Abstract
This chapter is a story of Florenese that form a migrant community in the borderland of Sabah in East Malaysia. The Florenese from East Flores, in small number, began to settle in Sabah in the late 1950s. The Florenese migrate to find better economic opportunities as their land was not particularly good for cultivation; besides wondering out became common as ships are available, especially to Kalimantan where they then crossed the border to Sabah, Malaysia. The Florenese migrants settled with their families, most of them working as plantation labourers. During the confrontation with Malaysia in the early 1960s, many Florenese men were recruited as militia to back up Indonesian troops. As Catholics the Florenese were welcomed by the Catholic churches in Sabah and were provided social and economic assistance. The Florenese migration to Sabah is an example of cross-border movement that occurred outside the official channel. Many of the Florenese in Sabah are stateless, and being Catholics they are discriminated by the Muslim majority. As contacts with their fellow Florenese at home are maintained, the Florenese in Sabah can also be described as a transnational community.
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Notes
- 1.
On the contentious relations of borderland communities and states in the Southeast Asian context, see the review article by Horstmann (2002).
- 2.
See Chap. 8 for a discussion of cross-border Indonesian migrant workers and the Nunukan Tragedy.
- 3.
See Hugo (2002) for a map of migration routes from Flores .
- 4.
- 5.
According to Barnes (1974), the Kedang are characterised not only by their different language but also by their physical environment and administrative boundaries.
- 6.
This shows that, using the Indonesian Central Bureau of Statistics ethnic classification, several different names are used for identifying the Florenese ethnic groups.
- 7.
Graham (n.d.) notes that institutional interests at different levels of church and state also generate divergent views and conflicting policies based on what officials in particular hierarchical settings perceive as the hidden dangers of and/or the benefits that accrue to such transnational labour migration. Whatever the policies formulated at the national level in Indonesia, the two most prominent institutional discourses that are promulgated locally place themselves for quite complex reasons firmly against the patterns of labour migration established early on. Graham argues that a long standing anxiety over competing codes of sexual morality underlies the Catholic Church’s expressed concern about the adverse effects of labour migration on Christian family life in Flores . Graham suspects that a range of political issues concerning the desire for order and control inform the discourse of Indonesian officials of the East Flores regency about unregulated labour migration undermining local attempts for economic development .
- 8.
Nunukan as a new district—granted autonomous administrative power under the new Regional Autonomy law—could also become a new economic and political force in the context of the BIMP-EAGA framework. For more detailed information on Nunukan, see Tirtosudarmo and Haba (2005).
- 9.
Indonesian citizens officially residing in the districts located in the border areas are entitled to Pas Lintas Batas (border-crossing passes). With this pass a resident is allowed to enter Malaysia and stay within the border area for a month.
- 10.
Around 300 Florenese children (6–17 years of age), left by their parents who are working in Sabah, currently remain under Church guardianship in Nunukan.
- 11.
In Nunukan , an organisation (KEKARNUSA— Kerukunan Keluarga Nusa Tenggara—or the Association of the Nusa Tenggara Brotherhood) has been formed by people hailing from East Nusa Tenggara . It was established to serve the needs of the migrant families from all places in the eastern part of Indonesia. During the ‘Nunukan crisis’ of August and September 2002, according to its leaders, it successfully mobilised funds for migrant workers expelled from Sabah. It also formed a cooperative that provides services to the local administration, such as cleaning the city roads. At the time of the fieldwork, the leaders of this organisation were also considering mobilising its members to join a particular political party in the General Elections of 2004.
- 12.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the Dutch colonial state recruited mostly Javanese for export to Sabah as indentured labour for the British North Borneo Company. For a fuller discussion on Javanese labour in Sabah, see Miyazaki (2003).
- 13.
Cross-border migration and transnational communities, while not recent phenomena, are clearly under-researched and neglected by social scientists in Southeast Asia . Cross-border migration and transnational communities that emerged as nation-states became entrenched. Yet, as in the cases of the Florenese in Sabah, the Sangirese in the southern Philippines and the Minangkabauans of East Malaysia, boundaries of nation-states, seem irrelevant when migrants are continuously interacting with their relatives in their places of origin. For a discussion of contemporary issues of cross-border movement in Indonesia, see Tirtosudarmo (2005).
- 14.
On labour migration in BIMP-EAGA, particularly Sabah, see Kurus et al. (1998).
- 15.
The term ‘irregular migration ’ in this paper is interchangeable with ‘undocumented’ and ‘illegal’ migration. On this issue in Southeast Asia, see Asis (2004).
- 16.
- 17.
In Southeast Asia, studies of borderland communities have mostly concentrated on indigenous populations, such as Wadley’s (2000) on Iban transnational circular labour migration in northwestern Borneo, Horstmann’s on Thai-speaking Muslims from the west coast of southern Thailand and Buddhist Thais from northeast Malaysia and Uchibori’s (2002) study of Iban cultural citizenship in Sarawak and Brunei.
- 18.
Tuan Azam and Om Franky are not their real names. Tuan is a Malay word meaning mister, and Om is originally a Dutch word meaning uncle.
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Tirtosudarmo, R. (2018). In the Margins of a Borderland: A Florenese Community in Sabah. In: The Politics of Migration in Indonesia and Beyond. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-9032-5_9
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