Peacemaking in Indonesia
In 1999, Duane Ruth-Heffelbower took a leave of absence from his graduate faculty position at Fresno Pacific University’s Center for Peacemaking and Conflict Studies to accept an invitation to join the faculty of Duta Wacana Christian University (UKDW) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia under an appointment from the Mennonite Central Committee.
Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, is formed from a
group of islands strung along the equator between the Asian mainland and
Australia. The over 500 tribes living in these islands were gathered into a
single colony by the Dutch colonialists. After WWII, Indonesia became an
independent nation which was held together for 32 years by a dictator.
Now, the people are trying to decide whether they should have a democratic
government. The choice is not obvious to many, and there are a number of
separatist movements.
Since the fall of the authoritarian ruler Suharto in 1998, at the height
of the Asian monetary crisis, the government’s ability to govern the
disparate tribes and cultures has been challenged and found lacking.
Complete societal breakdowns have hit many places, with grotesque violence
chasing 1.2 million Indonesians from their homes by the end of 2001.
Mennonite Central Committee has been working in Indonesia since it
emerged from Dutch colonial rule following World War II. With the fall of
dictator Suharto there was a new openness and new possibilities for
peacemaking, even as ethnic rivalries created immense need for new
peacemaking strategies and models.
Center for the Study and Promotion of Peace. (PSPP).
PSPP had been hosting other American trainers during the five years
preceding my appointment. It had established a reputation for offering a
seminar called Pemberdayaan untuk Rekonsiliasi (Empowering for
Reconciliation) which would look familiar to anyone using the community
mediation model developed in the US. The problem was that participants
weren’t able to apply what they were learning to their own situation, and no
local capacity to lead the workshop had been developed.
For three years prior to moving to Indonesia I had been working under a
grant from the US Office of Refugee Resettlement developing a method for
working with cross-cultural conflict in American cities receiving refugees.
After working in twelve sites around the U.S. we published a manual titled
Conflict and Peacemaking Across Cultures: Training for Trainers, and
prepared over 100 people to use it. This basic model proved to be very
valuable in Indonesia. All of our interventions were presented as “conflict
training.”
These training/intervention events all had three movements:
- Participants show each other how they would normally handle a conflict within their own culture;
- The team then shows some things we have learned about conflict, particularly through victim offender work;
- The mixed group of participants works together to develop a method for working with conflicts between their groups.
This self-contextualization of varying models is the key to success,
since people leave with a plan for applying what they have learned.
Indonesians are accustomed to the banking method of education, where the
teacher makes a deposit of information which is then withdrawn on the exam.
They are not usually encouraged to creatively apply new ideas, making it
very important for the application step to be included in the event.
To train people in conflict intervention, I have the students help me
intervene in conflict as well as doing some classroom teaching. That
strategy was also well-suited to the situation in Indonesia. We developed
three standard training packages: Empowering for Reconciliation Basic,
Advanced, and Peer. The work was supported by a book containing our workshop
material in Indonesian, Pemberdayaan untuk Rekonsiliasi, edisi
ke-2.
We also established a standard intervention model which brought
contending groups together for a conflict training, and had them leaving
with a collaborative plan for working together on the problems they faced.
This model allowed us to work with Christian groups in crisis and with
groups of Muslims and Christians in areas where armed conflict between the
groups was happening.
By the end of my time in Indonesia eight colleagues had worked with me on several very complex and difficult inter-group conflicts, and a dozen had participated in offering the regularly scheduled Empowering for Reconciliation workshops. We had done training or intervention with over 1,000 individuals. The team continues to work at bringing peace to Indonesia, and I am very grateful for the opportunity to work with them.
By Duane Ruth-Heffelbower
May 2002
