of decentralization was profound, in that the scope of authority and the roles and patterns of governance were transformed. The change, however, did have an impact by fostering a power vacuum in three areas: law enforcement, patronage, and conflict resolution. Community policing, often resisted by the military, evolved gradually to dismantle the territorial command structure. Patronage patterns were reconfigured as part of the electoral process, nationally driven initially in contests for parliament and the president and with the expansion of local gubernatorial, district, and mayoral elections, with greater depth in localities. The transformation in governance is evolving, in that the issues of corruption persist, yet most analysts agree that increased accountability has raised public awareness of this concern. From the perspective of violence, and mobbing in particular, the institutional transformation has three major effects in localities. First, the deficit in law enforcement encouraged many local communities to impose their own forms of “community justice.” Even today, the number of police per capita in Indonesia remains extremely low, with a ratio of over 50,000 per policeman. Second, the changes in patronage fostered conflict, which emerged from greater local competition, but simultaneously created uncertainty locally as to who would emerge as leaders in communities. Third, the transfer of authority from one group to another removed individuals as arbitrators of conflict, weakening local conflict resolution mechanisms. Since the New Order government had hardened who held power in communities, through ties to the military and Golkar, the transformation was significant in that new space had emerged for new leaders to emerge as previous leaders were discredited.

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The comparison of the experience of Bali with the other three provinces suggests that decentralization did have an important impact on levels of violence.28 Bali was one of the first places where the decentralization policy took effect. In late 1999, riots exploded in the main city of Denpasar, resulting from contestation over political patronage between Golkar and supporters of Megawati Sukarnoputri’s party, PDIP. The trigger was the decentralization policy a few months earlier, which allowed bureaucrats within the state in Bali to oppose local Golkar members, many of whom had strong ties to Java and Jakarta. Law enforcement officials in Bali point to their relative incapacity to address the violence, since the military territorial command structure was in place and the police reform process was at a nascent stage. It would not be until after the 2002 terrorist bombing in Bali that policing would become more professional and reforms would deepen. The riots were concentrated in the island’s main city, which comprises the most outsiders from Java and where the local conflict mechanisms were most tied to the national state rather than to local religious leaders. It is in this context, the early decentralization effect, that levels of mobbing spiked. The same transformations would not take effect until much later in the other provinces, due to less political competition, fewer potential gains from patronage, and greater military resistance to reform. Nationally, the policy of decentralization had the deepest impact on levels of mobbing. As policing and political pluralism took effect, creating more centers for conflict resolution, levels of mobbing dropped. The national effect of decentralization, however, cannot account for the spatial and form differences in keroyokan. Here, local factors emerge as important. When one draws from the case studies and spatial patterns of concentrated areas of mobbing, two factors stand out: the acquiescence of actors in local communities, and learning of mobbing in a community. In each of the three case studies examined, the violent entrepreneur sought out leaders in the community to gain tacit approval of the use of mobbing. This was true of Mat in the case of adultery, Hussin in the killing of Saprudin for witchcraft, and both Mariah and Osman in the killing of Shaiful for petty theft. They acted with the approval of leaders. Who they consulted differed, yet they included a broad range of society—religious leaders, a local policeman, family members of the victim, and neighbors. Consistently, however, there is a process of legitimation of the use of mobbing. The same picture emerges from the

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140 Collective Violence in Indonesia concentrated cases of keroyokan in Karangasem in Bali and Indramayu in West Java. This pattern points to the critical role of social networks for legitimation of violence. Mobbing emerges in areas where local actors approve this phenomenon. The second notable pattern that emerges from the spatial variation is the concentration of particular forms of mobbing in specific areas. This was noted in the discussion of concentrated cases of local custom in Karangasem (Bali), and gang warfare in Indramayu (West Java). These concentrations suggest that patterns of violence are repeated locally, creating a historical imprint of violence in one locality compared with another. The individual cases described, however, also reinforce this picture. In South Kalimantan, the use of mobbing to respond to adultery—to the violation of local norms—is repeated in the reported cases of keroyokan. According to the dataset, this practice is higher in this province and in these districts of South Kalimantan than anywhere else in the studied provinces. The concentration of witchcraft cases is also echoed in areas south of Bogor, although witchcraft cases are commonly found throughout reported keroyokan in southern and rural West Java, suggesting broader acceptance of mobbing to remove witch doctors. Similarly, burning victims were more common in West Java and Indramayu, where during the period 2001–2002 the most burning victims were reported. The findings of concentrated forms of keroyokan point to the important role of local learning in shaping concentrations of mobbing. The learning is along two dimensions. First, certain catalysts are accepted and connected with mobbing. Whether it is witchcraft in southern West Java or custom in northeast Bali, the historical accepted link between keroyokan and certain forms of behavior is socialized. Second, the elements in the ritual are also absorbed through learning. In the case of Shaiful in Indramayu, the violent entrepreneur Osman learned the means to kill Shaiful—by setting him on fire—from newspaper accounts and from his repeated participation in massa. This helps explain why burning is more common in this region and why mobbing is more frequent in this area. More opportunities to practice this behavior at the individual level lead to more mobbing, particularly of a specific form. Taken together, the impact of decentralization, social tacit approval of local leaders, and learned behavior provide an explanation of the variation of keroyokan. National and local factors form a synergy in accounting for this form of horizontal “ordinary” violence.

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Conclusion By drawing attention to the variation over time, space, and form of mobbing, I have shown in this chapter that a nuanced understanding of this phenomenon is essential for minimizing this form of local violence in the future. Mobbing has persisted for a long time in Indonesia, and its prominence has increased as horizontal violence has become more common than state-induced conflict. How Indonesia compares with other countries in the practice of mobbing is not known, since the ritual is hard to assess systematically. Yet, research shows that mobbing is a common phenomenon from Africa to Asia. By recognizing the critical role that local and national conditions play in shaping this phenomenon and by moving away from broad generalizations regarding national causes of this phenomenon, a richer understanding of the practice of mobbing can be attained. It is only through combining methods and approaches that the lessons to prevent future violence can emerge.

Notes 1. See van Klinken (2007a) and Supriatma (2008) for the most comprehensive account of ethnic violence. Excellent individual studies of ethnic violence during this period include Adeney-Risakotta (2005), Davidson (2003), Human Rights Watch (1997, 1999, 2001a, 2001b, 2002), International Crisis Group (2000, 2001a, 2004c), Schiller and Garang (2002), Smith (2005), Trijono (2004), Turner (2003), and van Klinken (2001). 2. See Javier Auyero (2007) and for a broader discussion of political ethnography, see Joseph, Mahlaer, and Auyero (2007). 3. See Spores (1988) for a richer discussion of this practice. 4. See Radar Bogor, June 1, 2000. This report was also buttressed with interviews with morgue officials in Bogor in August 2002. 5. Interviews in Tanggerang, June 2002. 6. The other two datasets collected were from available police records and morgue data, both of which were more spotty and inconsistent than the newspaper accounts. 7. The West Java (including Jakarta) data are derived from Kompas (1997–2004), Pos Kota (1997–2004), Pikaran Rakyat (1997–June 2004), Radar Bogor (2000–2004), and Radar Cirebon (2000–May 2004). The South Kalimantan data are gathered from the Banjarmasin Post from 1995 through July 2003. The Bali data are derived from three newspapers: Bali Post (1995–2004), Nusa Post (1995–2004), and Denpasar Post (2000–2003). Only two of these are “tabloids”—Pos Kota and Nusa Post.

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142 Collective Violence in Indonesia 8. The accuracy of these papers is at times questionable, yet they base their reports on actual facts and sensationalize the reports rather than construct fabricated reports. This conclusion was reached after randomly testing a series of the reports as part of our in-depth interviews of cases in different provinces. 9. Pikaran Rakyat, May 3, 1999. 10. For an excellent discussion of revenge in Indonesia, see Anderson (1989), and for the similar practice in Cambodia, see Hinton (1998). 11. The most vibrant discussion of witchcraft involved the Banyuwangi murders in East Java. See Brown (2000), Campbell and Connor (2000), Herriman (2006), and Siegel (2001). 12. The interviews for this research were conducted in October 2004. 13. The interviews for this research were conducted in June 2002. 14. The interviews for this case study were conducted in July 2003 in the village of Gambut and included the victim Hip, family members of Jako— notably his sister Ana and nephew Mat—Hip’s relative Atma, the local priest, and neighbors. 15. The interviews for this case study were conducted in August 2002 in the village of Cimanggu Dua with Hussin, his wife Sharifah, neighbors, the local imam, and neighbors. 16. The interviews for this case study were conducted in June 2003 in Indramayu and included Mariah, Osman, neighbors in the community, and the local policeman, Hari. 17. Two collections cover the range of the explanations below: Colombijn and Lindblad (2002) and Coppel (2006). For an alternative theoretical discussion, see Barron, Smith, and Woolcock (2004). 18. See Anderson (2001), Barker (1998), Kroef (1986), Lee (1999), Lindsey (2001), Rossa (2006), Shiraishi (1997), Tornquist (2000), and Wessel and Wimhöfer (2001). Most of the discussion in Kinsgbury (2005) also highlights state action. 19. See Bourchier (1990, 1999), Djalal (2000), Foreign Policy (2006), International Crisis Group (2001b), Kingsbury (2005), and Rhode (2001). 20. For discussion of economic issues, see Green, Glaser, and Rich (1998), SMERU (1998), Steward (2002), and Tadjoeddin, Shaharo, and S. Mishra (2003). 21. For two interesting discussions of the relationship between decentralization and conflict, see International Crisis Group (2001c, 2005). 22. The most prominent writer using this explanation on Indonesia is van Klinken (2007a). See also Tadjoeddin (2004), Platt (2004), Tilly (2003), and Useem (1998). 23. See Gould (1999) and Snow and Benford (1992). For the historical discussions of concentrated violence, see Cribb (1990) and Robinson (1995). 24. For trauma and threat affecting violence, see Kakir (1996) and Tolney, Beck, and Massey (1989). For a discussion of criminality, see Barker (1999), Meliala (2000), Ryter (1998), Schulte-Nordholt and van Till (1999), and Siegel (1998a, 1999).

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25. For a psychological discussion of “amok,” see Good and Good (2001). For a discussion of the critical role of local custom, see Acciaioli (2000) and Peluso and Harwell (2001). 26. For a discussion of local interpersonal dynamics, see Tambiah (1997). 27. For a good discussion of decentralization, see Aspinall and Fealy (2003), Bjork (2003), Hidayat (2007), King (2002), Ray and Goodpaster (2003), Rohdewohld (2003), and Saad (2001). 28. This discussion is based on interviews with local officials in Bali in October 2004.

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7 Final Reflections: Looking Back, Moving Forward Patrick Barron, Sana Jaffrey, Blair Palmer, and Ashutosh Varshney

In this final chapter, we look back on the findings presented in this

book, reflect on some other publications on conflict—both in Indonesia and elsewhere—note what we have learned, and sketch out potential research directions. More than a decade after the fall of Suharto and the New Order, we have arrived at a meaningful retrospective moment, allowing us to identify domains that remain analytically untouched, at least partially if not fully. We combine four sets of considerations in these final remarks: comparative, Indonesia-specific, methodological, and theoretical. A belief that conflict has de-escalated in Indonesia has crept into popular and policy circles. However, it is not clear whether the movement toward de-escalation is cyclical or permanent. Nor is it clear how common and deadly smaller forms of violence are or whether newer forms of violence will erupt in Indonesia. Comparative evidence indicates that violence often reappears in areas that previously had acute conflict. Theory also suggests that unless suitable institutions and policies are imaginatively devised and put in place, a multiethnic or multireligious society, especially at low or middle levels of income, is vulnerable to the possibility of long-term violent conflict. As Indonesia seeks to consolidate the democratic gains of the post-Suharto decade, understanding violent conflict is of utmost importance. By now, of course, the literature on conflict in Indonesia is quite substantial, and many elements of the story are reasonably clear.1 The fall of Suharto was accompanied by the outbreak of intense group violence in several parts of the country. As a result—and in dramatic contrast to studies of Indonesia during the late New Order when the literature emphasized order, stability, and economic dynamism—conflict

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146 Collective Violence in Indonesia became an important concern in scholarly and policy circles. The literature that emerged has especially advanced our understanding of some large-scale conflicts, such as in Aceh, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and the Malukus.2 Yet, as is often expected in the first flush of research, there are limitations to much of the existing literature on Indonesian conflict. Four are particularly worthy of note. First, as the introductory chapter noted at length, the vast majority of the literature on Indonesia has remained by and large unincorporated into the larger theoretical and methodological literature on conflict. Very little is known outside of Indonesia about the nation’s conflict dynamics beyond a small circle of country specialists. The conflict dynamics in Indonesia are likely to have relevance for multiethnic and/or multireligious societies that used to have authoritarian political orders and have of late gone through a democratic transition accompanied by considerable group violence. Nigeria, post-Communist eastern and central Europe, and Central America easily come to mind, but the list can be expanded. A creative engagement with theory and comparative experience nearly always illuminates uncharted dimensions of a problem, inaugurating newer ways of thinking. Second, the emphasis in the literature has been almost entirely on the colossal episodes of collective violence in Indonesia, especially in the Malukus, in Central Sulawesi, the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, and the war in Aceh. The most comprehensive dataset on Indonesian violence to date has focused on these incidents (see Chapter 1 of this book). This focus is understandable in light of how horrific these violent episodes were, but it has several serious drawbacks. The literature has more or less ignored routine acts of violence, such as fights over land or vigilante justice, which appear to be common in some parts of Indonesia. In earlier chapters of this book, Patrick Barron and Joanne Sharpe (Chapter 3) and Bridget Welsh (Chapter 6) suggest that, though each act of small violence kills or injures only a few, the overall magnitude is likely to be quite high.3 Additionally, if these forms of violence are a precursor to larger outbreaks of unrest, an important part of the picture is missing. Third, the methods with which cases of large-scale violence have been studied have led to incomplete explanations. Books by Jacques Bertrand (2004), John Sidel (2006), and Gerry van Klinken (2007a) look for commonalities among multiple case studies to determine causal factors. These scholars may well be right about the causes of violence, but without a comparison with peaceful cases, they cannot, in principle, be sure that the causes of violence they have identified are in-

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deed the right ones.4 As argued in Chapter 1, for a causal theory to be empirically correct, it is not only important to identify what is common across the many episodes of violence, but it is also critical to demonstrate that the factors associated with violence are absent in peaceful cases.5 We need variation in the research design.6 Finally, there is almost no systematic information available at all on the post-2003 years of conflict—its forms, causes, and trajectories. Ashutosh Varshney et al. (in this book) put together a database for the United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR) that records incidents of large-scale violence for the period 1990–2003; Barron and Sharpe (2005, and in this book) have created a dataset on small-scale violence in Flores and parts of East Java for 2001–2003. Yet relatively little is known about conflict since 2003.7 With the massive decentralization initiative, a whole host of new institutions have come into existence, altering the sites, group incentives, and dynamics of conflict. Post-2003 data are critical for understanding conflict and its impacts in Indonesia. We begin with a discussion of the relative merits of quantitative or qualitative work for understanding the causes, patterns, and dynamics of Indonesia conflict. Though some have critiqued the use of quantitative datasets (Sidel 2006), we offer our views and make a case for a mixed methods approach. We then concentrate on three substantive areas that, in our view, call for further attention of researchers.

Methodological Issues Methodological arguments in the social sciences are increasingly headed toward the view that both quantitative and qualitative approaches have distinct utilities and limitations, and an exclusive use of either approach can unduly confine the scope of analysis. Ideally, for a whole range of questions the two should be combined (Gerring 2007). Quantitative work typically relies on large-n datasets (Barron and Sharpe, in this book; Varshney et al., in this book). Such datasets typically allow two kinds of analyses: (1) identification of broad patterns and trends, and (2) establishment of correlations between “independent” and “dependent” variables. On the whole, if not always, large-n datasets are unable to establish causality,8 whereas qualitative research, by systematically looking at which events led to violence (“process tracing”), permits us to separate causes and effects. Of course, there are conditions under which large-n datasets can

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148 Collective Violence in Indonesia move beyond correlations. They can allow us to assign causality if good “instrumental variables” can be identified. However, even under such conditions, we need qualitative case studies. Instrumental variables can give us a good sense of causal effects (what is the effect of X on Y?), but not of causal mechanisms (how did X cause, or lead to, Y?).9 Following this reasoning, one can generate a large-n dataset, building on and supplementing existing datasets, which will allow for identification of trends in conflict types and forms and their impacts. Based on the empirical results of the quantitative work, targeted qualitative studies can then be undertaken to determine the causes of conflicts and of differing patterns of conflict escalation and de-escalation. For example, the large-n dataset may show that large episodes of violence are concentrated in cities, not villages. If so, the case studies could be aimed at exploring why this is so. It should be noted that there is another way to proceed. Sometimes, it is said that case studies are good at theory building, not theory testing, for which large-n datasets may be required (Gerring 2007). Conceptualized in this vein, case studies can be used for theory generation, and the theory so generated can be tested with the aid of a large-n dataset. Alternatively, with a large-n dataset, one can test whether some existing theories in the larger literature—for example, the ethnolinguistic fractionalization (ELF) argument—are applicable to Indonesia. Either way, it is best to combine the qualitative and the quantitative data. Each complements the other, and using them together in these ways will make for a sounder understanding.

Quantitative Data: The Role of Newspapers How, then, should we generate a large-n dataset? Considerable research shows that newspapers are often the best source of quantitative data on ethnic conflict (Barron and Sharpe, in this book; Varshney 2002; Varshney et al., in this book; Wilkinson 2004). Household surveys are weak at measuring conflict incidence and impacts, as they tend to record perceptions of conflict and have a tendency to underreport because violent conflict, especially large-scale, is a generally rare event that does not affect a whole community. Key informant interviews, as used by the PODES survey in Indonesia, create perverse incentives to under- or overreport conflict depending on the expectations about how the survey results will influence policy decisions and resource allocations (Barron

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2009a). Furthermore, survey methods rely on the memory of respondents and are therefore less reliable for recording the details of older incidents of violence, making it difficult to create time series data. Some preliminary work in parts of Indonesia that compares police, hospital, and NGO sources with newspaper data, reveals that police and hospital data systematically underreport fatalities, because they fail to notice cases that are not reported to the police or victims who are not admitted to hospitals.10 Moreover, these records do not contain the level of detail that would allow for a distinction to be made between incidents of group conflict and violent crime, such as assault and arson.11 In contrast, the newspaper monitoring methodology has been shown to be effective in both high- and low-conflict regions. The UNSFIR data, outlined in Varshney et al. (in this book), showed that building a national dataset that records conflicts reported in newspapers was both possible and worthwhile. That dataset provided useful estimates of large incidents of violence, but did not adequately cover forms of small violence given the news sources it used. Other newspaper data collected in East Java and NTT (Barron and Sharpe, in this book) and Aceh have permitted for finer-grained analyses, but to date have had limited temporal and geographic coverage. Existing datasets have enhanced our understanding of violence in Indonesia. For example, we know that large-scale violence is highly spatially concentrated in Indonesia (Varshney et al., in this book), that small-scale violence has a wider spread (Barron and Sharpe, in this book), and that the total casualties in small-scale violence may well be surprisingly large (Welsh, in this book). We did not know these trends for sure until the large-n studies gave us empirical evidence. Drawing on the insights provided in many of the chapters in this book, it appears that it is possible to put together a more comprehensive database tracking large and small violence across Indonesia.

Newspaper Reports: How to Interpret Reliability While newspapers appear be the best source of data for mapping conflict patterns and trends in Indonesia, they are not without weaknesses. Three potential issues may limit the utility of using newspapers to understand conflict. However, we believe these can largely be overcome; where reliability issues remain, understanding these can help ensure that interpretations of the data are reasonable. First, there is widespread consensus that the press in post-Suharto In-

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150 Collective Violence in Indonesia donesia is relatively free. However, previous research shows the existence of self-censorship in editorial policy continuing the SARA legacy of the New Order, or to prevent conflict escalation.12 Also present is “envelope” journalism, where newspapers sponsored by certain local groups or individuals become advocates of those parties (Barron and Sharpe 2005). Such biases do exist, but are not widespread enough to invalidate the use of newspapers as a source of data on conflict. Nevertheless, it is of utmost importance that the process of creating the dataset involves an assessment of institutional biases of different newspapers. Extensive interviews with newspaper staff, eliciting responses about not only their own reporting standards but also the reputations of other papers in an area, can help us choose which papers are most reliable and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of our data and how they can be analyzed. For example, if a newspaper acts as a mouthpiece for a politician, it cannot be used for an accurate count of conflicts related to elections. However, it may still be useful for reports on lynching and other forms of violence. Second, accurate reporting, especially as it pertains to assessing deaths, injuries, and property damage, is crucial for the validity of data. Some newspapers may lack systematic procedures to ensure accurate collection and checking of facts prior to publication, and this may be particularly true for subprovincial news sources. Gathering information about a newspaper’s sources of information and its policies on fact checking can enable us to select newspapers with high standards of reporting and to establish how accurate our data are likely to be. Using more than one newspaper in each location will also improve the accuracy of the data. Third, even if we use provincial- and district-level newspapers, it is likely that the reporting coverage will be uneven across districts and subdistricts. If this is the case, it may invalidate intertemporal and interarea comparisons, because different levels of violence may be an artifact of differential conflict reporting rather than incidence. However, by compiling information about areas where each newspaper has permanent offices, permanent reporting staff, and freelance reporters, we can (1) select newspapers with the best regional coverage for data collection, (2) supplant a weaker-coverage paper with others in that region, and (3) identify the stronger and weaker sections of our data. It is important that the construction of a newspaper database be preceded by a comprehensive media assessment that includes an analysis of archive coverage, newspaper reach, potential biases, and quality of reporting. In short, newspaper data have to be interpretively collected and used.

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Routine Violence Routine violence is one of the most neglected aspects of the current scholarship.13 Such incidents involve local actors struggling over local issues rather than large-scale mobilization by identity characteristics (such as ethnicity, religion, or region). There are several important justifications for the study of routine violence. First, although fatalities tend to be limited in each incident, the total number of those killed through routine violence can be large if such episodes are common or frequent (Barron and Madden 2004; Barron et al. 2009; Barron and Sharpe, in this book; Welsh, in this book; Tadjoeddin and Murshed 2007). Second, frequent small-scale violence can have serious systemic consequences. For example, if some regions of a country develop a tradition of lynching—a mob killing a suspected culprit instead of handing him or her over to the police or administration—it can impede the growth of the rule of law. Moreover, if the frequency of such acts is high, it can deaden popular sensibilities, arguably creating greater acceptance of large-scale violence as well. Finally, sometimes small incidents initiate a process that leads to huge conflagrations. Often, if not always, the starting point of a big episode of violence is a small clash between two groups or individuals. If we develop a better understanding of why small acts of violence occur and which people or groups are in conflict in these forms of violence, we can perhaps generate a theory that can identify institutions and strategies relevant to minimizing the occurrence or limiting the effects of such violence.

Escalation of Violence Extensive literature has emerged on large-scale violence in postSuharto Indonesia. However, we still do not have a good theory for why the small sparks of localized violence and tensions erupt into the large fires of intergroup collective violence. Developing such a theory is important for understanding not only the deadly outbreaks of communal violence in the past, but also (1) the potential for small-scale conflict and routine violence to escalate in various parts of the archipelago, including those areas that have not been hit by large-scale communal violence; and (2) the scope for intervention by the government and/or civil society. If, with the aid of theory, we can understand how to prevent sparks from becoming fires, perhaps we can also hope for fewer and less deadly violent conflicts in the future.

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152 Collective Violence in Indonesia Intercommunal ethnic or religious violence in West and Central Kalimantan, the Malukus, and Central Sulawesi, separatist conflicts in Aceh and Papua, and the Jakarta riots of May 1998 have received the greatest attention of Indonesia experts. Initially, most analyses focused on individual cases with few attempts at cross-case analysis. More recently, three scholars (Bertrand 2004; Sidel 2006; van Klinken 2007a) have written books on the broader issue of violence in Indonesia, examining multiple conflicts. Cross-case analysis has been used to develop frameworks to understand why different forms of conflict arose in different places at different times, concentrating largely on similarities in structural conditions that predated the outbreak of widespread violence. This new work has undoubtedly enhanced our understanding of the specific conflicts and has pointed to general systemic factors, all largely a product of Indonesia’s post-Suharto transition. Yet the books have also left some key gaps in the research. The greatest issue is methodological. None of these works is based on the idea of variation in research design. All have concentrated only on episodes of violence, mostly large-scale episodes, and none systematically compares why violence occurred in some places and not others. Bertrand (2004) studies violence in East Timor, the Malukus, and Kalimantan; Sidel (2006) focuses on the burning of churches in Java in the early to mid-1990s, the violence in Jakarta, and intercommunal conflict in the Malukus and Sulawesi; and van Klinken (2007a) concentrates on riots in Kalimantan, the Malukus, and Sulawesi. A good theory requires showing that the factors identified as causal in making violence possible were missing in places that did not experience violence.14 As discussed earlier, if we do not study peace and violence together, we cannot conclusively show which factors were really causal in producing either.15 Three more analytical issues, especially related to the analysis in Bertrand (2004) and Sidel (2006), are worth noting.16 First, the comparative work has not fully considered the processes of escalation, which turned existent social tensions into conflicts ranging from small-scale acts of hostility to large-scale episodes. Second, the explanations have largely been structural and often rather deterministic, focusing on demographic shifts, economic balance, and changing access to political power, and they have underplayed the importance of the processes of mobilization. Third, there has been an overriding emphasis on macroexplanations for the outbreak of violence in certain localities. Bertrand (2004), for example, concentrates on differential group

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access to power in Jakarta, and the role of different groups in the Indonesian nation and polity, to explain why the Dayaks, Christians, and Muslims rose up at certain points. As Bertrand (in this book) readily admits, this sort of approach can explain why violence gets clustered around certain periods (temporal variation), but it cannot help us understand why violence occurs in certain places (spatial variation). For understanding the latter, there is a need to pay attention to micro or local factors in explaining violence (Aspinall 2008; Varshney 2002, and in this book).

De-escalation of Violence In Indonesia and beyond, there has been little consideration of processes of de-escalation after episodes of large-scale violence have taken place, or of the conditions under which remaining tensions can re-escalate into new outbreaks of severe violence. Development of a theory that explains variations in the success of peace stabilization in areas that experienced massive unrest, that identifies why violent conflict reemerges in some areas and not in others, and that accounts for why “postconflict” violence takes different forms in different areas would be of enormous utility, for both the policy and academic communities. Paul Collier et al. (2003) have demonstrated that there is a significant chance of violent conflict reemerging within five years in areas where civil wars have formally ended. Even where countries do not return to civil war, new forms of postconflict violence can emerge (see for example, Rodgers 2007; Chaudhary and Suhrke 2008; Fortna 2008). In some cases, the human security impacts of such violence can be as great as those experienced during the initial period of war (Muggah 2009). In El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, for example, homicide rates are now higher than they were during the conflict period (Waiselfisz 2008). Indonesia provides an excellent site for studying postconflict violence and conflict de-escalation. We know that while many of the largescale intercommunal and separatist conflicts have subsided in recent years, small-scale violence has occurred in their wake. In Aceh, for example, the Helsinki peace agreement officially brought to an end a three-decade conflict between the Indonesian government and GAM, a rebel group. Yet while the peace process has by and large gone well, there have been rising levels of localized routine violence since the signing of the peace agreement (Figure 7.1).

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154 Collective Violence in Indonesia Beyond this, the sheer range of large-scale conflicts that hit Indonesia about the time of the post-Suharto transition provides ample scope for comparative analysis. Whereas many studies focusing on peace consolidation have compared countries, in Indonesia there appears to be tremendous variation in conflict patterns over time across different provinces and districts. Comparing areas that suffered similar levels of conflict but are now having different experiences of “peace” can help us generate a theory on how and why peace consolidates. A number of comparisons would be useful. First, it is interesting to look at how patterns of routine violence vary across different postconflict areas of the country. The four hypothetical scenarios laid out in Figures 7.2a–d illustrate the point. In each, the dotted area represents the trajectory of the original, large-scale violence, with routine, smallscale violence represented by the line with square markers. All four figures show steadily declining large-scale violence but four different trajectories in the evolution of routine violence. In Figure 7.2a, routine violence continues, unaffected by the decline in large-scale violence. In Figure 7.2b, both large-scale and routine violence decline roughly simultaneously. In Figure 7.2c, the two rates of decline are different, with

Figure 7.1 Violent Conflicts in Aceh, January 2005–January 2009

Sources: Barron (2009a and 2009b). Notes: The Helsinki MoU was signed in August 2005. Data are generated from local newspaper monitoring.

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routine violence taking longer to decline. In Figure 7.2d, large-scale violence declines over time, but routine violence increases instead. Second, variation in the forms of postconflict violence is also analytically important. Figures 7.3a and 7.3b break down further the different patterns of postconflict violence observable in two hypothetical areas. In each, levels of violence remain similar, but violence has taken

Figure 7.2 Patterns of Routine Postconflict Violence

7.2 a

7.2 b

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156 Collective Violence in Indonesia Figure 7.2 continued

7.2 c

7.2 d

different forms. Figure 7.3a shows a rise in vigilantism, while Figure 7.3b shows a rise in land conflicts. Third, much can also be learned by looking at variations within cases in levels and forms of violence. A quantitative dataset can allow the identification of sharp rises and falls in violence over the postconflict period. Qualitative cases, on the other hand, can focus on understanding

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Figure 7.3a Postconflict Vigilantism

Figure 7.3b Rise in Postconflict Land Conflicts

the reasons why such rapid changes occurred. Figure 7.4 shows the pattern of violence over time in a hypothetical district. Are the factors that led to the initial violence missing or do they remain in the second round? If these underlying factors remain even after the second de-escalation, can we posit that violence may reemerge again in the future?

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158 Collective Violence in Indonesia Figure 7.4 Within-Case Analysis of De-escalation

Conclusion We have suggested that scholars have understudied three kinds of issues: (1) What is the magnitude and spread of small-scale, routine violence in Indonesia, and why does it appear to be so large in its cumulative impact? (2) Why do some small episodes of violence escalate while others remain relatively contained or disappear altogether? (3) Do the patterns of de-escalation after periods of large-scale conflict markedly differ across the various theaters of violence, and why might that be so? We have also consistently made a methodological point that a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods will help us answer these questions best. Neither alone will do.

Notes 1. Although, for the most part, the policy implications of the existing research are unclear. 2. See, for example, van Klinken (2001) and Wilson (2008) on Maluku and North Maluku; Acciaioli (2000), Aragon (2001), and McRae (2008) on Central Sulawesi; McGibbon (2004) on Papua; Davidson (2008), van Klinken (2000), and Smith (2005) on West or Central Kalimantan; Aspinall (2006, 2009), Schulze (2004), and Sukma (2004) on Aceh; and Mietzner (2008), Purdey (2006), and Siegel (1998b) on the Jakarta riots. The reports of the International Crisis Group (ICG), available at www.crisisweb.org, have also illuminated many of the conflicts. A number of edited volumes have brought together pieces of conflicts, often drawing parallels with historical patterns of

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violence in Indonesia: see Anderson (2001), Anwar, Bouvier, Smith, and Tol (2005), Colombijn and Lindblad (2002), Coppell (2006), Hüsken and de Jonge (2002), Tornquist (2000), and Wessel and Wimhöfer (2001). 3. Also see Vel (2001) and Herriman (2007). The edited volume by Colombijn and Lindblad (2002) shows how “everyday” forms of violence are not new to Indonesia, being prominent in the precolonial and immediate postcolonial eras. The World Bank’s Conflict and Development program has also analyzed “local conflict” in Lampung (Barron and Madden 2004; Tajima 2004), and Flores and East Java (Clark 2005; Barron and Sharpe 2005 and in this book). 4. One other type of research—large-n in inspiration—ought to be noted. Barron et al. (2009) and Mancini (2005) use survey data to determine factors associated with conflict propensity. This sort of work does cover variation in the dependent variable, but as is true in general of large-n work, it is unable to identify the mechanisms through which the independent and dependent variables might be connected. 5. We say more on this later. See also Varshney (2007) and Aspinall (2008). 6. On the whole, a research design based on comparing similar episodes is useful in theory building, not in theory testing. Under one condition, however, theory testing is also possible through this method. If a theory is deterministic, not probabilistic, then even one case—let alone a few—where violence takes place in the absence of factors identified with violence is enough to invalidate the theory. Karl Popper’s famous example is relevant here: any number of white swans that we observe will not prove that all swans are white, but one black swan can prove that not all swans are white (Popper 2002). The Popperian observation, it should be noted, does not apply to probabilistic theories, which theories of violence, along with a lot of other social science arguments, tend to be. In a probabilistic scheme of things, one black swan could simply be an outlier. 7. Aceh is an exception. Here, the World Bank has been monitoring conflict incidents reported in local media since the tsunami (e.g., World Bank 2008). Some case evidence (e.g., van Klinken 2007b) and reports by the International Crisis Group also provide useful information. But these have not compared current conflict incidence and patterns with those in earlier periods, making it difficult to know how serious violence is today compared with that of the immediate post-Suharto period. Another data source is the Statistik Potensi Desa (PODES) survey conducted by the government’s Bureau of Statistics. The 2005 survey contained a question on the incidence and impacts of conflict, for all Indonesian villages. While the 2002 PODES data have been used (Barron et al. 2009), no one has published analysis of the 2005 data. Though the scale of the PODES is impressive (it is implemented in every village in Indonesia), the fact that it collects data at a single point in time prevents analysis of how conflict evolves over time, and there may be reliability issues, given incentives for respondents (primarily village heads) to over- or underreport conflict. 8. This is particularly true for research on violence, where the direction of causality can be impossible to determine (see Barron et al. 2009). 9. For details, see Gerring (2007, 43–48). See also George and Bennett (2005).

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160 Collective Violence in Indonesia 10. A pilot conducted in Maluku and North Maluku compared deaths reported by various sources between January and June 2005. It found that newspapers reported twenty-four deaths, police recorded only twelve, UN Incident Tracking found seventeen, and the Maluku Interfaith Association recorded only four. Hospital records recorded only one death in Ambon, compared with the seven reported in newspapers (for Ambon). The level of underreporting was most pronounced outside of the provincial capital (Sharpe 2005). 11. For these issues in India, see Varshney (2002, ch. 4). 12. On ethnocommunal issues, the New Order government had a so-called SARA policy. SARA was an acronym for ethnic (suku), religious (agama), racial (ras), and intergroup (antar-golongan) differences. These differences were not to be discussed in the public realm. 13. For example, routine violence is not a focus of attention in the three most recent book-length works on group conflict in Indonesia (Bertrand 2004; Sidel 2006; van Klinken 2007a). Routine violence refers to forms of violence (such as the beating of suspected thieves, intervillage brawls, or fights over a plot of land) that are not part of a large or widespread conflict, and where the impacts of single incidents are typically low. 14. Van Klinken (2007a) does develop a “vulnerability index” to compare the provinces of high violence with other provinces where large-scale violence did not break out. He identifies factors of rapid deagrarianization and high dependence of the local economy on the state as important in differentiating highviolence and low-violence provinces. However, the focus of the book is not on establishing how these factors led to violence through a comparison of dynamics in high-violence and low-violence provinces, but rather on tracing the evolution of conflict in the high-violence provinces. 15. For a more detailed discussion, see Varshney (2007). 16. Van Klinken (2007a) does concentrate on escalation, processes, and local dynamics—the three points we make below. However, his primary focus was not to isolate causal factors in order to develop policies for conflict mitigation. Van Klinken discussed one aspect of escalation for each of five big conflicts: West Kalimantan, Central Kalimantan, Maluku, North Maluku, and Central Sulawesi. As a result, we learn how Indonesian violence supports Tilly and his colleagues’ conceptual categorization of the dynamics of contentious politics (McAdam et al. 2001), and how elements of that theory can shed light on understanding violence in different provinces. But the lack of a comparative framework (even within high-violence locations) makes it hard to generate a broader understanding of why escalation occurs in some places and not in others.

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The Contributors

Patrick Barron has led the World Bank’s conflict work in Indonesia since 2002, which includes a research program on conflict and development issues and the World Bank’s support for the Aceh peace process. He is currently pursuing his doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford University, and continues to advise the Bank globally on responses to conflict. Jacques Bertrand is associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and coordinator of the Southeast Asia Group at the Asian Institute, Munk Centre for International Studies. He is the author of Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia and has published many articles in books and in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Comparative Politics, Pacific Affairs, and Asian Survey. Sana Jaffrey is working on violent conflict at the World Bank in Indonesia. Blair Palmer is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the Australian National University and has been researching conflict in Indonesia since 2006 as a consultant for the World Bank’s Conflict and Development program in Jakarta. Rizal Panggabean teaches in the Masters Program in Peace and Conflict Resolution, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. His current research is on the role of civil society in mitigating ethnic and religious conflict. Joanne Sharpe has worked extensively across the thematic areas of communications, community development, and conflict. Her research 179

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180 The Contributors in Indonesia includes mapping community access to media and evaluating efforts to promote the peace agreement in Aceh. She has developed communications strategies in support of community development and peace programs and has worked closely with the community radio sector. Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin is a doctoral candidate in economics at the University of Western Sydney. He has had visiting research appointments at the Queen Elizabeth House, University of Oxford, and at the Institute of Social Studies, The Netherlands. His publications have appeared in Economics of Peace and Security, European Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of East Asian Studies, Journal of International Development, Journal of Peace Research, and Oxford Development Studies. Yuhki Tajima is assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Riverside. In 2008–2009, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Order, Conflict, Violence Program at the MacMillan Center, Yale University. He is interested in communal violence, especially during democratic transitions, and the causes and effects of insurgencies. Ashutosh Varshney is professor of political science at Brown University. His book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India was awarded the Gregory Luebbert Prize of the American Political Science Association. In 2008, he won a Guggenheim fellowship and the Carnegie Scholar award. He served on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Task Force on Millennium Development Goals (2002–2005), with a focus on conflict and poverty. Bridget Welsh is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University. In 2004, she was a Henry R. Luce Southeast Asian Fellow at Australian National University, in 2007 she received a USIP fellowship, and in 2009 she received the Max M. Fisher Prize for teaching excellence at the School of Advanced International Studes at Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent publications include Reflections: The Mahathir Years, Legacy of Engagement in Southeast Asia, and Impressions of the Goh Chok Tong Years in Singapore.

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Aceh: civil war in, 30, 36; Darul Islam rebellions in, 117n4; ethnic conflict in, 77, 84; Free Aceh Movement, 88; income inequality in, 91; peace agreements in, 14, 95; resentment over repression in, 93; resistance in, 1; resurgence of violence in, 87; separatist conflict in, 88, 152; tsunami devastation in, 14, 95; violence in, 55, 88, 154fig; welfare decline in, 91 Adat land system, 68, 86, 107 Ambon: violence in, 20 Antara (newspaper), 23 Authoritarianism, 1, 47n8, 77, 88, 89, 101, 116; in New Order, 22; transition from, 14

Banten, 25; violence in, 41tab Barron, Patrick, 7, 9, 10, 11, 17n24, 51–74, 80, 81, 86, 145–158 Bengkayang: violence in, 43tab Bengkulu: keroyokan in, 126tab, 127, 127fig, 128tab; lynchings in, 4 Bertrand, Jacques, 7, 11, 13, 15n1, 33, 36, 39, 59, 77–98, 100, 146, 152, 153 Biki, Amir, 29 Black magic, 66 Blambangan Umpu: communal violence in, 107–108; effect of security force intervention in, 107–108 Buru: violence in, 43tab Buyung Katedo: violence in, 115

Bali: decentralization policy in, 139; keroyokan in, 126tab, 127, 127fig, 128tab, 129fig, 139, 140; lynchings in, 4; rioting in, 139; violence in, 54, 85 Banda Aceh: income inequality in, 91 Bangkalan: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig

Carok duels, 61, 70, 71, 72, 85 Central Java, 25; violence in, 41tab Central Kalimantan: deaths from violence in, 40; ethnic conflict in, 77, 91; violence in, 41tab, 152 Central Sulawesi, 25; communal violence in, 111–113; effect of security force intervention in, 111–113; ethnic conflict in,

181

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182 Index 91, 100; Muslim-Christian violence in, 33; Permesta rebellion in, 117n4; violence in, 41tab, 55, 152 Chinese: anti-Communist massacres and, 6; in detainment camps, 6; economic resentment of, 90; exclusionary policies and, 89; during independence period, 6; marginalization of, 93; massacre in West Kalimantan, 6; political marginalization of, 40; property damage and, 90; sociopolitical exclusions of, 33; as “target group,” 33, 90; violence against, 5, 17n18, 37, 38, 39fig, 40, 49n28, 49n29, 85, 89, 90, 92, 93, 101, 102 Christians: fear over renegotiation of relations with Islam, 11, 12. See also Violence, Muslim-Christian Cimanggu Dua: keroyokan in, 132–134 Community Conflict Negotiation (CCN), 55; data on deaths, 59tab; data on scale of violence, 56–58 Conflict: administrative, 56, 64–66; assessing differences in forms of, 55; categorization of, 26; civil, 19; communal, 36, 83, 105–115; costs of, 54; crime and, 59, 60, 60fig; critical junctures and, 12, 86–97; cyclical nature of, 61; de-escalation of, 145, 153–157; different types of impacts of, 64–66; escalation, 61; ethnographic approach to, 120; evolution of, 120; family, 64; forms of, 26; group, 60fig;

honor, 61; identity, 65fig; importance of local factors driving, 72; between individuals, 52, 54, 58–62; interethnic, 37, 102; intergroup, 61; interpersonal, 60fig, 128; interreligious, 51; intervillage, 67, 68tab, 99, 100; intravillage, 68tab, 69; land, 68, 72, 157fig; local, 54, 72–73, 75n2; noncoincidental intensification of, 84; over physical resources, 56, 64–66; political position/influence and, 56, 64–66; in post-Suharto Indonesia, 51–74; reduction of, 96; regional, 102; research, 10; resolution, 72, 120, 138; resource, 66–72, 83; revenge, 69fig, 79, 80–81, 85; role of local factors in driving, 52; separatist, 84, 152; sexual indiscretion and, 65, 66, 70, 122, 123, 130–132; sources of, 63; variation in sources of, 64–66; variations in actors and, 66–72; variations in form, 51, 62–73; vigilante, 65, 69. See also Violence Conflict, ethnic, 2, 12, 14, 26, 38tab, 77–98; clustering of, 87, 97; critical junctures and, 77–98; definitional scope of, 79–82; difficulty of comparison of types, 81, 82; exclusion of crucial cases from study, 82–84; financial crises and, 89, 90, 91, 92; generation of large numbers of casualties in, 81; importance of inclusion/exclusion in, 87, 88; levels of analysis of, 84–86; local factors in, 86; marginal-

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ization of groups and, 89; measures of intensity of, 81, 82; media attention to, 81; national models and, 77–98; peaks of, 77, 78, 81; recording of incidents of, 80; regionalist movements and, 89; relations with the state and, 87, 88; rise in, 77; role of military in, 99–117; timing of violence and, 77–98; triggers for, 96; various intensifications of, 89. See also Violence, ethnocommunal Critical junctures: defining, 11, 33; diminishing ethnic conflict after regime stabilization and, 95; economic crises and, 88; ethnic conflict and, 86–97; exogenous shocks and, 88; institutional change and, 86–97; mobilization of ethnic groups and, 87, 88; regime transition and, 88; renegotiation of terms of inclusion during, 11; significance of, 13; temporal significance of, 44; tensions during, 97; violence of New Order and, 32–34 Daryatmo (General), 103 Dayak-Madurese conflict, 33, 34, 77, 83, 85, 87, 92, 94, 95 Democratic Party of Indonesia, 103 Detik (newspaper), 47n9 Dukun santet, 41tab East Java, 25; deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact by actor combinations in conflicts, 69fig; impacts by level

183

of conflict in, 70fig; property disputes in, 61, 63; varied sources of conflict in, 64, 64fig; vigilantism in, 68; violence in, 38, 41tab, 55 East Nusatenggara, 25; violence in, 41tab East Timor: attempts at annexation, 1; civil war in, 30, 36; deaths in, 17n20; ethnic conflict in, 77, 84; income inequality in, 91; independence movement in, 117n4; insurgency in, 47n4; militarysupported militias in, 104; resurgence of violence in, 87; sociopolitical exclusions of, 33; state violence in, 36; Truth Commission in, 48n20; violence against prodemocracy demonstrators in, 103; vote for independence in, 36; welfare decline in, 91 Economic: crises, 88, 89; development, 101; resource distribution, 99 Editor (newspaper), 47n9 Elections: competitive, 119 Ende: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; impact of conflict in, 63fig; resource conflict in, 67fig Ethnic: conflict, 2, 8, 12, 14, 26, 81, 82; cooperation, 116; identity, 83; relations, 12; security dilemmas, 117n2. See also Conflict, ethnic; Violence, ethnocommunal Factionalism, 85 Flores: conflicts over resources in, 66; fatal conflicts in, 63;

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184 Index impact of conflict in, 63fig; resource conflicts in, 67, 67fig, 68, 68tab; varied sources of conflict in, 64, 64fig; violence in, 54 Flores Timur: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; resource conflict in, 67fig Free Aceh Movement, 88 Goenawan Mohamad, 119, 120 Governance: local patterns, 13; local variations in, 44; traditional forms of, 13, 44 Guided Democracy, 88 Gunung Makar: communal violence in, 109–111; effect of security force intervention in, 109–111 Habibie, B. J., 136, 138 Halmahera Tengah: violence in, 43tab Human rights, 14, 103, 113, 114; rise of international discourse on, 14 Identity: clashes, 65fig; common, 136; communal, 61, 68; defining, 83; ethnic, 81, 82, 83; group-based, 61; religious, 83, 99; role in shaping violence, 136; tribal, 68 India: Hindu-Muslim violence in, 5, 6, 42 Indonesia: absence of tradition of rule of law in, 32; authoritarian regime in, 1; center-periphery struggles in, 51; collective violence in, 37tab; corruption in, 14, 95; hierarchically organized structure in, 89; liberalization of media in,

103; lynchings in, 4, 5, 12, 26, 53, 68, 73, 100, 108–109, 119–141; as Pancasila state, 11, 12, 29, 89; patterns of collective violence in, 19–46; pervasiveness of violence in, 79; post-Suharto, 51–74; pressure on to crack down on Islamic extremist groups, 117n7; rejection of Islamic state, 89; strengthening democratization movement in, 103; succession crisis in, 89, 94; threat of disintegration, 46n1; unemployment in, 90, 91 Indonesian Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI), 94 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), 88 Indramayu: keroyokan in, 129, 140 Institutions: changes in and critical junctures, 86–97; compromise among, 87, 88; configuration of, 87; configurations for ethnic groups, 87, 88; exclusion from, 33; informal, 115, 117n2; law enforcement, 120; local, 13, 44, 120; national models and, 87; political, 93; of power, 33; stability of, 14, 88, 95 Insurgencies, 30, 36 International Crisis Group, 54 Islam, 11, 12, 33, 40, 89, 94, 101, 102; renegotiation of relations with, 11, 12; repression of, 12 Jabung: communal violence in, 109–111; effect of security force intervention in, 109–111 Jaffrey, Sana, 145–158

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Jakarta, 25; deaths from violence in, 40; income inequality in, 91; riots in, 152; violence in, 30, 41tab, 43tab, 49n24 Java: attacks on churches, 48n14; collective violence in, 41, 42tab; ethnic conflict in, 91; ethnocommunal violence in, 41tab; incidence of violence in, 40; income inequality in, 91; Muslim-Christian violence in, 33, 86, 87; urban riots in, 92 Justice: community, 138; mob, 71, 121; popular, 41tab; vigilante, 32, 146 Kalimantan: Dayak-Madurese conflict in, 78, 83, 87 Karangasem: keroyokan in, 129, 140 Kecamatan Development Program (KDP), 55; data on deaths, 59tab; data on scale of violence, 56–58 Keroyokan, 120; catalysts for, 130tab; causes of violence and, 135–137; correspondence to democratization, 124–126; crime and, 122, 124tab, 128, 134–135; forms of, 126–130; frequency of, 124–126; interpersonal relations and, 122, 128; level of brutality in, 122, 123, 124tab; level of premeditation in, 122, 123, 124tab; lynchings and, 121–124; motivation, 122; national political development and, 120; in nonconflict parts of Indonesia, 125; parallel truths of, 125; patterns of, 126–130; personal acrimony and, 124tab; pre-

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meditation and, 124tab; regional variation in, 125; revenge for adultery, 130–132; shaming ritual in, 122, 123; social legitimation of, 123, 124tab; spatial variation, 126–130, 137–140; target in, 123; temporal variation, 126–130, 137–140; as umbrella term, 121; unreported, 124; variations in, 121, 122, 124tab, 137–140; violation of societal norms and, 122, 123, 124tab; witchcraft and, 122, 123, 128, 132–134 Kolonasatie program, 106 Kompas (newspaper), 23, 24, 49n24 Kopkamtib, 102, 103 Kota Ambon: violence in, 43tab Kota Ternate: violence in, 43tab Kotawaringin Timur: violence in, 43tab Lampung: background on, 106; communal conflict during transition period, 106–115; destination for migrants, 106; ethnic conflict in, 100; indigenous communities, 106; killing of Islamic sect in, 102; Kolonasatie program in, 106; lynchings in, 100; Transmigrasi program, 106; use of militias in, 104, 114; violence in, 30 Land: adat system, 68, 86; claims to, 68; communal, 66, 68, 72; conflict, 72; disputes, 53, 61, 107–108, 157fig; government-issued titles to, 106; prices, 107; significance to tribal group, 61 Landak: violence in, 43tab

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186 Index Laskar Jihad, 114, 115, 117n7 Laskar Mujahiddin, 114 Liberalization, political, 14, 115 Lombok: violence in, 54 Lynchings, 3, 4–5, 12, 26, 48n12, 53, 68, 73, 100, 108–109, 119–141; in American South, 4, 16n10, 16n12, 16n13, 16n14; frequency of, 16n9; historical tradition of, 31; incidence of, 101; as mode of justice, 7; national and local causes of, 13; official sanctions for, 4, 5; per capita, 4; as products of vacuums of power from decentralization, 101. See also Keroyokan Madiun: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; martial arts gangs in, 71; property disputes in, 63, 75n6 Madura: deaths from violence in, 66; fatal conflicts in, 62; individual conflict in, 68, 71; lynchings in, 68; varied sources of conflict in, 65; vigilantism in, 66; violence in, 61 Madurese-Dayak conflict, 34, 38fig; large numbers of deaths from, 37 Magetan: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; property disputes in, 63, 75n6 Maluku, 25; deaths from violence in, 40; ethnic conflict in, 77, 84, 91; Muslim-Christian violence in, 83, 87, 94; peace agreements in, 14, 95;

riots in, 61; RMS rebellion in, 117n4; violence in, 41tab, 55 Maluku Islands, 24; MuslimChristian violence in, 33; violence in, 152 Maluku Tanggara: violence in, 43tab Maluku Tengah: violence in, 43tab Maluku Utara: violence in, 43tab Manado: violence in, 20 Manggarai: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 63; impact of conflict in, 63fig; land conflicts in, 66, 72; perang tanding tradition in, 68; resource conflict in, 67fig Marginalization: of Chinese, 40; communal, 13; political, 40 Martial arts gangs, 61, 71 Megawati Sukarnoputri, 12, 92, 95, 103, 104 Migration: alteration of local equilibria and, 13, 44; government sponsored, 106; as policy to relieve poverty, 106; spontaneous, 106 Military: as agent provocateur, 14; changing role of, 14; connection to proxy militias, 104, 114; Dili massacre and, 14; dual-function policy of, 101; dwifungsi policy, 101; effect of restraint on security, 105–115; excessive use of violence by, 14; factionalism, 79; human rights abuses/reform in, 103, 104, 113, 114; increasing restraints on, 102–105; Islam and, 94, 101; as key factor in various types

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of violence, 100; Kopkamtib in, 102, 103; maintenance of domestic order and, 14; massacres, 1; Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order, 102; political stability and, 101; promotion of economic development by, 101; regime, 1; removal of police from command in, 104; repression by, 94, 102; repression of extreme religious groups by, 102; role of, 14; separation from police, 14, 28; shaping of security environment by, 101–102; surveillance apparatus of, 102; withdrawal from civilian matters, 103; withdrawal from intervention in local disputes, 100 Militias: military-supported, 104; political agendas of, 114–115; religious, 114; use in Lampung, 104, 114 Moerdani, Benny, 29 Moluccas: internecine warfare in, 1 Muhammadiyah, 24 Mumbang Jaya: communal violence in, 109–111; effect of security force intervention in, 109–111 Murdani, Benny, 102, 103 Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), 24 National Commission on Human Rights, 14, 103 Nationalism, 15n4 National Model, 87, 88, 96; centralized unitary state in, 89; consequences for ethnic relations, 97; criteria of inclusion/exclusion in, 87; original,

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89; rejection of Islamic state, 89; renegotiation of, 87; repression and, 89; sanctioned views of history in, 89 Negara Jaya: communal violence in, 108–109; effect of security force intervention in, 108–109 Negeri Besar: communal violence in, 108–109; effect of security force intervention in, 108–109 New Order: anti-Communist killings and, 19, 29; belief that populace cannot be trusted with freedoms, 28; breakdown of, 12; centralization in, 23; collective violence during, 35; concern over communal tension and destabilization, 102; defining identities in, 83; demise of, 34, 37, 44, 51; disciplinary mechanisms in, 28–31; dismantling of, 94; downfall of, 19; exchange of prosperity for authoritarianism in, 22, 28; exclusionary policies of, 33, 34; fear of changing power relations after, 93, 94; “Hobbesian” bargain in, 28; increase in violence following, 51; intensification of violence after demise of, 80; intrinsic violence of, 44; killing of Communists and, 102; lack of evidence for peaceful rule in, 21; lack of press freedom during, 23, 35, 36; lack of published figures on ethnocommunal violence in, 22; military factionalism under, 79; peace and stability under, 28; police state, 1; position of Chinese in, 40; production of violence as in-

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188 Index strument during, 79; renegotiation with Islam, 33; role in precipitation of violence, 36; SARA policy in, 23; sociopolitical exclusions in, 33; stateperpetrated violence in, 21; systemic changes by, 33, 34; threat of repressive force in, 102; upset of traditional equilibrium of communities by, 13, 44; violence during, 29, 32–34; violent end to, 19 Newspapers: absence of reports on conflict in national editions, 23; accounts of keroyokan, 126; accurate reporting and validity of data, 150; censorship and, 23; closure of, 47n9; editorial selfcensorship in, 150; “envelope” journalism and, 150; interpreting reliability of reports, 149–150; as journals of record, 23; local, 2, 51–74; media assessment and, 150; national, 2, 47n7; need for local information to assess number of deaths from collective violence, 57, 58; “negative list” prohibitions by New Order government, 24; provincial, 2, 9, 10, 23–24, 34, 47n7, 54; reliability of reporting, 17n16, 23, 24, 47n7; role in furnishing analysis data, 148–149; subprovincial, 52, 54; tracking incidence of conflict through, 52; underreporting of violence by, 49n24; uneven reporting in, 150; use of in understanding conflict, 52; variations in conflict forms and, 52

Ngada: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; impact of conflict in, 63fig; resource conflict in, 67fig Nongovernmental organizations, 24 North Maluku, 25; deaths from violence in, 40; violence in, 41tab North Sulawesi: Permesta rebellion in, 117n4 NTT province: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; land disputes in, 61; provincial newspapers in, 75n4; violence in, 55 Operational Command for the Restoration of Security and Order, 102 Palmer, Blair, 145–158 Palu: violence in, 20 Pamekasan: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; retribution conflict in, 65fig; revenge conflict in, 69fig; varied sources of conflict in, 64, 64fig; vigilantism in, 65fig, 69fig; violence in, 61 Pancasila, 11, 12, 29, 89 Panggabean, Rizal, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17n16, 17n25, 19–46, 58, 80, 81, 85 Papua: civil war in, 30, 36; ethnic conflict in, 77, 84, 91; income inequality in, 91; resurgence of violence in, 87; separatist conflict in, 152 Patronage, 138, 139 People’s Consultative Assembly (MPR), 14, 95

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People’s Democratic Party (PRD), 103 Perang tanding tradition in, 68 Petrus campaign, 102 PODES surveys, 53, 58 Pogroms, 12 Police: early lack of autonomous capacity, 15; increase in responsibilities, 105; intentional restraint by of local politicians, 114; lack of capacity of, 114; law and order responsibilities, 14; removal from military command, 14, 28, 104, 116, 117; village expectations of, 109 Political: competition, 71; culture, 28, 137; institutions, 93; liberalization, 14, 115; openness, 103; organizations, 29; patronage, 139; pluralism, 138; resource distribution, 99; stability, 101 Ponorogo: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; property disputes in, 62, 66, 68, 71, 72, 75n6; retribution conflict in, 65fig; revenge conflict in, 69fig; varied sources of conflict in, 64, 64fig; vigilantism in, 65fig, 69fig Pontianak: violence in, 43tab Poso: communal violence in, 111–113; effect of security force intervention in, 111–113; Muslim-Christian violence in, 94; violence in, 20, 43tab Power: access to, 152; vacuums, 101, 120

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Reform: human rights, 14 Reformasi period, 100 Regime: authoritarian, 1, 14, 23, 77, 88, 89, 101, 116; collapse, 93; legitimacy, 92; military, 1; paternalistic, 28; stability, 12, 92, 94, 102; totalitarian, 23, 24; transition, 88; uncertainty surrounding end of, 94 Riau, 25; gambling dispute in, 37tab; violence in, 41tab Riots, 12, 36, 37tab; anti-Christian, 48n14; localized communal, 99; Muslim-Christian, 94; unemployed youth in, 90; urban, 92 Sambas: violence in, 43tab Sampang: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal conflicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; witch doctor killings in, 73 Sanggau: violence in, 43tab SARA policy, 23 Security: demilitarization of, 99–117; domestic, 99–117; effect of restraint on military on, 105–115; environment, 100; forces, 14; informal institutions and, 117n2; middle class demands for, 32; state, 101; vacuums in, 28 Setia Hata Winongo, 71 Setia Hati Terate, 71 Sharpe, Joanne, 7, 9, 10, 11, 17n24, 51–74, 80, 81, 86 Sikka: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; impact of conflict in, 63fig; resource conflict in, 67fig Silat groups, 61, 71, 75n6 Social: acceptance, 130; capital,

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190 Index 137; cohesion, 61; markers, 71; networks, 123, 140; tensions, 152; violence, 99, 100 Solo: ethnic conflict in, 85; violence in, 20 South Kalimantan: keroyokan in, 126tab, 127, 127fig, 128tab; keroyokan in, 129, 130–132; lynchings in, 4; violence in, 38 South Sulawesi: Darul Islam rebellions in, 117n4; violence in, 38, 41tab, 54 South Sumatra: violence in, 30 State: capacity, 14, 101, 136; coercion, 48n21; critical junctures and, 87, 88; failed, 19; role as catalyst for violence, 136; security, 14, 101, 115, 117n2 Suharto (President), 88, 94, 98n2, 101, 102, 103, 136, 145; differences with the military, 14; downfall, 11, 77, 89, 92; insurgencies during rule of, 21; interest in Islamic political groups, 89; nurturing of Islamic groups by, 94; peaceful image of, 19; renegotiation with Islamic groups, 11, 12, 40 Sukarno (President), 103; Guided Democracy of, 88 Sulawesi: ethnic conflict in, 77, 85; Muslim-Christian violence in, 83, 87; peace agreements in, 14, 95 Sumatra: ethnic conflict in, 91; income inequality in, 91; PRRI rebellions in, 117n4; urban riots in, 92 Sumenep: deaths from collective violence in, 59tab; fatal con-

flicts in, 62; impact of conflict in, 63fig; witch doctor killings in, 73 Tadjoeddin, Mohammad Zulfan, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 17n16, 17n25, 19–46, 58, 80, 81, 85 Tajima, Yuhki, 7, 8, 13, 14, 28, 99–117 Tanggerang: gang violence in, 123 Tanjung Priok incident, 29, 30, 102 Tempo (newspaper), 47n9 Terrorism, 83, 120 Totalitarianism, 23, 24, 47n8 Transmigrasi program, 106 Umpu Bakti: communal violence in, 107–108; effect of security force intervention in, 107–108 United Nations Support Facility for Indonesian Recovery (UNSFIR), 22, 23, 51, 52, 53, 54, 58; concentration on communal conflict, 60; data on deaths, 59tab; data on incidents of collective violence, 56–58; omission of violent incidents from study by, 81; temporal limitations of data, 84; underestimation of impact of violence by, 57–58 Vandalism, 71 Varshney, Ashutosh, 17n16, 17n25, 19–46, 53, 80, 85, 99, 117n2, 145–158 Violence: aggregate, 15n1; antistate, 99; big-incident effect on statistics of, 24; causation, 1; citizen, 32; comparison of UNSFIR and KDP/CCN data,

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56–58; cultural legitimation of, 85; deaths from, 20; defining, 51; democratic transitions and, 77, 83, 92, 93, 105–115, 119; difficulties in estimating incidence of, 6, 7; disaggregation of, 1, 37–40; distribution in finite period, 11; domestic, 64; Dukun santet, 41tab; economic, 12, 37, 41tab, 45app2.2, 61; effect of speed of police response on, 105–115; escalation of localized into collective, 151–153; ethnic, 14; exclusion of figures on disputes between individuals, 52, 54, 58–62; fear tactics and, 80; group, 2; Hindu-Muslim, 5, 6, 16n15; horizontal society-society, 120; impact of economic crises on, 136; intensification of after demise of New Order, 80; lack of generalization of, 33; legitimate forms of, 70; limited to certain groups and areas, 80; local mob, 120; manipulations of representations of, 85; measures of intensity of, 81; as mechanism of ensuring order, 31; mob, 101; motivations for, 61; need to consider process of escalation of, 152; obligatory, 70; “ordinary” dimension of, 119, 120, 151; patterns of, 13; personal, 61; pervasiveness of, 79; postconflict, 153, 154, 155, 155fig, 156, 156fig, 157, 157fig; prevention of outbreaks of, 85; Pribumi-Chinese, 5, 6, 17n19, 20; processes of mobilization in, 152; against prodemocracy

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demonstrators, 103; produced by authoritarianism of New Order, 32, 33; psychological factors in, 137; reappearance of, 145; religious, 12, 83, 111–113, 119, 125, 152; in remote areas, 54; in response to exclusions, 33; retaliatory, 61; retributive, 102; revenge, 120, 122; revolutionary, 6; ritualized, 121; role of common identity in, 136; scope and scale of, 56–58; secessionist, 36, 100; sectarian, 38tab; small-scale vs. large-scale relationships, 10, 11, 24; social, 14, 99, 100; social capital and, 137; societal actors in causation of, 136–137; state-perpetrated, 21, 30, 37, 44, 78, 79, 136; timing of, 33; used to impose stability, 44; use of criminals to inflict, 80; variation in impact and forms, 62–73; variations in actors and, 66–72; vertical state-induced, 120; vigilante, 51, 53, 56, 108–109, 121–124, 157fig; willingness of society to accept, 137 Violence, collective: categories of, 45app2.2; causal mechanisms/effects, 8, 9; caused by end of New Order, 27, 28–31; caused by problems of regime legitimacy, 27–28, 32–34; comparative patterns of distribution, 9; concentration around end of New Order, 44; critical junctures in, 11; deaths from, 35fig, 36tab, 52, 57fig, 59tab; decentralization of governmental powers and, 10,

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192 Index 48n18, 83; de-escalation of, 145, 153–157; during democratic transitions, 77, 83, 92, 93, 105–115, 119; distribution of, 7, 58; district-level distribution, 42–44; economic, 26; embedded in Indonesian history and culture, 27, 31–32; emphasis on larger episodes, 146; escalation of localized into, 151–153; forms of, 2, 19; frequency of, 19; geographic variation in, 44; historical institutionalist view of, 11, 12, 77–98; impact of, 52; income levels and, 3; increase in, 99; large-scale, 99; link to Suharto’s embrace of Islam, 40; local concentration of, 9, 21, 22, 32, 33, 42, 44; methodological issues in, 147–148; military as factor in, 14; national trends, 34–37; newspapers’ role in furnishing analysis data on, 148–149; overview, 1–15; patterns of, 19–46; in peaceful districts, 53; provincial distribution of, 40–42; quantitative/qualitative approaches to, 147–148; role of local factors in driving, 52; simultaneous occurences of, 77, 78; sketchy statistics concerning, 22; small-scale, 2; sources of information on, 2; spatial variations in, 7, 10, 11–13, 20, 126–130; state vs. community, 26; stereotypes and, 85; temporal variations in, 7, 11, 13–15, 20, 126–130; theories of, 27–34; town size and, 40; underreporting of, 52, 58; variations in forms of, 52,

62–73; wide distribution of, 52 Violence, ethnocommunal, 26, 41tab; clustering of, 77, 78, 81, 83; deadly nature of, 21; definitional scope of, 79–82; distribution of, 38tab; episodic nature of, 21; exclusion of crucial cases from study, 82–84; levels of analysis of, 84–86; linked incidents of, 81; share of deaths from, 37; simultaneous occurences of, 77, 78; waves of, 81; willingness of states to prevent, 117n2 Violence, mob: approval of local elites of, 120, 129, 140; causes of, 135–137; correspondence to democratization, 105–115, 124–126, 138; crime and, 122, 128, 134–135; forms of, 126–130; frequency of, 124–126; historical imprinting of, 140; interpersonal relations and, 122; keroyokan; level of brutality in, 122, 123; level of premeditation in, 122; motivation, 122; in nonconflict parts of Indonesia, 125; parallel truths of, 125; patterns of, 126–130; process of legitimation in, 139, 140; regional variation in, 125; repeat patterns of, 140; revenge, 130–132; spatial variation, 126–130; target in, 123; temporal variation, 126–130; unreported, 124; violation of societal norms and, 122, 123; witchcraft and, 122, 123, 128, 132–134. See also Keroyokan Violence, Muslim-Christian, 5, 6,

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7, 12, 28, 33, 39fig, 83, 86, 87, 93, 94, 111–113; Islamic intellectuals and, 40; large numbers of deaths from, 37; property damage in, 38; rioting and, 94; roots of, 20 Wahid, Abdurrahman, 14, 95, 104, 136 Wahono (General), 104 Warfare: civil, 3, 7, 14, 16n8, 17n20, 30, 36; guerrilla, 80; internecine, 1 Welsh, Bridget, 4, 13, 16n12, 101, 119–141 West Java, 25; Darul Islam rebellions in, 117n4; keroyokan in, 126tab, 127,

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127fig, 128tab, 129, 132–134, 140; lynchings in, 4; violence in, 38, 41tab West Kalimantan: anti-Chinese violence in, 6, 29, 33; DayakMadurese conflict in, 34, 92; deaths from violence in, 40; ethnic conflict in, 77, 85, 91; income inequality in, 92; Madurese-Dayak conflict in, 34; violence in, 41tab, 152 West Nusatenggara, 25 West Papua: resistance in, 1 Witchcraft, 31, 41, 73, 122, 123, 128, 132–134, 140 Wolfowitz, Paul, 103 Yogya: violence in, 2

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About the Book

Since the end of Suharto’s so-called New Order (1966–1998) in In-

donesia and the eruption of vicious group violence, a number of questions have engaged the minds of scholars and other observers. How widespread is the group violence? What forms—ethnic, religious, economic—has it primarily taken? Have the clashes of the post-Suharto years been significantly more widespread, or worse, than those of the late New Order? The authors of Collective Violence in Indonesia trenchantly address these questions, shedding new light on trends in the country and assessing how they compare with broad patterns identified in Asia and Africa. Ashutosh Varshney is professor of political science at Brown University. His book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India was awarded the Gregory Luebbert Prize of the American Political Science Association.

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