Where the heart is

PC(USA) partner serves new Indonesian ‘underclass’ of IDPs

by John Filiatreau

MANADO, Indonesia — The government declared in January that Indonesia no longer has any internally displaced people (IDPs).

The 500,000 Indonesians who live in crowded camps and barracks far from their ancestral homes are now officially “poor” or “vulnerable” persons, not IDPs.

That means they no longer qualify for emergency government aid.

It also means they must lean even more heavily on Stien Djalil, a program officer for Church World Service (CWS) to whom they go for everything from farm tools to a shoulder to cry on.

Djalil doesn't have time to quibble over semantics. She and her young assistant, Vanda Lengkong, are the final “safety net” for many of the 34,000 (ex-)IDPs living in a dozen refugee camps and in other temporary quarters in her province, North Sulawesi.

The CWS workers aren't getting much help these days. Most other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with humanitarian missions to IDPs have pulled up stakes, apparently accepting the government's claim that the emergency is over.

In June, Djalil and Lengkong escorted a visitor to three government-built camps in and near Manado, the ostensibly temporary homes of 450 families who cannot return to their villages in North Maluku because of continuing Christian-Muslim violence there.

The camps aren't visible from the main roads. They're tucked away in muddy little clearings hacked out of the jungle — makeshift villages where families live in plank-and-thatch houses barely bigger than coffins. Unemployment approaches 100 percent and most residents have no income at all.

The IDPs are people uprooted from their homes and transplanted to areas that couldn't be more alien. “Welcome to my boat,” one woman greeted a group of visitors as she lounged with her children on a shaded wooden platform in the jungle. It was a rueful, longing reference to the fishing business her kinsmen lost when Christian-Muslim violence forced them to leave their island and move to this land-locked “village.”

Manado is a busy, prosperous city at the northern tip of the big island the Dutch called Celebes. Twenty years ago, 80 percent of its 200,000 citizens were Christians. It now has twice that many residents, and the Christian-Muslim split is about 50-50. Author J.M. Nas wrote two decades ago that Manado was “in the process of change from a mainly Christian to a predominantly Muslim city.”

The region surrounding Manado is called Minahasa, which means “becoming one” — a reference to the fact that its various ethnic groups formed an alliance centuries ago for protection against pirates on the Sulawesi Sea.

Even in its current congested state, Manado is often held to be the prettiest city in Indonesia. Small wonder it keeps its ugly underbelly under wraps.

“People look around and say, ‘This is very nice, it's beautiful here,' and think we have no problems anymore,” Djalil says. “We must make them see what they don't see — that the need here is still very great.”

Although the camps are surrounded by a palmy jungle that might have been painted by Paul Gauguin, they're hardly paradisiacal. Some IDPs have refused to move into newly constructed camps because they lack such basic services as water, power, sanitation facilities and security from crime.

Not all IDPs live in camps. Thousands — no one knows how many — board with relatives, rent rooms from other families, move into abandoned buildings, squat on public lands or live as wandering nomads in the jungle.

In Ambon, more than 5,000 IDP families living in public and government buildings were told earlier this year that they had to move by the end of this month.

Church officials in Ambon led a tour of an IDP center on the ground floor of a school where as many as 30 people live in a single room. Each family is assigned a 5-by-7-foot sleeping mat on a concrete floor. Twice a week, the Protestant church brings in two 120-gallon containers of water — for bathing, cooking and drinking — to be shared by more than 250 people. In the entire camp, there are two fetid, closet-sized toilets. And two Bibles.

The IDPs packed into the Ambon school, like those in the Manado camps, are Christians whose homes were burned by Muslim mobs — but Indonesia also has thousands of Muslim IDPs. (All camps are not created equal. For a comparison of conditions in two North Maluku IDP camps, one Christian and one Muslim, click here.)

The lives of many IDPs are literally sickening. According to researchers from the World Food Program (WFP):

• Lengthy stays in temporary housing have a negative impact on family health;
• Most IDPs have untreated emotional traumas;
• Women and children are particularly vulnerable to illness;
• Most households have little “food security,” meaning that they don't know where their next meal will come from;
• Most IDPs don't have access to latrines and trash bins;
• Many families are in need of such basics as bedding, blankets and clothing.

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights says that “the vast majority of the internally displaced are women and children.” About two-thirds of IDPs are under 18 years old. More than half of IDP children are under-nourished.

CWS Indonesia —a partner of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a frequent collaborator with Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) — is the IDPs' lifeline in Minahasa, providing, in addition to “basic life-saving relief supplies and services,” drinking water, sanitation systems, nutritional supplements, agricultural materials and tools, health services and trauma counseling.

Since launching the program in 2001, CWS has focused on IDPs' short-term needs, assuming that most would not be in the camps for long. In fact, most IDPs spend two years or more in temporary quarters. About two-thirds of the 1.4 million Indonesians displaced since 1999 have returned to their home islands or resettled elsewhere. Many of those who remain cannot return because of continuing violence.

CWS thinks most IDPs in North Sulawesi are “unlikely to return to their respective places of origin” because of continuing Christian-Muslim violence in the Malukus. A United Nations assessment team found in a 2002 study that most IDPs in camps near Manado “did not desire to return.”

The annual budget for the Manado CWS operation is a paltry $120,000.

In June, Djalil said she wasn't sure the program would be funded again, even at that level. “We will leave it in God's hands,” she said. “God will provide, as he always has in the past.”

CWS is a humanitarian ministry of the PC(USA) and 35 other Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican denominations. Another PC(USA) mission partner, Action by Churches Together (ACT), a global alliance of 195 Protestant and Orthodox churches and church-related aid agencies, also has provided emergency assistance to IDPs in Indonesia.

Djalil, 62, took the CWS position after serving for many years in a similar capacity for the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCC). The IDPs are not her only concern. In June, for example, when a volcano on remote Sangihe island erupted, she and Lengkong, a college student and prospective ministry candidate, were dispatched to Sangihe to assess the needs of the 30,000 people who had to be evacuated from 16 villages in the danger zone and housed in churches and schools in safer areas.

In their absence, the CWS-supported programs were managed by “cadres” Djalil and her colleagues have recruited from among the IDPs and trained as health and nutrition workers, trauma counselors, disease-prevention experts and small-business operators. CWS programs are intended “to meet human needs and foster self-reliance for all whose way is hard.”

Although CWS provides assistance to “those most in need, without regard to political or religious creed,” the majority of the IDPs in Manado and nearby Bitung are Christians. (Most Muslim IDPs from North Maluku fled to the island of Ternate.)

Djalil is no stranger to “displacement” and suffering. In the 1960s, she was imprisoned for a year (and tortured by interrogators) because her husband was a student activist regarded as a threat to the Suharto regime.

That the IDPs are “poor” and “vulnerable” is not in doubt. A 2002 survey by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) found that the IDPs' poverty rate is about three times the national rate of 19 percent, and that IDPs also report higher rates of unemployment, malnutrition and sickness. WFP said 55 percent of the 5,500 families it surveyed were living in poverty, and 90 percent had illnesses in their households.

The agency warned that the IDPs are becoming a new Indonesian “underclass.”

“Statistics like these sound the alarm for the future of the displaced people in Indonesia, particularly women and children,” a WFP spokesman said. “These problems need to be solved now, before they have a chance to harden into a second generation.”

The second generation is very much in evidence in the camps, which are crawling with beautiful brown-eyed babies and children.

Promised “termination payments” from the government — lump sums to be used for resettlement after regular government aid was cut off — have not always made their way to the IDPs, “either because of a lack of funds or because of misuse of that money,” according to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC).

With the revocation of official IDP status, the national government has washed its hands of the problem, shifting responsibility for helping the “vulnerable” to provincial and district governments.

CWS distributes thousands of tons of rice, vegetable oil, “multi-nutrient sprinkle” and WSB (wheat soy blend) gruel; distributes mats, blankets, cooking utensils and mosquito nets to needy IDP families; and sponsors “food-for-work” projects in which camp residents build such facilities as footpaths, culverts, water channels and bridges.

It also offers health and sanitation training for food vendors and midwives; distributes “hygiene kits” and educational materials, including information on HIV/AIDS; supports water and sanitation projects; provides seeds, agricultural tools and fishing gear; provides emergency housing materials; sponsors special nutrition programs for babies and lactating mothers; organizes “support groups” for IDPs; manages an early-childhood enrichment program; provides trauma counseling as part of a broad program of “psychosocial-mental health” activities; and makes “micro-loans” (of $10-$15) to would-be entrepreneurs.

All materials used in CWS projects are purchased locally, and the agency actively seeks partnerships with local organizations and churches. Programs and activities are tailored to the clients' cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Many are managed by IDP “cadres,” who are paid a token wage.

The programs are supported in part by funds contributed by PC(USA) members and congregations through special appeals, Extra Commitment Opportunity (ECO) gifts and the One Great Hour of Sharing offering.

In the Indonesian language, one term, pengungsi, is used for IDPs and refugees, but there is a crucial difference: International conventions safeguard the rights of persecuted people who cross borders and become refugees, but there is no legal instrument protecting those who are forced to flee their homes but who stay within their countries' borders. These people — IDPs — must rely mostly on the international humanitarian community for moral and financial support.

The Jakarta government has identified three possible outcomes for IDP families: peaceful return to their “places of origin”; “empowerment” to begin life anew in the communities they adopted as IDPs; and resettlement with government assistance in other parts of Indonesia.

The first option is best for all concerned, but in many cases returning is out of the question because the violence that caused the displacement is still going on.

The second option, empowerment, sounds good but seldom happens. “Empowerment is a good alternative if the host communities are ready and willing to accept IDPs — which, in most cases, they are not,” Michael Elmquist, a former chief of Indonesia's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said two years ago.

“The only remaining option ... is resettlement in new sites,” he said. “For budgetary reasons, the government hopes that only a small number of IDPs will avail themselves of this option, but, in reality, it is the only one available for most of them.”

Elmquist, noting that IDPs are often regarded as a drain on scarce local resources, added: “So far, the government's resettlement policy has not been a complete success. Much more community involvement is needed in order to ensure that the relocation sites and houses are of a standard acceptable to IDPs, and that the sites are sustainable and accepted by the surrounding population.”