What do Indonesian students think about Osama bin Laden?
Katie Brayne
If you walk south along Jalan Malioboro past McDonalds, turn left into the Mall, take a right at Marks and Spencer, and then just before the ATM's take a left down the escalators, then, just opposite the Ericsson mobile phone store you'll find a small store with glass cabinets filled with stickers and T-shirts. In this store, on the bottom floor of Yogyakarta's favourite monument to western consumerism, you will find, next to stickers and T-shirts of the various Yogyakarta University logos, European soccer team logos and Yogya paraphernalia, a hand-written sign advertising the latest addition to the sticker collection - a proud portrait of Osama bin Laden, available in a variety of colours. T-shirts are also available, the sign reads on.
Further south, in an offshoot of the Beringharjo Market, you find the wooden boarded stalls of the book market. This labyrinth is affectionately known among Yogyakarta's large student population as 'shopping'. Amongst the old and new text books, newspaper clippings and pre-loved assignments and theses, a new book has flooded the market: Osama bin Laden versus America ('Osama bin Laden melawan Amerika') - a collection of essays from western and non-western academics and clerics translated into Indonesian.
In the aftermath of the Black Tuesday attacks in the US, Indonesian students are clearly interested in this man, whom America accuses of masterminding the most devastating attack on American soil since the Civil War.
So what do Yogya's students think about this infamous figure? This is what I wanted to find out amongst my friends and classmates at Gadjah Mada University and Muhammadiyah University Yogyakarta.
'I don't really know, and I don't really believe the recent news about Osama bin Laden because all the news comes from the West who want to put forward their particular point of view.'
'Scapegoat.'
'America is very scared of Osama. America says that because Osama is able to conduct such a terrorist attack, therefore he must have done it. This propaganda is proof of how scared America is of him.'
'Pretty cool in some ways.'
'He is the symbol of a revolutionary movement that is fed up with America's defence of Israel and its discrediting of Islam. Because of this sentiment, Osama bin Laden and his group hold violently strong beliefs against the West.'
'Osama is a true Islamic fighter, who is trying to free Islam itself from its status as a slave to American interests.'
'A militant who is prepared to sacrifice everything he owns for his religion and community.'
'An anti-American revolutionary who hates America for what he sees as their unjust role as world policeman.'
'He is great, but unfortunately he has no heart.'
'He is only presuming innocence.'
'It is not yet clear whether he did it, but it is clear that he agrees with it.'
'An anti-American, anti-imperialist militant.'
'He is one of the few men brave enough to oppose America. He is currently in hiding not because he is afraid, but because it is his strategy in facing America, who are currently playing judge without any strong proof. I think Osama didn't do it, but that doesn't mean he is not brave enough to do it'
'Osama bin Laden is a true Islamic militant whose goal is to free Islam from its fate as enemy number one to the West.'
Katie Brayne (kbrayne@hotmail.com) was a student at Gadjah Mada University through the Acicis program (wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/acicis).
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
What the guide books don't tell you about Surabaya
Duncan Graham
The East Java Provincial Government, like most administrations world wide, is not above a little dissembling. You get it on the road into Surabaya where the official welcome signs note that Indonesia's second biggest city is 'Bersih dan Hijau' - Clean and Green.
The signs are best seen at first light. By 9 am smog blurs the image and attention is distracted by beggars and newspaper sellers who swarm around any slow-moving car. Which is just about any vehicle, for the traffic density is close to gridlock. Try not to breathe.
That's in the dry season: In the wet roads are flooded from door to door, so pavement, verge, drain and bitumen merge into a seamless black scum where floating objects best remain unscrutinised. Then Surabaya stalls as saturated engines short circuit.
And the green? Most obvious on bright coloured giant billboards offering sexual, sporting and social success for the tiny price of a pack of smokes. Real trees are as rare as a shark (sura) fighting a crocodile (buaya), the city's mythological origin.
The authorities claim Surabaya has a Centre. If there is a focal point it has to be Tunjungan Plaza, a garish multi-storey department store full of over-priced goods and costly American fast-food shops. Here the poor peer, the middle class preen, and salesgirls professionally ignore customers with cash.
For Surabaya has not been planned, or if that claim is denied, the planners were corrupt, inept, or asleep. Probably all three.
Like some sci-fi squid from outer space which feeds on city sewers, Surabaya is devouring Gresik up the coast, climbing into the hill town of Tretes, swallowing nearby Sidoarjo, to be stopped only by the Straits of Madura. But even then its plastic excreta can be found far offshore.
Who can tell where it all begins and ends, because it doesn't. Surabaya defies definitions and census-takers, but four to five million for the area around the port could be a reasonable guess, with 30 million more in the hinterland. Or maybe that's the other way around.
At least 20,000 are prostitutes, for among its many credentials this sweaty, grimy industrial megapolis seven degrees south of the equator is reputedly Southeast Asia's biggest brothel, with the accessories of disease and despair to match.
And yet...
Without doubt Surabaya is Scunge City.
And yet and yet.
Unlike Bali, Surabaya doesn't care whether you come, and unlike Jakarta it's indifferent to whether you go. The few tourists who find themselves in Surabaya wander bemused, clutching handbags and hands, restless eyes playing spot-the-mugger.
Relax: Even the thieves are indifferent.
Expat businessmen and government officials are not to be spotted in public, except at product launches. They're more at ease gliding between hotel and office behind the black windows of their chauffeur-driven Super Kijangs.
Ignore them: They only mix with their own kind, then sell themselves as experts on the culture and economy.
In a narrow trench alongside Tunjungan Plaza, crushed by a motorbike park, are the warungs where shopgirls on $60 a month and their boyfriends retreat from their air-conditioned glitzy workplace to eat well for less than one Australian dollar.
And so can you. Rip-offs are rare and gawking at Western intruders is subtle.
For although Surabaya is chaotic, grotesque, dirty, impossible to negotiate, crass in its Soviet-realism monuments, noteworthy for its lack of notable buildings, events and attractions, try finding any place more Javanese.
The language of the kampungs and the street is Javanese, not Bahasa Indonesia. Advertisements for cigarettes, mobile phones and dandruff-cures may be English in a pretence of refinement, but the world language is rare outside the campuses.
What you see is what you get. The indifference towards Westerners extends to the locals. This is not special treatment, it is the treatment. Surabaya is raw and honest. No 'morning price', no concessions and, best of all, no contempt.
The obsequiousness, sneers and arrogance, so much the part of the local response in other Asian cities towards white skinned creatures outside their environment, is seldom encountered in Surabaya. You are obviously a walking cash box, but the temptation to make a quick withdrawal is usually found only among a few taxi drivers late on a wet night.
Yet what you see is not what you get. The splendid Majapahit Hotel, reputedly the most expensive in Indonesia and a marvel of indulgence and beauty with a fine historic past, is hidden behind a drab fawhich blends anonymously into a coarse streetscape of commercial sameness.
Likewise with Kampung Sasak. Even the locals have difficulty finding the entrance of this Arab quarter, which leads through a cramped street of traders to the ancient Ampel Mosque, founded by Sunan Ampel, one of the nine holy men who brought Islam to Java.
The mosque, in this densely packed centre of Middle Eastern commerce, always seems to be busy with the business of worship, unlike the landmark Agung Mosque near the toll road to Malang. This grand blue-domed and government-built celebration of Islam, with a Catholic church in its shadow as forced propaganda for tolerance, is as sterile and obvious as Ampel is potent and hidden.
There are hundreds of other nooks in Surabaya which reveal some of the complex and subtle nuances of this fourteenth century remnant of the Majapahit Kingdom. That they're absent from the guide books is no indicator of a desire for privacy; it's just that the government has a stereotyped view of foreigners and thinks visitors only want poolside drinks and American breakfasts.
When Surabaya was created, the deity which governs tourism blinked, and praise be for a marvellous escape from Mammon.
The best food is often found in the gloomiest, oil-lit warungs, original handicrafts in the drabbest shops, the finest dancers and singers in schools where the concrete is cancerous and the architecture indistinguishable from a public toilet.
East Java proclaims it is a Muslim State, but even the most pious will visit a paranormal in times of strife. Ghosts lurk in banyan trees, wayward spirits send lax students into trances, mystics are consulted by brokers who trade on the Net. At midnight, street people drift to a Chinese temple seeking a peep into the future. Islam is just the outer skin of an onion covering animism, Hinduism and other ancient mysteries.
Slim girls in gladwrap-tight jeans revealing navels, shoulders and their readership of Cosmopolitan, hold hands with friends covered from head to toe in the tradition of their grandmothers. Men smoke, drink and gamble, then pray.
To find the secret places and learn of the magics you need a special guide. Not a professional from a hotel - they'll only take you to KFC. The person you require will find you and will be insulted if you offer money, though a feed and help with English conversation will be appreciated.
How to meet such a marvel?
It's not that difficult. Wander the streets and markets alone, with an open mind, friendly face and polite gestures. Take your time. You'll be seen and watched. If you're sending the right signals someone is bound to find the courage to practise their English. Don't rush. Build an acquaintance - or walk away if the mood or person isn't right.
In a few days you'll have met a few of his or her friends, had a meal or two, maybe visited the family home, exchanged views and discovered differences. With luck you'll find more in common despite the Timor Sea of misunderstanding, language, religion, income, experience and lifestyle which separates us as neighbours. Then the smog starts to lift.
Since the British bombed the city in November 1945, Surabaya has been deceived and betrayed by successive governments in Jakarta, but its residents remain resilient, independent, stoic, Javanese.
For although Surabaya is rough and ugly, its people are genuine, keen to share, humble but proud. They apologise for the manifold faults of government, but retain hope for change. They hunger for knowledge. They thirst for understanding. Yet they are not ignorant or unsophisticated.
You may find wrinkled men sucking clove cigarettes who can debate philosophy having read the greats in Greek; young women studying John Donne and other metaphysical poets in the original yet destined to become secretaries; students who know more of Australian politics than the average Okker undergraduate. They hate KKN (corruption, collusion and nepotism) but know that without it they will surely miss the best jobs.
It's a humbling experience to continuously meet fluent self-taught English speakers when you're struggling with a language which is supposed to be easy, to discover the astonishing achievements of young people handicapped by lack of money, few books and a 1950-style education system.
Despite the universe-sized problems which beset this cumbersome and fumbling democracy, the next generation is largely incandescent with energy and determination to right the wrongs, all tempered with reality and an undercurrent of fear. Expect to be dazzled and confused. But never dismayed.
All this and more, as the tourist brochures like to say. Seek and ye will find. In Surabaya.
Duncan Graham (wordstars@hotmail.com) is a Perth based journalist who can't get enough of East Java.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Popular with sailors and miners, but not necessarily with their women
Terence H Hull
Men in some areas of Indonesia have a long history of inserting or implanting various objects in their penises. The origin of the practices is unclear, but some writers say that they were copied from Chinese traders who visited the islands, while others argue it is an indigenous innovation related to the use of other forms of amulets and inserts for medicinal and spiritual purposes. The objects used range from the very simple (the implant of ball bearings under the skin), to the magical (the use of specially selected semi-precious stones), or the elaborate (gold bars - called palang - or rings inserted through the glans). Historians have documented these practices in some detail, most notably in the annotated bibliography prepared by Brown, Edwards and Moore in Penis implants in Southeast Asia (1988), and Tony Reid's Land beneath the winds (1988).
Reid cites Pigafetta's 1524 traveller's tale to describe the Indonesian palang as having 'spurs' requiring intercourse to be commenced with the penis in a flacid state, and finished only after the penis has again become soft, to allow the woman to manoeuvre the palang in and out safely. Early reports of inserted bells or implanted balls begin with the 1433 report of Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim who found the practice in Thailand. Bells were found around Malaya to as far as Makassar.
While these might seem odd and esoteric practices long relegated to museums or Ripley's Believe It or Not, recent research is finding that the use of inserts is spreading rapidly among working class men in the Southeast Asia and Melanesia. The modern manifestations of inserts and implants are important because they may cause vaginal wounds, inflammation and infection among the partners of men attracted to these practices. They can also cause permanent damage to the males, particularly when the cutting involved is carried out under unhygienic conditions.
For some years I had been hearing of penis inserts in Indonesia, but like most middle class Indonesians I dismissed the stories as being little more than sensationalist rumours or fillers for slow news days in tabloids. Eventually though the growing number of reliable sources suggested that there might be something worthy of further research.
In February 2000 with colleagues from the University of Indonesia I examined the records of a random sample of over 700 men undergoing pre-employment checks for work in the shipping, hotel and banking industries. This was an exploratory attempt to determine the likelihood of obtaining information on male reproductive health issues from conventional clinic records. It was found that one percent of the applicants for shipping industry jobs had some form of penis implant. Since most of these men were young and inexperienced this might be taken as a minimum prevalence among sailors. In the course of our enquiries we found that the practices were more widespread and varied than we had imagined.
Variations
The difficulty of determining the exact spread of various penis augmentation practices lies in the fact that they are inspired and implemented in a highly informal way. It appears that groups of working class males living in isolated circumstances are quite likely to discuss and attempt these practices. Interviews reveal a variety of practices designed to 'augment' the penis and enhance masculinity.
Basic inserts - ball bearings.
Workers in forestry, fishing and mining industries apparently take ball-bearings from machinery, boil them and soak them in antiseptic, and then insert them under the skin of the penis, about a centimetre back from the glans. Interviews in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and the Philippines have also indicated that overseas contract workers in Saudi Arabia use the extended residence in highly controlled environments to experiment with implants.
Plastics - Tops of toothpaste tubes
Throughout Southeast Asia and Melanesia reports are emerging of prisoners inserting objects under the skin of their penises. The picture to emerge is one of boredom and isolation focussing attention on discussions of masculinity (kejantanan) and dreams of future possibilities to 'conquer' women. Prisoners while away the hours scraping tooth brushes into sharp instruments to pierce the penile skin, and melt down the caps to form small balls for insertion.
Silicon
Among transvestites throughout Indonesia the use of silicon implants to accentuate lips, cheeks, breasts, and other parts of the body is popular, and easily available through salons as well as some medical practitioners. There are some reports of Indonesian men, both straight and gay, using silicon implants in their penises, though this is probably less common than the use of ball bearings. In the Philippines silicon is used to create 'humps' around the shaft of the penis.
Semi-precious stones and gold - Investing objects with power
Throughout Southeast Asia inserts using precious stones, metals or pearls are regarded as providing special powers to men. In Indonesia the traditions of susuk implants support such thinking.
From ad hoc interviews I have found that men use the devices before marriage, but remove them when they settle down with one woman. Why, if the purpose is to please a woman? One explained: 'You can't really be sure about these things - what if something went wrong? You wouldn't want to take a risk with your wife.' Indeed, doctors and sex workers do report the occasional accident when a ring or stud or other sharp object is left in a vagina, or where women have suffered cuts or severe pain from men's experiments.
Interviews with social workers and commercial sex workers suggested that upwards of ten to twenty percent of regular clients of brothels have either penis implants or holes in the glans or skin of their penises. The holes may be normally for rings or studs, but during intercourse the ring is replaced by a piece of horsehair or the strand of a stiff-leaved plant which is tied and clipped off to a length of three or four centimetres as a 'tickler'. The putative reason for the practice is to 'please the woman', and men with inserts argue quite strongly that 'women love it'. However in the absence of systematic interviews with the lovers of such men, the testimony of commercial sex workers may be regarded as a useful commentary on the practice. Many of the women who earn their living from sex regard the use of inserts and ticklers as both strange and discomforting. One respondent recalled how one man using horsehair had caused her to bleed, while another reported great discomfort. She laughed at the idea that the devices were to 'please the woman'. 'That is what they say, but actually they only want the woman to reach orgasm before they ejaculate. It is a sign of their manliness (kejantanan)to have such control.' At the same time some women report the practices as being pleasurable.
Demystification
Informal but persistent attempts to understand the practices of genital cutting and the use of inserts and implants among Indonesian men indicate that what we are seeing today is not the resurgence of tradition. Rather these are largely attempts to come to terms with sexualities based on gender relations emerging from rapid modernisation.
Workers in isolated camps who rely on their peers for information on 'what women want' are easily convinced that implants may make them attractive to lovers. Young men who see peers attempting the operations to insert stones or plastic balls, and hear the bragging afterward are easily swayed to try the practice themselves. They do not hear clinical evidence of damage done to sex organs, and they definitely do not hear women's stories of pain, discomfort or infection. From the viewpoint of men and reproductive health the response to penis implants must be based on education and the demystification of large areas of sexuality.
The Indonesian Health Department regards any talk of penis adornments as esoteric, sensitive and obscure. Reproductive health service providers do not recognise the problems associated with genital cutting and the use of sexual accessories because such things are quickly dismissed as immoral. Whatever the moral arguments though, the practice of penis inserts appears to be spreading because men's sexual education is incomplete and isolated. Lower class men in particular are likely to experiment with implants, not because their sexual needs are any different from other men, but because they are the groups most likely to experience isolation from women in their occupations.
Terence H Hull (terry.hull@anu.edu.au) is Senior Fellow at the Demography and Sociology Program, Australian National University, Canberra. This note is based on a longer article written with Dr Meiwita Budiharsana to be published in the journal Reproductive Health Matters. Much of the information collected here was generously provided by colleagues in the ANU and internationally. Particular thanks go to the doctors and staff of the Klinik Baruna in Jakarta, and to Dr Sarsanto W Sarwono and Dra Ninuk Widyantoro whose work in Timika and other sites in Indonesia has revealed a range of behaviours normally hidden from routine medical practice.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
A flood of 'democratisation' dollars has corrupted the NGO movement
Anu Lounela
Wherever one goes in Indonesia, one will come upon non-government organisations (NGOs). They are of all kinds and sizes: one-person offices, young activists working from home, giant offices, and training centres on the beach. NGOs are among a wide range of organisations that stand between the household and the state - they are part of 'civil society'. They do community development, support the rights of minorities like indigenous peoples and women, resist economic globalisation, and much more. To make the concerns of citizens heard by state power, NGOs are in front.
NGOs are born and die again as fast as activists are able to act, and funding agencies able to give. According to Kastorius Sinaga (Bisnis Info, September 2001), there are 13,400 officially registered NGOs alone, not to mention those unregistered. In the 1980s there were only around 3,000.
However, some international donors as well as voices within the NGO community say all is not well. Media accounts have claimed that, after the mushrooming of NGOs since 1998, funding has been misused, while some NGOs formed mainly for the money lack orientation in their activities. NGOs are accused of lacking transparency towards the Indonesian people, and of deliberately keeping vague their ideological commitment to 'strengthen civil society' in order to get more funds.
The reason for the poor management and poor ethics, especially among newer NGOs, is that they have become places where ex-business people, ex-state officials, and others lacking a clear vision earn a salary. Some NGO activists also believe that fooling donors with false receipts is not wrong, since the donors have their own agendas that do not always coincide with those of the NGOs.
Swedish anthropologist Hans Antlhas been doing research on Indonesia for a long time and has written several books. He is also project manager for the Ford Foundation, a major American funding agency. 'Problems have been evident already for a couple of years. We now have to save the good reputation of NGOs in Indonesia, or affairs will turn for the worst. Of great importance is the trust between different stakeholders, especially donors and NGOs. If this does not exist, development cooperation will not work', he says.
Roots
The first Indonesian NGOs were born in the 1970s. Suharto was ruling Indonesia with an iron hand. There was no freedom of speech, and NGOs generally chose to concentrate on (safe) 'development' work.
Mansour Fakih is another researcher who has long been studying Indonesian civil society. He once divided NGOs into three groups: those that adapt, those that reform, and those that strive for transformation. The first adapted to the development policy of the state and tried to participate without a vision of their own. Reformers aimed to strengthen civil society, but did not question the hegemonic development ideology based on the idea of economic growth. The minority of NGOs aiming at transformative change wanted to challenge the hegemonic development ideology, for example by using 'participatory research' methods.
When the economic crisis of 1997 turned into the political crisis of 1998, foreign funding agencies - especially American - rushed to Indonesia. They wanted to help build good governance, strengthen civil society, develop democracy, and save the environment and indigenous people. A real money circus started after Suharto stepped down in May 1998. NGOs mushroomed everywhere, all promoting 'democratisation'. In 1999 many more international donors entered Indonesia to support free elections with gigantic sums of money. Civil society had been suppressed for so long - donors felt it was the right time to support a strengthening process.
Paskah Irianto from the Indonesian legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI) thinks the corruption sometimes goes beyond an unclear ideology. Some amounts of money are 'stolen' in administration, and receipts do not always correspond with reality. NGOs often obtain funding for the same proposal from several sources at once. Some obtain money from unsavoury Indonesian sources. For example, a report in Media Indonesia (5 October 2001) alleged that Indonesian Corruption Watch, a major watchdog, was itself partly backed by well-known corrupt business people and politicians. The basic problem, according to a series of articles in Media Indonesia early October 2001, is that most activists depend on NGOs to make a living. This creates an incentive to manipulate reports to donor organisations.
Many other NGOs feel uncomfortable about the situation. Money has distorted the NGO movement, so that institutions formed purely to get money are mixed with 'good' NGOs.
If overseas donors worry about corruption within Indonesian NGOs, bitter stories are also told within the NGO community about the foreign agencies. Foreign development workers grow rich from the development business. They move from one country to another while spreading their own views on how things should be done.
The UN Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank, and some individual governments are financing a 'good governance' program in Indonesia. It operates like a gatekeeper for NGO financial support. The UNDP program has an Indonesian board of supervision which evaluates incoming applications. However, the system is bureaucratic and top down. Jari (Jaringan Independen untuk Transparensi dan Akuntabilitas Pembangunan Indonesia) is a network of about eighty civil society organisations from around Indonesia. Yando Zakaria, who works at Jari, says Jari recently refused funding offered by UNDP. UNDP had rewritten the Jari funding application to include UN Volunteers, with a much higher salary than that of local staff. 'It is difficult to preserve your own mission and vision when the donor is recruiting staff, as well as changing the proposal and the amount of funding asked', says Yando.
Some NGOs are also upset with the US Agency for International Development. USAID currently administers about 68 grants and 22 cooperative agreements in Indonesia, with both international and Indonesian participating organisations. This US government agency's annual budget in Indonesia is US$ 130 million. Some Indonesian partners feel USAID controls their agendas. Walhi is Indonesia's major environmental umbrella organisation. Nieke Dewayani, its staff member responsible for donor relations, says that every time Walhi renews its contract with USAID there is a 'gentleman's agreement' to avoid using USAID funding for activities that concern mining. Joko Waluyo, the head of Walhi's information and communication department, adds that recently USAID was not willing to fund the Walhi environmental magazine Tanah Air. In his opinion, USAID disliked Walhi's mining advocacy.
In an interview with me, a USAID official said: 'We do not have these kinds of conditions tied to our agreements. We do not forbid criticism of badly behaving US corporations by the organisations we support.' However, this is not the first time that allegations have arisen of USAID cutting its aid for activities that threaten US companies. Inside Indonesia republished an IPS news item in its October-December 2000 edition in which the anti-mining group Jatam (Indonesian Mining Advocacy Network) had its USAID funding cut after it criticised US mining giant Newmont.
'Spoilt'
According to Hans Antlcivil society organisations have to a certain extent been 'spoilt' by the easy access to foreign funding. This was for instance the case during the 1999 election, with crash programs of voter education and election monitoring. 'Is it anywhere else in the world a habit to give to seminar participants a cash payment in an envelope? There are also allegations that some foundations were set up to launder money or as fronts for commercial enterprises. However, most civil society organisations are committed and are doing important work,' he says.
Many overseas donors are now changing their strategies towards Indonesian NGOs. Donors have to be accountable to their sources for the funding they hand out. The new strategies probably will include more support for multilateral agencies such as UNDP, more information sharing between donors, direct funding for local governments (rather than NGOs), and standardised reporting mechanisms to ensure the money goes to the 'right address'.
LP3ES, the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education and Information, is one of Indonesia's oldest NGOs. It was founded in 1971 by some Indonesian academics, and funded by the German agency FNS (Friedrich Naumann Stiftung). Imam Ahmad is LP3ES' managing director. He says: 'It is only a question of time when the funding agencies will change their strategy or go away and stop giving direct support to civil society. We have to change. From the very start we have been too dependent on them. Now we have a warning: become self-sufficient or die.'
'I feel as if I am a public servant of the United States!' Imam Ahmed continues. 'LP3ES gets its funding from many US agencies, such as USAID or the Ford Foundation. I get my salary from them. In my office there are seventy employees. If the funding stops, what will happen to their families? We receive no money from the Indonesian government. We do not get money from poor Indonesians. Maybe we will transform into a consultancy firm.'
Others say Indonesian NGOs are already more like consultancy firms than civil society organisations, since their 'managers' work so hard to adapt to donor ideas and requests. 'I think many of the grassroot NGOs will soon die,' says NGO veteran S Indro Tjahjono, director of the environmental organisation Skephi and an advisor of the labour minister. 'The middle class is no longer attracted to the idea of making NGOs a part of the social transformation movement.'
'As the funding agencies change their strategies, the NGOs dependent on them will live or die. NGOs have to create their own ideology, and not merely be followers of the neo-liberal agencies. We have to search for self-sufficiency, work with the people and the communities, and together create a people's movements', says Indro Tjahjono.
Anu Lounela (alounela@indosat.net.id) is an NGO volunteer with Insist in Yogyakarta (insist@yogya.wasantara.net.id).
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
The democracy movement must now challenge international capital
Revrisond Baswir
The transition to democracy in Indonesia isn't just a struggle between political factions within Indonesia. We must also consider the relationship with international capital. The New Order of Suharto was the child of capitalism. From CIA documents, we now know of the US involvement in bringing about Sukarno's downfall. The New Order under Suharto went on to establish strong links with international capital. The first laws the New Order enacted in 1967 were about Foreign Direct Investment (PMA). For 32 years the New Order's economic strategy was pro-mainstream, pro-growth or neo-liberal. We should not be surprised that the New Order survived so long. Despite its authoritarianism and corruption, it continued to enjoy the support of international capital - as long as Aceh still had gas to be exploited, as long Riau's oil fields were making a profit, and likewise in Papua.
The presence of the military is also important to international capital. Can you imagine what would happen if Exxon in Aceh had to close, or Caltex was overrun by the people of Riau? And today, who is busier than the representatives of international capital in lobbying the US government to reestablish links with our military?
So whether they were aware of it or not, the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia for thirty years not only had to oppose Suharto, the military and Golkar, but also the challenge of international capital. The question that arises is: with such strong backing, how could Suharto be deposed? Strangely enough, in the last few years before Suharto's downfall a co-existence developed between the pro-democracy movement and international capital. Since the early 'nineties the actions of Suharto and his cronies were proving increasingly problematic for international capital. Foreign investors had to include members of Suharto's family, pay commissions and involve the military. Suharto was becoming 'too expensive'. So they began to support the democracy movement. USAID, for example, began to pay for voter education.
In my opinion, the transition to democracy in Indonesia raises some very serious questions, which we must face honestly. We have to ask ourselves whether the movement that deposed Suharto on 21 May 1998 only got support from, or was it in fact manipulated by international capital? Personally I fear that it was manipulated.
No protest
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that following the fall of Suharto there has been no protest against international capital. Our friends in the pro-democracy movement demand the disbandment of the New Order political party Golkar, which is excellent. Many non-government organisations (NGOs) have been formed to support 'good governance', and they protest the actions of local parliament, local government, and the district heads. But none of them demand the disbandment of the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI, a group of governments that make loans to Indonesia), nor the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nor the World Bank and the transnational corporations. This is a very interesting phenomenon. The pro-democracy movement is exploited by, or rather working to the agenda of international capital. The direction of democratic reform in Indonesia is in the hands of global capital. And that is a great tragedy. We have always known this happens within the state and the market, but it clearly happens also within the grassroots movement of national and local NGOs.
This is very clear at the national level, in parliament. For thirty years throughout Suharto's reign the national parliament never dared to make any changes to the government's National Policy Guidelines (GBHN). Yet now when the IMF demands change they simply comply. They can't stand up to the IMF. The same goes for the government, which is very dependent on international investment capital. But the same can also be said of the grassroots movements. For example among the pro-democracy groups in Jakarta, and in oil-rich Aceh and Riau, no one questions the demands of international capital.
A few days before President Abdurrahman Wahid was ousted (on 23 July 2001) I was invited by the British Ambassador to attend the launching of an agreement between the British and the Indonesian Defence Departments. So this was already being prepared while Gus Dur (Wahid) was still president. The Americans and Australians have also restored their support to the military - after it was cut following the destruction of East Timor in 1999. The actions of the IMF, furthermore, played a big role in the removal of Gus Dur. For nine months the IMF refused to release the next US$ 400 million instalment in its huge rescue package, citing Jakarta's refusal to implement reforms. This eventually caused a crisis as the rupiah continued to fall against the dollar. In my opinion parliament only put the 'finishing touches' to the removal of Gus Dur. The ball had been placed in front of the goal by global capital interests. When Megawati took over as president, the money started flowing again. This resulted in a dramatic improvement in the value of the rupiah, which went from 11,300 to about 9,000 to the US dollar in a short time.
It's very clear how international capital behaves. The question for us is, in which direction should we steer the transition to democracy? Is it enough simply to confront the New Order elements still in power, in the military and the government? This is the most important question for the democracy movement. What is our attitude to international capital? In my opinion this question must be answered, and answered very explicitly. If it is not, I fear the democracy movement will continue to be exploited by international capital.
Twin Towers
The problem with being dependent on the international economy has become clearer after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. The attack has caused a worsening of the international economy in recent days, and this also affects our economy. Furthermore, if America continues to retaliate against Afghanistan there will no doubt be a negative reaction in Indonesia, whether or not it is true that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the Twin Towers attack. If America goes on to strike also against Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, or Egypt, then there will really be problems in Indonesia.
So what am I afraid of? I am afraid that the challenge to international capital in Indonesia will not come from the pro-democracy groups but from other groups. Even before the attack on the Twin Towers, groups were already mobilising in Indonesia to oppose America over its policy towards Palestine and Israel. If America attacks Kabul, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan or Egypt, I am sure there will be opposition to it in Indonesia. Stability will be disrupted, and don't hope that foreign investors will then come back. Before the Twin Towers tragedy there was already a travel warning for American tourists not to come to Indonesia. The threats that are sure to follow further retaliatory strikes will be directed not only at America, but also the British, the IMF, World Bank etc. Our economy will continue to be squeezed by what I call the 'Twin Towers Effect'. Our international markets will be weak, the internal situation will be unstable, and investors will not want to come to Indonesia.
Let's return to my question for the pro-democracy groups. What position will they adopt in this situation? It is a big question. Are we going to take part in large anti-America, anti-capitalist demonstrations? We have to be clear what we want. For me the transition to democracy is impossible without taking a position towards international capital. We must have an answer, or we will continue to be confused and oscillating.
Briefly, I want to suggest a solution. It's a very simple one. As long as our economy remains dependent on international capital it will remain weak. We have to turn around our dependence on global capital as the basis of our economy. Instead of 'waiting for Godot' we need to pay serious attention to our domestic market. The buying power of the people is the springboard of our economy. The revival of Indonesia can't be handed over to the global market, to international investors who may or may not come to our shores. This solution is clearly a dilemma for the current government and cabinet, who are the foot slaves of the IMF and World Bank. So the question remains: is the democracy movement ready or not to challenge not only the forces within Indonesia - the New Order, Golkar, the military, and the present government - but also the might of international capital?
Revrisond Baswir (revrisond@ygy.centrin.net.id) teaches accountancy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Condensed from a presentation at UGM on 18 September 2001.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Farmers in East Java are still working land they took three years ago
Sukardi
Until my hair turns grey, I'll never be able to own land, unless we ask for the land back that belonged to our ancestors. Even if I had money, no one is selling land, or if they are it's far too expensive. If the state or the state plantation really want this land back, there will be war, that's for sure. We'll all die.
(Suroto, a farmer who cut down cocoa plants at the Kalibakar plantation in South Malang, speaking in July 2000).
A land certificate is not important. The state plantation, for example, has a certificate, but they can't use the land because it has been taken over by the people. The important thing is to be able to work the land. Having no certificate is not a problem.
(Imam Sudja'i, village head who led the land takeover at Simojayan village, South Malang, speaking in March 2000).
At US$3-4 a kilo, cocoa beans are valuable. The 2,050 hectare cocoa plantation at Kalibakar, South Malang (East Java) was planted in 1965. The area was first leased from the local community in 1941 by a Dutch investor, who planted coffee. In exchange for the 35-year lease, every village received 350 pieces of silver and two rolls of cloth, plus a car which was used by the village head. When in 1959 all Dutch ventures were nationalised, it became a state-owned plantation, run by PTPN XII, the Twelfth State Plantation Company. Farmers who knew this as their land tried at various times to get it back, beginning in the mid-1970s, but they always failed.
However, on Monday 24 August 1998 the farmers living in five villages around the plantation struck in force. Thousands of them invaded in a well-prepared operation. Carrying clubs, knives and saws, they cut down hundreds of thousands of cocoa bushes, then occupied the land. The economic crisis of 1997-98 had made them desperate. Many poor relatives had returned to the country from the city, straining farmers' food supplies. They were also taking advantage of the euphoria of 'reformasi' following President Suharto's sudden resignation the previous May. This created chaos in government ranks. The big August action followed sporadic raids since the previous December.
Land remains the key asset for this farming community. Theirs was one of many actions around Indonesia to reclaim land at this time. The state claims monopoly control over land, but it has been insensitive to its social and economic importance to farmers. The August 1998 land action was not a case of banditry, but a valid community response to unceasing structural repression. Instead of being responsive in this reformation era, the state in many ways has behaved worse than the Dutch colonial state did in the late nineteenth century. As a result, farmers have faced not merely the power of the investors or the market, but of the state itself.
Victories
Today, more than three years later, the farmers have consolidated their position. They have won some significant victories, but still do not have formal recognition of their ownership. The farmers claim that the lease awarded to the Twelfth State Plantation Company in the 1980s is legally flawed. They also say PTPN XII should have made a bigger contribution to local welfare by providing more employment at better wages. Since its presence was illegal and of little local benefit, they decided to take the land back and work it themselves. PTPN XII, on the contrary, says the lease is perfectly legal, and that it makes a substantial contribution to Indonesia's export earnings.
Apart from actually working the land, the farmers have concentrated their efforts on getting legal recognition, and on redistributing the reclaimed land so that everyone has a share. Their efforts to resolve the conflict to the satisfaction of all have been increasingly intensive this past year.
Government at the Malang district level, led by the district administrator (bupati), is actively trying to bring various parties together. Money has been made available for the farmers in the Malang district government budget.
The farmers have also won support within the district elected assembly (DPRD-II). On 10 June 2000 the assembly issued a resolution supporting their struggle for justice. The two main farmers organisations are Papanjati (Paguyuban Petani Jawa Timur, East Java Farmers Association) and Forkotmas (Forum Komunikasi Tani Malang Selatan, South Malang Farmers Communication Forum). This resolution was a highly significant moment. It effectively brought these two organisations into an alliance with the main political parties in the assembly (PPP, PDI-P, PKB).
The land reclamation issue has played an important role in South Malang village politics too. As village head elections were held in most of the villages that took part in the 1998 action, rival candidates wooed voters by promising to fight for rights to the PTPN land. Those village elites with connections outside - village head candidates, farmers with money, even local crime bosses - have cooperated on a single agenda, namely village rights to negotiate over the land.
Villagers talk a lot about how 'Dutch' the plantation company managers always were. Foremen, for example, used to demand that their workers demonstrate 'loyalty' by feeding their cows free of charge. Villagers remember how little the company cared to help maintain local infrastructure such as roads. Overloaded company trucks damaged the roads and left them virtually impassable.
They also recall how unjust the system of sharecropping at the plantation used to be. They grew food crops on unused land in the plantation, but were forced to sell the harvest to the plantation company cheaply before it was ready (the so-called ijon system). And they recall how they were jailed or fined for stealing even small quantities of cocoa or cattle feed from the company.
Probably the most important external factor is the paralysis in the legal system, especially in 1997-98. When I asked one farmer why he took direct action instead of taking the matter to court, he said: 'When someone up there does something wrong, the only thing that happens is some words of criticism, and then people say "we must respect the principle of innocence until proven guilty". But when the little people do something wrong they often find themselves staring down a rifle barrel.' This was a very popular response among the farmers when asked about the justice system.
The district government is now hardening its position somewhat. They are talking about a compromise in which some land stays with PTPN XII, some goes to the farmers, and some goes to the provincial government to support its budget requirements. The latter, in the era of local autonomy, is an important consideration for them.
Meanwhile among the farmers themselves there are also tensions. The players here include the land redistribution committees, the chairpersons of the groups who actually cut down the cocoa shrubs, the village heads, the various brokers who deal with the outside world, and the thousands of individual farmers who received land and are now working it. The debates are over who precisely is entitled to land, how much, and where.
Three kinds of leadership have emerged among the farmers. Two village heads in particular use an authoritarian approach. One belongs to a family that has inherited control of the village for generations. The other is a crime boss. Their word is simply law. This approach is top-down, but fairly effective.
Some other villages use what we may call a 'corporatist' approach, in which the formal village bureaucracy forms an alliance with the land redistribution committees. The problem here is that it results in a lot of corruption. The relatively small number of people involved allows land transactions to take place under the table between people who are often related to one another. This in turn has led to violent resentment on the part of those left out.
Other villages again use a much more democratic approach, that we could call 'mass pluralism'. Any conflict arising must be brought before the village mass council, which consists of all the village land committee chairpersons and their advisors. The formal bureaucracy is not involved at all - a result of having opposed the land action in the first place. After the coordinating secretary explains the problem, all present are invited to put forward alternative solutions. A facilitator, also from the village, then steps forward to discuss the pros and cons of each alternative. Next, everyone present is invited to put up their suggestions and criticisms. At the end a decision is taken which is binding on all. Anyone who goes against this decision risks the wrath of the entire village - they could be ostracised or even killed.
The story of South Malang's farmers shows that agrarian reform in Indonesia can only be begun by the farmers themselves.
Sukardi (syukardi@excite.com) is a lecturer at Universitas Merdeka Malang. He is a postgraduate student at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Indonesian maids in Singapore want to be heard
Noorashikin Abdul Rahman
Women constitute seventy per cent of the estimated four million migrant workers who come from Indonesia. Their voices must be heard. Only by listening to their voices can we see that these women are after all individuals, with their own aspirations and potential.
Most of them work as live-in foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in households in the Middle East, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. The Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, has traditionally been a favourite destination for women migrant workers from Indonesia. But horrid tales of torture and abuse the women experienced there, exposed in the media in the early '90s and retold by ex-migrants, encouraged many aspiring migrants to reconsider their choice of destination. Proximity to Indonesia, a reasonably attractive exchange rate, and the relative freedom it offers, have made Singapore an increasingly popular destination for Indonesian FDWs.
'I chose Singapore because the exchange rate is much better than Malaysia. My friends who have worked in the Middle East advised me that it is less work here, as the houses are smaller. You also get more freedom because you can at least go to the market and send the children to school, unlike in Saudi where you are confined to the house all the time,' explained Sukinah, a 20 year-old who is on her first overseas assignment. Indonesian FDWs now comprise slightly more than half of the 150,000 foreign women who work as live-in domestic maids in Singapore. Hailing mostly from Java, they enter Singapore via Jakarta and Batam with the help of a network of labour recruiters and maid agents with links across international boundaries.
However, the factors underlying the discrimination they face are complex. They cannot be resolved with laws and protective policies alone. Many migrants have retired successfully to more comfortable homes, own bigger pieces of land, and support their children through university. Yet their lives are filled with hardship, and insults on their dignity are the norm. As foreigners and as women, they are viewed with suspicion and often patronised. As workers engaged in a low status job, they are treated with little respect and are hardly granted any of the rights workers are entitled to.
The exploitation begins even before the women leave Indonesian soil. Local entrepreneurs and bureaucrats conveniently overlook ministerial decrees meant to protect migrant workers in the recruitment process. Instead of ensuring that their rights as workers are defended, these people treat FDWs as a commodity that can be sold for a quick profit. Upon their return from overseas, the lack of protective laws leave them defenceless as more bureaucrats and middlemen appropriate their hard-earned money without any qualms. Stories of extortion at Jakarta's Sukarno-Hatta airport are common. For example, returning Indonesian FDWs are often charged exorbitant fees for the trip back to their village by members of a transport mafia allegedly linked to corrupt officials in the Labour Department.
Nevertheless, institutional support is available and protective laws are in place in Singapore to catch maid abusers. Unlike in Hong Kong, where foreigners have the freedom to form unions and associations for collective bargaining, Singapore's advantage lies in its strict laws against abusive employers. In 1998, the penal code was amended to include a special clause for FDWs. Offences such as assault, grievous harm and 'outraging of modesty' inflicted against FDWs by employers now carry heavier penalties. The Ministry of Manpower in Singapore operates a help line that FDWs and other migrant workers can ring when encountering problems. The Ministry also has officers to help resolve conflicts over non-payment of salaries.
In addition to the Singapore government, the Indonesian embassy in Singapore has a special department for Indonesian domestic workers that oversees their welfare and helps negotiate settlements in times of crisis. Technically, all Indonesian FDWs should be brought to the embassy upon their arrival. There they are supposed to be protected under a legally binding work contract endorsed by the embassy that ensures rest days, standard salaries and adequate provisions for their well-being. In practice, though, it rarely happens.
Attitudes
Working in Singapore is, after all, not that bad. What then are the problems for FDWs in Singapore that cannot be addressed by such institutional formulae? The problem lies with social attitudes that are not easily dealt with by regulations. Life as a foreign domestic worker in Singapore is hard, despite its advantages.
In this modern and orderly city-state, FDWs are employed under a two-year renewable work permit in which strict conditions such as a six-monthly medical examination to screen for pregnancy and venereal diseases and a bar on marriage to locals apply. The penalty for breaching any of these conditions is repatriation and a permanent ban from working in the country.
The Employment Act does not apply to FDWs, because domestic work is not recognised as formal work. Most FDWs negotiate personal contracts with employers, mediated by maid agents. According to one maid agent I interviewed, employers hire Indonesians because they are perceived to be more loyal, more docile, more hard working and less fussy than their Filipina counterpart. This reputation can mostly be attributed to good marketing techniques by maid agents. For although it may seem commendable, in reality this reputation translates into more difficult working conditions. Most Indonesians are expected to work without rest days.
Indeed, negative stereotypes, which subvert the identity of FDWs as individuals, monopolise the mindset of Singaporeans. This has led to the dehumanisation of FDWs in their everyday interactions with Singaporeans. 'I feel that Singaporeans do not like us working here. They look down on us and don't treat us as humans,' lamented Sumi, a 25 year-old who has been working in Singapore for four years.
This prejudiced mindset also justifies excessive control over Indonesian FDWs. Madam S, an employer of an Indonesian maid in Singapore, said: 'These Indonesians cannot be trusted. They may take advantage if you give them too much freedom. My policy is to prevent them from making friends. If they have friends they will know more and when they know more there will be more problems for me.' She was only half joking.
Indonesian FDWs are also patronised by representatives of their own country. 'Those people at the embassy, they only look upon us like we are mice, like we have no value,' exclaimed Ibu Siti, a 55 year-old migrant who has been working in Singapore for ten years. Tuti, a 44 year-old migrant, complained that the Indonesian embassy does not seem to be bothered to organise productive activities for Indonesian FDWs on their rest days, despite a demand for such facilities. Some Indonesian FDWs, through the help of their Filipina counterparts, have instead taken the initiative to join skill workshops organised by the Philippines embassy.
Nevertheless, the voices of Indonesian FDWs have not all fallen on deaf ears. Recently, a mosque in Singapore responded to an appeal by a few Indonesian FDWs to provide them with facilities to get together for religious classes. Beginning from a mere gathering of eight maids, the group now boasts 150 members and calls itself An-Nisa. Its activities have expanded to include skills workshop like English and handicraft lessons. A maid who wanted a place where Indonesian women could break the monotony of domestic work and assert their individual identities initiated the formation of the group. Sumi, the leader of the group, hopes that through the worthwhile activities of An-Nisa, Singaporeans can see that Indonesian FDWs are also 'good people' and not look down on them as just maids. 'I am not asking Singaporeans to respect us, but just to treat us as equals. We are all humans, and it's just unfortunate that we have ended up as domestic workers,' said Sumi.
Perhaps the Indonesian embassy too can start to heed the voices of their women to improve their reputation and self-esteem in Singapore. Embassy staff members have been invited to celebrate the Islamic New Year with An-Nisa, and have pledged support in organising future activities. Nevertheless, the pledge so far remains lip service. Volunteers at the mosque claim they have not heard from the embassy since. An-Nisa's participation in a fun fair, organised by the embassy in conjunction with Indonesia's independence day recently, was again an initiative by the women themselves, who asked the mosque to write to apply for a stall.
This reminds me of an unpleasant memory on a visit to the embassy a couple of years ago. A young migrant who appeared distressed had just been brought in from the guard post. Instead of being asked gently what her problem was, the staff on duty barked at her and said, 'What's your problem? You ran away right? Don't hope that you can get a free ticket back. Sit here and someone will deal with you later.' I was stunned. Noticing the look of disapproval on my face, the staff turned to me and said coldly, 'These kids expect us to fly them home when things are not right with their employers, they think life is that easy.' The young woman was by then trying very hard to fight back her tears so as not to create a scene and embarrass herself further. Maybe it's going to take a while for the embassy to really listen to the voices of their women.
Noorashikin Abdul Rahman (nabdul@yahoo.com) is writing her PhD dissertation on these women at Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
Workers, often women, take risks to earn an honest living
Michele Ford
In June last year, in Tanjung Pinang, I interviewed a Betawi woman a long way from her native Jakarta. Tanjung Pinang is a large town on the Indonesian island of Bintan, near Singapore. Once the administrative capital of the region, it is now just another frontier port economy largely dependent on smuggling and sex tourism. This woman, whom I will call Ibu Betawi, looked considerably older than her thirty-five years. She was part of a special sort of smuggling operation - the illegal export of labour to Malaysia. Unlike some of her compatriots, who are dumped off the Malaysian shore in the dead of night, she had a valid work permit - albeit issued on the basis of false papers, which her 'agent' had obtained by bribing local officials. Once in Malaysia as a domestic worker, there would be no guarantees for her well-being from the Malay businessman who organised her placement in return for her first three months' wages.
Ibu Betawiwas between a rock and a hard place. Unlike another of the potential migrant workers I spoke to in Tanjung Pinang, she was no starry-eyed, teenaged villager hoping to see the world. After her husband's death five years ago, she worked in a Korean-run export garment factory in Greater Jakarta, until her eyesight had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer meet factory production targets. When the small business she then started failed, she left her daughter with relatives and looked for work further afield. She had heard the stories about the misfortunes of women working abroad, but she was prepared to do whatever it takes (nekad), determined to earn an honest (halal) income for herself and her daughter.
Ibu Betawi's experience straddles two very visible modes of Indonesian working-class work: the factory production of export goods, and the export of labour itself. Both modes contribute much to the Indonesian economy. In 1999, light manufacturing (food, beverages and tobacco, textiles, leather products and footwear) earned over US$17 billion, or 15.6% of Indonesia's GDP. The sector produces mainly for export and employs over two million workers. In the same year, 302,791 women and 124,828 men were officially placed as overseas migrant workers. Many more go unofficially. Remittances from official overseas female migrant workers alone totalled some US$ 300 million in 1999. The two modes are also symbolically significant, because they lie at the forefront of Indonesia's engagement with the global economy. Ibu Betawi's story illustrates some of the human costs of a Third World economy's attempts to export its way out of trouble.
When I asked about her factory experiences, Ibu Betawi told me stories of unreasonable targets, hard work, forced overtime, low wages, and of having no time to spend with her daughter or her friends. These are common complaints, well documented by academics and non-government organisation (NGO) activists over the last two decades. They have become even more significant since the Asian economic crisis added to the woes of Indonesia's factory workers.
Indonesian manufacturing was badly affected by the crisis. But while many domestically oriented enterprises were forced to close, not all manufacturers suffered. In fact, demand for export products from large factories actually grew. Research done by two labour-oriented NGOs, Akatiga and LIPS, shows that the public acceptance of 'hard times' brought with it the opportunity to restructure. This opportunity was used both by struggling companies and those that were doing quite well. Companies downsized, diversified, and increased their exposure to export markets. They sacked trainees and daily workers first, in order to reduce their severance pay liabilities. The threat of dismissal was also increasingly used as a disciplinary measure for those still employed. A significant proportion of the workforce was casualised. Factory management compensated for the decline in the military's overt role in controlling the industrial workforce by replacing them with local thugs (preman), who operated in workers' communities and at the factory gates.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), up to 1,333,345 Indonesian industrial workers were dismissed in 1998 alone, with workers in the textile and footwear industries among the hardest hit. According to industry association estimates, 50% of the footwear and non-garment textile workforce was retrenched at the height of the crisis. Unemployed factory workers were forced to return to their villages (the agricultural sector grew for the first time in many years after Indonesia's economy collapsed) or into the urban informal sector.
Factory workers who did not lose their jobs also faced severe economic difficulties. Although nominal wages increased 15-20% in 1997-98, the consumer price index almost doubled in that time. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has been a major concern. In 1999, calculations of worker activists put a living wage at Rp 600,000 (about AU$ 120) in Jakarta and Bandung and Rp 469,000 in Surabaya. At the time, the regional minimum monthly wages were only Rp 230,000, Rp 228,000 and Rp 182,000 respectively. Shortfalls are met by compromising health and nutrition. As indicated by Ibu Betawi, workers work long hours to earn the overtime necessary for food, shelter and clothing. While some workers scrimp to send money to their families, others are actually subsidised by food sent from the villages.
Malaysia
As job opportunities shrank, the number of Indonesians looking for work overseas increased. According to a Kompas report in late 1998, demand for legal female migrant worker placements had jumped 35 per cent since the onset of the crisis. The crisis had a direct effect on the employment opportunities in many of the Asian countries where Indonesians work. In Malaysia - the Asian country receiving most Indonesian migrant workers - hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were rounded up and repatriated in order to protect Malaysian nationals from the effects of the crisis.
Despite repatriation drives in Malaysia and some other Asian countries, almost half a million Indonesians were placed by government-registered companies in the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America in 2000. 71.39% of 'legal' migrant workers sent overseas between January 1999 and June 2001 were women. Malaysia, where in 1998 legal entrants made up only about one-third of all labour migration, continues to be the destination for the largest number of Indonesia's unofficial migrant workers. In mid-2001, 600,000 illegal migrants were detained in Malaysia. About the same time, it was estimated that 60,000 illegal migrants were working in Middle Eastern countries excluding Saudi Arabia - the major destination for Indonesian migrant workers in the region. These figures show how far the labouring poor will go to find work.
While Ibu Betawi did not turn to domestic work in Malaysia as a direct result of the crisis, her experiences were certainly influenced by increasing pressures in the factory and contracting opportunities outside it. Her decision to work overseas, her determination and optimism, are an important part of the story of working class lives that is not often told. Indonesians working in the factories and overseas face many difficulties, but they are not powerless. Ibu Betawi's self-confessed recklessness in approaching an illegal labour migration agent was a way to take control of her life, to escape the grind of factory work and to make her dead husband's family take some responsibility for her daughter's wellbeing. For others, it might be the decision to leave the house without permission, to arrive late at a factory, to take extra time for prayers or to steal a Nike shoe, an Adidas cap or an electronic component.
Despite the disincentives for activism that job insecurity brings, some workers make the decision to attend an education session or a strike meeting. On a collective level, many factory workers have continued to protest and organise in the post-Suharto era. Dramatic changes in Indonesia's legal framework after President Habibie ratified ILO Convention No 87 on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise in June 1998 made trade union registration much easier. Ongoing opposition to trade unionism from business and significant sections of the bureaucracy has not prevented new unions from becoming part of Indonesia's official industrial relations system. SBSI, for example, is the major trade union alternative to the official SPSI in the 1990s. Others include informal workers' groups, some pre-New Order unions, and a host of new factory- and regionally-based unions. Although it is doubtful how effective many of these new unions are, their very presence is a significant achievement, considering Indonesia's long history of repression and the subsequent economic crisis.
For migrant workers, an organised collective response is more difficult. They don't work in factories employing thousands of people, but alone in their employers' homes. Nevertheless, with the support of a range of NGOs - many of which are associated with the Consortium for the Defence of Indonesian Migrant Workers (Kopbumi) - migrant workers have organised protests and campaigns in Indonesia and abroad.
Ibu Betawi may or may not be lucky in Malaysia. She might find herself with an understanding boss in conditions far better than those of domestic workers in Jakarta, or she might be deported, or raped or even killed. She has no desire to worry about what might or might not happen to her. Her sights are firmly set. She'll do whatever it takes.
Michele Ford (mford_mul@hotmail.com) is writing a PhD on Indonesian labour at Wollongong University, Australia.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
The street traders who feed and transport Jakarta are also its most unwelcome citizens
Vanessa Johanson
'During the economic crisis public transport drivers had a raw deal. The price of spare parts and fuel skyrocketed. Naturally they went on strike. But you know who organised them - the becak drivers!'
Romo Sudri and Palupi, and their colleagues at the Institut Sosial Jakarta (ISJ), spend their days organising those working in the so-called informal sector. Across Jakarta, they encourage them to challenge policies that prevent them from earning a reasonable income and living in reasonable dwellings.
No one knows for sure how many people make up the informal sector in Indonesia. Yet it is a central part of life. 'Imagine Jakarta without street vendors, building labourers and itinerant workers, garbage collectors (pemulung), street kids, home industries,' says Palupi. It could almost be said that this unacknowledged slice of the city community is actually its heart.
Romo Sudri and Palupi sit in ISJ's simple, dimly lit offices in Rawajaya, East Jakarta. Both are quiet-spoken. 'The informal sector have no legal protection whatsoever. All those bakso soup sellers are actually illegal. The urban poor workers - as we prefer to call them - are referred to by law as Social Welfare Problems (Penyandang Masalah Kesejahteraan Sosial). They have not been formally given any space, the law does not accept them as a real part of the community or economy. They don't pay tax. But I'd like to ask: how many conglomerates don't pay tax? Did Suharto ever pay tax?'
'The role of street vendors in the economy is ignored too. How would the newspaper companies, bottled drink companies and so on survive without them? Where do most of the office workers in Jakarta eat lunch? From street vendors of course. Yet these people are constantly evicted from their work locations and homes in so-called "city cleanup operations."'
Tension between the city administration and the urban poor - particularly becak (trishaw) drivers - is high. In some areas the streets are strewn with government-sponsored banners stating things like: 'This area has been cleansed of becaks'.
Development boom
Institut Sosial Jakarta was born in 1974 from the Sekolah Tinggi Filsafah. Its original goal was to move beyond philosophy to research and discuss the problems of the urban poor. One of its founders, John Muller, a German sociologist, was deported from Indonesia for his writing at the end of the 1980s. It was in the 1980s when ISJ decided to become more active in organising the urban poor and carrying out advocacy, as opposed to purely research.
'The 80's saw the development boom in Indonesia, accompanied by so much marginalisation of the poor. At the same time many NGOs became more involved in advocacy. In 1985 we established the Workers Consultation Bureau (Biro Konsultasi Perburuhan), which focused on education and case handling with factory workers. In 1989 Romo Sandyawan came to ISJ, and really consolidated the advocacy praxis.'
'We survived the repression of this era by studying the survival systems of the poor themselves. They have their own mechanisms, we used also what worked for them.'
Institut Sosial Jakarta enters poor communities hoping to catalyse but not lead activities. 'We can bring people together to talk about issues, we can suggest strategies, but we don't want to lead them. And we certainly don't want to use them for demonstrations for a particular issue. We want to organise them to work out their own strategies. This work is not very popular!'
ISJ has never been involved in welfare or income-generating activities. 'Actually, these people aren't poor,' says Romo Sudri. 'A becak driver can earn around Rp 30,000 (AU$6) a day, which is more than some taxi drivers earn, for example. They don't need charity, they need space. They need to know that they will be allowed to stay in one place and not be asked to pay illegal levies all the time.'
'The term slums (rumah kumuh) implies that the people who live there aren't interested in living clean lives. But they don't want to fix up their houses because they never know when they'll be moved on.'
The structural problems are great and long term. 'And it's not just in Jakarta,' says Palupi. 'Most cities have laws like the Public Order Regulation (Perda Ketertiban Umum) which regard the urban poor workers as filth.' This has been the attitude of the Jakarta administration since the days of governor Ali Sadikin, who said that trading in public places was illegal and those doing it should be swept out and go back to their villages.
'The people we work with are happy to pay tax, as long as they know that the system is clean. We surveyed the communities we worked with about what kind of government subsidies were needed and what for. They said they wanted subsidies for health and education, but hardly any wanted subsidies for their businesses. They just want to be allowed to go about their business, and for there to be no more harassment and no more monopolies.'
'We take a human rights rather than a charity approach. People have a right to earn their living unharrassed, it's not something they should have to beg for or be afraid about.'
Vanessa Johanson (vjohanson@indocg.org) works for the conflict resolution organisation Common Ground in Jakarta. Contact ISJ: email isj@indo.net.id, tel (62 21) 4786 3150 or tel/ fax (62 21) 489 7761.
Stop press: Up to 15,000 slum dwellers were made homeless in several cases of government-sponsored arson early in November. ISJ was there to accompany them.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Lea Jellinek
Jakarta's poorest tend to be hidden at the dead ends of pathways or on the river edge. Often their houses are in corners, along dark narrow alleyways where sun, air and light do not enter, even during the day. Otherwise their homes are perched on foul smelling drains or rest up against concrete walls.
The poorest often have difficulty communicating. They are used to being ignored. Some hardly look into your eyes but down and away so it is hard to have a conversation. They are ashamed. If you ask them about their background and history, they look blank - as if they have no memory. They speak in a mixture of dialects, slur their sentences and cannot explain their problems.
The poorest lack time. They cannot talk for long as they are looking all day for the money they need to buy food. Those who come to their homes find their doors bolted. 'They are out', a neighbour says. 'Gone looking for work.'
At 7 am one morning, we go to meet Ibu Ani, and find her walking through the local market place. She is a masseuse. She does not sit at home waiting for clients but seeks them out. We go back to her house to talk, but within half an hour she looks agitated. She says she must go out to look for work. Often she works till 10 pm, and then returns home to darn holes in clothing for her extended family.
The poorest have only their unskilled labour to sell. They tend to be masseurs, washerwomen, day labourers, guards, parking attendants, or 'Pa Ogah' - as they are oddly called - people who help cars do a U turn in the middle of the road. They seek work on a daily basis. They do not have the capital, confidence or skills for petty trade.
Up to four families, four generations, often live together in one tiny house. Ibu Ani, a grandmother, lives with three related families in her shack - a total of fifteen people - so she needs at least Rp 30,000 to feed them. That is four to six hours of massage per day and many hours of looking for clients.
The members of the family sleep side by side on the floor - no mattress, just pillows. During the day these pillows are stacked in a pile and the room is converted into a place for sitting and eating. An alcove in the roof with little light or air may be built above the room to create more sleeping space. People climb up a steep, rickety ladder to get there.
Flimsy
The homes of the poorest are built of flimsy materials: bamboo, cardboard, chicken wire, newspaper, tin cans, boards and other scavenged materials. The gaps in the walls let in some air but also the rain. They feel embarrassed by these flimsy structures. If the ground is wet, they have a bench to sleep on, for they are often close to rivers which flood knee-deep. Apart from the bench there is only a rack for clothing and dishes.
Electric lighting is rare. They use a kerosene lamp and, if their children are lucky enough to go to school, they gather like flies around the lamp to do their homework. Everything is done on the floor. Many of the poorest cannot read, write, or sign their names. They are embarrassed to write. With difficulty, they hold pen to paper and try to write their name.
Toilet and washing facilities are shared. For most water and toilet needs, the poorest usually have to walk some distance - sometimes along the narrow banks of sewage canals - to communal bathing facilities. Sometimes these cost Rp100-200 for urination and Rp300 for defecation or a bath. The poorest have to find ways of not paying these fees for they lack the money. To avoid paying for rubbish collection and sanitation, they throw everything into dirty canals or empty spaces around their homes.
It is a hard life with the mosquitoes, fleas, heat and filth. Their houses are often within metres of where everybody dumps rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish goes right into their homes, or it is burned nearby. There is a constant smell of burning plastic and smoke.
In the homes of the poorest, there is often an ill person lying in the background. Ibu Ani is very small, thin, and she limps. As we sit together on the floor, she keeps massaging her leg which looks thin, stiff and weak. Years ago she had a knee injury which was not treated. Now one part of the knee sticks out. Her face is hollow and sunken from suffering, and other parts of her body seem oddly disconnected.
Ibu Ani has lived in Jakarta since childhood and was orphaned at an early age. She explains that she has often been homeless and sought shelter in graveyards. She recalls the dark nights, the loneliness, the mud and the rain. Years ago she had one trip out of the city, to Bandung. The local government women's group organised it. She remembers it as the greatest journey of her life - acres of paddy, mountains, trees, blue sky, talk, laughter, friends in the bus and new experiences. Her face glows as she recalls the journey. 'When can I do it again?'
Lea Jellinek (leajell@ozemail.com.au) has written extensively - also in 'Inside Indonesia' - about how the poor cope.
Surviving thirty years in Central Jakarta
Lea Jellinek and Ed Kiefer
Central Jakarta is a smoking concrete jungle created over the past thirty-five years by Western-driven development. Work opportunities are difficult and extremely competitive. Uncontaminated water, air, and food are scarce. The poorest live crowded along stinking open sewers that were once rivers and canals. Ground water is polluted by industrial effluent and human waste. The sky is grey-black - as if a storm is coming - the result of unregulated vehicle emissions, open smoldering rubbish fires, and massive smoke-belching generators that power the air-conditioned luxury malls and apartment blocks of the rich.
Mimin is a native of Jakarta - a Betawi Asli. In her youth, she had been a tall, beautiful woman with lanky legs, a handsome face and long black hair which she tied back in a tight bun. She had been a singer (sinden) and widely known throughout the kampungs of Jakarta. With a middle school education, she was a confident, forceful woman.
In 1962 she married Mas Nilum, an East Javanese with a government job managing a military hostel near Mimin's home. At first they lived fairly comfortably with a house and a car. They started to have children. But Mimin's life went downhill dramatically when her husband lost his job during the upheavals of 1965.
In 1975 Mimin lived with her husband and many children in a dank concrete shack on the edge of the Cideng Canal in Kebun Kacang, then a densely settled urban kampung in the heart of Jakarta. She was nearly always on the central city streets. She traded all manner of things, as did her husband. She collected cakes from a Chinese manufacturer and sold them in the narrow pathways of local inner-city markets. Her husband distributed beer and live chickens to other kampungs. They were brokers (mencari objek) and dealt in anything going for sale. If a person needed a sideboard, chair, television, mattress or kampung house, they asked Mimin or Mas Nilum. They would find out who was selling these items, and where to buy them cheaply - receiving a payment from both the buyer and the seller. Mas Nilum also sold lottery tickets.
During the first ten years of their marriage, they made and lost money and were forced to move from one house to another in the same neighborhood. Eventually, Mimin obtained a cart and became a regular trader selling cigarettes, sweets and drinks opposite the Sarinah department store. Mas Nilum sold newspapers and magazines and his business expanded to incorporate ten to twenty paperboys, including some of his children. While Mimin was out on the streets, her eldest daughter looked after the younger children, shopped, cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed clothes.
Raids
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mimin suffered from anti-trader raids. The government clearing team would come along and try to confiscate her stall. She stood up to the military and police. Unlike most vulnerable traders on the streets of Jakarta, Mimin insisted she was a native of the area and how dare they try to move her away! She demanded to know whether they had children who needed food and education. What right did they have to destroy the livelihood of her family? Often they backed off, but once when her goods were cartedtaken away, she went with them, wrapping her arms around her cart and refusing to let go. The clearing team took her and her goods to Bekasi on the edge of Jakarta, where they were dumped in a compound among the rotting carts of many other traders. Many times she returned trying to retrieve them but without success. The guards wanted more for them than they were worth. Mimin mourned the loss of that cart for many months.
Mimin loved being surrounded by children. She had twelve, of whom nine survived, and she struggled to provide for them. Three of Mimin's children died of cholera. She had taken each to the hospital, but without money, they were not treated. From an early age, each child was taught to be responsible. Some sold newspapers, or shined shoes to add to the family's income. Each child, even if they worked, had to go to school. Her view - many children, much fortune ('banyak anak, banyak rejeki') - was typical of Indonesians at that time.
For many years Mimin had chosen to spend as little as possible on food. The children were thin and had poor complexions. They ate mainly fried or sweet snacks, rice, fried noodles, chili and salt. Mimin said that she lived on four herbal drinks (jamu) a day, which she bought from a passing traditional vendor. She believed they gave her the strength to go on.
Mimin befriended people sleeping on the streets who had just come into Jakarta and knew nothing about the city - advising them what to do, how to survive, where to make a livelihood. She often helped them with loans which were sometimes not repaid. She tried to help one young woman who had gone mad and walked the streets at night, black with dirt.
Mimin brought Aam to Jakarta from a poor family in Bogor, and tutored her in all the things that she had learned from a lifetime of trade on the streets of the city. Aam was related to Mimin through the marriage of a daughter. Aam had the innocence, strength and sharpness of a village girl, and became Mimin's loyal helper both in the home and at the stall. Aam eventually set up her own stall, taking over from Mas Nilum who had become too old and tired to sit by the bus shelter on the streets all day. As Mimin said: 'He cannot defend himself against the police. If they come to raid his stall he just sits there dumbfounded and lets them take everything away. He is afraid to speak out and assert his rights.'
Mimin preferred to ask outsiders such as Aam to help her with her stall rather than her own children. She felt that her children would feel entitled to dip into her trade and she would not be able to say no to them. Mimin believed that it was better if each of the children had their own separate income-earning activities. Mimin's eldest son had taken over his father's newspaper business. One of his younger brothers worked as a driver. The eldest daughter became a hairdresser. She combined this work with waitressing in a Chinese restaurant at night until she married and had a baby. Another daughter had married a man from Bogor and produced two children - thus the links with Aam. Sheni, the youngest, brightest and most ambitious daughter (much like her mother) had battled to study through university and became a cashier in one of the city's most exclusive restaurants.
The family was forced to move in 1981 when the kampung was demolished to make way for apartments. Most kampung dwellers were afraid to take up their option to move into these new flats. Without secure incomes, most feared regular monthly payments for mortgage, electricity, water, gas and rubbish collection. Mimin's family, however, jumped at the opportunity and took a ground floor flat. At that time it seemed beyond their capacity to pay, but looking back it was a bargain. The government had been trying to promote flats among the urban poor, and they received a subsidised rate. Years later these flats sold for many times the original price. Mimin and her family had obtained a very valuable asset: legal title to a home near the centre of Jakarta - within walking distance of their jobs on the city streets.
Mimin's children liked to gather regularly in the flat it was often full with as many as fifteen people, counting children and in-laws. At night, they lay like sardines - one beside the other watching television on the floor of the living room. Mimin and her husband had a room to themselves.
Crisis
When the economic crisis of 1997 hit the city centre, Mimin felt the impact keenly. Many banks which towered up around her home closed down. Across the road, the Golden Truly supermarket - partly owned by one of Suharto's children - went bankrupt. The number of people who came past Mimin's stall dropped by more than half. Instead of whole packets of cigarettes, customers wanted to buy only one cigarette at a time. The prices of Mimin's goods leaped up. She found it difficult to know what to charge. Sometimes she could not replace her stock for the price she had sold it.
Time and environment have taken a toll on Mimin. She sits every day in her tiny red and white striped stall on the hot, noisy and filthy street. No longer the elegant girl, she has become a wrinkled old lady, often frustrated, tired and in pain.
In her thirty years in central Jakarta, the temperatures have risen as large trees have been replaced by multi-storey buildings whose air-conditioners pump out heat. She worries about her children being influenced by the young drug addicts injecting and sniffing drugs beside her stall. A brothel has been started behind her stall. Police have been paid off and do little about these problems.
Although Mimin and her husband long to return to the village where some of their relatives still remain, there are major obstacles. Their children do not want to leave. They think rural life represents poverty, hard work and boring backwardness. They prefer to seek their livelihood in Jakarta and cannot envisage living anywhere else. All of them depend on their central city apartment. To move, Mimin would have to sell that flat to pay for land and a house in the village - but that would leave her children homeless in Jakarta.
Ed Kiefer (ekiefer@hotmail.com) and Lea Jellinek live near Lismore, Australia. Lea wrote about Mimim in Josef Gugler (ed), 'Cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America' (1997).
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Four years later, how has the economic crisis affected the poor?
Anne Booth
The debate about the impact of the crisis on poverty and income distribution continues. Let me start by summarising what the available statistics appear to tell us. First, the contraction in Gross Domestic Product which occurred in 1998 was most severe in the non-agricultural sectors of the economy, especially in construction, the financial sector, wholesale and retail trade, non-oil manufacturing and transport. All these sectors registered contractions of more than five per cent. It has also been in these sectors, especially construction and financial services, that employment has fallen most rapidly. Indeed the labour force surveys conducted since 1997 indicate that there has been no net growth in non-agricultural employment between 1997 and 2000.
It is also clear from the national income data that the contraction in investment expenditure was far greater than the contraction in personal consumption expenditure. This indeed was the main reason why the initial impact of the crisis on poverty and living standards was less than predicted in mid-1998. But there can be little doubt that the contraction in non-agricultural output and employment, together with the surge in inflation in the middle months of 1998, had an especially serious effect on the poor, because food prices rose more rapidly than non-food prices. This indeed was what had happened in previous inflationary episodes in Indonesia. Thus while the crisis-induced contraction in GDP might not have affected the incomes of the poor more seriously than those of the better off, the ensuing inflation certainly did.
Similarly, the lessons of previous devaluations in Indonesia are useful in predicting the likely effect of the very substantial rupiah devaluation of 1997-98 on incomes of various categories of producer. There can be no doubt that the devaluation led to a rapid increase in the rupiah prices of a range of agricultural products in the last part of 1997 and early 1998, and that the supply response was positive. The GDP data indicate that output of tree crops grew by more than two per cent between 1997 and 1999, in spite of the lingering effects of the drought. But the rapid inflation of 1998 led to a surge in the cost of living for farmers, and thus an erosion of the effects of the devaluation on relative prices. Because of the magnitude of the inflation, the erosion almost certainly took place more quickly than in past devaluations. In addition, the rupiah began to appreciate in late 1998 and early 1999 (although it fell again in 2000/1). Thus by mid-1999 much of the positive effect of the devaluation on the real incomes of rural producers had been dissipated.
As far as most wage and salary workers were concerned, the effects of the rupiah devaluation and the ensuing inflation were almost wholly negative. Real wages in all sectors of the economy fell steeply in late 1997 and 1998, and appear to have made only a partial recovery since then. Thus it may well be correct to argue that, relative to rural producers of export products, urban dwellers did suffer a greater decline in income especially in the initial phase of the crisis. But given the large increase in the agricultural labour force that has occurred between 1997 and 2000, it is unlikely that there will be a strong upward pressure on agricultural wages for some time to come.
Social security
It is hardly surprising, given the suddenness and severity of the downturn in Indonesia, that the question of enhanced social security should be getting far more attention from independent analysts and policy-makers than at any time over the past three decades. As in many other parts of the Asian region, Indonesian policymakers have in the past voiced their hostility to 'western-style' social security provision which is supposed to destroy entrepreneurial initiative and lead to a culture of welfare dependency. But in reality, given the combination of rapid economic growth, rapid growth of employment opportunities, and a favourable dependency ratio due to the speed of the fertility decline in most parts of the country, policy-makers have not been under pressure from any powerful constituency to concern themselves with comprehensive social security provision. Now with the possibility of slower economic growth, together with the demographic inevitability of a higher proportion of the population moving into the older age groups, issues such as social security, and the provision of 'social safety nets' are suddenly at the forefront of the policy debates in Indonesia.
They are likely to stay there in coming decades. The implementation of the social safety net programmes since 1998, however inadequate the targeting has been, has built up a set of expectations that the government should provide basic goods and services such as food, health and education at prices which all sections of the population can afford. Future Indonesian governments will have to deal with these, and other, expectations. Experience from other countries indicates that it is politically very difficult to remove welfare entitlements once they have been conceded, even if the initial granting of the entitlements was made under conditions of severe economic distress. However reluctantly, future Indonesian governments will have to transform emergency social safety net programmes into more comprehensive social programmes aimed at giving all citizens access to basic needs and services. Thus it is likely that debates over implementation and targeting, far from ending once the economy begins to recover, will intensify.
Does the Indonesian experience of 1997/9 offer any lessons to other countries coping with the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, leading to a substantial decline in real output? Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that such crises can burst out of what might appear to be a clear blue sky with little warning. While preventing a crisis from happening in the first place is obviously the best method of preventing crisis-related social ills, the experience of countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea in 1997-9 does confirm the view of the economic historian, Raymond Goldsmith, that financial crises are the inevitable 'childhood disease' of capitalism. Governments in other parts of the developing world would do well to realise that being hailed as a 'miracle economy' by leading international development experts does not immunise a country from such diseases. In fact, to the extent that the over-hyping of the economic performance of Indonesia, together with Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea, in a number of publications in the early 1990s bred an attitude among policy-makers in these countries that they were somehow exempt from the risks and dangers that beset other developing economies, the international development establishment, led by the World Bank, has to take some of the blame for the Asian crisis. Policy-makers in other parts of the developing world would do well to ponder these lessons, and make prudent allowance for the fact that such crises will almost certainly affect them at some stage in their evolution into mature capitalist economies.
A second important lesson is that the effects of a severe economic downturn in an economy as large and heterogeneous as Indonesia are very difficult to measure. Most of the initial judgements which were made by a number of agencies and individuals in 1998 have had to be modified as more data have come to hand from different parts of the country. Even four years after the crisis hit, the effects are still working through to millions of households across the country. In addition, different analysts have drawn quite different conclusions from the same body of data about trends in poverty, depending on how the poverty line is estimated.
Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that none of the data sets pressed into service between 1998 and 2001 to estimate the impact of the crisis on poverty, income distribution, and unemployment was entirely suitable for the purpose. Household surveys such as the Susenas by their very nature ignore that part of the population who do not live in registered households. To the extent that numbers of unregistered street dwellers have increased in urban and peri-urban areas since 1997, and to the extent that many of them have expenditures below the official poverty line, they are excluded from the poverty estimates. Other data sets such as the 100-village survey, while useful as far as they go, were deliberately skewed to poorer rural areas and ignore trends not just in urban areas but also in the more developed rural hinterland.
Thus debates about the impact of the crisis on poverty and living standards are likely to continue in Indonesia for some time to come. It will probably be at least a decade before we can draw final conclusions about the effects of the crisis on poverty and welfare, let alone evaluate the efficacy of the various policy measures which have been implemented to alleviate these effects. One can only hope that by then, living standards will have improved for the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Indonesia and the grim years at the end of the twentieth century will be a distant memory.
Professor Anne Booth teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has written numerous books and articles on the Indonesian economy.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Rich countries share responsibility for Indonesia's impossible debt burden
Ann Pettifor
On a wet London afternoon in October 2001, a small delegation of campaigners from Indonesia, Britain and Germany made their way to the British Treasury to meet the British Chancellor's deputy, Mr Paul Boateng. The purpose of the meeting was to pressure the British government to cancel military debts owed by Indonesia to Britain.
The delegation's eyes were on April 2002, when Indonesian representatives will meet the cartel of international creditors known as the Paris Club, which gathers in the French Treasury. Britain will be at the table with other powerful creditors, including Japan, the US and Germany. million of Indonesia's debt to Britain - a total of more than billion - consists of loans made by the British government and companies to a government the British had publicly criticised, but privately financed and armed - the Suharto government. The military debt is perhaps the most offensive part of this bigger problem.
Inside the formal setting of the British Treasury, Binny Buchori of the Indonesian NGO Forum on Indonesia Development (Infid) made a passionate appeal for the cancellation of Indonesia's debt, particularly the military component. 'This debt is being paid by millions of ordinary Indonesians', she said. 'Many of them are very poor, and most of them ignorant that Suharto's government has left each person - whether they be mothers, fathers, grandparents, their children and grandchildren - with a very heavy burden of public debt. These people are each sacrificing their basic human rights to a decent standard of living, so that Indonesia's public debt of US$ 152 billion can be repaid.'
Sugeng Bahagijo, also of Infid, added: 'Already the Indonesian government spends much, much more on paying foreign creditors than it spends on clean water, health, housing and education for its own people. The government is forced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to prioritise repayment to rich countries and banks over payments for schools, health and a better environment for the people of Indonesia.'
The British delegates at the meeting argued that ordinary people in Britain had not agreed that their taxes should be used to guarantee loans for military exports to Suharto's regime. 'It was British Scorpion tanks that attacked students and protesters who stood up to Suharto in 1998. It was British Hawk jets that were used in East Timor,' said the British delegate.
'British people were not consulted about those loans, that were made in their name, and with their taxes. Instead the loans were made to Suharto in secret. We are now, as part of the Jubilee movement, calling on the British government to cancel those odious debts.'
This meeting, which did not make the media headlines, is but one example of the way in which campaigners from north and south are working together, under the banner of Jubilee Movement International, to challenge an international financial system designed to profit those with money - creditors, speculators and bankers. A system which extracts and transfers resources from south to north. A system which goes by the name of 'globalisation' and which prioritises money rights over human rights.
The poor of Indonesia, like the poor of many countries, are the victims of this system. Some 160 million Indonesians, 70% of them in rural areas, live below the international poverty line of US$2 a day. The World Bank estimates that between 1997 and 1998 the real wages of agricultural workers fell by as much as 40%, and those in urban areas fell by 34%. Since 1997, it is said, 39 million Indonesians have lost their jobs.
Government funds that should be used to help re-build economic stability in Indonesia, and support the poor, are instead being used to repay foreign creditors. Before 1997, 40% of the government's budget was spent on human development. Since 1997 that spending has been cut by a third. Today, domestic and external debt service expenditure uses up 41% of the budget, and 61% of tax revenues.
The IMF has played a key role in increasing Indonesia's foreign and domestic indebtedness. The institution is dominated by rich country OECD governments, like the US, the UK and Japan, who are its biggest shareholders. Most IMF policies are designed to promote their interests, and the interests of investors, creditors and speculators based in those countries. The IMF also acts as the gatekeeper for access to international finance and capital. So for Indonesia to be able to borrow on the international capital markets, or indeed for Indonesia to be able to obtain aid from OECD countries, it must first gain the approval of the IMF.
Compensate
The IMF itself has acknowledged it made a mistake when a small IMF staff team, after just two weeks in Jakarta, forced the Bank of Indonesia to close sixteen banks on 1 November 1997. The cost of that blunder is the larger part of Indonesia's huge domestic debt burden of $80 billion. Before this debacle in 1997, Indonesia did not have a significant domestic debt burden.
We in Jubilee 2000 have a healthy respect for the market and agree that in some areas of the economy the market responds more democratically to consumer demands than say, state-backed companies.
The IMF should take full responsibility for its error, and compensate the people of Indonesia for the full amount of the liabilities incurred through the banking debacle, by paying off the domestic debt that resulted from their blunder. The purpose of such compensation must be twofold: first to compensate and support the poor of Indonesia, and second to prevent future perverse errors by the IMF.
IMF policies to increase taxes on fuel are a classic example of 'one-size-fits-all' policy errors which do not respond to, nor are accountable to market or indeed democratic forces. But the rise in fuel prices is also a device by the IMF to quickly raise funds for the Indonesian budget. These funds in turn are used to prioritise debt repayments to domestic and foreign creditors.
There is no doubt that this policy could destabilise the government of Indonesia, and result in the defeat of democracy. Former President Wahid's government understood this well, and proposed an alternative to the sudden removal of fuel subsidies. The elected cabinet wanted to introduce taxes on the rich, conscious that very few Indonesians pay taxes. IMF staff resisted, arguing that Indonesia needs a 'quick fix' to raise funds for the budget, and that these funds are better raised through removing subsidies on fuel.
The Minister of Finance, Mr Ramli, defied the IMF by asserting, informally and in public, that he intended to round up non-taxpayers. The effect of his announcement was that 600,000 Indonesians immediately signed up to pay their taxes. The government was confident that with more stringent sanctions far more tax avoiders could be persuaded to pay, and much more money could be raised. However, when a country is indebted, the diktats of unelected IMF officials (representing foreign creditors) take precedence over the democratic decisions of Indonesian politicians
Because of the secrecy that surrounds IMF/ World Bank and Indonesian government negotiations, ordinary Indonesians are ignorant of what is being done in their name, and of the high costs associated with the economic policies imposed by foreign creditors. Indonesia's foreign and domestic debts remain, effectively, a state secret. Only when debate is opened up around the debt, and only when both the borrower (the Indonesian government) and the lenders are open and accountable for the public debts they incur, can we hope to introduce some discipline into the system, and control the spiralling rate of indebtedness.
Only when money rights are once again subordinated to human rights, can we hope for peace, justice and an end to poverty in Indonesia.
Ann Pettifor (apettifor.jubilee@neweconomics.org) is Programme Coordinator with Jubilee Plus (www.jubileeplus.org) at the New Economics Foundation.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
A guide to resources for peace-makers
Jane McGrory
Peace movements find a natural ally in the internet. The global reach of the world wide web provides a clear advantage in rallying public opinion. The Nobel Prize-winning coalition for the ban on anti-personnel landmines, for example, relied heavily on the internet to create a global 'virtual' network of organisations. The East Timorese solidarity movement also made extensive use of the internet.
But when it comes to using the internet as a tool for peace in Indonesia, a 'digital divide' is soon evident. International organisations take the lead. Local Indonesian initiatives to exploit the potential of the internet are only slowing taking shape.
The prize internet site in the field of conflict prevention in Indonesia is a portal operated by the Harvard Peace Initiative (www.preventconflict.org/portal/main/portalhome.php). It includes daily news highlights, as well as links to in-depth articles and the Initiative's own background analysis. Its broad perspective of conflict-related issues - or 'human security precursors'- makes a valuable contribution in promoting understanding of the causes and potential for conflict and peace in Indonesia.
A number of useful sites track developments in conflict situations. Among them are the UN's ReliefWeb news service (http://www.reliefweb.int/w/rwb.nsf), and the country reports produced by USAID's Office of Transitional Initiatives (www.usaid.gov/hum_response/oti/country/indones/index.html).
Excellent monthly newsletters compiling international reporting on conflict issues and threats to ethnic/ religious minorities can be found on the Prevent Genocide International site (www.preventgenocide.org). While largely pulling material from mainstream international media sources, the broad perspective of the screening process guarantees interesting reading. Another initiative highlighting the plight of threatened minority groups is the Minorities at Risk Project (www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/mar www.bsos.umd.edu/cidcm/mar). Its Indonesian section looks at the situation facing ethnic Chinese, East Timorese, Papuans and Acehnese.
If you are looking for information on the work of international organisations to build peace in Indonesia, try the Indonesian sections of sites for Search for Common Ground (www.searchforcommonground.org/locations.cfm?locus=Indonesia), Mercy Corp (www.mercycorps.org), www.mercycorps.org/) Catholic Relief Services www.catholicrelief.org/what/overseas/peace/index.cfm), Pact Worldwide (pactworld.org/Global/Indonesia_Discuss.html) and the British Council (http://www.britishcouncil.or.id/governance/index.htm). Or, visit the UNDP's unit for conflict prevention and recovery (//www.undp.or.id/cdu/index.html).
The Asia Pacific Center for Justice and Peace (www.apcjp.org/) introduces research on conflict-related issues in Indonesia and the region. A good set of links can be found in the country guide on Ulster University's Incore site (//www.incore.ulst.ac.uk/cds/countries/indonesia.html) - as well as a wealth of information on peace practice worldwide. Another good links page is the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee (//www.cpcc.ottawa.on.ca/links-e.htm). The Conflict Resolution Information Service (www.crinfo.org/) also offers broad range of resources on conflict and conflict transition. A search for Indonesian material produces a number of interesting links - and the other theme-based sections provide countless opportunities for good browsing.
The Forum on Early Warning and Early Response (www.fewer.org) site provides links to current conflict research and a risk assessment for Indonesia. The Indonesia project site of the International Crisis Group (www.crisisweb.org/projects/project.cfm?subtypeid=7) highlights relevant news items and offers high-quality research reports of key security issues. A keyword search on the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict (www.ccpdc.org/) will also turn up some interesting material.
Indonesian groups
To find Indonesian groups working for conflict prevention, try the listing at the Asia-Pacific Directory site of the Japan Centre for Preventative Diplomacy (www.conflict-prevention.org). Or visit http://www.lsm.or.id //www.lsm.or.id, an excellent Indonesian non-government organisations (NGOs) networking site. The latter does not have a specific category for groups working on conflict issues, but the advocacy section should provide some leads to organisations working on issues of peace, justice, anti-discrimination, among others.
In addition to those listed on the LSM site, try Aksara (www.aksara.org) and Yappika (www.yappika.org). Also, Gadjah Mada University's Centre for Security and Peace Studies (//www.csps-ugm.or.id/) maintains a good site introducing its research and programming work. Or visit the site of Pusat Studi dan Pengembangan Perdamaian at Duta Wacana University (//www.ukdw.ac.id/lpip/pspp/index.html) and its sister-site on peacebuilding (www.empoweringforreconciliation.org). All of these Indonesian sites are bi-lingual.
Looking for something more interactive? The Dialogue Webpage for Conflicts Worldwide (www.dwcw.org) hosts an on-line forum on conflict in various global hot-spots - including Indonesia. The Conflict Prevention Initiative runs an under-utilised on-line forum on Papua (www.preventconflict.org/portal/main/portalhome.php). And to stay up-to-date, you can join the Indonesian peacebuilding listserve by sending an email (with 'subscribe' in the subject line) to peacebuilding-subscribe@topica.com.
Jane McGrory (janemcgr@telkom.net) is a consultant with Catholic Relief Service in Yogya
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Give peace a chance
Gerry van Klinken
When Herb Feith died suddenly on 15 November last year, the small group of people most closely involved with Inside Indonesia magazine immediately decided they wanted to honour him in the next edition. The theme was to be 'peace and international collaboration', the two leading ideas of Herb's later years. And here it is! For those readers who did not know Herb personally, we hope this edition will be a fitting if belated introduction to a remarkable pioneer of friendship with Indonesians. If it produced a flood of new enquiries to Australian Volunteers International from adventurous souls we would be especially pleased!
Many people are talking about the need for peace in Indonesia. Including the Indonesian military, who display banners everywhere proclaiming: 'Peace is beautiful'. It is of course. However, if I am not mistaken there is a hidden message in these banners. It is that too many people are not peaceful, and we still need the military to keep the peace between them. That is certainly the message behind the upgrading of the TNI military command in war-torn Aceh last February.
A security-oriented message ignores a persistent record of human rights abuse by the military themselves. Peace enforced by abusing human rights is no peace at all. Indeed, not just the military are an obstacle to peace. The state as a whole remains undemocratic in too many ways. It has a troubled history, going back to colonial times, of deeply deforming local communities. The conflicts we have seen in Indonesia since the end of the New Order have a lot to do with this disturbing history.
Giving peace a chance does not mean returning to New Order militarism. It means democracy and human rights, from the centre to the remotest region. And it means trusting local communities to rediscover their own identity.
Our thanks to all those who keep making Inside Indonesia possible, not least those who volunteer behind the scenes even during the long vacation.
Gerry van Klinken is the Editor of Inside Indonesia
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Learning from Indonesian religious experience
Herb Feith
My experience as a syncretistic Jew, or 'Yahudi abangan', has been an attempt to make my Judaic religion the starting point of learning to live religion in the plural. The term 'abangan' is borrowed from the Javanese, who use it to describe a 'syncretistic' understanding of Islam.
I was born in 1930 in the city of Vienna, in Austria. At that time about twenty percent of Vienna's population was Jewish. Political life in Vienna, and in Austria, was a contest between the Catholic Party and the Socialist Party, and almost all Jews supported the Socialists. In 1934 a big conflict erupted between the government of Austria, led by right-wing Catholics, and the Vienna city council led by Socialists. The Vienna city council was eventually crushed by military force.
You could say my parents were middle class. My father ran a small store selling bags; my mother was a nurse, helping a doctor who specialised in X-rays. Both were Jews but of a highly assimilated kind. My father said he was an agnostic in religious matters. My mother thought of herself as a believer in Judaism, but of a passive kind and she rarely went to the synagogue. But her mother, my maternal grandmother, was very pious and strict about religion. As long as she was alive, all the food in our home was always kosher, as the traditional Jewish dietary rules required.
My father and my grandmother had a very good personal relationship, but they always differed greatly in the area of religion. My grandmother forbade anyone to mention the name of God in my presence before I was six years old.
I became more aware of my Jewishness after Austria was occupied by the Germans in March 1938. We lived for a year under a Nazi government. I remember my parents were always talking together and with their friends about how to escape from Hitler's empire. They asked one another which country would give them a visa so that they could go there. My father spoke fluent English because he had lived in England for a year during World War I. Our family friends often asked him to write their letters for them applying to various countries for refugee status.
In March 1939 the three of us succeeded in leaving Austria behind. We went by train to Belgium, via Germany. I remember very clearly how relieved we all felt once we crossed the German-Belgian border. My parents gave thanks in a thousand languages! They often reminded me of the Jewish story, celebrated every year at Passover, about how God liberated the Jews and brought them out of slavery in Egypt led by the Prophet Moses.
We arrived in Australia in May 1939, in Melbourne. Not longer after that my mother began to attend a liberal synagogue, and I joined her. Besides synagogue on Saturdays I also attended Sunday school on Sunday mornings. My mother became more pious than she had been in Vienna. She said Hitler had turned her back into a Jew. One thing I remember clearly is how she sang the cantor in the synagogue service. She was a well-known cantor, indeed very well known in Germany before we emigrated to Australia. I recall so well the call she sang out every Saturday, the prayer called Shema, which we might call the Jewish syahadat. 'Hear O Israel, for the Lord our God is one God (Shema Yisrael Adonoi Elouhenu Adonoi Ekhod). I will sing it for you [Herb then sang it very expressively].
Socialist
When I was 13 I took my Bar Mitzvah rite and had to read the Torah in Hebrew before the synagogue congregation. This meant I had been accepted as an adult Jew. After that I became a teacher in the Sunday school. But that only lasted two years. When I was 15 I began to leave the religious community.
At the time I was reading various books that turned me into a humanist. I began to think of Judaism as an obstacle. Maybe I was bored, and there was some rebellion, but I called myself a socialist and an internationalist. And I was annoyed with the Jewish insistence that we should only have Jewish girlfriends or boyfriends. They were very afraid of what they called 'marrying out'!
In 1947 I fell in love with Betty Evans, and six years later she became my wife. She was a socialist too, as well as an enthusiastic Christian, in fact a Methodist. We were students together at Melbourne University, and she brought me along to join the Student Christian Movement. For three years I was very much under the influence of that movement, which maintained a high intellectual standard. Besides the intellectual quality I was impressed by the moral seriousness of its members, who were often interested in issues of social and international justice. I was most impressed with theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. One thing that attracted me was the admiration SCM leaders had for Gandhi.
In 1951 I began work in Jakarta, as an assistant for English at the Ministry of Information. There I had a lot of contact with the Indonesian Student Christian Movement GMKI, and with some Dutch and Swiss clergy who were teaching at the theological college.
Why did I distance myself from the Jewish religion? In practical terms it was because I wanted to marry Betty. But the decision also had to do with certain beliefs:
- the problem of 'marrying out', and the need for 'group survival'
- the Jews as the chosen people, and exclusivism - Zionism
- an aggressive Israeli state nationalism, and the pressure on Jews in the diaspora to actively support it
My admiration for Gandhi, especially for his universalism, was important to me. And poverty in Asian countries was a moral challenge. For me the sufferings in the Third World (and especially in Indonesia) became far more important than things said in the synagogue sermons when I went there. My friends who remained devoted to the Judaic religion seemed to have no interest in those Third World problems. Or if they did they were rather against the so-called Third World countries - because most of those countries sided with Palestine against Israel.
In Australia, as in America, the Jewish community grew increasingly affluent. Far more affluent than they had been forty years earlier, and with a tendency towards conservatism.
I was often cross with the arguments put forward by the defenders of the Israeli state in Australia, especially the use of the Holocaust for propaganda purposes. It seemed as if they needed to claim that this particular genocide was unique, more terrible than any other genocide.
Syncretism
So what is left of my identity as a Jew? I worship more often in a church than in a synagogue. Not many of the books on religion I read are written by Judaists. But I was never baptised. So I am still a Jew. But I like to call myself 'Yahudi abangan', a syncretistic Jew, in the manner of 'Islam abangan', the 'syncretistic' Javanese Islam. I am attracted by the possibility of attaching myself to more than one religious tradition. That is something we could say is especially Asian (South Asian, East Asian, Southeast Asian - not West Asian).
Gandhi said, I am a Hindu, and a Muslim, and a Christian, and a Sikh, and a Parsi, and a Jew. Sukarno spoke of himself as an adherent of nationalism, Islam and Marxism. I have been much influenced by the thought of Soedjatmoko.
Arnold Toynbee, a famous English historian, once predicted that historians of the future quite possibly will say the special feature that is most important about this twentieth century is not the atomic bomb or the concentration camp, but the first intensive encounter between the Christian and Buddhist religions.
In Indonesia today many people are unhappy with the word abangan, or syncretism. But I am attracted by its basic proposition, which is that we can learn from various religious traditions.
I appreciate the attitude of many Christians, Jews, and Muslims that we should first study our own religions more deeply before engaging in dialogue with other believers. But I do not like it when they condemn syncretism as something inconsistent with true religion. That tends towards exclusivism.
For me the purpose of dialogue between believers from religion A and religion B should be to learn. Not just to work together to face a third party. Not just to avoid the danger of conflict. Nor just to add to our knowledge of another group. The more important thing is to deepen our faith and enrich each of our spiritualities.
I am very grateful that the last thirty or forty years many Westerners have allowed themselves to learn from Eastern religious traditions. Some of them are Christians, some Jews, and some belong to the Jewish nation but no longer practice the religion.
I was inspired by the writings of an American Jew whose name used to be Richard Alpert and is now Baba Ram Dass. I was also attracted by a book entitled The Jew in the lotus, which told of the visit of a group of Western Jews to the Dalai Lama in India. The American Jewish novelist Chaim Potok discusses a similar theme. And I love Charles Durack on 'cultivating oneness', in the American Jewish magazine Tikkun.
I have to confess I have never attempted to study the mystical traditions of the Jewish religion. If I did, quite likely I would find there things that could equally enrich my spiritual life. But for me that is not the only possibility.
Herb Feith gave this talk at the Interfidei institute for inter-religious dialogue in Yogyakarta, 29 November 1998. Thanks to Samsuri.
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Herb Feith's search for better mental road maps to a complex Indonesia
Jamie Mackie
One aspect of Herb's work on Indonesia that has attracted less attention than it deserved amongst the many tributes to him has been his creative role as a formulator of new ideas that throw a fresh beam of light upon the bewildering world around us. This role was especially in demand in pre-1965 Indonesia. Because Herb's lovable personal qualities have given rise to so many marvelous stories about his life, this more recondite side of his intellectual contribution to our understanding of Indonesia can easily be overlooked.
Much of his work on the nation's political and social turmoil since 1945 was devoted to hunting for new and better mental road maps that would help to explain the innumerable complexities involved. It was not just his unrivalled knowledge of Indonesian society and politics, both detailed and comprehensive, that made him so special, but also his passion for better explanations that would throw light on the obscure parts of it.
I recall a rather dismissive comment he once made about something written about an aspect of the Indonesian revolution which I thought was pretty good but which he waved aside as: 'Oh, that's just a piece of history'. He wanted more analysis, theorising and comparison with similar cases elsewhere - which weren't easy to find. I suppose he felt that 'mere history', or story telling, was too easy. Conceptualising was the real hard work we ought to be engaging in.
It was an odd remark from the author of The decline of constitutional democracy in Indonesia, which was such a fine blend of superb story telling about the course of events between 1950-57 and brilliantly illuminating analysis. The story will never have to be told again, apart from a few details, perhaps, because it was such excellent historical narrative. Yet what we all remember about it were his innovative ideas about relations among the elite, the political public and the newspaper-reading public, or the celebrated categorising of 1950s Indonesian political leaders into 'administrators' and 'solidarity makers'. (Years later he used to flinch whenever anyone mentioned those words in front of him. Not because he felt they were wrong, I think - which they patently weren't - or that he wanted to disown authorship of them, but because he thought they were often being used to oversimplify a more complex reality.)
Later he wrote a masterly account of 'The Dynamics of Guided Democracy' in the Ruth McVey-edited Indonesia, describing the power struggle after 1959 in terms of the Sukarno-Army-PKI triangle. Not long after that came an article modifying that picture, with the revealing subtitle 'The triangle changes shape', which hit the nail on the head exactly.
His celebrated exchange in the Journal of Asian Studies with the high-powered Harry Benda, after the latter's review of his book, became something of a classic. In reply to Benda's challenge: 'How could anyone have seriously expected democracy to succeed in Indonesia's circumstances?' Herb responded with an unusually 'historical' rather than theoretical answer: Indonesia in the 1950s had become a very different, more 'modern' place, he said, than the traditional Indonesia evoked by Benda. Surely he was right.
Most of us who heard him lecture will recall those ingenious diagrams he would scrawl across a blackboard as road-maps to the political manoeuvring (percaturan politik) relevant to the particular phase of the game he was talking about. Parties, groups and individuals were arrayed from left to right on the horizontal axis in more or less conventional class or ideological terms, and vertically according to more exotic alignments. (There is a good example on page 14 of Indonesian political thinking 1945-1965.) We used to argue endlessly about the details, but rarely about the general framework he had set before us, which was nearly always helpful to newcomers to the subject and old hands alike.
Marxist notions
One of the puzzles we talked about frequently in the early years of Indonesia's independence was that conventional Marxist notions of class analysis of society and politics did not seem applicable there, for reasons Sukarno had set out well in his 'Marhaen dan Proleter'. Most peasants were not landless, although generally poor. There did not seem to be a wealthy propertied class of landlords or a bourgeoisie. The Dutch and to a lesser extent the Chinese had played roles rather like that, but their political and economic power was crumbling in the 1950s in the face of the Indonesian revolution. So what had the revolution been all about, apart from merdeka (independence)? And what would be the social and political basis of the new Indonesia?
Wertheim had tried to give a more or less Marxist interpretation in his influential Indonesian society in transition, but it was less than fully satisfactory. Kahin sometimes implied a class basis to the political support he discerned for the main parties, but did not push the analysis very far. The PKI put forward some ingenious assertions about Indonesia's class structure, but they were questionable and left a great deal unexplained. Herb, on the other hand, took a more Weberian rather than Marxist approach to the problem, with greater success, in my view.
His previous study of political science at the University of Melbourne under Macmahon Ball and Hugo Wolfsohn had steeped him in the debates about Marxism and the Weberian alternatives to it, mainly in terms of European and Australian politics. He was far more impressed, he once told me, by Wolfsohn's deep knowledge of the Marxist classics than he was by Ball's Nationalism and communism in East Asia. But we were all preoccupied in those days with the question of how far theories and concepts appropriate to European conditions were applicable to the radically different circumstances of Asian countries. Hence the need to find alternatives, and the excitement generated by Herb's contributions to the search.
While he was at Cornell in the late 1950s Herb came under the sway of the new approaches to political and social analysis which became known as 'structural-functionalism', or more generally 'modernisation theory'. But he never really became a devotee of the latter, for he had already seen enough of the good and bad effects of Westernisation and modernisation in newly independent Indonesia not to be swept off his feet by any such panacaea. Yet he did adopt many of the concepts put forward by Lasswell, Shils, Pye, Wriggins and Arnold and Coleman, whose 1960 book on The politics of the developing areas he particularly admired. In his early years at Monash University he introduced a new wave of Australian students of Indonesian politics to these ideas.
When a reaction against modernisation theory set in later in the 1960s, leading towards a new emphasis on neocolonialist interpretations of Third World poverty, then dependency theory and later a revival of class analysis, Herb moved with it, although not so wholeheartedly and without turning away from those earlier ideas. He was very much impressed for a time with Huntington's Political order in changing societies, although far from being a disciple. In the early 1970s he was much attracted by the ideas of the maverick Ivan Illich and spent a semester at his centre at Cuernavaca. But by this time Herb's most productive phase as an ideas person was ending and he was drawing increasingly on the ideas of others (there were many more others by then, including the prolific and fertile-minded Ben Anderson), including his own graduate students, like Harold Crouch and Rex Mortimer who had a big influence on him in the 1970s. He shifted increasingly towards peace studies and theories of international order in his later years.
Dilemmas
The timing of the reaction against modernisation theory, just after the fall of Sukarno and in the early Suharto years when the New Order was taking shape, created painful moral and intellectual dilemmas for Herb. These partly explain why his stream of new ideas about Indonesia began to dry up in later years. He was impressed and initially cheered by Suharto's success in pulling the country out of the mire of economic stagnation of the mid-1960s towards on-going economic progress. Suharto had done this largely on the advice of Herb's old friends Widjojo, Sadli and Emil Salim. But he soon became increasingly opposed to the repressive aspects of the regime and its dreadful record on human rights, especially after the seizure of East Timor in 1975. His last piece on Indonesia with an innovative thrust was his influential 1980 essay on 'repressive-developmentalist regimes', an ugly but accurate piece of phrase-making which conveyed the essence of the unbeautiful Suharto regime all too well.
Was it his dismay over Indonesia's political trajectory under Suharto that caused Herb to write so little about Indonesia after 1970, or was it disillusionment with the ideas he had derived from modernisation theory which he had earlier found so stimulating and fruitful? A bit of both, I suspect, but that is too tangled and far-reaching a question to answer briefly here. The earlier unpredictability of Indonesian politics had given way to such a dominant, heavy-handed regime that there was not much scope for new ideas. But it was always ideas - and people, especially those who generated them - that really delighted him, right to the end.
Jamie Mackie (jamiemackie@hotmail.com) is professor emeritus at the economics department of the Indonesia Project, Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies, Australian National University, Canberra.
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Bill Liddle and Herb Feith
These two scholars of Indonesia exchanged emails early November 2001 about the terrorist attack in New York on September 11. The exchange began with a draft article Liddle wrote for a newspaper. Extracts:
Liddle: 'Talking With Indonesian Muslims' (draft article for New York Times)
Indonesian Muslims, like Muslims elsewhere, are struggling with the meaning of September 11 and its aftermath for themselves, their faith, their country, and the world. After the bombing of Afghanistan began, some militants demanded that the government of Megawati Soekarnoputri break relations with the United States. A demonstrator publicly threatened the life of the American ambassador. The majority, who are normally moderate in their views about both international and domestic affairs, have been silent in public but concerned in private.
To some extent their concern reflects a lack of knowledge or wishful thinking, as in the still widespread belief that no Muslim could be guilty of such terrible acts. But many well-educated and sincere people believe that President Bush has not provided evidence of bin Laden and al Qaeda's guilt, that even if bin Laden is guilty the Taliban government of Afghanistan should not be targeted for destruction, that the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is not an ahistoric act of evil but instead the latest in a series of attacks and counter-attacks in the continuing struggle for power in the Middle East....
Feith: Rather an imaginative new twist in the historic struggle against foreign domination of the Middle East
My responses to this are mixed. I think it is good that you should write in these terms to the NYT, but I also disagree with several of your emphases. Above all, I am sorry for Americans like yourself, and wonder whether I am right to be so angry with the mainstream America to which you need to relate. As I see it, Bush and Bushism are more of a problem for the species and the planet than Osama and Osamaism. My preoccupation, for which I found quite a bit of sympathy in Indonesia - I got back from there on Friday after four weeks of UGM teaching and a week in Jakarta - is with fashioning mendayung antara dua karang [steering between two rocks] strategies.
Liddle: I'm not sure why you should feel sorry for 'Americans like myself,' on the assumption that I'm not mainstream America.
Feith: When I say I am sorry for you I suppose I see myself as fortunate not to be in your shoes. It is hard to be an Australian these days, but to be an American would, I think, be even harder. Anyway I am delighted that you feel you can associate yourself with a mendayung antara dua karang formulation. I read somewhere recently that people are peaceminded who prefer thinking in threes to thinking in twos. Interesting isn't it?
Whether you are or aren't mainstream America is semantics. What is clear to me is that your long-term political practice is mainstream, as indeed is mine, though more hesitantly.
Liddle: I'm genuinely torn. Sometimes late at night I turn on CNN and see a live picture of the World Trade Centre, still smoking, and I feel both terrible anger and a conviction that the perpetrators must be caught and punished. I don't know how to do that other than to invade Afghanistan and chase down bin Laden cs.
Feith: The perpetrators are Mohamad Atta and co and they are dead.
Another kind of American president could, i think, have appealed to American pride, saying that we will see to it that justice is done while refusing to lower ourselves to answering terror with terror. A Republican president could have talked that language more easily than a Democratic one. I guess Powell could have taken that tack if he were president.
Liddle: It may be that I am reacting this way because I am American, but I resist that conclusion. In theatres and other public events now, we are often asked to stand and sing the national anthem. Most people do, with their hand over their heart as we used to do in elementary school when saying the pledge of allegiance. I stand, but without singing or putting my hand over my heart. .... I think (with Bush? - although I am less certain about his sincerity than about my own) that it is humankind who were attacked that day, and it is humankind who should respond.
Having said all this, at the same time I recognise the force of your comment that the attack was 'an imaginative new twist in the historic struggle against foreign domination of the Middle East.' I guess that's what I mean when I say I'm torn.
Your comment on Bush and Bushism. I'm afraid that what Bush is doing is very popular.
Feith: So was what Hitler did, so is what Sharon is doing, and probably Saddam as well. I feel quite strongly that the popularity of a leader in his state is an inappropriate criterion for actions taken in a global arena.
Prof Bill Liddle (William.Liddle@polisci.sbs.ohio-state.edu) teaches at Ohio State University and has written widely on Indonesian politics. 'Inside Indonesia' thanks him for allowing us to publish these extracts of his correspondence with Herb Feith, who died a few days later.
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Herb Feith, who began it all 50 years ago, inspires a new volunteer
Rachael Diprose
My first memory of Herb Feith is of him peddling along on his trusty bicycle several years ago near the Gadjah Mada University campus in Yogyakarta. The sun was softly falling on his thinning hair, his glasses perched on the tip of his nose, as he sat straight-backed in a faded batik shirt, negotiating the potholes.
I thought, 'so this is the infamous Herb Feith', popular amongst Indonesian and Australian students alike, respected academic and Indonesianist, and exactly the picture of eccentricity I had envisaged. He was working as an Australian volunteer in Indonesia, teaching politics. I am now lamenting the fact that when I was an Australian student on exchange in Indonesia I considered my Indonesian language skills inadequate to attend one of his very popular classes. Missed opportunities.
Several years later, working as an Australian volunteer in Jakarta, I was lucky enough to meet with Pak Herb. He was the guest speaker at the opening of a photo exhibition held in Jakarta in November 2001, celebrating 50 Years of Australian volunteering. Pak Herb pioneered the Volunteer Graduate Scheme in 1951 when he came by boat to Indonesia to serve as an interpreter in the Sukarno government administration. At the time he received a small, local salary, working alongside the Indonesian staff under local conditions, with the objective of promoting cross-cultural understanding.
Several things stand out about what Pak Herb said that evening. He spoke of 'curiosity' and 'solidarity'. The curiosity that arises when one becomes a volunteer and moves to a foreign country, and the solidarity one feels with those who are suffering and who don't have the basic rights others take for granted. Pak Herb described the fascination of those first volunteers with the Indonesian community, their way of life, political system, and open friendliness. This same curiosity and solidarity has led many volunteers to become respected academics in Indonesian studies, human rights campaigners, researchers and policy makers back home.
Being there
In light of the September 11 tragedy, Pak Herb highlighted the dangerous and saddening divide developing between what some call Muslim and non-Muslim countries. He spoke for many Australian volunteers currently living in Indonesia, who believe that now is the most important moment to be in-country. In times of uncertainty, simply being in Indonesia is a significant contribution we can make to our workplaces or the communities in which we live, despite the pressure from some families and friends to return home. This makes a stronger statement about Australians and our personal commitment to Indonesia than any foreign news report.
Volunteers may be placed in large cities, or very remote communities, depending on where their skills are required. When a volunteer moves to their placement country, they are given some preliminary language training. But they still have to overcome the communication barriers, learn to understand the culture, adapt to the food and climate, and simply learn a new way of living. However, lifetime friendships and extraordinary personal growth are the rewards that volunteers take with them when they return to Australia.
Employed as a translator and English editor with an Indonesian research institute, I could communicate to some extent upon arrival. However, learning to speak another language and live in another culture is a constant process, no matter how long a volunteer has been living in-country. And it is a joint learning process. My friends and colleagues seem to delight in my Australian mannerisms and question me constantly about customs at home.
As an independent, somewhat assertive, unmarried female, I feel at times like something of an enigma. While this is not unheard of in Indonesia, at present I still fall into the minority. Taxi and bajaj (automated pedicabs) drivers are amazed that I have not had children. Learning to eat with my hands at the office, without rice ending up all over my face and clothes, took months of perseverance! Living in a densely populated city has been challenging for me after the wide, open spaces of Australia.
Yet, when I go home at the end of each day I am constantly amazed at the new experiences I have shared. In what once seemed so foreign, I now find peace and tranquility in the call to prayer. I have learnt to order my day around the monsoon rains. I can see lifelong friendships forming, and imagine my relationship with Indonesia continuing long into the future. I only hope that I can give back a fraction of the wonderful experience that my friends have given me, and carry on the legacy of Pak Herb.
Rachael Diprose (rdiprose@smeru.or.id) is an Australian Volunteer (www.ozvol.org.au) working at the Smeru Research Institute in Jakarta.
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Herb Feith
It is delightful to see so many old friends here. Let me say a few things on behalf of the 1950s generation of volunteers. I think the most important thing to say is that we enjoyed ourselves enormously while we were here. It extended our curiosity fairly persistently, it stretched us, it empowered us, it gave us a sense of being able to relate comfortably to more than one culture. And some of us got a lot of career advantages out of it too.
We were young, we were a bit radical, so we also saw ourselves as engaging in a form of protest, staying with Indonesian families and hostels rather than European enclaves, riding our bikes when other slack people were being driven in cars. We saw ourselves as particularly against white colonial attitudes, against expatriate lifestyles and so on. In fact we had a pretty a strong sense of our own moral superiority towards them. And when we got back to Australia, we saw ourselves as being in the van of enlightenment on things like racism and parochialism. And when I speak of parochialism I don't mean merely Australian parochialism, I also mean Western parochialism, which is sometimes called first-world parochialism and which is, as you well know, well and truly alive.
There's a temptation on occasions like this to exaggerate the contributions that volunteers have made particularly to the Australia-Indonesia relationship. Obviously, people who came here as volunteers are only a part of the Australians who've been Indonesianised in the way they live. But it is true that a lot of meaningful friendships developed from all of those people living here, and those have survived the bad period. They survived the '63 to'65 bad period, and they survived the bad period of two years ago.
Looking at Australia today, it's certainly a lot more multicultural country than it was when our fifties group of volunteers came here, and it's a country which engages Asia in far more ways. But it's still a country in which first-world parochialism is a very powerful force. Australians who see themselves as citizens of a planet are still a pretty small minority, and that's become painfully clear to us, particularly recently over the asylum-seekers issue, over the people coming in tiny boats from long distances, and ultimately from places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And of course it's become clear to us as a result of the events of September the 11th in New York and Washington. The 'all the way with the USA' responses that have been so dominant in Australia have given all of us a great deal to ponder about and indeed a great deal to be anxious about. So those of us who believe in solidarity with Asians and people in other third-world countries still have an awful lot of battles to fight. But it's a happy thing that we've been empowered in relation to those battles by a lot of very valuable Indonesian friendships. Thanks for doing that.
From Herb's remarks at the 50th anniversary celebration for Australian Volunteers International held in Jakarta, 2 November 2001.
Inside Indonesia 70: Apr - Jun 2002
Page 55 of 68
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