How Islamic will the new movements make Indonesia?
Bernhard Platzdasch
Unlike the Suharto era, Indonesia now has quite radical Islamic groups operating in the open. Among them, the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam, FPI) is infamous for unleashing paramilitary gangs on 'iniquitous' nightspots. The Sunni Communication Forum (Forum Komunikasi Ahlusunnah Wal Jamaah, FKAWJ) fights for Muslims in Maluku. The Liberation Party (Hizbut Tahrir) is a branch of the Middle Eastern movement of the same name. It calls for the Indonesian nation-state to be abolished and replaced by the classic model of an Islamic state, the caliphate. Both FKAWJ and Hizbut Tahrir bluntly reject democratic models as a Western invention, incompatible with Islam. The campus-based Hizbut Tahrir shows restraint in its actions, but the other two frequently operate in a grey area of the law (see accompanying article).
The Islamic Defenders Front and the FKAWJ draw their mass support from poorly educated lower income classes. Somewhat unconvincingly, unlike the blunt anti-pluralism of FKAWJ and Hizbut Tahrir, the Defenders proclaim a nebulous democratic agenda. Still, all these groups are similar in their fierce anti-Western and anti-Zionist propaganda.
Recent news coverage outside Indonesia has frequently expressed concern that a strident and anti-democratic Islam is on the rise in Indonesia. This view is not to be dismissed completely, but it is over-drawn. As we shall see, there is a widened range of Islamic parties and movements in Indonesia, but it overwhelmingly supports the country's stumble toward democracy. Groups such as those described above stand outside the party spectrum. They make up a small radical fringe inclined to violence and intimidation to achieve its goals.
Less removed from the mainstream are some important Muslim student organisations. The most notable among them is the Indonesian Muslim Student Action Union (Kesatuan Aksi Mahasiswa Muslim Indonesia, Kammi). This group was a significant force during the 1998 protests that initiated the change of regime. Rooted in the Islamic neo-revivalist movement on campus, and ideologically tied to the teachings of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Kammi is a major source of party workers for the Justice Party (Partai Keadilan, PK).
Both Kammi and PK are the expressions of a new generation of Muslims who promote an 'uncompromising' purification of Islamic belief and strict adherence to religious morals, while simultaneously pushing for political modernisation.
Despite its Islamist tone, they advocate a reformist agenda that is largely devoid of exclusivist propaganda. Indeed, all the electoral parties adhering to what we may call 'formalist' Islam support democracy and the rule of law as the preferable political system. The most important are the United Development Party (Partai Persatuan Pembangunan, PPP) and the Crescent Moon and Star Party (Partai Bintang Bulan, PBB), besides the just mentioned PK. The new vice-president, Hamzah Haz, comes from this side of politics (PPP). While a relatively small number of groups operate at the margins or outside of what is legally tolerable, in most cases religious militancy has made common cause with politically moderate positions. The formalist parties are in many ways part of the more reform-willing forces in parliament. They support the need for democratising amendments to the constitution, and want to reduce the role of the military.
Formalist Islamic groups (as opposed to more cultural ones) adhere to a literal understanding of Islamic doctrine and its adoption into private and public life. They seek a formal acknowledgement of their religion, ie. by the state in the constitution. A striking aspect of formalist Islam is its religious conservatism or militancy. At a glance, the rise of new Islamic organisations and the return of ideological stridency point to a substantial change within Indonesian politics. In fact, the appearance tends to belie the reality.
The recent developments are above all logical symptoms of a newly liberalised political system. The New Order disfavoured Islamic parties, and made all parties adopt Pancasila as their sole ideology. But the breakdown of state control following reformasi allowed Muslims to adopt Islam formally as the ideology of political organisations. When the Pancasila requirement was dropped in 1998, new Islamic parties sprang up and thus created a perception of political Islam on the march. Today these parties have a more distinct 'voice' than at any time since Sukarno introduced his authoritarian 'Guided Democracy' in 1959.
However, the emergence of these new parties should only come as a surprise to us if we were to assume that the New Order's ideological monopoly had succeeded in winning the hearts and minds of ideologically aware Muslims.
In any event, formalist parties proved to lack mass support. Nearly ninety percent of the Indonesian population is at least nominally Muslim. But in the 1999 general elections formalist Islamic parties won a mere sixteen percent of the total votes. And this was a dramatic drop compared to the 43.9% in the last free elections, back in 1955. It is certainly a major obstacle for the realisation of any more militant goals in the near future.
Symbolic
So what are the formalist movements offering Indonesia? At bottom lies the idea that Islam should be an all-encompassing 'way of life'. Virtually unheard under Suharto, demands for the full implementation of Islamic law (shariah) are very much in vogue these days. The message is spread through numerous overtly Islamic journals that gained new momentum from the collapse of ideological censorship.
Yet Islam's shift toward stridency is more symbolic than aimed at a policy impact. The clearest proof of this is the reemergence of the Jakarta Charter issue. This is the 'classic' formalist theme.
During the constitutional debates in 1945, 'seven words' were briefly incorporated into the constitution, but soon thereafter deleted. These seven words later became known as the Jakarta Charter, and their 'illegal' deletion a cause celebre for formalist Muslims. They were a supplement to the first principle of the national ideology Pancasila, the one that declares belief in 'the One Supreme God'. The Jakarta Charter remains widely understood as obliging the state to implement Islamic law among Muslims.
After being hotly but fruitlessly debated for many years under Sukarno, the Jakarta Charter question was outlawed under Suharto as destabilising. But the Charter experienced a sudden comeback in the wake of last year's annual session of Indonesia's highest decision-making body, the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR). It was raised there by the PBB and PPP parliamentary factions.
PK, part of an alliance with Amien Rais' secular-based National Mandate Party (PAN) in the Reform Faction, chose to stay neutral. Interestingly, although PK did not support the issue in its role as the smaller member of its faction, internally it favoured a more sweeping concept. While PBB and PPP both followed the traditional wording of the Charter, PK was suggesting an alternative version which would give the state legal force to implement not only Islam, but also religious teachings among all five officially registered religions. This is an unworkable proposal, considering that Christian religions do not give the state authority to enforce religious doctrine.
In any case, the MPR discussion went nowhere. Calls for the Jakarta Charter remain vague as to their scope and practical implementation. The issue has never been explained to most Indonesians. There is little substantial debate on ideological concepts and principles. There is also remarkably little open ideological dispute between Islamic political parties. This hardly makes the Charter a convincing ideological alternative. Outside parliament, the volume of the 'shariah' calls is not matched by an accordingly influential position of its promoters.
The Charter issue is as much driven by immediate political needs as by religion. While in essence promoting it remains an expression of religious obligation, there were strategic reasons to promote it as well. For example, to consolidate support from militant Islamic groups. The struggle for the Charter in 2000 occurred at a moment of mounting tension between the Abdurrahman Wahid government and parliament. It served to counter the president's announcement earlier in 2000 that he wanted the ban on communism lifted - a step formalist Muslims perceived as an undisguised provocation.
For almost four decades, ideology in Indonesia was manipulated by the state. The Jakarta Charter and other ideological formulations are an Islamic comeback from within society. They draw widespread public attention for that reason. But their substantial meaning is often overrated. First and foremost, they touch an emotional nerve. Many Muslims see a formal statement of party ideology as an essential testimonial to their religious identity. As such, it does not function in the same way as the platform of a Western political party. Nor does it have much immediate impact on that party's policy outlook. During various recent party congresses, the Islamic identity statement was often discussed quite separately. Ironically, it appeared to have no effect on the organisation's statutes or policy positions.
Bernhard Platzdasch (bernhard@coombs.anu.edu.au) is researching Indonesian Islam for a PhD at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
For now, reformasi is dead. But Mega didn't kill it
Edward Aspinall
How should we interpret the fall of Abdurrahman Wahid and his replacement by Megawati Sukarnoputri? Was this, as the MPR argued, a legitimate exercise by Indonesia's supreme constitutional body to remove an incompetent leader? Or was it, as argued by President Abdurrahman and his supporters, a victory for resurgent Suhartoist forces? This second view has, especially overseas, become the orthodox interpretation. It has some validity, but the former has more.
Certainly, there were those in the military, in Golkar and the bureaucracy who were hostile to some of President Abdurrahman's policy initiatives, such as his proposal in 2000 to rehabilitate the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) or his early willingness to negotiate with independence supporters in Aceh and West Papua. It is also true that the momentum of Indonesia's reformasihas long been visibly failing. However, to view Abdurrahman's removal as a decisive return to the past is a misreading of events. By focusing too much on the battle over the presidency, such a view misses the larger picture.
In retrospect, Indonesia was always going to have a narrow window for dramatic democratic change. In the months before and immediately after the fall of President Suharto, long pent-up desires for reform were unleashed. Beginning on campuses in February-March 1998, a large and variegated movement for democracy sprang up and rapidly spread throughout the archipelago. When Suharto resigned on 21 May, there was an explosion of civil society. Demonstrations forced corrupt local officials from office around the country. Peasants occupied land taken from them in the past. Scores of new political parties, labour unions, anti-corruption bodies and other organisations were formed.
In response, the remaining New Order elite facilitated a rapid restructuring of the political system. President Habibie oversaw a remarkable liberalisation of the political parties, electoral laws, labour unions, the press and much else. His presidency now looks like the high water mark of reformasi. This does not mean he was at heart a liberal, although his supporters do argue this, but rather that politics is determined more by the broader alignment of political forces within society than by who is president.
Under Habibie, when it was still possible to identify the government with the old regime, it proved relatively easy to maintain the reformasi movement outside parliament. However, as in every transition from authoritarian rule, the key challenge was to institutionalise the democratic impulses of the mass movements and make them a permanent feature of the political landscape. Numerous obstacles stood in the way. Chief among them was the fracturing of the political map. Divisions between 'opposition' and 'status quo' forces were cross-cut by other divisions, such as those between secular and Islamic groupings, within the Islamic community itself, and between parties led more by personalities than policies. Add to this the weakness of democratic institutions after 32 years of Suharto's rule, pervasive corruption, a deep economic crisis and a host of other problems.
Wahid
When Abdurrahman Wahid was elected president in October 1999, much of the foreign press represented it as a victory of 'reformist forces'. He was in fact placed there by a coalition which drew heavily on Suharto's New Order. Many Golkar and military leaders feared a Megawati-led clean sweep of senior officialdom. Many in the major Islamic-based parties were equally fearful that a secular-oriented Megawati presidency would reverse the advances they had made in the late Suharto and Habibie periods. These two blocs provided Abdurrahman with the votes he needed, and he now needed to appease them. A cumbersome 'national unity' government resulted. As Indonesia's first democratically elected president assembled his government, therefore, it proved impossible to draw a clear line between the New Order past and the democratic future. This basic fact dogged all subsequent attempts to carry out substantial reform.
President Abdurrahman did have a deep philosophical commitment to pluralist democracy and a conspicuous commitment to social and religious diversity. He appointed some prominent reformers to cabinet and other posts. Early on he took some important steps to reduce the military's political role. He also encouraged legal reform, promoted dialogue with secessionist leaders in Aceh and West Papua and reconciliation with the East Timorese, and attempted to end discrimination against the ethnic Chinese minority. Even so, many of the major reform programs (such as decentralisation) merely implemented changes made under Habibie.
However, strong currents were flowing against reform. The June 1999 election was the culmination of Indonesia's democratic transition. But it also largely succeeded in domesticating reformasienergies. The shift of focus from the streets to parliament, from mobilisation to legislation, called for a new kind of politics based on negotiation, compromise and incremental change. In the regions new coalitions sprang up between the new parties and old military, bureaucratic and business groupings. In many places Golkar reasserted its dominance. Even where 'reformist' parties like PDI-P and President Abdurrahman's own PKB were dominant, local politics were frequently marked by a resurgence of 'money politics' and political gangsterism. At the same time, with the line between 'reformists' and 'status quo' inside the government now very blurred, the reformasimovement on the outside lost momentum, symbolised by growing fractiousness and apathy in the student movement.
Determined leadership from the president could still have resulted in serious reform. However, Abdurrahman frittered away any such chance by his increasingly destructive leadership style. Armed with infinite self-confidence and imperious indifference to criticism, he alienated his ministers, rode roughshod over the parliament, made and broke promises with a cavalier style and frequently made blatantly false public claims. Reports of graft within the palace became rife. Most importantly, he failed to construct a strong reformist bloc within the government, parliament or society. Personal loyalty became the key criteria for the rise and fall of cabinet ministers, conservatives and reformists alike. This alienation of the entire political elite, not a supposed alliance of the 'status quo', accounts for the end of his presidency.
In order to shore up support, Abdurrahman countenanced a return to New Order-style policies, most obviously by tolerating renewed military operations in Aceh from March-April 2001. His government even began to wind back some reforms made during the Habibie era (such as generous severance payments for workers - it took an outburst of unrest for this reversal to be reviewed). He personally turned to authoritarian methods: threatening the media, repoliticising the military and eventually taking the dictatorial path of attempting to dissolve parliament. The strongest argument against the 'conservative conspiracy' interpretation of Abdurrahman's dismissal is that he had in fact simply ceased to be a block to conservative policies. Despite his claims to the contrary, there was no clear dividing line between 'status quo' forces lined up against him and 'democrats' standing behind him.
Megawati
The conspiracy view also misreads Megawati's own position. In much of the international press, she is portrayed as a 'captive', even an 'agent,' of military interests. However, nothing in her record suggests that Megawati is beholden to the military. On the contrary, she was steadfast in the face of strong military pressure in the final years of the Suharto regime. It should be remembered that Abdurrahman Wahid had at that time succumbed to similar pressures by entering into a de facto alliance with Suharto's daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana (Tutut). It may indeed be true that Megawati supported intensified military operations in Aceh and Papua. But Abdurrahman was also willing to support these policies.
Megawati Sukarnoputri is a difficult character to read, largely due to her well-known reticence, even aloofness. She lacks Abdurrahman Wahid's connections with Indonesia's liberal intelligentsia and foreign intellectuals, and his ready wit. Her public statements often convey a frustratingly general commitment to constitutionalism and democracy in a language easily understood by the mass of the population. At the same time, they evince a strong commitment to political order and, especially, defence of the unitary state. In many respects she is a classical populist politician, presenting herself as a mystical embodiment of the popular will. As 'mother of the nation', she projects an image of security and comfort at a time of disturbing political change and economic dislocation. It is true that populism can readily be combined with an authoritarian style and ruthless economic austerity.
Many Indonesians fear reformasihas run out of steam. They may well be right. But its weakening has less to do with the new president than with wider forces at work in Indonesia. This is largely a by-product of the shift from street politics to parliamentarism. It reflects the messiness of Indonesia's political landscape, and the appearance of new, usually local, coalitions of bureaucratic, business and political power. It is highly unlikely that Megawati's ascension marks a dramatic return to full-blown Suharto-style authoritarianism. Her government is based essentially on the same combination of forces which brought Abdurrahman to power, with the addition of her own PDI-P. Probably it will present a similar policy mix, minus the chaos generated by his personal style.
Under Abdurrahman, two vital years were lost on the road to political reform. It may now prove impossible to recreate a clear division between 'reformasi' and 'status quo' forces, or to recapture the promise of the first post-Suharto years.
Edward Aspinall (E.Aspinall@anu.edu.au) is a post-doctoral fellow at the Australian National University.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
A spiritual home for the lost, this militant sect is used by dangerous elites for their own ends
IRIP News Service
Laskar Jihad ('Holy war fighters') is Indonesia's most notoriously militant sect. Its parent body, Forum Komunikasi Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah (FKAWJ), officially surfaced on 14 February 1998 in Solo. It was a moment of extreme political instability. Just months later, Suharto was ousted and his New Order regime dismantled. All kinds of political, religious, youth and student groups scuttled out from underground exile to agitate for their respective interests against a weakened government. As the full weight of the monetary crisis bore down and propelled millions below the poverty line, extremists from all ends of the spectrum found audience among the desperate. It was the perfect climate for a group such as FKAWJ to venture into the public eye.
However, the community of Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah (from which FKAWJ arose) had been growing quietly for over ten years. Its leader Ustadz Jafar Umar Thalib purchased land for it near Yogyakarta in 1993 with donations from the wider Islamic community. Pondok Pesantren Ihyaus Sunnah, founded the following year in Degolan, became Jafar's private residence, and the hub of Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah operations. From here Jafar, along with some others who later made up the Central Board of FKAWJ, began to consolidate the community across Java and the archipelago.
Ahlus Sunnah Wal Jama'ah members are deeply religious. Enchanted by the charisma of Ustadz Jafar Umar Thalib and the religious fervour of the group, they discover a willingness to give their lives for the Jihad mission in Maluku, and for their dream of implementing Islamic law (Syari'at Islam) in Indonesia. As in many sects, an unnatural amount of the community's cohesion is based on fear, lies and propaganda, on social isolation, rigorous peer pressure and outright force. The structured, prescribed way of life and philosophy makes the group experience all the more intense. Its members strive to follow a very literal understanding of the way of the Prophet Muhammad in their everyday lives, leading more liberal Muslims to accuse them of 'fundamentalism' and 'fanaticism'.
Saved
Regular members of Laskar Jihad and FKAWJ come across as ordinary young people, generally aged between 17-40. Ustadz Jafar Umar Thalib attracts a wide variety of people, bound together by their youth, their religious devotion and their nationalistic fervour. There are students, unemployed graduates and businesspeople. Many are educated with young families. Others are the lost and lonely, the homeless and poverty-stricken. Some members had led the life of a street thug ('preman'), heavily into drugs, violence and crime, before they were saved by the movement's disciples.
These people crave for the totalising, all-encompassing identity that Laskar Jihad offers. They are the by-products of the economic and political crisis, the angry rejects of society, isolated and disadvantaged by reformasi. Many speak fluently of globalisation, marginalisation, of Western cultural hegemony and of the way the West demonises Islam and Islamic peoples. They see themselves as losers in the global political order. Their overwhelming violence and anger, the fabric of Laskar Jihad, begins there.
Laskar Jihad wants Syari'at Islam implemented as Indonesia's supreme governing force. In order to achieve this goal, they are maneuvering themselves to become a potent force within the Islamic community and the national arena. Since it emerged in Yogyakarta on 30 January 2000 as FKAWJ's military wing, Laskar Jihad's activities have been high profile for this reason.
The proclamation of the Jihad fi Sabilillah ('Strive for God') campaign in Jakarta on 6 April 2000 is Laskar Jihad's largest and most costly undertaking so far. At least 3,500 young men were dispatched to Ambon and surrounding islands to support Muslims in the religious conflict that has now besieged the area for over two and a half years.
In Java and Sumatra, certain branches of Laskar Jihad have joined other militant groups to conduct 'sweeping' operations against entertainment venues. Ardent nationalists, they speak of themselves as the 'defenders', 'the pioneers' and 'the owners' of the nation. They speak of their right and responsibility as good Indonesian Muslims to assume a military role, a role which certain shadowy elite figures are all too happy to encourage for their own gain.
For there can be no doubt that Laskar Jihad's leadership mixes in some elite circles. On 30 May 2000 a Laskar Jihad jeep exploded in the East Java town of Nganjuk. It was laden with TNI-registered weaponry and en route to Surabaya, the departure point for Ambon. The security apparatus in Surabaya at the same time refused to implement a presidential instruction to stop Laskar Jihad from embarking for Ambon. Laskar Jihad members themselves claim to be 'intimate' with the TNI in Ambon. On 30 October 2000, the military arrested twelve of its members in Ambon city bearing sophisticated TNI weaponry and uniforms.
Their repeated ability to slip prosecution points to a high level of collusion with elements of Indonesia's military and political elite. Even Ustadz Jafar Umar Thalib's arrest in May 2001 (on grounds of inciting religious hatred and stoning a member to death), which momentarily augured well for the future, ended in his release and even a one million rupiah 'compensation' payout. Clearly some extremely powerful figures have taken this organisation under their wing. For now, Laskar Jihad is untouchable.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
Old elites in Central Kalimantan discover new and dangerous strategies
Gerry van Klinken
When police raided the Hotel Rama in Sampit, Central Kalimantan, on 26 February this year, they found human heads littering the grounds. This was the headquarters for Dayak 'special forces' (pasukan khusus) who killed hundreds of transmigrants from the island of Madura, and expelled the remaining nearly 100,000 from the province. Police arrested 84 warriors.
The flurry of television images, with voice-overs about a revival of 'barbaric' headhunting, soon faded to the next war zone. Jakarta, too preoccupied to worry about provincial squabbles, soon pretended the problem had gone away.
Perhaps most disturbing was the silence of Indonesian opinion makers. Many sympathised with Dayaks as an indigenous people dispossessed of their forests by rapacious New Order development. Others, shocked by the savagery, felt Madurese citizenship rights deserved a defence as well. The two rights - the non-ethnic rights of all citizens versus the First People rights of Dayaks - seemed so irreconcilable as to make any statement inadequate.
There is a dilemma here, but it is not insoluble. Our sense of revulsion at what has happened must be our guide: hundreds (some say thousands) of men, women and children murdered for their ethnicity alone, and an entire community 'cleansed' from the province. This has more of fascism than of the gentle forest-dweller.
Where does this ethnic fascism come from? The key lies in rejecting the simplistic view that an entire ethnic group can have just one set of interests. The indigenous forest dwellers of our television documentaries live, of course, in the forest. Hotel Rama (with the heads) is in Central Kalimantan's busiest town, the port city of Sampit. The interests of rural and urban Dayaks are so dissimilar that it is fair to say the urban elite have in 2001 dealt a grave blow to the forest dwellers they claim to represent.
Organised
The American scholar Paul Brass is an expert on Hindu-Muslim riots in India. He says these events 'are best seen as dramatic productions with large casts of extras. They are... partly organised... [E]xtensive ad-libbing occurs in order to convey the impression of spontaneity.' The organisers, of whom there are many kinds, are 'riot specialists', part of an informal network that influential actors can call on in times of political crisis. We will in a moment discern something similar in Central Kalimantan.
If you had asked a forest-dweller in central Borneo 150 years ago what tribe they belonged to, they might have answered Ngaju, Ot Danum, or Ma'anyan. None would have said Dayak. That was a convenient category only in the minds of colonial anthropologists. But in the early twentieth century the category became a political reality. Dayak students in the city of Banjarmasin, anxious that their better-organised Banjar fellows were getting the pick of the civil service jobs, set up the first Dayak association in 1919. They worked hard - with pamphlets, books and speeches - to convince their brethren in the forest that they were all 'Dayaks' together. Ever since, Dayak-hood has been an invention of the urban middle class. Ignoring the concerns of the forest dwellers, the books they wrote had only one agenda: achieving a Dayak province of their own, run by educated Dayaks.
The Dutch briefly gave them what they wanted in late 1946, part of an effort to wean outer islanders away from the largely Javanese Republic of Indonesia. The arrangement was undone when Indonesia became independent. But the former Dayak students, now professional soldiers and teachers, persisted. Taking advantage of the unrest around Indonesia in 1956-57, they added punch with a guerrilla movement bearing the awkward acronym GMTPs. It worked - Central Kalimantan was created a Dayak province in 1957.
At first, its governors were Dayak. Tjilik Riwut (1957-67) was a popular TNI soldier who had supported the movement. Later the New Order gradually reduced Dayak autonomy. But as it began to wane, the urban Dayak elite, including some old fighters from the '50s, demanded an indigenous governor once more.
True to tradition, the Dayak scholar KMA Usop wrote a thick book in 1996 explaining why Dayak ethnicity was all about Dayaks running the province. Usop, retired rector of the university in Palangkaraya, talks with passion about being Dayak. We used to believe that the more 'modern' people become the less myths of blood interest them. Usop shows us the reverse. His book also provides marvelous ammunition to those who argue that the origins of Dayak ethnicity lie not in the mists of time but with the birth of the modern state in Indonesia - about a century ago.
Dayaks make up about two-thirds of Central Kalimantan's population. Madurese used to be around 6-7 percent. There is no evidence for the claim often heard that the Madurese lord it over the Dayaks. Economically, there is little difference between them. That gives the fight between Dayaks and Madurese an artificial, indeed a darkly conservative, racist character.
Golkar
The urban Dayak elite who invented this fight have little record of fraternity with their rural cousins. They belonged to a New Order that impoverished the great mass of Dayak society. Usop, for example, was the Golkar spokesperson in Central Kalimantan under the New Order. He was used to the backroom business and political deals that characterised New Order cronyism. Like many others, he only jumped ship to the PDI-P when reformasi made Golkar a liability.
But PDI-P never became important. Instead, Usop and those who thought like him wanted a new ball game. The future lay in ethnic politics. Its vehicle was the ethnic association. LMMDD-KT - long acronyms are still the norm - was the most prominent among them. Usop was its leading figure. Another was an organisation with a name reminiscent of the 1956 guerrillas - APP-GMTPs.
These associations are first of all businesses. LMMDD-KT was in on the environmentally damaging 'million hectare peat swamp' project (PLG). Illegal forestry and small-scale gold mining were also important. Life in these frontier areas is tough. The underemployed Dayak loggers and miners who joined them found protection there. In exchange, they became their 'special forces' in 2001.
Police and military got their cut too. The chairman of APP-GMTPs, Yansen Binti, also leads the thuggish Pemuda Panca Marga, an organisation made up of the sons of soldiers. Together, they used their muscle to keep competitors at bay.
The money was plentiful. Central Kalimantan is heaven for illegal loggers. The young tycoon Abdul Rasyid became notorious in 1999 after courageous environmentalists proved he was stripping Tanjung Puting National Park. He was a major donor during Central Kalimantan's corrupt gubernurial election last year, according to an independent report. Yet he remains a member of the supreme national legislative body the MPR.
In 1999 the ethnic associations became de facto political parties and moved resolutely onto the political stage. They gave press conferences and organised demos during the gubernurial race. LMMDD-KT demonstrated again when Usop lost the race against another Dayak.
The next milestone was the implementation of regional autonomy on 1 January 2001. The stakes were high. They chose this moment to whip up an anti-Madurese crisis. Civil society in Central Kalimantan was too weak to prevent this blatant manipulation of public opinion.
On 15 December 2000 one of their thugs, the 36-year old Sendong, was killed in a brawl at the gold mining shantytown of Kereng Pangi. A riot broke out and hundreds of Madurese fled town. It was merely the beginning. The associations began a campaign to unify feeling around this Dayak 'hero'. They threatened more violence unless Jakarta took action against his killers. On 20 February 2001, led by LMMDD-KT, they issued a statement that the Madurese had taken over Sampit. It was largely a fabrication, but served to justify the massacre that began that day.
Was it worth it? This elite seem to think so. The ethnic cleansing campaign effectively united the chronically fractured Dayak politicians behind a single banner. Even governor Asmawi Agani, not at first an Usop ally, found himself demanding that the 84 Dayak warriors arrested at the Hotel Rama be released. The police were forced to comply. As they were to similar pressure to release Usop himself - he was arrested as the main 'provokator' on 3 May.
For fear of losing their own heads, meanwhile, other ethnic groups quickly fell in behind the Dayak hegemony.
Most importantly, the resurgent Dayak elite sent a powerful message to Jakarta that they had rewritten the rules. So far Jakarta has not challenged them. In June 2001 Usop was the main organiser of a 'People's Congress' in Palangkaraya. It castigated the Madurese as the real troublemakers and told them to apologise if they wanted to return. The governor helped pay for the congress.
Jack Snyder warns in his book (From voting to violence, 2000) that nations emerging from authoritarianism can fall prey to demagogues who take advantage of the chaotic new democratic space. That is a good explanation for the rise of ethnic fascism in Central Kalimantan. It is a fundamental challenge to Indonesian civil society and its friends overseas.
Now is the time to put out an alternative message. Not ethnic pride, but social justice is the real issue. Some Dayak farmers displaced by the million-hectare peat swamp project had it right. When they came to Palangkaraya to plead their cause last March, in the midst of the furore, they had this to say: 'We're not interested in the Madurese issue. We just want our land back.'
Gerry van Klinken (editor@insideindonesia.org) edits Inside Indonesia magazine. Thanks to Sentot, who generously shared his findings.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
The poor must come first
Gerry van Klinken
As the annual supreme legislative body (MPR) got underway in Jakarta early November, costing US$1.5 million, 8,000 informal workers, garbage collectors and transport drivers were evicted from their tiny shacks in a dozen locations across Jakarta. In the dark and the rain, their dwellings were burnt the ground. The following week the inter-governmental Consultative Group on Indonesia approved US$3.1 billion in new loans for Indonesia, bringing the public debt burden to a total US$74.2 billion. (Of this US$8.7 billion had to be repaid between September and December alone).
If within Indonesia the poor seemed hardly to matter, outside it the terrorist attack of 11 September gave narrow minds the excuse to narrow them more (as reflected in some of our readers' letters...). In Australia, 11 September strengthened an anti-refugee mood that eventually came to dominate the federal election. In America, it boosted conservative agendas that prioritised military strength over justice for the poor.
Yet the most basic fact about Indonesia is not whether it is harbouring terrorists, or Afghan refugees. It is - still! - that it is a very poor country. We dedicate this edition of Inside Indonesia to the poor, and to those enquiring minds (also found among our readers' letters) who want to learn about them.
Four years after the economic crisis hit, its harmful impact is still felt in millions of homes around Indonesia. Though poverty levels are notoriously difficult to determine, several estimates predict Indonesia will not recover to pre-crisis levels till 2005. The government, meanwhile, is burdened with a debt to rich creditors so mountainous it can simply never be repaid.
Until the world has solved these basic problems, that is where we should begin.
Gerry van Klinken is the editor of Inside Indonesia.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
After the tragedy of 11 September, the world needs dialogue
Ulil Abshar-Abdalla
Among the many deplorable things that happened after the World Trade Center tragedy in New York on 11 September was the reawakening of a sub-conscious, 'instinctual' Western prejudice against Islam. The media have a strong tendency to generalise about Islam and about Muslims, without looking at the numerous little things that make up everyday life. Like a dormant virus that never dies, such prejudice arises again every time another tragedy happens that involves the Islamic world.
Peter Rodman, of the National Security Council, wrote back in 1992: 'Yet now the West finds itself challenged from the outside by a militant, atavistic force driven by hatred of all Western political thought, harking back to age-old grievances against Christendom.' Almost the same sentence recurred in the New York Times on 16 September 2001: ' The airborne assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the culmination of a decade-long holy war against the United States that is escalating methodically in ambition, planning and execution.' The words 'Christendom' and 'holy war' suggest eternal sacred warfare between the West and the world outside - especially the Islamic world. (Of course we should recognise that the term 'crusade' is often used in the West without religious connotations as well, as in the crusade against abortion.)
The same happens on the Islamic side. As soon as President Bush announced plans to launch attacks on Afghanistan, (some) Muslims proclaimed a 'jihad' against the US. Worse, certain groups wanted to conduct razzias against Americans in Indonesia. Some Islamic groups gave the impression of a total confrontation between the Islamic and the Western or Christian worlds. Suddenly everyone was quoting Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilisations'.
Dialogue
But that impression is so clearly false. There are probably more people building bridges of dialogue between civilisations than there are those fighting between civilisations. Countless students from the Muslim world go every year to study in the West - Europe, America, Australia. Conversely, countless Western scholars make 'intellectual' journeys to Islamic countries, to understand the many faces of Islam. Karen Armstrong's book The History of God is an excellent example. As is TheOxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, by John L Esposito and others at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University, Washington DC.
All of this does not mean American foreign policy is without its problems. One of the biggest paradoxes is the constant American campaign for democracy and human rights while at the same time supporting the Saudi Arabian Kingdom without reserve, a regime that violates the rights of its own citizens. The one-sided American policy on Palestine is the source of much frustration and hatred in the Arab world. But it would be foolish to equate the American government with all American citizens. Not all Americans agree with their government's foreign policy. Those who want to conduct razzias against Americans forget that.
After the tragedy at the WTC and Pentagon buildings, dialogue between civilisations has become more difficult. The situation strongly favours those who believe the world is divided into only two hostile blocs, a Western and an Islamic bloc, a 'good' bloc and an 'evil' one.
Yet who really knows what is Western and what is Islamic? If the West is Europe and America, then those are two very different cultures. If the West is America, we might recall that America is a federation precisely because Americans have such a strong 'anti-state' tradition. Most Americans have very little interest in the overseas 'imperialism' of their government.
Similarly, it is far from clear what 'Islam' really means. In the end, Islam is a social concept - it is expressed in the lives of human beings with a complex history. Islamic reactions to the WTC and Pentagon tragedy have been highly varied.
One frequent misunderstanding is to talk about the Afghan people, the Taliban government, the state of Afghanistan, and Islam, all in one breath. Just because most Afghans are Muslim does not mean that the American attack on Afghanistan is an attack on Islam.
Of course we should oppose the American attacks. The Afghan people have suffered long enough from war ever since the Soviet invasion in 1979. But it is an unfortunate mistake to assume the Taliban regime is representative of the Islamic world just because they wear beards and robes. Anyone who doubts their evil practices towards women should look at this web site: www.rawa.org. Such behaviour is in strong contrast with the prophetic values of Islam itself.
Dialogue is the only way. The path of confrontation only favours those who view the world in simplistic terms of good versus evil. That is the path of conservatives and extremists in whatever religion, whether Islamic or otherwise. It is also the path of religious elites everywhere who want to manipulate the ignorance of their congregation for their own narrow interests.
Ulil Abshar-Abdalla (ulil@isai.or.id) chairs the research institute Lakpesdam, within Nahdlatul Ulama. This article is condensed with permission from a piece on the Islam Liberal web site: www.islamlib.com.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
A rare visit with the Free Aceh Movement shows them confident and well organised
Damien Kingsbury
The dawn awoke on the side of the mountain with the calls of birds and monkeys in the upper canopy. The 'boys' rose slowly, slung their weapons and wandered down to the stream to wash. We later organised and trekked down along the overgrown track, across gullies, over fences and across a river, coming up to a dirt road along which walked a dozen or so school girls in neat uniforms. The girls seemed familiar with this gang of longhaired guerrillas carrying automatic weapons.
This was in the hills beyond Lhokseumawe, a strongly pro-independence area. I was there as a guest of the independence movement, to get their side of the story. The night had passed safely; the paramilitary police Mobile Brigade patrol had not found us.
In Aceh, on the northwestern tip of Indonesia, some 10,000 Indonesian soldiers and around 20,000 paramilitary police had instilled in the people fear, anger and an overwhelming desire for a referendum on self-determination.
I was struck by the similarities to East Timor ahead of its own referendum in 1999. Here too, the TNI and Brimob looked like an invading army, killing civilians and feebly trying to blame the separatists, burning homes and schools and using rape as a weapon.
Also similar to East Timor, desire for independence was very strong across a range of groups and organisations. According to pro-independence leaders there was an historical claim to separation(partially recognised in Aceh's 'special region' status) and a long history of rebellion against outsiders, starting in 1873 and only pausing in 1949 and then between 1963 and 1976. The movement started in 1976 is popularly known as the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka - GAM), but prefers to be called the Aceh Sumatra National Liberation Front (ASNLF).
The TNI and Brimob were obvious in Banda Aceh and the major industrial city of Lhokseumawe, but it was the highway from Banda Aceh to near the North Sumatra border that showed their real presence. Brimob, the Siliwangi Division, Marines, and territorial troops ran numerous posts and roadblocks. South of Lhokseumawe these occurred every several hundred metres for dozens of kilometres. Burned homes were littered in between. Yet just a short distance from the highway one was immediately in ASNLF held territory.
Observers close to the TNI estimate the ASNLF's military force at 3-5,000 full-time members plus a large and active support base. What I saw was consistent with those figures - the support base is itself armed and could number around 10,000. Like any guerrilla force, the ASNLF relies on popular support. Moving from point to point near the important industrial city of Lhokseumawe, I met no one who was not as one with ASNLF. A local ASNLF leader in the region said that the ASNLF was not separate from the people. It could not otherwise function, he said.
In a violent environment few would challenge those with guns, and the becak driver who drove me out of town was visibly scared when he unexpectedly found himself among a number of ASNLF. The ASNLF has a deserved reputation for killing people it identifies as its enemies. But cooperation otherwise seemed happy and voluntary, unlike the obliged voluntarism I have seen accompanying the TNI.
The Indonesian government has portrayed ASNLF as a fanatical Islamic organisation. Two senior TNI generals made this claim to me again just days before I met with ASNLF representatives. While ASNLF and its supporters could be identified by their devout Islam, another cultural marker that sets them apart from others in the archipelago is the Acehnese language.
Language, religion, territory and a common history, especially in adversity, are the classical markers of 'nation'. There is no doubt that Aceh has these, separate from the rest of Indonesia. Similar markers could also be applied to other 'national' groups in Indonesia. One ASNLF official laughingly referred to not just Bangsa Aceh (Aceh Nation), but Bangsa Minang, Bangsa Sunda and Bangsa Bali. He acknowledged, however, that not all potential 'bangsa' might wish to have that status.
Aceh has a devout and usually tolerant form of Islam. The ethnic Chinese and Christian Bataks have lived in peace with their Islamic neighbours since the 1980s. Having said that, there is little tolerance for Javanese transmigrants, who have been attacked by the ASNLF. The ASNLF claims that it has only attacked Javanese militias, although the question of who is a combatant has become blurred in Aceh.
One ASNLF official I spoke to in Banda Aceh was keen to state that his organisation did not want to impose itself on the people of Aceh. What it wanted, he said, was a popular referendum to determine whether or not Aceh should remain as a part of Indonesia. 'Referendum' was graffitied around Banda Aceh and Lhokseumawe. The Acehnese organisations I contacted were unanimous in wanting a referendum. This popular move for a referendum reflects the squeezing of the middle ground during the escalation since 1999. Indeed, the ASNLF itself has only accepted the legitimacy of a referendum since 1999. The East Timor ballot was a critical lead.
The ASNLF official stressed that Aceh had historical and religious links with other Islamic communities, but was not funded by them. He was at pains to point out that ASNLF was horrified by the terrorist attack in the US on 11 September 2001, allegedly conducted by Islamic extremists. The ASNLF, he said, looked to the rest of the international community for support, including the United Kingdom and the United States, with which Aceh once had diplomatic relations.
The ASNLF official did acknowledge that their guerrillas had received training in Lybia until 1999, much later than usually thought. But the link was no longer necessary as the ASNLF had its own training bases, and Lybia's standing could adversely affect how the ASNLF was internationally perceived. The ASNLF receives some support from sympathisers and Acehnese refugees abroad, especially in Malaysia, but its financial component is negligible compared to its internal capacity to raise income.
Well funded
The ASNLF raises 'taxes'. The Indonesian government and some NGOs call this extortion, in some cases extracted with threats of violence. The ASNLF justifies it on the grounds that as a legitimate government it needs to levy taxes. The TNI and Brimob also demand payments for 'protection', although as institutions of a government that already levies taxes this extra-financial activity cannot claim the legitimacy of 'tax'.
All local businesses pay a tax to ASNLF, as a percentage of profits, according to the ASNLF up to and including the giant Exxon-owned and operated Arun liquid natural gas plant at Lhokseumawe. The ASNLF is well funded and consequently well equipped.
The ASNLF's high level of organisation also presented itself in other ways. In meeting a regional ASNLF commander, the network of drop-offs, pick-ups and exchanges was extraordinary, complicated and perfectly timed. Everyone along the route knew what was going on, and many had cellular two-way radios.
I was finally deposited in a small and remote village and told to wait on a pavilion under a palm-thatched roof. I had only just begun to get my small pack off when, through a bamboo gate, came a young man wearing a baseball cap and a clean white T-shirt over which was black military webbing containing clips of ammunition. In his belt was a pistol and in his left hand an AK-47 assault rifle. He held out his right hand to me and said: 'Hello, I am Jamaica,' indicating his code-name. Out of the undergrowth came around twenty young men similarly dressed, carrying AK-47s and M-16s.
Jamaica wanted Hasan di Tiro to return as Aceh's sultan, but in a political system that included elected parties. We discussed the UK's constitutional monarchy, and that of Thailand, which he thought were suitable models. Others I spoke to said they wanted an elected US-style executive president and separate legislature, although with Islamic ethics, and within a local federalist system.
The idea of a referendum on self-determination logically led to a vote for representative government, and what policies should be followed. Jamaica, the local guerrilla leader, did not want to see one repressive system replaced by another. Again, there were similarities to East Timor.
I was introduced to 'Grandfather', who was in his 70s. Grandfather had been fighting since the early 1950s as, he said, had his father before him. Grandfather was still enthusiastic. He later led Jamaica, myself and a group of the 'boys' into the jungle to hide overnight from a Brimob patrol.
I later met other old men, drinking sweet tea in the half-light of the open shop front by the intersection of a small town. The town was mostly deserted. Some of the boys sat drinking black coffee and tea with ice, their radios crackling with intermittent traffic, exchanging banter with the old men. With guards posted at intervals and bombs set on three of the four roads in and out it was as safe as anywhere in Aceh. The army and Brimob had come here, but had each time been beaten back, which was why none of the buildings here were burnt.
A ten-year-old boy stood around, self-consciously part of this group of hardened men. His father had been shot dead by Brimob a few days previously. This boy was already the next generation of the struggle, waiting his turn. One might hope the people of Aceh have the opportunity to vote on their future in an internationally supervised referendum before this boy also has to pick up a gun.
Dr Damien Kingsbury (dlk@deakin.edu.au) is Senior Lecturer in International Development at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia. His most recent book is the second edition of 'The politics of Indonesia' (Oxford).
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Fighting has stopped in North Maluku, but mistrust lingers
Christopher R Duncan
The newly formed province of North Maluku in eastern Indonesia is starting to recover from a period of communal violence that began in August 1999 and continued through July of 2000. Now reconciliation and reconstruction are the tasks ahead for the people of North Maluku. More than 100,000 refugees need to return home, dozens of villages must be completely rebuilt, and regional infrastructure has to be repaired.
Formed in October of 1999, the province of North Maluku includes the island of Halmahera and surrounding islands, such as Ternate and Tidore, as well as the Sula Archipelago to the southwest. As the fighting raged in Ambon further south in early 1999, North Maluku remained peaceful. However, in mid-August 1999 violence erupted in Halmahera, in the sub-district of Kao, between Makian migrants and indigenous populations. These clashes focused on plans by the regional government to create a new sub-district (kecamatan) of Makian Daratan from the southern half of the Kao sub-district. This new sub-district would consist of all of the Makian villages that were established in 1975 when the Indonesian government moved the Makian from their homes on Makian Island and resettled them in Kao to protect them from a predicted volcanic eruption.
The argument revolved around the inclusion of several villages in the new sub-district that were inhabited by indigenous Pagu and Jailolo people. Government regulations insist on a minimum number of villages per sub-district. The Pagu villagers had no desire to be separated from their indigenous brethren, nor to be ruled over by the Makian. The resulting tension led to violence on the day the new sub-district was to be formally inaugurated. Another factor that has been cited as a cause of the violence was the economic benefits associated with an Australian-owned gold mine in the region.
This violence was short-lived, but the problem remained unresolved. Disturbances broke out again in October, this time resulting in the total defeat of the Makian by the indigenous population (both Muslim and Christian). Approximately 15,000 refugees fled to Ternate and Tidore. Although the fighting started as an ethnic conflict, it soon took on the character of a religious war when the violence spread to Ternate and Tidore in November, since the Makian are Muslim, and many of the people of Kao are Christian.
The violence in Tidore began with the appearance of a false letter calling for Christians to cleanse the region of Muslims. This letter infuriated Muslims, particularly the Makian refugees who were still resentful for having been chased from their homes on Halmahera the previous month. Once all the Christians had fled from Tidore, the violence then spread to Ternate. As a result approximately 13,000 largely Christian refugees fled to North Sulawesi and Halmahera. This was followed by Muslim attacks on the western and southern regions of Halmahera, sending thousands of Christian refugees to North Sulawesi and northern Halmahera.
At the end of 1999, after months of tension, fighting broke out in Tobelo in north Halmahera. It resulted in the deaths of several hundred Muslims and the complete destruction of their homes and mosques. Accounts of this violence, made worse by exaggeration, created a national uproar. This led to the creation of the Laskar Jihad, a group of self-proclaimed Muslim holy warriors who flooded into Maluku and North Maluku several months later to help their religious brethren. These Jihad troops, supported by some army units and some among the local Muslim population, destroyed virtually every Christian village in the sub-district of Galela, as well as on the islands of Morotai and Obi and elsewhere.
By the time it slowly came to a halt in July of 2001, few areas were unaffected by the violence. The extent of the damage remains unclear, and the total number of deaths will likely never be known. Many perished in the forest as they fled, and Laskar Jihad troops from outside Halmahera who were killed in fighting were buried without record keeping.
Reconciliation
Although many on both sides would like to move on with the process of reconciliation, mistrust and animosity remain. Many say they will never again be able to trust the other side. Government efforts at facilitating reconciliation have been half-hearted at best. Officials seem to believe that once the refugees have gone home reconciliation has been completed. They have thus far failed to realise that the process will take a long time and extended effort.
Numerous non-government organisations (NGOs) have sprung up in the region to deal with this challenge, but with mixed success. Efforts by international aid groups have largely been unsuccessful. They bring a few open-minded 'leaders' from North Maluku to Manado for meetings and then send them home with little if any follow-up. The lack of success of these meetings has led many refugees to stop attending them, as they see them as a waste of time. Their argument, and that of many on Halmahera, is that any attempts at reconciliation have to be made from the bottom up, and be made in Halmahera.
Where refugees have returned it has been a case of repatriation rather than true reconciliation. Where reconciliation has begun, it is the exception rather than the rule. For example, Muslims have begun returning to Tobelo, but the Christian population has greeted their return with mixed feelings. Many are eager to put the past behind them, while others are still mistrustful and would rather the Muslims did not return. Dealing with the latter group will be the challenge for the local government. News reports say that 'Team 30', an organisation established to promote reconciliation in the sub-district of Jailolo, has had some success, and many refugees from Jailolo have returned home.
In addition to reconciliation, the people of North Maluku must rebuild. During the fighting an estimated 20,000 homes were destroyed, along with innumerable churches, mosques, schools, and government buildings. Dozens of villages were destroyed completely. Many people had their gardens partially destroyed, and other means of livelihood, such as fishing boats were burnt or stolen, hampering economic recovery. The flight of civil servants and schoolteachers from the region has slowed recovery efforts as well. Several efforts are addressing the destruction, including donations of material from USAID and World Vision Indonesia. Unfortunately these programs are only for refugees who return to their place of origin. They do not help people who have no desire to, or cannot, return home. Furthermore, the aid programs have been hampered by corruption at the local level.
Refugees
The biggest remaining obstacle is the return of the more than 100,000 refugees displaced by the violence. Many have begun returning home on their own accord. In the Malifut area the first returnees from both sides are starting to rebuild. The same can be said for other parts of northern Halmahera. The first groups of Muslims returned to Tobelo in July 2001, accompanied by the army to guarantee their safety. A few Christians have returned to Galela. However they were not provided with military protection, and most are unwilling to return at this point. There are also significant numbers of Christian refugees in northern Halmahera from Morotai Island and from southern and central Halmahera who are still scared of going home.
The largest remaining group of displaced people is in North Sulawesi, many living in large refugee camps in Bitung and Manado. These approximately 30,000 refugees, the majority of whom are Christians from Ternate, Tidore, and southern Halmahera, remain uncertain about their future. Many of the refugees from Ternate have decided they will never return. They have sold their homes and taken up opportunities for relocation in North Sulawesi, or are moving to Ambon or Halmahera. The picture looks the same for Tidore where, according to one Muslim journalist, the Sultan of Tidore has said that it is unsafe for Christians to return. Other groups from the islands of Obi and Bacan want to go home, but the lack of information about the current state of affairs hampers any decision. Others see no point in returning to their destroyed villages where their lives will be more difficult than in the refugee camps.
One forgotten victim group has been the thousands of Javanese transmigrants. They were deported by the army against their will from the largely Christian regions of Halmahera. These largely Muslim transmigrants had refused to take part in the violence, and had received assurances from Christian communities, as well as from Muslim communities in Kao, that they would not be attacked, as this was a purely local matter. However, the military decided to forcibly remove the Javanese with only a few hours notice, forcing them to leave behind their belongings. After they left, their homes were taken over by refugees, and the irrigation works and rice fields built for them by the government have been destroyed. Some Javanese families have returned, but most are still waiting in Java.
Christopher R Duncan (modole@hotmail.com) is a research fellow at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Halmahera, and visited the area in August 2001. For more on this conflict, see 'Inside Indonesia' no.63 (Jul-Sep 2000). One organisation doing good work with refugees on both sides of the conflict is Consortium for Assisting the Refugee and Displaced in Indonesia (Cardi, email cardi@cbn.net.id).
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
What do Indonesian students think about Osama bin Laden?
Katie Brayne
If you walk south along Jalan Malioboro past McDonalds, turn left into the Mall, take a right at Marks and Spencer, and then just before the ATM's take a left down the escalators, then, just opposite the Ericsson mobile phone store you'll find a small store with glass cabinets filled with stickers and T-shirts. In this store, on the bottom floor of Yogyakarta's favourite monument to western consumerism, you will find, next to stickers and T-shirts of the various Yogyakarta University logos, European soccer team logos and Yogya paraphernalia, a hand-written sign advertising the latest addition to the sticker collection - a proud portrait of Osama bin Laden, available in a variety of colours. T-shirts are also available, the sign reads on.
Further south, in an offshoot of the Beringharjo Market, you find the wooden boarded stalls of the book market. This labyrinth is affectionately known among Yogyakarta's large student population as 'shopping'. Amongst the old and new text books, newspaper clippings and pre-loved assignments and theses, a new book has flooded the market: Osama bin Laden versus America ('Osama bin Laden melawan Amerika') - a collection of essays from western and non-western academics and clerics translated into Indonesian.
In the aftermath of the Black Tuesday attacks in the US, Indonesian students are clearly interested in this man, whom America accuses of masterminding the most devastating attack on American soil since the Civil War.
So what do Yogya's students think about this infamous figure? This is what I wanted to find out amongst my friends and classmates at Gadjah Mada University and Muhammadiyah University Yogyakarta.
'I don't really know, and I don't really believe the recent news about Osama bin Laden because all the news comes from the West who want to put forward their particular point of view.'
'Scapegoat.'
'America is very scared of Osama. America says that because Osama is able to conduct such a terrorist attack, therefore he must have done it. This propaganda is proof of how scared America is of him.'
'Pretty cool in some ways.'
'He is the symbol of a revolutionary movement that is fed up with America's defence of Israel and its discrediting of Islam. Because of this sentiment, Osama bin Laden and his group hold violently strong beliefs against the West.'
'Osama is a true Islamic fighter, who is trying to free Islam itself from its status as a slave to American interests.'
'A militant who is prepared to sacrifice everything he owns for his religion and community.'
'An anti-American revolutionary who hates America for what he sees as their unjust role as world policeman.'
'He is great, but unfortunately he has no heart.'
'He is only presuming innocence.'
'It is not yet clear whether he did it, but it is clear that he agrees with it.'
'An anti-American, anti-imperialist militant.'
'He is one of the few men brave enough to oppose America. He is currently in hiding not because he is afraid, but because it is his strategy in facing America, who are currently playing judge without any strong proof. I think Osama didn't do it, but that doesn't mean he is not brave enough to do it'
'Osama bin Laden is a true Islamic militant whose goal is to free Islam from its fate as enemy number one to the West.'
Katie Brayne (kbrayne@hotmail.com) was a student at Gadjah Mada University through the Acicis program (wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/acicis).
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
What the guide books don't tell you about Surabaya
Duncan Graham
The East Java Provincial Government, like most administrations world wide, is not above a little dissembling. You get it on the road into Surabaya where the official welcome signs note that Indonesia's second biggest city is 'Bersih dan Hijau' - Clean and Green.
The signs are best seen at first light. By 9 am smog blurs the image and attention is distracted by beggars and newspaper sellers who swarm around any slow-moving car. Which is just about any vehicle, for the traffic density is close to gridlock. Try not to breathe.
That's in the dry season: In the wet roads are flooded from door to door, so pavement, verge, drain and bitumen merge into a seamless black scum where floating objects best remain unscrutinised. Then Surabaya stalls as saturated engines short circuit.
And the green? Most obvious on bright coloured giant billboards offering sexual, sporting and social success for the tiny price of a pack of smokes. Real trees are as rare as a shark (sura) fighting a crocodile (buaya), the city's mythological origin.
The authorities claim Surabaya has a Centre. If there is a focal point it has to be Tunjungan Plaza, a garish multi-storey department store full of over-priced goods and costly American fast-food shops. Here the poor peer, the middle class preen, and salesgirls professionally ignore customers with cash.
For Surabaya has not been planned, or if that claim is denied, the planners were corrupt, inept, or asleep. Probably all three.
Like some sci-fi squid from outer space which feeds on city sewers, Surabaya is devouring Gresik up the coast, climbing into the hill town of Tretes, swallowing nearby Sidoarjo, to be stopped only by the Straits of Madura. But even then its plastic excreta can be found far offshore.
Who can tell where it all begins and ends, because it doesn't. Surabaya defies definitions and census-takers, but four to five million for the area around the port could be a reasonable guess, with 30 million more in the hinterland. Or maybe that's the other way around.
At least 20,000 are prostitutes, for among its many credentials this sweaty, grimy industrial megapolis seven degrees south of the equator is reputedly Southeast Asia's biggest brothel, with the accessories of disease and despair to match.
And yet...
Without doubt Surabaya is Scunge City.
And yet and yet.
Unlike Bali, Surabaya doesn't care whether you come, and unlike Jakarta it's indifferent to whether you go. The few tourists who find themselves in Surabaya wander bemused, clutching handbags and hands, restless eyes playing spot-the-mugger.
Relax: Even the thieves are indifferent.
Expat businessmen and government officials are not to be spotted in public, except at product launches. They're more at ease gliding between hotel and office behind the black windows of their chauffeur-driven Super Kijangs.
Ignore them: They only mix with their own kind, then sell themselves as experts on the culture and economy.
In a narrow trench alongside Tunjungan Plaza, crushed by a motorbike park, are the warungs where shopgirls on $60 a month and their boyfriends retreat from their air-conditioned glitzy workplace to eat well for less than one Australian dollar.
And so can you. Rip-offs are rare and gawking at Western intruders is subtle.
For although Surabaya is chaotic, grotesque, dirty, impossible to negotiate, crass in its Soviet-realism monuments, noteworthy for its lack of notable buildings, events and attractions, try finding any place more Javanese.
The language of the kampungs and the street is Javanese, not Bahasa Indonesia. Advertisements for cigarettes, mobile phones and dandruff-cures may be English in a pretence of refinement, but the world language is rare outside the campuses.
What you see is what you get. The indifference towards Westerners extends to the locals. This is not special treatment, it is the treatment. Surabaya is raw and honest. No 'morning price', no concessions and, best of all, no contempt.
The obsequiousness, sneers and arrogance, so much the part of the local response in other Asian cities towards white skinned creatures outside their environment, is seldom encountered in Surabaya. You are obviously a walking cash box, but the temptation to make a quick withdrawal is usually found only among a few taxi drivers late on a wet night.
Yet what you see is not what you get. The splendid Majapahit Hotel, reputedly the most expensive in Indonesia and a marvel of indulgence and beauty with a fine historic past, is hidden behind a drab fawhich blends anonymously into a coarse streetscape of commercial sameness.
Likewise with Kampung Sasak. Even the locals have difficulty finding the entrance of this Arab quarter, which leads through a cramped street of traders to the ancient Ampel Mosque, founded by Sunan Ampel, one of the nine holy men who brought Islam to Java.
The mosque, in this densely packed centre of Middle Eastern commerce, always seems to be busy with the business of worship, unlike the landmark Agung Mosque near the toll road to Malang. This grand blue-domed and government-built celebration of Islam, with a Catholic church in its shadow as forced propaganda for tolerance, is as sterile and obvious as Ampel is potent and hidden.
There are hundreds of other nooks in Surabaya which reveal some of the complex and subtle nuances of this fourteenth century remnant of the Majapahit Kingdom. That they're absent from the guide books is no indicator of a desire for privacy; it's just that the government has a stereotyped view of foreigners and thinks visitors only want poolside drinks and American breakfasts.
When Surabaya was created, the deity which governs tourism blinked, and praise be for a marvellous escape from Mammon.
The best food is often found in the gloomiest, oil-lit warungs, original handicrafts in the drabbest shops, the finest dancers and singers in schools where the concrete is cancerous and the architecture indistinguishable from a public toilet.
East Java proclaims it is a Muslim State, but even the most pious will visit a paranormal in times of strife. Ghosts lurk in banyan trees, wayward spirits send lax students into trances, mystics are consulted by brokers who trade on the Net. At midnight, street people drift to a Chinese temple seeking a peep into the future. Islam is just the outer skin of an onion covering animism, Hinduism and other ancient mysteries.
Slim girls in gladwrap-tight jeans revealing navels, shoulders and their readership of Cosmopolitan, hold hands with friends covered from head to toe in the tradition of their grandmothers. Men smoke, drink and gamble, then pray.
To find the secret places and learn of the magics you need a special guide. Not a professional from a hotel - they'll only take you to KFC. The person you require will find you and will be insulted if you offer money, though a feed and help with English conversation will be appreciated.
How to meet such a marvel?
It's not that difficult. Wander the streets and markets alone, with an open mind, friendly face and polite gestures. Take your time. You'll be seen and watched. If you're sending the right signals someone is bound to find the courage to practise their English. Don't rush. Build an acquaintance - or walk away if the mood or person isn't right.
In a few days you'll have met a few of his or her friends, had a meal or two, maybe visited the family home, exchanged views and discovered differences. With luck you'll find more in common despite the Timor Sea of misunderstanding, language, religion, income, experience and lifestyle which separates us as neighbours. Then the smog starts to lift.
Since the British bombed the city in November 1945, Surabaya has been deceived and betrayed by successive governments in Jakarta, but its residents remain resilient, independent, stoic, Javanese.
For although Surabaya is rough and ugly, its people are genuine, keen to share, humble but proud. They apologise for the manifold faults of government, but retain hope for change. They hunger for knowledge. They thirst for understanding. Yet they are not ignorant or unsophisticated.
You may find wrinkled men sucking clove cigarettes who can debate philosophy having read the greats in Greek; young women studying John Donne and other metaphysical poets in the original yet destined to become secretaries; students who know more of Australian politics than the average Okker undergraduate. They hate KKN (corruption, collusion and nepotism) but know that without it they will surely miss the best jobs.
It's a humbling experience to continuously meet fluent self-taught English speakers when you're struggling with a language which is supposed to be easy, to discover the astonishing achievements of young people handicapped by lack of money, few books and a 1950-style education system.
Despite the universe-sized problems which beset this cumbersome and fumbling democracy, the next generation is largely incandescent with energy and determination to right the wrongs, all tempered with reality and an undercurrent of fear. Expect to be dazzled and confused. But never dismayed.
All this and more, as the tourist brochures like to say. Seek and ye will find. In Surabaya.
Duncan Graham (wordstars@hotmail.com) is a Perth based journalist who can't get enough of East Java.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Popular with sailors and miners, but not necessarily with their women
Terence H Hull
Men in some areas of Indonesia have a long history of inserting or implanting various objects in their penises. The origin of the practices is unclear, but some writers say that they were copied from Chinese traders who visited the islands, while others argue it is an indigenous innovation related to the use of other forms of amulets and inserts for medicinal and spiritual purposes. The objects used range from the very simple (the implant of ball bearings under the skin), to the magical (the use of specially selected semi-precious stones), or the elaborate (gold bars - called palang - or rings inserted through the glans). Historians have documented these practices in some detail, most notably in the annotated bibliography prepared by Brown, Edwards and Moore in Penis implants in Southeast Asia (1988), and Tony Reid's Land beneath the winds (1988).
Reid cites Pigafetta's 1524 traveller's tale to describe the Indonesian palang as having 'spurs' requiring intercourse to be commenced with the penis in a flacid state, and finished only after the penis has again become soft, to allow the woman to manoeuvre the palang in and out safely. Early reports of inserted bells or implanted balls begin with the 1433 report of Ma Huan, a Chinese Muslim who found the practice in Thailand. Bells were found around Malaya to as far as Makassar.
While these might seem odd and esoteric practices long relegated to museums or Ripley's Believe It or Not, recent research is finding that the use of inserts is spreading rapidly among working class men in the Southeast Asia and Melanesia. The modern manifestations of inserts and implants are important because they may cause vaginal wounds, inflammation and infection among the partners of men attracted to these practices. They can also cause permanent damage to the males, particularly when the cutting involved is carried out under unhygienic conditions.
For some years I had been hearing of penis inserts in Indonesia, but like most middle class Indonesians I dismissed the stories as being little more than sensationalist rumours or fillers for slow news days in tabloids. Eventually though the growing number of reliable sources suggested that there might be something worthy of further research.
In February 2000 with colleagues from the University of Indonesia I examined the records of a random sample of over 700 men undergoing pre-employment checks for work in the shipping, hotel and banking industries. This was an exploratory attempt to determine the likelihood of obtaining information on male reproductive health issues from conventional clinic records. It was found that one percent of the applicants for shipping industry jobs had some form of penis implant. Since most of these men were young and inexperienced this might be taken as a minimum prevalence among sailors. In the course of our enquiries we found that the practices were more widespread and varied than we had imagined.
Variations
The difficulty of determining the exact spread of various penis augmentation practices lies in the fact that they are inspired and implemented in a highly informal way. It appears that groups of working class males living in isolated circumstances are quite likely to discuss and attempt these practices. Interviews reveal a variety of practices designed to 'augment' the penis and enhance masculinity.
Basic inserts - ball bearings.
Workers in forestry, fishing and mining industries apparently take ball-bearings from machinery, boil them and soak them in antiseptic, and then insert them under the skin of the penis, about a centimetre back from the glans. Interviews in Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and the Philippines have also indicated that overseas contract workers in Saudi Arabia use the extended residence in highly controlled environments to experiment with implants.
Plastics - Tops of toothpaste tubes
Throughout Southeast Asia and Melanesia reports are emerging of prisoners inserting objects under the skin of their penises. The picture to emerge is one of boredom and isolation focussing attention on discussions of masculinity (kejantanan) and dreams of future possibilities to 'conquer' women. Prisoners while away the hours scraping tooth brushes into sharp instruments to pierce the penile skin, and melt down the caps to form small balls for insertion.
Silicon
Among transvestites throughout Indonesia the use of silicon implants to accentuate lips, cheeks, breasts, and other parts of the body is popular, and easily available through salons as well as some medical practitioners. There are some reports of Indonesian men, both straight and gay, using silicon implants in their penises, though this is probably less common than the use of ball bearings. In the Philippines silicon is used to create 'humps' around the shaft of the penis.
Semi-precious stones and gold - Investing objects with power
Throughout Southeast Asia inserts using precious stones, metals or pearls are regarded as providing special powers to men. In Indonesia the traditions of susuk implants support such thinking.
From ad hoc interviews I have found that men use the devices before marriage, but remove them when they settle down with one woman. Why, if the purpose is to please a woman? One explained: 'You can't really be sure about these things - what if something went wrong? You wouldn't want to take a risk with your wife.' Indeed, doctors and sex workers do report the occasional accident when a ring or stud or other sharp object is left in a vagina, or where women have suffered cuts or severe pain from men's experiments.
Interviews with social workers and commercial sex workers suggested that upwards of ten to twenty percent of regular clients of brothels have either penis implants or holes in the glans or skin of their penises. The holes may be normally for rings or studs, but during intercourse the ring is replaced by a piece of horsehair or the strand of a stiff-leaved plant which is tied and clipped off to a length of three or four centimetres as a 'tickler'. The putative reason for the practice is to 'please the woman', and men with inserts argue quite strongly that 'women love it'. However in the absence of systematic interviews with the lovers of such men, the testimony of commercial sex workers may be regarded as a useful commentary on the practice. Many of the women who earn their living from sex regard the use of inserts and ticklers as both strange and discomforting. One respondent recalled how one man using horsehair had caused her to bleed, while another reported great discomfort. She laughed at the idea that the devices were to 'please the woman'. 'That is what they say, but actually they only want the woman to reach orgasm before they ejaculate. It is a sign of their manliness (kejantanan)to have such control.' At the same time some women report the practices as being pleasurable.
Demystification
Informal but persistent attempts to understand the practices of genital cutting and the use of inserts and implants among Indonesian men indicate that what we are seeing today is not the resurgence of tradition. Rather these are largely attempts to come to terms with sexualities based on gender relations emerging from rapid modernisation.
Workers in isolated camps who rely on their peers for information on 'what women want' are easily convinced that implants may make them attractive to lovers. Young men who see peers attempting the operations to insert stones or plastic balls, and hear the bragging afterward are easily swayed to try the practice themselves. They do not hear clinical evidence of damage done to sex organs, and they definitely do not hear women's stories of pain, discomfort or infection. From the viewpoint of men and reproductive health the response to penis implants must be based on education and the demystification of large areas of sexuality.
The Indonesian Health Department regards any talk of penis adornments as esoteric, sensitive and obscure. Reproductive health service providers do not recognise the problems associated with genital cutting and the use of sexual accessories because such things are quickly dismissed as immoral. Whatever the moral arguments though, the practice of penis inserts appears to be spreading because men's sexual education is incomplete and isolated. Lower class men in particular are likely to experiment with implants, not because their sexual needs are any different from other men, but because they are the groups most likely to experience isolation from women in their occupations.
Terence H Hull (terry.hull@anu.edu.au) is Senior Fellow at the Demography and Sociology Program, Australian National University, Canberra. This note is based on a longer article written with Dr Meiwita Budiharsana to be published in the journal Reproductive Health Matters. Much of the information collected here was generously provided by colleagues in the ANU and internationally. Particular thanks go to the doctors and staff of the Klinik Baruna in Jakarta, and to Dr Sarsanto W Sarwono and Dra Ninuk Widyantoro whose work in Timika and other sites in Indonesia has revealed a range of behaviours normally hidden from routine medical practice.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
A flood of 'democratisation' dollars has corrupted the NGO movement
Anu Lounela
Wherever one goes in Indonesia, one will come upon non-government organisations (NGOs). They are of all kinds and sizes: one-person offices, young activists working from home, giant offices, and training centres on the beach. NGOs are among a wide range of organisations that stand between the household and the state - they are part of 'civil society'. They do community development, support the rights of minorities like indigenous peoples and women, resist economic globalisation, and much more. To make the concerns of citizens heard by state power, NGOs are in front.
NGOs are born and die again as fast as activists are able to act, and funding agencies able to give. According to Kastorius Sinaga (Bisnis Info, September 2001), there are 13,400 officially registered NGOs alone, not to mention those unregistered. In the 1980s there were only around 3,000.
However, some international donors as well as voices within the NGO community say all is not well. Media accounts have claimed that, after the mushrooming of NGOs since 1998, funding has been misused, while some NGOs formed mainly for the money lack orientation in their activities. NGOs are accused of lacking transparency towards the Indonesian people, and of deliberately keeping vague their ideological commitment to 'strengthen civil society' in order to get more funds.
The reason for the poor management and poor ethics, especially among newer NGOs, is that they have become places where ex-business people, ex-state officials, and others lacking a clear vision earn a salary. Some NGO activists also believe that fooling donors with false receipts is not wrong, since the donors have their own agendas that do not always coincide with those of the NGOs.
Swedish anthropologist Hans Antlhas been doing research on Indonesia for a long time and has written several books. He is also project manager for the Ford Foundation, a major American funding agency. 'Problems have been evident already for a couple of years. We now have to save the good reputation of NGOs in Indonesia, or affairs will turn for the worst. Of great importance is the trust between different stakeholders, especially donors and NGOs. If this does not exist, development cooperation will not work', he says.
Roots
The first Indonesian NGOs were born in the 1970s. Suharto was ruling Indonesia with an iron hand. There was no freedom of speech, and NGOs generally chose to concentrate on (safe) 'development' work.
Mansour Fakih is another researcher who has long been studying Indonesian civil society. He once divided NGOs into three groups: those that adapt, those that reform, and those that strive for transformation. The first adapted to the development policy of the state and tried to participate without a vision of their own. Reformers aimed to strengthen civil society, but did not question the hegemonic development ideology based on the idea of economic growth. The minority of NGOs aiming at transformative change wanted to challenge the hegemonic development ideology, for example by using 'participatory research' methods.
When the economic crisis of 1997 turned into the political crisis of 1998, foreign funding agencies - especially American - rushed to Indonesia. They wanted to help build good governance, strengthen civil society, develop democracy, and save the environment and indigenous people. A real money circus started after Suharto stepped down in May 1998. NGOs mushroomed everywhere, all promoting 'democratisation'. In 1999 many more international donors entered Indonesia to support free elections with gigantic sums of money. Civil society had been suppressed for so long - donors felt it was the right time to support a strengthening process.
Paskah Irianto from the Indonesian legal Aid and Human Rights Association (PBHI) thinks the corruption sometimes goes beyond an unclear ideology. Some amounts of money are 'stolen' in administration, and receipts do not always correspond with reality. NGOs often obtain funding for the same proposal from several sources at once. Some obtain money from unsavoury Indonesian sources. For example, a report in Media Indonesia (5 October 2001) alleged that Indonesian Corruption Watch, a major watchdog, was itself partly backed by well-known corrupt business people and politicians. The basic problem, according to a series of articles in Media Indonesia early October 2001, is that most activists depend on NGOs to make a living. This creates an incentive to manipulate reports to donor organisations.
Many other NGOs feel uncomfortable about the situation. Money has distorted the NGO movement, so that institutions formed purely to get money are mixed with 'good' NGOs.
If overseas donors worry about corruption within Indonesian NGOs, bitter stories are also told within the NGO community about the foreign agencies. Foreign development workers grow rich from the development business. They move from one country to another while spreading their own views on how things should be done.
The UN Development Program (UNDP), the World Bank, and some individual governments are financing a 'good governance' program in Indonesia. It operates like a gatekeeper for NGO financial support. The UNDP program has an Indonesian board of supervision which evaluates incoming applications. However, the system is bureaucratic and top down. Jari (Jaringan Independen untuk Transparensi dan Akuntabilitas Pembangunan Indonesia) is a network of about eighty civil society organisations from around Indonesia. Yando Zakaria, who works at Jari, says Jari recently refused funding offered by UNDP. UNDP had rewritten the Jari funding application to include UN Volunteers, with a much higher salary than that of local staff. 'It is difficult to preserve your own mission and vision when the donor is recruiting staff, as well as changing the proposal and the amount of funding asked', says Yando.
Some NGOs are also upset with the US Agency for International Development. USAID currently administers about 68 grants and 22 cooperative agreements in Indonesia, with both international and Indonesian participating organisations. This US government agency's annual budget in Indonesia is US$ 130 million. Some Indonesian partners feel USAID controls their agendas. Walhi is Indonesia's major environmental umbrella organisation. Nieke Dewayani, its staff member responsible for donor relations, says that every time Walhi renews its contract with USAID there is a 'gentleman's agreement' to avoid using USAID funding for activities that concern mining. Joko Waluyo, the head of Walhi's information and communication department, adds that recently USAID was not willing to fund the Walhi environmental magazine Tanah Air. In his opinion, USAID disliked Walhi's mining advocacy.
In an interview with me, a USAID official said: 'We do not have these kinds of conditions tied to our agreements. We do not forbid criticism of badly behaving US corporations by the organisations we support.' However, this is not the first time that allegations have arisen of USAID cutting its aid for activities that threaten US companies. Inside Indonesia republished an IPS news item in its October-December 2000 edition in which the anti-mining group Jatam (Indonesian Mining Advocacy Network) had its USAID funding cut after it criticised US mining giant Newmont.
'Spoilt'
According to Hans Antlcivil society organisations have to a certain extent been 'spoilt' by the easy access to foreign funding. This was for instance the case during the 1999 election, with crash programs of voter education and election monitoring. 'Is it anywhere else in the world a habit to give to seminar participants a cash payment in an envelope? There are also allegations that some foundations were set up to launder money or as fronts for commercial enterprises. However, most civil society organisations are committed and are doing important work,' he says.
Many overseas donors are now changing their strategies towards Indonesian NGOs. Donors have to be accountable to their sources for the funding they hand out. The new strategies probably will include more support for multilateral agencies such as UNDP, more information sharing between donors, direct funding for local governments (rather than NGOs), and standardised reporting mechanisms to ensure the money goes to the 'right address'.
LP3ES, the Institute for Social and Economic Research, Education and Information, is one of Indonesia's oldest NGOs. It was founded in 1971 by some Indonesian academics, and funded by the German agency FNS (Friedrich Naumann Stiftung). Imam Ahmad is LP3ES' managing director. He says: 'It is only a question of time when the funding agencies will change their strategy or go away and stop giving direct support to civil society. We have to change. From the very start we have been too dependent on them. Now we have a warning: become self-sufficient or die.'
'I feel as if I am a public servant of the United States!' Imam Ahmed continues. 'LP3ES gets its funding from many US agencies, such as USAID or the Ford Foundation. I get my salary from them. In my office there are seventy employees. If the funding stops, what will happen to their families? We receive no money from the Indonesian government. We do not get money from poor Indonesians. Maybe we will transform into a consultancy firm.'
Others say Indonesian NGOs are already more like consultancy firms than civil society organisations, since their 'managers' work so hard to adapt to donor ideas and requests. 'I think many of the grassroot NGOs will soon die,' says NGO veteran S Indro Tjahjono, director of the environmental organisation Skephi and an advisor of the labour minister. 'The middle class is no longer attracted to the idea of making NGOs a part of the social transformation movement.'
'As the funding agencies change their strategies, the NGOs dependent on them will live or die. NGOs have to create their own ideology, and not merely be followers of the neo-liberal agencies. We have to search for self-sufficiency, work with the people and the communities, and together create a people's movements', says Indro Tjahjono.
Anu Lounela (alounela@indosat.net.id) is an NGO volunteer with Insist in Yogyakarta (insist@yogya.wasantara.net.id).
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
The democracy movement must now challenge international capital
Revrisond Baswir
The transition to democracy in Indonesia isn't just a struggle between political factions within Indonesia. We must also consider the relationship with international capital. The New Order of Suharto was the child of capitalism. From CIA documents, we now know of the US involvement in bringing about Sukarno's downfall. The New Order under Suharto went on to establish strong links with international capital. The first laws the New Order enacted in 1967 were about Foreign Direct Investment (PMA). For 32 years the New Order's economic strategy was pro-mainstream, pro-growth or neo-liberal. We should not be surprised that the New Order survived so long. Despite its authoritarianism and corruption, it continued to enjoy the support of international capital - as long as Aceh still had gas to be exploited, as long Riau's oil fields were making a profit, and likewise in Papua.
The presence of the military is also important to international capital. Can you imagine what would happen if Exxon in Aceh had to close, or Caltex was overrun by the people of Riau? And today, who is busier than the representatives of international capital in lobbying the US government to reestablish links with our military?
So whether they were aware of it or not, the pro-democracy movement in Indonesia for thirty years not only had to oppose Suharto, the military and Golkar, but also the challenge of international capital. The question that arises is: with such strong backing, how could Suharto be deposed? Strangely enough, in the last few years before Suharto's downfall a co-existence developed between the pro-democracy movement and international capital. Since the early 'nineties the actions of Suharto and his cronies were proving increasingly problematic for international capital. Foreign investors had to include members of Suharto's family, pay commissions and involve the military. Suharto was becoming 'too expensive'. So they began to support the democracy movement. USAID, for example, began to pay for voter education.
In my opinion, the transition to democracy in Indonesia raises some very serious questions, which we must face honestly. We have to ask ourselves whether the movement that deposed Suharto on 21 May 1998 only got support from, or was it in fact manipulated by international capital? Personally I fear that it was manipulated.
No protest
I have spent a lot of time thinking about the fact that following the fall of Suharto there has been no protest against international capital. Our friends in the pro-democracy movement demand the disbandment of the New Order political party Golkar, which is excellent. Many non-government organisations (NGOs) have been formed to support 'good governance', and they protest the actions of local parliament, local government, and the district heads. But none of them demand the disbandment of the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI, a group of governments that make loans to Indonesia), nor the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nor the World Bank and the transnational corporations. This is a very interesting phenomenon. The pro-democracy movement is exploited by, or rather working to the agenda of international capital. The direction of democratic reform in Indonesia is in the hands of global capital. And that is a great tragedy. We have always known this happens within the state and the market, but it clearly happens also within the grassroots movement of national and local NGOs.
This is very clear at the national level, in parliament. For thirty years throughout Suharto's reign the national parliament never dared to make any changes to the government's National Policy Guidelines (GBHN). Yet now when the IMF demands change they simply comply. They can't stand up to the IMF. The same goes for the government, which is very dependent on international investment capital. But the same can also be said of the grassroots movements. For example among the pro-democracy groups in Jakarta, and in oil-rich Aceh and Riau, no one questions the demands of international capital.
A few days before President Abdurrahman Wahid was ousted (on 23 July 2001) I was invited by the British Ambassador to attend the launching of an agreement between the British and the Indonesian Defence Departments. So this was already being prepared while Gus Dur (Wahid) was still president. The Americans and Australians have also restored their support to the military - after it was cut following the destruction of East Timor in 1999. The actions of the IMF, furthermore, played a big role in the removal of Gus Dur. For nine months the IMF refused to release the next US$ 400 million instalment in its huge rescue package, citing Jakarta's refusal to implement reforms. This eventually caused a crisis as the rupiah continued to fall against the dollar. In my opinion parliament only put the 'finishing touches' to the removal of Gus Dur. The ball had been placed in front of the goal by global capital interests. When Megawati took over as president, the money started flowing again. This resulted in a dramatic improvement in the value of the rupiah, which went from 11,300 to about 9,000 to the US dollar in a short time.
It's very clear how international capital behaves. The question for us is, in which direction should we steer the transition to democracy? Is it enough simply to confront the New Order elements still in power, in the military and the government? This is the most important question for the democracy movement. What is our attitude to international capital? In my opinion this question must be answered, and answered very explicitly. If it is not, I fear the democracy movement will continue to be exploited by international capital.
Twin Towers
The problem with being dependent on the international economy has become clearer after the attack on the Twin Towers in New York. The attack has caused a worsening of the international economy in recent days, and this also affects our economy. Furthermore, if America continues to retaliate against Afghanistan there will no doubt be a negative reaction in Indonesia, whether or not it is true that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the Twin Towers attack. If America goes on to strike also against Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, or Egypt, then there will really be problems in Indonesia.
So what am I afraid of? I am afraid that the challenge to international capital in Indonesia will not come from the pro-democracy groups but from other groups. Even before the attack on the Twin Towers, groups were already mobilising in Indonesia to oppose America over its policy towards Palestine and Israel. If America attacks Kabul, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan or Egypt, I am sure there will be opposition to it in Indonesia. Stability will be disrupted, and don't hope that foreign investors will then come back. Before the Twin Towers tragedy there was already a travel warning for American tourists not to come to Indonesia. The threats that are sure to follow further retaliatory strikes will be directed not only at America, but also the British, the IMF, World Bank etc. Our economy will continue to be squeezed by what I call the 'Twin Towers Effect'. Our international markets will be weak, the internal situation will be unstable, and investors will not want to come to Indonesia.
Let's return to my question for the pro-democracy groups. What position will they adopt in this situation? It is a big question. Are we going to take part in large anti-America, anti-capitalist demonstrations? We have to be clear what we want. For me the transition to democracy is impossible without taking a position towards international capital. We must have an answer, or we will continue to be confused and oscillating.
Briefly, I want to suggest a solution. It's a very simple one. As long as our economy remains dependent on international capital it will remain weak. We have to turn around our dependence on global capital as the basis of our economy. Instead of 'waiting for Godot' we need to pay serious attention to our domestic market. The buying power of the people is the springboard of our economy. The revival of Indonesia can't be handed over to the global market, to international investors who may or may not come to our shores. This solution is clearly a dilemma for the current government and cabinet, who are the foot slaves of the IMF and World Bank. So the question remains: is the democracy movement ready or not to challenge not only the forces within Indonesia - the New Order, Golkar, the military, and the present government - but also the might of international capital?
Revrisond Baswir (revrisond@ygy.centrin.net.id) teaches accountancy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta. Condensed from a presentation at UGM on 18 September 2001.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Farmers in East Java are still working land they took three years ago
Sukardi
Until my hair turns grey, I'll never be able to own land, unless we ask for the land back that belonged to our ancestors. Even if I had money, no one is selling land, or if they are it's far too expensive. If the state or the state plantation really want this land back, there will be war, that's for sure. We'll all die.
(Suroto, a farmer who cut down cocoa plants at the Kalibakar plantation in South Malang, speaking in July 2000).
A land certificate is not important. The state plantation, for example, has a certificate, but they can't use the land because it has been taken over by the people. The important thing is to be able to work the land. Having no certificate is not a problem.
(Imam Sudja'i, village head who led the land takeover at Simojayan village, South Malang, speaking in March 2000).
At US$3-4 a kilo, cocoa beans are valuable. The 2,050 hectare cocoa plantation at Kalibakar, South Malang (East Java) was planted in 1965. The area was first leased from the local community in 1941 by a Dutch investor, who planted coffee. In exchange for the 35-year lease, every village received 350 pieces of silver and two rolls of cloth, plus a car which was used by the village head. When in 1959 all Dutch ventures were nationalised, it became a state-owned plantation, run by PTPN XII, the Twelfth State Plantation Company. Farmers who knew this as their land tried at various times to get it back, beginning in the mid-1970s, but they always failed.
However, on Monday 24 August 1998 the farmers living in five villages around the plantation struck in force. Thousands of them invaded in a well-prepared operation. Carrying clubs, knives and saws, they cut down hundreds of thousands of cocoa bushes, then occupied the land. The economic crisis of 1997-98 had made them desperate. Many poor relatives had returned to the country from the city, straining farmers' food supplies. They were also taking advantage of the euphoria of 'reformasi' following President Suharto's sudden resignation the previous May. This created chaos in government ranks. The big August action followed sporadic raids since the previous December.
Land remains the key asset for this farming community. Theirs was one of many actions around Indonesia to reclaim land at this time. The state claims monopoly control over land, but it has been insensitive to its social and economic importance to farmers. The August 1998 land action was not a case of banditry, but a valid community response to unceasing structural repression. Instead of being responsive in this reformation era, the state in many ways has behaved worse than the Dutch colonial state did in the late nineteenth century. As a result, farmers have faced not merely the power of the investors or the market, but of the state itself.
Victories
Today, more than three years later, the farmers have consolidated their position. They have won some significant victories, but still do not have formal recognition of their ownership. The farmers claim that the lease awarded to the Twelfth State Plantation Company in the 1980s is legally flawed. They also say PTPN XII should have made a bigger contribution to local welfare by providing more employment at better wages. Since its presence was illegal and of little local benefit, they decided to take the land back and work it themselves. PTPN XII, on the contrary, says the lease is perfectly legal, and that it makes a substantial contribution to Indonesia's export earnings.
Apart from actually working the land, the farmers have concentrated their efforts on getting legal recognition, and on redistributing the reclaimed land so that everyone has a share. Their efforts to resolve the conflict to the satisfaction of all have been increasingly intensive this past year.
Government at the Malang district level, led by the district administrator (bupati), is actively trying to bring various parties together. Money has been made available for the farmers in the Malang district government budget.
The farmers have also won support within the district elected assembly (DPRD-II). On 10 June 2000 the assembly issued a resolution supporting their struggle for justice. The two main farmers organisations are Papanjati (Paguyuban Petani Jawa Timur, East Java Farmers Association) and Forkotmas (Forum Komunikasi Tani Malang Selatan, South Malang Farmers Communication Forum). This resolution was a highly significant moment. It effectively brought these two organisations into an alliance with the main political parties in the assembly (PPP, PDI-P, PKB).
The land reclamation issue has played an important role in South Malang village politics too. As village head elections were held in most of the villages that took part in the 1998 action, rival candidates wooed voters by promising to fight for rights to the PTPN land. Those village elites with connections outside - village head candidates, farmers with money, even local crime bosses - have cooperated on a single agenda, namely village rights to negotiate over the land.
Villagers talk a lot about how 'Dutch' the plantation company managers always were. Foremen, for example, used to demand that their workers demonstrate 'loyalty' by feeding their cows free of charge. Villagers remember how little the company cared to help maintain local infrastructure such as roads. Overloaded company trucks damaged the roads and left them virtually impassable.
They also recall how unjust the system of sharecropping at the plantation used to be. They grew food crops on unused land in the plantation, but were forced to sell the harvest to the plantation company cheaply before it was ready (the so-called ijon system). And they recall how they were jailed or fined for stealing even small quantities of cocoa or cattle feed from the company.
Probably the most important external factor is the paralysis in the legal system, especially in 1997-98. When I asked one farmer why he took direct action instead of taking the matter to court, he said: 'When someone up there does something wrong, the only thing that happens is some words of criticism, and then people say "we must respect the principle of innocence until proven guilty". But when the little people do something wrong they often find themselves staring down a rifle barrel.' This was a very popular response among the farmers when asked about the justice system.
The district government is now hardening its position somewhat. They are talking about a compromise in which some land stays with PTPN XII, some goes to the farmers, and some goes to the provincial government to support its budget requirements. The latter, in the era of local autonomy, is an important consideration for them.
Meanwhile among the farmers themselves there are also tensions. The players here include the land redistribution committees, the chairpersons of the groups who actually cut down the cocoa shrubs, the village heads, the various brokers who deal with the outside world, and the thousands of individual farmers who received land and are now working it. The debates are over who precisely is entitled to land, how much, and where.
Three kinds of leadership have emerged among the farmers. Two village heads in particular use an authoritarian approach. One belongs to a family that has inherited control of the village for generations. The other is a crime boss. Their word is simply law. This approach is top-down, but fairly effective.
Some other villages use what we may call a 'corporatist' approach, in which the formal village bureaucracy forms an alliance with the land redistribution committees. The problem here is that it results in a lot of corruption. The relatively small number of people involved allows land transactions to take place under the table between people who are often related to one another. This in turn has led to violent resentment on the part of those left out.
Other villages again use a much more democratic approach, that we could call 'mass pluralism'. Any conflict arising must be brought before the village mass council, which consists of all the village land committee chairpersons and their advisors. The formal bureaucracy is not involved at all - a result of having opposed the land action in the first place. After the coordinating secretary explains the problem, all present are invited to put forward alternative solutions. A facilitator, also from the village, then steps forward to discuss the pros and cons of each alternative. Next, everyone present is invited to put up their suggestions and criticisms. At the end a decision is taken which is binding on all. Anyone who goes against this decision risks the wrath of the entire village - they could be ostracised or even killed.
The story of South Malang's farmers shows that agrarian reform in Indonesia can only be begun by the farmers themselves.
Sukardi (syukardi@excite.com) is a lecturer at Universitas Merdeka Malang. He is a postgraduate student at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Indonesian maids in Singapore want to be heard
Noorashikin Abdul Rahman
Women constitute seventy per cent of the estimated four million migrant workers who come from Indonesia. Their voices must be heard. Only by listening to their voices can we see that these women are after all individuals, with their own aspirations and potential.
Most of them work as live-in foreign domestic workers (FDWs) in households in the Middle East, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. The Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia, has traditionally been a favourite destination for women migrant workers from Indonesia. But horrid tales of torture and abuse the women experienced there, exposed in the media in the early '90s and retold by ex-migrants, encouraged many aspiring migrants to reconsider their choice of destination. Proximity to Indonesia, a reasonably attractive exchange rate, and the relative freedom it offers, have made Singapore an increasingly popular destination for Indonesian FDWs.
'I chose Singapore because the exchange rate is much better than Malaysia. My friends who have worked in the Middle East advised me that it is less work here, as the houses are smaller. You also get more freedom because you can at least go to the market and send the children to school, unlike in Saudi where you are confined to the house all the time,' explained Sukinah, a 20 year-old who is on her first overseas assignment. Indonesian FDWs now comprise slightly more than half of the 150,000 foreign women who work as live-in domestic maids in Singapore. Hailing mostly from Java, they enter Singapore via Jakarta and Batam with the help of a network of labour recruiters and maid agents with links across international boundaries.
However, the factors underlying the discrimination they face are complex. They cannot be resolved with laws and protective policies alone. Many migrants have retired successfully to more comfortable homes, own bigger pieces of land, and support their children through university. Yet their lives are filled with hardship, and insults on their dignity are the norm. As foreigners and as women, they are viewed with suspicion and often patronised. As workers engaged in a low status job, they are treated with little respect and are hardly granted any of the rights workers are entitled to.
The exploitation begins even before the women leave Indonesian soil. Local entrepreneurs and bureaucrats conveniently overlook ministerial decrees meant to protect migrant workers in the recruitment process. Instead of ensuring that their rights as workers are defended, these people treat FDWs as a commodity that can be sold for a quick profit. Upon their return from overseas, the lack of protective laws leave them defenceless as more bureaucrats and middlemen appropriate their hard-earned money without any qualms. Stories of extortion at Jakarta's Sukarno-Hatta airport are common. For example, returning Indonesian FDWs are often charged exorbitant fees for the trip back to their village by members of a transport mafia allegedly linked to corrupt officials in the Labour Department.
Nevertheless, institutional support is available and protective laws are in place in Singapore to catch maid abusers. Unlike in Hong Kong, where foreigners have the freedom to form unions and associations for collective bargaining, Singapore's advantage lies in its strict laws against abusive employers. In 1998, the penal code was amended to include a special clause for FDWs. Offences such as assault, grievous harm and 'outraging of modesty' inflicted against FDWs by employers now carry heavier penalties. The Ministry of Manpower in Singapore operates a help line that FDWs and other migrant workers can ring when encountering problems. The Ministry also has officers to help resolve conflicts over non-payment of salaries.
In addition to the Singapore government, the Indonesian embassy in Singapore has a special department for Indonesian domestic workers that oversees their welfare and helps negotiate settlements in times of crisis. Technically, all Indonesian FDWs should be brought to the embassy upon their arrival. There they are supposed to be protected under a legally binding work contract endorsed by the embassy that ensures rest days, standard salaries and adequate provisions for their well-being. In practice, though, it rarely happens.
Attitudes
Working in Singapore is, after all, not that bad. What then are the problems for FDWs in Singapore that cannot be addressed by such institutional formulae? The problem lies with social attitudes that are not easily dealt with by regulations. Life as a foreign domestic worker in Singapore is hard, despite its advantages.
In this modern and orderly city-state, FDWs are employed under a two-year renewable work permit in which strict conditions such as a six-monthly medical examination to screen for pregnancy and venereal diseases and a bar on marriage to locals apply. The penalty for breaching any of these conditions is repatriation and a permanent ban from working in the country.
The Employment Act does not apply to FDWs, because domestic work is not recognised as formal work. Most FDWs negotiate personal contracts with employers, mediated by maid agents. According to one maid agent I interviewed, employers hire Indonesians because they are perceived to be more loyal, more docile, more hard working and less fussy than their Filipina counterpart. This reputation can mostly be attributed to good marketing techniques by maid agents. For although it may seem commendable, in reality this reputation translates into more difficult working conditions. Most Indonesians are expected to work without rest days.
Indeed, negative stereotypes, which subvert the identity of FDWs as individuals, monopolise the mindset of Singaporeans. This has led to the dehumanisation of FDWs in their everyday interactions with Singaporeans. 'I feel that Singaporeans do not like us working here. They look down on us and don't treat us as humans,' lamented Sumi, a 25 year-old who has been working in Singapore for four years.
This prejudiced mindset also justifies excessive control over Indonesian FDWs. Madam S, an employer of an Indonesian maid in Singapore, said: 'These Indonesians cannot be trusted. They may take advantage if you give them too much freedom. My policy is to prevent them from making friends. If they have friends they will know more and when they know more there will be more problems for me.' She was only half joking.
Indonesian FDWs are also patronised by representatives of their own country. 'Those people at the embassy, they only look upon us like we are mice, like we have no value,' exclaimed Ibu Siti, a 55 year-old migrant who has been working in Singapore for ten years. Tuti, a 44 year-old migrant, complained that the Indonesian embassy does not seem to be bothered to organise productive activities for Indonesian FDWs on their rest days, despite a demand for such facilities. Some Indonesian FDWs, through the help of their Filipina counterparts, have instead taken the initiative to join skill workshops organised by the Philippines embassy.
Nevertheless, the voices of Indonesian FDWs have not all fallen on deaf ears. Recently, a mosque in Singapore responded to an appeal by a few Indonesian FDWs to provide them with facilities to get together for religious classes. Beginning from a mere gathering of eight maids, the group now boasts 150 members and calls itself An-Nisa. Its activities have expanded to include skills workshop like English and handicraft lessons. A maid who wanted a place where Indonesian women could break the monotony of domestic work and assert their individual identities initiated the formation of the group. Sumi, the leader of the group, hopes that through the worthwhile activities of An-Nisa, Singaporeans can see that Indonesian FDWs are also 'good people' and not look down on them as just maids. 'I am not asking Singaporeans to respect us, but just to treat us as equals. We are all humans, and it's just unfortunate that we have ended up as domestic workers,' said Sumi.
Perhaps the Indonesian embassy too can start to heed the voices of their women to improve their reputation and self-esteem in Singapore. Embassy staff members have been invited to celebrate the Islamic New Year with An-Nisa, and have pledged support in organising future activities. Nevertheless, the pledge so far remains lip service. Volunteers at the mosque claim they have not heard from the embassy since. An-Nisa's participation in a fun fair, organised by the embassy in conjunction with Indonesia's independence day recently, was again an initiative by the women themselves, who asked the mosque to write to apply for a stall.
This reminds me of an unpleasant memory on a visit to the embassy a couple of years ago. A young migrant who appeared distressed had just been brought in from the guard post. Instead of being asked gently what her problem was, the staff on duty barked at her and said, 'What's your problem? You ran away right? Don't hope that you can get a free ticket back. Sit here and someone will deal with you later.' I was stunned. Noticing the look of disapproval on my face, the staff turned to me and said coldly, 'These kids expect us to fly them home when things are not right with their employers, they think life is that easy.' The young woman was by then trying very hard to fight back her tears so as not to create a scene and embarrass herself further. Maybe it's going to take a while for the embassy to really listen to the voices of their women.
Noorashikin Abdul Rahman (nabdul@yahoo.com) is writing her PhD dissertation on these women at Curtin University, Perth, Australia.
Workers, often women, take risks to earn an honest living
Michele Ford
In June last year, in Tanjung Pinang, I interviewed a Betawi woman a long way from her native Jakarta. Tanjung Pinang is a large town on the Indonesian island of Bintan, near Singapore. Once the administrative capital of the region, it is now just another frontier port economy largely dependent on smuggling and sex tourism. This woman, whom I will call Ibu Betawi, looked considerably older than her thirty-five years. She was part of a special sort of smuggling operation - the illegal export of labour to Malaysia. Unlike some of her compatriots, who are dumped off the Malaysian shore in the dead of night, she had a valid work permit - albeit issued on the basis of false papers, which her 'agent' had obtained by bribing local officials. Once in Malaysia as a domestic worker, there would be no guarantees for her well-being from the Malay businessman who organised her placement in return for her first three months' wages.
Ibu Betawiwas between a rock and a hard place. Unlike another of the potential migrant workers I spoke to in Tanjung Pinang, she was no starry-eyed, teenaged villager hoping to see the world. After her husband's death five years ago, she worked in a Korean-run export garment factory in Greater Jakarta, until her eyesight had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer meet factory production targets. When the small business she then started failed, she left her daughter with relatives and looked for work further afield. She had heard the stories about the misfortunes of women working abroad, but she was prepared to do whatever it takes (nekad), determined to earn an honest (halal) income for herself and her daughter.
Ibu Betawi's experience straddles two very visible modes of Indonesian working-class work: the factory production of export goods, and the export of labour itself. Both modes contribute much to the Indonesian economy. In 1999, light manufacturing (food, beverages and tobacco, textiles, leather products and footwear) earned over US$17 billion, or 15.6% of Indonesia's GDP. The sector produces mainly for export and employs over two million workers. In the same year, 302,791 women and 124,828 men were officially placed as overseas migrant workers. Many more go unofficially. Remittances from official overseas female migrant workers alone totalled some US$ 300 million in 1999. The two modes are also symbolically significant, because they lie at the forefront of Indonesia's engagement with the global economy. Ibu Betawi's story illustrates some of the human costs of a Third World economy's attempts to export its way out of trouble.
When I asked about her factory experiences, Ibu Betawi told me stories of unreasonable targets, hard work, forced overtime, low wages, and of having no time to spend with her daughter or her friends. These are common complaints, well documented by academics and non-government organisation (NGO) activists over the last two decades. They have become even more significant since the Asian economic crisis added to the woes of Indonesia's factory workers.
Indonesian manufacturing was badly affected by the crisis. But while many domestically oriented enterprises were forced to close, not all manufacturers suffered. In fact, demand for export products from large factories actually grew. Research done by two labour-oriented NGOs, Akatiga and LIPS, shows that the public acceptance of 'hard times' brought with it the opportunity to restructure. This opportunity was used both by struggling companies and those that were doing quite well. Companies downsized, diversified, and increased their exposure to export markets. They sacked trainees and daily workers first, in order to reduce their severance pay liabilities. The threat of dismissal was also increasingly used as a disciplinary measure for those still employed. A significant proportion of the workforce was casualised. Factory management compensated for the decline in the military's overt role in controlling the industrial workforce by replacing them with local thugs (preman), who operated in workers' communities and at the factory gates.
According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO), up to 1,333,345 Indonesian industrial workers were dismissed in 1998 alone, with workers in the textile and footwear industries among the hardest hit. According to industry association estimates, 50% of the footwear and non-garment textile workforce was retrenched at the height of the crisis. Unemployed factory workers were forced to return to their villages (the agricultural sector grew for the first time in many years after Indonesia's economy collapsed) or into the urban informal sector.
Factory workers who did not lose their jobs also faced severe economic difficulties. Although nominal wages increased 15-20% in 1997-98, the consumer price index almost doubled in that time. The purchasing power of the minimum wage has been a major concern. In 1999, calculations of worker activists put a living wage at Rp 600,000 (about AU$ 120) in Jakarta and Bandung and Rp 469,000 in Surabaya. At the time, the regional minimum monthly wages were only Rp 230,000, Rp 228,000 and Rp 182,000 respectively. Shortfalls are met by compromising health and nutrition. As indicated by Ibu Betawi, workers work long hours to earn the overtime necessary for food, shelter and clothing. While some workers scrimp to send money to their families, others are actually subsidised by food sent from the villages.
Malaysia
As job opportunities shrank, the number of Indonesians looking for work overseas increased. According to a Kompas report in late 1998, demand for legal female migrant worker placements had jumped 35 per cent since the onset of the crisis. The crisis had a direct effect on the employment opportunities in many of the Asian countries where Indonesians work. In Malaysia - the Asian country receiving most Indonesian migrant workers - hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were rounded up and repatriated in order to protect Malaysian nationals from the effects of the crisis.
Despite repatriation drives in Malaysia and some other Asian countries, almost half a million Indonesians were placed by government-registered companies in the Middle East, the Asia-Pacific, Europe and North America in 2000. 71.39% of 'legal' migrant workers sent overseas between January 1999 and June 2001 were women. Malaysia, where in 1998 legal entrants made up only about one-third of all labour migration, continues to be the destination for the largest number of Indonesia's unofficial migrant workers. In mid-2001, 600,000 illegal migrants were detained in Malaysia. About the same time, it was estimated that 60,000 illegal migrants were working in Middle Eastern countries excluding Saudi Arabia - the major destination for Indonesian migrant workers in the region. These figures show how far the labouring poor will go to find work.
While Ibu Betawi did not turn to domestic work in Malaysia as a direct result of the crisis, her experiences were certainly influenced by increasing pressures in the factory and contracting opportunities outside it. Her decision to work overseas, her determination and optimism, are an important part of the story of working class lives that is not often told. Indonesians working in the factories and overseas face many difficulties, but they are not powerless. Ibu Betawi's self-confessed recklessness in approaching an illegal labour migration agent was a way to take control of her life, to escape the grind of factory work and to make her dead husband's family take some responsibility for her daughter's wellbeing. For others, it might be the decision to leave the house without permission, to arrive late at a factory, to take extra time for prayers or to steal a Nike shoe, an Adidas cap or an electronic component.
Despite the disincentives for activism that job insecurity brings, some workers make the decision to attend an education session or a strike meeting. On a collective level, many factory workers have continued to protest and organise in the post-Suharto era. Dramatic changes in Indonesia's legal framework after President Habibie ratified ILO Convention No 87 on the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise in June 1998 made trade union registration much easier. Ongoing opposition to trade unionism from business and significant sections of the bureaucracy has not prevented new unions from becoming part of Indonesia's official industrial relations system. SBSI, for example, is the major trade union alternative to the official SPSI in the 1990s. Others include informal workers' groups, some pre-New Order unions, and a host of new factory- and regionally-based unions. Although it is doubtful how effective many of these new unions are, their very presence is a significant achievement, considering Indonesia's long history of repression and the subsequent economic crisis.
For migrant workers, an organised collective response is more difficult. They don't work in factories employing thousands of people, but alone in their employers' homes. Nevertheless, with the support of a range of NGOs - many of which are associated with the Consortium for the Defence of Indonesian Migrant Workers (Kopbumi) - migrant workers have organised protests and campaigns in Indonesia and abroad.
Ibu Betawi may or may not be lucky in Malaysia. She might find herself with an understanding boss in conditions far better than those of domestic workers in Jakarta, or she might be deported, or raped or even killed. She has no desire to worry about what might or might not happen to her. Her sights are firmly set. She'll do whatever it takes.
Michele Ford (mford_mul@hotmail.com) is writing a PhD on Indonesian labour at Wollongong University, Australia.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
The street traders who feed and transport Jakarta are also its most unwelcome citizens
Vanessa Johanson
'During the economic crisis public transport drivers had a raw deal. The price of spare parts and fuel skyrocketed. Naturally they went on strike. But you know who organised them - the becak drivers!'
Romo Sudri and Palupi, and their colleagues at the Institut Sosial Jakarta (ISJ), spend their days organising those working in the so-called informal sector. Across Jakarta, they encourage them to challenge policies that prevent them from earning a reasonable income and living in reasonable dwellings.
No one knows for sure how many people make up the informal sector in Indonesia. Yet it is a central part of life. 'Imagine Jakarta without street vendors, building labourers and itinerant workers, garbage collectors (pemulung), street kids, home industries,' says Palupi. It could almost be said that this unacknowledged slice of the city community is actually its heart.
Romo Sudri and Palupi sit in ISJ's simple, dimly lit offices in Rawajaya, East Jakarta. Both are quiet-spoken. 'The informal sector have no legal protection whatsoever. All those bakso soup sellers are actually illegal. The urban poor workers - as we prefer to call them - are referred to by law as Social Welfare Problems (Penyandang Masalah Kesejahteraan Sosial). They have not been formally given any space, the law does not accept them as a real part of the community or economy. They don't pay tax. But I'd like to ask: how many conglomerates don't pay tax? Did Suharto ever pay tax?'
'The role of street vendors in the economy is ignored too. How would the newspaper companies, bottled drink companies and so on survive without them? Where do most of the office workers in Jakarta eat lunch? From street vendors of course. Yet these people are constantly evicted from their work locations and homes in so-called "city cleanup operations."'
Tension between the city administration and the urban poor - particularly becak (trishaw) drivers - is high. In some areas the streets are strewn with government-sponsored banners stating things like: 'This area has been cleansed of becaks'.
Development boom
Institut Sosial Jakarta was born in 1974 from the Sekolah Tinggi Filsafah. Its original goal was to move beyond philosophy to research and discuss the problems of the urban poor. One of its founders, John Muller, a German sociologist, was deported from Indonesia for his writing at the end of the 1980s. It was in the 1980s when ISJ decided to become more active in organising the urban poor and carrying out advocacy, as opposed to purely research.
'The 80's saw the development boom in Indonesia, accompanied by so much marginalisation of the poor. At the same time many NGOs became more involved in advocacy. In 1985 we established the Workers Consultation Bureau (Biro Konsultasi Perburuhan), which focused on education and case handling with factory workers. In 1989 Romo Sandyawan came to ISJ, and really consolidated the advocacy praxis.'
'We survived the repression of this era by studying the survival systems of the poor themselves. They have their own mechanisms, we used also what worked for them.'
Institut Sosial Jakarta enters poor communities hoping to catalyse but not lead activities. 'We can bring people together to talk about issues, we can suggest strategies, but we don't want to lead them. And we certainly don't want to use them for demonstrations for a particular issue. We want to organise them to work out their own strategies. This work is not very popular!'
ISJ has never been involved in welfare or income-generating activities. 'Actually, these people aren't poor,' says Romo Sudri. 'A becak driver can earn around Rp 30,000 (AU$6) a day, which is more than some taxi drivers earn, for example. They don't need charity, they need space. They need to know that they will be allowed to stay in one place and not be asked to pay illegal levies all the time.'
'The term slums (rumah kumuh) implies that the people who live there aren't interested in living clean lives. But they don't want to fix up their houses because they never know when they'll be moved on.'
The structural problems are great and long term. 'And it's not just in Jakarta,' says Palupi. 'Most cities have laws like the Public Order Regulation (Perda Ketertiban Umum) which regard the urban poor workers as filth.' This has been the attitude of the Jakarta administration since the days of governor Ali Sadikin, who said that trading in public places was illegal and those doing it should be swept out and go back to their villages.
'The people we work with are happy to pay tax, as long as they know that the system is clean. We surveyed the communities we worked with about what kind of government subsidies were needed and what for. They said they wanted subsidies for health and education, but hardly any wanted subsidies for their businesses. They just want to be allowed to go about their business, and for there to be no more harassment and no more monopolies.'
'We take a human rights rather than a charity approach. People have a right to earn their living unharrassed, it's not something they should have to beg for or be afraid about.'
Vanessa Johanson (vjohanson@indocg.org) works for the conflict resolution organisation Common Ground in Jakarta. Contact ISJ: email isj@indo.net.id, tel (62 21) 4786 3150 or tel/ fax (62 21) 489 7761.
Stop press: Up to 15,000 slum dwellers were made homeless in several cases of government-sponsored arson early in November. ISJ was there to accompany them.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Lea Jellinek
Jakarta's poorest tend to be hidden at the dead ends of pathways or on the river edge. Often their houses are in corners, along dark narrow alleyways where sun, air and light do not enter, even during the day. Otherwise their homes are perched on foul smelling drains or rest up against concrete walls.
The poorest often have difficulty communicating. They are used to being ignored. Some hardly look into your eyes but down and away so it is hard to have a conversation. They are ashamed. If you ask them about their background and history, they look blank - as if they have no memory. They speak in a mixture of dialects, slur their sentences and cannot explain their problems.
The poorest lack time. They cannot talk for long as they are looking all day for the money they need to buy food. Those who come to their homes find their doors bolted. 'They are out', a neighbour says. 'Gone looking for work.'
At 7 am one morning, we go to meet Ibu Ani, and find her walking through the local market place. She is a masseuse. She does not sit at home waiting for clients but seeks them out. We go back to her house to talk, but within half an hour she looks agitated. She says she must go out to look for work. Often she works till 10 pm, and then returns home to darn holes in clothing for her extended family.
The poorest have only their unskilled labour to sell. They tend to be masseurs, washerwomen, day labourers, guards, parking attendants, or 'Pa Ogah' - as they are oddly called - people who help cars do a U turn in the middle of the road. They seek work on a daily basis. They do not have the capital, confidence or skills for petty trade.
Up to four families, four generations, often live together in one tiny house. Ibu Ani, a grandmother, lives with three related families in her shack - a total of fifteen people - so she needs at least Rp 30,000 to feed them. That is four to six hours of massage per day and many hours of looking for clients.
The members of the family sleep side by side on the floor - no mattress, just pillows. During the day these pillows are stacked in a pile and the room is converted into a place for sitting and eating. An alcove in the roof with little light or air may be built above the room to create more sleeping space. People climb up a steep, rickety ladder to get there.
Flimsy
The homes of the poorest are built of flimsy materials: bamboo, cardboard, chicken wire, newspaper, tin cans, boards and other scavenged materials. The gaps in the walls let in some air but also the rain. They feel embarrassed by these flimsy structures. If the ground is wet, they have a bench to sleep on, for they are often close to rivers which flood knee-deep. Apart from the bench there is only a rack for clothing and dishes.
Electric lighting is rare. They use a kerosene lamp and, if their children are lucky enough to go to school, they gather like flies around the lamp to do their homework. Everything is done on the floor. Many of the poorest cannot read, write, or sign their names. They are embarrassed to write. With difficulty, they hold pen to paper and try to write their name.
Toilet and washing facilities are shared. For most water and toilet needs, the poorest usually have to walk some distance - sometimes along the narrow banks of sewage canals - to communal bathing facilities. Sometimes these cost Rp100-200 for urination and Rp300 for defecation or a bath. The poorest have to find ways of not paying these fees for they lack the money. To avoid paying for rubbish collection and sanitation, they throw everything into dirty canals or empty spaces around their homes.
It is a hard life with the mosquitoes, fleas, heat and filth. Their houses are often within metres of where everybody dumps rubbish. Sometimes the rubbish goes right into their homes, or it is burned nearby. There is a constant smell of burning plastic and smoke.
In the homes of the poorest, there is often an ill person lying in the background. Ibu Ani is very small, thin, and she limps. As we sit together on the floor, she keeps massaging her leg which looks thin, stiff and weak. Years ago she had a knee injury which was not treated. Now one part of the knee sticks out. Her face is hollow and sunken from suffering, and other parts of her body seem oddly disconnected.
Ibu Ani has lived in Jakarta since childhood and was orphaned at an early age. She explains that she has often been homeless and sought shelter in graveyards. She recalls the dark nights, the loneliness, the mud and the rain. Years ago she had one trip out of the city, to Bandung. The local government women's group organised it. She remembers it as the greatest journey of her life - acres of paddy, mountains, trees, blue sky, talk, laughter, friends in the bus and new experiences. Her face glows as she recalls the journey. 'When can I do it again?'
Lea Jellinek (leajell@ozemail.com.au) has written extensively - also in 'Inside Indonesia' - about how the poor cope.
Surviving thirty years in Central Jakarta
Lea Jellinek and Ed Kiefer
Central Jakarta is a smoking concrete jungle created over the past thirty-five years by Western-driven development. Work opportunities are difficult and extremely competitive. Uncontaminated water, air, and food are scarce. The poorest live crowded along stinking open sewers that were once rivers and canals. Ground water is polluted by industrial effluent and human waste. The sky is grey-black - as if a storm is coming - the result of unregulated vehicle emissions, open smoldering rubbish fires, and massive smoke-belching generators that power the air-conditioned luxury malls and apartment blocks of the rich.
Mimin is a native of Jakarta - a Betawi Asli. In her youth, she had been a tall, beautiful woman with lanky legs, a handsome face and long black hair which she tied back in a tight bun. She had been a singer (sinden) and widely known throughout the kampungs of Jakarta. With a middle school education, she was a confident, forceful woman.
In 1962 she married Mas Nilum, an East Javanese with a government job managing a military hostel near Mimin's home. At first they lived fairly comfortably with a house and a car. They started to have children. But Mimin's life went downhill dramatically when her husband lost his job during the upheavals of 1965.
In 1975 Mimin lived with her husband and many children in a dank concrete shack on the edge of the Cideng Canal in Kebun Kacang, then a densely settled urban kampung in the heart of Jakarta. She was nearly always on the central city streets. She traded all manner of things, as did her husband. She collected cakes from a Chinese manufacturer and sold them in the narrow pathways of local inner-city markets. Her husband distributed beer and live chickens to other kampungs. They were brokers (mencari objek) and dealt in anything going for sale. If a person needed a sideboard, chair, television, mattress or kampung house, they asked Mimin or Mas Nilum. They would find out who was selling these items, and where to buy them cheaply - receiving a payment from both the buyer and the seller. Mas Nilum also sold lottery tickets.
During the first ten years of their marriage, they made and lost money and were forced to move from one house to another in the same neighborhood. Eventually, Mimin obtained a cart and became a regular trader selling cigarettes, sweets and drinks opposite the Sarinah department store. Mas Nilum sold newspapers and magazines and his business expanded to incorporate ten to twenty paperboys, including some of his children. While Mimin was out on the streets, her eldest daughter looked after the younger children, shopped, cooked, cleaned, washed and ironed clothes.
Raids
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mimin suffered from anti-trader raids. The government clearing team would come along and try to confiscate her stall. She stood up to the military and police. Unlike most vulnerable traders on the streets of Jakarta, Mimin insisted she was a native of the area and how dare they try to move her away! She demanded to know whether they had children who needed food and education. What right did they have to destroy the livelihood of her family? Often they backed off, but once when her goods were cartedtaken away, she went with them, wrapping her arms around her cart and refusing to let go. The clearing team took her and her goods to Bekasi on the edge of Jakarta, where they were dumped in a compound among the rotting carts of many other traders. Many times she returned trying to retrieve them but without success. The guards wanted more for them than they were worth. Mimin mourned the loss of that cart for many months.
Mimin loved being surrounded by children. She had twelve, of whom nine survived, and she struggled to provide for them. Three of Mimin's children died of cholera. She had taken each to the hospital, but without money, they were not treated. From an early age, each child was taught to be responsible. Some sold newspapers, or shined shoes to add to the family's income. Each child, even if they worked, had to go to school. Her view - many children, much fortune ('banyak anak, banyak rejeki') - was typical of Indonesians at that time.
For many years Mimin had chosen to spend as little as possible on food. The children were thin and had poor complexions. They ate mainly fried or sweet snacks, rice, fried noodles, chili and salt. Mimin said that she lived on four herbal drinks (jamu) a day, which she bought from a passing traditional vendor. She believed they gave her the strength to go on.
Mimin befriended people sleeping on the streets who had just come into Jakarta and knew nothing about the city - advising them what to do, how to survive, where to make a livelihood. She often helped them with loans which were sometimes not repaid. She tried to help one young woman who had gone mad and walked the streets at night, black with dirt.
Mimin brought Aam to Jakarta from a poor family in Bogor, and tutored her in all the things that she had learned from a lifetime of trade on the streets of the city. Aam was related to Mimin through the marriage of a daughter. Aam had the innocence, strength and sharpness of a village girl, and became Mimin's loyal helper both in the home and at the stall. Aam eventually set up her own stall, taking over from Mas Nilum who had become too old and tired to sit by the bus shelter on the streets all day. As Mimin said: 'He cannot defend himself against the police. If they come to raid his stall he just sits there dumbfounded and lets them take everything away. He is afraid to speak out and assert his rights.'
Mimin preferred to ask outsiders such as Aam to help her with her stall rather than her own children. She felt that her children would feel entitled to dip into her trade and she would not be able to say no to them. Mimin believed that it was better if each of the children had their own separate income-earning activities. Mimin's eldest son had taken over his father's newspaper business. One of his younger brothers worked as a driver. The eldest daughter became a hairdresser. She combined this work with waitressing in a Chinese restaurant at night until she married and had a baby. Another daughter had married a man from Bogor and produced two children - thus the links with Aam. Sheni, the youngest, brightest and most ambitious daughter (much like her mother) had battled to study through university and became a cashier in one of the city's most exclusive restaurants.
The family was forced to move in 1981 when the kampung was demolished to make way for apartments. Most kampung dwellers were afraid to take up their option to move into these new flats. Without secure incomes, most feared regular monthly payments for mortgage, electricity, water, gas and rubbish collection. Mimin's family, however, jumped at the opportunity and took a ground floor flat. At that time it seemed beyond their capacity to pay, but looking back it was a bargain. The government had been trying to promote flats among the urban poor, and they received a subsidised rate. Years later these flats sold for many times the original price. Mimin and her family had obtained a very valuable asset: legal title to a home near the centre of Jakarta - within walking distance of their jobs on the city streets.
Mimin's children liked to gather regularly in the flat it was often full with as many as fifteen people, counting children and in-laws. At night, they lay like sardines - one beside the other watching television on the floor of the living room. Mimin and her husband had a room to themselves.
Crisis
When the economic crisis of 1997 hit the city centre, Mimin felt the impact keenly. Many banks which towered up around her home closed down. Across the road, the Golden Truly supermarket - partly owned by one of Suharto's children - went bankrupt. The number of people who came past Mimin's stall dropped by more than half. Instead of whole packets of cigarettes, customers wanted to buy only one cigarette at a time. The prices of Mimin's goods leaped up. She found it difficult to know what to charge. Sometimes she could not replace her stock for the price she had sold it.
Time and environment have taken a toll on Mimin. She sits every day in her tiny red and white striped stall on the hot, noisy and filthy street. No longer the elegant girl, she has become a wrinkled old lady, often frustrated, tired and in pain.
In her thirty years in central Jakarta, the temperatures have risen as large trees have been replaced by multi-storey buildings whose air-conditioners pump out heat. She worries about her children being influenced by the young drug addicts injecting and sniffing drugs beside her stall. A brothel has been started behind her stall. Police have been paid off and do little about these problems.
Although Mimin and her husband long to return to the village where some of their relatives still remain, there are major obstacles. Their children do not want to leave. They think rural life represents poverty, hard work and boring backwardness. They prefer to seek their livelihood in Jakarta and cannot envisage living anywhere else. All of them depend on their central city apartment. To move, Mimin would have to sell that flat to pay for land and a house in the village - but that would leave her children homeless in Jakarta.
Ed Kiefer (ekiefer@hotmail.com) and Lea Jellinek live near Lismore, Australia. Lea wrote about Mimim in Josef Gugler (ed), 'Cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America' (1997).
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Four years later, how has the economic crisis affected the poor?
Anne Booth
The debate about the impact of the crisis on poverty and income distribution continues. Let me start by summarising what the available statistics appear to tell us. First, the contraction in Gross Domestic Product which occurred in 1998 was most severe in the non-agricultural sectors of the economy, especially in construction, the financial sector, wholesale and retail trade, non-oil manufacturing and transport. All these sectors registered contractions of more than five per cent. It has also been in these sectors, especially construction and financial services, that employment has fallen most rapidly. Indeed the labour force surveys conducted since 1997 indicate that there has been no net growth in non-agricultural employment between 1997 and 2000.
It is also clear from the national income data that the contraction in investment expenditure was far greater than the contraction in personal consumption expenditure. This indeed was the main reason why the initial impact of the crisis on poverty and living standards was less than predicted in mid-1998. But there can be little doubt that the contraction in non-agricultural output and employment, together with the surge in inflation in the middle months of 1998, had an especially serious effect on the poor, because food prices rose more rapidly than non-food prices. This indeed was what had happened in previous inflationary episodes in Indonesia. Thus while the crisis-induced contraction in GDP might not have affected the incomes of the poor more seriously than those of the better off, the ensuing inflation certainly did.
Similarly, the lessons of previous devaluations in Indonesia are useful in predicting the likely effect of the very substantial rupiah devaluation of 1997-98 on incomes of various categories of producer. There can be no doubt that the devaluation led to a rapid increase in the rupiah prices of a range of agricultural products in the last part of 1997 and early 1998, and that the supply response was positive. The GDP data indicate that output of tree crops grew by more than two per cent between 1997 and 1999, in spite of the lingering effects of the drought. But the rapid inflation of 1998 led to a surge in the cost of living for farmers, and thus an erosion of the effects of the devaluation on relative prices. Because of the magnitude of the inflation, the erosion almost certainly took place more quickly than in past devaluations. In addition, the rupiah began to appreciate in late 1998 and early 1999 (although it fell again in 2000/1). Thus by mid-1999 much of the positive effect of the devaluation on the real incomes of rural producers had been dissipated.
As far as most wage and salary workers were concerned, the effects of the rupiah devaluation and the ensuing inflation were almost wholly negative. Real wages in all sectors of the economy fell steeply in late 1997 and 1998, and appear to have made only a partial recovery since then. Thus it may well be correct to argue that, relative to rural producers of export products, urban dwellers did suffer a greater decline in income especially in the initial phase of the crisis. But given the large increase in the agricultural labour force that has occurred between 1997 and 2000, it is unlikely that there will be a strong upward pressure on agricultural wages for some time to come.
Social security
It is hardly surprising, given the suddenness and severity of the downturn in Indonesia, that the question of enhanced social security should be getting far more attention from independent analysts and policy-makers than at any time over the past three decades. As in many other parts of the Asian region, Indonesian policymakers have in the past voiced their hostility to 'western-style' social security provision which is supposed to destroy entrepreneurial initiative and lead to a culture of welfare dependency. But in reality, given the combination of rapid economic growth, rapid growth of employment opportunities, and a favourable dependency ratio due to the speed of the fertility decline in most parts of the country, policy-makers have not been under pressure from any powerful constituency to concern themselves with comprehensive social security provision. Now with the possibility of slower economic growth, together with the demographic inevitability of a higher proportion of the population moving into the older age groups, issues such as social security, and the provision of 'social safety nets' are suddenly at the forefront of the policy debates in Indonesia.
They are likely to stay there in coming decades. The implementation of the social safety net programmes since 1998, however inadequate the targeting has been, has built up a set of expectations that the government should provide basic goods and services such as food, health and education at prices which all sections of the population can afford. Future Indonesian governments will have to deal with these, and other, expectations. Experience from other countries indicates that it is politically very difficult to remove welfare entitlements once they have been conceded, even if the initial granting of the entitlements was made under conditions of severe economic distress. However reluctantly, future Indonesian governments will have to transform emergency social safety net programmes into more comprehensive social programmes aimed at giving all citizens access to basic needs and services. Thus it is likely that debates over implementation and targeting, far from ending once the economy begins to recover, will intensify.
Does the Indonesian experience of 1997/9 offer any lessons to other countries coping with the aftermath of a severe financial crisis, leading to a substantial decline in real output? Perhaps the most obvious lesson is that such crises can burst out of what might appear to be a clear blue sky with little warning. While preventing a crisis from happening in the first place is obviously the best method of preventing crisis-related social ills, the experience of countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea in 1997-9 does confirm the view of the economic historian, Raymond Goldsmith, that financial crises are the inevitable 'childhood disease' of capitalism. Governments in other parts of the developing world would do well to realise that being hailed as a 'miracle economy' by leading international development experts does not immunise a country from such diseases. In fact, to the extent that the over-hyping of the economic performance of Indonesia, together with Thailand, Malaysia and South Korea, in a number of publications in the early 1990s bred an attitude among policy-makers in these countries that they were somehow exempt from the risks and dangers that beset other developing economies, the international development establishment, led by the World Bank, has to take some of the blame for the Asian crisis. Policy-makers in other parts of the developing world would do well to ponder these lessons, and make prudent allowance for the fact that such crises will almost certainly affect them at some stage in their evolution into mature capitalist economies.
A second important lesson is that the effects of a severe economic downturn in an economy as large and heterogeneous as Indonesia are very difficult to measure. Most of the initial judgements which were made by a number of agencies and individuals in 1998 have had to be modified as more data have come to hand from different parts of the country. Even four years after the crisis hit, the effects are still working through to millions of households across the country. In addition, different analysts have drawn quite different conclusions from the same body of data about trends in poverty, depending on how the poverty line is estimated.
Indeed, it can reasonably be argued that none of the data sets pressed into service between 1998 and 2001 to estimate the impact of the crisis on poverty, income distribution, and unemployment was entirely suitable for the purpose. Household surveys such as the Susenas by their very nature ignore that part of the population who do not live in registered households. To the extent that numbers of unregistered street dwellers have increased in urban and peri-urban areas since 1997, and to the extent that many of them have expenditures below the official poverty line, they are excluded from the poverty estimates. Other data sets such as the 100-village survey, while useful as far as they go, were deliberately skewed to poorer rural areas and ignore trends not just in urban areas but also in the more developed rural hinterland.
Thus debates about the impact of the crisis on poverty and living standards are likely to continue in Indonesia for some time to come. It will probably be at least a decade before we can draw final conclusions about the effects of the crisis on poverty and welfare, let alone evaluate the efficacy of the various policy measures which have been implemented to alleviate these effects. One can only hope that by then, living standards will have improved for the poorest and most vulnerable groups in Indonesia and the grim years at the end of the twentieth century will be a distant memory.
Professor Anne Booth teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She has written numerous books and articles on the Indonesian economy.
Inside Indonesia 69: Jan - Mar 2002
Page 54 of 67
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