Novelist Christopher Koch (The year of living dangerously, Highways to a war) complained recently that Australian journalists had a negative attitude to Indonesia's complex culture. Even though Indonesia was a permanent neighbour, as well as a friendly and successful nation, he suggested there was something of an unconscious 'yellow peril' fear in a media obsession with human rights abuse, especially in East Timor. 'No other nation... is judged on a single issue'.
We hope Mr Koch gets to read this Sumatra theme issue of Inside Indonesia, for two reasons (other than that we borrowed his Indonesian title for one article).
First, because we do deal with the complexity. Sumatra covers almost a quarter of Indonesia's land area, and earns most of its foreign exchange. Yet the Sydney Morning Herald, perhaps Australia's most Indonesia-literate daily, mentioned Sumatra in only 4 stories between March and November 1996, compared to 86 for East Timor. In this issue of Inside Indonesia we present three features on Aceh, one on Minangkabau, a historical one on East Sumatra, and three on the largely Batak area around Medan.
Second, because Mr Koch will hopefully make some new friends. Once you meet people like Djumilah and Maya, who lost their husbands to the military in Aceh in 1991, or the almost quaintly pious Muchtar Pakpahan, in a Medan jail for leading a labour union, you can no longer feel it is an act of hostility to Indonesia to sympathise with their desire for greater justice.
We hope this edition will help put a human face on a part of Indonesia too long neglected by observers abroad. Some are heroes, some are victims, some far from either. There's the Acehnese student who threatens to go to Libya and become a terrorist if the government won't give him a job; the West Sumatran village officials anxious to reconstitute a textbook Minangkabau 'culture' in order to get the roads they need; avaricious nineteenth-century financiers who destroyed the Sumatran forest to supply a market for a mild chewing drug; the speed boat driver on Lake Toba who proudly helps a bishop of the church evade a police dragnet; Javanese plantation workers stuck in a colonial backwater. These are indeed, as Christopher Koch says, our permanent neighbours. Their affairs invite our active empathy.
The people who made this issue what it is did all their work
voluntarily. Whether they were named or not, our sincerest thanks
to them all.
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