Parliament, the constitution, and the future, as seen from the presidential palace
Greg Barton interviews President Abdurrahman Wahid
Tell us your impressions of this annual session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR).
The most important thing about the current MPR session as expressed by some PKB members is that instead of having the arrogance of the executive, as was the case in the past, now we have the arrogance of the legislature. We need to understand the reasons for this. In my opinion many are afraid of an executive that is too arrogant and because of that they want something to check its power. The check and balance has shifted from the one envisioned in the constitution of 1945.
The necessity now is to adjust the powers of the two sides: the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government. I think that this problem has existed for many years, even in 1945. Do you know that when independence was declared and the 1945 constitution was applied, a declaration was issued that gave the prime minister the power to form a parliamentary cabinet with a parliament dominated by the parties? That was in clear breach of the constitution. If we see now people like Heri Achmadi (PDI-P parliamentarian) and Budi Santoso (Golkar parliamentarian) and many other members of the MPR, this same mistake can be repeated again in a bid to check the power of the executive.
As I told Megawati Sukarnoputri during this session: 'They can check the power of the executive but they should not do it at the expense of changing the constitution. You see, if you change the basic formulation of the constitution of 1945 I am afraid that this will provoke the other side to stage a coup d'etat. That will mean the constitution of 1945 has been violated.' So I told her that if this scenario should develop I would have to take the side of those who launch the coup d'etat. Why? Because for me it is only possible to have democracy if you have a state. But if you constantly have such turbulence that the very form of the state is questioned then you have will have no democracy at all. So the most important thing is to guarantee the existence of the state. The important thing is to avoid the situation deteriorating to the point of a coup d'etat being launched.
It is essential to have a stable state. Without it democracy cannot function. So because of this I have stressed the importance of returning to the constitution of 1945. But of course the holder of the presidency has the duty to heed the warnings as well as the wishes of those who would like to have a more balanced government. The executive should not be too powerful. This we can achieve not by weakening the executive as a whole but by weakening the presidency.
So I had to reply to the parties that I will assign technical daily tasks involving the cabinet to the vice president, in order to distribute the power of the office holder. Each decision needs to be made on the basis of discussion between myself together with the vice president and the two coordinating ministers. Through this arrangement, in which the leadership team discusses all important matters, the power of the president will be checked so that he is not able to simply do things for his own purposes.
And the system will remain a presidential one with the final authority left with the president?
Yes, of course, until the MPR is convinced otherwise.
In what way will your new cabinet be different to the cabinet of the past ten months?
I think that the stress will not be on balancing party-political interests but instead upon expertise. Technical matters will be taken care of by three people: the two coordinating ministers and the vice president, whilst I will take care the 'big picture matters' both domestic and international.
If, to some extent, assessment of the previous cabinet's performance was a matter of perception, is this partly a result of the fact that many did not appreciate that regime change takes at least five years, and often ten to make substantial changes?
Whatever people say about Indonesians as a whole, as a nation, one thing that seems clear to me is that they understand that the changes have to be profound, have to be fundamental. Although they might be very noisy in protesting many things, both the intellectuals and everyone else, in the end they understand that we have to change. This is very important to understand. Otherwise, if we don't know our own people we will be returning to the clichof the past, and I am against this sort of attitude. We have to stick to the principles and apply them to the day-to-day realities of our nation.
What sort of 'cliche of the past' do you have in mind?
Well the sort of things said recently by (UN human rights commissioner) Mary Robinson that we have to be against those in the armed forces. That's crazy because we have so many good people among the soldiers. So we have to differentiate between the institution and the individuals. There are so many individuals and it may be that many of them were not good but we have to back the good people, the honest people. You know the most democratic of people, Ali Sadikin, was a lieutenant general in the marines.
So your vision is one of moderate and gradual change?
We have to continue to stress the fundamental direction of change but also not to forget the reality of the situation.
How would you summarise your vision for what you want to achieve over the next four years?
The most important thing is to establish democracy, which means bringing the principles of democracy to bear on the day-to-day realities of life in this nation. The second thing is to revive the economy, this is very important. We have to stimulate foreign investment and build confidence. We have to rationalise the entire way in which this nation functions, the way that business works here. I see that one of the main obstacles that we need to overcome is establishing sufficient infrastructure to enable future development in the form of roads, bridges, airports, harbours, schools, hospitals and so forth.
Apart from that I think that Indonesia as the fourth-largest nation and the third-largest democracy has the right to play an important role in international affairs. It is important to monitor and contribute to international affairs and I intend to do this, with the assistance of the minister for foreign affairs.
In this context it is important to recognise that we have not, and will not, take the path of pure socialism. Instead our system is based on capitalism but it needs to be a capitalism which is mindful of the needs of all people.
What about the political parties? After all it is not possible to have a healthy democracy without good parties. In particular, how do you see the future for PDI-P and PKB?
One thing that is clear now is that our political landscape will change. The change will be caused by many things. The first is that Golkar is so discredited by its past. To some extent the Golkar leadership could rectify the situation by acknowledging the fact that they were guilty of many wrongs in that past and declaring that they now want to make amends, to ask for forgiveness from the people. But up until now they have not done that. If they continue like this Golkar will be soundly rejected in the next election.
The second thing is that the next election will be determined by complex party affiliations that cut across a wide range of social groupings. Both PDI-P and PKB need to become parties with broad-based support across society. The parties need to apply rationalism to develop their positions and not simply rely on emotionalism. PDI-P needs to move beyond a simplistic kind of 'Sukarnoism' and stress a more thoughtful understanding of Sukarno's legacy. I myself follow him in many ways, adapting his thinking and techniques but seeking to be true to his principles.
At the same time PKB needs move beyond Islam and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) as its political base. It needs to move beyond politics based on communal affiliation. That is why I said to the chairman of PKB, Matori Abdul Djalil, that whilst in the short term we need to draw our party leadership from largely Islamic sources we should try to be as inclusive as possible and draw from across the full spectrum of Muslim communities, associations, NGOs and social groupings.
Greg Barton (gjbarton@deakin.edu.au) teaches at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He is writing a biography of Abdurrahman Wahid. These are excerpts from an exclusive interview recorded for 'Inside Indonesia' on 15 August 2000, partway through the MPR session.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
A spectacular joint Australian-Indonesian performance bursts boundaries
Robin Laurie
The premiere performance of Theft of Sita took place at the Adelaide Festival in March this year. It was an outdoor performance set among huge old Moreton Bay figs, beautifully lit against the black night sky. The audience sat in rows of steep bleachers looking down on a square of wooden staging. Ten musicians, five of them Balinese gamelan players and five from the Australian Art Orchestra, took their places. Five puppeteers, a Balinese dalangand four Australians, emerged onto the stage and lit the screen light or damar. A large fabric screen descended from above at the front of the stage and we were in the enchanted forest of creation.
Before us lay the idealised classical landscape of the ancient Ramayana story, complete with shadow puppets of the lovely Sita, her princely lover Rama, and their farting, chatting servant/ clown companions Tualen and Merdah, the latter a father and son pair from the Balinese wayang kulit known aspunakawan. A range of whimsical and funny animal shadow puppets pass across the screen. But there is always trouble in paradise. Sita is captured by the giant demon Rahwana and carried off to his kingdom of Langka. Then huge logging machines invade the forest and begin demolishing trees...
This Ramayana begins conventionally, but quickly explodes into a metaphor of the tumultuous events surrounding the overthrow of Suharto. Computer-generated images and photographic projections of demonstrations coexist with giant shadow puppet logging beasts. There are white water rafters and withering paddy fields in Bali. And Langka becomes a futuristic city of gleaming steel and glass towers, and of rubbish tips. Giant screens lift and disappear, perspective shifts from screens at the front to screens at the back of the stage. Shadow puppets emerge on tiny screens in the middle of the space and then shift again.
In those turbulent days of 1998-9 two main avenues of expression for radical views were satirical political comment by performers of all kinds, including the wayang, and the internet. Theft of Sita consciously brings together these two screens, the fabric screen of the wayang and the electronic screen of TV and the internet.
The working behind the scenes was as complex as the images in front. Associate director and puppeteer Peter Wilson describes how the puppeteers had to work from trolleys lying on their backs, keeping the puppet level as they hurtled downstage, or trying to look at the puppet as they moved backwards away from the audience.
Through all this impressive scenery wander the determined and shrewdly amused figures of Tualen and Merdah. Their mission from Rama is to rescue Sita from the clutches of the demon Rahwana. Theirs is a people's mission. Normally that mission belongs to the nobles and to the White Monkey General Hanuman and his army, but these do not appear in this version.
The clowns pass through burnt-out forest landscapes. Tualen explains to his son the strange and remarkable transformation of forests into toilet paper for the west. The two punakawan continue on their quest, engaging in a struggle to restore water to the rice paddies of Bali, traveling through a surreal world of factories, electrical pylons and freeways, before at last coming upon the awesome sight of Langka just as Rahwana's black limousine glides ominously past. Merdah and the army of the poor then join students and demonstrators. Together they storm Rahwana's palace as his financial empire collapses. The night I was in the audience, as the demonstrations reached their peak, a real helicopter flew overhead. One of the unpredictable pleasures of outdoor performance.
Collaboration
How did this epic collaboration come together? Director Nigel Jamieson and composer Paul Grabowsky were offered a commission for the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Sydney-based Performing Lines produced. Nigel and Paul wanted to do something based on the Ramayana story. Nigel had invited the Balinese dalang I Wayan Wija to Australia in 1998 for the Australian Theatre for Young Performers. Nigel wrote versions of the Sita script, eliminating some characters, as he felt it would be hard for western audiences to recognise too many. He sent these drafts and ideas to Wayan Wija.
A team of puppeteers, designers and the composer went to Bali to rehearse in November 1999. It was the height of the tensions around Timor and the choice of a new president. I Wayan Wija decided that because of the political tensions he was unable to continue with the project. Nigel and Arif Hidayat, the Australian-based interpreter for the team, went off on their own mission to find a new dalang. The rest of the team meanwhile found a shed in Denpasar, negotiated streets filled with demonstrators and burning tyres, and began experimenting with the lights and computer images using equipment they had brought with them. Nigel and Arif finally met I Made Sidia, who teaches at the arts college STSI in Denpasar and is the son of the famous Balinese dalang I Made Sija. Made is a mask (topeng) dancer and choreographer as well as a dalang. He had worked in New York on a version of the Mahabarata epic with one of the more experimental New York groups, Mabou Mines, as well as throughout Asia and Europe.
Nigel and Peter both tell the story of Made's arrival at the Adelaide rehearsal space in February this year. Peter was lying on the floor manipulating one of the giant logging beast puppets. Made had just got off a plane. His puppets, traditionally imbued with the sacred power of the gods, had been confiscated and gassed by Australian customs. He arrived in the space, saw what Peter was doing, took off his coat, lay down on the floor, picked up another puppet and the two puppeteers began playing together.
What are we to think of these international collaborations? Are they not manifestations of cultural globalisation in which western idioms inevitably dominate? Doesn't the commercialisation of the ticket-buying international festival circuit destroy local culture? Global television and western economic dominance certainly do threaten cultural diversity as never before. But a project like Theft of Sita is different. Decisions were not made in some far-off place that caused another country's economy to crash.
In this kind of project a group of people work together intensely over a period of time, in a cheap, large room somewhere. They discuss and argue about issues of power and culture, politics and gods, life and art and how they are to be represented. If it's a good process, understandings and accommodations and creative transformations occur. By all accounts, Theft of Sita was a good process. Arif and Peter both tell me this was because it was in fact something new for all of them.
Transformed
But doesn't this process ruin the authenticity of the Ramayana? The story was totally transformed, new puppets were invented, the god-like voice of the single dalang in charge was abandoned, overtly political comments on environmental issues and the voices of the people were heard. However, no culture is static. Wayang has constantly adapted to new political circumstances, new social values and technologies.
New puppets have often emerged. Helen Pausacker, a Melbourne based dalang, tells me there have been puppet bicycles and motorbikes. When President Sukarno used to arrive everywhere by helicopter there was a period in the 1960s where the god Visnu would descend in the same manner. TV and video created a demand for faster action and more realism if wayang performers were to attract younger audiences. Multiple dalang and multiple screens, electric and coloured lights have all been used before in Indonesia. Sometimes the puppets even move through film projections of exploding volcanoes. These changes are popular with audiences. There are rock songs in the middle, comedians (pelawak), singers, and people get up and dance. In one wayang performance the dalang smashed his puppets in a manner reminiscent of Who concerts.
Indonesian environmentalists have used traditional performance structures before. The Earth Cleansing (RuwatanBumi) of April 1998 was a series of performances based around Earth Day. Clearly traditions are not only located There, in Indonesia, and innovation Here, in Australia. Barbara Hatley notes that western interest encouraged Indonesian performers to explore their own traditions in the 1970s. Conversely, interaction with Asia has encouraged western performers to explore ritual and spiritual aspects of performance.
Indonesia's crisis is creating turmoil and change. The phrase Think Globally Act Locally is heard in Indonesia as well as Australia. Theft of Sita is global in its concerns with the environment. It recently performed at a festival in Germany. It is local in that it is part of creating new cultural relationships and artistic collaborations in our region. In Indonesia progress became modernity, became development, and now democracy is the word on everyone's lips. Theft of Sita ends with images of the celebrations following the overthrow of Suharto. A confused Merdah and Tualen nervously approach the ballot box. Plot mirrors politics.
Robin Laurie (nibor@vicnet.net.au) is a performance director in Melbourne. She was a founder of Circus Oz, and has just been in East Timor recording traditional dances and songs for a CD. 'Theft of Sita' will be part of the Melbourne International Festival in October 2000.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
A well-known artist explains his work, his activism, and why he is in Canada
Yvonne Owens interviews Semsar Siahaan
Since arriving in Victoria, Canada, in the spring of 1999, you have had three exhibitions. Some of them contained quite gripping political imagery, including 'A self portrait with black orchid'. Could you comment?
A self-portrait with black orchid (1.5m x 2m, oil on canvas, March 1999) is dedicated to fourteen activist friends who were kidnapped and killed by the military in early 1998. The painting is also about the chaos and violence in Indonesia sponsored by the military, about the struggle of the political parties and the students and pro-democracy activists who kept on with their 'moral force' actions for reformation. My self-portrait is central to the painting, because the painting is about my self, my thoughts, my feelings, and my experiences that need to be shared with the audience. This image is about the last moment of the New Order regime before it collapsed after the killing of the four students by military snipers at the Trisakti University in Jakarta. I was there with some activist friends and members of the 1978 class of the Bandung Institute of Technology. I was there, near the four bodies lying pale, in pools of blood on the floor. I was there among those brave students until 1:45am. I was there before and after the killing, preparing a huge banner that had been requested by the activists and students for the memorial ceremony for the four slain students, planned for the 21st of May 1998.
I could not finish the banner because extreme violence began the next day, after the funeral, with widespread looting, burning, chaotic rampage and student demonstrations in the area in which I lived. Thousands of poor people surrounded that area. Those are the people for whom I dedicate my art, my thoughts, my feelings, and my sympathy. Instead of fighting with them (like those who did so in protecting their property), after five days I decided to leave my house and possessions and walk away. I left my home unlocked and returned in July. The layered imagery of the painting fills in the background and context - of the events and of my reactions - during this crisis. It completes the banner I was unable to finish, and addresses my audience, the victims of totalitarianism and violence. One needs to understand the dialectical process of visualisation in my art works, and my background of social-political activism.
The painting also shows the multinational corporate industrialists and international investors gambling on Indonesia's political and economic crisis for profit. The violence engineered by the military, which caused suffering to the motherland, is shown in the iconography of the victimised mother and child.
There has been some misunderstanding recently, in print, of the nature of the imagery in your painting 'Women workers between factory and prison'. This involved the mistaken view that the painting revolved around the iconography of the factory worker Marsinah as a martyr.
The iconography of Women workers between factory and prison (1m x 1m, oil on canvas, 1992) is not related to the late Marsinah at all. Marsinah was tortured and killed in 1993, while I did the painting in 1992. I did design a poster commemorating Marsinah's death as a martyr that was printed in five hundred copies in December of 1993 for the Indonesian pro-democracy activists, for the annual Yap Thiam Hien human rights award. The award that year went to Marsinah's father and family. The poster was then disseminated among all the Indonesian non-government organisations concerned with workers and others.
Why were you expelled from your university, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), in 1981?
It was my 'happening art' that I was doing at the art department of ITB at that time. My artwork was called Oleh-oleh dari desa II - February 9th, 1981 ('Remembrance from the village II'). In this work, I took my teacher Sunaryo's sculpture called Citra Irian dalam torso ('Irian image in torso'), since he took the Asmat ornaments as a part of his work of art. I also used mud, fire, banana leaves, water, yellow rice and a placard on which was written my statement with red paint, that 'Indonesian modern art should return to reality...'. [As a result, the sculpture was burned. - Editor].
Sunaryo used the Asmat-West Papua sacred ornaments by putting them in his wooden sculpture series. At that time it was made clear that 'Indonesian modern art should explore traditional art forms and ornaments so that Indonesian modern art could achieve its national identity.' Those words were part of a 'secret formula' but I think it was formulated by the military think tank Lemhanas. That formula suggested some kind of national security approach to culture and art, and was a strategy to oppose the strong 'latent' influence of the communists' cultural wing Lekra (People's Cultural Council) after the 1965 affair, where an estimated one quarter million alleged communists were killed. The formula was clearly a method to eliminate social criticism from Indonesian contemporary artists' work. That formula was systematically implemented in the art academy curriculum. As a result, artists became exploitative towards indigenous culture and art. These artists became extremely rich, while the indigenous people remained in the same condition - in poverty and being exploited.
So, I wasn't yet expelled from ITB, not for seven months, when I was accused of organising the three day ITB fine arts student strike, demanding more freedom of expression.
It has been written that you are planning to mount an exhibition of your installation work called 'Slaughterhouse', about the brutality of the Suharto regime, in Victoria, BC. Could you tell us about this?
I never had any plan to mount an installation work entitled Slaughterhouse here in Canada. Many Canadian friends and friends in the US know that the exhibition was planned for Seattle, USA. And the work was not going to deal with Suharto's New Order regime or its brutality, but about the Global Butchers - such as the arms industry, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and capital investment corporations that push indigenous cultures from their land everywhere on this planet.
When did you start painting?
I enjoyed drawing since I was nine years old. My mother supported me greatly with this, as did my father, supporting me with books of art - and it was the happiest aspect of my childhood. Another time during which I produced a lot of art works was when I was with my girl friend, Widya Paramita - because during this time, for six years, she morally supported my creativity. Also during my marriage with Asnaini, when I created the Homage for the Christo's mother.
I must ask you, why are you in Canada?
Well, it is like I was saying before, I was there when the New Order regime collapsed. But even the new regime of BJ Habibie was no different from the old regime. He was nothing but Suharto's crony. Later, I became really sick, with high blood pressure - 150/250. This was caused by tension due to the continuing violence, the kidnapping of activists, and political uncertainty in Indonesia. So I flew to Singapore, where I saw two doctors. My weight was extremely low. They concluded that I had a major illness that would take six months on medication to treat. This is a well-known factor of my residency here. They suggested that I stay away from the tensions and chaos happening in Indonesia temporarily for the sake of my future health.
And I do not agree with the label of 'exile,' as I have recently been described within these pages. I also don't agree, as was stated here, that Hendra Gunawan was in exile after the '1965 affair.' As far as I know, he was in imprisonment in Bandung, and then moved to a Yogyakarta prison. And Sujana Kerton, I don't think he was in exile either. He was in the USA and stayed there temporarily until he went back to Indonesia in the late 1970s.
What are your projections for the future?
First I have to rebuild my artistic image professionally - internationally - after the 'character assassination' in a previous issue of this magazine. Secondly, I am still working on the idea of the Slaughterhouse installation, but it has been postponed for production reasons. And my next solo exhibitions will hopefully be in New York, and in London. I'll also keep busy with some non-government organisations and activism, as always.
Yvonne Owens is an author and art critic in Victoria, Canada. Semsar Siahaan was first profiled in Inside Indonesia no.16, October 1988. The Inside Indonesia article referred to in this interview is 'Hero into exile', by Astri Wright, edition no.62, January-March 2000. See also Astri Wright's reader's letter in the current edition.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000{jcomments on}
Once feared as the mark of a criminal, tattoos are today almost a teenage fad
Megan Baker
Athonk knows his art form like the back of his tattooed hands. The owner of Pure Black Tattoo Studio in Yogyakarta can tell you that Australians in Melbourne have the most desirable tattooing skin because the needle easily penetrates their fine, cold hide. Indonesians have the least suited skin. A red heart tattoo on his throat beats as he swallows.
His passion for tattooing grew out of drawing comics. Athonk studied at the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) in Yogyakarta until lack of funds put an end to formal education. He then learnt to apply his artistic skills to skin through friends, magazines, and a trip to study the art form in Australia. A vast collection of photographs proves his technical competence. Designs range from small simple turtle motifs to large detailed tribal patterns applied to limbs and backs.
New Order tattoo artists used to work underground. In the early 1980s Yogyakarta was the least safe place for tattooed Indonesians. Tattoos were a sign of a previous prison sentence. The government embarked on an operation to 'clean' the city of troublesome citizens. 'Mysterious gunmen' (petrus - penembak misterius) shot down tattooed street thugs known as gali (gabungan anak liar). Men with tattoos were told to report to the police. Their tattoos were noted, and in some cases forcibly removed with a hot iron. The stigma forced artists underground, where drugs or alcohol became payment for artwork and hence part of tattoo culture. Athonk once received a chicken from a poor client.
The tattoo artist creates a lifetime mark. The relationship between designer and client at times resembles that of psychologist and patient. In a state of pain, Athonk says, clients easily 'confess all'. One got a tattoo because he was ordered to marry someone he did not love. Rebellion continues to be a prime inspiration, like the anti-military 'peace punk' tattoos in the US in the 1970s. Many clients make a ceremony of the process, inviting friends, preparing party food for the minute of completion.
Hygiene is a big concern. In the 1930s tattoo studios in New England were blamed for the spread of syphilis. Athonk worries about street tattooists who use dirty tools. Few studios use gloves as they are expensive and artists do not know where to purchase them. Athonk tries to educate other artists by organising Tattoo fashion parades and establishing the Java Tattoo Club. Artists need to learn the technicalities of tattooing machines and the latest ink types, as well as how to apply designs to skin. There are too few skilled tattoo artists to meet increasing demand. Studios not ready to 'go public' continue to operate from small outlets in heavily touristed areas of Yogyakarta like Sosrowijayan.
The tattooed community considers non-tattooed people 'stark naked' (telanjang bulat), a term Athonk claims originates with tattoo. In the early 1990s the music of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns 'n' Roses had a 'phenomenal' influence on Indonesian youth. They wanted tattoos of the cover image on the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Now Indonesian youth, aware of a new 'individuality' which comes packaged in consumerism, are requesting more self-devised designs as well as common popular hearts and roses. Their choice of designs provides a visual reading of attitudes in a transforming society.
Athonk also owns the only professional studio in Jakarta. Many clients come from wealthy families. In fact most are teenage girls who come to the studio with their parents. Tattooists are increasingly seen as 'fine artists'.
But 'sensationalism' remains part of modern tattooing culture. Foreign tourists come to Indonesia in search of the more raw tradition lacking in the West. They ask for exotic tribal designs, symbols of eternity and spirituality, or pictures of Javanese wayang puppets.
Javanese do not have a strong tattooing tradition. But tattooing is an integral part of the more tribal Dayak and Mentawaian cultures. Bunga Terong, the top part of an eggplant, originated in Borneo and is now an internationally recognised tattoo. In Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) women tattoo symbols on their foreheads to indicate skills such as weaving which increase their worth in the eyes of potential husbands. Men were expected to earn their tattoos by taking heads.
Megan Baker (megabak@hotmail.com) studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Find Athonk near Supermans in Sosrowijayan, Yogyakarta
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Radical Yogyakarta artists get among the people
Heidi Arbuckle
It is World Food Day, Yogyakarta 1999. Dr Syarifuddin Karamoy, secretary general of the Department of Agriculture, is due to open an Agricultural Expo. But his address has been delayed. Outside, a chorus of voices. Farmers, students and activists are chanting 'anti-revolusi hijau' (anti-green revolution), 'tolak bahan pestisida' (refuse pesticides), 'cabut SK 527'(withdraw the proposed bill). Most vocal of all is 67 year-old Magelang farmer Mbah Seko. He holds up a petition signed by 260 fellow farmers from the vicinity of Yogyakarta - Klaten, Pacitan, Bantul and Kulonprogo. The petition is clear - withdraw the bill that proposes to re-introduce several harmful pesticides.
Most striking about this demonstration is the diverse array of supporters the anti-pesticide cause attracts. The people (rakyat) are young and old, rural and urban. Among them is an unusual group of rakyat who have been particularly active at protests the last few years. They are not your ordinary animate Indonesians, but shadow puppet (wayang)adaptations of real people. Made from simple materials like cardboard, bamboo stakes, and paint, these life-size wayang characters represent members of a newly democratising Indonesian society.
The puppet-masters (dalang) of the protest wayangis a group of radical artists, members of a progressive arts network called Taring Padi. Taring Padi refers to the sharp tip of the rice plant, and is a metaphor for people's power. The group emerged in 1998 following the popular movement that brought down President Suharto. Many of those involved in Taring Padi were active in student politics throughout the 1990s. They were among the architects of the radical art actions that highlighted the Yogyakarta protest movement in 1998.
Yogyakarta is renowned historically as a centre for radical cultural protest, particularly in the visual arts. Radical Yogya artists have embraced anti-colonial and revolutionary causes since early in the twentieth century. Like their predecessors, Taring Padi artists promote the concept of people's art - seni kerakyatan-a loose term that defines the artist's social commitment and popular orientation. Taring Padi attempt to put this credo into practise through concrete action, rather than just aesthetic empathy for the plight of the 'oppressed masses'.
Mainstream art, the conventional system of curators, galleries and art collectors, is something Taring Padi avoid. Rather, they cultivate relations with other progressive organisations including students, farmers, and the urban poor. Such was the case for the World Food Day action, when Taring Padi collaborated with Mbah Seko and his group of organic farmers called Petani Lestari (Conservation Farmers), as well as with activists from the environmental non-government organisation Keliling. At the demonstration, activists shared out the protest wayangamong themselves. The cast of wayang figures symbolised the various 'actors' involved in the pesticide 'drama'.
Taring Padi dalangs do not narrate their wayang performances. Rather, the characters themselves tell the story. The pesticide drama involved the general public. Mothers holding babies, school children, workers, and religious figures were all depicted as the potential 'victims' of polluted food. The protagonists were the 'enlightened' farmers, who knew the effects of poisonous farming inputs and were willing to boycott them. The antagonists included the 'capitalists' and corrupt bureaucrats who were intent on re-introducing dangerous pesticides for their own financial gain, impervious to the public interest.
This adaptation of the popularwayang tradition subverts standard wayangconventions whereby the people (rakyat)are portrayed as bungling clowns (punakawan), 'unrefined' and characterised by crude features. In contrast, protest wayangportray positive, realist images of the rakyat, who are wise to the deceptions of their conventionally 'benevolent' rulers. Power-holders, who are normally characterised by their 'refined' features, are here depicted as beast-like creatures often resembling pigs, wolves, rats or grotesque monsters. These characters don modern day attire such as business suits and military greens, often juxtaposed with symbols of the traditional elite, or the 'national' Indonesian icon, the kopiah or male Islamic headdress.
Taring Padi and their theatre of protest wayang have 'performed' at a number of events throughout Central Java and in Jakarta. Their dramas take on issues like the role of the military, the 'conviction' of New Order 'criminals', electricity and fuel price hikes, and the debt trap. In February 2000 they created about twenty wayang characters for a mass action in Jakarta to oppose renewed loans and austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The anti-debt coalition KAU that organised the action timed it to coincide with a meeting of the international Consultative Group on Indonesia to discuss debt rescheduling.
Pacifist
Taring Padi often uses wayang for 'agitation' purposes and to depict conflicting class relations. But Taring Padi's artwork also promotes pacifist causes. In the period before the June 1999 elections, a number of Indonesian cities experienced heightened unrest. Political commentators predicted 'civil war', and the media fuelled the volatile pre-election atmosphere by nurturing perceived religious, ethnic and racial tensions. As a response, Taring Padi began to produce a series of woodcut posters which carried messages promoting solidarity and peaceful social interrelations.Between March and June 1999, they distributed approximately 10,000 woodcut posters throughout major cities in Java, Sumatra and South Sulawesi. The woodcuts, hand-printed on draft paper, were pasted on city streets, on churches and mosques, on village notice boards, in food stalls, in market places.
Among their other artwork, Taring Padi issue a popular pamphlet called the People's trumpet. A series of banners and murals resemble the work of Mexican muralist Diego Riviera. Taring Padi banners are often commissioned by other organisations. The women's division of the National Human Rights Commission ordered a series of them. Titled The evacuation, the banners depict the harsh realities of the refugee crisis in Aceh by focusing on women's daily struggles.
But Taring Padi also use banners and murals for community purposes, and invite local people to be part of the painting process. Taring Padi's creative ethos involves a collective, process-oriented production of artwork. They want to eliminate illusive notions of the artist as 'genius' or 'eccentric' individual, and of the artwork as somehow 'sacred'. Taring Padi artwork does not carry recognition of the 'individual' artistic creator. It is stamped instead with the Taring Padi 'kerakyatan' insignia - a sprig of rice, red star and cogwheel.
Most Taring Padi activities are self-funded. Many Taring Padi artists are hostile toward the art market. The group ekes out a living from informally selling posters, postcards and books. They are lucky to have an advantageous living arrangement - the group squats in the former visual arts campus of the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) in Yogyakarta. The abandoned arts campus is now a melting pot for young Yogya radicals to meet, camp, and plan their 'revolutionary' activities. The buildings have not escaped their rhetoric. Graffiti, painting, and poetry cover its inner walls, quoting Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and the Indonesian poet Agam Wispi.
But they are by no means an in-group. They also engage in more community-oriented events such as creative activities with village children, theatre performances, workshops, and even wedding receptions.
Under the New Order regime, artists of social conscience struggled to maintain a community-oriented approach to their artistic activities. Persistently plagued by bureaucratic red tape and harassed by the military, artists and the community became forcibly detached. Now, amid the wave of recent reform in Indonesia, new possibilities for a lively community arts network are opening up.
Heidi Arbuckle (a.heidi@mailcity.com) recently completed her honours thesis on Taring Padi at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She lives in Yogyakarta and studies at the Indonesian Institute of Art. Contact Taring Padi at taring99@hotmail.com.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Underground music gives young people back their voice
Jo Pickles
Halfway down the road to Parangtritis, in the isolated Gabusan Art Building, wedged between sugar cane and rice paddies, a crowd of Yogyakarta youths endure the intense mid-day sun to watch an underground music concert.
Outside, near the parked motorbikes, the atmosphere is vibrant. Small groups cluster in narrow strips of shade to dodge the harsh noon glare. Some chat and joke as they wait for their favoured bands to come on. Others rest in silence, conserving energy before they perform, or recovering from a stint of brutal pogo dancing inside the airless hall. Not all the spectators are from Yogya. Many travelled from neighbouring cities in Central Java or from further afield in Bali or West Java to see the poster-billed bands and check out new local talent.
Vibrations from the hall hum through the air. Each time watchful police open the venue's doors to let sweaty bodies slip through, broken lyrics and fast drum phrases spill out into daylight.
Like most underground concerts these days, this event showcases several music genres: the loud angry disorder of Punk, the low growls and grunts of Grindcore, the melancholic and nihilistic screeching of Doom Metal, not to mention Black Metal, Brutal Death and Skacore.
Distinctive musical styles are coupled with dramatic fashion. Metal fans decked out in monochrome black contrast with the vivid ripped punk style, as do the checked shirts, braces and black boots of the skinheads. This is an 'anything goes' space, both stimulating and disseminating self-expression.
Underground concerts are not unique to Yogyakarta. The scene has flourished throughout Indonesia since the early nineties. Similar events are mirrored in Bandung, Malang, Denpasar, Blora and numerous other cities.
United by the desire to reclaim artistic creativity, the underground movement offers musicians an escape from the clutches of commercial culture. Hollers, screams and growls are let loose. Unlike the mainstream music world which is engineered by profit-oriented major label corporations, expression is not restricted. 'When I'm fed up, this music lets me get out my emotions and become positive' says Dempak, vocalist for the Bandung hardcore punk band Jeruji.
For many of the kids at this concert, music is more than just a hobby. Close-knit communities of young people sharing an interest in underground music have emerged throughout Indonesia. Underground youth cultures provide a network of like-minded people to experiment, hang out and jam with. A place of refuge from families who don't understand the aspirations of their youth, and from a society preoccupied with other issues. These groups provide a sense of belonging and family-like support for members who choose nomadic life on the streets in preference to living at home. Distinct from other more segregated social structures, the underground scene is open for all to join and participate in. Money and education are not barriers.
History
With its roots in the underground movement, punk is the most theatrical youth culture in Indonesia. Intentionally in your face and necessarily cheap, punk dress code, music and lifestyle have been adopted by young people from a cross section of classes, religions and ethnic backgrounds. Uni students, street kids, salespeople and the unemployed unite in a show of studded jackets, gravity-defying hairstyles and pants patched with angry slogans. They have redefined these symbols of a western tradition in a new setting.
The seventies British punk scene grew out of a climate of high youth unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. Found objects were given new 'absurd' contexts: over-sized safety pins pushed through earlobes and spiked dog collars buckled around human necks. These visual statements set out to ridicule the conventions of respectable social life. The tough non-conformist attitudes of punkers were a reaction to a conservative government which offered limited prospects to its youth.
Indonesian punk has a similar history. According to those who have been involved in the scene for almost a decade, some of Indonesia's youth began parading punk fashion as a rebellious visual stab at unappetising social 'norms'. At that stage, fear of repercussions ensured that they rarely voiced discontent with the establishment openly.
Ironically, the increased freedoms after the fall of the New Order produced an intellectual rift that divided the punk scene. One section chooses to remain uninterested and disenchanted by politics. Others look to punk activism in other parts of the world as a blueprint for how to voice concerns. 'It's time for us, the next generation, to open our thoughts, hearts and ears to fight for what we are sure of and what is right' cries a cut-and-paste photocopied leaflet, handed out during a concert in East Java.
The Do-It-Yourself ethic long associated with this branch of the underground music movement encourages young people to be active in a sub-culture they can call their own. The realisation that anyone can record their own music or publish a homemade fanzine is self-empowering. Alternative distribution systems replace dependence on the unattainable and limiting commercial media. The movement values independent thinking and self-education. Most opinion pieces in underground newsletters cockily invite critical feedback.
Samples from political speeches are mixed into three-chord thrash and then coated in layers of rebellion and dissatisfaction. Weapons of consumer culture such as packaging are appropriated and disarmed. Album covers, for example, are used as a space for critical commentary. Stamped with images selected to stimulate a reaction, this medium opens another doorway for bands to communicate directly with their audience. The compilation Punx 'n Skins: Street Sounds of Revolution is wrapped in the printed aspirations of the thirty bands involved in making the album. A short text inside the simple cover dedicates the album to the ideals of freedom, togetherness and the environment. It states its opposition to injustice and oppression. The words 'ELIMINATE THEM!' ('Basmi mereka!') in bold capitals are aimed at the corruptors who have eaten through Indonesia's bureaucracy.
Music is not their only medium of criticism. Concern for the future of Indonesia often leads these youths to the forefront of heated demonstrations. They assert their personal beliefs and try to raise awareness in others through street posters, stickers, badges, fanzines and handouts.
Prejudice
But sharp spikes, superfluous zippers, and tattoos still twig a sensitive nerve in today's Indonesia. In the rare event the media looks at this group of young people it usually paints an ugly ('jelek') portrait. When last November the weekly tabloid Adil published a feature article on 'Bandung's sea of gangs', it described the punk community as 'disturbing' and placed it on a par with the thugs who rule Bandung's underworld. Music mag Mumu in its April edition said punk members were paid to take part in demonstrations. ('They are happy to do it as they are getting paid' - 'Mereka sih senang-senang aja disuruh seperti itu karena diberi uang'). Prejudice stemming from conservative values also comes in more sinister forms. Random beatings, threats and tales of harassment are not uncommon.
Punk and other underground music may have originated in the west. But Indonesia's youth have indigenised these cultures and given them new meanings. Amidst Indonesia's current upheaval, they offer young people an identity to participate in, and a support base. Even more important, the underground has broken down barriers to expression and given youths back their voice after a long period of silence.
Jo Pickles (joanna_pickles@hotmail.com) is a student at the Australian National University, Canberra. She was in Yogyakarta with Acicis (the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies).
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
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
Page 51 of 68
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