Political parties can play a great role by picking intellectual, humanist and pluralist candidates as their cadre to be placed in the government both central and local.
In general, conflict is a natural phenomena in society. In fact, it is unavoidable because every social relationship has potentials of conflict.

In this sense, conflict is a related to freedom, meaning that the more democratic a country, the more conflict potential it has because a conflict often appear and being spread from the freedom to think, argue, gather, and create a union. Nevertheless, it does not mean that a democratic country will fail to maintain the peace. In fact, it is a challenge.

Related to this, Indonesia is a plural nation with 1.072 ethnicities. Like other multicultural countries, the integration of all ethnics into one national identity is always problematic.

Even after 62 years of independence, clashes between ethnics still happen. Meanwhile, the assimilation of all ethnics is intensively ongoing but has not resulted any significant progress to increase nationalism.

This was signaled by rampant communal conflicts in some areas such as West Kalimantan, Poso, Ambon, and North Maluku. These conflicts unfortunately were often seen as ethnic-, religion- and race-nuanced (SARA) conflicts while it should be seen from many aspects such as socio-culture, politic, demography, and economy.

On the other side, communal conflict happened due to stereotyping between two genealogically and culturally different ethnics or even religions that lead to anarchistic and destructive actions, riots, act of looting and physical violence.

Additionally, the communal conflicts almost always take a lot of casualties, hundreds or thousands of people died and tens or hundreds displaced. Each conflict is widespread among the entire district up to the province and always occurs between two groups of people that follow the lines of ethnic origin or religion.

Such things could happen because of strengthening factor of disintegration based on ethnocentrism that has devised distinction in rights and interests, misunderstanding with other groups, miscommunication etc., that eventually create temperamental society with high ego that do not support integration.

In order to overcome these conflicts, understandings on integration points that aim to improve the comprehension and knowledge on Indonesianism are required. By this, it is hoped that the spirit of unity that long has been lost can be restored.

This effort will not be optimal without direct supports and participations both from government and the people. One of the way is developing a set of teaching pattern that emphasize the importance of respect and tolerance towards pluralism that should be considered as a potential resource that need to be preserved. Another way is narrowing social gap in society by distributing the wealth fairly.

The most basic solution is actually on the governments' hand, that is creating as many job as possible to eradicate poverty and decrease unemployment rate.

Besides, political parties can play a great role by picking intellectual, humanist and pluralist candidates as their cadre to be placed in the government both central and local.
    
They should also be proactive to encourage and facilitate the birth of institutions of art and culture of each ethnic so that they can feel the appreciation of their heritage, which in turn will also be expected to boost the income of the central and local government in tourism sector.

*). Graduate students of Gunadarma University, Jakarta.



Pewarta: By Amira Fadillah
Editor : M. Tohamaksun

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