Community Policing Pt. 2: Bali

By Wombat | March 24th, 2006 | No Comments

Here is the second of the two articles about community policing in Bali by I Wayan Juniartha in Denpasar, Bali. Here, the pilot project was trialled in six villages in three different regions of the island.

Lessons on security that can be learned from the villages
I Wayan Juniartha, Denpasar, Bali

The community policing program not only succeeded in forging a better network of cooperation between the villagers and the local police, but also provided the participating experts with colorful insights on the real security hazards in the island’s rural areas.

“We were quite aware beforehand that the security-related problems in the rural areas would be quite different from the ones in the urbanized areas of Bali. However, we did not expect them to be as complex as they eventually turned out to be,” Chusmeru said.

An anthropologist with extensive knowledge of communication and behavioral analysis, Chusmeru was one of the experts recruited by Manikaya Kauci to assist in the implementation of the community policing program pilot project in six villages across the island. Manikaya Kauci also hired another academic, I Nyoman Wiratmaja, who has extensive knowledge of the island’s sociocultural idiosyncrasies.

“We are also assisted by several former student activists, who possessed the required expertise for conducting outreach field activities,” Manikaya Kauci’s executive director Gunadjar said.

The community policing pilot project, which was conducted from March 2004 to March 2006, took place at six villages in three different regencies in Bali. Those villages were Medewi and Pulukan in the island’s western regency of Jembrana; Julah and Les in the island’s northern regency of Buleleng; and Manggis and Nyuhtebel in the eastern regency of Karangasem.

The villages lied between 60 to 100 kilometers away from the capital Denpasar.

The first revelation that struck the experts was the fact that ordinary crimes, such as larceny, robbery or homicide, were not perceived by the villagers as the most important security-related problems in the rural villages.

“Of course all these villages have experienced the occurrence of such ordinary crimes. However, there was a general perception among the villagers that those crimes were not the most dangerous security hazards they had to deal with,” Chusmeru said.

The people of Manggis, for instance, told Manikaya Kauci’s community policing team their biggest fear was related to burglary that specifically targeted their temples’ sacred effigies. In the last five years, the village had experienced several such crimes.

“The material losses were insignificant compared to the psychological trauma such crimes inflicted on the residents of this village. Those were important religious objects, the spiritual core of the village,” Wiratmaja said.

The team later helped the villagers and the local police to devise a community-based security system aimed at providing better protection for the village’s temples and sacred effigies.

The village of Les offered another example of the unique characteristics of security-related problems in rural Bali.
The people of Les viewed the mutual animosity between their village and the two neighboring villages of Siakin and Subaya as their prime security concern. Siakin and Subaya, which lie on higher ground above Les, control the surrounding forest in the area.

For years, the villagers of Les had blamed the people of Siakin and Subaya for damaging the forest. Meanwhile, the people of Siakin and Subaya considered the residents of Les as selfish. Les residents were accused of commercially exploiting the villages’ shared water resources by both establishing a tourist site near a waterfall and by selling water. Les had never shared the revenue from the tourist site and the water with Siakin and Subaya.

The fact that the natural wellsprings were located in Siakin and Subaya only increased their resentment toward Les. “This economic jealousy triggered several violent clashes in the past,” Chusmeru said.

The fact that Les was part of Buleleng regency while Siakin and Subaya were part of Bangli regency made the problem more difficult to solve.

“It added an administrative jurisdiction problem to the already chronic problem of inter-villages clashes,” Gunadjar said.

After a long, tiring process of negotiations and lobbying, the Manikaya Kauci community policing team managed to bring the leaders of the three villages to a critical meeting, where, for the first time in the history of their conflicts, they could openly speak their minds.

“We haven’t reached any definite solution yet. But, at least, the villages agreed not to resort to violence and to hold another meeting in the near future,” Gunadjar said.

Inter-village conflicts, generally triggered by disputes over shared natural and economic resources, are not a new thing for Bali. An inscription from the 10th century reported in detail such violent clashes.

“The rate and number of such conflicts keep increasing by the year, probably due to the significant decrease in the availability of economic and natural resources and the ongoing economic hardship that has befallen the island ever since the 2002 terrorist bombings,” Wiratmaja said.

The existence of a well-designed and well-implemented community policing program, Wiratmaja claimed, would enable the Balinese to prevent such conflicts from exploding into messy, violent clashes.

“The Les case is clear evidence that the disputing parties can be persuaded to use peaceful means to solve their problems as long as there is a neutral, trustworthy third party willing to facilitate the process,” he said.

Les, Manggis and the other participating villages in the community policing program, Wiratmaja said, also provided Manikaya Kauci with one single important lesson.

“To be effective, the community policing program must be flexible enough to cope with the diverse security problems in the island’s rural villages,” Wiratmaja said.