Jakarta – At 53 years of age, Murad is about to start a new life. After almost two decades of living and working in Aceh, Murad has been forced to return to his hometown in Java, with just the clothes on his back and the few items he and his family could carry.

In 1983, Murad and his wife moved to Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island, where they and some 300 other Javanese were each given one and a half hectares of land and a modest house.

Murad says the land he was given was only "half-ready." "The government only cut big trees, it was still jungle," he said. "So we had to cut smaller trees, hoe the ground. [We] cleared the land from bushes and rocks with only hoes and blades."

But Murad and the other transferees to Aceh were in no position to complain. Their move had been instigated by the government of then-president Suharto, which had formulated a transmigration program aimed largely at easing the congestion on Java and encouraging development elsewhere.

Since the program began in the early 1980s, millions of Javanese have transmigrated to some of the least populated areas in Indonesia. Many of these places, however, are now being torn apart by communal conflict, and Javanese transmigrants like Murad have found themselves targets of violence.

The transmigrants are now leaving their adopted hometowns in droves. In the last three months alone, at least 152,039 transmigrants have left their homes in Aceh, Kalimantan in Borneo, Maluku and Papua.

Local administrations in Java have been scrambling to find resettlement sites for the "returnees." But their efforts are being complicated by the fact that Java is getting a smaller share than ever from the national coffers, as the central government tries to strike a fairer distribution of funds among the regions.

To some observers, the surge in the number of returnees to Java only proves that the transmigration policy was a huge mistake. Says Paulus Londo, a researcher at the LS2LP Population Research Center: "The present exodus of transmigration to their places of origin is a showcase of the failure of an ideological-political project that was called transmigration." He adds, "It is evidence that they [transmigrants] had never been accepted, and the idea of building socio-cultural cohesion was never really practiced."

To people like Londo, transmigration merely exacerbated old resentments against the central government in Jakarta and the Javanese. The violence breaking out in so many places, they say, shows that what was supposed to bring about national unity seems instead to have sped Indonesia toward national disintegration.

To be sure, few had questioned the Suharto government's claims that the program was aimed primarily at balancing the population distribution between Java and Indonesia's other islands. Even now, Java, which is a mere one-fourth of Sumatra island in land area, is host to 119.6 million people, or 58.6 percent of the Indonesian population.

Another argument for transmigration was that it would resolve the shortage of arable land in Java. The theory was that increased productivity – and therefore prosperity – would be enjoyed by those left behind in Java, who would have larger plots to till.

But the program's proponents said the transmigration sites would also benefit from playing host to a huge number of newcomers. After all, they said, getting skilled Javanese peasants to move to the least developed areas across the country would result in a transfer of knowledge. In addition, said officials, the introduction of another group of people in such places could only promote tolerance, and later bring about social and cultural cohesion.

Many observers, however, saw other political objectives. They noted that a large number of the transmigrants were sent to places with potential for separatism, such as Aceh, Papua (then Irian Jaya) and Riau. Now that separatist sentiments are again on the rise in these areas, the transmigrants are being seen as symbols of the central power that the locals are fighting against, as well as "usurpers" of local lands.

The recent Papua People's Congress (KRP), for instance, declared that transmigration had taken away the Papuans' "traditional rights," which now must be returned to them.

Critics of transmigration say it has not even led to a population balance between Java and the other islands. This is because while many Javanese were being moved to the transmigration sites, Java itself continued to attract more migrants.

Points out Londo: "The government encouraged people to move to other islands, but it built good infrastructure and centralized the national development on Java island. So people went to Java. Life is much better in Java."

He also says the Suharto government's economic policy all but made a mess of the objective of improving the lives of the farmers left in Java. Londo explains that hectares upon hectares of agricultural lands were converted to industrial estates, housing and other non-agricultural sites. As this went on, says Londo, "more farmers became landless and were getting poorer."

But there are those like Harto Nurdin, a deputy at the Transmigration Ministry, who insist that the growing number of returnees to Java does not necessarily mean the transmigration program has been a total failure.

To Nurdin, what is happening now is "a result of an oppressive and unjust political system. Transmigration is only an innocent victim." He insists that despite the current turmoil in many transmigration sites, the program itself has brought some positive results.

"A number of isolated places [were] opened up," says Nurdin. "Some people of Kalimantan had switched from their traditional nomadic lives to settled agricultural pattern There has been a transfer of knowledge on agriculture, thanks to the transmigration."

But he concedes that the government may have been ill-advised to relocate people by force. He says that in the future, it would be better if people "moved to other places because they want to. It should be more on a self-initiative and demand basis."

Yet even that may take some doing, now that Pres. Abdurrahman Wahid has decided to close down the Transmigration Ministry as part of efforts to streamline the bureaucracy and make the Cabinet more efficient. Says Sukarto Karnen, head of the West Java Transmigration Office: "We have considerably big jobs now – but with no funds and an unclear [future].