The Indonesia Project: Ten Years on

In August 2009, the PBI Indonesia Project (IP) commemorated its tenth year of service to the people of Indonesia with celebrations in Wamena, Jayapura and Jakarta. Since 1999, nearly two hundred volunteers from twenty-nine countries served with the IP, providing protective accompaniment and peace education services to 27 Indonesian client NGOs, as well as running countless workshops with various other civil society groups and government organizations. Altogether, the IP worked in seven provinces, from the westernmost province of Aceh, to Papua on the far eastern fringe of the archipelago.

PBI first received requests from Indonesian civil society groups for protective services in 1998 and following a two month exploratory visit, established the PBI East Timor Project in Dili in August of 1999. However, later that year, due to widespread violence following the East Timor referendum for independence, the team evacuated to Jakarta, Bali, Flores and West Timor. The IP continued to provide support for client organizations in both East and West Timor, such as TRuK-F and LAP Timoris, until the West Timor sub-team was formally closed in May 2002.

The first year of the new millennium saw the expansion of the IP with the establishment of permanent teams in both Jakarta and Banda Aceh. From Jakarta, PBI could more thoroughly integrate with the international community and the national government of Indonesia. Better integration would lead to better support for PBI clients like Suciwati, who for years has relentlessly sought justice in the case of the 2004 assassination of her husband, human rights defender Munir Sahid Thalib, aboard a Garuda Airlines flight to Amsterdam. Munir’s unresolved case is perhaps the highest profile human rights case in Indonesia.

PBI opened a second Aceh team in Lhokseumawe in 2002, and in the same year ran workshops in Flores and West Timor on conflict resolution and conflict management. By the summer of 2003, when the declaration of Martial Law forced the evacuation of both Aceh sub-teams to Medan, PBI was serving seven local NGOs in the province. From Medan and Jakarta, PBI worked hard to provide continued support to clients in Aceh, primarily via frequent check-in-calls to each organization to monitor the safety and situation of clients and the civilian population.

The unspeakable tragedy of the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2004, which left 153,000 Acehnese dead and perhaps a million without homes or livelihoods, added new dimensions and pressing demands to the challenges facing PBI and our clients in Aceh. We were terribly saddened by the loss of some Indonesian colleagues in this disaster, and so hardened our resolve to provide a protective presence for their organizations while they began rebuilding and undertaking the humanitarian and human rights work they were uniquely qualified to do. 

PBI was finally able to return to Aceh in January 2005. Eight months later, the Aceh Peace Agreement was signed in Helsinki. This agreement effectively ended the fighting between GAM and the Republic of Indonesia. The agreement also created the Aceh Monitoring Mission (AMM), which was tasked to monitor human rights and the implementation of the terms of peace. The PBI sub-team based in Banda Aceh worked closely with the AMM by monitoring  clients’ security while at the same time building up networks in the province to increase cooperation between local and international bodies working on the peace process, in particular between the AMM and our client organizations.

As the situation in Aceh stabilized, PBI received fewer and fewer requests for protective accompaniment so we were able to focus and expand our participatory peace education program. From 2006 onwards, the Aceh sub-team ran numerous youth camps, capacity-building, peace-building, transparency, and gender equality workshops in cooperation with local and international partners. PBI formally closed the Aceh sub-team in 2008 with the consent of our clients. Nevertheless, we continued to stay in close contact and to monitor the peace in Aceh. In January 2009, the Jakarta team conducted a three-week fieldtrip to the province to meet with former client organisations and local authorities in the lead-up to the first local elections since the signing of the peace agreement.

During its last five years, the IP also had field teams in Papua, one of the most conflict-prone regions in Indonesia. In 2004 ElsHam, a Papuan NGO based in Jayapura, asked to become a PBI client. The following year, after an initial exploratory field trip, PBI established the Jayapura sub team. The sub-team began building a security network, raising awareness of PBI with local NGOs and government authorities, and considering the need for another office in Wamena.  PBI quickly decided that another Papuan team based in Wamena was necessary to serve the isolated and vulnerable people of the surrounding Baliem Valley, and so in 2006 PBI created the Wamena sub-team.

PBI worked with a number of clients in Papua, including JAPH&HAM, SKP, LP3BH, and FOKER LSM on issues ranging from impunity, access to justice, and security sector reform, to land rights, natural resources and cultural/ traditional rights. Historically, the Jayapura team focused on protective accompaniment, including regular field trips to many different cities and villages around Papua in support of our clients, while the Wamena team focused on participatory peace education activities in partnership with client and local NGOs.

In Wamena, Peace Day holds particular cultural and social importance. PBI helped to develop events around this celebration, culminating in 2009’s celebration with a month of peace-related activities, discussions, and debates all planned and carried out by local organizers and PBI client organizations. 2009 also saw the formal re-opening of the Wamena peace library  run by two local staff. The staff succeeded in attracting a much wider range of people to the library through an expanded collection of children books, comics, and novels, and a program of activities including handicrafts, beading, short story writing and film screenings.

The Jayapura team throughout its history provided support for PBI clients with offices all around Papua. In 2007, the Jayapura team visited client SKP in Timika for one week to raise awarenees with local authorities and reassess SKP’s security situation. The following year PBI spent ten days with client organization LP3BH in and around Manokwari, as well as making various other trips with clients to Bituni Bay, Puncak Jaya and Merauke. In 2009, further field trips were made to Merauke and Nabire to provide conscious visibility and to support client organizations based there.

By late 2009, however, the IP was already facing challenges and constraints on its work. A Strategic Review was carried out in August and September 2010 to determine whether the project could continue in its current form. Ultimately, PBI's International Council decided that the current phase of operations in Indonesia should be closed by the end of January 2011. That process is now complete.