SINGAPORE -- As Indonesia assesses the carnage from the recent ethnic violence in its province of Kalimantan, a poignant legacy of the failure of its transmigration policy slowly but surely emerges.
A lesson from the fiasco is that when implementing purely economic policies or directives, cultural differences between the people affected should be taken into account. Hatched in the 1960s and halted three decades later, the policy to shift people from densely-populated islands to sparsely-populated regions unfortunately ignored those differences. Today, Indonesia is reaping what it sowed 40 years earlier.
In the latest ethnic violence that has claimed more than 500 lives, the Dayaks, the indigenous population in Kalimantan, went on a rampage, torching the homes of Madurese settlers and beheading many of them.