Finding Tools to Limit Sectarian Violence in Indonesia: The Relevance of Restorative Justice

• Date: 01 November 2017
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12207

Finding Tools to Limit Sectarian Violence

in Indonesia:

The Relevance of Restorative Justice

By GREG ACCIAIOLI*

ABSTRACT. This article explores the relevance of the restorative justice

paradigm to issues of conflict avoidance and resolution in Indonesia.

Sectarian violence engulfed Indonesia in the late 1990s after the fall of

the New Order, largely as a result of resource competition and other

economic factors. In addition, the revival of customary forms of

authority through the national indigenous peoples movement

exacerbated the potential for conflict between long-settled indigenes

and more recent migrants. A case study shows how the spread of

communal conflict to the Lindu plain in Central Sulawesi was averted

despite the sectarian violence in a nearby city. Local customary

procedures of adjudication were insufficient to cope with such issues in

a multiethnic context, as the ethnic groups in the area did not all

subscribe to the same body of custom (adat). Instead, a diverse

assembly of stakeholders invoked nationalist idioms of harmony and

consensus to forge an agreement to avoid violence. Previous legal

theorists have pointed to adat as a preexisting respository of restorative

justice practices. However, this article argues that interethnic contexts

require restorative practice to forge novel syntheses to deal with

communal violence. Such syntheses may incorporate adat

mechanisms, but they must also integrate other tools that gain the

allegiance of multiple groups to work toward reconciliation and

avoidance of furtherviolence.

*Discipline Chair in Anthropology and Sociology and lecturer/researcher in Interna-

tional Development at the University of Western Australia. Research interests include

resource contestations in protected-area settings, both terrestrial and marine, and the

politics of indigeneity in Indonesia and Malaysia. Recent focus is on statelessness of

marine nomadic groups in Southeast Asia: “Foreigners Everywhere, Nationals Nowhere:

Exclusion, Irregularity, and Invisibility of Stateless Bajau Laut in Eastern Sabah,

Malaysia,” Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies 15:3 (2017). Email: gregory.

acciaioli@uwa.edu.au

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 76, No. 5 (November, 2017).

DOI: 10.1111/ajes.12207

V

C2017 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.

Indonesia is a nation with wonderful resources of intracultural justice ...

What is lacking is experience with intercultural restorative justice on a

scale needed to ward off the assault on democracy from the demagogues

of interreligious and interethnic intolerance. Hence the preexisting intra-

cultural traditions must be harnessed to the intercultural challenge.

(Braithewaite 2002: 366)

***

Introduction

During the period from 1998 to 2001, communal violence broke out on

several of the islands of Indonesia, the fourth largest country in the

world, by population. Since then, sporadic cases of inter-ethnic vio-

lence have emerged, such as a three-day fight in southern Sumatra that

left 14 people dead (VOA 2012); however, for the most part, Indonesia

has been relatively more peaceful for the past 15 years since the vio-

lence that marked the onset of the Reform era after the fall of Suharto’s

New Order in 1998. Nevertheless, some of the underlying conditions

for renewed violence still exist. This article examine the roots of the

violent clashes that took place at the turn of the century and seeks to

discern factors that permitted some areas to avoid violence, despite the

presence of precipitating conditions. A central question we will con-

sider is whether the concept of restorative justice can be applied not

only to resolving, but alsoavoiding, conflicts between groups.

Indonesia contains over 300 ethnic groups by some counts, differing

in language and religion. Although many groups in proximity to each

other have sustained stable relations, the heightened population move-

ments that began with initiatives in the Ethical Period of the late colo-

nial era and that were intensified during Suharto’s New Order

(1966–1998) have brought groups into ever greater competition for

local resources. When tensions run high, there is an ever-present dan-

ger that they will explode in communal violence.

Understandably, the government of Indonesia, at least officially, has

a strong desire to limit inter-ethnic violence, just as it wishes to prevent

personal crime. When an individual commits a crime, it may be possi-

ble to use the tools of restorative justice, particularly if the perpetrator

and victim belong to the same community. Indonesia has been

The American Journal of Economics and Sociology1220

pioneering restorative justice techniques in the context of juvenile

crime, but has yet to extend such initiatives to adult crimes (Fathurokh-

man 2014). Cases involving conflicts between ethnic groups, either at

an individual or communal level, pose even greater problems for the

application of the standard methods of restorative justice.

Restorative justice normally depends on the existence of an institu-

tion or group of citizens with a stake in the outcome of proceedings.

Stakeholders involved in the process must be able to envision methods

of healing that do notdepend on punishment by an impersonal author-

ity. The aim of restorative justice is not so much justice as harmony, not

only between perpetrator and victim but among all affected parties.

Thus, the procedures followed to reach the final goal are as important

as the outcome. The process may be slow, but the results are likely to

have lasting consequences if genuine healing takes place.

In the Indonesian context, the domain of customary law (hukum

adat) has sometimes been perceived as an arena already characterized

by restorative justice. Customary resolution of disputes by adat authori-

ties often involves bringing the disputants into face-to-face contact for

deliberations (musyawarah) that often involve a formal apology by the

perpetrator to the victim as well a payment of a fine. However, such

resolutions are oriented not only to resolving the specific case, but to

restoring the harmony that has been fractured by the crime, a harmony

regarded not only as a matter of community but of cosmological bal-

ance as well, as was noted even by the earliest Dutch colonial commen-

tators on adat law in the EastIndies (ter Haar 1939). The administration

of adat law thus fulfils many of the major components of restorative

justice.

However, theorists of restorative justice have noted that, however

well this already existing basis of restorative justice works in the intra-

ethnic context, where members of a single ethnic group all subscribe to

an adat they see as the badge of their identity, its operation is more

problematic in inter-ethnic contexts where not all residents in a com-

munity feel bound by the strictures of the adat of only one of the

groups living together (Braithewaite 2002: 366). Achieving harmony

among aggrieved parties is complicated enough when all parties

belong to the same community, but when the boundaries of group

membership are crossed, the obstacles are increased dramatically.

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