In Jakarta and Yogyakarta, the election brought renewing hope
Laine Berman
From a distance we heard the deafening roar of scooters, shouting voices, the honking of horns and blaring music, all under the pale yellow-grey blanket of exhaust emissions which already hung heavily in Jakarta's morning sky. We approached Jalan Thamrin with apprehension, caused by terrifying memories of previous election campaigns. In 1992 in Yogya I witnessed the naked violence and widespread fear of Indonesian street campaigns: the threatening spectacle of scooters with no mufflers, their 'ninja' drivers and menacing passengers with sticks in hand ready to use on any bystander who failed to raise the appropriate hand signal. This was Jakarta, it was day one of the campaigns, and I was scared.
The first day of campaigning was the only one when all 48 parties were permitted to march. 'Experts' of all kinds predicted riots. But from the moment we reached Jalan Thamrin and began the hike south to the Hotel Indonesia roundabout, all my concerns disappeared. Instead of open intimidation, we had a celebration. Vehicles from one party happily gave way to the next. Buses carried flags from many parties under the banner 'Bis Koalisi'. People helped each other. Whereas in 1992 Chinese bystanders were harassed for 'petrol money', now they too were visibly relieved and joined the throngs on the roadsides. When we finally reached the roundabout, the carnival atmosphere was in full swing with acrobats, clowns, floats, colourful banners, and a great deal of good cheer. Jakartans had beaten the odds, confounded the 'experts', and enjoyed themselves immensely to boot!
In Jakarta and in Yogyakarta the campaign and the election itself went surprisingly well. Very few incidents marred the festivities. On June 7th, in my kampung in central Yogyakarta, men sat in the shade of the fruit trees in my front yard discussing politics. They joked about the old days before reformasi, when nobody bothered to vote yet the kampung tally still showed full participation for Golkar. Now things were different. Men of all ages were enjoying the atmosphere, while women lined up to vote first. 'Women shouldn't have to stand in the heat', the men said as they stepped aside to let the women through. The process was long. It took over an hour from queuing up to casting the three ballots to confirming their legitimacy to staining a finger in ink (meant to prevent double voting). No one complained. Everyone seemed to enjoy the experience and the chance to discuss it all with neighbours.
For weeks prior to this day, TV, radio, and all print media educated the nation on the voting process. Each night speakers from the different parties were introduced through open debates and speeches. Immediately upon Suharto's resignation, the talk show format seemed to have taken over evening TV. Now there were discussions of election topics, reviews of party platforms, training videos, guest speakers, and viewer call-ins. Through TV videos, advertisements, posters, pamphlets, and print media cartoons, the nation was assured that this election was unlike all the previous ones.
Women's voice
People were taught to recognise various ways of cheating, and to reject gender bias by assuring women that their votes were personal and very important. Women make up over half the electorate. Media campaigns incessantly told them that 'for the first time, we do have a voice. Women will determine the nation's future!' TV ads assured women that their vote was secret and should be cast for the party that best supported women's issues. Disappointingly, no one I asked knew of such a party.
Other ad campaigns encouraged voters to follow their own preference and conviction and not just follow husbands, village heads, or religious leaders. Yet others warned of 'politik bayaran' or vote buying. They actually encouraged people to take the money but vote according to their preference. As the day approached and for weeks afterward, the media campaigns shifted. Now, the nation was encouraged to accept the outcome as free and fair, regardless of who won. Scenes showed friends and family fighting over differences of opinion, then pointed out how wasteful such arguments were.
No one doubted the significance of this election. Everyone in my kampung said how important they felt personally. While most agreed that no candidate stood out as a true leader, all felt confident that Indonesia was finally on the mend. After the polls closed, as many people as the hall could fit took part in the counting. Many kept their own tallies. During three days of counting, the crowds in the hall and those hanging around outside never abated. Nor did their enthusiasm and desire to be part of the great occasion. Fathers led me to the window of the hall to point to their sons and daughters and with great pride said: 'That's my child, an election monitor!'
During the long counting process, each ballot paper was read out aloud. Each one was greeted by a flurry of comments: cheers (Megawati's PDI-P), boos (Golkar), laughter (the youthful PRD). Any discrepancy was carefully checked. On the night of June 7 and for the rest of the week, kampung celebrations were visible all over town. Men gathered in roadside party huts ('posko') to shave their heads and/or to cook dog meat stew, both common ways of giving thanks and celebrating a blessing. Their reasons were numerous. 'No, I didn't vote for Mega, but that doesn't matter. What is important is that the election was a success.' 'We are celebrating the new era for Indonesia.' 'We are celebrating because Golkar is finished.' 'We don't care who wins as long as it is clean.' 'Yes, it will take a long time to clean up Suharto's mess, but we have already begun!'
The only people who remained cynical and had no inked finger (alias they didn't vote, saying they were 'Golput') were the older generation of Yogya activists. These were the university students who had helped Muchtar Pakpahan create the labour union SBSI, had helped Megawati rise in the PDI and later to form PDI-P, and had helped Amien Rais form his PAN, among others. Before Suharto's fall they had pitched in to write their platforms, and organised their rallies and protests. Many of them had now graduated (or dropped out) and are working for non-government organisations. They felt they knew the candidates too well. They were too familiar with their flaws to vote for them.
Open minds
All in all, the changes Indonesia has experienced (in some places) since 21 May 1998 are phenomenal. In just over one year a wave of openness has flooded into the media, the streets, the kampungs, the campuses, and people's minds. Rather than blindly follow provocateurs, people are beginning to feel their responsibility in the future shape of the nation. They question the motives of troublemakers.
The group of men I sat with as they waited for the women to vote talked about their roles in preventing corruption and in ensuring the next president really does represent the people. The idealism I witnessed was touching, if not a bit naive. Indonesia has a long way to go before the effects of oppression, social inequality, and institutionalised violence subside. At least in the kampungs of Yogyakarta and Jakarta, the 'little people' are ready to face the changes. Let's hope both the old and the new generation of leaders can do the same.
Laine Berman is a research fellow in the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University.
Inside Indonesia 60: Oct-Dec 1999
The author of a recent play reveals how the personal and the political intertwined as he wrote it.
Louis Nowra
Sometimes a play has a long genesis. My latest, The language of the gods, set in the Sulawesi of 1946, had one longer than most. In many respects its gestation can be traced back to my childhood in Melbourne. One of my first memories is of a terrifying wooden statue about half a metre high that rested on our mantelpiece. It was seated on a throne and had a wide mouth full of vicious shark-like teeth. It also had bat-like wings and large popping eyes. Later on I was to find out it was a Garuda. It was one of the few mementos my mother kept from her time in Java.
Hers is an unusual story for the times. During the second world war she married a Javanese man who had fled from the Japanese with the Dutch and was living in Queensland. After the war he took her back to Java. Her marriage was a brave, even stubborn thing to do because in those days very few white women married brown men. Later on she was to divorce and I became the product of her second marriage. When she became nostalgic she would talk about her first husband and her time in Java. We lived on a housing commission estate and I think we would have been the only family who ate Indonesian food, which she'd learnt to cook in Java.
But this was not the only Indonesian connection I had as a boy. My two aunties had also married Javanese men who, unfortunately for them, had chosen to fight for the Dutch during the war of independence (1945-49). Both men became exiles in Australia and were on a black list of those Indonesians not allowed to return home. What I vividly remember is how upset they were when, years later, they still weren't allowed to go home to visit their dying relatives. It seemed unfair to me, given I admired these men, but it also gave me a sense of the consequences of choosing the wrong side in a political struggle.
Although I had visited Indonesia briefly I didn't have a deep and personal interest in it. In 1986 I heard that there was to be an Indonesian translation of my play The precious woman, which is set in China during the 1920s warlord era. I was curious as to why such a play would have been chosen, and doubted that I would hear anything more. But a translation was made by actress and lecturer in English Tuti Indra Malaon, and I looked forward to going to Jakarta to see the production, to be directed by the veteran film-maker Teguh Karya. However, from then on I heard nothing. Then in the early 90s I was visited by an academic from the University of Indonesia, who told me the reason why the play didn't go on was that there had been 'problems'. What the problems were I didn't find out until The precious woman was published in a dual language text (English/ Indonesian) in 1997. In it, the editor Philip Kitley explained that when Teguh was about to direct the play the political climate had changed drastically. Cultural productions with any sort of Chinese associations were viewed with suspicion.
Just as my uncles' lives were changed by politics, so a play of mine had been stopped by politics. It reinforced my previous view of Indonesia as a place where politics were personal and dangerous. But then a curious thing happened. I was invited by a Japanese film company to write a screenplay based on a novel they had bought. The book was a woeful mixture of bad plot and New Age gibberish set in Bali. Having been to Bali and read a little I realised this supposedly factual book was fiction. I asked the film company if I could research the topic in Sulawesi. The whim was based on my childhood fascination with the shape of the island. My mother's talk about Java always sent me to an atlas, but I thought the shape of Java was boring compared to Sulawesi, which seemed like an octopus caught in an electric blender. Going to Sulawesi proved to be one of the most important times of my writing life.
Sulawesi
I travelled to Sulawesi knowing little about it and found in the Tana Toraja region a world so far removed from the Balinese or Javanese cultures that I was shocked. I forgot to research the screenplay I was working on and instead travelled widely, profoundly moved by the simplicity of the dancing (compared to the baroque Balinese), the funeral ceremonies and the music. Then one day I discovered a reference to the Bissu, the transvestite priests, a tradition that goes back some four to five hundred years. A town was mentioned where there might still be some Bissu. I hurried down south to Segeri with my translator, who tried to talk me out of it. 'These men,' he said, 'are not normal.'
We found a Bissu who was a curious mixture of camp and dignity, of the temporal and of the priest. He showed me photographs of himself and then took me across the road to a wooden house where he used to hold many ceremonies. In the back room was a wooden chair, a throne, which held offerings. He spoke of how he talked to the gods and how he could walk through fire and cut himself without bleeding. He was one of the most extraordinary men I have ever met. I was deeply moved, because he represented a tradition that was dying out. Once there were many Bissu, now hardly any, once the wooden house throbbed with many dancers, now few young boys wanted to learn, once the Bissu's magic was feared, now only the old thought these men had powers. Back in Australia I read as much as possible about the Bissu.
Then I came across the infamous soldier Captain Westerling, who created bloody havoc in the Celebes (as the Dutch called Sulawesi) during their 'Police Action'of 1946-47 directed at Indonesians wanting independence. I read his memoirs and thought he was a cross between a psycho and Errol Flynn. I read as much as possible about the Dutch in the Celebes. And then I came upon the Dutch novelist Louis Couperus and his extraordinary novel The hidden force. Somehow all these things coalesced in my mind and from it came the idea for my play The language of the gods.
The play is set in 1946, when Braak, the Dutch administrator, having returned to the Celebes from exile in Australia, with his new Australian wife Alice, finds a country on the verge of upheaval. He adores the traditional Indonesia as represented by Dely, the Bissu, but realises that even though he loves the Indies, like the rest of the Dutch, he will be cast out, and because of Captain Westerling's rampage the locals are beginning to hate him. He can't control Westerling, or his own private life, and the very person whom he respects, Dely, will be the one to destroy him.
I suppose you could say that the play is in keeping with the idea I have had ever since I was young that in Indonesia politics is personal. Even though he would have liked to have separated the two, Braak in the end realises too late that he can't. This probably makes the play sound too much of an ideas-driven work, but really it is a character-driven story and certainly not moralistic about who was right and who was wrong in those fraught times.
The opening night in the Playbox Theatre on 8 September was a strange one. The chaotic situation in East Timor was on everyone's mind, so there seemed to be a desire that the play have parallels to it. But it was written without any such parallels in mind. Yet history is a curious thing. It repeats itself, Hegel said as farce but he was wrong. Sometimes when history repeats itself there is an overwhelming sense of deja vu, which does not make one laugh at all but makes one cringe at how little we learn from past mistakes.
Louis Nowra (lnowra@aol.com.au) is a playwright, novelist and screenwriter. Scripts of 'The language of the gods' and 'The precious woman' are available from Currency Press (email currency@magna.com.au, web www.currency.com.au).
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
1960s Artists struggled to create solidarity with the oppressed. One of their slogans survived in Golkar, but not their spirit.
Julie Shackford-Bradley
Turba' is an acronym for 'turun ke bawah', meaning 'descend from above'. It has a complex historical lineage from the 1950s and 1960s to the present. In New Order parlance it has cropped up to refer to visits by state officials out beyond the limits of the metropolis. Thus we read that World Bank President James Wolfensohn, during a recent visit to Indonesia, 'turba' to the slums (kampung) to witness the effects of the economic crisis. National Development Planning Board bureau chief Triono Soendoro also 'turba' to a central Javanese village to gather research on infant malnutrition. In a different context, former vice-president Try Sutrisno, as chairman of the Association of Armed Forces Retirees, 'turba' to the regions beyond Java to create interest in his political party the PKP, a spin-off of Golkar.
The contemporary usage of the word amounts to a misappropriation of a concept and practice developed by leftist thinkers in the 1950s. The word turba gained its initial currency when it was used to refer to the movement of urban artists and activists to rural areas as part of a programme sponsored by the Communist Party PKI and the People's Cultural Association, Lekra. Through interviews conducted with Lekra organisers, and from readings on the topic, it has become clear to me that the term evokes a variety of interpretations of the Maoist concept of xia fang, to go out into the countryside. Mao himself outlined the concept in the following way in 1953:
'China's revolutionary writers and artists, writers and artists of promise, must go among the masses... go into the heat of the struggle, ... in order to observe, experience, study and analyse all the different kinds of people, all the classes, all the masses, all the vivid patterns of life and struggle, all the raw materials of literature and art.'
As writer and Lekra member Hersri Setiawan describes it, part of the purpose of turba in Indonesia was to introduce urbanised leftists to the physical deprivations and psychological hardships of village life, in the hope that they would be transformed in a deeply personal way. This element of personal transformation was, however, subsumed in a larger, politically-oriented structure in which turba participants were sent out to specific areas to conduct research and create revolutionary art forms. The intention, in essence, was to set up a two-way flow of information between village and city.
Participants would practise the 'three togethernesses' (tiga kesamaan): eating, living, and working together with village farmers. They would honour the four 'don'ts', which included prohibitions against lecturing to farmers or taking notes in their presence, along with the four 'musts': humility, learning the language and cultural practices of the area, and contributing to the farmers' households.
Lekra members I interviewed in Amsterdam in 1998 emphasised that a great deal of research was gathered about Javanese villages through the turba programme. This information became the basis for Communist Party chairman Aidit's discussions of the '7 Demons' village farmers faced, which in turn sparked programmes in land reform, among others.
Lekra artists and dramatists practised turba as a way to study the village-based arts, including the ketoprak, wayang, and ludruk, to determine how these forms could be utilised to disseminate information and radical ideologies. Lekra member Kuslan Budiman recalls discussions of the politicisation of the shadow puppet theatre (wayang). It was determined, for example, that it would be more appropriate to have clowns talking about politics than to merge the identities of the mythical hero Arjuna with the revolutionary president Sukarno.
New art forms
For some turba artists, however, the goal was to go beyond the politicisation of the wayang. These artists wanted to create new art forms by blending elements from the local genres of drama, dance, and music with Marxist ideology. Tragically, the results of this kind of artistic experimentation exist only in the memories of the participants still living. When they are re-collected, these memories reveal an underlying ambivalence.
Hersri suggests that, according to prevailing opinion at least, the art produced in the turba programme was a 'failure'. It did not bring about the desired effect of conscientising the masses and spurring them on toward revolution. One problem was that turba dramatists and choreographers who wanted to incorporate local forms found themselves trapped within a 'feudal' sign-system when they evoked rhythms and dance movements that audiences associated with pleasure and entertainment, rather than those that would spur defiance or revolutionary fervour.
Recalling Lekra dramatist Suyud's sung poem Blanja wurung ('No more shopping'), Hersri describes a piece that might, in other contexts, be categorised as experimental performance art. Against the soothing gamelan background, a voice chants: 'Ngono ya ngono, mbok ya 'ja ngono!' ('it's like that, ya, like that, but don't let it be like that').
As an alternative, choreographers dismantled existing structures to create new forms, as in the case of Tari ronda malam ('Dance of the night watchman'). Here only the gamelan's kendong drum accompanies the dance, a representation of the rhythms and movements of the villagers' labour.
But did the rural audience 'get it'? In Hersri's estimation, they did not. But, as fellow Lekra member Agam Wispi responds, this was not the only measure of success or failure for artists of the period. 'I did not write poetry for the farmers,' he says, but rather 'about the farmers,... studying their songs, and voices... in order to portray their strength and courage.'
The Lekra members with whom I spoke agree to disagree on whether the primary objectives of Lekra and of turba were artistic or political. Those who participated in the turba movement do agree, however, that their village experiences forced them to confront their class-based prejudices in a transformative way.
Personal recollections of turba experiences reveal the tensions that arose between the urbanised youths and rural folk. For those who went 'down' into the villages, according to Kuslan and fellow Lekra artist Mawie Ananta Yonie, class differences were only magnified when they were experienced on the physical level. Contrary to their own intentions, turba participants struggled not to make value judgments about village farmers when forced, for example, to defecate unsanitarily in the river, or when watching 'boys become men' in the ritualised prostitution called tayuban.
At the same time, the Javanese farmers could not help but treat the city boys as guests, offering them greater portions of the best food they had. This caused some turba participants to eat elsewhere, at local warungs for example.
Many also tired of the labour after a few days. 'Our bodies were not suited to that kind of work,' Kuslan recalls. 'Our muscles were not developed, our hands were not properly callused.' Moreover when only 'sleeping together' remained of the three togethernesses, anti-communist critics, as Hersri notes, jumped at the chance to exploit the sexual innuendo inherent in the phrase.
In the heat of the moment, turba participants were hesitant to confront such tensions, much less write about them. As these tensions surface in retrospect, however, they cannot be separated from the biases inherent in the term itself. The very concept of 'descent from above' is based on a spatial configuration of class that is uncompromisingly hierarchical.
'Descent' to the slums
In recent New Order usage, 'turba' retains that hierarchical quality, while ignoring the original philosophical intent. We can see from the examples above that the term is now used in such a way as to gloss over the ever-larger gaps between metropolis and village, between elite enclaves and kampungs, and between Java and the 'outer regions.' The term becomes a shorthand, when used in the context of 'descending' to the slums or to the regions beyond Java, for crossing a boundary that has been made to look so 'natural' as to need no explanation.
The contemporary usage reminds us that the means by which that boundary is traversed will determine how the boundary itself is conceived. Even if we now consider the three togethernesses, the four don'ts and musts as a throwback to rigid communist rhetoric, these mottoes forced the turba participants to acknowledge the class divide for what it was. When turba is practiced in an air-conditioned Mitsubishi, the wall between the classes is only strengthened, and that is precisely the point.
Misappropriation of the term reaches an ironic pinnacle in recent pro-Golkar political activities. Try Sutrisno, for example, uses the word turba in the context of 'socialising' (mensosialisasikan) the retired generals' new political party PKP. As with all misappropriations, there must be some convergence between the original and the copy that creates the basis for a relationship. Here, PKI is replaced by PKP, and land reform is replaced by the 'socialising' of development projects with military support.
Indonesian newspaper readers and Western observers have gotten used to this tactic of misappropriation through the decades of New Order rule. In the period of change now taking shape, such practices can now be openly challenged in the interests of uncovering lost histories.
Julie Shackford-Bradley (jsbrad@uclink4.berkeley.edu) is conducting doctoral research at the University of California at Berkeley.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Activists in South Sulawesi find democracy in old manuscripts
Elizabeth Morrell
Since the 1970s, the South Sulawesi city of Makassar has been known as Ujung Pandang. But in the last days of his presidency, Habibie gave it back its historically resonant name. The change followed popular demand. It indicates how important history is to people in South Sulawesi.
Forum Informatika Komunikasi (FIK) is a non-government organisation based in Makassar. For the past few years, FIK has used history and culture as a vehicle to educate the public about democracy, gender, human rights, and the environment.
They have sponsored community theatre based on a satirical form of people's theatre known as Kondobuleng. This was formerly often used during resistance against Dutch colonial authority. Petta Puang is a Makassar-based group that uses this popular political satire to question many contemporary social issues. The name Petta Puang refers to titles accorded to highest leaders.
FIK also initiated an international arts festival in Makassar in September 1999. Their intention was to revitalise the cultural expression stifled during the New Order period.
Lontara
Members of the group have also tried another experiment to raise awareness of political and development issues. In order to increase grass-roots participation in decision-making they have adopted the historical and mythical texts found in South Sulawesi and known as lontara'. These old manuscripts were once written on leaves taken from the lontar palm.
Ordinary people have long been depoliticised under the New Order concept of the 'floating mass'. Many of them are concerned that democracy represents the breakdown of social order, and a Western threat to customary values. If unaddressed, such anxiety about change could result in a superficial 'reformasi' which does not significantly alter patterns of thought.
FIK members therefore embarked on a public information campaign drawing on the widely respected lontara'. They use these manuscripts to demonstrate that, prior to Dutch colonial influence, South Sulawesi had democratic systems of government. Rather than threatening customary values, egalitarianism is part of those values.
The lontara' manuscripts were produced only in the lowlands kingdoms, but FIK activists have also included examples of egalitarianism followed by highland communities in their campaign. In the mountains of Toraja, for example, where writing did not develop until the twentieth century, examples are taken from oral traditions and ritual practice.
They then use this traditional framework to discuss the rights and responsibilities of leaders and citizens. Among the issues they raise in their seminars and essays are these: civil contracts between leaders and citizens; systems of government including federalism; the right to constructive and open debate and the freedom to criticise leaders; the appointment of political officials; abuses of power; and ethical issues surrounding the accumulation of wealth by rulers. Democracy is shown to be an indigenous principle, rather than a concept alien to local communities.
Over many centuries in South Sulawesi, written script has produced thousands of manuscripts. These reveal a detailed historiography, and are a source of great local pride. The lontara' documents have now been catalogued under the title Naskah Lontara' Sulawesi Selatan. The catalogue was compiled at Hasanuddin University and the office of the National Archives in Makassar, with assistance from The Ford Foundation. It lists almost 4,000 texts written in the principal regional languages and Arabic.
The documents take many different forms, and cover a wide variety of topics. Among them are aspects of traditional law and punishment, discussions between rulers, government treaties, and inter-island trade. Not all manuscripts have yet been translated into the Indonesian language, but most have been microfilmed for future research, and some have been published.
Limited power
Many manuscripts describe the relations of power which existed in the small kingdoms of the South Sulawesi peninsula. They indicate systems of government in which citizens appeared to enjoy considerable levels of participation. According to the documents, organised kingdoms developed during the thirteenth century. But despite a mythology of divine descent, rulers did not hold absolute power. Within most kingdoms, local chiefs retained leadership over their respective communities.
Many confederations existed within the kingdom system, in which political units at different levels agreed to share power. This provides the basis for today's discussions of federalism and increased regional autonomy. Not all kingdoms were governed by hereditary rulers claiming divine descent. Some kingdom histories refer to governing councils, and to social contracts specifying the freedom of the people. According to several translated manuscripts, most kings and queens held positions of shared authority with other community leaders. Strong obligations and responsibilities for the welfare of their subjects limited their power. Royal power was modified by the council of customary (adat) leaders. Sovereignty rested with adat rather than with the rulers as such.
Democracy in the modern sense did not exist. Yet the lontara' record many examples of egalitarianism, including agreements for the protection of human rights. Rulers could lose office if they did not carry out their obligations, or if they abused their power. History records that some were removed in a constitutional manner, while others were deposed or killed for crimes against the people.
The responsibilities of power are prescribed in manuscripts which instructed the rulers in the importance of honesty, the necessity of justice, accessibility to their subjects, and sensitivity to their needs. In the northern kingdom of Luwu', aspiring rulers were required to live for a short period in small, basic and uncomfortable housing conditions, in order to teach them empathy with their subjects. During that time they were supplied with a minimal amount of food. The candidate then had to satisfy the community that he or she was familiar with adat law, especially as it related to leadership and ethics.
The manuscripts also discussed the misappropriation of public assets. Prosperity was important, and wealth was listed as a desirable characteristic of leadership. But this wealth was to be used for the overall good of the kingdom. Examples show rulers demonstrating concern for subjects living in poverty. Furthermore, a prosperous kingdom was a stable kingdom. The wealth of the state offered security for the populace, while misconduct by the ruler resulted in general misfortune.
This ethical concept of wealth allows FIK activists to draw parallels with Suharto's rule, in which prosperity was limited and selective, and which eventually resulted in economic crisis and social disorder. They interpret the manuscripts to say that this disorder was the fault of the ruler, not of the people.
Practical
How reliable are the lontara' as historical documents by which to shape the future? Local scholars rarely question the veracity of the information contained in them. One reason for this is the manuscripts' open, uncomplicated writing style that suggests honesty. The literature emanated from the courts, yet modern interpretations stress that the manuscripts communicate clearly and without apparent deceit or obscurity. The texts do not hide the unacceptable behaviour of some rulers. At times rulers are criticised, and their faults recorded. This point enables discussion of modern restrictions on freedom of speech.
The manuscripts reveal a simple, concise, practical literature that is firmly based in reason. It pursues the functional aims of recording history, listing genealogies, maintaining order and stability, ensuring agricultural and economic success, and understanding religious law. Even cosmology was discussed in a functional style, and for practical purposes. The literary aesthetic was one in which rationality, the application of knowledge, and the clear understanding of historical events took precedence over romance, drama, and esoteric knowledge.
When FIK activists re-present the lontara' texts they are not rejecting modernity. They are simply recognising the power of history in the cultural identity of all ethnic groups in the peninsula. That is another reason why FIK does not contest the historical record contained in the lontara'. They use the popular acceptance of historicity to demonstrate that precedents for democracy do exist.
Following the texts, they point out that it is not the people who cause destabilisation, but inappropriate government practices neglecting the rights of the people. They point out that throughout local history, society has had the right to reform injustice.
It was not always so. During the Suharto period, some local scholars did use the lontara' to draw attention to customary values as an ordering rather than a liberating principle. But this newest generation of lontara' scholars recalls history with a different purpose, namely to give society the confidence to deal with a changing order.
Elizabeth Morrell (emorrell@metz.une.edu.au) teaches Indonesian language and culture at the University of New England, Armidale, Australia. Contact FIK at tel +62-411-86857.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Illegal logging in Indonesia's national parks
Julian Newman
In 1998 it was voracious forest fire. In 1999, rampant illegal logging, as the future prospects for Indonesia's remaining tropical forests continue to darken.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency in collaboration with the Indonesian group Telapak have been monitoring illegal logging in two of Indonesia's flagship national parks Tanjung Puting in Central Kalimantan, and Gunung Leuser in northern Sumatra.
Both parks provide a protected haven for some of the country's most endangered wildlife including the orangutan, proboscis monkey, Sumatran tiger, Sumatran rhino and clouded leopard. Both are being devastated by illegal logging on a commercial scale.
In Tanjung Puting the EIA/ Telapak investigators witnessed virtual anarchy in the park. While there has always been small-scale illegal logging in the more remote parts of the 400,000 hectare park, over the last year the logging has escalated dramatically and is now affecting the core area where scientific research stations and tourist lodges are found.
Along the Sekonyer River - one of the park's main arteries blatant logging activity was observed. Logging camps were found in close proximity to the park's guard posts and the scientific camps. An extensive network of wooden rails had been constructed to pull the logs out and the sound of chainsaws permeated the air. On a single day over 700 illegal logs were counted being towed down the river in broad daylight by a succession of small boats.
Once the logs reach Kumai Bay they are either loaded onto steel barges or taken to nearby sawmills. All of this activity takes place in full view of the authorities charged with protecting the park. Many local officials from the forest department and police are implicated in the logging, and actually issue 'permits' for the loggers to operate in the park and charge a levy on the illegal timber being brought down the Sekonyer River.
The loggers are targeting ramin trees, a valuable luxury hardwood used for mouldings, picture frames, furniture components and futon beds. Ramin is listed as vulnerable across its range and only grows in swamps so it cannot be cultivated. Sawn ramin can fetch up to US$800 per cubic metre on the international market. Yet the loggers inside Tanjung Putting receive a pittance a few dollars per cubic metre cut. It is the corrupt officials and local timber bosses making the money from the pillage of the park.
EIA/ Telapak traced the illegal timber to two sawmills in Kumai, and to the factories of a local timber baron Abdul Rasyid. Posing as timber buyers the investigators gained access to two of Rasyid's factories and discovered a huge operation based solely on ramin. Unmarked logs were seen being delivered to one of the factories, proof that the timber was illegal. Within minutes of meeting Rasyid's nephew, the investigators were offered the opportunity to conduct illegal business.
Leuser
The situation in Gunung Leuser National Park is just as dire. Logging activities were apparent even in the Suaq Balimbing research station, the only place where orangutans have been observed using tools such as sticks to open fruit. Once again EIA/ Telapak traced the activities of the loggers inside the park to local sawmill owners, who were funding and organising the illegal logging.
From field reports it appears that many of Indonesia's stunning national parks are being heavily logged. Such a finding is indicative of a much deeper malaise threatening the country's remaining forests. Recent research by the Indonesia-UK Tropical Forest Management Programme reveals that illegal logging now outstrips legal timber production in Indonesia.
The research found illegal logging to account for 32 million cubic metres every year (equivalent to 800,000 hectares of land being logged), compared with official production of 29.5 million cubic metres. Indonesia is not only losing its forests at a rapid rate, but is also losing vast amounts of revenue in a country where 50 million people are below the poverty line.
The impact of this wanton destruction cannot be underestimated. Species such as the orangutan are increasingly being hemmed into the pockets of protected forests in Kalimantan and Sumatra, and even these area are now being logged. Orangutan populations have plummeted by 50% in the last decade, and fewer than 25,000 remain in the wild.
The outbreak of illegal logging in the national parks is a legacy of 30 years of mismanagement and corruption in Indonesia's forest sector under the Suharto regime. Vast tracts of land were dished out to business cronies, the overwhelming majority of forest concession holders broke the rules, and local people were thrown off the land.
The only viable solution to the illegal logging epidemic in Indonesia is to effect genuine forest reform, not the watered down version the previous government forced through the parliament in its dying days last October. Such a reform must include the participation of local communities, and the dismantling of the present concession system, which has seen half of Kalimantan's forests destroyed in the last 25 years.
EIA and Telapak are also pressuring the Indonesian authorities to take action against the timber bosses implicated in the illegal logging of national parks, and for the replacement of corrupt officials who have presided over the destruction.
Julian Newman is an investigator at the Environmental Investigation Agency. The report 'The final cut Illegal logging in Indonesia's orangutan parks' is available from: EIA, 69-85 Old St, London EC1V 9HX, tel +44-171-490 7040, fax +44-171-490 0436, e-mail eiauk@gn.apc.org, web http://eia-international.org
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Indonesia's super-wealthy still love their Gulfstreams and Harley Davidsons
Veven Wardhana and Herry Barus
What if we try to track down some of Indonesia's super-rich for whom travelling is a hobby and find out something about their special travel preferences? The first thing we discover is that the travel bureaus in Indonesia are coy about providing any information. We suspect that this is not because their clients insist on confidentiality but more because it's a mystery to the travel bureaus themselves. The problem is that most of your Indonesian super-rich don't book their plane tickets through travel agents. They just jump on a private jet. Nor are the companies which look after the privately owned planes keen to talk. They are unwilling to release information, many of them, because they are close to ex-president Suharto's family, and our own enquiries came just after Suharto announced his resignation from the presidency. Only one or two of them were able to help us, and even then they wouldn't say much.
The existence of aviation charter companies in Indonesia is not a new phenomenon. PT Dayajasa Transindo Pratama for example has been going since 1986, while Indonesian Air Transport (IAT) started up even earlier, in 1968. The majority of air charter aircraft are leased out by the oil companies. Recently, however a number of private individuals have begun to appreciate the benefits of jet-powered travel. And we don't necessarily mean leasing. Many of them find the purchase option increasingly attractive, especially with the demands of business being what they are in this era of globalisation, when fast communications with the outside world have become an absolute necessity.
Once you have the jet, of course, you find that it's useful not only for business purposes but also for taking the family on trips abroad business permitting, that is. Families who often make use of private jets include Pontjo Sutowo, Sudwikatmono, Aburizal Bakrie and also Abdul Latief.
Private jet prices can range from US$3 million to US$33 million. This figure does not include the cost of fitting out the interior of the aircraft. After the purchase has been transacted, the interior decor and external colour scheme are dependent on customer taste. Communications and navigation equipment likewise: although standard installations are provided, it is common for executives everywhere, including Indonesia, to specify more sophisticated equipment as they might if they were buying a yacht to sail around in.
On larger aircraft, the cabin lends itself for conversion to sleeping quarters. The ALatief Corporation's BAC 1-11, for example, in its original configuration could accommodate 100 passengers. After purchasing the aircraft, ALatief remodelled the interior completely, leaving seating for only 18 passengers. This made space for a large bedroom, a bathroom complete with shower and vanity with gold-plated faucets, and two sofas. The additional cost of conversions like this can be as much as US$3 million or from 10 to 20 percent of the purchase price of the aircraft.
Apart from the capital cost, the expense of using an aircraft can be gauged from the operating costs. Fuel, maintenance and catering alone can cost up to US$2,500 per flying hour. And then there are crew salaries, training, insurance and hangarage which might be as much as US$30,000 per month. These rates are for a new aircraft, whereas the rates for a used aircraft can be even higher. The maintenance cost for the aircraft operated by Sudwikatmono and associates is US$100,000 per month. 'Not including spare parts as required,' said the cinema chain king Sudwikatmono.
But are they privately owned, these aircraft? Isn't private ownership of aircraft banned by government regulation? Well, just as the shadow puppeteer is never without a story, so your Indonesian entrepreneur is never without a way around the regulations. As in the case of the prohibition on private ownership of islands, where it was found that Indonesian executives who were rich enough could acquire them in the name of a company, so also can your private plane be acquired in the name of a company.
Unlike private islands, though, most private planes are made available by their owners for commercial use by others. In other words, the private aircraft is actually placed in the hands of an aviation charter firm and made available for hire. Pontjo Sutowo's Gulfstream IV, for example, is looked after by Indonesian Air Transport, as are the aircraft of Aburizal Bakrie and Sudwikatmono. 'The maintenance costs are prohibitive if you don't get some commercial return,' explained Sudwikatmono.
Disneyland
Setya Novanto, president director of PT Citra Permatasakti Persada, a consortium of companies active in a variety of fields, and also the owner of the Tee Box Cafe, a watering hole in South Jakarta, tends to choose his travel destinations with the help of the rest of the family. 'Once, before the difficult times caused by the monetary crisis, the children would all come along. I would arrange my own holidays to coincide with the children's school vacation time. Usually I would make the arrangements a month ahead. But in the critical times we're going through now I haven't made any plans, and I think the children understand the situation,' said this businessman, author of the book Manajemen Soeharto (1997).
If the children were on their long vacation, Novanto would take them to Disneyland or other places suitable for children of their age. Otherwise, in the summer, they might choose to go together to Europe. For the shorter vacations, they might go somewhere within Indonesia. Bali was a favourite destination.
Harley Davidson
Another kind of travelling is indulged in by members of a different set of super-rich Indonesians. They are the Harley Davidson motorcycle enthusiasts. They have an association called the Harley Davidson Club of Indonesia, HDCI. Because of their love of this particular make of motorcycle, you can be sure that the travelling the members of the association do will always involve this favourite mode of transport of theirs. Recently they organised a tour to Daytona, USA.
Achmad Rizal, executive director of the well-known Jakarta restaurant 'Waroeng Kemang', a member of HDCI, hasn't missed one annual visit to South Dakota in the last three years. Sturgis, South Dakota is the world's other Harley Davidson Mecca. Harley Davidson enthusiasts flock here from all over the world at the same time every year. 'At that time there would be upwards of 250,000 Harley Davidson enthusiasts getting together to talk about the Harley or show off their riding skills on the Harley Davidson. It's a lot of fun. One year, 1997, there were a million people there, all Harley Davidson enthusiasts,' he said.
Rizal usually goes with ten other HD enthusiasts from Indonesia. When they arrive in the land of Uncle Sam, the Indonesian team members go straight off to collect their Harley Davidsons from a hire company and set off on the road to the rallying point on their hired machines complete with all the essential attributes and accessories. And what does the Indonesian delegation do when they get to their destination? 'Ya, immerse ourselves in the general Harley-mania, buy up gear and accessories sporting the HD logo or buy HD parts and equipment to take home and install on our own machines in Indonesia.'
When it comes to cost, Rizal explains that the members of the group will each have their own budget. 'On a tour like this, involving your favourite hobby, there's no limit to the amount you might spend. Each person would spend at least Rp15 million. That would be just for the plane ticket and hotel. Then you would need about Rp10 million to hire a Harley. Some people would spend Rp 35 million to Rp 40 million on one trip,' Rizal said.
Besides touring America on Harley Davidsons, Rizal with a number of Jakarta and Bandung business associates once made a round trip of 960 kilometres on the continent of Australia. Starting from the Gold Coast, this trip took them along the Eastern seaboard and into the mountains, with opportunity to sample the renowned Australian seafood and visit all the popular tourist spots. As well, they are frequent visitors to Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand needless to say, on their Harley Davidsons.
Abdul Latief, Minister of Labour (1993-1998), Minister of Tourism, Art and Culture (16 March 21 May 1998), CEO of the holding company ALatief Corporation with subsidiaries in the construction, retail, agribusiness and hotel industries including the supermarket chain PT Pasaraya Toserjaya.
Aburizal Bakrie, Board Chairman of Grup Bakrie and Brothers, Chair of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), major shareholder in Bank Nusa, May Bank Nusa International, PT Daya Sarana Pratama and other companies.
Achmad Rizal, well-known professional in the hospitality industry, especially bars and cafes, executive director of Jakarta restaurant 'Waroeng Kemang'.
Pontjo Nugro Susilo Sutowo, President Director of Nugra Sentana, major shareholder in about 30 business companies including a marine dry dock, CEO of PT Indobuild Company which manages the Jakarta Convention Centre, and Chairman of the Indonesian Hotels and Restaurants Association (PHRI).
Setya Novanto, Executive Director of PT Dwisetya Indolestari; board member of a number of companies, including PT Solusindo Mitrasejati, PT Dwimakmur and PT Multi Dwisentosa, board chairman of PT Bukit Granit Mining Mandiri and PT Nagoya Plaza Hotel; as well as having a key role with one of Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana's companies in the national driver's licence computerisation project.
Sudwikatmono, owner of a business empire comprising the Subendra Group, Jababeka Group and Golden Truly Group, and one of the four Indonesian business tycoons known as The Gang of Four; the other three being Liem Sioe Liong, Djuhar Sutanto, and Ibrahim Risjad.
Veven Wardhana (veven@indosat.net.id) is a virtual media editor with Gramedia Majalah in Jakarta. He also coordinates the Media Watch programme at the Institute for the Free Flow of Information (ISAI). Herry Barus is a journalist with Warta Kota (Jakarta), and before that covered professional lifestyles for Tiara magazine. This article is extracted with permission from their book 'Para Superkaya Indonesia'(Jakarta: ISAI, December 1998). John Gare (johngare@melbpc.org.au) was the translator.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Indonesian non-government organisations call for massive relief
Binny Buchori & Sugeng Bahagijo
Indonesia has just freed itself from an authoritarian regime, but the Indonesian people are not free from the debt burden. Unless massive debt relief is extended to Indonesia, the next decade will be lost for millions of Indonesians and their children. Supported by international public institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the Paris Club, the Suharto regime accumulated US$159 billion in external debt. This debt now threatens Indonesian economic recovery.
The highlights of Indonesian external debt are as follows:
Over the period 1993-1998, Indonesia suffered a net transfer of minus US$ 5,354 million. This means that the inflow of money from loans by various creditors (bilateral, multilateral and private) was smaller than the outflow under Indonesia's repayment obligations by this amount.
Indonesia has to pay more than half of her export earnings to service its debt. This means that over half the country's hard currency, which could be used to buy goods and services for economic recovery and for the social safety net, goes to the rich countries and banks in the north.
Without rescheduling or debt relief, the principal repayments on Indonesia's public external debt will increase from about $2 billion in 1999 to $5 billion in 2000, rising to $9 billion a year in both 2001 and 2002, according to the credit rating firm Standard & Poor.
Indonesian debt now amounts to over 140 percent of the annual gross domestic product, double what it was eight years ago.
How bad is it?
Before the 1997 financial crisis, Suharto preferred to call foreign debt by the name foreign aid. Because of mismanagement in handling loan proceeds, and corruption in the collection of taxes, Indonesia was not able to rely on domestic resources like manufacturing and oil and gas to gradually reduce the external debt. Indonesia continued to increase her external debt every year. At the same time the World Bank, IMF, ADB and other creditors (Paris Club, CGI) were always eager to extend new loans, despite knowing about this corruption and mismanagement.
A recent study by the independent Jakarta economic think tank Econit (table) pictures continually increasing government or public debt - that is, debt owed not by private companies but ultimately by the public through the state. In 1998, the year an IMF package kicked in, it rose to US$144 billion. This debt is now higher than the total amount Indonesia produces in a year (gross domestic product, GDP). The debt service ratio (DSR) measures debt repayments (interest and principal) as a proportion of export earning. It now stands at well over half.
Indonesia's debt
The financial crisis of 1997 became an economic crisis due to rapid devaluation, spiraling external debt, and a loss of investor confidence. When the IMF came to Indonesia's rescue it applied its classic prescription of increased taxes, reduced public spending, and increased interest rates. The package caused a dramatic surge in Indonesia indebtedness. In the words of aid agency Oxfam, the IMF was not responsible for East Asia's crisis, but it was responsible for deepening and prolonging the recession.
Behind these statistics lies a real human cost suffered by Indonesians. Here are some of the facts on how the crisis directly affects child and maternal welfare:
In West Sumatra, more than 32 thousand children out of 300 thousand children under 5 years old are critically malnourished. In Riau province, the incidence of malnourishment among children under five is 27,690 children. Across Indonesia, malnourishment among children under 5 is found in 200 district (kabupatens) out of 320.
Vitamin A deficiency has reemerged. The proportion of children aged between one and two years that do not consume eggs (the main source of vitamin A) has almost doubled to 14 percent (Hellen Keller International - HKI - data, quoted by Oxfam report, 1999)
Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA), which impairs the immune system and the intellectual development of children, has increased from 50 per cent in 1985 to 64 percent. Both childhood and maternal anemia rates have risen during the crisis (HKI data).
Maternal malnutrition is increasing. Since 1996 the average body mass among women of reproductive age fell by 1 kg - almost reversing the increase achieved over the past 30 years. (HKI data). The effects are also visible in education. Oxfam reports recently:
A decrease of 4-5 per cent in school enrolments. This translates to about 1.3 million children who are deprived of access to the education they need to escape a life of poverty. The rate of decline for girls' enrollment is twice that for boys.
The most significant reductions in enrolment level have been recorded in Central Java, Jakarta and Maluku.
A proposal
There are at least five arguments in favour of debt relief for Indonesia:
Without relief, economic and social recovery will be threatened. Indonesia post-crisis is similar to post-second world war Germany. Many schools, factories, and offices are closed. Many children under five are malnourished. Many public health clinics do not have medicines. Unemployment is rising. The only hope is revenue from exporting oil and manufactured products. But if the debt service ratio continues at its current level of more than 50%, the prospect for recovery is long and difficult. Certainly the budget for health, education, and subsidies for medicine, food and kerosene will be sacrificed.
The new government under president Gus Dur needs budget and fiscal flexibility to allow it to stimulate economic growth through increased public spending, increased real sector investment and to finance the costs of the social safety net. (The current social safety net is financed, once more, by loan money from the World Bank with adjustment conditionalities.) Without such flexibility, any government will have difficulty in delivering its economic recovery agenda.
Loans that were misused or corrupted by Suharto cronies and New Order officials cannot be the responsibility of the new government. We propose that odious or criminal debts be cancelled. The World Bank admitted the leakage and estimated it amounted to about 30%. We propose that the coming Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) meeting, and talks with the IMF, should include the cancellation of this debt.
Creditors are ready to discuss the issue of debt and debt relief now. During World Bank consultations with Infid, World Bank country director for Indonesia Mark Baird expressed his concern about the rising Indonesia debt burden, both external (owed to bilateral, multilateral and private banks in the north) and domestic (the government has issued billions of rupiahs in bonds to finance the recapitalisation of sick banks).
Debt relief experience in the past has been workable and good, both for debtors and creditors. The massive debt relief extended to Germany after world war two by the allied powers, and the huge debt relief for Indonesia granted by the Paris Club (for bilateral debt) in 1970-71 are prime examples. The debtor economy can use the money to buy goods and services for recovery. As long as there is common sense and political will on the side of the creditors, debt relief is workable.
The International Non-government organisations (NGO) Forum on Indonesian Development, Infid, therefore proposes debt relief for Indonesia as follows:
A minimum 30% debt cancellation/ reduction to be taken out of the US$70 billion government debt owed to multilateral (WB, IMF and ADB), bilateral (Japan, US, Germany) and private banks;
Indonesia only to repay debt at an annual level not to exceed 5% of DSR ( 5 per cent from export revenues). This will free up money for public spending and the social safety net;
Private debt should not become a burden for public debt. The Indonesian government should not be forced to pay the private debt. Creditor and debtor should both be held responsible for bad lending and bad decisions.
Binny Buchori is executive secretary of Infid (the International Non-government organisations Forum on Indonesian Development). Sugeng Bahagijo is information manager. Contact Infid: Jalan Mampang Prapatan XI/23, Jakarta 12790, Indonesia, tel +62-21-79196721, 79196722, fax +62-21-794 1577, email infid@nusa.or.id or krakatau@cbn.net.id
Public external debt (US$bn)
% of GDP
DSR %
1991
72
62
45
1995
107
53
43
1997
137
63
46
1998
144
147
52
Source: Econit 1999.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
A conversation with an activist reveals there is more than one Aceh cause?
Maree Keating
Otto Syamsuddin Ishak is at once public servant, academic and activist. He lectures in agriculture at the Syiah University in Banda Aceh and is executive officer of Cordova, a non-government organisation (NGO) educating the public on civil society and human rights. He also has links with the armed section of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). I met Otto in Melbourne during an awareness-raising tour last October.
To an outsider, there seem many grounds for hope. New president Gus Dur says he is prepared to negotiate with GAM. He created the new portfolio of Minister for Human Rights, and appointed long term Acehnese human rights campaigner Hasballah Saad to fill it. More concessions have been granted to Islamic syari'ah law in Aceh. Aceh is no longer classified as a military operations area (DOM), and General Wiranto has admitted military excesses.
But when I ask Otto how the Acehnese perceive these concessions he tells me bluntly: 'There is not a single policy that gives us cause for hope, because both Gus Dur and Megawati have the same principle - they want a united nation and give no indication they will free Aceh'. He is equally pessimistic about Hasballah: 'Nobody really believes that he can be successful, because he is not a popular figure in Aceh. The people in Aceh feel better represented by the PPP leader, Ghazali Abbas Adan. He is the only one in a position to speak about human rights in Aceh to Jakarta.'
Hasballah's position, Otto says, is dilemmatic - he stands between the Acehnese struggle and the Indonesian military, each as determined as the other. I wonder if rejecting Hasballah on these grounds is not tantamount to ruling out any form of cooperation. But Otto puts it like this: 'Jakarta always sets up teams [to investigate abuses], without any consultation. Because of that, people have no faith in these teams. None of its members are credible.'
Is Ghazali credible because PPP supports a referendum for Aceh, whereas Hasballah remains less definite on it? Otto seemed reluctant to articulate such political differences, perhaps because, as he says, human rights have become an intensely unifying issue for those championing independence. 'At the moment GAM has a human rights perspective', he says. 'Human rights are being used as a way to find a sympathetic focus. They use the issue of human rights to mobilise society.'
Religion
Otto is also wary of Jakarta's concessions in the area of Islamic syari'ah law. He seems to suggest it could be an attempt by Jakarta to fuel horizontal conflict. Operasi Jilbab is a recent phenomenon where Islamic officials force people to dress in accordance with strict Islamic codes, attend mosque regularly and behave in a devout manner. It is unclear whether Operasi Jilbab sprang spontaneously from a desire for more religion within the community, or whether outside forces played a role in developing an Islamic militancy which most people find oppressive.
When I ask Otto to explain the role of religion in the conflict, he says: 'It is really a secular issue. People have resorted to the security of Islam as a kind of regional identity and as a means of survival.... So they would not feel they were dying in vain? It is not GAM so much as the people themselves who have turned to religion.'
It is difficult for me to imagine what living in a devoutly religious society is like. Perhaps an Islamic version of Christian liberation theology I can recognise, but when people start talking about holy wars and public floggings, I realise that not all things can be translated easily for an Australian public. It strikes me as odd that Otto calls the Aceh conflict a secular issue, for how could anything be secular in a society where Operasi Jilbab can take place and where religious leaders are so powerful?
I ask him about the worst case scenario, and his reply reveals the depth of religious feeling in Aceh. He says: 'The worst scenario is a face to face confrontation. The religious leaders (ulama) have declared that if there is no referendum in the next six months they will take a decision to declare a holy war (jihad). If the ulama want it, they will get the support from the community.' When asked how he and others in the NGO community feel about that, his answer implies that the power of the religious leaders is stronger than that of the non-violent civil society movement. 'They are worried about what will happen', he says. 'But they are not brave enough to say this because they will become a target for the community's anger.'
The referendum movement in Aceh seems to consist of groups with sometimes opposing aims. They include the armed and unarmed sections of GAM, the religious leaders (divided into 'old' and 'new'), students, NGOs and other advocates for a civil society. There is in fact no single Acehnese movement.
Some of the 'old' style ulama lost credibility in the past for aligning themselves too closely with Golkar. They now want to regain popular support by taking a strong stance on the referendum. According to Otto, ninety percent of the population want a referendum. Whereas militant GAM leaders in the past have said they will not engage with the 'Javanese' government on a referendum, Otto says this stance has recently changed. 'If the ulama call for a referendum, GAM will support it, even though previously they did not.'
But if ninety percent support a referendum, it is not clear whether people want the outcome to be a sultanate or a democratic republic. Otto says: 'There are those who want democracy (who use non-violence), and those who want a sultanate (who use violence)? There is a symbiosis between the two which is mutually beneficial. Student activists and all the groups with an interest in a democratic society believe that a sultanate will not be democratic. Because of that they are taking the initiative towards a referendum.'
For Australians wanting to answer Otto's call for support, the challenge remains to find a clearer understanding about what kinds of dialogue are possible within Aceh. If groups within Aceh are afraid to speak out against a violent solution for fear of unleashing the community's anger upon them, the potential for a democratic process could be a fragile one.
Maree Keating (mkeating@ozvol.org.au) is country program manager for Indonesia with Australian Volunteers International. The views in this article are her own and not necessarily those of AVI.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
An urban movement pushes for a peaceful solution
Nina FitzSimons
In the wake of a military crackdown in Biak in July 1998, Christian churches, student and women's groups, and non-government organisations (NGOs) formed a non-party political coalition to pursue a peaceful solution to West Papuan concerns. The Forum for Reconciliation of Irian Jaya Society (Foreri) sought to enter into dialogue with the government.
On the 26th February 1999, after four months of planning and five drafts of the terms of reference, then-President Habibie and cabinet ministers met in Jakarta with a one hundred member delegation of Papuan representatives to launch the 'national dialogue'. Foreri played the role of facilitator. The West Papuans unanimously declared their desire for independence. They wanted President Habibie to publicly recognise the loss of Papua's independence through the 1969 Act of Free Choice. Habibie's response indicated that he was not expecting the declaration. Putting aside his prepared speech, he told the delegation to consider their decision carefully.
Since that meeting there has been no progress. On April 17th 1999 Irian Jaya's chief of police, Hotman Siagian, issued a proclamation banning all discussion and dissemination of information resulting from the national dialogue. This effectively prevents all Papuans from discussing independence or greater autonomy from Indonesia. The workshops and seminars which were to follow the Jakarta meeting will not be taking place.
NGOs in Jayapura say they know the government's answer to the delegation's aspirations. It is the 27th July bill to divide Irian Jaya into three separate provinces. Governors for the new provinces of West Irian, Central Irian and East Irian were sworn in on 12 October 1999. The Protestant church GKI says the division indicates the government's refusal to open any form of conflict resolution. West Papuans fear the administrative expansion will bring in more Javanese bureaucrats. Transmigration (often by Muslims) already means the (largely Christian) Papuan population now only makes up half the territory's population.
Since the February 26th meeting, delegates and facilitators of the national dialogue have become targets of intimidation. Travel restrictions were placed on the main leaders of the national dialogue delegation in August, preventing them from leaving Jayapura. On a wider scale, military command posts are continually being set up to ensure no further 'interference' by delegation parties. Furthermore the government has sought to eliminate the role of Foreri by suspending all communications with the Foreri office. The government discredits the national dialogue as the work of radicals. Some officials have dropped hints that delegate members are part of a group supplying arms to West Papuans opposing the Freeport mine.
In Fak-Fak police raided and vandalised a local traditional house that was being used as a meeting place and information centre on independence issues by local tribal leaders. While no one was injured, police removed all sacred and indigenous artifacts and destroyed them.
The independent human rights organisation in Jayapura, ELS-HAM, has been collecting data on recent killings and intends to publish the results. In August it distributed a report listing human rights abuses in the Central Highlands area as a direct result of the foreign hostage case of early 1996. The abuses implicated the International Committee of the Red Cross and British elite troops SAS. The fact that it took three years to gather enough concrete evidence highlights the difficulties faced by NGOs investigating human rights abuse. As it is, calls by ELS-HAM for the government to protect witnesses relating to this case have fallen on deaf ears.
Nina FitzSimons (ninafitz@solo.wasantara.net.id) is an Australian volunteer in Solo, Central Java. She visited Irian Jaya in June 1999 as an electoral monitor under an ACFOA programme.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
The UN ballot in 1969 broke every rule for genuine self-determination
Sam Blay
West Papua (Irian Jaya) is the oldest self-determination issue in Indonesia since independence. During decolonisation negotations in 1949, the Dutch did not hand over this part of the former Netherlands East Indies to what is now the Republic of Indonesia. However, Indonesia continued to demand sovereignty over West Papua on two grounds: (a) that it succeeded to Dutch sovereignty over the whole of the Netherlands East Indies, including West Papua; (b) that there were historical ties between the rest of Indonesia and West Papua before the colonial era.
In 1962, Indonesia and the Netherlands reached agreement over West Papua under the New York Agreement. The Netherlands transferred sovereignty over West Papua to Indonesia, with an interim administration by the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (Untea). Untea administered West Papua from October 1962 to May 1963, when Indonesia assumed total control and responsibility.
Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua was to be tentative because, under Article XVIII of the agreement, Indonesia undertook to ascertain the wishes of the people of West Papua through a consultation process to establish whether they wanted to remain part of Indonesia or to form an independent state. This consultation, the Act of Free Choice, took place in July 1969.
Right from the outset, considerable sections of the West Papuan population opposed the incorporation. Activists formed the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) in 1970. The movement aimed at independence for West Papua by way of armed struggle. In July 1972, the OPM enacted a provisional constitution and declared West Papua a republic.
The principal claim of West Papuan separatists is that the 1969 consultation process was not properly conducted and was therefore not valid. West Papuans demand the conduct of fresh consultations, as was the case in East Timor. OPM organisations argue that a consultation is now more urgent than ever because of continuous and increasingly gross human rights violations by Indonesia, and because Indonesia has attempted to change the population balance in West Papua through the transmigration of 'mainland' Indonesians.
A series of petitions to the UN on these human rights violations, and pleas for the UN Decolonisation Committee to investigate the conduct of the 1969 referendum and possibly recommend fresh consultations, have all so far failed.
The OPM is fragmented. Too poorly armed to mount any credible guerilla campaign and with no effective strategy, it relies mostly on non-governmental organisations. It lacks any real political support even in the South Pacific. In spite of these difficulties, the events in East Timor and the current focus on self-determination in Indonesia provide some optimism for West Papua's future. International political support would in part depend on the legal merits of their claims in international law.
Rules
As a rule, self-determination can be exercised in one of the following three ways: the establishment of an independent state; the association of the beneficiary territory with an existing state; or the integration of the beneficiary territory into an existing state. Whatever the outcome, democratic consultations are the necessary precondition for a valid exercise of the right. The 1969 consultations indicated that West Papuans opted for integration, but the issue is whether the option was validly exercised. According to UN rules, two conditions must be satisfied for a valid exercise of self-determination by integration:
(a) the integrated territory should have attained an advanced stage of self-government with free political institutions, so that its people would have the capacity to make a responsible choice through informed and democratic processes;
(b) the integration should be the result of the freely expressed wishes of the territory's peoples acting with full knowledge of the change in their status, their wishes having been expressed through informed and democratic processes, conducted impartially and based on universal adult suffrage.
It is very doubtful whether the West Papuan integration in 1969 met these conditions. Before the Act of Free Choice, Indonesian authorities had made it quite clear that the consultations were only to be a formality. Indonesia indeed indicated that it was 'going through the motions of the act of free choice because of [its] obligations under the New York Agreement... But West [Papua] is Indonesian and must remain Indonesian. [Indonesia] cannot accept any alternative'. From the Indonesian point of view, the outcome of any consultation was irrelevant - integration was a foregone conclusion.
Under the New York Agreement, a traditional form of consultation was to be used initially to determine the appropriate methods to be followed for the Act of Free Choice. Secondly, the consultation had to involve the participation of all adults (male and female) of West Papua. Thirdly, the method used to ascertain the wishes of the West Papuans had to be in 'accordance with international practice'.
When the time came for a decision on the method to be used, the representative of the UN Secretary General in West Papua suggested that the 'democratic, orthodox and universally accepted ?one-man-one-vote? method would be most appropriate'. However, he qualified this by saying, 'the geographical and human realities in some parts of the territory required the application of a realistic criterion.' Consequently, he proposed a normal adult suffrage for the urban areas, and a form of tribal consultation for the rural areas. Indonesia rejected the suggestion and adopted instead the tribal musyawarah system throughout the territory.
The musyawarah system involved consultations with tribal council representatives, who in turn were presumed to have had consultations with their tribesmen. Arguably, the system may have been a useful democratic machinery for tribal administration, but it was certainly not in conformity with the essential requirements of the UN's prescriptions on self-determination. By employing the musyawarah system throughout the territory, it would seem that Indonesia breached one of its obligations under the New York Agreement, and indeed, international law.
Indonesia itself admitted that the musyawarah system fell short of the UN requirement, but it justified the use of the system with the argument that 'in West [Papua] there exists? one of the most primitive and underdeveloped communities in the world', and that it was unrealistic to apply normal democratic methods to ascertain their wishes. This was a rather significant admission. If according to the Indonesian administration the West Papuans were so primitive that a single one man one vote adult suffrage was not appropriate for them, it may be argued that they were not sufficiently advanced to appreciate the complex implications of integration.
Some African states that opposed the Indonesian method summed up the general sentiment at the time with the observation that 'no society could be so primitive... in the modern world that the vital exercise of democratic government could be indefinitely denied to its peoples'. Some UN members also held the view that if the West Papuans were that primitive, the way to ensure their right to self-determination was not through the musyawarah system but through an accelerated economic development of the territory under the auspices of the UN to bring them up to a level that could enable them to exercise their right to self- determination meaningfully. Even though these criticisms and suggestions were ignored, they underscored the anomalies associated with West Papua's integration.
Defects
The Act of Free Choice had other defects. Under the UN regulations, consultations for integration must not only be by adult suffrage, but must also be conducted impartially, and where the UN deems it necessary, under its own supervision. However, in line with Indonesia's position that West Papua belonged to it in any case and that the consultations were only a formality to rubber-stamp its claims, Indonesia maintained tight controls over all aspects of the consultations. In fact Indonesia allowed a token UN supervision in only 195 of the 1,000 consultative assemblies.
The required impartiality, and the appropriate explanations to West Papuans as to other options for self-determination available to them, were arguably absent in the consultations. The UN representative to West Papua further attested to the unsatisfactory state of affairs in his observation that 'the act of free choice was obviously stage-managed from start to finish ... [Indonesia] exercised at all times a tight control over the population.'
In the frenzy of decolonisation in the 1960s, Third World states at the UN were eager to terminate Dutch colonialism in West Papua. Indonesia enjoyed considerable support at the UN in its claims against the Netherlands for West Papua. Quite apart from its diplomatic advantage, Indonesia had also been preparing a military invasion of West Papua.
In the face of these difficulties, the Netherlands signed the New York Agreement. It was a face-saving measure that enabled the Netherlands to withdraw 'honourably'. For Indonesia, the Agreement had been a great diplomatic victory. After the signing, West Papua became a de facto integral part of Indonesia, despite the requirement of the so-called Act of Free Choice. At the UN, the incorporation seemed a fait accompli.
Secret documents recently released by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade easily indicate that Australia and the United States actively assisted Indonesia at the UN to secure its control over West Papua, even where it was clear that there were serious defects with the procedure. Australia also helped discourage petitions and debate on the merits of the integration at the UN.
It is beyond doubt that the people of West Papua were denied their right to self-determination. Little noticed, separatist agitation in West Papua has persisted for over three decades. Every indication is that it will persist into the new century. After East Timor, the conditions appear right to re-examine the issue to help protect West Papuans rights. Legally there is no barrier for a re-examination of the issues. However as is usually the case in international law, the absence of legal barriers may not be enough.
West Papua needs support for the Decolonisation Committee to accept to investigate the case. Time is of the essence. The UN intends to disestablish the Decolonisation Committee by the year 2001. Given Australia's involvement and its commitment to stability in the region, it has a critical role to play in assisting West Papua.
Sam Blay (sam.blay@uts.edu.au) is professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
An Indonesian eyewitness to the East Timor tragedy pleads for compassion.
Interview with Yeni Rosa Damayanti
Booing filled the auditorium of the Menara Peninsula Hotel in Jakarta. They were booing Yeni Rosa Damayanti, saying she was 'non-nationalistic', 'without love' for Indonesia, because she had given evidence of the burning of East Timor. One participant in the public debate on post-ballot East Timor, held by the think-tank Cides on 15 September, came to the microphone and accused her of disgracing Indonesia before the world. For Yeye - Damayanti's nickname - it was not the first time. Someone circulated an email headed: 'Do you know who the nation's traitors are?' Yeye was second on the list. The first was Hendardi, director of the legal aid institute PBHI. How did Yeye react to all this?
People just now thought you were too angry. What do you say to them?
I was in Dili until September 11, with seven friends from the independent Indonesian monitoring group Kiper. We saw the people of Timor, adults and children alike, being killed. Their houses looted, then burnt down. Anyone would be angry if they saw humanity trampled like that. Even now, the soul of a whole nation is being murdered.
You mean pro-independence East Timorese?
I mean the nation of Timor Leste. The killings are regardless of the victims' political views. I can prove that. Straight after the announcement of the ballot result on September 4, militias from Barisan Merah Putih (Red and White Front) and Aitarak were going around Dili carrying M-16, SS-1 and homemade guns, as well as machetes. At first it was just psy-war. But then the shooting was aimed directly at the townspeople. They attacked suburbs such as Taibesi and Becora and razed them to the ground. Massive burning took place on September 6 and 7. In just two days, Dili was reduced to ashes.
In a press conference yesterday you mentioned the army's involvement....
Yes. Where did those M-16 and SS-1 rifles come from? And the police and military (TNI) clearly let the militias burn. Militias looted a shopping centre and one managed to find a spring bed. Do you know how they took it away? On an army truck. Before the militias attacked a suburb, police came and announced it would soon be controlled by pro-autonomy forces. 'Residents out or be killed.' This also happened to Kiper. Our Dili office constantly had to move, because the area was being attacked. In the end Kiper's office was also looted and burnt down.
Did you see any shooting between militias and pro-independent supporters?
This is what needs to be clarified. Not a single bullet was fired between the two groups. This was entirely about terror and killing carried out by just one force and supported by the Indonesian military.
There are 800,000 East Timorese. Only about 130,000 have gone to West Timor. Where are the rest?
Some were killed, and more than 500,000 chose to flee to the mountains of East Timor. This is what I'm worried about. Three hundred children in Ermera are facing death by starvation. There is no food for them.
Why didn't they go to the refugee camps already prepared for them in Atambua in West Timor?
All the refugees to West Timor had to sign a letter saying they were pro-autonomy. And TNI guarded the town borders. They would ask: 'Where are you heading?' If they were refugees, they were sent along a special route that no one else was allowed to use. My friends and I tried to follow the same route. The soldiers asked: Refugees? My friend said: No. We were forbidden to go that way. I don't imagine the army will help the refugees. I demand that Timor Leste be opened to humanitarian aid for those in the mountains.
Military intelligence SGI was out looking for you. How did you pass the blockade?
The order was indeed to get Yeni Rosa Damayanti. But the militias and the soldiers didn't know what I looked like. SGI were not just looking for me. Also for the East Timorese students now in hiding in various places.
In the debate just now, some thought you were not nationalistic enough.
TNI kills people in Timor Leste, Aceh, Papua, Tanjung Priok. Why doesn't anyone say they are not nationalistic enough? If people say TNI kill to preserve Indonesian nationhood, the integrity of the nation, then in my view our concept of nationalism is chauvinistic, fascist and expansionist. I've had enough of it, if that is the case.
Many demonstrations in Jakarta reject interference by other countries on nationalistic grounds.
Yes, I have heard that our flag was burnt in Australia and this led to demonstrations. Including demonstrations by students. I myself don't agree with flag burning. But we need to consider two things carefully. One is the humanitarian perspective. Don't turn away from this. TNI not only failed to protect the citizens of East Timor, they themselves became agents of violence. We have to see the cause of foreign interference. Secondly, we have all been manipulated to accept the military concept of nationalism. Throughout the Suharto era we fought against words that had become synonymous with power. Why do we still want to regurgitate a militaristic nationalism that is anti-humanitarian?
This interview was recorded just before Interfet troops landed in East Timor. It appeared in Xpos (ekspos@hotmail.com) of 19-25 September 1999. Rani Ambiyo was the translator. Yeni Rosa Damayanti (yenirosa@hotmail.com), is a well-known human rights activist. Under Suharto she spent time in gaol as well as in exile to the Netherlands. James Goodman describes Kiper in an article in Inside Indonesia no.59, July-September 1999.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
The inside story of East Timor's ballot for freedom
Helene van Klinken
In mid-June 1999 I arrived in East Timor to work with the newly established United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor (Unamet). I was sent to the beautiful district of Ermera, in the hills an hour's drive south of Dili. It is a picturesque, fertile, coffee growing area. The welcome people gave to Unamet was unbelievable. Children would pop out of fragrant coffee gardens as we drove past, waving and calling in chorus, 'Unamet, Unamet!'
My job as a political affairs officer was to meet everyone, and report to Unamet's Dili headquarters what they were saying and hoping for, and whether it was possible for the popular consultation to proceed. It is without doubt the most amazing job I have ever done.
The new President Habibie first mentioned offering wide-ranging autonomy to East Timor in June 1998. But the people of East Timor came out instead in support of independence, and of a referendum. In Ermera, long-standing East Timorese supporters of Indonesia made peace with their Timorese bothers and sisters, joining the pro-independence side. Even Timorese soldiers who had fought for Indonesia sought reconciliation with Falintil. This unity among East Timorese represented a dilemma for Indonesians, in whose minds fear of Falintil and pro-independence actors was well established. A foreign visitor in East Timor at the time described the atmosphere to me as a 'Prague Spring'.
With the likelihood of a popular consultation, a savage crackdown began in Ermera on 10 April. A CNRT youth, Antonio Lima, was killed and the CNRT office burnt down. People later told us that the killings were done by Indonesian police and military in uniform, who patrolled the streets searching for and shooting pro-independence leaders. These killings began five days after the widely reported massacre in a church in nearby Liquica. The Ermera district CNRT leader, Eduardo de Deus Barreto, was arrested. He was later jailed for 'extorting money and coercing people to join the CNRT'. All remaining CNRT leaders fled to the hills around Ermera. During the days that followed many more pro-independence people were killed.
In some areas of East Timor, Falintil had managed to maintain long-term control of a few villages. Indonesian military posts stationed in these areas reached some sort of modus vivendi with Falintil, and they did not 'disturb' each other. One such 'liberated area' was Fatubolo village, close to the district administrative centre Gleno. On 10 April all senior Ermera CNRT office-holders fled into this Falintil-controlled territory, though some went to Dili which was also considered safe. When I later visited the Falintil base I met many important people from the Ermera community.
Civil servants who were prepared to sign statements promising to support autonomy could come out of hiding on 24 April, 1999. The CNRT itself was forced to 'disband' on 26 April.
Militias
Militias have been part of the military strategy in East Timor since 1975. However, beginning in late 1998 many more were conscripted, bribed and forced to join their ranks. Each district had its own militia, although militia did not always keep to their designated districts and there was even competition between them. In Ermera district they were called Darah Integrasi, Blood of Integration. They claimed 1,500 members, but according to informants the number of committed members was in the low hundreds. Miguel Soares Babo was its commander, while his brother Antonio dos Santos was second-in-command. Antonio was a low ranking TNI officer, who said he was on 'civilian duties'. He was the real force and spokesperson. Miguel was often drunk and prone to abusive language.
While there have always been military outposts in remote areas of East Timor, the numbers of these posts in Ermera was now greatly increased, many of them established after the crackdown in April and May 1999. A military post was usually a simple structure of bamboo and local materials, with the telltale tall communications antenna. At a post there were often four Indonesian officers and about ten East Timorese TNI soldiers. A group of about 20 militia, mostly locally recruited, was also stationed at each post, thus demonstrating once more the close link between militia and military.
We received numerous complaints from villagers about the activities of these soldiers. In the middle of the night soldiers would throw stones on the roofs of houses of people known to have housed Falintil soldiers in the past. They would shoot randomly into the air to intimidate people. They would break into houses saying they had received information that Falintil soldiers were attacking the occupants. Most often they were drunk, and frequently they terrorised female members of the household, sometimes spending all day lying round inebriated in a house, making it impossible for the owners to care for their children or cook.
The many government officials, sub-district and village heads and village secretaries who remained in hiding and refused to sign statements supporting autonomy were replaced with people who were persuaded and bribed to support integration with Indonesia.
CNRT leaders were inspiring people who did not sell their souls, even though they lived with constant threats and in fear. They would express their disappointment about their fellow countrymen who had capitulated to the pressures. Local CNRT leader Amaral would always say that Timorese have to be honest but tell a few lies, and that even while they were afraid they must also be brave. When facing a tiger, you have to be careful or you'll get caught by one of his teeth, he would say.
Indonesians seemed to have no idea of the breadth of support the CNRT enjoyed. One Balinese government official honestly told me that he believed 70% of people in Ermera supported autonomy.
Decision
On the first day of registration people turned out in their hundreds at each centre, queuing like sardines in a tin. Registration centres were joyful places. The Timorese people had taken the decision into their own hands. No matter what the security situation was like they were going to vote. Registration was a resounding success, numbers far exceeding estimates. I did not meet any Timorese in Ermera who had wanted to register but were unable to do so. As a result of this success, in some ways Unamet slipped into a false sense of what we could achieve.
We also had to make a judgement as to whether there were equal opportunities for both sides. For the CNRT in Ermera it was a constant struggle, though they philosophically said, 'we've been campaigning for 24 years. Our people know what they want'. Nevertheless they were not passive, and engaged in strategies to raise their profile. As the CNRT had no office and their leadership was in hiding, the pro-autonomy actors felt they had the upper hand.
The next step was the campaign, a period of about ten days prior to voting day. Militia provided the 'crowds' at the autonomy campaigns. Public servants, who were obliged to support autonomy, led the rallies. The militia travelled around all day in several trucks, conducting random campaigns whenever and wherever they could find a crowd. Some militia complained to Unamet local staff about having to 'yell party slogans all day', without even being given food.
In the end the CNRT cancelled all but two of its six planned meetings, because the leaders were worried about threats to ordinary people who attended rallies, especially those held far from the main Unamet headquarters.
There were strong indications that Timorese from both sides wanted to resolve their differences peacefully. In this they requested the mediation of Unamet. The militia commanders were particularly keen to meet with Falintil. The Indonesian district police commander was supportive of such a meeting. In mid-June he visited Falintil in the area controlled by them (Region IV), and saluted its commander, whose code name was Ular (Snake), before shaking hands. The Timorese were jubilant about this meeting, claiming it was the first time in 24 years an Indonesian official had openly recognised Falintil. However, after some time it became clear that the Indonesian district military commander was against any such rapprochement. He would always say he could not guarantee security.
So how did the CNRT convey their message to the people, given that the right to campaign and open an office was basically denied them? At every sub-district and village level there were CNRT secretaries, who carried the message, albeit clandestinely. Priests and nuns also gave moral courage and leadership, many at great personal risk. On the occasion that Bishop Belo came to Ermera he told the people that this vote was a once-only opportunity given to them by the international community. They should not be afraid. They should vote according to their conscience, not just thinking of their own safety but remembering they were choosing the future for their children and grandchildren.
Also a group of university students was instrumental in spreading the message. The university students mostly belonged to the East Timorese Students' Solidarity Council. Some belonged to East Timorese organisations in Java, Bali and Sulawesi. In Ermera they were very well organised. Some 200 of them originating in Ermera returned to their home villages at the commencement of registration to explain to people the registration and voting process, and to gather information about human rights abuses. They were in constant conflict with the authorities, who claimed they 'angered the people'.
Celebration
After an agreement between Falintil commanders and senior Dili Unamet officials, Falintil guerillas moved into 'cantonment', meaning they pulled back to predefined areas in the mountains while retaining their weapons. One of these areas was located in Ermera district, in Poetete village. There on 20 August, they celebrated Falintil Day. It was the first time ever they had been able to celebrate it openly, and for many East Timorese it was the first time they had met with the guerillas. The celebration was no less than a campaign rally of 18,000 people.
The shops and streets of the towns in Ermera were deserted. The militia, with their police and TNI escorts, were angry to find no one at the village where they had planned a rally. On their way home the next day, they vented their anger by attacking villagers and destroying homes of people who had just returned from attending the Falintil celebration.
Two days before the vote, the CNRT held a flag raising in the cantonment. As the flag rose slowly under the intense tropical glare, men hugged each other, their tears flowing unashamedly. The cantonment was by far the most interesting place in Ermera district, alive with hope and indeed forgiveness.
Incidents involving militia, reported to Unamet, were passed to the Indonesian police, as they were responsible for investigation. But little action was ever taken, despite the promises, and never an arrest of a militia member. After the vote, the police commander told the Unamet police commander that he had been ordered 'from above' not to interfere with the actions of the militia.
Voting day, Monday 30 August, unlike registration, was not a jubilant occasion. Bishop Belo, in a pastoral letter read in all churches the previous day, exhorted people to go home afterwards and pray, and keep on praying. Don't do anything to provoke, he told them, presumably meaning 'don't celebrate'. By 7:30 on the morning of the vote, we heard on our Unamet radios that most people were already waiting in line to vote, and this was the case everywhere in East Timor. Many people had travelled the previous evening to their polling centres, as voting had to take place where you registered. A small percentage of people were intimidated after registration and left the areas where they had registered, so were unable to vote. Despite all the fears that voting might be disrupted, 98.5% of registered voters were successful in casting their votes.
The militia attack on our Gleno polling station at midday that day came as a surprise, as Ermera was by this time considered safe, although it was always a knife-edge situation. The US ambassador, Roy Stapleton, had come to view voting there, and was in the yard when shooting broke out and rocks were thrown at the walls of the polling station. The Timorese could hardly believe their luck, to have the ambassador of the superpower actually witness this attack! After several hours and an attempt to address the militia's complaints, the polling station was reopened. Only about 300 of the approximately 2,500 registered voters at this polling station were too frightened to return after the attack.
In a distant sub-district of Ermera, Atsabe, over three hours drive away, a more disturbing attack was taking place, in which at least one and probably three local Unamet staff were murdered by militias.
Even the ballot boxes in Gleno were not removed without incident. New militia arrived in town the day after polling. The rumour was that they were inserted because Darah Integrasi had never been 'effective'. They tried to prevent the helicopter from picking up the ballot boxes, but not with sufficient determination to succeed. During this attempt, Unamet staff saw Indonesian police mobile brigade members handing traditional weapons to the militia.
The evening after the vote, the burning of houses of CNRT leaders began. A young twelve-year old girl came to the Unamet headquarters to tell us about her house that was burnt, together with their store of rice and corn. Soon after that, all of East Timor was in ashes, and we were evacuated back to Australia. It was as if winter had come to beautiful Ermera.
Helene van Klinken (helenevk@hotmail.com) teaches Indonesian language in Brisbane. The views in this article represent her own and are not necessarily the official Unamet position. This essay is dedicated to Ana, a wonderful East Timorese friend whose fate remains unknown. A longer version appears in a special edition of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Fifty years ago, Indonesian nationalism was open to the world
Goenawan Mohamad
On 29 July 1949, a Dakota aircraft crashed near Maguwo, Yogyakarta, killing three officers of the Republic of Indonesia Air Force. A civilian aircraft, on a flight from New Delhi, it was carrying medical supplies donated by the Republic of India to the Republic of Indonesia. Its broken fuselage still bore the letters 'VT-CLA'. Reports suggested the Dakota had been pursued and shot down by fighter planes of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, which controlled the northern part of Java.
A youth of 17 visited the crash site. He was not a photographer, but he wanted to record what had happened. He was a painter, and he made a drawing of what was left of the plane, hoping that it would stand as a witness: a civilian aircraft shot down without compunction by Dutch troops intent on using military might to take back control of Indonesia.
Now, in 1999, that young man is recognised as one of Indonesia's foremost painters, Srihadi Sudarsono. But it has taken 50 years, until his first exhibition at the Lontar Gallery in Jakarta last week, for Srihadi's priceless collection of drawings of the battles and negotiations of the revolution to become widely known. Not all of his work has survived. Most of it in fact was lost in a fire that destroyed one of the buildings which played a key role in the events of the revolution. But at the Lontar Gallery I was privileged to see not only the remains of the Dakota, but also the figure of a guerilla fighter riding on a train, a group of Dutch soldiers ransacking a private home in Solo, the face of Bung Karno, the face of Moh. Roem, and a group of foreign diplomats at Kaliurang, Yogya, people who - thanks to the UN - were trying to deal with the problems that arose with the end of colonialism in Indonesia.
Indonesia 1949, Indonesia 1999. Srihadi himself is maybe unaware of this, but someone looking at his drawings will easily pick up on a difference, a depressing contrast between then and now.
Half a century ago, the outside world - together with a young and vigorous UN - came to the aid of Indonesia, a weakling in the face of overwhelming odds. Now all we hear is pointed criticism from the rest of the world, directed at a big and brutal Indonesia intent on destroying little Timor Leste (and failing in the effort).
Indonesia then, Indonesia now. A half century ago the leaders of the Indonesian Republic noted with conviction and emotion in the preamble to their new constitution: 'Whereas freedom is the right of all nations...'. They stood firm in their belief that freedom was a right that everyone had to recognise because it was one expression of universal values. Now we only ever hear the phrase recited with indifference. For the last 40 years, the leaders of Indonesia have tried to proclaim that there is no such thing as universal values. We cannot be measured by 'Western' standards, they cry. We have our own democracy, we are unique, you know, you must understand Javanese culture, Asian values.... It's as though for oppressed peoples there is some essential difference between Indonesian military cruelties and, say, the tyranny of the Portuguese.
The crash of a Dakota aircraft carrying medical supplies from the outside world. A number of foreign faces at a meeting in Kaliurang. In Srihadi's 1946 drawings there is no implication in the way foreigners are drawn that they are something to be feared, something weird or distant from ourselves. When he makes a drawing, Srihadi doesn't only record an event. As a soldier who knows what a war of independence means, he also records an attitude. In the lines of his drawings, we can sense that the Indonesian revolution - and Indonesian nationalism - contained no suspicion of the 'outside', was not closed to what was 'foreign'.
From Srihadi we learn that the Indonesian revolution was not something 'inward looking', the kind of revolution that could emerge from, for example, the ideology and actions of the Khmer Rouge when they went about building a republic in Cambodia. Srihadi's record of events shows that even in the midst of its war of independence, Indonesia was an open book. The outside world came and looked, and skinny little Indonesia stood up boldly before it.
On a street wall in Jakarta, around November 1945, the young independence fighters wrote in large letters, in English: 'Give me liberty or give me death'. They were not addressing Indonesians themselves. The words were those of Patrick Henry, an American, spoken in the face of British colonialism in the 18th century. By quoting them, the young Indonesians seemed to want to remind the outside world: the voice of an American patriot in the 18th century is the same as the voices of Indonesian patriots in 1945.
How eloquent they were, how different from the gun-bearing, speechless wearers of safari suits we see all around us now. The outside world had to be convinced, because we were right. There was nothing that needed to be covered up, because we had no cause to be ashamed. Just like the conviction of the revolutionary troops of the 1940s who mobilised painters like Srihadi: they wanted to make a record of events, even if only in painting, at a time when they didn't own cameras. They didn't want to lose the traces of where they had stood. They were not thieves. They were making a history, one that also has meaning for people in a different place, at a different time, in a new millenium.
Goenawan Mohamad is a poet and senior journalist. This article appeared in Tempo magazine, 10 October 1999. It was translated, with permission from the author, by Keith Foulcher (keith.foulcher@asia.su.edu.au).
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
President Gus Dur's cabinet breaks much new ground. Inside Indonesia highlights eight of its 37 members.
Abdurrahman Wahid (President)
In all that has been written about Indonesia's fourth president, little has been said about one outstanding passion which dramatically distinguishes him from his predecessors, Suharto in particular, namely his long record of support for civil society in Indonesia and internationally. He created space for many community initiatives by lending his name and protecting them from official harassment. These included Infid, a key coalition of over 100 Indonesian and mainly Western NGOs concerned to promote a human rights approach to Indonesia's often repressive development programs. At Infid forums when the prevailing wisdom counselled compromise, it was often Gus Dur who would advocate the bolder course, particularly on human rights. East Timor was no exception. Gus Dur was the first prominent Indonesian to dialogue with Jose Ramos Horta, whom he met in Paris in the early 90s. In a bold move to improve people-to-people relations with Indonesia, Australian NGOs invited a delegation of their Indonesian counterparts to visit in 1987. Anxious about the reception they would get on issues like East Timor, the Indonesian NGOs asked Gus Dur to lead the delegation. As so often happened, he agreed but then had to pull out. But his endorsement was really all that was needed. The visit was a success. Suharto retarded Indonesia's development by repressing civil society. There are good reasons to hope that Indonesian civil society and Australia-Indonesia people to people relations will thrive during Gus Dur's term as president.
Alwi Shihab (Foreign Affairs)
Born in South Sulawesi into a well-to-do family of Arabic descent 53 years ago. He first met Gus Dur three decades ago when they studied Islam together in Cairo, and they have been close friends since. Gus Dur did not finish his degree, but Shihab did - a master's and a PhD, then another master's and PhD in the US, all in religious studies. Taught comparative religion at Temple University and Hartford Seminary in the US from 1993. Has written widely in the Indonesian media on the need for 'active' religious tolerance. After Suharto resigned, Gus Dur asked him to leave academia and support his bid for the presidency. Alwi Shihab spent the next 15 months as perhaps Gus Dur's main political operator. As one of several chairmen of PKB, he worked hard to bring together Megawati's PDI-P and Amien Rais' PAN into a loose reformist alliance. His older brother Quraish Shihab is close to the Suharto family and served as minister of religion in Suharto's last cabinet. Though comfortable in the West, the job of Foreign Minister will be a huge challenge for this gentle religious scholar.
Erna Witoelar (Housing and Regional Development)
One of only two female ministers (the other is Khofifah). Born in South Sulawesi in February 1947. Civil society activist with excellent international contacts. In 1991 she was elected chairperson of The International Organisation of Consumers Unions, the first woman from the developing world to hold this position. Chairperson of the Indonesian environmental umbrella Walhi in the mid-1990s. Indeed Walhi wanted her as environment minister. In 1998 she supported a half-hearted presidential campaign by former Environment Minister Emil Salim. Reportedly refused an invitation to sit on Habibie's cabinet in 1998. In 1999 she represented the general Indonesian movement of non-government organisations to the inter-governmental funding group for Indonesia CGI, to the World Bank, to the UN Development Programme, and as an appointed member to the Consultative Assembly MPR. She was also active in the poll monitoring activities of KIPP. Married to Rachmat Witoelar, former Golkar secretary-general (1988-93) and Indonesian ambassador to Russia, who remains politically active in the National Front (Barnas).
Rear Admiral Freddy Numberi (Administrative Reform)
Born 52 years ago in a village on Serui near Biak, West Papua/ Irian Jaya. Joined the navy in 1968 and became the first Papuan in the armed forces to reach senior officer rank. Is now the first Papuan to become a member of cabinet. In April 1998 he was appointed governor of Irian Jaya. Before that he commanded the naval base in Jayapura that covers Maluku and Irian Jaya. In his brief stint as governor he seemed more often swept along than in charge. No one applauded him when he assured demonstrators in mid-1998 that President Habibie had promised autonomy. On 26 February 1999 Numberi, who had often said how impossible independence was, found himself amid a 100-strong delegation to President Habibie that unanimously demanded independence. Threatened to resign in anger last October when the Interior Minister broke Irian Jaya into three provinces without consulting him. The breakup is widely condemned in Irian Jaya. In cabinet he has the opportunity to become de facto minister for West Papuan affairs as well. It may not be a job he relishes.
Hasballah M Saad (Human Rights)
Born into a poor rice-farming family in Pidie, Aceh, 51 years ago, he taught in an isolated primary school for 7 years before becoming a human rights activist for the next 15 years. He was imprisoned for 15 months in 1978 for criticising Suharto. In 1998 he was among the most outspoken Acehnese demanding the military be held accountable for years of killing and rape. In 1998 he joined Amien Rais' National Mandate Party (PAN) and was elected to parliament in the 1999 elections. He was also a member of the commission that implemented the new electoral system. The creation of his ministry suggests a new seriousness to tackle the cycle of violence of the Suharto era. Hasballah is a strong supporter of a federal structure for Indonesia. He will effectively be the minister for a democratic resolution in Aceh, but his interests extend throughout Indonesia.
Khofifah Indar Parawansa (Women's Affairs)
At 34 the youngest member of cabinet. She was an activist in the NU-related Indonesian Muslim Student Movement (PMII) while studying political science in Surabaya, graduating in 1990. Through the 1992 election she entered parliament (DPR) with the Islamic PPP party. In the March 1998 Consultative Assembly (MPR) session she read a PPP statement critical of President Suharto. When NU activists set up PKB in July 1998 to contest the 1999 election she moved across to that party with Gus Dur's encouragement. She became its main spokesperson on gender and other issues, in the face of religious conservatism even within her own party. At first she supported Megawati rather than Gus Dur for president, partly for feminist reasons, but she admires Gus Dur for his religious tolerance and acceptance of women in leadership roles. Married with three children.
Marzuki Darusman (Attorney General)
Born into a diplomat's family in Bogor, West Java, in 1945. Spent much of his early life overseas, learning fluent English. Graduated in law from a Bandung university. His determined work to build up the credibility of the National Human Rights Commission, which Suharto established in 1993, earned him a well-deserved reputation as a human rights advocate. However, he is just as much a Golkar politician, having sat in parliament since 1977. In the months before the June 1999 election he emerged as the only hope Golkar had of making itself acceptable to the public, but it was not enough. More hopes ride on this attorney general than ever before. He needs to clean up his deeply corrupt department, then prosecute key individuals of the Suharto era for corruption and for human rights abuse. Some fear that, his liberalism and human rights reputation notwithstanding, a lifetime career in Golkar might make it difficult for him to prosecute fellow Golkar members.
Ryaas Rasyid (Regional Autonomy)
Born in South Sulawesi in 1949. Will be the key administrator in this cabinet. His appointment reflects the urgency that the new government places on finding a non-violent resolution to dissatisfaction in regions such as Aceh, Riau, Kalimantan, Ambon and West Papua. Rasyid is a non-party-political bureaucrat highly educated in politics and public administration in the US (Northern Illinois 1988 and Hawaii 1994). With a team of academics he drafted the key legislation for the democratic elections of June 1999 in just a few months, beginning immediately after Suharto resigned. He led a government academy of public administration until appointed to a powerful post overseeing regional autonomy within the Home Ministry in July 1998. From here he also designed new legislation that will bring greater autonomy to regions outside Java, in an attempt to stop them seceding. He says the legislation 'is federalistic in all but name'.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Wahid's presidency may herald the end of Indonesia as we know it.
Michael van Langenberg
The Jakarta Post on November 10 editorialised as follows:
The central government must do away with its obsession with national unity and start giving real autonomy to the regions. The government must not offer half-hearted measures if it wants to spare this nation from disintegrating. Barring complete separation, the ultimate form of autonomy is federalism.... Ultimately, the real threat to disintegration.... comes from Jakarta.
The New Order regime from its inception in 1966 constructed a state-system in which two factors predominated. First was an idealised nation conceived in the official motto of 'Unity in Diversity' (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). Second were notions of an 'integralistic' state resting on 'family' principles, designed to protect an archipelaegic unity (wawasan nusantara). From its very beginning in 1945 there has been a crucial contradiction in the Indonesian state-system between ideal legal principles of regional autonomy, and the reality of an increasingly centralised national state.
The collapse of the Suharto presidency in 1998 may mark the end of a century-long process of bureaucratic centralism in state building. That process began with the consolidation of the imperial state of the Netherlands Indies at the turn of the 20th century. In its later stage, Suharto's presidency came to resemble the imperial governor-generalships, supplemented with resonances of pre-colonial divine kingship. Suharto's presidency ended amid a massive loss of popular legitimacy. National government itself was perceived widely as corrupt and nepotistic, responsible for abuses by the military, greedily appropriating regional resources, and culturally arrogant.
In the past decade, coherent independence movements emerged in several territories of the state. East Timor is now on the road to full independence. Aceh seems destined to achieve either independence or some kind of special 'federalist' relationship with Jakarta in the immediate future. Irian Jaya has just been divided into three provinces, creating increased local resentment against what is perceived as a further example of Jakartan imperialism. Increasingly coherent movements for regional 'autonomy' are now also active in the Moluccas (in two areas), Sulawesi (more than one!), Riau, West and East Kalimantan, West Sumatra, and Bali.
Dispersal
How will the new government headed by President Abdurrahman Wahid deal with these movements? Executive government is vastly weaker than a decade earlier. The legislature is now more powerful and more legitimate than at any time since the mid-1950s. It has successfully restricted presidential incumbency to two five-year terms, and made the president answerable to parliament once a year. The chairman of the Peoples' Consultative Assembly (MPR), Amien Rais, is a prominent advocate of a federalist state. Popular legitimacy of the internal security functions and political role of the military is now lower than at any time in the history of independent Indonesia. The ruling oligarchy of the New Order no longer dominates the economy to the extent it did prior to the economic crisis of 1997-98. Conditions are ripe for a significant dispersal of power within the Jakartan empire.
Supporters of Wahid and vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri present their political partnership as an integrating leadership 'duality' (dwitunggal), echoing that of Indonesia's two independence 'proklamator's Sukarno and Hatta. Like them, Wahid and Megawati reflect a partnership of Islamic identity and secularist orientation. Similar echoes of the earlier dwitunggal are heard in Wahid's stated preference for a federalist Indonesia, while Megawati has emphasised commitment to her father's vision of a centralised unitary state. However, unlike the symbolic regional duality of Java/Bali and Sumatra/'outer islands' of the Sukarno-Hatta dwitunggal, Wahid and Megawati constitute an emphatically Javanese variant of national political culture.
The new cabinet has been designated the Cabinet of National Unity. In reality it is a cabinet of compromise and coalition building. It brings together conflicting political forces - rural Javanese Islam, modernising reformist Islam, secularist nationalism, federalists, unitarists, military professionals, internationalists, protectionists, liberal democrats. It reflects the broad coalition that Wahid built within the MPR in October to gain the presidency. In a sense this was less a coalition to ensure that Wahid became president than to ensure that Megawati did not. Once the Wahid-Megawati dwitunggal was in place, the cabinet had to accommodate the wide range of interests behind it. These negotiations saw the cabinet increase from Wahid's initially intended 25 to an eventual 35 portfolios. Policy coherence might prove impossible. Executive government instability is a distinct likelihood.
Alongside 'reformasi', 'referendum' has entered the dominant national discourse. The former emphasises a new era of 'moral' politics, with national leaders seeking popular legitimacy as a matter of priority. The latter discourse, on display most vocally in East Timor and Aceh, has placed the debate about federalism and secessionism at centre stage. The 'Jakartan empire' is facing far-reaching structural change.
Michael van Langenberg (mvl@asia.usyd.edu.au) is a private consultant and researcher on contemporary Indonesia and Southeast Asia, and fractional employee in the School of Asian Studies, University of Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Indonesia and Australia over the long haul, as if ethics mattered.
Richard Tanter
It's a bad time to talk about relations between Indonesia and Australia as if ethics were important. Over the bodies of East Timorese, Australian and Indonesian political leaders matched each other, measure for repulsive measure, each marked by racialised nationalism, self-interest and brazen hypocrisy.
Even as United Nations teams began their investigations of Indonesian atrocities in East Timor, the country's soon-to-be fourth president Abdurrahman Wahid declared that Australian pressure on Indonesia to fulfil its international obligations in East Timor amounted to 'pissing in our face'. This was no isolated remark by a politician with an eye to a domestic audience. With an astonishingly small number of honourable exceptions such as Onghokham and brave little groups like Kiper and Solidamor, Indonesian intellectuals were paralysed by the nationalism that saturates political thinking in that country. Nationalism in denial prevented them from seeing the truth of the quarter century-long Indonesian colonial project in East Timor.
Yet the Australian government was no less hypocritical than the Indonesian if anything, more egregiously so. John Howard, a man who proudly displays his 1950s white Australian fantasies, accepted a journalist's summary of his position on East Timor as one where Australia was the 'deputy sheriff' of the United States. More importantly, he used the catastrophic end of Indonesian colonialism in East Timor to recycle populist Anglo-Australian images of Australia as an outpost of civilisation perennially faced with always potentially barbaric peoples to our north. The constantly reiterated phrases of 'Australian values' and 'European civilisation' were carefully spoken, but in the codes of Australian politics after Pauline Hanson, the message was clear.
The Indonesian reaction was understandable. After all, the two governments had been partners in crime for more than two decades.
Moreover, Australian politicians and media commentators seem to have a talent for hypocrisy. The same people who less than a few months earlier were still denouncing any possibility of Timorese self-determination or substantial Australian pressure on the Suharto dictatorship, overnight discovered the cause of freedom and democracy.
So it may well be a bad time to talk about exploring a completely different kind of long-term relation between these two peoples. Yet that makes it all the more important to do exactly that. I want to imagine a relationship between these two societies in the lifetime of my now young children a relationship built on the assumption that ethics and justice mattered. We think ethically about all the rest of our lives. Why should international relations alone be severed from the mutual expectations of fairness and right that even children possess? The core ethical assumption must surely be that what applies to me applies to the other person. What do East Timor and Kosovo show us if not the fact that moral communities do not stop at borders?
'Indonesia' and 'Australia' are today part of the same global social and economic system. The hurricane of the Southeast Asian currency crisis arose from the same forces of globalising capital that induced the Hawke, Keating, and Howard governments to transform the industrial structure of Australia in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of 'deregulation'.
Indeed the two countries were formed by the same social forces that are still transforming the world today. A hundred years ago the now neighbouring states of Indonesia and Australia did not exist. Extraordinary violence, as well as periods of great hope and sacrifice, accompanied their formation into two nation states. A century ago the armies and capital of the Netherlands and Britain were still conquering the Malay archipelago. Ten years before Australian federation in 1901, Dutch imperial forces were in the last stages of invading Aceh. Until the coming of a new wave of imperialists in January 1942, Dutch imperialism broke the frame of indigenous Indonesian society and reworked it, at grotesque human cost, to Dutch advantage.
The new post-war Indonesian state followed exactly the outlines of the state the Dutch had carved out in blood. It was marked at its birth and for the next fifty years by the Cold War, and never quite recovered. Always it was a partial state and a dependent economy. Thirty years of Suharto's militarisation was built on oil, American and Japanese economic aid, and American strategic hegemony.
For the indigenous peoples of Australia meanwhile, the British invasion which began in 1788, and which was still in process of unfolding in the north and centre within living memory, brought almost every form of desolation imaginable. The invading settlers from two small islands in the North Sea built a new colonial society founded on extraordinary state violence towards the lower orders, and on a callous solidarity of a caste of all 'white men' over all others, indigenous and foreign.
By slim good fortune, the new Australian settler capitalism was characterised by a continuously expanding imperial need for agricultural commodities, and by a perennial labour shortage throughout the nineteenth century. As a result the scales of class conflict were weighted sufficiently to the left to generate at least an appearance of social democracy, at least for those whose skin was pale enough.
These shared imperial origins extend into the twentieth century. Australian soldiers died in Southeast Asia in their thousands to defend European empires against a newer imperialism, thinking they were defending themselves. The next generation fought in Korea and Vietnam for a cause no less imperial.
Future
Today we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If we look forward in time for comparable periods, what can we see for these entities we call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'?
In 1933 the German literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote a terse set of Theses on the philosophy of history. In one, Benjamin meditated on a Paul Klee painting he owned and kept with him in his harried exile from Nazi Germany.
'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the debris before him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress.'
This storm shaped our countries, and has not abated; there are more dead, and yet more to make whole. After the linked catastrophic pasts of Australia and Indonesia and East Timor, there is a possibility of a shared future, if we can find it and face it.
Let me start with an extreme proposition. Unless there is some radical change in political dynamics, there will be war between Indonesia and Australia in the lifetime of my young children. This is not a matter of extrapolation of domestic trends visible at the moment, but of normal politics between neighbours with deep differences in a highly militarised world system in which war is normal over the long term.
Unless something surprisingly new happens, the two societies will continue to misrecognise each other. Each will still see the other through unacknowledged racist stereotypes. Australia will still suffer from a deeply deforming misperception of Islam that has deep roots in unexamined but ancient European ideas.
John Marsden is undoubtedly Australia's most popular fiction writer of recent years. A remarkable talent, Marsden has just published the last in a seven-book series of novels for young people known as the Tomorrow series, beginning with Tomorrow, when the war began. This is the story of a group of teenagers in a rural area of south-eastern Australia who return from a remote bush camping trip to find their country successfully invaded, and all adults, including their parents, brutally imprisoned.
A writer of subtly delineated character and strong narrative, Marsden's series is the story of the group's fight to survive, resist, and help turn back the invasion. For our purposes what is important is the setting of invasion, the sense of violation of a relationship with land and space, that Marsden handles equally well, but with a curious and probably deliberate lack of precision.
The invaders are unnamed. Their language is not English. Many of their soldiers have darker skins than most of the Australians, though they are in fact a varied lot. Their army is brutal. Though the invader is not named, the friends of Australia are firstly New Zealand and Papua New Guinea; somewhat more hesitantly, the United States. Who then is the unnamed enemy? It is unlikely that many in his huge audience would have considered too many alternatives to Suharto's Indonesia.
For all Marsden's considerable achievement and his attempt to avoid the worst aspects of the genre, the Tomorrow series is the latest and most successful example of the long-running Australian genre of invasion novels, of which there have been hundreds over the past century or longer. To be a little unfair to Marsden, who is so much better than this suggests, the basic confrontation remains pacific white Australia versus the invading brutal non-whites from the north.
Marsden is at pains to acknowledge and hence neutralise the worst of this. His wonderful protagonist Ellie is well aware that she is the beneficiary of an earlier invasion, and wonders about the ghosts of the losers as she moves through the bush she knows and loves. Most importantly, she thinks about one of the basic moral issues: by what right do we monopolise this continent?
If I sit in the bush, and try to catch an imaginative glimpse of what it may have been like for people of another culture to have lived there, I cannot fail to wonder what it will be like for yet another culture to make the same attempt. For we must surely accept that there will be another shift at some point. For me, the important question is whether the next great historical transformation visited on the Australian landscape will be as violent and bloody, as ecologically ruthless, as the last.
Quite likely, the Southeast Asians will indeed come. But perhaps, too, that coming will be, not the stuff of a 'yellow peril' nightmare, but in some sense a return to the pre-imperial Southeast Asia in which borders mattered less.
Asian Community?
Imagine, just for a moment, that ethics did matter, and that there was a decision to treat the peoples within the two societies we now call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia' as members of a single system, with shared moral responsibilities. Almost immediately infantile fantasies arise: in the 'Australian' case, the fear of loss, the fear of being swamped. Not racist in themselves, but the constitutive racism of Australia certainly gives such elemental fantasies added power. I cannot really imagine the 'Indonesian' side of the well of fantasy, but it would be deep.
Now let those night fears return to sleep, and try to imagine a path we might tread towards this single system involving an 'Indonesia' and an 'Australia'. A path in which ethics mattered.
Let me put another extreme proposition. Within 50 years let us say 100 years to be conservative - the states we now call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia' will not exist, and the shape and location of the underlying societies will be quite different.
The end of the Cold War apart, the most startling change in international relations in the past 50 years has been the establishment of the European Community. Beginning from the construction of a 'common market', the European Community is now halfway to living up to its name. There are EC-wide legislative, executive and judicial institutions, each of which has a complex but precisely defined constitutional relationship to national counterparts. National sovereignty has not disappeared, but it is greatly circumscribed.
Is it absurd, starting from our two instances of 'Australia' and 'Indonesia', to think about an Asian Community, or a Southeast Asian Community? Already both countries are part of the stuttering Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Forum, which is attempting under US leadership to eliminate barriers to trade within a much larger region in the name of economic deregulation. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, understandably concerned about the ideology of blanket deregulation and excessive US influence on Apec, has proposed a Japan-centred East Asian Economic Caucus, though Japan's public disinterest has stalled further discussions.
These trade-centred models of 'community' present only one limited aspect of the possibilities. Why not begin with some simple re-thinking about borders between 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'? The oldest tradition of foreign trade in Australia long antedates western colonialism. For at least 300 years before 1907, Makassan fishing praus brought Indonesian fishermen to the northern coastline of Australia searching for trepang. Aboriginal people, in places hostile, in places friendly to the visitors, received new technologies, new diseases and vocabulary for their languages. Some accompanied their visitors back home. At the end of the nineteenth century, the South Australian government imposed a tax on 'foreign' trepang harvesting, killing the Makassan trade in a decade. Yet while the colonial legal borders were inviolate, the memories of the trade remain in both Sulawesi and Arnhem Land even today.
Building on the Mabo case which led to recognition of prior ownership of the Australian continent by its indigenous inhabitants, Campbell Watson has proposed that Australia recognise the traditional fishing rights of Indonesian fishermen from the island of Roti. For more than 400 years these people have fished for shark, trepang, trochus, sponges and molluscs in the shallow waters around Ashmore Reef off north-western Australia. The Mabo decision of Australia's High Court in 1992 rendered notions of land title and land usage less singular and absolutist. In the same way of thinking, our borders would become just slightly more permeable. As we know from exemplary models such as the joint management of Uluru-Katatjuta National Park in Central Australia, our ability to understand and protect the environment is strengthened rather than weakened by fusing indigenous and industrial approaches to land management.
How should such issues be settled? The present approach is that 'the line is the line'. International law puts the 200-mile exclusive economic zone at a certain point on the seabed. But the truth of the matter is that the rulings of international law represent frozen power, the embodiment of past victories and defeats. It represents a moral advance on violence, but its moral limits lie in its inability to question its origins. Even here in our outermost sea-boundaries, the core questions confront us.
And what of two other fundamental questions: immigration and labour? Let us never forget that the first act passed by the first Australian parliament was an immigration control act to secure 'Australia for the white man'. Much has changed since then, but immigration control is a universal preoccupation of Australian politics. Anglo-conservatives worry about the changing character of 'our part of the country', to use Geoffrey Blainey's telling phrase. Serious environmentalists rightly fret about the impact of even the present dispersed population level on a largely arid environment. Moreover, the achievements of Australian labour were built on the exclusion of non-white labour.
Yet the mobility of capital in this age of globalisation mocks and exploits the caste solidarities of national labour. Nothing is easier than to close a factory in Wangaratta and move it Tangerang. If we were to take ethics seriously in this single system, we would be looking for ways to equalise labour conditions in the two places. That is in fact already happening, but on the worst possible terms for both sides. What is needed is some framework that will begin to allow a flow of labour between the two parts of this single, imaginary system of 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'. At the same time there should develop a 'levelling-up' (instead of the current 'levelling-down') of the political and environmental playing field in which labour is bought and sold.
Democracy is a remarkably universal value. Indeed all the contemporary arguments for the reform of both Indonesian and Australian politics use the idiom of 'democracy'. Yet our existing democratic institutions are derived from eighteenth century European political thinking about regulating power within nation-states. The global capitalist economy flows over and through this system of nation-states. Today the globalisation of international finance and the dominant ideology of government deregulation has rendered national governments, democratic or otherwise, almost powerless.
Democracy, in Australia as much as Indonesia, needs rethinking on the basis of shared trans-national interests to regulate highly mobile capital. What is needed is a new stage of democratic innovation that operates above and beyond borders, that identifies areas of shared responsibilities and risks, and where moral notions of 'citizenship' and 'obligation' rise above the seas that divide the two geographies. An Asian version of the European Community would involve a great deal more than Apec's deregulation of trade barriers. After centuries of nationalist war, Europe has invented a new category of citizenship the European, that co-exists in carefully defined ways with national citizenship. Is a new category of shared 'Indonesian-Australian' citizenship inconceivable?
It's a bad time for these thoughts after thirty years of Suharto plus Timor. But for those long years Indonesia was not the expression of the shared aspirations of Indonesians. On the contrary, Australia, together with the United States and Japan, made possible the violation of Indonesia. In time, there is a good chance of decent government in Indonesia. And there is always the historical chance of regression in Australia.
But what if ethics were to matter? We might then expect that the needs of 210 million or more 'Indonesians' have some claim in addition to those of 20 million 'Australians'. A new framework of decision-making, a new concept of trans-national democracy, a recognition that ecology, economics and morality mock borders. This is the new agenda that might show the way to unfreezing the arbitrary results of colonial history, and bring a measure of justice.
Richard Tanter (rtanter@hotmail.com) recently co-edited a special issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars on 'East Timor and the Indonesian crisis' (http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/bcashome.html).
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Don't let Aceh be
President Gus Dur said in mid February he had a new ideology called 'let-it-be'-ism (biarinisme). Problems, he said, were of two kinds - those that had to be solved, and those that solved themselves. Aceh, apparently, falls into the latter. 'We can't play God. Anyway God is always relaxed', he said in his disarming manner. 'For me it's quite simple. If God wants our state to fly apart, it certainly will, but if he doesn't, it won't. What's the fuss?'
Gus Dur's humour and humility have endeared him to many. And on some issues he has been far from 'let-it-be'-ist. But we should hope that 'let-it-be'-ism does not extend to Aceh. Neither Aceh nor most of the other regions wanting change are likely to solve themselves
A human tragedy is unfolding in Aceh that cannot be ignored. Jakarta clearly remains determined to refuse Aceh independence. But unless it wants to continue the violent repression plus elite cooptation model favoured under Suharto, Jakarta will have to engage in a political process that takes the Acehnese seriously. Acehnese overwhelmingly want a referendum on their association with Indonesia. Even if Jakarta cannot handle this demand, it can at least start by accounting for past human rights abuses, and giving more local control over the territory's natural resources.
Unfortunately Jakarta has until now been reluctant even to go this far. The military seem intent on sabotaging a special Acehnese human rights tribunal. And new laws that will by April 2001 begin returning resource revenues to the regions will probably operate not at the provincial level but at the district (kabupaten) level. This will ensure a big bunfight among Aceh's districts next year.
President Wahid's options are constrained because he runs a compromise government that still includes some of the same elites who ran the New Order. But 'let-it-be'-ism is not good enough for the people over whom he governs.
This edition of Inside Indonesia is again the work of many people, of whom only a few are named. Their satisfaction comes from knowing that you the reader will become just that little bit more engaged with the issues facing the people of the world's fourth largest nation.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
With Suharto gone, Indonesia's most outrageous anti-Suharto artist chooses exile. Why?
Astri Wright
Born in blood by the authority of guns, the New Order's preferred art was sweetly decorative and/ or abstract-spiritual. Fine art genres in themselves, they were also seen as politically toothless, thus 'safe' to a regime which in terms of citizens' rights could bear no scrutiny. However, the injustices of Suharto's New Order, in combination with its ultra-conservative art establishment, ensured the return of politically engaged art by activist painters and poets. Beginning after a ten-year hiatus following the decimations of the 1965 massacres, this gradual return ensured a tenuous existence for engaged art from the late 1970s onwards.
By the early 1990s, the upsurge in Indonesian artists' interest in installation art coincided with a broader interest in political dimensions to art, to the point where the two combined to become a 'must' for artists desiring international visibility. From now on, politically engaged art bore the two faces of fashion and serious concern. No doubt, the last two years have conscientised larger numbers of artists than at any time in the last thirty-two years. At the same time, the intense uncertainty and hardship of this time of transition has led to some surprising changes for artists, which reflect the larger confusion: after the tyrant is gone, what does one put in his place?
Semsar Siahaan, now in his late 40s, was on the art-activist barricades from the late 1970s, one of the most outraged and outrageous of them all. While others limited their critiques of Indonesia's establishment aesthetics and internal colonialisms to their art and private conversations, Semsar went several steps further. He made the news by burning one of his art teacher's sculptures, Sunaryo's West Irian in torso, at the Bandung Art Academy (ITB) in 1981. This avowed 'cremation' led to Semsar's expulsion from the school. The event launched him as someone who placed the private completely within the political realm and who felt that any means were valid, as long as his point was made, and made the public think. The last twelve years, Semsar has received significant attention at home, in Japan and in Australia, with his large, even monumental canvases that depict the struggle of the people against the greed and hypocrisy of the business and political elites, ever witnessing and holding up to view events that could not be discussed freely.
So how can it be that, today, with Suharto gone and a new Indonesia in the pangs of being birthed, and after twenty-odd years of fighting, Semsar has chosen to go into exile? And not to a country with any Indonesian resistance in exile, like Germany, Australia, Holland, or even the USA - but to Canada?
Semsar is not the only one who has left Indonesia in the last few years. Several activist artists have left for shorter or longer stays abroad. The mental toll of going against the dominant grain of their nation year after year, with the apparatus of control reaching right into their homes, is heavy. But none has sought permanent domicile elsewhere. Of all people, Semsar has.
Going Canadian
In February 1999, Semsar Siahaan arrived in Canada as a visiting artist and speaker at the University of Victoria, in 'Beautiful British Columbia' (also known as 'Britishful Beauty Columbia'). His visit was arranged in record time, via nightly letters, faxes, memos and phone calls back and forth to Singapore after he contacted me in early January, sick and depressed. Semsar arrived thin and drawn, his hair all grey - no longer the energetic young fighter I had met eleven years earlier while doing my PhD research. After setting him up in a rented room and a studio and catching up on news, the task of networking to draw people to his talks began.
As luck would have it, Semsar's first week here coincided with the week-long visit of radical young writer-journalist Seno Gumira Adjidarma, and the brief visit of another Indonesian writer-journalist living abroad, Dewi Anggraeni, from Australia. This brought a sense of community to people interested in Indonesia. Semsar's three months hosted by the University of Victoria brought many people into contact with what to them was a completely unknown context beyond the issue of East Timor. To those who had experienced Indonesia through travel, work or activist lobbying, Semsar and Seno's presence provided a shot of vital energy for likeminded people.
Whether professors of art history, writers living in exile in Canada from South Africa, students of bahasa Indonesia or the Asia-Pacific region, activists or local artists staging a solidarity exhibition for the struggle in Chiapas - most of those who attended were moved by Semsar's public talks and found his work interesting. His speaking style balanced between the informal and the informative, packaged as a charismatic blend of humour and stubborn adherence to principle and his own role as upholder of truth.
Semsar also began to paint and sketch, both indoors and outdoors. The question arose: what does an activist painter paint after he has become completely worn out by his political and personal traumas? What does an activist painter do who has 'lost his nerve' (as Semsar admitted before eighty people on March 1st, 1999) and left his country, whether temporarily or for good?
In mid-March, Semsar finished his first painting in Canada, a large canvas entitled Black orchid (ca.200cm x 140 cm) begun only a few weeks earlier. The composition centres on the artist's self portrait. As the focal point in the canvas, his face binds together the disparate, turbulent scenes represented all around. In the upper left of the canvas, a mother screams in pain with her head held back and her arms flung out to the sides. Her breasts are shrunken, milk-less, and the infant who desperately clutches at her body is dying. In the upper right of the canvas, men with arms raised threateningly shout and point accusing fingers. Below the artist's face is a pond which reflects his features. But beneath the reflection, under the water, the outlines of still bodies are visible. These represent the sixteen activists Semsar knew who 'disappeared' the year before.
In the early stages of painting, done in pale washes later painted over till the canvas glowed with bright colours, Semsar depicted himself with his mouth tightly closed. In the finished painting, however, his mouth is open. In the end, he claimed the role of active, audible witness to history. Merely observing the events all around him was not enough.
While the guest of our department, Semsar gave two large public talks and had a solo exhibition at the university gallery. On his own initiative, he joined a group exhibition at Open Space, an alternative gallery downtown. Semsar's visit, then, was successful for all parties. But apparently Semsar harboured longer-term plans as well. A few months after his arrival, his request for a political refugee visa was granted. Even more surprising was the news recently that Semsar has now become a 'landed immigrant'. This means he can now officially work, collect regular social welfare (as opposed to the refugee welfare he was getting), and cannot leave the country for more than six months at a time.
At present Semsar is preoccupied with the immigrant's shifting identity. In July 1999 he painted a huge painting on paper entitled Confusion (c.500 x 340 cm), which was exhibited at a show featuring 'Vancouver Island Artists.' His instant membership in such a group perhaps said as much about the curators' desire to host a more cosmopolitan spread than one generally sees in this small government and university town whose main industry is tourism. In this canvas, Semsar depicted his own and other ghostly figures, of people in his past as well as characters from his symbolic cast. Reclining, struggling and reaching across a space defined from left to right, the stage was set between a banana palm tree and an oak, with the outline of European style buildings which resemble Victoria's parliament in the centre. Hard questions
What, one wonders, does an activist artist in exile, enforced or self-imposed, dream at night? How does exile change their work? Other artists in modern Indonesian art history have lived in exile: Basuki Resobowo, Sudjana Kerton, Hendra Gunawan, are some of the better-known examples. Their art fared variously, but none of them ceased to paint Indonesia.
As for future art work, Semsar has some impassioned ideas. One is for a painting and installation exhibition which would feature the New Order as a huge slaughterhouse. While this thematic obviously could not have been realised under Suharto or Habibie, perhaps it will see the light of day in the near future. But will it be shown primarily in Canada, where there is only minimal interest in contemporary Asian art (and mostly Chinese, at that), or will it be seen where it has the most immediate value, in Indonesia itself?
While Semsar from early on played an important role as the extremist exception in an otherwise relatively 'naughty-free' art world, the cumulative effect of observing his style and his work over the last two decades has made some people question the point at which opportunism and self-righteousness take centre stage and push righteousness and integrity to the side. While painting heroes, Semsar's verbal narratives seem to spare no one in the intellectual, activist and artistic world from scathing criticism. While frequently placing himself centrally in the canvas as witness, one begins to get the feeling that he needs to depict himself as an almost godlike presence. While painting women as often as he paints men (and often in sexually explicit poses), to hear Semsar talk about his own suffering, one gets the impression that most of it is caused by women, from childhood onwards.
Analysing the work and the man, many questions arise. While Moelyono created his exhibition commemorating the murdered labour activist Marsinah in August 1993, on the 100th day after her death, why did Semsar only paint his work of Marsinah more than a year after the fact? Was he in fact throwing himself on the wave of the growing democracy-discourse celebrating Marsinah-as-martyr? The ensuing painting, which is stunning, was used as a poster during the Women's NGO conference in Beijing in 1995. But why are the faces of all four women in this painting (entitled Women workers between factory and prison) elongated versions of his own face? What is more, they all wear the same exact expression as Semsar's in a photo of the same year, standing before the painting entitled Selendang abang (1994).
In the last decade Semsar's heroic figures increasingly wear his own features. If not earlier, this began to be evident in his black/ white and oil work exhibited in 1988. The working class hero wearing the yellow hard hat in the monumental oil painting Olympia is clearly a self-portrait. Instead of the technique of playwright Ratna Sarumpaet, which Carla Bianpoen calls 'becoming the figure she personifies', Semsar seems to make his heroes, male and female, into himself. Rather than reaching beyond and transcending his own ego-boundaries, Semsar's is a process of imposing his own marks and signs on others, one might even say of appropriating their heroic deeds for himself.
While Moelyono, Harsono, Arahmaiani, Tisna Sanjaya and others are vocal in post-Suharto Indonesia, and Dadang Christanto is extremely visible teaching and exhibiting in Australia and in exhibitions in Europe and Korea, what is Semsar doing getting permanent residenceship in Canada? And that in a city without an Indonesian population and no visibility, internationally, except as a city of flowers and mock-English scenography for tourists? What is Semsar doing participating in local exhibitions that feature 'Vancouver Island Artists', a few months after he arrives? And what are all the tortured, windblown images of his own features about, watching or reaching out to mostly naked women, both Asian and not?
Going private
Pointing at the water in the lower half of Black orchid, Semsar said in February 1999: 'This is Canada.' He had been painting studies of the pond behind his lodgings. Its reflective surface and revealing depths represented the artist's time away from Indonesia - the chance to withdraw, remember, think and work, living without the constant fear caused by extreme social turmoil and state-sponsored violence.
Perhaps Semsar, now nearly fifty, has decided that there is after all a separation between the individual and the group struggle, between the private and the public. Perhaps, after a life of throwing stones and shouting: 'Down! Down!', Semsar has decided to tend to his own glass-house, first. To spend extensive time alone, far away from everything and everyone, not fighting. And to discover the deeper challenge of how and what to build, constructively, in the nation, after rebuilding the soul.
Astri Wright (astri@finearts.uvic.ca) is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Art at the University of Victoria in western Canada. For a longer discussion on activist art see her chapter in Timothy Lindsey & Hugh O'Neil (eds), 'AWAS! Art from contemporary Indonesia' (Melbourne: Indonesian Art Society, 1999), pp.49-69. For more on Semsar see www.javafred.net
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol will benefit Indonesia's forests
Merrilyn Wasson
On February 28 and 29, forty Indonesian and international experts on climate change met in Bogor to discuss the implications of carbon trading for Indonesia's forests. Led by Assistant Environment Minister, Pak Aca Sugandhy and scientific advisor, Professor Daniel Murdiyarso, the theme of the meeting was the potential impact of Clean Development Mechanism investment in the forest sector. There was consensus on the potential value of carbon trading through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). But there was considerable debate on how the CDM could or should operate in practice, in the current climate of reform in Indonesia's forests.
One fundamental issue had to be addressed first at the Bogor consultation. Should Indonesia's ecologically sensitive and economically valuable forest sector, with its troubled history of deforestation, tenure uncertainty and timber companies with a reputation for corruption, be part of the growing global market in carbon emission reductions?
The CDM is set up by Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. It enables industrial nations to help meet their greenhouse emission reduction targets by investing in emission reduction projects in developing nations. These investments must meet three essential criteria: they must result in measurable emission reductions, the investment must promote sustainable development, and it must benefit the host developing nation.
Investment in forests and other land-based carbon 'sinks' has the additional benefit of actually reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Article 3 of the Kyoto Protocol has the effect of limiting investment in forest sinks to projects which promote reforestation, or the 'afforestation' of land that has historically been used for other purposes.
Given these criteria, and the fact that CDM investment is Foreign Direct Investment which does not increase national debt, as well as the fact that deforestation in Indonesia has now reached an estimated 1.6 million hectares annually, CDM investment in reforestation seems highly desirable.
Controversy
Unfortunately, in the international negotiations on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, controversy still surrounds the inclusion of forestry projects as recipients of CDM investment in developing nations. Political and economic tensions between the industrial or Annex I nations complicate this debate. As a result, the 'reality check' of tropical deforestation tends to be ignored.
Tropical deforestation accounts for 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions annually. That's 2.2 gigatonnes of carbon. According to the calculations of Indonesia's international expert on greenhouse emissions, Professor Daniel Murdiyarso, the 1997/8 trans-boundary haze crisis from forest fires added another gigatonne of carbon to the atmosphere.
Given these figures, international opposition to investment in CDM projects in tropical forests borders on the absurd. Indeed, opposition to the inclusion of carbon emission reductions in tropical forests would be absurd but for one factor. There is genuine concern among some international and Indonesian NGOs dedicated to the protection of forest ecosystems, that investment in CDM projects might lead to the unintended outcome of increased deforestation. How real is this possibility?
The year 2000 is the official start for banking carbon credits from CDM projects. It coincides with an ongoing process of political and economic reform in the forest sector in Indonesia. Reform has so far encompassed revelations about the extent of timber corporation indebtedness, as well as customary (adat) claims over forest land held by the state. In the future it will result in the decentralisation of forest resource allocation to the provinces. To add to the complexity, the day after the Bogor consultation ended, hot spots from fires in Sumatra's Riau and Jambi provinces were located by monitors in Singapore.
Against this background, can CDM investment in Indonesia's forest sector be a mechanism for reform, or will it be another drain on forest resources? Specifically,
Will it slow or increase the rate of deforestation of natural forest?
Will CDM projects improve the sustainable production of timber products?
Can CDM investment support more equitable access to forest resources for all socio-economic groups?
How will the Indonesian economy benefit?
Investment must be restricted to reforestation or rehabilitation of degraded forests, or to plantations established on land used historically for other purposes. CDM reforestation and rehabilitation projects must satisfy the criteria of sustainable forest management, ensuring soil conservation and the protection of water quality. It may also be possible to invest in protected forests if it can be demonstrated that they are in danger of deforestation. So far so good, and there is more.
To make sure that all three criteria for CDM projects are fulfilled, an international examination board will be set up to verify the 'credit worthiness' of each project. In addition, the host nation has the final control over investment guidelines and can prevent or abort projects which do not adhere to national guidelines and the criteria of Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol.
No system is immune from human ingenuity to produce socially undesirable outcomes. But this double check on CDM projects at both the national and international level will comprise a new development in the monitoring of forest resource use.
There is another consideration. Far too much money has been invested in Indonesia's pulp, paper and plywood industry. This is a critical problem. It is a major cause of deforestation and, possibly, social unrest. Concentrating investment instead in sustainable reforestation and rehabilitation is a partial solution to the reconstruction of the forestry industry after the crony capitalism of the New Order regime.
Equitable
Can CDM investment support more equitable access to forest resources for all socio-economic groups? The investor from an Annex I nation can only strike a CDM project contract with the owner or concession holder of the land or forest sector to be reforested, afforested or protected. But the presence of a CDM project need not retard a change of ownership envisaged by advocates of more equitable forest access, so long as the Indonesian government acts as guarantor for the continuation of the project. This solution is in harmony with the people-based concept of forest ownership under Indonesia's constitution, and enables the CDM project to continue while still allowing for changes in 'ownership' of the project area.
The willingness of the Indonesian government to act as guarantor is essential, as the credit worthiness of some sink investments may require a period of time longer than the current concession tenure.
How will the Indonesian economy benefit? Obviously, payment will be made for the tonnes of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by the trees, or prevented from entering the atmosphere. This can either be made to a central fund, like the existing Reforestation Fund (Dana Reboisasi), for redistribution to other economic priorities, or it can be kept by the host community or company.
A CDM project will not have a monopoly on forest use. The distribution of other profits from the harvesting and sale of timber products is likely to be a matter for negotiation between investor and host, taking into account the transaction and establishment costs and risks associated with the CDM project.
Perhaps the greatest economic benefit will come from the contribution of reforestation and sustainable forestry to the environment. For example, the government has estimated that loss of fisheries costs the country US$4 billion per annum. Mangrove reforestation restores fish breeding habitats, controls land-based pollution and protects other fish habitats like sea grasses and coral reefs. This is one example of an ecological benefit from reforestation which has direct economic benefits. And there is the benefit of additional employment.
Like every nation, Indonesia is vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. And like every nation, Indonesia makes a contribution to the problem, especially when land-clearing fires burn out of control. Yes, there are risks associated with CDM investment in the forest sector. But the benefits effortlessly eclipse them.
Merrilyn Wasson (wasson@rsbs.anu.edu.au) is a researcher in the biological sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. She attended the Bogor consultation.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Agus P Sari
Climate change happens due to the so-called 'greenhouse effect' (see picture). The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon necessary for life as we know it. If there were no greenhouse effect, the earth would be 32 degrees celsius colder than it is now, rendering it uninhabitable. Too much greenhouse effect, however, will lead to global warming and climate change, with disruptive effects on human well-being. The greenhouse effect occurs due to the presence of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. These gases - water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), nitrous oxide (N2O), and tropospheric ozone (O3) - act like a blanket that slows the loss of heat from the earth's atmosphere.
The concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere are steadily increasing. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million (ppm, by volume) in 1990, already one-fourth higher than that in the preindustrial era (circa 1750 - 1850). The concentration of methane at 1.72 ppm in 1990 was more than twice that in the preindustrial era. CFCs are strictly of human origin.
Carbon dioxide has contributed approximately 60 percent of increased global mean air-surface temperature 'forcing' by greenhouse gases over the last 200 years, followed by methane at 20 percent, CFCs at 10 percent, and other gases at 10 percent. Based on a modeling exercise, **IPCC expects that a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations will increase the global mean temperature by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Thus, IPCC suggests cutting current emissions levels by 60 to 80 percent just to stabilise current atmospheric concentrations.
Carbon dioxide, the most prominent anthropogenic gas, arises primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels and from the burning and clearing of forested land for agricultural purposes. Worldwide consumption of fossil fuels in the period of 1860 to 1949 is estimated to have released 187 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. Between 1950 and 1990, fossil fuel use had accelerated and carbon dioxide emissions are estimated at an additional 559 billion metric tons.
Agus P Sari (apsari@pelangi.or.id) is executive director of Pelangi, a Jakarta-based environmental think tank. He has followed the climate change negotiations since their inception and has been part of the Indonesian official delegation the last three years.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Page 48 of 67
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