| Summary/Abstract |
In 1983 a reporter from the Far Eastern Economic Review visited a Balinese headman, inspecting a long row of tiny new homes recently built for himself and one hundred other families from his village. This was not Bali, however, but a new town carved out of the forest in the sparsely populated Luwu district of South Sulawesi, Indonesia, where nearly 43,000 people had moved from Java and Bali since 1970. These villagers were participants in Indonesia’s transmigration program, which between 1972 and 1990 resettled nearly five million people, mostly poor, landless farmers, from the densely populated islands of Java and Bali to more than 3,000 new settlements in Southern Sumatra, Aceh, Kalimantan, West Papua, Sulawesi, East Timor, and other parts of Indonesia. Jakarta spent nearly $10 billion in the process, reshaping the lives of millions of ordinary Indonesians on both ends of the migration chain and changing the fabric of modern Indonesia, though often in ways that confounded the program’s intentions.
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