Makassar, Indonesia – March 31, 2010 – In recent years, the sources of potential conflicts in Indonesia have shifted from ethnic and religious issues to competition for natural resources, political representation, and growing corruption in the public and private sectors. Engaging citizens at the community level to prevent these issues from causing violent conflict was the focus of a three-day national conference for Peace Facilitators organized by Institut Titian Perdamaian (ITP) in Makassar, South Sulawesi, and funded by USAID/SERASI. The Peace Facilitators invited are mostly community leaders previously trained by ITP in conflict early warning and early response system methodologies.

The January 25-27 conference was opened by the Governor of South Sulawesi and attended by more than 100 peace facilitators and NGO activists from 15 provinces. The conference provided those in attendance the opportunity to learn and share experiences and to capitalize on the critical role peace facilitators can play at the community level. The conference attendees agreed, as a result of discussions, to commit to further development of a National Peace Facilitators Network. Existing Peace Centers in 15 provinces will form the nucleus of the informal network that meets periodically and communicate regularly. The network will serve as a forum for the peace facilitators to exchange information about early detection of potential conflicts and proven effective steps to deal with potentially destabilizing situations when they arise.

During the three day event, various resource speakers renowned for their work in conflict transformation and peace building, such as Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono who was influential in uniting the country during the turbulent years of late 1990s, addressed the crowd. The conference provided a forum for peace building experts in Indonesia to directly share their experiences in addressing conflicts through various approaches— social, cultural, psychological, and economic. The presentations sparked active discussions that resulted in a report out on key triggers of potential conflict in today’s environment: social jealousy, economic and politic injustices, limited access to justice for the poor and marginalized groups, and lack of employment and social welfare. Nurhajjah Tahumil, a peace facilitator from Peace Center Central Sulawesi proffered that to be effective, any conflict sensitive policy should tackle those issues as top priorities.

In addition to the creation of the network, the Conference also yielded a set of recommendations that will be presented to the national government and disseminated through the peace facilitators network, including: 1) the government needs to create an adequate legal umbrella to address social crisis 2) the government needs to organize and institutionalize the role of Peace Facilitators into peace-sensitive official policy on crisis responses and 3) to increase awareness about peace sensitive crisis responses through programmatic activity and joint campaigns by government and civil society groups.

SERASI is a three-year USAID funded project focused on creating stable, democratic communities. It is implemented by International Relief and Development.