Socio-economic conditions of the Indonesia-Malaysia border areas according to Kompas newspaper reporting 2008-2012

Indonesia-Malaysia border areas have gained public attention, priority in government policy, and mass media coverage since the end of Indonesia’s New Order era in 1998. Under the New Order, the border was left in socioeconomic backwardness but remained in control of the military for defense and security purposes. The 1998 political reforms brought to the fore the imperative of managing the border areas in the context of a welfare perspective. The debate between welfare versus security perspectives had then dominated the post-reform discourse of border management from 1998 until 2010. It ended when the Indonesian government established a national agency for integrative border management known as the Badan Nasional Pengelola Sempadan (BNPP). However, the socio-economic development of the border areas had not experienced significant progress throughout 2008- 2012, at least according to the Kompas. This had a lot to do with the lack of coordination and synchronization of border development programmes and projects among related government agencies under the jurisdiction of the BNPP on the one hand and the lack of government allocated budget for the development of infrastructures in border areas on the other.