Some directions in post-New Order theatre
Lauren Bain
Many within the arts community in Indonesia experienced a sense of euphoria after the fall of Suharto. Two years on, is theatre really 'floundering and directionless' as a recent article in The Jakarta Post suggested (6 August 2000)?
Under the New Order the performing arts were subject to tight state controls. Yet theatre groups were to varying degrees able to resist and to make critical comment on many aspects of New Order society.
The late New Order saw increasing numbers of theatre companies producing non-linear, non-text based works using physical performance forms. This form of theatre invited multiple, pluralistic responses from audiences, and in a western theoretical framework could be described as 'postmodern'. Much of this work was also highly critical of the New Order state, but perhaps because of its non-text based format was largely able to avoid censorship. By saying the 'unsayable' without using words it perhaps positioned itself outside the parameters of perceived threats to New Order hegemony and thereby subverted it.
Teater SAE, Teater Kubur, Payung Hitam, Bali Exsperimental Teater and Teater Re-Publik are all groups which produced work along these lines, each in its own unique way. Most are producing it still. Numerous other groups including Teater Api (Surabaya) and Teater Ruang (Solo) continued to use text in their work but also developed a highly physical performance style.
But how has reformasi impacted on this type of theatre production? Is this style of work, this idiom, still an appropriate strategy for subverting the status quo? In fact if there is no clear 'status quo' is it possible to be radical? Many theatre groups and artists are grappling with these questions.
Some maintain that the impacts of the New Order are still so widely felt that there is no need to adapt styles of performance which were successful at that time. The most recent production of Payung Hitam, under director Rachman Sabur, is DOM: Dan orang mati, performed in June 2000. It created a sometimes terrifying spectacle of chaos, violence and confused national identity - a chaos in which the audience itself was also clearly implicated, as massive military search lights passed overhead. Huge floor-ceiling banners, bearing the outlines of the heads of Suharto, Habibie and Wiranto moved back and forth across the stage. Both thematically and stylistically DOM is very similar to the work Payung Hitam have been producing over the last five years. The work is still powerful, and the performance well crafted and disciplined, but for how long will this approach be valid?
Other theatre groups are challenging the paradigm within which for example Payung Hitam work. For Yogya-based Teater Garasi, subverting what they call 'dominant theatre culture' is an important agenda. Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, the group's artistic director, argues that in order to 'subvert' the dominant theatre culture of the late 1990s, it was necessary to return to what he refers to as 'simple' themes - such as relationships between men and women. In addition, Teater Garasi chose to deal with these themes through performing realist text based theatre. Yudi Tajudin also argues that the kind of abstract, physical theatre which dominated the scene in the late New Order was 'killing acting', a trend which Teater Garasi's style of work attempts to reverse.
Whilst Teater Garasi deliberately defines its work as 'subversive', their method of subverting the dominant theatre culture could be seen as a return to a more conservative style. It is also perhaps ironic that a company which draws heavily on postmodern/ cultural studies theory should be so concerned with saving 'acting' - or perhaps the notion of 'the actor' - from the 'threats' posed by physical and overtly political theatre.
Perhaps Teater Garasi's approach exemplifies a more general shift away from a deliberately political theatre culture. 'Theatre (in Indonesia) has become the media of agitators' lamented one artist-academic in Kompas recently (22 June 2000). Nano Riantiarno, director of Jakarta's Teater Koma, who experienced consistent problems with censorship under the New Order, says that he is deliberately taking a more 'mainstream' approach to his work since the fall of Suharto.
Whilst there is a need to question whether the styles of work used under the New Order are still valid, the idea that theatre which does not deal directly with political themes is 'apolitical' is surely a naive misconception. Although Teater Garasi argue that they are 'relaxed about ideology' their work still has ideological implications.
It should not be surprising if there is a sense of a loss of direction within Indonesia's theatre community. Many other types of groups in Indonesia are also re-evaluating their position in relation to structures of power. Theatre artists are developing new modes of critique, and in some cases are re-evaluating strategies which may have been successful under the New Order. If theatre is to continue to be radical in the post New Order era, it is critical that both the continuing use of 'New Order' idioms and the strategies used to 'subvert' this 'political' style of work are themselves opened to question.
Lauren Bain (lhbain@hotmail.com) is a PhD candidate at The University of Tasmania. She is researching contemporary theatre of the reformasi era from her base in Solo.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Artists rebuild community identity in new, democratic ways
Halim HD
Centralism violates everything that is good about society and the arts. It is the cause of the disintegration now threatening this nation of thousands of islands once held together by some common memory and some common hope. When we decided that 'decentralisation' would be the theme of an arts festival in Makassar, South Sulawesi, some of my artist friends enjoying the good life in Jakarta wrote to tell me they thought it was a poor idea. But those who came, not just from around Makassar but from all over Indonesia, thought it was fantastic.
We started talking about the concept of a Makassar Arts Forum in a coffee shop in front of Fort Rotterdam in July 1998, just two months after Suharto resigned. It was going to be something entirely democratic and separate from the official arts establishment. That coffee shop became our secretariat, where anyone could drop by and discuss ideas. Asmin Amin was there, a well-known activist in a non-government organisation (NGO) combating HIV/Aids in South Sulawesi. Another activist there was Shalahuddin, better known for his interest in maritime ecology and organic farming. These people had worked with theatre groups such as Teater Pilar and Teater Petta Puang, and with the music and dance troupe Batara Gowa, to spread their message all over Sulawesi since the mid 1990s. I was in Makassar for another festival, but these people asked me and some other arts activists from Java to stay and help them organise the arts forum.
It soon became clear that the official arts bodies were rather afraid of these influential NGO 'outsiders'. Word was that people in the Makassar Arts Council, the South Sulawesi Arts Council, the Indonesian National Arts Coordinating Body, and South Sulawesi Taman Budaya thought they would politicise the arts. The arts councils were set up in many regions under the New Order in the 1970s. In fact these institutionalised artists had themselves long politicised the arts. They had lots of money, were close to officialdom, but had only weak roots in the community. The success of the much more open Makassar Arts Forum was soon to make the arts council model look outdated.
Andi Ilhamsyah Mattalata, a local businessman and retired sportsman, said he was prepared to help out financially. He lent us some space and a telephone. We scrounged around for a computer and paper, and for more volunteers.
By this time it was nearly a year since Suharto's resignation kicked off reformasi. Friends wanted somehow to commemorate the date. We used donated old newspapers to wrap the 5-6 metre high walls of the historic Fort Rotterdam in newsprint. The idea was to celebrate the new press freedoms, and to remember that we are surrounded by news all the time. The participants also wrapped themselves in newsprint and paraded around town - buskers, dancers, theatre players, street kids, painters and even some sidewalk sellers, about 150 of them! All the kids joined in, as did lots of motorbikes, bicycles and cars. It was like a spontaneous carnival. For three nights from 19 May '99 there was music in the streets, and dancing, theatre, poetry reading, and art shows, holding up the traffic for a kilometre or more till midnight. Every night new groups came to participate. They liked it because it was so democratic, and there were no bureaucratic hassles like funding proposals.
At the same time the South Sulawesi Arts Council (Dewan Kesenian Sulawesi Selatan) was putting on a visual arts show with artists from around South Sulawesi. I heard they spent about forty times more than our meager two million rupiahs, and there were rumours of corruption. The governor and deputy governor opened it, but hardly anyone came because it was held at the cold and inaccessible Mandala Monument, built to commemorate the 1962-63 Mandala Operation led by Suharto to recover West Irian for the Republic.
Good art
In the 1970s the Makassar Arts Council became a place where ambitious people snuggled up to the governor and to big business, perhaps with an eye to getting into parliament themselves. Any artist close to Golkar was guaranteed to get lots of projects and official appointments.
But times have changed and now younger artists can see that this is not the way to promote good art. In the 1990s many new groups began to emerge who knew that to express themselves freely they needed to keep their distance from power. At the same time a NGO movement grew more influential among the people and also began to hold cultural activities. This offered new opportunities to the artists. As an arts practitioner on the ground, I can see that many of these younger independent artists see this as their protest against the Jakarta 'centre'.
Finally it was 7 September 1999, and the ten day Makassar Arts Forum was ready to open. It had been organised by just three people, Asmin Amin, Shalahuddin, and Pak Andi Mattalata, with minimal funds. But none of the artists made a fuss about how little they were paid. Local coffee shops sent packed lunches, some of the artists themselves contributed coffee, rice, bottled water. All personal contributions. It was amazing.
Nearly all the artists from around South Sulawesi came. More turned up from all over Indonesia. There were painters, dancers, musicians and theatre artists from Yogyakarta, Solo, and from so many other cities in Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, all over Sulawesi, Lombok and Irian Jaya. Four hundred artists altogether. There were foreigners as well, from Australia, the US, Switzerland, Canada, South Korea. We worried about how we would feed them all. We went around to the restaurants in town and many contributed food or some money. Villagers sent fried bananas or cassava. All this happened outside the well-funded official arts organisations.
The 'decentralisation' theme was there as an expression of self-confidence by people on the 'margins', and as a statement welcoming difference. I thought it was a wonderful recognition of diversity and generosity, of empowerment.
Mak Cammana played the rebana - a traditional drum. She comes from a village in Polewali-Mamasa regency, in the Mandar region of South Sulawesi. She learned the rebana from her father and her grandfather. The rebana player is an important person in the community. They do not merely make music but also teach the Q'uran and officiate at weddings and circumcisions.
Mak Coppong performed the old courtly dances from Gowa, also in South Sulawesi. They are very slow and require a lot of discipline. Unfortunately many talented dancers are lost to the art when they marry and their 'modern' husbands forbid them from going on. Quite ironic, because there are older women who have danced all their married lives. The form remains very popular in the villages for traditional ceremonies.
In the New Order, these art forms were always shaped for public display by the demands of officialdom. These were occasions for officials to demonstrate their own ideas, and they would interfere in what the artists wanted to do. Sometimes officials themselves would dance, or at least train the dancers. It was all about their own ambitions.
The model of the Makassar Arts Forum has in fact been developing since the 1980s. In Solo, theatre groups have long organised themselves informally, based on mutual solidarity and sharing. Anyone can contribute ideas. News goes out and comes in by letters, telephone, fax or email, through a wide network of friends within the arts community and even beyond. That is how artists in Solo grew close to the NGO movement, which was flourishing at the time as a reaction to the total failure of the political parties to reach the grassroots.
Indonesia still exists. Otherwise all those artists wouldn't want to come from all over Indonesia. Some of them even suggested we should all stay together for six months or even a year and learn together.
Some wanted to make the Makassar Arts Forum an annual event. They thought of Makassar as an emerging centre for the whole of eastern Indonesia. But I hope the forum will not become a monument, an annual ceremony to the greatness of any 'centre'. It should be like sand by the seaside, where children build a castle and the waves wash it away again. We need to live our traditions every day, and not turn them into a ritual. To me, decentralisation is not about making new centres to oppose Jakarta. Makassar is just a small part of South Sulawesi and of the wider region. No area should be sacrificed for someone else's 'centre'. Decentralisation means that every region is its own centre.
HalimHD (halimhd@hotmail.com, pinilih@hotmail.com) is an arts networker in Solo, Central Java.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
These young artists revolt against the political crisis with their own bodies
M Dwi Marianto
Young Indonesian artists have started using nudity in new and quite personal ways. One artist showed a video of he and his wife making love to climax on a wet canvas. Just as some segments of society are being drawn into more normative religion, and in the midst of a Javanese society that disapproves of frank personal expression, these artists are brazenly creating a space to make very private statements. This could be their personal revolt against a necrophilic mass media culture that revels in violence, chaos and death. Like so many Indonesians, they want to know what use it is to listen to the big ideas of an intellectual elite that seems so righteous yet is so powerless against the intrigues of that very same elite.
In June I visited the home of Laksmi Shitaresmi (born in Yogyakarta in 1974). She had just given birth to a baby girl. Her husband is also a painter. In their tiny living room I was shocked to see two large nude paintings of Laksmi. The breasts and pubic hair were quite naturalistic. I had seen the paintings before, but what shocked me was where she had hung them, precisely where every visitor could see. Amidst a society growing more puritan, Laksmi didn't care if anyone thought this was impolite. As I sat there snacking in her living room, my eyes were exactly on a level with her genitals. This was significant! Laksmi seemed to want to speak directly, without being bound by traditional norms that in practice stop people from saying anything personal or critical.
Erica (born in Yogyakarta in 1971) is a dropout from the Indonesian Institute of Art in Yogyakarta, and one of the few female painters making a living from her work. At present she is doing a 'bathing' series. Up till now she has been painting playful, nascenes from in and around her home, and she has become quite successful. But in 1999 she began to be more personal. Bathing in my favourite villa is a self-portrait in the bath. Only the pubic area is discreetly scattered with soap bubbles (see cover). She wants to depict bathing as a relaxing and refreshing activity, but also one in which she can shed her restrictive 'cultural' clothing, at least on canvas. That is something many Indonesians long for at a time when so many crises give them a headache.
Made love
Arahmaiani (born in Bandung in 1961) is different again. This artist, who once studied at the Bandung Institute of Technology, has long made critical statements through her art. She has occasionally made use of clearly depicted genitalia, which in her work symbolise domination and militarism in an Indonesian context. As one of the few critical Indonesian women artists her work might appear more radical because there is so little comparison. At a performance in the French Cultural Centre in Bandung in 1999 she took off her shirt (leaving a bra) and invited the audience to take a marker pen and draw or write anything they liked on her skin. This is the first time a Sundanese woman has done this. When Sundanese greet one another they only touch with the tip of their finger. Men and women do not touch at all - they just tip their hand to their own breast when they meet.
I thought Arahmaiani had been the most radical ever in terms of using the body as an artistic medium, until Nurkholis came to my home to show me a video. This artist, born in Jepara in 1969, is well known for his religiosity, and remains so to the present day. He hates pretence and has always acted just as he has spoken. His work could be called surrealist. The body painting on his VCD was truly radical. The first part showed him painting the canvas with his own naked body. That is already unusual for Indonesia, but it was nothing compared to the next part, which involved his wife. They made love, and let their natural movements imprint themselves on the wet canvas. He showed this VCD at the opening of an exhibition in the Dirix Gallery on 1 July 2000. The audience was stunned. Some reacted cynically, others looked embarrassed, while others again congratulated Nurkholis.
The technique came to him after a period of dryness, when conventional painting with the brush no longer satisfied. In frustration he kicked the wet canvas and it left an impression of his foot. He then developed this idea until his entire body was painting on a canvas already covered in wet paint. A simple idea, but it had a big impact especially among younger artists and collectors in Yogyakarta and beyond. I think Nurkholis' search for a new language to express himself is shared by many Indonesians, who are no longer satisfied with the 'true and correct Indonesian' (bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) they were taught at school to understand their national crisis.
These four artists are looking for an answer to a personal problem, but their discoveries represent an open visual text and a symbolism with much wider relevance. They are working in the midst of a multi-dimensional crisis that directly or indirectly affects their personal lives. They speak visually in a language whose vocabulary is drawn from the body - a very private language.
When I still lived in Rawasari Kampung in Jakarta I often overheard the neighbourhood women bicker. A few times one of them would turn around, bend over and in her fury lift her skirts and say: 'Your face is just like my arse!' Maybe these four artists are like many other people who find themselves simply confused by all the very true but also very remote political analysis in the media. To all that big talk they want to say: 'Why don't you just shut up and learn to control your inner self first'.
M Dwi Marianto (isiyogya@yogya.wasantara.net.id) is a well-known art critic. He teaches at the Indonesian Institute of Art in Yogyakarta.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Review: How one man's courage changed the course of history
Ron Witton
This book is a beauty. It tells how the sixteenth century Dutch East India Company, the grand old VOC, spread its tentacles across the globe in search of the inordinately valuable spices of the eastern islands of present day Indonesia.
The Dutch, like other European nations (particularly the English, their greatest competitor), initially followed Columbus westward from Europe in order to find a passage to the East Indies. This resulted in the Dutch establishing themselves on Manhattan Island, which they named New Amsterdam. They sailed up the Hudson River hoping to reach the Pacific. When that proved unsuccessful, they began to explore northwards in search of the fabled, but ultimately impassable, northwest passage. Others travelled northeast from Europe in search of an equally fabled, but also unpassable, arctic passage along Russia's northern coast. Mariners had horrifying experiences caught in winter ice floes thousands of miles from home, on routes that would prove fruitless.
Even the proven passage to the east via the Cape of Good Hope was perilous, but with luck they returned to Europe with cargoes of spices worth far more than gold. There are enough stories here of heroism, horror and adventure to keep the reader awake until late at night, exploring the roots of modern empire. Contemporaneous illustrations and maps are an added bonus.
Not till two thirds through this gripping book do we meet Nathaniel, whose 'courage changed the course of history'. He was an Englishman committed to his nation's titanic economic struggle against the Dutch. He succeeds in taking over and fortifying the now forgotten island of Run, which lies 'in the backwaters of the East Indies, a remote and fractured speck of rock that is separated from its nearest land mass, Australia, by more than six hundred miles of ocean' (p2). Forgotten today, it is not even shown on modern maps. However, Run Island figured prominently on seventeenth century maps because of the fragrant nutmeg that grew in abundance there. The island was the key to monopoly control of the world's supply of this fantastically valuable spice.
For five years, Nathaniel Courthorpe and his half-starved band of thirty men were besieged by a Dutch force one hundred times greater. Their heroism led directly to one of the most momentous geo-political rearrangements of the world. Stymied by Courthorpe's courage, the Dutch were forced to give the English the island of Manhattan in exchange for this now insignificant speck of rock. Thus New Amsterdam became New York. It is a tale so fantastic that one is left wondering why it has never been previously told.
Giles Milton, Nathaniel's nutmeg. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999, 388pp, ISBN 0340696761 (pbk)
Ron Witton (rwitton@uow.edu.au) teaches at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
The environment after Suharto
Gerry van Klinken
The colonial Dutch romantically called their tropical possessions 'a girdle of emeralds'. Even today many Javanese living rooms are adorned with paintings of rustic villages amidst luxuriant green in a style called Mooi Java, Beautiful Java. But the 'unspoiled' coral reefs and boundless wilderness proclaimed in the tourist brochures have been under threat for at least a century, and especially during the rapacious industrialism of the New Order. Now that the New Order is gone, how is the environment faring? This edition of Inside Indonesia addresses that question.
The single biggest change since the end of the Suharto era is the weakness of central government. Just as its strength under Suharto was a mixed blessing, so is its weakness today.
On the one hand, weakness in Jakarta provides locals living around destructive megaprojects with the opportunity to reclaim their right to clean water and land. We should welcome, not regret, local pressure on paper pulp, mining and other such companies.
On the other hand, weakness has robbed government of any leverage it may have had to keep destructive activities in check. If under Suharto the government was not brilliant on implementing environmental regulations (to say the least), today even that minimal effort has become nearly impossible, as Lesley Potter and Simon Badcock's article on the Riau forests demonstrates.
The answer, our authors seem to be saying, now lies elsewhere. Non-government organisations, of whatever nationality, working for a sustainable Indonesian environmental policy need support. And international companies with poor environmental records - Australian miners, Malaysian palm oil companies - need to be pressured in their home countries to raise their standards. We hope this edition will contribute to that answer.
As always, our sincere thanks to all those who made this edition a reality, especially our expert and therefore busy authors who made time to write.
Gerry van Klinken is the editor of Inside Indonesia
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Across Kalimantan by boat and on foot
Ciaran Harman
Pak Rabun was padding along the mulch in the sparse undergrowth when he stopped and went tense. When he turned around, he had an enormous grin on his face. 'Babi!' he mouthed past me to his grandson Tusung behind me. 'Thank God!' I almost said out loud. Even I could see them. The track we were following sloped downward between giant rainforest trees and the straining saplings between them, and turned left to run upstream beside the Hubung River. Just on the other bank, lit up angelically (or so I remember it) by a shaft of light let into the forest by the slice the river cuts through it, were a family of wild boar.
Pak Rabun was doing a little dance while Tusung quietly dropped his pack and began stripping down to his shorts. They were as happy at the prospect of something other than rice and fish to eat as I was. Tusung took off his rubber shoes and the long flour-sack socks that tied up under his knees to keep the leeches off. He tied a bandanna around his head, picked up his ten-foot ironwood spear and with his grandfather right behind, trod down the track, around a tree and out of sight.
They were such an odd pair. Tusung was huge, his shoulders a mile wide, but coloured like an old map where the untreated eczema that covered them and ran down his arms had taken the pigment out of his skin. He spoke rarely but deliberately, and usually jokingly. He had an appreciation of sarcasm. I liked him. His grandfather Nyurabun, or just Pak Rabun, was the toughest 63 year-old I had ever met. He didn't wear shoes. Ever. He kept leeches off with chewing tobacco and a large and expertly wielded mandau, a type of machete. He had long stringy hair and a metal bar through his penis and I am quite sure he thought I and every other tourist he had taken through the jungle were completely mad.
The rainforests of Borneo have the greatest species richness of any patch of ground on this earth. They are also rapidly disappearing. Rafts of giant logs lashed together had floated past my riverboat every half-hour or so on my three-day journey up from the coast at Samarinda. Every now and then a red scar and a logging camp would appear on the banks as we pushed past. As though some rough beast had hauled itself up from the river and begun devouring the jungle. My plan was to travel up the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan as far as I could, then find some guides to take me across the Muller Ranges and into the catchment of the great Kapuas River, which led to Pontianak on the west coast. I wanted to see what was left of the wilderness. I wanted to breathe it all in. I wanted to become part of it. As it turned out I became more a part of it than I intended. The leeches siphoned off about a pint or so of my blood and thus made me well and truly part of the ecosystem.
From Samarinda in East Kalimantan, the Mahakam kinks and bends up through the lakes and the plains, through Long Iram where it crosses the equator, past mosques of diminishing size (the Javanese transmigrants prefer the coast) to the inland town of Long Bagun. You can only get so far inland by riverboat though. To get the rest of the way to the last major outpost on the river, Tiong Ohang, you have to either fly in with the missionary airline from the coast or spend a couple of exhilarating days in a high powered longboat shooting the rapids above Long Bagun. Always the sucker for the long way round, I spent one amazing day in a boat gunning against the forces of nature between cliffs of fern and waterfalls. On the second day rain set in. With water all around me I had little choice but to sit under a leaky tarpaulin beside chain-smokers and crying children, only now and then getting a glimpse up into the vast forests I was entering.
Fortune seekers
Tiong Ohang was a mixing place, a strange sort of frontier town where the local Penihing Dayak people co-exist with young Banjar men from the south. Upstream there was only the forest and a few small and very old Dayak villages, but in Tiong Ohang the Banjar fortune seekers live. They scale the crumbling limestone cliffs to collect edible birds nests for about four million rupiah (approx. A$800) a kilogram. The young men told me you could make a thousand dollars in a month. Many did, they said, only to go down to the coast and blow it all in a couple of days of carousing. One even bought himself a motorcycle and managed to lug it all the way back to Tiong Ohang.
Some of the young fortune seekers told me they knew some people that could take me across the mountains and into West Kalimantan. They took me to the end of the town, out where the slash and burn fields began. Pak Rabun's house was raised up on stilts like all the others, and inside was furnished with rattan mats. He certainly looked the part of the Dayak guide. He had broad feet and thick stumpy legs. His hair seemed like hanging lianas, black and ropy. At first Pak Rabun reminded me of an old English gaffer. He kept his viney hair under an old flat cap and smoked a pipe as we negotiated costs. No quiet old Englishman could boast Pak Rabun's strong nimble body though.
Across his muscled chest and shoulders the skin sagged only slightly under his tattoos. 'Devil' was printed roughly on his left arm. Pak Rabun was Catholic. He said it was to remind him that evil was always close by. As close as his left arm apparently. Across his chest was written 'Hatiku Bahagia Karenalah Engkau', or 'My heart is happy because of you'. He was always ambivalent about who this referred to. On his right arm was the most cryptic: 'Masaq Lona'. 'It is what it is,' he would say, 'Masaq lona. Far from my eyes, close to my heart.'
We settled on a fee for Pak Rabun and his grandson Tusung. A couple of days later we set out. In a long thin boat called a 'ces' we pushed upriver until well into the afternoon and camped in the unoccupied home of a friend of Pak Rabun. The next day we began climbing up from the river and into the forest.
Shades of green
The journey through the forest was painted in manifold shades of green. At times it was like walking underground. There was not the sense of distance or time that pervades the Australian landscapes I am used to. This was an ecology of the intricate, not the vast and explicit. Trees fought their way into the canopy, spreading roots like armies across the wet ground. When they died they did not really die, they were chewed up by a billion termites and bright fungi and became new. Sometimes a skeleton of fig vines would remain to mark the spot. The air was cool under the canopy but thick with life. It hummed. I had expected it to sound different. I thought rainforests sounded like zoos, with thousands of birds and howling monkeys. Instead, one bird would sing with a voice that filled up the whole forest, and always off to the left or the right was the bright rustle of the river. Otherwise it was quiet.
Perhaps the quiet was my fault though. My puffing stumbling frame could probably be heard for miles and could have scared off most animals. That was why when we came upon those wild boars on about the fourth day, Tusung and Pak Rabun hushed me up and sat me on the ground as they stalked off ahead. I picked leeches out of my shoes as I waited. Socks were no defence against them and wearing boxer shorts instead of briefs had been a very bad idea. Sitting there alone, the silent forest felt bigger. I felt like I was inside a living thing, rather than just surrounded by trees.
Suddenly, with a rustle and a crash, an animal bounded out onto the path in front of me. When it saw me it stopped rock still. It might have been a barking deer or a kijang. It was no more than four feet high and had a brown velvety coat. For about half a second, we stared at each other in shock. For that deer it must have been as strange to see me sitting there as for me to see a wild deer skipping through the centre of my native Perth. The lovely animal caught its wits and bolted, crashing away through the undergrowth again.
I felt like an intruder. As though I had walked in on Mother Nature in the shower. I had seen parts of nature that would otherwise have tried hard to remain hidden. It wasn't an epiphany or anything of that sort, but I understood then the importance of wilderness. To strip nature down to resources and a few scattered national parks was to leave it dressed in rags. Wilderness, the untamed places, where those like Pak Rabun and Tusung become part of the forest in order to survive within it, rather than bend it to their own will: those are the places were we can see into the life of things.
Tusung and Pak Rabun soon returned empty-handed. I was not really disappointed at all.
Ciaran Harman (ciaran69@hotmail.com) is a student in environmental engineering and Asian studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He was participating in the Acicis Study Indonesia Program in Yogyakarta (wwwshe.murdoch.edu.au/acicis/).
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
What will Indonesia look like in 2010?
Dedy A Prasetyo
Four scenarios for Indonesia in 2010 were launched on 1 August 2000 at the Proclamation Statue in Jakarta. A quarter of a million copies were slipped into newspapers around the country. They contained four pictures of what Indonesia might look like, in the form of stories entitled 'On the edge', 'Into the crocodile pit', 'Paddling a leaky boat', and 'Slow but steady'.
These were not predictions of the future, nor were they strategic plans. They did not describe some utopian future or even one we would quite like, but simply possibilities that might occur because of what we do today.
One of several approaches to picturing the future is known as scenario planning. Scenarios are a tool to help us perceive different futures, each of which is influenced by decisions we make today. Put simply, they are a combination of stories - written or oral - that make up a bigger plot. A scenario gives a multi-perspectival picture of a complex future. Precisely because the future is unpredictable, scenarios are good planning tools.
Creating a scenario is a dialogical process that brings together different visions and interests. The aim is to bridge the gap between key analyses of present day problems and various possibilities in the future.
Our view of 'the future' usually contains three elements: what is likely to happen, what I would like to see happen, and what might happen. The first leads to prediction, the second to subjectivity (wishful thinking). But scenario planning emphasises the third - what might happen.
Scenario building has been much used in international business, but it has also been used at the national level. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter is the South African Mont Fleur process. In 1991/92 South Africans came up with four scenarios of what might happen there in ten years time (2002). In 1997/98 Columbians produced Destino Columbia, with four possible futures for the year 2013. Most recently, Guatemalans built three scenarios that they named Vision Guatemala. The small island state of Singapore has been using scenario planning since 1993. Japan has three scenarios for the year 2020.
The steering committee for Future Indonesia 2010 consisted of about thirty individuals - academics, human rights workers, politicians, economists, businesspersons, religious figures, military, and others. They were supported by the Future Indonesia Working Group, including Asmara Nababan, Marzuki Darusman, Binny Buchori, Emil Salim, HS Dillon, Felia Salim, Emmy Hafild, as well as some facilitators - Daniel Sparringa, MM Billah, Edy Suhardono, and Rudolf Budi Matindas. These groups wrote the preparatory studies and then spread the word to many different groups all over Indonesia.
It all began with a meeting in Bogor early in 1999, where activities were set in train to eventually come up with the Future Indonesia scenarios (Indonesia Masa Depan). The idea was to stimulate discussion, fresh thinking, and debate among Indonesians about the future of their country. We hoped that some collective consciousness would be born within society that tomorrow is the result of our actions and decisions today. We also hoped people would not stay trapped in mutual recriminations over the problems of today or yesterday, but would set out on a constructive journey in search of the alternatives stretched out before us in the future. This way, we hoped, the Indonesian public would take part in thinking about Indonesia's tomorrow, and become involved in creating that future.
Various groups within society, each as varied as the other, then began taking initiatives. They engaged in dialogue, while avoiding dogmatism. It began in East Java in July 1999, where about thirty quite different individuals from all over the province came together. For three days, they tried to build future scenarios for Indonesia in 2010, from an East Java social perspective.
Similar dialogues followed in other cities and regions, among them Medan, Mataram, Riau, Makasar, Samarinda, Pontianak, Palangkaraya, Bali, Yogyakarta, West Java, Kupang, Jayapura, Central Java, and Jakarta. Fourteen dialogues were held in all.
The results of all of these dialogues were then compiled and synthesised in a national dialogue meeting attended by representatives from each region.
A great number of fresh ideas came out of this dialogical process, as did much anxiety and sharp criticism about what kind of future Indonesia was heading for. Among the matters most often raised in the discussions were these: centralisation and decentralisation, injustice, religious conflict, the growth of democracy after Suharto (including cynicism about it), law enforcement, gender issues, constitutional amendments, national leadership, environmental and cultural exploitation, state involvement in the economy, relations between Javanese and non-Javanese, and the role of the police and military.
All these issues could be divided into two groups - those that mainly concerned people in Java and outside Java. Participants within Java focused more often on the rule of law, whereas those outside Java focused on (de)centralisation. However, civil society issues concerned everyone, whether within or outside Java.
New ideas are not always readily accepted, and so it was with this dialogical project. Depending on their region of origin or their personality, people responded in many and varied ways. People outside Java often felt suspicious there was some hidden agenda at work in the project. Inside Java, on the contrary, suspicion was far less. It generally revolved around the question of who would benefit from this dialogue, where the money came from, and whether there was a 'conspiracy' behind it. It was an exhausting process that now and then broke out into frustration when confronted by these various 'bad' thoughts.
Very clear explanation was especially required when speaking about the concept of the scenario. Unless misconceptions were cleared up here at the very beginning, they were likely to reinforce already existing prejudices. However, as the dialogue proceeded, suspicion, pessimism and cynicism tended to recede. Sometimes the dialogue closed in quite a touching atmosphere, as people said with tears in their eyes that their suspicions had been unfounded. Whichever wise person said that democracy is expensive and exhausting, said a true thing.
Scenario planning is a clever instrument to explore the views that live within society. Straight from the heart, these views can then become the basic capital for a strong civil society in Indonesia. Ironically, the Future Indonesia dialogues often threw up some strange contradictions. At a moment when so many participants had the opportunity to represent the strength of civil society, they often spoke like government spokespersons. As a result, it was hardly surprising if at times the vision put forward was no real alternative to the dominant vision produced and reproduced by the state. Even more saddening was the discovery that many participants seemed to retain the New Order perspective that there is only one truth. This made it very difficult to make the necessary linkages leading to a new future.
However, scenario planning is a vital tool in learning democracy. In several regions, the dialogue forum became a medium for reconciliation between various elements of society that had hitherto been at odds with one another over the spoils of office. Even if they did not become a collective movement, the forums bore witness to a new possibility and created a space that brought people together without regard for the attributes of power, politics, ethnicity, religion or social standing. Let us hope that this kind of dialogical process can continue, drawing on the lessons that have already been learned. The choice is ours - we, the people of Indonesia. And Indonesia's future is made today.
Dedy A Prasetyo (deape@hotmail.com) was a program officer with the Working Group for Indonesia Masa Depan. He is a law student at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
The search for consensus is taking time
Blair A King
The vague nature of the 1945 Constitution (UUD 1945) contributed to the rise of authoritarian dictatorships under both Presidents Sukarno and Suharto. Constitutional reform was thus one of the basic demands of the student movement that overthrew Suharto in May 1998. The First and Second Amendments passed in October 1999 and August 2000 have only begun to address the fundamental issues of constitutional reform in Indonesia. Much of the more important work lies ahead.
Despite its drawbacks, the 1945 Constitution has remained the basic framework for the ongoing democratic transition in Indonesia. UUD 1945 places implementation of popular sovereignty in the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). One of the primary functions of the MPR is to establish and amend the constitution.
In October 1999, the MPR decided to begin in 2000 to hold annual sessions, in order to amend the constitution, to pass decrees, and to evaluate the government's performance. The 2000 Annual Session convened on August 7 amid persistent talk of a confrontation between President Abdurrahman Wahid and the MPR. In the event, the rumoured impeachment did not take place. Behind these headline events, however, a large amount of work was done on other issues a few of which made news, most of which did not.
In Indonesia, as in many other countries, 'constitutional' issues are not just resolved in the formal constitution but also in other sources of law, such as MPR decrees and laws themselves. In late 1999, the MPR Working Body (Badan Pekerja) formed two subcommittees, one to address formal constitutional amendments and one to draft MPR decrees, following the mandate given by the 1999 MPR General Session.
The first subcommittee (Ad Hoc Committee I, or PAH I) aimed to amend the existing 1945 Constitution rather than draft an entirely new one. At the beginning of its deliberations, PAH I reaffirmed support for the existing preamble, the unitary state, and the presidential system.
Responsibility for drafting new decrees for debate at the MPR Annual Session rested with Ad Hoc Committee II (PAH II).
Between November 1999 and May 2000, these two subcommittees conducted numerous consultations. After the legislature reconvened in May 2000, PAH I conducted a detailed chapter-by-chapter review of the 1945 Constitution, which it completed at the end of June. PAH II considered about 20 possible subject areas and narrowed the list down to six topics for seven draft decrees, among them some on regional autonomy and the separation of the police (Polri) from the military (TNI).
The final subcommittee reports were agreed at the end of July and were transmitted via the full MPR Working Body to the Annual Session. This session referred the reports to its commissions, who then reported back to the plenary session on August 15. The MPR approved the new decrees and the Second Amendment on August 18, the 55th anniversary of the promulgation of the original Constitution in 1945.
The PAH I proposals included revisions to 16 of the chapters of the existing 1945 Constitution, and draft text for five new chapters. In the event, only seven of these 21 chapters were approved.
Slow
There appear to have been two main reasons for the slow progress: the first related to political positions, the second to procedural issues. The political cause of delay was the lack of any real consensus on the major structural issues of the constitution. Elements in the MPR that are more conservative on constitutional change wished to conduct the debate in what they called a slow and cautious manner. The conservative camp is led by the largest bloc, PDI-P, and the TNI/ Polri bloc. Together these two blocs control 223 of the 695 MPR seats, nearly the 232 votes needed to block constitutional amendments. Both blocs argue that UUD 1945 is an 'inheritance of the nation's founding fathers' that should not be radically amended. Many of the other major parties say that, in the end, 'slow and cautious' may mean little significant reform at all. As compromises negotiated in PAH I broke down, debate started over again in Commission A. This led to procedural arguments as well.
Despite the difficulties, amended text was agreed for five chapters of the constitution: on regional authorities, the People's Representative Assembly (DPR), citizens and residents, defence and security, and national symbols. In addition, two new chapters, on human rights and on national territory, were agreed.
The constitutional amendments contained in the Second Amendment and several of the MPR decrees passed at the 2000 Annual Session can be divided into four themes: (1) civil-military relations, (2) the separation of powers and checks and balances, (3) the decentralisation of power to the regions, and (4) a bill of rights. Each of these themes contains important changes to the Indonesian political system.
The military was the backbone of the authoritarian New Order political system. Ending its role in domestic politics has been an important facet of the democratic transition. The 2000 MPR Annual Session represented one of the first opportunities for civilian politicians to address the military's role in politics on an institutional level. The results are mixed, but the MPR has laid a legal foundation on which the DPR can now build democratic, civilian control over the military in Indonesia. This foundation includes drawing the distinction between external defence, as the responsibility of TNI, and internal security, law enforcement and maintenance of public order, as the responsibility of Polri. It also includes requirements that presidential decisions to appoint and dismiss the TNI commander and Polri chief be approved by the DPR. Finally, the police will be fully subject and the military partially subject (for ordinary criminal cases) to the civilian judicial system. The previously all-encompassing military judicial system will now only handle breaches of the military legal code. The challenge now will be to pass laws and regulations that fully reflect these important changes, and then to implement the new system.
The main points of concern are the decision to extend the TNI/ Polri bloc's existence in the MPR until 2009, and the inclusion of the 'total people's defence system' (sishankamrata) doctrine in the constitution.
One of the primary weaknesses of the 1945 Constitution is the lack of clarity concerning one of the fundamental dimensions of any democratic system: is it presidential or parliamentary? Since the greater weight is on the presidential side, perhaps it is appropriate to call it 'presidential with parliamentary characteristics'. This MPR session endorsed the basically presidential nature of the system. At the same time, the MPR and DPR wish to restrict the formerly unchecked powers of the presidency. One of the challenges is that UUD 1945 does not recognise the separation of powers and checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches that is such an important part of a presidential system. On the whole, the amendments and decrees passed in August 2000 have helped to strengthen these principles, although they have not fully resolved the issue.
The New Order was a highly centralised political and economic system. Decentralisation of power was thus one of the central demands of the reform movement in 1998, and after Suharto resigned many regions began voicing their discontent. The transitional administration of President B J Habibie responded with a policy of 'wide-ranging regional autonomy'.
Despite concessions by the centre (Laws 22 and 25 of 1999), many regions remained dissatisfied that regional autonomy was based only in laws that were in essence a 'gift' from the centre that could be rescinded at any time. Thus pressure continued for the decentralisation of power to the regions to be enshrined in the constitution, making it harder to reverse in the future. Through the amendment to chapter VI of UUD 1945, the general spirit of Laws 22 and 25 is now reflected in the constitution. A strongly regional flavour is given by the principle that regions may act on any subject that is not reserved by law to the central government. The primary challenge remains the implementation of these laws, in a context of resistance from line ministries in Jakarta, poor human resources in local bureaucracies, and little tradition of government accountability to elected bodies at any level.
Human rights
The original 1945 Constitution contained few guarantees of civil and political rights. It more often referred to citizens' responsibilities to the state. It is thus quite significant that a substantial new chapter on human rights has been added to the constitution as part of the Second Amendment. The provisions of the new chapter XA of UUD 1945 on human rights have proven controversial, despite having been substantially drawn from the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR). In particular, the clause prohibiting prosecutions under retrospective legislation originates from Article 11(2) of the UDHR. The juxtaposition of international human rights standards and the calls for justice for past human rights violations by the military and police has created a dilemma for Indonesian and international human rights activists. However, the controversy surrounding this clause has largely died down in the months following the annual session. Indeed on November 6 the DPR passed a law establishing human rights courts across the country that are based in the current criminal code, thus avoiding the retrospective problem.
Some of the material that was not agreed at this MPR session was fairly routine, but some has proven highly controversial, relating to the basic structure of state institutions. These chapters include the form and sovereignty of the state, the structure and role of the MPR, executive powers (including the method of election of the president and vice president), the possible creation of an upper chamber representing regional interests (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah or DPD), and the procedures for constitutional amendment.
The MPR has decided to use the remaining material prepared by PAH I as the basis for a continuing constitutional debate, scheduled to take place between now and August 2002. This is the latest annual session at which it will be possible to pass major changes to the structure of state institutions with enough lead time to conduct elections under the new arrangements in 2004.
Many MPR members at the 2000 Annual Session may have felt that fundamental decisions on structural issues should not be finalised in an atmosphere of high tension over the relationship between the current president and the current legislature. Whether the atmosphere will be more conducive to debate on these issues in 2001, or 2002, is not yet known. However, the additional time available does create a very important opportunity for wider public debate.
Blair A King (baking@lycos.com) is a PhD candidate in political science at Ohio State University. In 1999 and 2000, he worked at the Jakarta office of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI). This article is drawn from a study he co-authored for NDI (' Indonesia's bumpy road to constitutional reform', see www.ndi.org)
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Jafar Siddiq Hamzah died defending dialogue and human rights
Sidney Jones
Many knew Jafar as a political science student at New School University, New York. Others knew him as a leader of the very close Acehnese community in Woodside, Queens, where he'd lived since 1996. Some New Yorkers may have known him as one of the least aggressive taxi drivers this city has ever produced. Many of us knew him as a dedicated human rights defender, a lawyer who came to the aid of victims who didn't dare speak out for themselves. His was a voice for dialogue and moderation in a conflict that is now spiralling out of control. And he was a son, a brother, a husband, and a friend. Jafar would have been thirty-five in about two weeks.
He was a slight, gentle, self-effacing man, very bright, a little absent-minded, with a lovely sense of humour. He wasn't a rabble-rouser, he wasn't a fiery speaker, he wasn't a mobiliser of large crowds, and he certainly wasn't a guerrilla. What he was, first and foremost, was an Acehnese and intensely proud of it. He wanted the world to know and appreciate Aceh's past, and he was determined that the Acehnese should have a say in their future. Jafar was particularly angry over the long period beginning in 1990 - the year he became a human rights lawyer - when the Indonesian army declared Aceh an area of special military operations and began conducting a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against what was then a tiny group of guerrillas of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM).
Jafar risked his life then to get the word out about the atrocities that were taking place. He helped Jakarta-based human rights organisations and foreign journalists get in to Aceh to find out for themselves. When Suharto was forced to resign in May 1998, Jafar didn't want revenge, but he did want justice. I think he also came to the conclusion that it was not going to be possible to protect human rights in the absence of major political change in the relationship with Jakarta.
Some months after Suharto's fall Jafar helped found the International Forum on Aceh. Its first conference was held at New York University in December 1998. It was the first ever international gathering to discuss the political dynamics of modern-day Aceh. By the time of the second IFA conference in the spring of last year, a nonviolent movement for a referendum on Aceh's political status, led by students, NGOs, and Muslim scholars, was well underway. The second conference was attended by an even wider range of well-known Acehnese, from members of parliament in Jakarta to rival factions of the guerrilla movement. Again, all viewpoints were represented, everyone had a chance to speak, and I remember Indonesian students in the audience pleading with pro-independence Acehnese to give them a second chance, now that Suharto was gone.
Jafar was not a member of GAM, and didn't try to idealise the guerrillas or their leadership. He was in contact with individuals in the movement, just as he was in contact with Acehnese members of the political establishment in Jakarta. Indonesian authorities, however, made no distinction between IFA and GAM. When Jafar disappeared on August 5, I didn't believe it at first. He went from a meeting in broad daylight on a busy street in the country's third largest city and was never seen alive again. His body was found three weeks later with four others about 83 km away. Those four have not been identified to this day, and the police in Medan purport to have no leads to Jafar's killer. Shortly after Jafar disappeared, another activist received a call saying, 'We took care of Jafar, now it's your turn.' The caller complained that the activist never raised GAM abuses but only those of the TNI. That's not an excuse for threats, let alone murder. Circumstantial evidence and the pattern of killing points to military involvement in Jafar's death, but there is no hard evidence, and we may never know exactly what happened.
Jafar's main flaw was that he trusted everyone. He couldn't believe that other people could be operating in bad faith when he himself was so open about his intentions. We know he had been threatened before his disappearance; we know he was worried enough to call home at regular intervals to check in. We also know that he didn't let fear deter him from pursuing a political settlement in Aceh.
The best tribute we can all pay Jafar is to do the following: 1. Keep up the pressure to find and prosecute his killers; 2. Continue to seek justice for victims of human rights violations and their families; 3. Raise the profile of Aceh so that more and more people across the world appreciate the culture and history of this complex place; 4. Press ahead with efforts to end the conflict through unrestricted dialogue; 5. Continue symposia like this one. We all want Jafar back, but this kind of gathering may be the most fitting memorial.
Sidney Jones (joness@hrw.org) is the Asia Director of Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org). She read this obituary at a memorial service held in New York on 24 October 2000.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
An interview with the leader of a new, radical and militant sect
Greg Fealy
Laskar Jihad headquarters belies expectations. I went to the site in late August anticipating a large, well-equipped facility, bustling with various paramilitary training activities and white-gowned staff coordinating the operations of thousands of Muslim fighters in Maluku. Instead, the 'nerve centre' of Laskar Jihad was based in a small, dusty, rather run-down Islamic boarding school (pesantren). The school, Ihya'us Sunnah Tadribud Du'at, is in the village of Degolan, about ninety minutes drive north of Yogyakarta. It comprises about half a dozen buildings, including a small mosque, several houses and two cramped dormitories. Most of the buildings are rented and of simple construction. The main dormitory has dirt floors covered with mats and plastic, no ceiling or lining on the walls. There are about sixty students, many of whom are 'day' students who have lodgings in nearby villages. If the Laskar Jihad is receiving generous funding from the Suharto family and sections of the military, as is often alleged, there is little sign of it at Degolan.
The head of the pesantren and commander (panglima) of Laskar Jihad is Ustad Ja'far Umar Thalib, a 39-year-old Malang-born teacher and preacher of Arab-Madurese descent. Until the formation of Laskar Jihad earlier this year, Ja'far was little known outside the Arab community and militant Islamic circles, where his fiery sermons had made him a popular preacher. Much of his adult life has been spent quietly enough teaching Arabic and Islamic sciences in the al-Irsyad school system. By his own admission, the highlight of his early life was the two years he spent fighting with the Mujahidin against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in 1988-89. Ja'far had joined the Mujahidin after dropping out of the Mawdudi Institute in Lahore, where he had been taking advanced Islamic studies.
Somewhat portly, with soft hands that suggest it has been a long time since he engaged in combat, Ja'far is revered, and quite probably feared, by his students. Most refer to him respectfully as 'panglima' and speak constantly of his feats in Afghanistan or his knowledge of Islam. One student showed me a collection of Ja'far's articles and told me: 'You need not look elsewhere. This is the truth [pointing to the articles]. Just read Pak Ja'far and you'll learn what Islam is really about.' Another told me how Ja'far had shot down five Soviet helicopters with one missile in Afghanistan (Ja'far later recounted this story to me but did not claim credit for firing the missile). Ja'far's manner with his students is stern. In a plangent voice, he delivers instructions to students and quickly becomes irritated if they are not carried out to his satisfaction.
Origins
Laskar Jihad is the paramilitary division of the Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah wal Jama'ah (most simply translated as the Sunni Communication Forum) or FKAWJ, an organisation formed by a group of hardline Muslim leaders in early 1998 to promote 'true Islamic values'. FKAWJ is controlled by a 60-member board of patrons (dewan pembina), of which Ja'far is chairman. Most board members are leaders of pesantren or prominent preachers and it is their followers who form the core of the Laskar Jihad.
FKAWJ doctrine is notable for its narrow Islamism and exclusivism. Although most of Indonesia's main Islamic organisations regard themselves as ahlus sunnah wal jamaah, FKAWJ believe that only they can rightly use this ascription. For example, Ja'far states that neither Nahdlatul Ulama nor Muhammadiyah can claim to be genuinely ahlus sunnah wal jamaah because they have deviated from the Qur'an and example of the Prophet Muhammad and have doctrines which are corrupted by non-Islamic sources.
FKAWJ also rejects democracy as 'incompatible with Islam' and refuses to support any political party, including the more Islamist parties. According to Ja'far, 'in democracy, people who don't understand anything, and they are the majority, elect their leaders without any educated considerations at all. They only elect those that give them money or say what they want to hear.' By these means, religious minorities and nominal Muslims have been able to 'thwart the application of Islamic law' in Indonesia. In a genuine Islamic society, it is God's law rather than the will of the people that is supreme. FKAWJ calls for democracy to be replaced by a council of experts (ahlu halli wal aqdi) dominated by Islamic scholars who are learned in Islamic law.The council would have the power to appoint the head of state and control government policy.
Its attitudes to women also place it outside the mainstream. Women are not permitted to hold leadership positions in FKAWJ and cannot join Laskar Jihad. For Ja'far, FKAWJ's main responsibility to women is 'to educate them and then marry them to pious men who are capable of preventing them from falling into sin. Men's role is to supervise women and ensure that their behaviour is properly Islamic.' Ja'far has three wives, each of whom wears Middle Eastern-style black gowns and headdresses which cover their faces.
Maluku
Laskar Jihad was formally established on 30 January 2000 in Yogyakarta in response to what FKAWJ saw as deliberate persecution of Muslims in Maluku. According to Ja'far, the decision to form Laskar Jihad came after FKAWJ despatched a team of researchers to Maluku in late 1999 to gather data on the conflict. It found evidence that Protestant churches had plans to form a breakaway Christian state comprising Maluku, West Papua and North Sulawesi. Remnants of the former Republic of the South Moluccas (RMS) based in the Netherlands were actively involved in this movement. A key part of their plan was to wage war on Muslims in those provinces in order to drive them to other areas. It was, he said, a plan for 'religious cleansing'. When pressed on what evidence there was to support this, he referred to the testimony of Christians who were 'loyal to Indonesia' who had leaked documents detailing the Protestant churches' plans.
Based on these findings, the FKAWJ declared those Christians in Maluku who were attacking Muslims to be kafir harbi or 'belligerent infidels'. Kafir harbi are seen as the most dangerous category of unbelievers and Islamic law obliges Muslims to wage war against them. In the case of the Laskar Jihad, the labelling of Christians as kafir harbi gave a powerful religious licence to kill. FKAWJ subsequently declared the current Islamic year to be the 'Year of Jihad' (literally 'religious struggle' but also with the connotation of holy war) and stated any Muslim killed fighting Christian kafir harbi would die a martyr. Ja'far stated that in mobilising the Laskar Jihad, he was merely doing his duty as a Muslim, because 'clearly the Abdurrahman Wahid government is unable or unwilling to protect the Islamic community. If the state can't protect us [ie. Muslims], then we must do it ourselves.' Ja'far maintains that Abdurrahman's government is anti-Islamic: 'It is positioned to oppress Muslim interests and protect those of the infidels.' FKAWJ is committed to bringing it down.
Mobilising the Laskar
The Laskar Jihad's membership and notoriety grew quickly in its early months. Many of its members were drawn from poorer, less educated sections of the Islamic community, though a small number of tertiary graduates and professionals also joined. It first made national headlines in March when Ja'far led an assault on the followers of a Muslim leader in Cirebon who had alleged that it was extorting funds from local non-Muslims and who had also condemned its plans to send fighters to Maluku (Gatra, 25 March 2000). The following month, it undertook a series of demonstrations and marches in Jakarta, including to the presidential palace and parliament, with many Laskar members waving unsheathed swords and daggers. In late April, about 3000 members departed for Maluku. Press reports estimate there are now about 6000 Laskar Jihad fighters in Maluku, though Ja'far claimed the figure is less than 4000. Total membership, according to the FKAWJ secretary-general, Ma'ruf Barhan, is now at 10,000 and plans are afoot to send units to new troublespots such as Poso in Central Sulawesi, where several hundred Muslims were killed in religious violence earlier in 2000.
Like many other militant Islamic groups, Laskar Jihad has proved adept at promoting its views via the media. It produces a magazine, Salafy, at an office and dormitory complex four kilometres from Degolan on the road to Yogyakarta and also has a regularly updated website run from FKAWJ's Jakarta office (www.LaskarJihad.or.id).
Ja'far dismisses widespread speculation that the Laskar Jihad is backed by influential sections of TNI, saying that the Islamic community has learned through bitter experience not to trust the military. In interviews earlier in the year, however, he and his lieutenants boasted of their relationship with TNI. In one interview, Ja'far claimed to have a hotline to TNI commander Admiral Widodo (Panji Masyarakat, 26 April 2000). Another FKAWJ leader also admitted that TNI officers have assisted in the training of Laskar Jihad (Gatra, 25 March 2000). He says that most of Laskar Jihad's funds are raised through sources in the Muslim community.
Greg Fealy (gfealy@coombs.anu.edu.au) is a research fellow in Indonesian history at the Australian National University
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
A Truth Commission could bring healing for a tragic past
Mary S Zurbuchen
Even seasoned observers had trouble predicting how difficult the 'post-Suharto era' would be. Yet, despite economic woes, social conflict and vacillating leadership, many Indonesians feel they have indeed embarked on a journey leading toward a more democratic society. Among the key milestones on the road, many say, are efforts to face up to Indonesia's troubled past.
The litany is familiar, from the mass violence and detentions following the 'failed coup' of 30 September 1965, through episodic suppression of dissent (Tanjung Priok, Lampung, Dili), to policies leading to systematic rights violations (Aceh, Irian Jaya, East Timor), and to student killings and mass violence in May and November of 1998. These events, and the patterns of impunity they point to, are troubling memories that to this day perpetuate dissatisfaction with government and undermine national cohesion.
In the public mind the New Order's controlling instruments - the military and police, intelligence, and bureaucracy - should account for this record. This sentiment is affirmed by a segment of the elite. Indications of commitment at the highest levels of Indonesia's new government to redress past wrongs include pending draft laws to establish a human rights court and a national truth commission. Still, the process of establishing 'truth' and 'justice' is a daunting assignment. It covers a diverse array of events including state as well as vigilante violence, sectarian conflict, detention, discrimination, disappearance, and systematic civil rights abuse. It must be dealt with at a moment when the state's relations with its citizens are undergoing profound redefinition (for example through decentralisation), while regional disaffections and separatism run high, and as an uneasy military relinquishes some of its formidable powers.
Two tough dilemmas face those who hope to shed light on matters long hidden under the New Order. One challenge is to determine whose truth needs to be told, and what definitions of victimisation and guilt are necessary to read accurately the long record of abuse. Another is to identify ways for 'truth-seeking' to create conditions for a stronger national compact, thus providing a foundation for reconciliation and social cohesion.
Uncensored
Previously suppressed accounts are being published for the first time. Colonel A. Latief, long jailed for his role in the events of 30 September 1965, has told his story in Tempo; Pramoedya Ananta Toer's once-banned book on Indonesia's Chinese was launched with much fanfare; and former persona non grata Benedict Anderson's commentaries are widely disseminated. Radio and television talk shows host uncensored discussion on topics such as East Timor's legacy of violence, New Order corruption, or the military's purported role in the deaths of the Trisakti University students in the Jakarta unrest of May 1998.
Once targets for official banning, book publishers are illuminating the past from new vantage points. Flower Aceh, an energetic non-governmental organisation promoting gender justice, produced a volume on women's accounts of Aceh's persistent violence (see Inside Indonesia April 2000). An important dissertation by Indonesian social scientist Hermawan Sulistyo has appeared analysing aspects of the 1965 mass killings. Garin Nugroho's semi-historical film Unburied Poem, which portrays an Acehnese 'didong' storyteller's memory of involvement with 1965 violence, even had a brief run in cineplex theatres. Despite the continued ban on the study of Marxism-Leninism, books on the left and socialism have proliferated, and were in fact best-selling items in book stalls during the August 2000 session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). In the world of arts and culture, meanwhile, an exuberant celebration of Chinese performance traditions suppressed under the New Order has taken place in many locales.
Other Indonesians are pulling the veil from patterns of violence through grass-roots voluntary service. The Volunteer Team for Humanity (Tim Relawan Kemanusiaan)has helped many victims and collected accounts of human rights abuse. Their work has inspired other networks in East Java, Bali, Medan, West Timor, Maluku, Pontianak, and Papua, often with links to faith communities and other NGOs.
Other types of local acknowledgement have challenged official versions of history. In early July 2000 Sultan Hamengku Buwono X of Yogyakarta dedicated a monument attesting that his father, the late Hamengku Buwono IX, conceived the March 1, 1949 republican assault on Dutch-held Yogyakarta. It directly counters New Order claims that then Lieutenant-General Suharto was the sole hero of that revolutionary operation. New private foundations and activist researchers have initiated studies into the legacy of 1965, the Tanjung Priok killings, and other events. Some of these groups seek to rehabilitate Indonesians long deprived of basic rights through political imprisonment after 1965.
Responding to growing public awareness, some senior figures have apologised publicly. In August 1999 then-armed forces chief General Wiranto apologised for military abuses in Aceh. During an otherwise low-key television appearance in March 2000, President Abdurrahman Wahid expressed his regrets over the involvement of his own Muslim organisation Nahdlatul Ulama in the mass killings of 1965-66 in Java. Many see apologies as inadequate, because they skirt issues of accountability and the complete revelation of the truth. But under the New Order, such gestures would have hardly been imaginable.
Popular concern has also led to formal processes. Commissions established at the national and provincial levels have submitted reports on abuses following East Timor's referendum in August 1999, on killings of civilians in Aceh, and on the fatal Tanjung Priok riots of 1984. A multi-sectoral fact-finding team that included legal experts, activists, department officials and military attempted to clarify the widespread May 12-15, 1998, violence and destruction in Jakarta. Another investigation, this one led by the national police, has attempted to fix responsibility for the violent takeover of the party headquarters of the PDI in July 1996. Each of these efforts has proved controversial. Each has been driven by the government's need to address specific political groups as well as international opinion. Public reaction has included charges of 'whitewashing', and complaints about weak prosecutorial follow-up. In the Aceh case, a trial and conviction (also much criticised) of low-ranking officers in the killings of Teungku Bantaqiah and his followers resulted from one such report.
Just as opportunities to bring perpetrators to account are opening up, the weaknesses of Indonesia's justice system appear especially glaring. Widespread judicial corruption, limited investigative capacity, and unreliable prosecutors are major constraints when 'truth and justice' are defined solely through the courts. Despite ongoing training programs for prosecutors and high court reforms, the judicial contests are slow. In frustration, some groups have called for 'people's trials' for Suharto and his family and associates.
Truth Commission
Recognising that formal legal process might not be adequate, some Indonesians have begun to look at establishing a Truth Commission to clarify the New Order record of human rights abuse. Early suggestions along this line came during the short-lived Habibie government, and highlighted the nation's need for 'national reconciliation'. The most detailed blueprint was created by Abdurrahman Wahid before he became president. His Independent Commission for National Reconciliation would have been a private effort involving prominent international advisors and a distinguished Indonesian panel of commissioners.
International donors have been willing to help Indonesians seeking to bring the past to light. In May 2000 a group of Indonesians from the government, military and police, research community and civil society groups went to South Africa for a two-week study of that country's efforts to confront its history of racial violence, including the well known Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Specialists from South Africa and other regions have visited Indonesia to share their knowledge. Senior government figures traveled to Seoul in July 2000 to learn about South Korea's prosecution of former national leaders. Human rights activists, women's advocates, and victims' groups have begun to learn about the growing record of international experience with truth commissions.
This experience shows that a society can stand to gain through the truth commission process. First, truth commissions allow individual victims to voice their own stories - and to be listened to, perhaps for the first time. Second, they promote public education through producing an official record of violations. Third, they can aid resolution by acknowledging the suffering of victims, mapping impacts of past crimes, and recommending reparations. Fourth, commissions can recommend specific reforms in public institutions such as the police and judiciary with the aim of preventing recurrence of rights violations. And finally, truth commissions can sort through issues of accountability and indicate perpetrators.
The twenty or so truth commissions that have taken place around the world have all operated in different ways, with various outcomes. There is no single model for Indonesia.
Would Indonesia benefit from a truth commission? What would be its objectives? What form would it take, and how much of the past would be included in its mandate? How would it accommodate Indonesia's great diversity, and the many 'truths' of different actors over the long New Order years? Would the commission have investigative powers? Could it establish a credible account of the past and meet the expectations of victims of rights abuse? Would it help or hinder the judicial process of bringing perpetrators to justice? Would bringing painful past events to light lead to vengeance in society? Is government committed to truth-seeking, or is a commission likely to be a weak instrument co-opted by political interests?
One of the greatest priorities is to promote public education and debate about the possible commission. Advocates believe that formal legal processes alone are not likely to provide the answers about the tragedies of the past. They are convinced that if Indonesia listens to the voices of diverse victims of rights violations, a different vision of society will begin to emerge. Both citizen commitment and consistent political will are needed. Only through looking back at such history can the country move forward to shape a better future.
Mary Zurbuchen (mzurbuchen@yahoo.com) directed the Jakarta office of the Ford Foundation, a private US philanthropy, between 1992 and 2000. She is now at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Living with tigers in South Aceh
John McCarthy
In January 1999, a local newspaper described the fear gripping villages around Labuan Haji, a township located on the western coast of southern Aceh. A tiger had attacked a schoolboy picking nutmeg in a forest garden near Hulu Pisang village, close to Mount Leuser. The tiger pounced, mauled, and finally killed the youth. Over the next few days, the tiger stalked the area, leaving footprints in the surrounds. Farmers abandoned their gardens for some days. Villagers wanted to poison the tiger, but the local authorities and the village heads sought the help of a traditional tiger expert a pawang.
During 1996-9, just before the latest conflict broke out in Aceh, I spent twelve months in villages around Tapaktuan, the capital of South Aceh. People often discussed the tiger. This dangerous animal clearly preoccupied villagers. Older villagers described how tigers were once common. People walking through the village at night sometimes met tigers sitting by the side of a path. Tiger attacks were always unusual, but they did occur. As villagers farming nutmeg in hillside gardens feared the tiger, they would go into the hills with three or more friends.
In South Aceh, villagers farming in the hills belong to an association of farmers working gardens within the same hillside territory. It is known as a seuneubok. Each seuneubok chooses a person respected for their forest skills to act as the customary head. When possible, farmers prefer to have a pawang work in this capacity a person with special esoteric knowledge. Village lore holds that pawang can contact the guardian spirits of the forest, the aulia, who appears in dreams. With the help of the aulia, pawang can call tigers.
In his book, Indonesian Eden: Aceh's rainforest, Mike Griffiths described how villagers believed dreams worked as a medium for communication. 'Years ago, a lady had a dream in which two orphaned kittens approached her and begged for food. She consented and the kittens expressed their gratitude. The next day while working in her ladang [fields], she saw two tigers at the forest's edge. Recognising the significance of her dream, she prepared food and left it at the place where she saw the tigers, whistling as she left. After that she continued to leave food out, and periodically the tigers came to eat perhaps learning to associate her call and whistle with the opportunity for easy food.'
Agreement
By tradition, each seuneubok has an understanding with one or more tigers known as seuneubok tigers, tigers that spend part of each year in the seuneubok. Older villagers recall that once there were up to three tigers in any seuneubok. Nowadays a seuneubok is lucky to have one. According to a tacit agreement between seuneubok members and the tiger, the resident tiger hunts pigs and other pests while leaving human beings alone. Villagers report that this tiger will also warn of the presence of 'strange' tigers from outside the area by leaving distinctive claw marks on the main path. When villagers see these marks, they understand that there are wild tigers in the seuneubok, and they will not go to their forest gardens that day.
In return for the tiger's benevolence, villagers provide for it. For instance, even to this day, custom requires that during the durian harvest farmers leave five durian fruit from each tree for the seuneubok tiger. Once a year, at the time the forest flowers, the seuneubok holds a feast, and villagers always think of resident tigers. At this time, seuneubok heads able to act as pawang call the tiger and provide rice, meat and vegetables. In the course of their duties, a seuneubok head able to act as a pawang becomes familiar and even befriends the seuneubok tiger, often meeting them in their forest gardens. At the time of the annual feast (kenduri), resident tigers have been known to seek out the pawang to remind him of the feast, leaving signs in the dirt, calling out, or even sleeping under a pawang's forest hut.
The customary rules relating to the seuneubok have a sacral element, and these are binding for humans and tigers alike. Villagers understand that tigers, being under the command of the aulia guardian spirit, enforce the customary laws. Any villagers attacked by tigers are held to be evil people who have broken Islamic precepts. A seuneubok head explained to me that the resident tiger 'is on duty there. If there is someone who steals from the village and takes it to the mountain, he will be disturbed by the tiger.' However, the pawang will hunt a tiger that violates the tacit seuneubok covenant. If a tiger attacks and kills someone, the pawang sets out to trap it.
A local forestry official told me that tigers tend to come down into the village areas during the western monsoon. Females bring their cubs down to avoid older males who can attack cubs, while older, tired tigers also descend out of the hills at this time.
To deal with tiger attacks, the forestry department regularly uses the skills of the pawang. 'We used to have a pawang on our staff,' the official said. But most pawang are now over fifty, and young people are no longer training to become pawang. Like the tiger itself, the pawang are becoming increasingly rare. Since the departmental pawang died, the forestry department has had to hire pawang to help track errant tigers. According to the forester, pawang 'say that a tiger won't want to enter a trap if he is not in the wrong.'
Poachers
The Sumatran tiger is highly endangered. According to one estimate, less than four hundred still survive in Sumatra's shrinking forests. Nonetheless, in some villages in South Aceh villagers often see them. 'People say the tigers are going extinct,' an older villager said to me, 'but those people haven't been here.' A forester confirmed this: 'We don't know the number of tigers,' he said, 'but there are lots of tigers in some places, and here tigers often disturb the villages.'
As the forestry department wants to conserve tiger numbers, they even try to safeguard man-eating tigers. While villagers wish to catch a killer tiger, if possible foresters will drive the tiger back into the jungle. 'We have to be very sensitive handling these cases', he said.
Over 1998-9, the World Wide Fund for Nature found 66 Sumatran tigers ready for illegal sale in the markets of Sumatra. Traders sell tiger products such as skin, teeth, claws and whiskers, mostly as ingredients in traditional Chinese medicines. The Jakarta Post reported recently that traders can earn between Rp 300,000 to Rp 500,000 per tooth. Poachers who catch tigers use poison or snares, but these are not pawang. 'We haven't seen this [ie. pawang poaching tigers for gain] ourselves', the forestry field officer noted, 'although there are storiesA pawang is generally angry if people catch tigers. This is because he considers the tiger as part of his happiness'.
When a villager was killed near Tapaktuan in the mid 1990s, a pawang caught the errant tiger. Before the forestry department took it away, the local forestry office put the caged animal on exhibition for a week. Later, foresters released this representative of a highly endangered species near the regional centre of Tapaktuan. But villagers were disappointed. The tiger had killed someone, and they felt it wasn't right to return his freedom.
John McCarthy (J.McCarthy@murdoch.edu.au) is a researcher at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Western Australia.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
A weak government struggles with 'people power', poverty and pulp companies
Lesley Potter and Simon Badcock
A new timber boom is underway in Riau province, but much of it is illegal. The once extensive forests in this central Sumatran province have been logged, then partly converted to plantations of pulpwood and oil palm. Two huge pulp and paper plants, Indah Kiat Pulp and Paper (IKPP) and Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP), use 4.4 tons of wood for each ton of pulp they manufacture. Though both have pulp plantations, it is cheaper for them to obtain wood from natural forests while stocks last. Official statistics suggest that all the woodworking industries in Riau, including plywood factories and legal sawmills, need almost 16 million cubic metres of wood per year. Production from all legalsources is only 5.5 million. There is thus an extensive illegal trade in timber, increased further by demand from neighbouring provinces, and from Malaysia and Singapore.
Owners of legal sawmills, plus a multitude of illegal ones, compete for raw materials with the large pulp companies. It was recently estimated that 96% of Riau's roads have been ruined by the hundreds of heavy logging trucks which choke them day and night. Communities still in possession of traditional forests are increasingly being persuaded to cut and sell them.
The reformasi following the fall of the Suharto government coincided with the continuing impact of Indonesia's economic crisis. Feelings of greater freedom among local people, coupled with economic need, resulted in the forest laws being increasingly challenged. Conservation areas are at risk, their natural products seen as treasures for the taking, their protection half-hearted at best. Not only local citizens are involved in the profitable timber business but civil servants, the police, the army and local elites as well.
How will recent moves to decentralise authority away from Jakarta to the districts affect the forests? The answer is not yet clear. On the one hand, district leaders see them as potential sources of income. On the other, they are more aware of the value of preserving local resources and traditions. In some cases, it is already too late. In others, there may still be some action which conservation-minded local officials and non-government organisations can take to at least slow the process of destruction. We use as an example of the first situation, the Bukit Batabuh 'protected forest', and of the second, the Bukit Tigapuluh (Thirty Hills) National Park. Both are in southern Riau.
Bukit Batabuh
This 25,000 hectare 'protected forest' was established in 1984 to protect the watershed in part of the hilly border region between Riau and West Sumatra provinces. It now presents a stark image, with scarcely a tree to be seen. Instead, small patches of cassava or rubber are visible on the rapidly eroding and largely bare slopes. The burnt out shell of a forest warden's post is a reminder of recent conflict.
On our first visit in April 2000, roadside signs still proclaimed the protected forest and warned of heavy fines for trespass - Rp100 million or ten years jail for cutting, burning or settling in the area. When we returned in July, most signs had disappeared. The story involves a series of actors, the first being illegal loggers from West Sumatra. The forest on that side of the border is classified 'production forest', a category now appearing to invite invasion, unless a logging company remains active and vigilant. The invaders crossed the border, unaware of its existence, and began removing the trees from the protected area to sell in Padang.
People in Lubuk Jambi, the nearest village on the Riau side, immediately became irate. According to their cultural (adat) head, Bukit Batabuh was their traditional forest, which had been taken by the Suharto government in 1984, signed over by village elders without popular consent. As there was no forestry department action to stop the thieves from West Sumatra, the Lubuk Jambi people began gradually occupying the area themselves. They cut and burned patches of forest and marked out farms, but did not remove timber to sell, claiming they were too poor to organise such logging activities. The occupation was carried out step by step, one family at a time. People argued that they needed the land in order to eat. Previously, they had been afraid of government sanctions. With reformasi, they were no longer afraid. Eventually, forest guards accompanied by soldiers arrived from the provincial capital Pekanbaru and confiscated six of the people's chainsaws. This led to an angry confrontation and the burning of the forest post.
Much negotiation followed between the village and the government, which the adat chief complained took too long, allowing access to others who removed 80% of the remaining timber, which was sold to sawmills, plywood and pulp companies. As a result of the negotiation, 652 households will be allowed to settle on the 'protected forest' land. Each is to be allocated two hectares in a rubber cooperative. Another 250 hectares will be turned over to the people to replant and manage as a social forest (hutan kemasyarakatan).
The forestry department head with jurisdiction over the area denied that the forest belonged to Lubuk Jambi. He told us that on his first visit in 1977, he remembered Bukit Batabuh as real primary forest, empty of human presence. He argued that it was only reformasi that made the people fearless of defying forestry regulations. The local district head (bupati) agreed, describing their activities as resulting from 'the euphoria of reformasi'. They did acknowledge that the people needed access to some land, and this has been granted. The people's claims have thus largely succeeded, but the valuable timber has brought them no reward and the 'protected forest' has virtually disappeared.
This case demonstrates the complete breakdown of the forest regulations which had previously restrained the people's understandable desire to claim back their lands. The credibility of the claim was acknowledged during the protracted negotiations, but it was unfortunate that at that time the forest appeared unprotected and was therefore quickly destroyed by unscrupulous outsiders.
Bukit Tigapuluh
This park came into being in 1995, its 128,000 hectares of former protected forest and logging concession being divided 70%-30% between Riau and Jambi provinces. It contains one of the few intact blocks of Sumatran lowland rain forest, with high biodiversity, including 660 plant species and populations of several endangered mammals, among them the Sumatran tiger.
Within the park is a small resident population of minority Talang Mamak and Kubu people, still leading relatively traditional lives. Outside the park boundaries, in the buffer zone, is a much larger and more heterogeneous community of Talang Mamak and Melayu, Javanese transmigrants, and new arrivals from North Sumatra and Aceh.
The main threats to the continuing viability of the park arise from the buffer zone. Coal mining and oil palm plantations extend right up to its boundaries. But an even larger problem comes from irresponsible commercial logging. PT STUD, a plywood factory in Jambi, is organising local communities to sell their traditional forests to its factory through a logging company subsidiary. The company provides heavy equipment to help locals conduct large-scale clearing. In fact the locals are being used simply as labourers, their returns on the timber being minimal. A study by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), a NGO concerned with protecting the park and its people, described the logging company officials as 'civet cats', and the illiterate, unsophisticated Talang Mamak villagers as mere 'chickens', easily devoured by the fierce civet cats.
One reason for this rush by local people to clear their traditional forest (held under hak ulayat tenure, now more recognised as conferring communal ownership), is the extremely low prices which have prevailed for rubber, the staple commodity. People believe that oil palm will solve their economic problems, so they band together in co-operative farmer groups to clear sections of village forest for conversion to that crop. They need money for this activity and are seduced by the availability of 'cash money' from the logging companies who encourage them in further forest work. While existing access roads through the park have been closed in an attempt by the authorities to inhibit trespass, villagers seeking timber supplies cut new roads with borrowed bulldozers, sometimes penetrating far inside the park.
The strategy of the park authorities is to cancel all logging and oil palm licences in the buffer zone. The area would become a social forestry project, in which local communities have more control. The bupati has agreed to this plan, but there is no guarantee the Talang Mamak will like it. They may talk about the cultural importance of the forest, but they are still keen to sell timber. Several traditional leaders are heavily involved in logging. According to WWF, reformasi has legitimated the removal of timber from the park and its buffer zone using local people. The implementation of existing regulations is too weak to prevent such activities and people believe themselves free to dispose of the forests.
These two examples contrast the ways in which reformasihas impacted on local communities, in a context of extreme timber demand. In Bukit Batabu the flouting of the rules as the protected forest was opened for logging encouraged locals wanting back their land. As they struggled to reclaim it, others removed the forest. Around Bukit Tigapuluh, timber has become a quick cash commodity, even though this cash is far below the true value of the resource. The poverty of the people and the extreme difficulty of controlling the timber trade make a mockery of official and NGO attempts at protecting the park. Until the pulp and logging companies begin to act in a more responsible manner, the future of the Riau forests and protected areas looks bleak indeed. There is a faint hope that decentralisation will enable more control to be exercised over the activities of rogue companies, but the involvement of so many people in the quest for fibre, from the poorest villagers to high-placed officials, provides few grounds for optimism.
Lesley Potter (lesley.potter@adelaide.edu.au) teaches at the University of Adelaide. Simon Badcock (simon.badcock@adelaide.edu.au) is Lesley's research officer with much field experience in Indonesia.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Greed and stupidity destroy the last peatland wilderness, home to thousands of orangutan
Jack Rieley
Southeast Asia contains seventy percent of the world's total tropical peatland, mostly in Indonesia and Malaysia. But these vast peatland landscapes are under great pressure from years of resource exploitation and land development. Government policies promoting land conversion from peat swamp forest to agriculture have greatly reduced the area of the natural ecosystem. Ecologists have always understood the environmental degradation this brought about, but now the economic basis of the conversion is under challenge as well.
Until a decade ago there were still 2.5 million hectares of peat swamp forest in Malaysia and 25 million hectares in Indonesia. Most of this was part of the commercial forestry estate in both countries. This area has now been reduced to around one million hectares in the former and 17 million hectares in the latter. The land has mostly been converted to plantation use, especially oil palm, although small farmers from outside the locality have been used to open some parts to new settlements.
The largest of these land conversion schemes was the Mega Rice Project in Central Kalimantan. The brainchild in 1996 of former President Suharto, it was the most glaring misuse of tropical peatland in recent times. Suharto felt obliged to restore Indonesia's rice self-sufficiency. In 1985 the Food and Agriculture Organisation gave him a medal for such sufficiency. But since then about one million hectares of rice paddy in Java had been sold for commercial and urban development. To compensate, he decreed that an equivalent area be created out of lowland peat swamps in Borneo. In theory this proposal had much to commend it. However, the peatland soil characteristics in Central Kalimantan are completely different from those of volcanic Java. The project was doomed to fail before it started.
Knowing that international aid organisations and funding agencies would not agree to the Mega Rice Project, President Suharto authorised expenditure from internal Indonesian sources, especially the reforestation fund in the forestry ministry. The money was spent largely on excavating drainage and irrigation channels, done by companies owned by his cronies. The forest resource within the project area was allocated for clear felling, again by companies owned by Suharto's family and friends. No independent environmental impact assessment was done beforehand. Only afterwards did a team of so-called experts, of whom hardly any had experience of peatland ecology, carry out a minor one.
The Mega Project was an unmitigated disaster. Not one blade of productive rice was ever grown there, in spite of the removal of at least half a million hectares of primary peat swamp forest, the extermination of around 5,000 orangutan and myriads of other wildlife, and the creation of more than 4,600 kilometres of channels. This environmental folly, many believe, contributed to Suharto's downfall. His successor and protPresident Habibie stopped the project and handed over the land to be managed by the forestry ministry and the Central Kalimantan provincial government.
Ruins
By the time the project was abandoned, major damage had been done to the regional and global environment. Forestry resources had been ransacked, government money had been misappropriated, and the economy and quality of life of indigenous people had been irreparably disrupted. Five years after the Mega Rice Project commenced, one million hectares of wetland landscape lie in ruins, a wasteland testimony to human greed and stupidity. The peat swamp forest is either gone or in terminal decay. The 60,000 settlers who were transferred to part of the area can grow neither rice nor enough substitute crops to exist. Disease and poverty are rife. Many have reverted to despoiling the nearest remaining forest for firewood. Others have joined the legion of illegal loggers, who are financed by a new generation of crooks replacing the Suharto cronies in raping this sensitive landscape.
The sad story does not end there. Rubbing salt in the human-induced wounds, nature has also contributed to the saga of destruction of the peat swamp forests of Southeast Asia. The combination of forest destruction, land clearance and an exceptionally severe El Nino climatic event in 1997 led to the severest forest and peatland fires ever known in this region. Between half a million and three million hectares of vegetation burned, much of it on peat. The fires penetrated into the dried-out surface peat to a depth of up to 1.5 metres.
At least one billion tonnes of carbon were released into the atmosphere - more than that released by the fossil fuels the European Union burns in a year. It undid an estimated ten years of carbon fixation by all of the world's pristine peat bogs. The radiative forcing generated by this sudden release of carbon could have added about 0.5 parts per million carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This is a significant addition to the global greenhouse gas concentration. It was a disaster of monumental proportions, yet governments and international environmental organisations have underplayed it. Why?
The answer to this last question lies in the relationship between the governments in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, and business interests involved in land development and resource exploitation. These regimes and the companies that support them have vested interests in removing forests, draining peatlands, and establishing plantation crops, especially oil palm. Intensive logging, forest destruction and land conversion having been taking place in Indonesia and Malaysia for more than twenty years. Several severe fire and haze episodes occurred in that time. In developing countries, fire is the only effective tool for clearing land cheaply prior to converting it to agriculture. But the fires attracted little publicity, and nothing was done to stop the activities that caused them. Too much money was at stake for those involved, whose influence reached to the highest levels of government.
The Malaysian and Singaporean governments made no comment until the devastating 1997/98 fires occurred - a combined result of the extreme El Nino drought and the Mega Rice Project land clearance in Central Kalimantan. Even so they intervened only after the fires had been raging for more than six weeks, and initial comments were almost muted. Could this reluctance to condemn the lack of action by the Indonesian government be linked to the fact that companies owned by Malaysian and Singapore interests, including family members of prominent politicians, were involved?
A new scam
The eventual response of the Indonesian government was to cancel the Mega Rice Project. But in the absence of any real understanding of what do about the disaster, it rolled this failed scheme into an even larger proposal to develop 2.8 million hectares of tropical peatland in Central Kalimantan. An enormous sum of money had already been squandered in the failed attempt to create a vast area of rice paddies. Officials clearly believed that throwing even more money at it was the only cure. The infrastructure for this Integrated Economic Area within the Kapuas, Kahayan and Barito Catchments (Kapet Das Kakab) is now in place. Instead of rice paddy this plan favours oil palm and rubber plantations. The new proposal is yet another scam to justify removal of a further half million hectares of pristine peat swamp forest, as well as to launder money to certain business enterprises and government officials under the guise of land clearance, infrastructure provision and planting incentives.
In late 1999 Erna Witoelar, minister of public works and regional development in the new government (and a former environmental activist), put the Kapet on hold. On the one hand, this action was a positive acknowledgement that Central Kalimantan's peat swamps are special and difficult to convert to agriculture. On the other hand, it created a vacuum of indecision that will provide opportunities for unscrupulous developers to suggest further crazy schemes. They see the potential to make more money from land conversion and the provision of infrastructure. One thing is certain, however. They will not grow economically sustainable crops with any more success than did the Mega Rice Project.
The losers, as always, are the environment (because of irreparable loss of biodiversity and natural resource functions), the provincial government (who have to deal with the problems), and the poor farmers (who have been deposited in a bleak landscape without sustainable means to survive). The only glimmer of hope is the new democratically elected government in Jakarta and its stated determination to root out collusion, corruption and nepotism. International agencies are supporting (forcing!) it in this attempt. New laws are being enacted, but enforcement is slow to follow. It will be a long haul. Corruption is deeply rooted in all levels of society, and some of the worst offenders are the supposed law enforcers. By the time the problem is sorted out there may be no natural peat swamp forest left.
There must be a new approach to managing tropical peatlands. It must begin with a detailed evaluation of all its attributes, services and values, including biodiversity, ecology and natural resources. Land uses for nature conservation, landscape protection and sustainability of natural resources must be given equal weighting to agricultural development and human settlement.
Jack Rieley (Jack.Rieley@nottingham.ac.uk) is Director of the Kalimantan Tropical Peat Swamp Forest Research Project and Vice President of the International Peat Society. Further information from his web site www.geography.nottingham.ac.uk/~rieley/research.htm. Inside Indonesia first described the peat project in edition 48, October 1996.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Without Suharto to help out, an Australian gold mining company in Kalimantan is having trouble with the local community
Jeff Atkinson
The story of the Australian-owned Indo Muro mine in Central Kalimantan illustrates what can happen when a mining company operates under the auspices of a corrupt and oppressive government and passively accepts the standards of that government. In this case this meant not negotiating with landowners over access, not paying proper compensation for land and other property acquired by the mine, and allowing the police to clear out small-scale miners who had been working the area before them.
Long before the company ever appeared in the Indo Muro area, local Dayak people knew of and were working gold-bearing deposits there. Small scale mining, with a pan in the river or using hand-dug shafts and tunnels, had become a major activity and a useful economic fallback for poor communities when agriculture was not paying well. It had also attracted large numbers of outsiders. Mining settlements had grown up at the deposits, which eventually took on the aspect of small towns.
While some of the mining techniques used by these small-scale miners were benign, others were environmentally damaging. Some used mercury to extract the gold. Because it was cheap, they preferred to throw it into the river after use rather than try and recover it. Some small enterprises, financed by outsiders, used pumps and high pressure water hoses to wash away river banks etc to get at the gold, while others used pumps to dredge river beds for gold-bearing sands.
But on the positive side, this activity provided villagers in this remote and neglected area with a level of economic security that they had never known before.
Australian
In 1985, the Indonesian-registered company PT Indo Muro Kencana (PT-IMK) was given a contract of work by the Indonesian government to explore and mine in an area of 480 square kilometres, covering the main deposits. In 1992 an Australian company, Ashton Mining Ltd, acquired 90 percent ownership of PT-IMK. The following year, Ashton Mining Ltd was reorganised, and their gold operations handed over to a newly formed company, Aurora Gold Ltd, based in Perth, in which Ashton retained a 30 percent share. Aurora Gold Ltd now owns 100 percent of PT-IMK and is the operator of the mine. Gold production began in December 1994.
To clear the way for PT-IMK, the Indonesian government in the late 1980s declared all the small-scale mining within the lease area 'illegal' and told people in the settlements they had to leave. Most refused to go, and when persuasion failed, the army and police were sent in. First they frightened people off, then they came in with bulldozers and simply knocked everything down - houses, shops, mosques - smashed all the mining machinery and filled in the mine shafts. What was left was then burnt, leaving nothing but rubble. These forced closures continued from 1987 till 1993.
'The company burnt down my house, along with my household goods, and even my clothes. It was all destroyed in front of my eyes. I cried. It was really terrible. So much was burnt. I lost a lot of my possessions. All burnt. They didn't give me a new house.'(A woman, who now sells vegetables door to door in nearby Puruk Cahu, recalling what happened in 1989).
These evictions did not however mean the end of small-scale mining. There were still some deposits outside the PT-IMK lease area worth working, and people returned to those within the lease whenever they could, risking arrest or worse at the hands of the Mobile Brigade. In a 1996 document, the company estimated that there were 1,002 'illegal miners' in its lease area, and said it intended to:
'Impress upon the Department of Mining and Energy and the police (Mobile Brigade) the need to take steps to restore security and orderShow that the local government and the company have rights and powers which must be maintained. If steps are not taken against illegal miners it will be considered as a sign of weakness and the problem will get worse.'
As well as the mining areas, land which had been used for growing rice, rubber, fruit and other crops was also appropriated by the mine. People who lost land and crops were given compensation, but the rate was set by government and was very low. Measurement of the land to be compensated for was carried out by a local government team, and owners had little or no input into the process. Many felt ignored and cheated. Some who protested felt the full force of police intimidation. The result was considerable anger, frustration and anxiety.
'We are small people, we have nothing to live from except planting our fields, plantations and panning for gold. That's all. Since Indo Muro came, they have appropriated our fields. We are not allowed by them to mine for gold. So what will be our fate if it goes on like this?' (Interview, Beringin, January 1998).
In the years that followed, the company appeared unwilling or unable to deal adequately with these problems, and unwilling to talk with any group other than official ones. In August 1999 the Australian owners, Aurora Gold Limited, issued what they called a 'statement of regret':
'The company (Aurora Gold Ltd) recognises that prior to acquiring its 90% ownership of PT Indo Muro Kencana in 1993 there were certain actions undertaken by previous owners and government security agencies that disadvantaged the local community in the contract of work area. While the company had no control over, or responsibility for, any such actions by former owners and government security agencies, it deeply regrets such incidents and the trauma that may have been caused to the community.'
On the question of compensation it was resolute. It would offer 150 jobs at the mine to local people, and try and improve community assistance programs, but would make no restitution for past injustices against small-scale miners because they were, it said, illegal squatters:
'PT-IMK rejects all claims for diggings, shafts, pits, rock crushing-milling buildings, stamp mills and associated activities and equipment declared illegal by the Government of the Republic of Indonesia.'
After Suharto
Residual resentment over unresolved claims and abuses by the police, together with the company's close identification with the Suharto government and its security apparatus, did it no good when that regime finally fell in 1998. Taking advantage of the looser political situation, large numbers of people, locals and outsiders, some of them backed by local officials, swarmed into the mining areas. The company described what happened in its 1999 annual report:
'The whole of 1999 was marked by increasing incursions by illegal miners into operating pits. At times mining operations had to cease as hundreds of illegal miners entered the pits to steal freshly blasted high-grade ore. In late June a group with land rights claims closed the Bantian-Batu Tembak (BBT) mining complex. Negotiations with this group proved difficult and in mid July, before the BBT complex could be reopened, another group which claimed outstanding land compensation from pre-Aurora activities also closed off access to the Permata-Hulubai (PBH) complex.
The loss of BBT and PBH left the Kerikil complex as the only pits providing ore to the processing plant, supplemented by low-grade stockpile material. In late September however a roadblock on the Kerikil haul road by unrepresentative protestors, agitated by a local non-government organisation, stopped company access to the Kerikil pits.'
By this time the community was becoming divided between those who wanted the mine to continue, including company employees, and those who wanted the company out and a return to the former situation. By early 2000, the replacement of some local officials meant that PT-IMK was able to obtain enough official support to have the police sent in to clear out the pits. The company was able to resume operations, although periodic illegal mining continues in some pits as well as occupations by land rights and compensation claimants. Meanwhile, the clearing operations have now added another set of grievances against the company.
Things might have been different for both the company and local people if PT-IMK had from the beginning been willing to respect the fundamental social and economic rights of those impacted by its operations. These include the right of indigenous landowners to determine what happens to their land; the right of those who lose the sources of their income to compensation that enables them to replace them; and the right of people to be free of violence and harassment by the police. Expressing regret is all very well, but restitution of those rights is also required.
Jeff Atkinson (jeffa@caa.org.au) is Mining Ombudsman with the non-government organisation Community Aid Abroad (Oxfam Australia, based in Melbourne, Australia). He previously wrote on mining in Indonesia in 'Inside Indonesia' no.47, July-September 1996.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Popular protest closes a huge paper and pulp mill in Sumatra, but others go on polluting
Frances Carr
It looks as though the fate of PT Indorayon Inti Utama's controversial paper pulp and rayon fibre plant in North Sumatra has been sealed less by the Wahid government than by thousands of local protestors. Indorayon's financial backers are tired of waiting for the company to break the deadlock with the Porsea community, which has cost over two years of lost production and run up massive debts. Foreign banks and bondholders which own 86% of Indorayon stopped making monthly US$1 million operational payments on 1 September 2000. The company announced that it could hold out no longer and started to lay off its 7,000 workforce within weeks. A US$400 million debt for equity swap agreed last year was dependent on pulp production resuming. Meanwhile the government, after much wavering, seems to have lost the will to prop it up.
Why was Indorayon singled out among the plethora of cases in Indonesia where companies flout environmental regulations and violate local communities' rights? What message does Indorayon's closure send out to investors in other socially and environmentally damaging investments in Indonesia? What about the negative impacts of the pulp and paper industry as a whole?
Long-standing grievances against Indorayon over environmental and health issues erupted soon after the downfall of Suharto. Production virtually came to a halt in mid-1998 when thousands of local residents prevented trucks from bringing raw materials to the mill for four months. Months of violent confrontations between local people and the security forces resulted, in March 1999, in a presidential order to close the pulp plant pending a full audit of its social and environmental impacts. However, it never happened.
Shut down
Indorayon has become a test case for the credibility of Wahid's government at home and abroad. As an opposition figure during the Suharto years, 'Gus Dur' developed links with many leaders of civil society groups. Environmental non-government organisations (NGOs) broadly welcomed his appointment as president in October 1999. His environment minister, Sonny Keraf, was quick to point out that companies investing or operating in the 'new' Indonesia must expect more scrutiny of the social and environmental impacts of their operations. He set up teams to investigate the most obvious cases, including mines owned by Freeport, Rio Tinto and Newmont, but Indorayon was the only pulp plant. Keraf's departmental review revealed that the company had violated pollution and toxic waste edicts and had not implemented its environmental management plans. The minister announced in early 2000 that Indorayon should be shut down for good.
Meanwhile, the company and its supporters (which include important local government figures) denied the allegations, promised to address community concerns and lobbied Jakarta intensively to allow the pulp plant to reopen. Jusuf Kalla, then Minister for Trade and Industry, explained that Indorayon 'is a big investment. Such a factory today will need US$1 billion investment to establish. The export value, which reaches about US$100 million a year, and the ability to absorb 7,000 workforce mean something to the state and the people.' Despite Keraf's recommendations, no company in Indonesia had ever been shut down on environmental grounds, and there was genuine uncertainty in Jakarta about how legally to do this.
In May 2000, the government decided that the paper pulp side of Indorayon's operations could start up again, but the production of dissolving pulp (the raw material for rayon fibre) should not be resumed. The decision provoked appeals from all directions. Environmentalists argued that the company's past pollution and community record justified a complete shutdown. The company claimed its survival depended on the Porsea plant's unique facility to switch between pulp for either the paper or the textiles industries according to market conditions and relative profitability. The community was split between those who wanted the plant to close on environmental and health grounds and others, mainly workers at the factory, who supported its reopening. Protests involving thousands of local people, backed by students and NGOs, once again prevented the mill from resuming production. A student was shot dead by police in clashes between protestors in June 2000. Around a dozen people have been killed and many hundreds seriously injured in the 27-month conflict. Indorayon's increasingly desperate bids to address local grievances with promises of more employment, business opportunities and a community foundation funded by the company and its foreign investors were rejected by the people.
The Wahid government is clearly reluctant to let Indorayon go to the wall. The closure of a company once listed on the Jakarta and New York stock exchanges sends out all the wrong signals to the investment community at a time when the government is desperate to attract foreign investment, increase tax revenues and boost Indonesia's exports. It has lost at least $50 million in tax revenues and other fees from Indorayon last year alone. Some companies have already threatened to take their investment elsewhere unless they can continue 'business as usual', even if this rides roughshod over local communities' interests. Indonesian environmentalists are disappointed over this government stance. Mas Achmad Santosa, executive director of the Indonesian Centre for Environmental Law (ICEL) said at a press conference this May: 'Unfortunately, what the government cares about now is getting as many investments as possible. The preservation of the environment has taken a back seat.'
Given IMF pressure to increase export revenues, Wahid's government can hardly afford to close down export-orientated pulp plants. Indonesia exported about three million tons of pulp and three million tons of paper in 1999. Paper pulp prices on world markets have risen sharply in 2000, to US$579 per ton in September compared with US$372 per ton this time last year. This has benefited Indonesian companies, which export most of their production. Among them are the other giant producers Indah Kiat (pulp) and Tjiwi Kimia (paper), both part of the Sinar Mas group, headed by Eka Tjipta Widjaja, as well as Riau Andalan Pulp and Paper (RAPP), which is controlled (like Indorayon) by Sukanto Tanoto's Raja Garuda Mas Group. They have also benefited from the weak rupiah as their input costs are mainly in local currency but revenues are paid in dollars. Their profitability has helped the big pulp and paper companies to ride out economic and political storms despite shortages of raw materials, lack of domestic demand and investigations into their financial connections with the Suharto family.
Environmental movement
However, the Indonesian government might decide to overcome its reluctance and accept Indorayon's closure as the lesser of two evils. To facilitate the resumption of production against the majority of the community's wishes would smack of the excesses of the Suharto years.
The North Sumatra pulp mill was a flagship development for the Suharto regime. The economy was booming when construction of the paper pulp mill began in 1986. The government wanted to boost the growth of Indonesia's textile industry by developing rayon fibre production in order to reduce dependence on imported cotton. By 1993, Indorayon was the first Indonesian plant to produce dissolving pulp. It is now relatively old and small, with a capacity to produce either 240,000 metric tons of paper pulp or 60,000 tons of rayon fibre a year.
The Indonesian environmental movement also boomed during the 1980s. Indorayon has long been a landmark case for it. In 1988, the largest and best-known environmental group Walhi (Indonesian Forum for the Environment) filed a lawsuit against Indorayon and five government departments for failure to comply with the 1982 Environment Law. The case was lost on the flimsy grounds that the company had not started full commercial production when the action was brought, so the court considered it impossible to gauge potential pollution. Nevertheless, the case established the important legal precedent that NGOs had the right to sue companies or even the government over environmental issues.
The outcome of the lost case was that inhabitants of villages near the Indorayon plant suffered a decade of polluted air and water. The acrid fumes which poured out of the smoke stacks day and night could be smelt several kilometres away. Local people blame the high incidence of asthma, chest infections and other respiratory ailments on the factory, but health care facilities are so poor that there is no proof. The evidence of acid rain is obvious: corrugated iron roofs of houses and churches used to last two generations; since Indorayon, they corrode away within five years. There has been a dramatic improvement in environmental quality during the two years that the pulp mill has effectively been closed. Trucks no longer thunder through Batak villages every minute day and night, destroying roads and bridges. The air is refreshingly clear, as elsewhere in the Lake Toba region, and local people are again able to drink the water and to fish in the River Asahan.
Indorayon has been a cause celebre for environmentalists. Unfortunately it is one of the very few paper and pulp cases to receive NGO attention at local, national and international levels. There is no network of Indonesian civil society groups which focuses on the pulp industry comparable to the national information and advocacy networks which exist for the forest, mining and, more recently, palm oil sectors. Indorayon is far from being Indonesia's largest or most polluting pulp operation. The industry is keen to point out that it has cleaned up its act. Larger plants in Sumatra, like PT RAPP and Indah Kiat's Perawang units have installed more advanced and less polluting pulping, bleaching and waste management technologies.
Indonesian environmental groups have been strongly influenced by international campaigning on pulp industry pollution in the 'North' where led by Greenpeace - the debate has largely centred on dioxins. Fears about the long-term health risks posed by minute quantities of these carcinogens promoted the introduction of 'elemental chlorine-free' technology (ECF), which use chlorine compounds rather than chlorine gas, in Europe, North America and some plants in Southeast Asia. ECF technology only became compulsory for new plants in Indonesia after a chlorine tank burst at Indorayon in November 1993. Thousands of people fled the Porsea area fearing another Bhopal incident.
Polluters
It is true that the worst environmental problems may well be associated with the smallest and oldest pulp and paper mills, especially those in Java which are located in densely populated areas. However, the big plants remain major polluters. Concerns about dioxins or accidental chemical releases have diverted attention from the everyday realities of people living in the pollution shadow of pulp and paper plant. The fact remains that all current technologies turning wood chips into pulp require a large amount of fresh water, fuel and a cocktail of highly corrosive chemicals, and produce substantial quantities of noxious wastes.
The Tanjung Enim Lestari plant (PT TEL) in South Sumatra is a case in point. This paper pulp mill which came on line in late 1999 will be one of the largest in Indonesia, with production rising from 450,000 tons to 1 million tons of pulp per year. Communities in the Muara Enim district complained to the local branch of Walhi about the stench from the factory and tainted water supplies within weeks of start-up. PT TEL's environmental impact assessment, approved by local and central government, reveals that even when waste treatment units are working optimally over 18 tons of sulphurous gases will be released every day. Giant pipes over two metres wide pour 80,000 cubic metres of waste per day into the River Lematang - the main source of water for drinking and all other domestic needs for the tens of thousands of people whose homes lie along its banks. These discharges will deplete oxygen levels in the river and make the water murkier, affecting the aquatic ecosystems on which local fisher folk depend for a living.
It is important to note that these levels of pollution are the norm. More serious impacts will result if waste treatment plants fail, as happened at Indorayon on several occasions, resulting in extensive fish kills. There are many examples of pulp plants which try to reduce costs by not using all technology intended to reduce pollution. In a telling phrase, PT TEL's environmental impact document states that 'the plant can produce 100% ECF pulp if needed'. In other words, unless local authorities insist, the company could opt for more polluting options.
Other problems
The impacts of Indonesian paper pulp production extend beyond the effects of pollution and social conflict in the vicinity of pulp mills, but space is insufficient to discuss them at length. First, the pulp industry is inevitably linked to the destruction of natural forests. Too few timber plantations have been established to supply the pulp industry. The vast majority of the rapid growth experienced by Indonesia's pulp and paper industry from the late 1980s until the mid 90s took place at the expense of the country's tropical rainforest. Over-capacity in the pulp industry is an important factor driving illegal logging. In 1998, Indonesia exported 6.7 million tons of paper and pulp three times 1997 levels - while domestic demand fell by half to 1.3 million tons. This level of production consumes the equivalent of 16 million cubic metres of timber (after imports of pulp and waste paper have been taken into account). Yet the official supply of all Indonesian timber, including 'conversion forest', was only 21 million cubic metres just the capacity of Indonesia's plywood mills.
Nevertheless, the pulp and paper industry is set to expand further. It is three times cheaper to produce paper pulp in Indonesia than Sweden, mainly because of the industry's vertical integration, in which the whole process from logging to pulp is controlled by giant conglomerates like Sinar Mas and Barito Pacific.
Second, the huge timber plantations violate indigenous communities' rights and destroy their livelihoods. That is why Indorayon, Indah Kiat, and Riau Andalan have all been the focus of local struggles over land and forest tenure over a number of years. As at Porsea, social conflict is intensified due to lack of employment opportunities for local people. Typically, companies use transmigrant labour in their logging concessions and plantation, and skilled labour imported from urban areas in the pulp plants. Horizontal conflicts arise within communities where some people have become dependent on their lowly jobs at the pulp plant while their neighbours are demanding fair compensation for land or property taken or damaged by pollution.
Third, even more people are subsidising Indonesia's pulp industry through debt repayments to the IMF and international creditors. A substantial proportion of Indonesia's IMF loans have been to the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency, which strives to resolve the crisis in the country's banking sector. Timber tycoons like Bob Hasan and Prayogo Pangestu were major players there and are among the biggest debtors. Bailing out bankrupt banks in effect makes the private debts incurred by these individuals and their business empires into public debts, to be repaid by increased taxes and decreased public expenditure on schools, hospitals and subsidies of basic necessities. The price of one of the world's lowest cost sources of paper and pulp is indeed high for ordinary Indonesians. Indorayon may be international financiers' first salutary lesson that investing in socially and environmentally damaging developments can also hit them where it hurts.
Frances Carr (dte@gn.apc.org) is a campaigner for Down to Earth: the International Campaign for Ecological Justice in Indonesia. A fuller version of her article is available on www.gn.apc.org/dte. 'Inside Indonesia' first covered the Indorayon Porsea mill in its July 1989 edition.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Involved locals are saving one of the world's most beautiful marine parks
Mark V Erdmann
Bunaken National Park (TNB) in North Sulawesi was established as a marine park in October 1991. It has become one of Indonesia's best-known marine ecotourism destinations. The park encompasses 79,056 hectares of land and sea. A southern mainland section, the Arakan-Wowontulap coast, is set aside mainly for its old-growth mangrove forests and dugong population. The northern section consists of five islands famous for their drop-off fringing coral reefs. The USAID-funded Natural Resources Management Program (NRM) was extensively involved in management planning throughout the early 1990s, culminating in 1996 in the Bunaken National Park Management Plan. However, despite this NRM assistance, its formal status as a national park and its international reputation, TNB has suffered a slow but continuous degradation of its marine resources. This is largely due to ineffective management and enforcement.
Two main factors lie behind the management shortcomings. One is a problematic zonation system, the other an increasingly irritable relationship between the park management authority (BTNB) and the local government. At the same time, private diving tourism operators have begun calling loudly for better protection of the park's reefs. Since mid-1998, a new NRM program known as NRM2 has been trying to strengthen the BTNB park authority and generally improve management.
Two specific initiatives have achieved encouraging results: the TNB zonation system is being revised in a participatory manner, and the private marine tourism sector has become involved in management and enforcement activities. Both have benefited from the Indonesian government's decentralisation policy, which has presented a good opportunity to revise current policies and improve management by including all those who have an interest in the park (the so-called primary stakeholders).
Zones
Indonesia's national parks are managed through a zonation system, whereby the park area is divided into various use zones, such as core conservation zones and community use zones. Regulations on activities vary in each zone. The 1996 Bunaken National Park Management Plan includes a proposed zonation system that was designed through a participatory process with villagers, dive operators, and government officials. Unfortunately, the 'official' TNB zonation system as set forth in the 1997 ministerial decree on TNB zonation is different from that proposed in the management plan. The official zonation does not specifically address what activities are allowed in each of the zones beyond some quite general discussion. For example, it simply says that 'sustainable' fishing methods are allowed in the community use zone. The result of these two conflicting zonations, and the lack of detailed regulations for each zone, has been great confusion among villagers, rangers, and dive operators alike. It has also paralysed the enforcement system.
In an attempt to clarify this situation, the BTNB and NRM2 began a multi-stakeholder, participatory revision process in early 2000. It focused on the two main user groups of the park's resources: villagers and the marine tourism sector. At the heart of the process with villagers lies a series of community meetings, using a combination of both formal open meetings and informal focal groups. This system allows villagers to air their concerns, discuss suggestions to improve the current zonation, and help draw up detailed regulations on activities to be allowed in each zone. At the same time, parallel meetings are also being conducted with a zonation committee from the North Sulawesi Watersports Association (NSWA), a group of environmentally concerned marine tourism operators in the area. Results of meetings with each group are shared with the other, and with both local and central government officials.
Meetings have been lively and productive. Both of the primary user groups - villagers and tourism operators - have shown a willingness for compromise. This is a key point, since there is the potential for diametrically opposed viewpoints on park usage between these two groups. The first phase of this revision process focused on Bunaken Island and is now complete after a lengthy period of public commentary. Throughout this first phase, emphasis was placed on recording the 'lessons learned', which are now being used to improve the revision process as it moves to the other areas of the park. The entire process is expected to take up to two years. In the end, the park should have a zonation that is agreeable to all stakeholder parties - one that will therefore be a robust and effective management tool.
Dive operators
Involving private tourism operators in managing the park has been a new NRM2 initiative. Seven marine tourism companies operating in TNB formed the NSWA in mid-1998. They had become alarmed at the rapid degradation of the reefs caused by anchor damage from the ever-increasing number of tourism boats visiting the park every day. With NRM2 support, the NSWA grew to thirteen operators and officially banned anchoring in the park by its members. They developed a self-reporting scheme whereby violators of the ban faced the threat of being exposed in the local newspaper. At the same time, a mooring buoy design competition, with cash awards, was held in the villages of the park. Villagers were able to show their expertise in designing boat moorings. They also developed a sense of ownership of the moorings and began to work together with the dive operators. The campaign was very successful - anchoring by dive boats is no longer a threat to TNB's reefs.
International diving magazines gave the successful stop-anchoring campaign positive publicity. Thus encouraged, the NSWA moved on to new programs aimed at further protecting TNB's reef resources. One key area of concern was to increase the benefits of tourism to local villagers. That way villagers would acquire an interest in also protecting the park's resources. Each operator made a specific commitment to hire more TNB villagers in their operations as dive guides or boat captains. NSWA members also sponsored a local handicrafts program by ordering embroidered handkerchiefs, coconut shell carvings and other souvenirs from the TNB villagers, who had been given loans to start up their cottage industries. Most recently, the NSWA began a scholarship donation program. Diving guests are encouraged to donate to the fund, which recently awarded two marine sciences university fellowships and one tourism vocational school scholarship to three promising young students from villages within the park.
Enforcement issues have also been a top concern of NSWA members. While the NSWA wants to work with the villagers as much as possible, experience has shown that certain villagers will continue to engage in illegal and reef-destructive activities within the park if enforcement is not an integral part of TNB management. Each month, the NSWA contributes fuel and boat time to local water police and park rangers to help with patrol activities. Most recently, the NSWA has instituted a one-time, US$5 fee per diver to support a Bunaken preservation fund. The fund was spurred by a serious increase in illegal cyanide fishing in the park. It is managed under a memorandum of understanding between the NSWA, the BTNB authority, and the local water police. The agreement pays for stepped-up patrols, especially at night. The NSWA is now also supporting the repair, maintenance and fueling of both ranger and police boats.
The new enforcement efforts have already met with great success. Since June 2000, three high profile 'busts' resulted in seventeen cyanide and bomb fishers being sent to jail - a 'first' for Indonesia! Villager response has been overwhelmingly positive. Several village leaders publicly announced their support for NSWA assistance in protecting the park from this menace that threatens the livelihoods of both 'honest' fishers and dive operators.
Local government
One of the biggest obstacles to effective management of TNB has been the antagonistic relationship between the local North Sulawesi government and the BTNB authority. The conflict goes back to the late 1980s, when the Bunaken Sea Garden nature reserve was 'upgraded' to the status of a marine national park. Control over the park, including the authority to collect entrance fees, then passed from the local to the central government.
In an effort to reduce the conflict, the NRM2 program has worked with both the BTNB and local government to develop a new park entrance fee system that benefits both parties. The new system revolves around a Bunaken National Park Management Advisory Board bringing together various stakeholders. This board manages the funds collected. This initiative should be on-line by December 2000, and should lay the groundwork for a more cooperative relationship between the BTNB and local government. Importantly, the ministry of forestry has approved this groundbreaking model of multi-stakeholder local management as a two-year pilot project.
Part of the entrance fees will be distributed to local government programs, but the vast majority will be used to fund management activities within the park, such as mangrove and reef restoration, beach clean-ups, village improvement schemes, and enforcement. The management advisory board will include representatives from BTNB, provincial and municipal government, village leaders, environmental NGOs, and private sector marine tourism operators. By allowing multiple stakeholders an equal voice in this advisory board, truly effective management of Bunaken National Park may soon become a reality.
Dr Mark V Erdmann (flotsam@manado.wasantara.net.id) is the Marine Protected Areas Advisor to the NRM2/EPIQ Program in North Sulawesi.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Suharto cronies control an ASEAN-wide oil palm industry with an appalling environmental record
George J Aditjondro
Widespread forest fires, covering significant proportions of Sumatra and Kalimantan, with its smoke and haze drifting to Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia, have become an almost annual occurrence in archipelagic Southeast Asia. Yet, the Indonesian government has not taken drastic steps to prevent their recurrence. Why? The palm oil industry in Indonesia has been blamed as the main culprits. Its political strength relies on two factors. Firstly, it is still controlled by relatives and business associates of the former Indonesian president, Suharto, who still enjoy tacit support in the top echelons of the Indonesian political and economic system. Secondly, the influence of the Suharto oligarchy extends way beyond the boundaries of Indonesia into the two neighbouring countries, Singapore and Malaysia, which have been the most affected by the haze caused by the forest fires.
During the 1990s, the scale of the burning grew each year as the forestland converted into tree plantations in Sumatra and Kalimantan expanded. Plantation firms and the land-clearance contractors they hired almost exclusively use fire to clear land. Scientists assessing the forest fire damage say that approximately five million hectares of land were burned in 1997. Of this, 20 per cent was estimated to be forest, 50 per cent agricultural land, and 30 per cent non-forest vegetation and grasslands. Putting this in financial terms, scientists working for Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) Indonesia have calculated that the direct and indirect short-term impacts of 1997/1998 have exceeded US$ 4 billion, equivalent to total annual health spending by both the public and private sectors.
In 2000, the situation did not radically improve. The emergency of hotspots as early as March moved Singaporean officials to sound their alarm bell. Nevertheless, this did not discourage corporate and individual farmers in central Sumatra to continue burning the undergrowth way into the middle of July, when officials in Peninsular Malaysia began to worry. These early hotspots and the smog that engulfed half of the Malay Peninsula revived traumatic memories of the 1997 haze, which blanketed Singapore and Malaysia for weeks and scared off tourists.
Corporate arsonists
Regardless of the national and international criticism, three consecutive regimes in Jakarta (Suharto, Habibie, Abdurrahman Wahid) have not been able to cope with these recurrent forest fires. In fact, from the 144 companies which had their licences revoked in October 1997 by then Minister of Forestry Djamaludin Suryohadikusumo, two months later 45 permits were reinstated. And even after a new forestry law was enacted in 1999, which carries a sentence of a maximum of five years in prison or a fine of Rp 5 billion (around US$ 0.5 million), no company owner or executive has been charged and found guilty of lighting the fires.
From the Forestry Ministry's initial list of 176 suspects, 133 were oil palm and pulpwood plantations. Of these two, oil palm plantations had the biggest share, since 46%-80% of all big fires took place on these concessions.
Currently, Indonesia out-competes Malaysia in terms of labour costs by five times and in terms of land by four times, thereby making it the cheapest producer of palm oil in the world. Companies owned by the members of the Suharto clan and their cronies were the most outstanding among the 176 companies blacklisted by the Forestry Minister in 1997. They are still the main driving force in the palm oil business. Cross-referencing the 1997 blacklist with general and specific business directories in Indonesia shows twelve business conglomerates linked to the Suharto family, namely the Salim, Sinar Mas, Barito Pacific, Astra, Raja Garuda Mas, Surya Damai, Kalimanis, Danitama, Mercu Buana, Citra Lamtorogung Persada, Teknik Umum, and Maharani Groups, prominent among the corporate arsonists.
More important than the predominance of Suharto-linked companies on the 1997 Forestry Department's list of suspects is the systemic control the Suharto clan have over the entire palm oil industry, from plantations to marketing to the use of revenues generated from the palm oil trade. Three generations of the clan are represented in the plantations, from Suharto's brother and cousin to Suharto's grandson.
The marketing hegemony works in the following way. During the Suharto era, state palm oil plantations produced crude palm oil (CPO), which was sold to the state logistics agency (Bulog) in either its raw or refined form at rock bottom prices. Bulog made a significant mark-up and profit on its subsequent sales of cooking oil, which is still dominated by two Suharto-linked conglomerates, Salim and Sinar Mas. Key state officials pocketed the difference, foremost among whom is Bustanil Arifin who headed Bulog for two decades. This is also the man who Suharto has trusted - together with Bob Hasan - to manage his four wealthiest charities, claimed by Arifin to far surpass the wealth of the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations.
Given the fact that three generations of the Suharto family controlled the palm oil industry one can label it Suharto's 'palm oil nepotism'. But since it does not only involve one but several extended families of Sino-Indonesian business people and a handful of retired generals and bureaucrats, loyal to Suharto, one can further label this political economic system, Suharto's 'palm oil oligarchy.'
Despite the fact that Suharto has officially stepped down, this oligarchy is still deeply entrenched in the political and economic system in Indonesia. Janji Akbar Zahiruddin Tanjung, the speaker of parliament, for instance, is a member of the Tanjung family whose family company, PT Marison Nusantara, has overlapping shares with several member companies of the Salim and Raja Garuda Mas Groups. Their businesses range from condensed dairy milk to trade in chemical products.
ASEAN-isation
The influence of Suharto's palm oil oligarchy, however, has not been limited to Indonesia's borders. Preceding the smog that drifted across the Malacca and Natuna Straits to Indonesia's northern neighbours, the tentacles of this business octopus had already become deeply entrenched in the nearest ASEAN countries. This explains the lukewarm response which the haze has received in the upper echelons in Kuala Lumpur, and to a lesser degree, in Singapore.
While in late July 2000 the smog from Indonesia's forest fires had drifted along the Malay Peninsula into southern Thailand, ASEAN government leaders did not offer any concrete steps to ameliorate the catastrophic Indonesian forest fires. On the contrary, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad strongly refused to take any steps. The ten-nation ASEAN foreign ministers' summit in Bangkok also failed to address the transnational haze strongly in its final communiquMahathir Mohamad in particular, even criticised the international press for 'exaggerating' the haze problem, driven by what he labeled as a 'political agenda' to discourage tourists from coming to Malaysia.
The attack on the foreign media had been preceded by a ban on the domestic media to publish air pollution readings, after Kuala Lumpur and other areas on the peninsula were blanketed with dense haze from forest fires across the Malacca Strait. The Malaysian public, however, refused to play that ostrich policy, forcing the New Straits Times, which usually supports government initiatives unreservedly, to call for the government to publish the Air Pollution Index readings.
On the macro level, Malaysia's silence is partly influenced by the fact that it needs Indonesia to expand its own palm oil industry. By March 1997, Malaysia already had commitments to invest in 1.6 million hectares of oil palm plantations in Indonesia through joint ventures with various Indonesian companies. This was more than a third of all the oil palm plantations planned until the turn of the century. More than 1.3 million hectares had already materialised by 1999, with some of them linking up with companies controlled by four Suharto siblings, namely Bambang Trihatmodjo, Tommy Suharto, Titiek Prabowo, and Siti Hutami Adiningsih. Their plantations cover hundreds of thousands of hectares in Sumatra and Kalimantan. Thus the largest Indonesian business groups had already formed numerous joint ventures with the most well connected companies in Singapore and Malaysia.
Moving deeper into the current and former ruling elites of Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia, several joint ventures have emerged, where relatives of former president Suharto, former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, and incumbent Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad hold powerful positions as shareholders or directors. Or else they are shareholders in companies which in turn acquired shares of other companies in which members of these three families are involved. Mahathir's middle son, Mokhzani, for instance, through his Tongkah Holdings, acquired a majority stake in Hospital Pantai, which in turn became a substantial shareholder in Singapore-listed AsiaMatrix Ltd. This company has Suharto's daughter-in-law, Ratnawati Harjojudanto, listed as its chairperson.
The list is growing of companies which involve the three powerful clans of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore and which have expanded further in the Asia-Pacific region. They were the driving force behind the economic opening of China. That is the reason why the country-by-country approach of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), without unraveling the capital flow from the Southeast Asian countries to China and elsewhere, is doomed to fail.
Any serious attempt to reduce the frequency and extent of the forest fires and the related haze problem has to deal with this 'intra-ASEAN oligarchy.' The long-term aim should be to enforce regional and global transparency and accountability of the members of this oligarchy to its stakeholders, and especially to the ordinary citizens in the ASEAN region who have been - and may still be - regularly choked by the smoke from forest fires.
George Aditjondro (aditjond@psychology.newcastle.edu.au) teaches at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Extracted with permission from an article in the inaugural edition of 'Ecopolitics: Thought and action' (contact Martin Mulligan m.mulligan@uws.edu.au).
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
The Australian government needs to control Australian miners in Indonesia
Jeff Atkinson
A large proportion of foreign mining companies in Indonesia are Australian. They may be generating badly needed funds for the country, but the cost to those living near these mines has been very high.
Indonesia is rich in mineral resources. It desperately needs the income that exploiting these resources can bring. In 1998 the mining industry contributed some US$ 9,573 million to the Indonesian economy, and US$ 570 million to government revenue. Minerals and related products accounted for 19 percent of total Indonesian export revenue, and generated over US$ 3,000 million in export revenue.
But who benefits most from this, and who has to bear the cost? Under the Suharto government, and still today, local communities living around the mine have borne the heaviest burden.
Communities already on the poverty line lose the land, the source of their livelihood, to the mine, usually without sufficient compensation to allow them to maintain an adequate income. Others have lost valuable income from small-scale and artisanal mining when the authorities declare it illegal in the company's concession area. Rivers on which they depend have become unusable because of pollution; the fish disappear and the river water causes rashes and itchiness when people try to bathe in it. Those who object to any of this feel the heavy hand of the police Mobile Brigade.
At the Indo Muro mine in Central Kalimantan, operated by Perth-based Aurora Gold Ltd, the problem was the loss of land by indigenous Dayak people, and the loss of income from small-scale and artisanal mining. At the Barisan mine in South Sumatra, owned by another Perth-based company, the complaint is pollution of the rivers by run-off from the mine.
At Rio Tinto's Kelian gold mine in the upper reaches of the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan there have been human rights abuses. In July 2000 the Indonesian Human Rights Commission released a report that, among other things, highlighted sexual abuses against local women and female employees at the mine. Some of the victims were under-age and the majority of these, according to the report, are alleged to be the victims of an Australian who was the mine manager at the time.
It is of course not just Australian companies that are causing problems. The operations of PT Freeport Indonesia in West Papua, majority-owned by US-based Freeport MacMoRan, have become notorious for their massive environmental damage from riverine waste dumping and gross human rights violations against local groups who resist.
All of these operations were established under the Suharto regime, when negotiating access to land with local landowners was not necessary and companies left community relations to the government and the Mobile Brigade. Now with Suharto and his political apparatus largely gone, many of these companies are paying the price of appalling community relations and unjust treatment from which they benefited. Local communities have become much more demanding and aggressive, and many operators have seen their mines over-run by large numbers of illegal miners.
Voluntary code
What has been the response of the mining industry in Australia to all this? It is well aware that the problems are not confined to Indonesia, and that Australian mining companies have been engaged in sub-standard practices in many countries. In Papua New Guinea for example, it was revealed in 1999 that the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi mine, 52 percent owned by BHP, was far worse than had been expected, and that none of the possible solutions that had been investigated were feasible. Most notorious of all was the massive cyanide spill early in 2000 at the Australian-owned Esmerelda mine in Romania, which had a cataclysmic effect on fisheries in nearby Hungarian rivers.
There is certainly a realisation within the industry that they need to 'lift their act', that community expectations in the home country and the demands of communities in the host country are such that this kind of performance is no longer acceptable. But their approach is to allow improvement to occur at a rate that the industry is happy with, rather than one that the protection of people's fundamental rights demands.
The preferred approach of the industry body, the Minerals Council of Australia, is to encourage companies to work towards the standards set down in its Code for Environmental Management. This has been in place since 1996 and has now been signed on to by some 40 Australian mining companies, including all the major ones. Its strength, says the council's executive director 'lies in the fact that companies volunteer to commit within a framework of principles, and can choose to implement the code in a way that is appropriate to their operations and their environments. The code works because it gives the industry flexibility to choose how it goes about achieving excellence in environmental behaviour.'
The problem is that the code is voluntary, its principles are vague and general, and only refer to the management of environmental effects, not social or economic impacts. There is no monitoring of companies' performance against the code - although there is an obligation for signatory companies to report annually on their own performance. And there are no sanctions for non-compliance. While most of the majors have signed on, large numbers of smaller mining companies have not. Those that want to continue with sub-standard practices will never sign on.
It is not good enough for the industry to set its own rate of change, with no sanction for unacceptable behaviour. What would be the reaction if we applied this approach to other groups in society with the potential to damage the rights of others, eg drivers who drink?
Australian government
The code may have its place as a mechanism for self-improvement by companies, but it is not a substitute for legislation and enforced standards. The Australian government urgently needs to introduce legislation that sets standards for Australian-based mining companies operating overseas, monitors performance and, where possible, imposes sanctions for non-compliance.
An independent complaints mechanism needs to be established able to investigate the complaints of mine-affected communities in Indonesia and elsewhere. In the absence of any such commitment by the industry or government, Community Aid Abroad earlier this year established its own Mining Ombudsman. But this is a responsibility that properly belongs to the Australian mining industry and government, not to a small under-resourced non-government organisation.
Political support for stronger measures by government is growing. In April this year the Australian Labor Party's shadow ministers for foreign affairs, Laurie Brereton, and for environment and heritage, Nick Bolkus, issued a joint media statement in which they 'renewed Labor's call for a comprehensive review of environmental protection standards and practices implemented by Australian mining countries operating overseas'. Mr Brereton added: 'Labor has long supported an active role for government in encouraging Australian companies operating overseas to adhere to public codes which commit them to observe international human rights standards, including core labour standards, and ensure that their operations do not directly or indirectly violate human rights, or inflict unacceptable impacts on local communities and the environment."
In September 2000, Australian Democrats senator Vicki Bourne introduced a private member's bill into the senate that sought to introduce legislated standards for Australian companies operating overseas. This has since been referred to a parliamentary committee, which has announced a public inquiry into the matter.
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney has introduced a similar bill into the US Congress. The European Parliament recently passed a resolution on EU Standards for European Enterprises Operating in Developing Countries, which would cover companies like Rio Tinto and BP that have gold and coal mines in East Kalimantan.
It is now time for the Australian government to act. Australia's supposed concern for human rights in Indonesia must be extended to include economic and social rights. At the very least it must ensure that it is not Australian companies that are abusing those rights.
Jeff Atkinson (jeffa@caa.org.au) is Advocacy Coordinator with the non-government organisation Community Aid Abroad (Oxfam Australia) and is that organisation's Mining Ombudsman. He is the author of the recent book 'Undermined: The impact of Australian mining companies in developing countries' (Melbourne: Community Aid Abroad, 1998).
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Review: Tarian bumi is the story of four generations of Balinese women
Pamela Allen
With this novel (originally serialised in Republika in 1997) Oka Rusmini joins two minority groups in contemporary Indonesian literature - Balinese novelists, and female novelists. Born in Jakarta of Balinese parents in 1967, Oka is a journalist for the Bali Post. She has had poetry published in several anthologies, and short stories in a range of journals and magazines. She is married to the East Javanese poet Arif B Prasetyo, a union which so upset her family on account of his ethnicity and religion that they disowned her.
Tarian bumi is the story of four generations of Balinese women. It is told in the third person, but from the narratorial point of view of Ida Ayu Telaga, a woman in her thirties whose aspirations for herself and her daughter Sari differ somewhat from those of her mother, her grandmother, and her female peers. These women are motivated primarily by two factors: a longing to be beautiful, and desire for a high-castebrahmana husband.
Telaga's mother Luh Sekar, born into a commoner sudra family, declares when she is just a girl that the only thing she cares about is becoming the wife of a brahmana man, thus elevating herself from her lowly status. When she finally meets and marries her brahmanaman, her world changes irrevocably. She can no longer use the name Ni Luh Sekar. She can no longer pray in her family temple. When she gives birth to Telaga, her mother-in-law forbids her from taking the child to see its maternal grandmother. Yet, as a woman who has become a brahmanaby marriage rather than by birth, she is treated differently within the circle of her husband's family compound. She can never truly be a part of her new brahmanafamily, but at the same time she is expected to sever her ties with her sudrapast.
Despite the displacement and distress her new status causes her, she continues to perpetuate the importance of high-caste standing by projecting her aspirations onto Telaga who, however, scandalises her family by marrying the sudraWayan Sasmitha, in defiance of the importance in the Balinese hierarchy of a woman not lowering the status of the whole family by marrying beneath her.
Telaga's difficulty in adjusting to the lifestyle of a sudra family is proof to her mother-in-law that the marriage should never have taken place. Finally, because her presence in the household is regarded as unlucky, her mother-in-law asks her to go back to her family compound to perform the upacara Patiwangi, the ceremony which officially sets a person free from the brahmana caste. In the end, Telaga is transformed into a sudrawoman. It is a liberation for her.
Beauty
The women are also driven by the longing to be beautiful, which goes hand-in-hand with the desire to be a fine dancer. However, like the brahmana status, beauty has its price. In the novel, beauty is infused with the same sort of quality traditionally associated with power in Java: it seems to be finite, and the competition to acquire it is fierce. The envy surrounding beauty is compounded by pique that brahmanawomen are perceived as having more than their fair share of it.
Closely linked with the quest for beauty are questions about what it means to be a woman in Bali. The female protagonists of Tarian Bumi are somewhat ambivalent about their womanhood and how it intersects with their quest for a brahmana husband and unrivalled beauty. Telaga, whose life is controlled by her mother's avarice, her mother-in-law's bitterness, and her sister-in-law's greed, has frequent cause to question what it means to be a woman.
Tarian bumi is in part a novel about caste, beauty, and Balinese women. The caste system has to the outside world generally seemed to sit lightly on Balinese social structure. It is here depicted as in fact an insidious one that perpetuates a hierarchical way of understanding the world and creates jealousy and avarice in the women who are forced to compete with each other for brahmanahusbands and for beauty. Tarian bumi is also, however, a novel about the ways in which caste binds and divides per se. The male characters in the novel, too, are subjected to the inequities of this hierarchical system.
Like much other contemporary writing about Bali, the novel is an antidote to the exoticism depicted by early anthropologists and travel writers and in mainstream contemporary tourist ventures. Much of its appeal lies in the fact that it is an attempt by a Balinese, rather than an outsider, to deconstruct some of the myths that lie at the heart of the Orientalist fantasy.
Oka Rusmini, Tarian bumi, Magelang: IndonesiaTera, 2000, 141 pp, ISBN 979-95428-8-X
Pamela Allen (Pam.Allen@utas.edu.au) teaches Asian studes at the University of Tasmania, Hobart.
Inside Indonesia 66: Apr - Jun 2001
Page 51 of 68
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