TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The rapid proliferation of new districts in Papua is strengthening the political influence of highlanders at the expense of the traditionally dominant coast, but it is also producing new conflicts and complicating the search for peace.

A new report from the Jakarta-based Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), Carving Up Papua: More Districts, More Trouble, shows how the creation of many of these new districts is driven by clan and sub-clan competition that can erupt into violence around local elections. The problem is exacerbated by unreliable population statistics, inflated voter rolls, and especially in the central highlands, a voting-by-consensus method that invites fraud.

Cillian Nolan, deputy director of IPAC said that the carving up of Papua used to be seen as a useful divide-and-rule tactic by Jakarta but now it is driven overwhelmingly by local elites looking for status and spoils.

"The problem is that Papua is becoming fractured along clan lines," Nolan said according to a release Tempo received on Oct. 10.

Papua has undergone more administrative expansion than anywhere else in Indonesia. What in 1999 was once a single province with ten districts has become two provinces with 42 districts, and proposals for 33 more divisions are now awaiting parliamentary consideration.

Much of the expansion has been in the central highlands, the poorest and most remote region of Papua, where the creation of new districts helped build a political base for Lukas Enembe, elected in January 2013 as the first-ever highland governor. His victory has strengthened support for separate provinces along the north and south coasts, although neither is likely to come into being anytime soon.

The report examines the voting practices, collectively called the noken system, used in many parts of the highlands that make accurate vote-counting impossible and that produced a wide range of implausible results in the governor’s election, including several places with a 100 per cent voter turnout.

It also looks at two recently created districts, Puncak and Nduga, where election disputes resulted in deadly violence, the first between clans, the second between sub-clans and even extended families. In both, the district governments ended up paying astounding sums in compensation to victims, funds that could otherwise have been used for social services.

"The solution to local election violence in Papua is not to scrap direct elections, as some top officials have suggested," said Nolan. "What's needed is stricter enforcement of the criteria for creating new districts – and a reduction in the financial incentives that make it so attractive."

Administrative fragmentation may be a way of giving previously unrepresented ethnic groups a stake in the political process but it may not make relations with Jakarta any easier. It has, however, produced a group of over 1,000 elected Papuan officials whose views on Papua’s future will have to be taken seriously. (*)