More From Our Geographers

Geographer Melinda Meade speaks on devolutionary forces within Indonesia.

Well, the status of Indonesia certainly is more precarious than it was…. [Of] the peripheral islands, only Aceh, the fundamentalist Muslim area in Sumatra, had fought hard not to join Indonesia. They wanted to be part of a…Muslim state, and at independence, it took the Indonesian army that had just fought the Dutch, to go and force Aceh to be part of Indonesia. With some atrocities and serious behavior problems by the Indonesian military, they have kept Aceh part of Indonesia. As the central government becomes weaker, Aceh and those areas are again trying to move to become a separate state.

East Timor was an example of a very different kind. It's one of those relics of colonialism that has really caused havoc. It was the last part of the old Portuguese empire to remain. And when Angola and Mozambique were ended as Portugal finally became democratic, so East Timor, which was still Portuguese, and here is one half of one island in the middle of an archipelago, they thought they wanted to be independent. There's not very much basis for that. Now we think that there's some oil there, but in the beginning, they didn't even know that. They might want to become part of Australia, another foreign country - [an unthinkable horror] to Indonesia. Indonesia saw no reason for this.

Here is one half of one island in the middle of the archipelago. They're Catholics. Okay, well this island is Catholic, that island is Catholic. They don't speak Indonesian. Well, that's okay, we don't speak Indonesian either, we speak Javanese. And using the example of the Indian army, which moved in and took Goa and made Goa part of India, another Portuguese outpost that was just taken over, they thought they could just bring East Timor into Indonesia just like the rest of the arch. But it didn't work.

These Timorians revolted. They took to the mountains, and the decades of serious oppression, famine, and other things have followed. And now, finally, East Timor is a sovereign independent country with the UN working to help re-establish a new government there. And Indonesia by the way has brought the generals and those who were responsible in East Timor to trial already. For crimes as soldiers.

But this is the first chink and this now makes some of the other islands and ethnic groups say, "Maybe we don't have to let the Javanese come here, maybe we can keep the Sulawesi people from coming into our islands." The real big danger, and I don't know if it would be a bad thing from my point of view, but from Indonesia's point of view, is Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea. They were controlled by the Dutch and so Indonesia claimed them after independence. The rest of the world and the UN at that time wasn't ready to go along with that. But it became a fait accompli.

They're totally different people. They're Papuans. They look different. They sound different. They have different religions. The Javanese describe them as half-naked savages who don't know how to wear clothing and don't worship God. And so they see their activities in Irian Jaya as civilizing.

Add to that the largest, richest [gold] mine in the world, owned by Americans and Canadians, taking out more than a billion dollars of profits from Irian Jaya a year, and oil companies, [and] others have moved into deforesting and getting after the resources of Irian Jaya. And the people on Irian Jaya are having an insurrection. If they could, they would secede. They are very small and weak still, in comparison to the Indonesian army. So it's not coming apart but it's becoming frayed. And the lack of a strong government with a lot of popular support right now, who can go back to the national language as a unifier, back to the diversity as development destinations, back to bringing students into Java and to the national university systems, back to the great institution and nation-builder, which was the Indonesian army, which recruited people from all the ethnic groups and all the islands, and taught them that they were Indonesians and part of Indonesia.

And so there is a real question now ... will our center hold? Or our world will come apart. I don't think there's any question that the inner islands are cemented. …But this problem of Irian Jaya and whether it could or should be a country, maybe it should join the independent part of New Guinea. Whether Aceh…could or should become an independent country, they're going to probably deal with that for quite a while.