Too busy to fight? A new approach to security in Poso yields unexpected results

Too busy to fight?
A new approach to security in Poso yields unexpected results

Dave McRae


In January 2007, Indonesian police took decisive if overdue action to halt violence in Poso. A mainly rural district stretching from the coast up into the Central Sulawesi highlands, Poso was the last of Indonesia’s post-Suharto inter-religious conflict areas still experiencing persistent unrest. Most people in Poso had stopped fighting in 2002, but an alliance of outside jihadists and their core local Muslim supporters had continued to perpetrate sporadic attacks. The January police raids targeted the main centre of continuing jihadist activity, severely disrupting the leadership of this alliance. The raids also produced the most significant seizure of factory-standard weapons during the entire nine years of the conflict, raising hopes that violence in Poso was finally at an end.

But despite this success, police feared that the raids might prove insufficient to guarantee lasting security. The raids had targeted only the core members of the jihadist alliance, in a strategy designed to facilitate successful prosecutions and to limit community opposition to arrests. As a consequence of this strategy, several hundred supporters of the men arrested remained at large in the community, some of whom had fought against police during the January raids and others who had participated in violence or military-style training earlier in the conflict. Moreover, because of the short sentences typically meted out in Poso conflict cases by courts in Central Sulawesi, a number of key conflict prisoners had either been released recently or were about to complete their sentences. If these supporters and ex-prisoners had nothing to occupy them, police feared, they may be prone to perpetrate further attacks.

In an attempt to prevent the return of violence, the Central Sulawesi provincial police decided to run a reintegration program for these men, which started six months after the raids. This program, which provided vocational training to former combatants, was complemented by a similar but independent program run by the Poso district government, which provided cash grants. Local authorities hoped that by occupying ex-combatants with ‘productive concerns’, they would be less likely to engage in renewed violence that could endanger their businesses. In other words, although each program provided economic assistance, their ultimate aim was to contribute to improved security in Poso. Between them, the two programs covered approximately 500 men. Designed primarily for Muslim men, the programs also involved around 100 Christians, most of whom were included as a result of successful lobbying on their behalf by an association of ex-prisoners.

Although reintegration programming has become a core component of responses to internal warfare worldwide, the Poso programs were only the second time that reintegration was tried after a conflict in Indonesia. The first had been in Aceh province following the 2005 peace agreement between the Government of Indonesia and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). As a civil war between insurgent guerillas and the state brought to an end by a formal peace agreement, the Aceh conflict was a fairly conventional context for reintegration programming. By contrast, the state had not been a direct combatant in Poso, where violence took place between Christian and Muslim community members. Nor were combatant entities as rigidly structured in Poso as they typically would be in a civil war. Furthermore, compared to other instances in which reintegration had been attempted before, the scale of the conflict in Poso was relatively small. To be sure, violence at the height of the conflict had been fierce and lethal, but most of the estimated 600-1000 deaths were confined to just one of Indonesia’s 500-odd districts. Reintegration programming under such circumstances was largely untested, and it was far from certain what results these programs would produce.

As it turned out, neither program was particularly successful. When interviewed in late 2008-2009 – around a year after the programs concluded – less than half of Muslim participants said they were still using the assistance provided to them for economic activities. Two thirds said the programs had not helped their economic status. Nor were the programs among the main factors contributing to improved security in Poso. Instead, it appeared as if the January police raids had been more effective even than police may have hoped, as demonstrated by the absence of serious security incidents in the six month period after the raids but before the programs got underway. In the end, the most interesting feature of the programs was a somewhat surprising side effect: they helped police to develop relations with ex-combatants which they were then able to leverage to improve their ability to manage security.
Untested assumptions

No thorough assessment of the circumstances of ex-combatants in Poso preceded the design of the programs. As a consequence, each of the programs rested on a number of untested assumptions. Most important among these was the assumption that unoccupied ex-combatants posed a threat to the newly established secure conditions. An assumption of widespread unemployment is valid for many civil wars, in which combatants mobilise far from their villages to fight and so are disconnected from the local economy. But because the scale of violence in Poso was localised and attacks in the last years of the conflict were sporadic, it would have been possible for combatants to hold a job. Indeed, only around a quarter of program participants reported that they were unemployed in early 2007, shortly before the programs began. Of course these men may have been unwilling to admit to unemployment or recalled incorrectly. But this finding nevertheless draws into question the economic premise of the programs: if most ex-combatants were already employed prior to the programs, why provide them with economic assistance? Moreover, if most combatants were in fact employed, then ex-combatant idleness is less likely to have been the kind of significant security threat program planners assumed it to be.

The design of the programs also assumed that it would be possible to identify men who were prone to perpetrate violence. Although these loosely defined selection criteria left room for subjective judgements, for the most part organisers essentially reframed this challenge as identifying those with past involvement in violence. Target groups included former perpetrators, ex-conflict prisoners and youths who had been otherwise associated with radical groups. Even then, there were several formidable challenges to identifying who had been a combatant in Poso. For one thing, combatant entities had been clandestine and had never been rigidly structured. Moreover, with no formal amnesty in place, many ex-combatants were also reluctant to openly identify themselves as perpetrators of violence for fear of arrest. Finally, there had been far fewer factory-standard firearms than combatants, ruling out weapons surrender as a mechanism to identify ex-combatants.

Program organisers adopted a combination of strategies to overcome these challenges. Police lists compiled from previous arrests were one source of participant names. A small number of influential ex-combatants were also asked to verify these lists or to compile their own. For the cash program in particular, word of mouth regarding the availability of funds saw many individuals submit proposals. But despite these various efforts, participants in the reintegration programs complained that some ex-combatants had been excluded from the programs and non-combatant associates of influential ex-combatants and program implementers included. Under the circumstances, the non-inclusion of at least some ex-combatants was inevitable. Nevertheless, their exclusion hampered the programs’ effectiveness in two ways. First, excluded combatants presumably posed an undiminished risk to security. Second, excluded men sometimes demanded a share of participants’ money or received voluntary contributions from their friends in the programs. These demands reduced the programs’ effectiveness for included combatants, by decreasing the amount of capital available to them.
Poor design and implementation

Contributing to ex-combatant livelihoods is a difficult challenge for reintegration programming under the best of circumstances. In Poso, serious flaws in design and implementation further reduced the chances of success. The main flaw in the district government’s cash program was its failure to provide guidance on business planning or to monitor sufficiently how funds were used. Although some participants did put the Rp. 10 million (A$1500) lump sum they received to its intended use – one man, for example, used the money to kick-start a computer repair business – others used the funds for purposes completely unrelated to the program’s aims. For instance, at least two men used some or all of the money to fund their weddings, whereas others put the money towards building their houses or used the cash to cover their daily living expenses.

In the vocational training program, training was too short and was poorly matched with participants’ previous economic activity. This shortcoming was exemplified by three cocoa farmers who under the program received training in television repair, fishing and livestock farming, respectively. Meanwhile, another participant with a photograph development business was trained as a cocoa farmer. Many participants also complained that they were unable to access enterprise capital intended to help them put their training into practice, as more influential combatants tool control of it. Others complained that the resources provided was of poor quality or was inappropriate. Mechanic trainees were given electric air compressors that were unsuitable to inflate car tyres. Livestock trainees received exceedingly young cows and no bulls.

A senior member of the NGO tasked by police to implement the training program freely admitted that his organisation had under-spent on enterprise assistance. If the budget stipulated Rp. 5-6 million per cow, he said, they would look for cows that cost Rp. 4 million. He denied that the money had been embezzled – claiming that part of the money had been used to pay off influential ex-combatants so that they would encourage others to take part in the program. The balance, he said, had been used to cover the NGO’s operating costs.

But not everyone was convinced. Participants in each program raised allegations of corruption, with one participant in the vocational training program even claiming to have accepted additional payments from implementers to encourage him not to make his accusations public. Unfortunately, the programs included no mechanism to follow up complaints or to address the resultant disaffection, leaving this problem unresolved.
A surprising result

All in all then, the economic outcomes of the programs were relatively poor. But another goal of the programs was actually achieved. Police had hoped that at the very least the programs would generate some kind of contact with ex-combatants, an aim in line with broader Indonesian police counter-terrorism strategies. Contact with combatants is useful to police as it can be leveraged to gather information in the aftermath of security incidents and to detect potential security disturbances as they are developing. In the end, almost half of the Muslim participants – some of whom had not been willing to communicate with police prior to their participation – did indeed report during the study that they had been in some kind of contact with police after taking part. This success is somewhat surprising, not only because of the programs’ modest economic outcomes, but especially because of the widespread hostility among ex-combatants towards police in Poso. This hostility derived from past failures in law enforcement during periods of large-scale attacks by Christians on Muslim communities, from the fact that police had killed sixteen Muslims during the two January police raids, and from jihadist doctrine that designated police to be anti-Islamic.

The forms of contact and the motivations for respondents to communicate with police varied widely. Significantly, not all contact between ex-combatants and police took place on voluntary terms. Indeed, some instances of contact with police described by ex-combatants more closely resembled surveillance than reciprocal communication, generating a degree of resentment. But other contact derived from mutual interests created by the programs and a related police strategy of providing preferential access to resources to combatants, called the ‘persuasive’ approach. Some participants sought access to free drivers’ licenses or vehicle registration papers, for instance. Others said they would make contact with either the police or the government when tendering for construction projects. At a more mundane level, the assistance provided under the programs gave police an excuse to contact ex-combatants, ostensibly to ask how their business enterprises were going.

There have been several specific examples of police leveraging their relationships with ex-combatants. When two brawls took place in Poso Pesisir in mid-2007 when ex-combatants objected to other youths consuming alcohol, police were able to contact influential ex-combatants to try to prevent the confrontations from escalating. Police also used their contacts to call a meeting of around 150 ex-combatants in 2007 ahead of Christmas and New Year’s period to warn against any disturbances. Representatives of around ten ex-combatant groups were called together for another meeting shortly before the November 2008 execution of three perpetrators of the October 2002 Bali bombings, when it was feared the executions could spur violent protests or retribution attacks in Poso.

These measures are not the main factors that have brought about improved security in Poso, with the police raids in particular having been more decisive. But the programs and the persuasive approach of which they are a part did provide one additional tool to police to manage security in Poso. Establishing such relationships may be the primary value of reintegration programming in situations of localised conflict.
A worthwhile investment?

The Poso programs were not without costs. In a situation in which all community members have been affected by violence, there is a significant ethical trade-off in prioritising perpetrators of violence to receive assistance funds, when others in the community may have equal or more pressing needs. Political scientist Stina Torjesen has also highlighted that too great a provision of economic inducements to combatants risks achieving short-term security at the cost of long-term development, particularly if inducements entrench combatants’ economic and political standing. But the extent to which either trade-off manifested in Poso was mitigated by the relatively modest commitment of resources. The approximate Rp. 4 billion (A$550,000) cost of the programs is just a fraction of the overall post-conflict aid that has been allocated to the district for the broader recovery and for peace-building. Neither this assistance nor the relatively minor construction contracts allocated to combatants have yet established them as dominant players in the local economy.

Ironically, the main benefit from the Poso programs arose from a side aim rather than by the primary mechanism by which planners envisaged that they would work. With greater attention to assessing the position of combatants during the design phase, planners might have focused more narrowly on developing relationships with a more limited set of influential ex-combatants along with individuals subject to specific risk factors. At the same time, unemployment could have been addressed through needs-based job creation initiatives rather than the specific targeting of combatants. Of course costs and benefits cannot be predicted precisely in advance, all the more so in a volatile post-conflict environment, and the programs were a laudable sign of police and government determination to maintain security. But such an approach might have achieved the same security outcomes at a lesser cost.

Dave McRae (dgmcrae@gmail.com) is a member of the Inside Indonesia editorial committee. He would like to thank Lian Gogali, Nasrul Jamaludin, Budiman Maliki and Salma Masri for their work as field researchers in evaluating the Poso programs.
Inside Indonesia 103: Jan-Mar 2011