ANTROPOLOGI INDONESIA Special Volume, 2004 11 Towards a New Politics of Tradition? Decentralisation, Conflict, and Adat in Eastern Indonesia

The intention of this article is to discuss the relationship between the processes of fiscal and political decentralisation, the outbreak of communal violence, and what I call ‘the new politics of tradition ’ in Indonesia. In 1999 under the former President, Jusuf Habibie, the Indonesian parliament (DPR) voted in favour of two laws, No. 22 and 25 of 1999, which promised to leave a significant share of state revenues in the hands of the regional governments. Strongly supported by the liberal ideologues of the IMF and the World Bank, the two laws were envisaged within Indonesia as a necessary step towards devolving the centralised control of New Order patrimonialism and as a way of curbing separatism and demands for autonomy by giving the regional governments the constitutional and financial wherewithal to maintain a considerable degree of self-deter-mination. Decentralisation was in other words touted as the anti-dote to communal violence and separatist tendencies—an anti-dote administered or at least prescribed by multi-national development agencies in most conflict-prone areas of the world. This paper wishes to probe this idea by looking at the conflict and post-conflict situatio