The island of Sumatra is the Indonesian part of the Malacca Straits region, and forms one of its edges. Its location on the route between the China Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea is exceptional, and has played a role in all the main periods of world history up to the time of Indonesian Independence. The building of this far-flung archipelago into a nation was marked by a fear of centrifugal forces; centralization of territorial management from the capital, Jakarta, and control by closing borders provided a solution to this problem. “Introverted” Indonesia developed over a fifty-five-year period, concentrating its investments on the central area, Java (Charras and Franck 2000, 2004), and turning Sumatra into an outlying area on the national scale. A major component of the Straits region due to its size (443,000 km2), its natural resources and the production of its plantations, but also on account of its demographic weight (50 million inhabitants, representing at present 21 per cent of the population and 21 per cent of the surface area of Indonesia, a unique balance in the archipelago), Sumatra today is a long way behind Singapore and the peninsular part of the Malaysian Federation in terms of economic performance.

This study presents the effects of the development policies since 1966, the beginning of the Soeharto regime, which led to this “sidelining”, then examines whether the ten years’ implementation of the regional autonomy law have finally enabled this large island to regain its place in the opening up and renewal of transnational relations on a regional scale. It deals with the central part of East Sumatra, which consists of three provinces — Riau, Jambi and South Sumatra (Sumsel) — facing the Malay peninsula, from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore, via Melaka and Johor Bahru. The coastline is bordered by a very wide swamp area and small islets encumbering the straits; it is the part closest to the opposite shore (see Map 9.1). It is also in this central part — rightly considered to be isolated and depressed in the regional study performed by the Japanese cooperation agency (JICA) in the 1980s — that recent development and spatial reshaping have been the greatest.