ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a state policy through ethical analysis, posing the question of whether the colonization of tribal areas and the accompanying exploitation of their resources can be justified. As a basis for classifying policy rationales, it deals with the Indonesian government's declared goals for its transmigration policy, as articulated in the early 1980s. These various policy rationales can be distilled into the following simplified set: national development, environmental protection, alleviating heartland poverty, developing "backward" peoples, and territorial integrity and national unity. If the tribal communities do not persist and their survivors drift off to the towns and cities of the national society, they typically end up on the periphery of those communities and come to form a new underclass or join an existing one. Territorial consolidation, national integration, the imperatives of population growth and economic development are phrases Third World states use to cover up the killing of indigenous nations and peoples.
