In 1999, I took a leave of absence from my 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. My assignment was to help prepare faculty of the university to intervene in conflict and to train others to do likewise. This activity was under the banner of Pusat Studi dan Pengembangan Perdamaian (PSPP), the Center for the Study and Promotion of Peace. 

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