Indonesian non-government organisations call for massive relief
Binny Buchori & Sugeng Bahagijo
Indonesia has just freed itself from an authoritarian regime, but the Indonesian people are not free from the debt burden. Unless massive debt relief is extended to Indonesia, the next decade will be lost for millions of Indonesians and their children. Supported by international public institutions such as the World Bank, the IMF and the Paris Club, the Suharto regime accumulated US$159 billion in external debt. This debt now threatens Indonesian economic recovery.
The highlights of Indonesian external debt are as follows:
Over the period 1993-1998, Indonesia suffered a net transfer of minus US$ 5,354 million. This means that the inflow of money from loans by various creditors (bilateral, multilateral and private) was smaller than the outflow under Indonesia's repayment obligations by this amount.
Indonesia has to pay more than half of her export earnings to service its debt. This means that over half the country's hard currency, which could be used to buy goods and services for economic recovery and for the social safety net, goes to the rich countries and banks in the north.
Without rescheduling or debt relief, the principal repayments on Indonesia's public external debt will increase from about $2 billion in 1999 to $5 billion in 2000, rising to $9 billion a year in both 2001 and 2002, according to the credit rating firm Standard & Poor.
Indonesian debt now amounts to over 140 percent of the annual gross domestic product, double what it was eight years ago.
How bad is it?
Before the 1997 financial crisis, Suharto preferred to call foreign debt by the name foreign aid. Because of mismanagement in handling loan proceeds, and corruption in the collection of taxes, Indonesia was not able to rely on domestic resources like manufacturing and oil and gas to gradually reduce the external debt. Indonesia continued to increase her external debt every year. At the same time the World Bank, IMF, ADB and other creditors (Paris Club, CGI) were always eager to extend new loans, despite knowing about this corruption and mismanagement.
A recent study by the independent Jakarta economic think tank Econit (table) pictures continually increasing government or public debt - that is, debt owed not by private companies but ultimately by the public through the state. In 1998, the year an IMF package kicked in, it rose to US$144 billion. This debt is now higher than the total amount Indonesia produces in a year (gross domestic product, GDP). The debt service ratio (DSR) measures debt repayments (interest and principal) as a proportion of export earning. It now stands at well over half.
Indonesia's debt
The financial crisis of 1997 became an economic crisis due to rapid devaluation, spiraling external debt, and a loss of investor confidence. When the IMF came to Indonesia's rescue it applied its classic prescription of increased taxes, reduced public spending, and increased interest rates. The package caused a dramatic surge in Indonesia indebtedness. In the words of aid agency Oxfam, the IMF was not responsible for East Asia's crisis, but it was responsible for deepening and prolonging the recession.
Behind these statistics lies a real human cost suffered by Indonesians. Here are some of the facts on how the crisis directly affects child and maternal welfare:
In West Sumatra, more than 32 thousand children out of 300 thousand children under 5 years old are critically malnourished. In Riau province, the incidence of malnourishment among children under five is 27,690 children. Across Indonesia, malnourishment among children under 5 is found in 200 district (kabupatens) out of 320.
Vitamin A deficiency has reemerged. The proportion of children aged between one and two years that do not consume eggs (the main source of vitamin A) has almost doubled to 14 percent (Hellen Keller International - HKI - data, quoted by Oxfam report, 1999)
Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA), which impairs the immune system and the intellectual development of children, has increased from 50 per cent in 1985 to 64 percent. Both childhood and maternal anemia rates have risen during the crisis (HKI data).
Maternal malnutrition is increasing. Since 1996 the average body mass among women of reproductive age fell by 1 kg - almost reversing the increase achieved over the past 30 years. (HKI data). The effects are also visible in education. Oxfam reports recently:
A decrease of 4-5 per cent in school enrolments. This translates to about 1.3 million children who are deprived of access to the education they need to escape a life of poverty. The rate of decline for girls' enrollment is twice that for boys.
The most significant reductions in enrolment level have been recorded in Central Java, Jakarta and Maluku.
A proposal
There are at least five arguments in favour of debt relief for Indonesia:
Without relief, economic and social recovery will be threatened. Indonesia post-crisis is similar to post-second world war Germany. Many schools, factories, and offices are closed. Many children under five are malnourished. Many public health clinics do not have medicines. Unemployment is rising. The only hope is revenue from exporting oil and manufactured products. But if the debt service ratio continues at its current level of more than 50%, the prospect for recovery is long and difficult. Certainly the budget for health, education, and subsidies for medicine, food and kerosene will be sacrificed.
The new government under president Gus Dur needs budget and fiscal flexibility to allow it to stimulate economic growth through increased public spending, increased real sector investment and to finance the costs of the social safety net. (The current social safety net is financed, once more, by loan money from the World Bank with adjustment conditionalities.) Without such flexibility, any government will have difficulty in delivering its economic recovery agenda.
Loans that were misused or corrupted by Suharto cronies and New Order officials cannot be the responsibility of the new government. We propose that odious or criminal debts be cancelled. The World Bank admitted the leakage and estimated it amounted to about 30%. We propose that the coming Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) meeting, and talks with the IMF, should include the cancellation of this debt.
Creditors are ready to discuss the issue of debt and debt relief now. During World Bank consultations with Infid, World Bank country director for Indonesia Mark Baird expressed his concern about the rising Indonesia debt burden, both external (owed to bilateral, multilateral and private banks in the north) and domestic (the government has issued billions of rupiahs in bonds to finance the recapitalisation of sick banks).
Debt relief experience in the past has been workable and good, both for debtors and creditors. The massive debt relief extended to Germany after world war two by the allied powers, and the huge debt relief for Indonesia granted by the Paris Club (for bilateral debt) in 1970-71 are prime examples. The debtor economy can use the money to buy goods and services for recovery. As long as there is common sense and political will on the side of the creditors, debt relief is workable.
The International Non-government organisations (NGO) Forum on Indonesian Development, Infid, therefore proposes debt relief for Indonesia as follows:
A minimum 30% debt cancellation/ reduction to be taken out of the US$70 billion government debt owed to multilateral (WB, IMF and ADB), bilateral (Japan, US, Germany) and private banks;
Indonesia only to repay debt at an annual level not to exceed 5% of DSR ( 5 per cent from export revenues). This will free up money for public spending and the social safety net;
Private debt should not become a burden for public debt. The Indonesian government should not be forced to pay the private debt. Creditor and debtor should both be held responsible for bad lending and bad decisions.
Binny Buchori is executive secretary of Infid (the International Non-government organisations Forum on Indonesian Development). Sugeng Bahagijo is information manager. Contact Infid: Jalan Mampang Prapatan XI/23, Jakarta 12790, Indonesia, tel +62-21-79196721, 79196722, fax +62-21-794 1577, email infid@nusa.or.id or krakatau@cbn.net.id
Public external debt (US$bn)
% of GDP
DSR %
1991
72
62
45
1995
107
53
43
1997
137
63
46
1998
144
147
52
Source: Econit 1999.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
A conversation with an activist reveals there is more than one Aceh cause?
Maree Keating
Otto Syamsuddin Ishak is at once public servant, academic and activist. He lectures in agriculture at the Syiah University in Banda Aceh and is executive officer of Cordova, a non-government organisation (NGO) educating the public on civil society and human rights. He also has links with the armed section of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM). I met Otto in Melbourne during an awareness-raising tour last October.
To an outsider, there seem many grounds for hope. New president Gus Dur says he is prepared to negotiate with GAM. He created the new portfolio of Minister for Human Rights, and appointed long term Acehnese human rights campaigner Hasballah Saad to fill it. More concessions have been granted to Islamic syari'ah law in Aceh. Aceh is no longer classified as a military operations area (DOM), and General Wiranto has admitted military excesses.
But when I ask Otto how the Acehnese perceive these concessions he tells me bluntly: 'There is not a single policy that gives us cause for hope, because both Gus Dur and Megawati have the same principle - they want a united nation and give no indication they will free Aceh'. He is equally pessimistic about Hasballah: 'Nobody really believes that he can be successful, because he is not a popular figure in Aceh. The people in Aceh feel better represented by the PPP leader, Ghazali Abbas Adan. He is the only one in a position to speak about human rights in Aceh to Jakarta.'
Hasballah's position, Otto says, is dilemmatic - he stands between the Acehnese struggle and the Indonesian military, each as determined as the other. I wonder if rejecting Hasballah on these grounds is not tantamount to ruling out any form of cooperation. But Otto puts it like this: 'Jakarta always sets up teams [to investigate abuses], without any consultation. Because of that, people have no faith in these teams. None of its members are credible.'
Is Ghazali credible because PPP supports a referendum for Aceh, whereas Hasballah remains less definite on it? Otto seemed reluctant to articulate such political differences, perhaps because, as he says, human rights have become an intensely unifying issue for those championing independence. 'At the moment GAM has a human rights perspective', he says. 'Human rights are being used as a way to find a sympathetic focus. They use the issue of human rights to mobilise society.'
Religion
Otto is also wary of Jakarta's concessions in the area of Islamic syari'ah law. He seems to suggest it could be an attempt by Jakarta to fuel horizontal conflict. Operasi Jilbab is a recent phenomenon where Islamic officials force people to dress in accordance with strict Islamic codes, attend mosque regularly and behave in a devout manner. It is unclear whether Operasi Jilbab sprang spontaneously from a desire for more religion within the community, or whether outside forces played a role in developing an Islamic militancy which most people find oppressive.
When I ask Otto to explain the role of religion in the conflict, he says: 'It is really a secular issue. People have resorted to the security of Islam as a kind of regional identity and as a means of survival.... So they would not feel they were dying in vain? It is not GAM so much as the people themselves who have turned to religion.'
It is difficult for me to imagine what living in a devoutly religious society is like. Perhaps an Islamic version of Christian liberation theology I can recognise, but when people start talking about holy wars and public floggings, I realise that not all things can be translated easily for an Australian public. It strikes me as odd that Otto calls the Aceh conflict a secular issue, for how could anything be secular in a society where Operasi Jilbab can take place and where religious leaders are so powerful?
I ask him about the worst case scenario, and his reply reveals the depth of religious feeling in Aceh. He says: 'The worst scenario is a face to face confrontation. The religious leaders (ulama) have declared that if there is no referendum in the next six months they will take a decision to declare a holy war (jihad). If the ulama want it, they will get the support from the community.' When asked how he and others in the NGO community feel about that, his answer implies that the power of the religious leaders is stronger than that of the non-violent civil society movement. 'They are worried about what will happen', he says. 'But they are not brave enough to say this because they will become a target for the community's anger.'
The referendum movement in Aceh seems to consist of groups with sometimes opposing aims. They include the armed and unarmed sections of GAM, the religious leaders (divided into 'old' and 'new'), students, NGOs and other advocates for a civil society. There is in fact no single Acehnese movement.
Some of the 'old' style ulama lost credibility in the past for aligning themselves too closely with Golkar. They now want to regain popular support by taking a strong stance on the referendum. According to Otto, ninety percent of the population want a referendum. Whereas militant GAM leaders in the past have said they will not engage with the 'Javanese' government on a referendum, Otto says this stance has recently changed. 'If the ulama call for a referendum, GAM will support it, even though previously they did not.'
But if ninety percent support a referendum, it is not clear whether people want the outcome to be a sultanate or a democratic republic. Otto says: 'There are those who want democracy (who use non-violence), and those who want a sultanate (who use violence)? There is a symbiosis between the two which is mutually beneficial. Student activists and all the groups with an interest in a democratic society believe that a sultanate will not be democratic. Because of that they are taking the initiative towards a referendum.'
For Australians wanting to answer Otto's call for support, the challenge remains to find a clearer understanding about what kinds of dialogue are possible within Aceh. If groups within Aceh are afraid to speak out against a violent solution for fear of unleashing the community's anger upon them, the potential for a democratic process could be a fragile one.
Maree Keating (mkeating@ozvol.org.au) is country program manager for Indonesia with Australian Volunteers International. The views in this article are her own and not necessarily those of AVI.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
An urban movement pushes for a peaceful solution
Nina FitzSimons
In the wake of a military crackdown in Biak in July 1998, Christian churches, student and women's groups, and non-government organisations (NGOs) formed a non-party political coalition to pursue a peaceful solution to West Papuan concerns. The Forum for Reconciliation of Irian Jaya Society (Foreri) sought to enter into dialogue with the government.
On the 26th February 1999, after four months of planning and five drafts of the terms of reference, then-President Habibie and cabinet ministers met in Jakarta with a one hundred member delegation of Papuan representatives to launch the 'national dialogue'. Foreri played the role of facilitator. The West Papuans unanimously declared their desire for independence. They wanted President Habibie to publicly recognise the loss of Papua's independence through the 1969 Act of Free Choice. Habibie's response indicated that he was not expecting the declaration. Putting aside his prepared speech, he told the delegation to consider their decision carefully.
Since that meeting there has been no progress. On April 17th 1999 Irian Jaya's chief of police, Hotman Siagian, issued a proclamation banning all discussion and dissemination of information resulting from the national dialogue. This effectively prevents all Papuans from discussing independence or greater autonomy from Indonesia. The workshops and seminars which were to follow the Jakarta meeting will not be taking place.
NGOs in Jayapura say they know the government's answer to the delegation's aspirations. It is the 27th July bill to divide Irian Jaya into three separate provinces. Governors for the new provinces of West Irian, Central Irian and East Irian were sworn in on 12 October 1999. The Protestant church GKI says the division indicates the government's refusal to open any form of conflict resolution. West Papuans fear the administrative expansion will bring in more Javanese bureaucrats. Transmigration (often by Muslims) already means the (largely Christian) Papuan population now only makes up half the territory's population.
Since the February 26th meeting, delegates and facilitators of the national dialogue have become targets of intimidation. Travel restrictions were placed on the main leaders of the national dialogue delegation in August, preventing them from leaving Jayapura. On a wider scale, military command posts are continually being set up to ensure no further 'interference' by delegation parties. Furthermore the government has sought to eliminate the role of Foreri by suspending all communications with the Foreri office. The government discredits the national dialogue as the work of radicals. Some officials have dropped hints that delegate members are part of a group supplying arms to West Papuans opposing the Freeport mine.
In Fak-Fak police raided and vandalised a local traditional house that was being used as a meeting place and information centre on independence issues by local tribal leaders. While no one was injured, police removed all sacred and indigenous artifacts and destroyed them.
The independent human rights organisation in Jayapura, ELS-HAM, has been collecting data on recent killings and intends to publish the results. In August it distributed a report listing human rights abuses in the Central Highlands area as a direct result of the foreign hostage case of early 1996. The abuses implicated the International Committee of the Red Cross and British elite troops SAS. The fact that it took three years to gather enough concrete evidence highlights the difficulties faced by NGOs investigating human rights abuse. As it is, calls by ELS-HAM for the government to protect witnesses relating to this case have fallen on deaf ears.
Nina FitzSimons (ninafitz@solo.wasantara.net.id) is an Australian volunteer in Solo, Central Java. She visited Irian Jaya in June 1999 as an electoral monitor under an ACFOA programme.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
The UN ballot in 1969 broke every rule for genuine self-determination
Sam Blay
West Papua (Irian Jaya) is the oldest self-determination issue in Indonesia since independence. During decolonisation negotations in 1949, the Dutch did not hand over this part of the former Netherlands East Indies to what is now the Republic of Indonesia. However, Indonesia continued to demand sovereignty over West Papua on two grounds: (a) that it succeeded to Dutch sovereignty over the whole of the Netherlands East Indies, including West Papua; (b) that there were historical ties between the rest of Indonesia and West Papua before the colonial era.
In 1962, Indonesia and the Netherlands reached agreement over West Papua under the New York Agreement. The Netherlands transferred sovereignty over West Papua to Indonesia, with an interim administration by the United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (Untea). Untea administered West Papua from October 1962 to May 1963, when Indonesia assumed total control and responsibility.
Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua was to be tentative because, under Article XVIII of the agreement, Indonesia undertook to ascertain the wishes of the people of West Papua through a consultation process to establish whether they wanted to remain part of Indonesia or to form an independent state. This consultation, the Act of Free Choice, took place in July 1969.
Right from the outset, considerable sections of the West Papuan population opposed the incorporation. Activists formed the Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM) in 1970. The movement aimed at independence for West Papua by way of armed struggle. In July 1972, the OPM enacted a provisional constitution and declared West Papua a republic.
The principal claim of West Papuan separatists is that the 1969 consultation process was not properly conducted and was therefore not valid. West Papuans demand the conduct of fresh consultations, as was the case in East Timor. OPM organisations argue that a consultation is now more urgent than ever because of continuous and increasingly gross human rights violations by Indonesia, and because Indonesia has attempted to change the population balance in West Papua through the transmigration of 'mainland' Indonesians.
A series of petitions to the UN on these human rights violations, and pleas for the UN Decolonisation Committee to investigate the conduct of the 1969 referendum and possibly recommend fresh consultations, have all so far failed.
The OPM is fragmented. Too poorly armed to mount any credible guerilla campaign and with no effective strategy, it relies mostly on non-governmental organisations. It lacks any real political support even in the South Pacific. In spite of these difficulties, the events in East Timor and the current focus on self-determination in Indonesia provide some optimism for West Papua's future. International political support would in part depend on the legal merits of their claims in international law.
Rules
As a rule, self-determination can be exercised in one of the following three ways: the establishment of an independent state; the association of the beneficiary territory with an existing state; or the integration of the beneficiary territory into an existing state. Whatever the outcome, democratic consultations are the necessary precondition for a valid exercise of the right. The 1969 consultations indicated that West Papuans opted for integration, but the issue is whether the option was validly exercised. According to UN rules, two conditions must be satisfied for a valid exercise of self-determination by integration:
(a) the integrated territory should have attained an advanced stage of self-government with free political institutions, so that its people would have the capacity to make a responsible choice through informed and democratic processes;
(b) the integration should be the result of the freely expressed wishes of the territory's peoples acting with full knowledge of the change in their status, their wishes having been expressed through informed and democratic processes, conducted impartially and based on universal adult suffrage.
It is very doubtful whether the West Papuan integration in 1969 met these conditions. Before the Act of Free Choice, Indonesian authorities had made it quite clear that the consultations were only to be a formality. Indonesia indeed indicated that it was 'going through the motions of the act of free choice because of [its] obligations under the New York Agreement... But West [Papua] is Indonesian and must remain Indonesian. [Indonesia] cannot accept any alternative'. From the Indonesian point of view, the outcome of any consultation was irrelevant - integration was a foregone conclusion.
Under the New York Agreement, a traditional form of consultation was to be used initially to determine the appropriate methods to be followed for the Act of Free Choice. Secondly, the consultation had to involve the participation of all adults (male and female) of West Papua. Thirdly, the method used to ascertain the wishes of the West Papuans had to be in 'accordance with international practice'.
When the time came for a decision on the method to be used, the representative of the UN Secretary General in West Papua suggested that the 'democratic, orthodox and universally accepted ?one-man-one-vote? method would be most appropriate'. However, he qualified this by saying, 'the geographical and human realities in some parts of the territory required the application of a realistic criterion.' Consequently, he proposed a normal adult suffrage for the urban areas, and a form of tribal consultation for the rural areas. Indonesia rejected the suggestion and adopted instead the tribal musyawarah system throughout the territory.
The musyawarah system involved consultations with tribal council representatives, who in turn were presumed to have had consultations with their tribesmen. Arguably, the system may have been a useful democratic machinery for tribal administration, but it was certainly not in conformity with the essential requirements of the UN's prescriptions on self-determination. By employing the musyawarah system throughout the territory, it would seem that Indonesia breached one of its obligations under the New York Agreement, and indeed, international law.
Indonesia itself admitted that the musyawarah system fell short of the UN requirement, but it justified the use of the system with the argument that 'in West [Papua] there exists? one of the most primitive and underdeveloped communities in the world', and that it was unrealistic to apply normal democratic methods to ascertain their wishes. This was a rather significant admission. If according to the Indonesian administration the West Papuans were so primitive that a single one man one vote adult suffrage was not appropriate for them, it may be argued that they were not sufficiently advanced to appreciate the complex implications of integration.
Some African states that opposed the Indonesian method summed up the general sentiment at the time with the observation that 'no society could be so primitive... in the modern world that the vital exercise of democratic government could be indefinitely denied to its peoples'. Some UN members also held the view that if the West Papuans were that primitive, the way to ensure their right to self-determination was not through the musyawarah system but through an accelerated economic development of the territory under the auspices of the UN to bring them up to a level that could enable them to exercise their right to self- determination meaningfully. Even though these criticisms and suggestions were ignored, they underscored the anomalies associated with West Papua's integration.
Defects
The Act of Free Choice had other defects. Under the UN regulations, consultations for integration must not only be by adult suffrage, but must also be conducted impartially, and where the UN deems it necessary, under its own supervision. However, in line with Indonesia's position that West Papua belonged to it in any case and that the consultations were only a formality to rubber-stamp its claims, Indonesia maintained tight controls over all aspects of the consultations. In fact Indonesia allowed a token UN supervision in only 195 of the 1,000 consultative assemblies.
The required impartiality, and the appropriate explanations to West Papuans as to other options for self-determination available to them, were arguably absent in the consultations. The UN representative to West Papua further attested to the unsatisfactory state of affairs in his observation that 'the act of free choice was obviously stage-managed from start to finish ... [Indonesia] exercised at all times a tight control over the population.'
In the frenzy of decolonisation in the 1960s, Third World states at the UN were eager to terminate Dutch colonialism in West Papua. Indonesia enjoyed considerable support at the UN in its claims against the Netherlands for West Papua. Quite apart from its diplomatic advantage, Indonesia had also been preparing a military invasion of West Papua.
In the face of these difficulties, the Netherlands signed the New York Agreement. It was a face-saving measure that enabled the Netherlands to withdraw 'honourably'. For Indonesia, the Agreement had been a great diplomatic victory. After the signing, West Papua became a de facto integral part of Indonesia, despite the requirement of the so-called Act of Free Choice. At the UN, the incorporation seemed a fait accompli.
Secret documents recently released by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade easily indicate that Australia and the United States actively assisted Indonesia at the UN to secure its control over West Papua, even where it was clear that there were serious defects with the procedure. Australia also helped discourage petitions and debate on the merits of the integration at the UN.
It is beyond doubt that the people of West Papua were denied their right to self-determination. Little noticed, separatist agitation in West Papua has persisted for over three decades. Every indication is that it will persist into the new century. After East Timor, the conditions appear right to re-examine the issue to help protect West Papuans rights. Legally there is no barrier for a re-examination of the issues. However as is usually the case in international law, the absence of legal barriers may not be enough.
West Papua needs support for the Decolonisation Committee to accept to investigate the case. Time is of the essence. The UN intends to disestablish the Decolonisation Committee by the year 2001. Given Australia's involvement and its commitment to stability in the region, it has a critical role to play in assisting West Papua.
Sam Blay (sam.blay@uts.edu.au) is professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
An Indonesian eyewitness to the East Timor tragedy pleads for compassion.
Interview with Yeni Rosa Damayanti
Booing filled the auditorium of the Menara Peninsula Hotel in Jakarta. They were booing Yeni Rosa Damayanti, saying she was 'non-nationalistic', 'without love' for Indonesia, because she had given evidence of the burning of East Timor. One participant in the public debate on post-ballot East Timor, held by the think-tank Cides on 15 September, came to the microphone and accused her of disgracing Indonesia before the world. For Yeye - Damayanti's nickname - it was not the first time. Someone circulated an email headed: 'Do you know who the nation's traitors are?' Yeye was second on the list. The first was Hendardi, director of the legal aid institute PBHI. How did Yeye react to all this?
People just now thought you were too angry. What do you say to them?
I was in Dili until September 11, with seven friends from the independent Indonesian monitoring group Kiper. We saw the people of Timor, adults and children alike, being killed. Their houses looted, then burnt down. Anyone would be angry if they saw humanity trampled like that. Even now, the soul of a whole nation is being murdered.
You mean pro-independence East Timorese?
I mean the nation of Timor Leste. The killings are regardless of the victims' political views. I can prove that. Straight after the announcement of the ballot result on September 4, militias from Barisan Merah Putih (Red and White Front) and Aitarak were going around Dili carrying M-16, SS-1 and homemade guns, as well as machetes. At first it was just psy-war. But then the shooting was aimed directly at the townspeople. They attacked suburbs such as Taibesi and Becora and razed them to the ground. Massive burning took place on September 6 and 7. In just two days, Dili was reduced to ashes.
In a press conference yesterday you mentioned the army's involvement....
Yes. Where did those M-16 and SS-1 rifles come from? And the police and military (TNI) clearly let the militias burn. Militias looted a shopping centre and one managed to find a spring bed. Do you know how they took it away? On an army truck. Before the militias attacked a suburb, police came and announced it would soon be controlled by pro-autonomy forces. 'Residents out or be killed.' This also happened to Kiper. Our Dili office constantly had to move, because the area was being attacked. In the end Kiper's office was also looted and burnt down.
Did you see any shooting between militias and pro-independent supporters?
This is what needs to be clarified. Not a single bullet was fired between the two groups. This was entirely about terror and killing carried out by just one force and supported by the Indonesian military.
There are 800,000 East Timorese. Only about 130,000 have gone to West Timor. Where are the rest?
Some were killed, and more than 500,000 chose to flee to the mountains of East Timor. This is what I'm worried about. Three hundred children in Ermera are facing death by starvation. There is no food for them.
Why didn't they go to the refugee camps already prepared for them in Atambua in West Timor?
All the refugees to West Timor had to sign a letter saying they were pro-autonomy. And TNI guarded the town borders. They would ask: 'Where are you heading?' If they were refugees, they were sent along a special route that no one else was allowed to use. My friends and I tried to follow the same route. The soldiers asked: Refugees? My friend said: No. We were forbidden to go that way. I don't imagine the army will help the refugees. I demand that Timor Leste be opened to humanitarian aid for those in the mountains.
Military intelligence SGI was out looking for you. How did you pass the blockade?
The order was indeed to get Yeni Rosa Damayanti. But the militias and the soldiers didn't know what I looked like. SGI were not just looking for me. Also for the East Timorese students now in hiding in various places.
In the debate just now, some thought you were not nationalistic enough.
TNI kills people in Timor Leste, Aceh, Papua, Tanjung Priok. Why doesn't anyone say they are not nationalistic enough? If people say TNI kill to preserve Indonesian nationhood, the integrity of the nation, then in my view our concept of nationalism is chauvinistic, fascist and expansionist. I've had enough of it, if that is the case.
Many demonstrations in Jakarta reject interference by other countries on nationalistic grounds.
Yes, I have heard that our flag was burnt in Australia and this led to demonstrations. Including demonstrations by students. I myself don't agree with flag burning. But we need to consider two things carefully. One is the humanitarian perspective. Don't turn away from this. TNI not only failed to protect the citizens of East Timor, they themselves became agents of violence. We have to see the cause of foreign interference. Secondly, we have all been manipulated to accept the military concept of nationalism. Throughout the Suharto era we fought against words that had become synonymous with power. Why do we still want to regurgitate a militaristic nationalism that is anti-humanitarian?
This interview was recorded just before Interfet troops landed in East Timor. It appeared in Xpos (ekspos@hotmail.com) of 19-25 September 1999. Rani Ambiyo was the translator. Yeni Rosa Damayanti (yenirosa@hotmail.com), is a well-known human rights activist. Under Suharto she spent time in gaol as well as in exile to the Netherlands. James Goodman describes Kiper in an article in Inside Indonesia no.59, July-September 1999.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
The inside story of East Timor's ballot for freedom
Helene van Klinken
In mid-June 1999 I arrived in East Timor to work with the newly established United Nations Assistance Mission in East Timor (Unamet). I was sent to the beautiful district of Ermera, in the hills an hour's drive south of Dili. It is a picturesque, fertile, coffee growing area. The welcome people gave to Unamet was unbelievable. Children would pop out of fragrant coffee gardens as we drove past, waving and calling in chorus, 'Unamet, Unamet!'
My job as a political affairs officer was to meet everyone, and report to Unamet's Dili headquarters what they were saying and hoping for, and whether it was possible for the popular consultation to proceed. It is without doubt the most amazing job I have ever done.
The new President Habibie first mentioned offering wide-ranging autonomy to East Timor in June 1998. But the people of East Timor came out instead in support of independence, and of a referendum. In Ermera, long-standing East Timorese supporters of Indonesia made peace with their Timorese bothers and sisters, joining the pro-independence side. Even Timorese soldiers who had fought for Indonesia sought reconciliation with Falintil. This unity among East Timorese represented a dilemma for Indonesians, in whose minds fear of Falintil and pro-independence actors was well established. A foreign visitor in East Timor at the time described the atmosphere to me as a 'Prague Spring'.
With the likelihood of a popular consultation, a savage crackdown began in Ermera on 10 April. A CNRT youth, Antonio Lima, was killed and the CNRT office burnt down. People later told us that the killings were done by Indonesian police and military in uniform, who patrolled the streets searching for and shooting pro-independence leaders. These killings began five days after the widely reported massacre in a church in nearby Liquica. The Ermera district CNRT leader, Eduardo de Deus Barreto, was arrested. He was later jailed for 'extorting money and coercing people to join the CNRT'. All remaining CNRT leaders fled to the hills around Ermera. During the days that followed many more pro-independence people were killed.
In some areas of East Timor, Falintil had managed to maintain long-term control of a few villages. Indonesian military posts stationed in these areas reached some sort of modus vivendi with Falintil, and they did not 'disturb' each other. One such 'liberated area' was Fatubolo village, close to the district administrative centre Gleno. On 10 April all senior Ermera CNRT office-holders fled into this Falintil-controlled territory, though some went to Dili which was also considered safe. When I later visited the Falintil base I met many important people from the Ermera community.
Civil servants who were prepared to sign statements promising to support autonomy could come out of hiding on 24 April, 1999. The CNRT itself was forced to 'disband' on 26 April.
Militias
Militias have been part of the military strategy in East Timor since 1975. However, beginning in late 1998 many more were conscripted, bribed and forced to join their ranks. Each district had its own militia, although militia did not always keep to their designated districts and there was even competition between them. In Ermera district they were called Darah Integrasi, Blood of Integration. They claimed 1,500 members, but according to informants the number of committed members was in the low hundreds. Miguel Soares Babo was its commander, while his brother Antonio dos Santos was second-in-command. Antonio was a low ranking TNI officer, who said he was on 'civilian duties'. He was the real force and spokesperson. Miguel was often drunk and prone to abusive language.
While there have always been military outposts in remote areas of East Timor, the numbers of these posts in Ermera was now greatly increased, many of them established after the crackdown in April and May 1999. A military post was usually a simple structure of bamboo and local materials, with the telltale tall communications antenna. At a post there were often four Indonesian officers and about ten East Timorese TNI soldiers. A group of about 20 militia, mostly locally recruited, was also stationed at each post, thus demonstrating once more the close link between militia and military.
We received numerous complaints from villagers about the activities of these soldiers. In the middle of the night soldiers would throw stones on the roofs of houses of people known to have housed Falintil soldiers in the past. They would shoot randomly into the air to intimidate people. They would break into houses saying they had received information that Falintil soldiers were attacking the occupants. Most often they were drunk, and frequently they terrorised female members of the household, sometimes spending all day lying round inebriated in a house, making it impossible for the owners to care for their children or cook.
The many government officials, sub-district and village heads and village secretaries who remained in hiding and refused to sign statements supporting autonomy were replaced with people who were persuaded and bribed to support integration with Indonesia.
CNRT leaders were inspiring people who did not sell their souls, even though they lived with constant threats and in fear. They would express their disappointment about their fellow countrymen who had capitulated to the pressures. Local CNRT leader Amaral would always say that Timorese have to be honest but tell a few lies, and that even while they were afraid they must also be brave. When facing a tiger, you have to be careful or you'll get caught by one of his teeth, he would say.
Indonesians seemed to have no idea of the breadth of support the CNRT enjoyed. One Balinese government official honestly told me that he believed 70% of people in Ermera supported autonomy.
Decision
On the first day of registration people turned out in their hundreds at each centre, queuing like sardines in a tin. Registration centres were joyful places. The Timorese people had taken the decision into their own hands. No matter what the security situation was like they were going to vote. Registration was a resounding success, numbers far exceeding estimates. I did not meet any Timorese in Ermera who had wanted to register but were unable to do so. As a result of this success, in some ways Unamet slipped into a false sense of what we could achieve.
We also had to make a judgement as to whether there were equal opportunities for both sides. For the CNRT in Ermera it was a constant struggle, though they philosophically said, 'we've been campaigning for 24 years. Our people know what they want'. Nevertheless they were not passive, and engaged in strategies to raise their profile. As the CNRT had no office and their leadership was in hiding, the pro-autonomy actors felt they had the upper hand.
The next step was the campaign, a period of about ten days prior to voting day. Militia provided the 'crowds' at the autonomy campaigns. Public servants, who were obliged to support autonomy, led the rallies. The militia travelled around all day in several trucks, conducting random campaigns whenever and wherever they could find a crowd. Some militia complained to Unamet local staff about having to 'yell party slogans all day', without even being given food.
In the end the CNRT cancelled all but two of its six planned meetings, because the leaders were worried about threats to ordinary people who attended rallies, especially those held far from the main Unamet headquarters.
There were strong indications that Timorese from both sides wanted to resolve their differences peacefully. In this they requested the mediation of Unamet. The militia commanders were particularly keen to meet with Falintil. The Indonesian district police commander was supportive of such a meeting. In mid-June he visited Falintil in the area controlled by them (Region IV), and saluted its commander, whose code name was Ular (Snake), before shaking hands. The Timorese were jubilant about this meeting, claiming it was the first time in 24 years an Indonesian official had openly recognised Falintil. However, after some time it became clear that the Indonesian district military commander was against any such rapprochement. He would always say he could not guarantee security.
So how did the CNRT convey their message to the people, given that the right to campaign and open an office was basically denied them? At every sub-district and village level there were CNRT secretaries, who carried the message, albeit clandestinely. Priests and nuns also gave moral courage and leadership, many at great personal risk. On the occasion that Bishop Belo came to Ermera he told the people that this vote was a once-only opportunity given to them by the international community. They should not be afraid. They should vote according to their conscience, not just thinking of their own safety but remembering they were choosing the future for their children and grandchildren.
Also a group of university students was instrumental in spreading the message. The university students mostly belonged to the East Timorese Students' Solidarity Council. Some belonged to East Timorese organisations in Java, Bali and Sulawesi. In Ermera they were very well organised. Some 200 of them originating in Ermera returned to their home villages at the commencement of registration to explain to people the registration and voting process, and to gather information about human rights abuses. They were in constant conflict with the authorities, who claimed they 'angered the people'.
Celebration
After an agreement between Falintil commanders and senior Dili Unamet officials, Falintil guerillas moved into 'cantonment', meaning they pulled back to predefined areas in the mountains while retaining their weapons. One of these areas was located in Ermera district, in Poetete village. There on 20 August, they celebrated Falintil Day. It was the first time ever they had been able to celebrate it openly, and for many East Timorese it was the first time they had met with the guerillas. The celebration was no less than a campaign rally of 18,000 people.
The shops and streets of the towns in Ermera were deserted. The militia, with their police and TNI escorts, were angry to find no one at the village where they had planned a rally. On their way home the next day, they vented their anger by attacking villagers and destroying homes of people who had just returned from attending the Falintil celebration.
Two days before the vote, the CNRT held a flag raising in the cantonment. As the flag rose slowly under the intense tropical glare, men hugged each other, their tears flowing unashamedly. The cantonment was by far the most interesting place in Ermera district, alive with hope and indeed forgiveness.
Incidents involving militia, reported to Unamet, were passed to the Indonesian police, as they were responsible for investigation. But little action was ever taken, despite the promises, and never an arrest of a militia member. After the vote, the police commander told the Unamet police commander that he had been ordered 'from above' not to interfere with the actions of the militia.
Voting day, Monday 30 August, unlike registration, was not a jubilant occasion. Bishop Belo, in a pastoral letter read in all churches the previous day, exhorted people to go home afterwards and pray, and keep on praying. Don't do anything to provoke, he told them, presumably meaning 'don't celebrate'. By 7:30 on the morning of the vote, we heard on our Unamet radios that most people were already waiting in line to vote, and this was the case everywhere in East Timor. Many people had travelled the previous evening to their polling centres, as voting had to take place where you registered. A small percentage of people were intimidated after registration and left the areas where they had registered, so were unable to vote. Despite all the fears that voting might be disrupted, 98.5% of registered voters were successful in casting their votes.
The militia attack on our Gleno polling station at midday that day came as a surprise, as Ermera was by this time considered safe, although it was always a knife-edge situation. The US ambassador, Roy Stapleton, had come to view voting there, and was in the yard when shooting broke out and rocks were thrown at the walls of the polling station. The Timorese could hardly believe their luck, to have the ambassador of the superpower actually witness this attack! After several hours and an attempt to address the militia's complaints, the polling station was reopened. Only about 300 of the approximately 2,500 registered voters at this polling station were too frightened to return after the attack.
In a distant sub-district of Ermera, Atsabe, over three hours drive away, a more disturbing attack was taking place, in which at least one and probably three local Unamet staff were murdered by militias.
Even the ballot boxes in Gleno were not removed without incident. New militia arrived in town the day after polling. The rumour was that they were inserted because Darah Integrasi had never been 'effective'. They tried to prevent the helicopter from picking up the ballot boxes, but not with sufficient determination to succeed. During this attempt, Unamet staff saw Indonesian police mobile brigade members handing traditional weapons to the militia.
The evening after the vote, the burning of houses of CNRT leaders began. A young twelve-year old girl came to the Unamet headquarters to tell us about her house that was burnt, together with their store of rice and corn. Soon after that, all of East Timor was in ashes, and we were evacuated back to Australia. It was as if winter had come to beautiful Ermera.
Helene van Klinken (helenevk@hotmail.com) teaches Indonesian language in Brisbane. The views in this article represent her own and are not necessarily the official Unamet position. This essay is dedicated to Ana, a wonderful East Timorese friend whose fate remains unknown. A longer version appears in a special edition of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Fifty years ago, Indonesian nationalism was open to the world
Goenawan Mohamad
On 29 July 1949, a Dakota aircraft crashed near Maguwo, Yogyakarta, killing three officers of the Republic of Indonesia Air Force. A civilian aircraft, on a flight from New Delhi, it was carrying medical supplies donated by the Republic of India to the Republic of Indonesia. Its broken fuselage still bore the letters 'VT-CLA'. Reports suggested the Dakota had been pursued and shot down by fighter planes of the Royal Netherlands Air Force, which controlled the northern part of Java.
A youth of 17 visited the crash site. He was not a photographer, but he wanted to record what had happened. He was a painter, and he made a drawing of what was left of the plane, hoping that it would stand as a witness: a civilian aircraft shot down without compunction by Dutch troops intent on using military might to take back control of Indonesia.
Now, in 1999, that young man is recognised as one of Indonesia's foremost painters, Srihadi Sudarsono. But it has taken 50 years, until his first exhibition at the Lontar Gallery in Jakarta last week, for Srihadi's priceless collection of drawings of the battles and negotiations of the revolution to become widely known. Not all of his work has survived. Most of it in fact was lost in a fire that destroyed one of the buildings which played a key role in the events of the revolution. But at the Lontar Gallery I was privileged to see not only the remains of the Dakota, but also the figure of a guerilla fighter riding on a train, a group of Dutch soldiers ransacking a private home in Solo, the face of Bung Karno, the face of Moh. Roem, and a group of foreign diplomats at Kaliurang, Yogya, people who - thanks to the UN - were trying to deal with the problems that arose with the end of colonialism in Indonesia.
Indonesia 1949, Indonesia 1999. Srihadi himself is maybe unaware of this, but someone looking at his drawings will easily pick up on a difference, a depressing contrast between then and now.
Half a century ago, the outside world - together with a young and vigorous UN - came to the aid of Indonesia, a weakling in the face of overwhelming odds. Now all we hear is pointed criticism from the rest of the world, directed at a big and brutal Indonesia intent on destroying little Timor Leste (and failing in the effort).
Indonesia then, Indonesia now. A half century ago the leaders of the Indonesian Republic noted with conviction and emotion in the preamble to their new constitution: 'Whereas freedom is the right of all nations...'. They stood firm in their belief that freedom was a right that everyone had to recognise because it was one expression of universal values. Now we only ever hear the phrase recited with indifference. For the last 40 years, the leaders of Indonesia have tried to proclaim that there is no such thing as universal values. We cannot be measured by 'Western' standards, they cry. We have our own democracy, we are unique, you know, you must understand Javanese culture, Asian values.... It's as though for oppressed peoples there is some essential difference between Indonesian military cruelties and, say, the tyranny of the Portuguese.
The crash of a Dakota aircraft carrying medical supplies from the outside world. A number of foreign faces at a meeting in Kaliurang. In Srihadi's 1946 drawings there is no implication in the way foreigners are drawn that they are something to be feared, something weird or distant from ourselves. When he makes a drawing, Srihadi doesn't only record an event. As a soldier who knows what a war of independence means, he also records an attitude. In the lines of his drawings, we can sense that the Indonesian revolution - and Indonesian nationalism - contained no suspicion of the 'outside', was not closed to what was 'foreign'.
From Srihadi we learn that the Indonesian revolution was not something 'inward looking', the kind of revolution that could emerge from, for example, the ideology and actions of the Khmer Rouge when they went about building a republic in Cambodia. Srihadi's record of events shows that even in the midst of its war of independence, Indonesia was an open book. The outside world came and looked, and skinny little Indonesia stood up boldly before it.
On a street wall in Jakarta, around November 1945, the young independence fighters wrote in large letters, in English: 'Give me liberty or give me death'. They were not addressing Indonesians themselves. The words were those of Patrick Henry, an American, spoken in the face of British colonialism in the 18th century. By quoting them, the young Indonesians seemed to want to remind the outside world: the voice of an American patriot in the 18th century is the same as the voices of Indonesian patriots in 1945.
How eloquent they were, how different from the gun-bearing, speechless wearers of safari suits we see all around us now. The outside world had to be convinced, because we were right. There was nothing that needed to be covered up, because we had no cause to be ashamed. Just like the conviction of the revolutionary troops of the 1940s who mobilised painters like Srihadi: they wanted to make a record of events, even if only in painting, at a time when they didn't own cameras. They didn't want to lose the traces of where they had stood. They were not thieves. They were making a history, one that also has meaning for people in a different place, at a different time, in a new millenium.
Goenawan Mohamad is a poet and senior journalist. This article appeared in Tempo magazine, 10 October 1999. It was translated, with permission from the author, by Keith Foulcher (keith.foulcher@asia.su.edu.au).
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
President Gus Dur's cabinet breaks much new ground. Inside Indonesia highlights eight of its 37 members.
Abdurrahman Wahid (President)
In all that has been written about Indonesia's fourth president, little has been said about one outstanding passion which dramatically distinguishes him from his predecessors, Suharto in particular, namely his long record of support for civil society in Indonesia and internationally. He created space for many community initiatives by lending his name and protecting them from official harassment. These included Infid, a key coalition of over 100 Indonesian and mainly Western NGOs concerned to promote a human rights approach to Indonesia's often repressive development programs. At Infid forums when the prevailing wisdom counselled compromise, it was often Gus Dur who would advocate the bolder course, particularly on human rights. East Timor was no exception. Gus Dur was the first prominent Indonesian to dialogue with Jose Ramos Horta, whom he met in Paris in the early 90s. In a bold move to improve people-to-people relations with Indonesia, Australian NGOs invited a delegation of their Indonesian counterparts to visit in 1987. Anxious about the reception they would get on issues like East Timor, the Indonesian NGOs asked Gus Dur to lead the delegation. As so often happened, he agreed but then had to pull out. But his endorsement was really all that was needed. The visit was a success. Suharto retarded Indonesia's development by repressing civil society. There are good reasons to hope that Indonesian civil society and Australia-Indonesia people to people relations will thrive during Gus Dur's term as president.
Alwi Shihab (Foreign Affairs)
Born in South Sulawesi into a well-to-do family of Arabic descent 53 years ago. He first met Gus Dur three decades ago when they studied Islam together in Cairo, and they have been close friends since. Gus Dur did not finish his degree, but Shihab did - a master's and a PhD, then another master's and PhD in the US, all in religious studies. Taught comparative religion at Temple University and Hartford Seminary in the US from 1993. Has written widely in the Indonesian media on the need for 'active' religious tolerance. After Suharto resigned, Gus Dur asked him to leave academia and support his bid for the presidency. Alwi Shihab spent the next 15 months as perhaps Gus Dur's main political operator. As one of several chairmen of PKB, he worked hard to bring together Megawati's PDI-P and Amien Rais' PAN into a loose reformist alliance. His older brother Quraish Shihab is close to the Suharto family and served as minister of religion in Suharto's last cabinet. Though comfortable in the West, the job of Foreign Minister will be a huge challenge for this gentle religious scholar.
Erna Witoelar (Housing and Regional Development)
One of only two female ministers (the other is Khofifah). Born in South Sulawesi in February 1947. Civil society activist with excellent international contacts. In 1991 she was elected chairperson of The International Organisation of Consumers Unions, the first woman from the developing world to hold this position. Chairperson of the Indonesian environmental umbrella Walhi in the mid-1990s. Indeed Walhi wanted her as environment minister. In 1998 she supported a half-hearted presidential campaign by former Environment Minister Emil Salim. Reportedly refused an invitation to sit on Habibie's cabinet in 1998. In 1999 she represented the general Indonesian movement of non-government organisations to the inter-governmental funding group for Indonesia CGI, to the World Bank, to the UN Development Programme, and as an appointed member to the Consultative Assembly MPR. She was also active in the poll monitoring activities of KIPP. Married to Rachmat Witoelar, former Golkar secretary-general (1988-93) and Indonesian ambassador to Russia, who remains politically active in the National Front (Barnas).
Rear Admiral Freddy Numberi (Administrative Reform)
Born 52 years ago in a village on Serui near Biak, West Papua/ Irian Jaya. Joined the navy in 1968 and became the first Papuan in the armed forces to reach senior officer rank. Is now the first Papuan to become a member of cabinet. In April 1998 he was appointed governor of Irian Jaya. Before that he commanded the naval base in Jayapura that covers Maluku and Irian Jaya. In his brief stint as governor he seemed more often swept along than in charge. No one applauded him when he assured demonstrators in mid-1998 that President Habibie had promised autonomy. On 26 February 1999 Numberi, who had often said how impossible independence was, found himself amid a 100-strong delegation to President Habibie that unanimously demanded independence. Threatened to resign in anger last October when the Interior Minister broke Irian Jaya into three provinces without consulting him. The breakup is widely condemned in Irian Jaya. In cabinet he has the opportunity to become de facto minister for West Papuan affairs as well. It may not be a job he relishes.
Hasballah M Saad (Human Rights)
Born into a poor rice-farming family in Pidie, Aceh, 51 years ago, he taught in an isolated primary school for 7 years before becoming a human rights activist for the next 15 years. He was imprisoned for 15 months in 1978 for criticising Suharto. In 1998 he was among the most outspoken Acehnese demanding the military be held accountable for years of killing and rape. In 1998 he joined Amien Rais' National Mandate Party (PAN) and was elected to parliament in the 1999 elections. He was also a member of the commission that implemented the new electoral system. The creation of his ministry suggests a new seriousness to tackle the cycle of violence of the Suharto era. Hasballah is a strong supporter of a federal structure for Indonesia. He will effectively be the minister for a democratic resolution in Aceh, but his interests extend throughout Indonesia.
Khofifah Indar Parawansa (Women's Affairs)
At 34 the youngest member of cabinet. She was an activist in the NU-related Indonesian Muslim Student Movement (PMII) while studying political science in Surabaya, graduating in 1990. Through the 1992 election she entered parliament (DPR) with the Islamic PPP party. In the March 1998 Consultative Assembly (MPR) session she read a PPP statement critical of President Suharto. When NU activists set up PKB in July 1998 to contest the 1999 election she moved across to that party with Gus Dur's encouragement. She became its main spokesperson on gender and other issues, in the face of religious conservatism even within her own party. At first she supported Megawati rather than Gus Dur for president, partly for feminist reasons, but she admires Gus Dur for his religious tolerance and acceptance of women in leadership roles. Married with three children.
Marzuki Darusman (Attorney General)
Born into a diplomat's family in Bogor, West Java, in 1945. Spent much of his early life overseas, learning fluent English. Graduated in law from a Bandung university. His determined work to build up the credibility of the National Human Rights Commission, which Suharto established in 1993, earned him a well-deserved reputation as a human rights advocate. However, he is just as much a Golkar politician, having sat in parliament since 1977. In the months before the June 1999 election he emerged as the only hope Golkar had of making itself acceptable to the public, but it was not enough. More hopes ride on this attorney general than ever before. He needs to clean up his deeply corrupt department, then prosecute key individuals of the Suharto era for corruption and for human rights abuse. Some fear that, his liberalism and human rights reputation notwithstanding, a lifetime career in Golkar might make it difficult for him to prosecute fellow Golkar members.
Ryaas Rasyid (Regional Autonomy)
Born in South Sulawesi in 1949. Will be the key administrator in this cabinet. His appointment reflects the urgency that the new government places on finding a non-violent resolution to dissatisfaction in regions such as Aceh, Riau, Kalimantan, Ambon and West Papua. Rasyid is a non-party-political bureaucrat highly educated in politics and public administration in the US (Northern Illinois 1988 and Hawaii 1994). With a team of academics he drafted the key legislation for the democratic elections of June 1999 in just a few months, beginning immediately after Suharto resigned. He led a government academy of public administration until appointed to a powerful post overseeing regional autonomy within the Home Ministry in July 1998. From here he also designed new legislation that will bring greater autonomy to regions outside Java, in an attempt to stop them seceding. He says the legislation 'is federalistic in all but name'.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Wahid's presidency may herald the end of Indonesia as we know it.
Michael van Langenberg
The Jakarta Post on November 10 editorialised as follows:
The central government must do away with its obsession with national unity and start giving real autonomy to the regions. The government must not offer half-hearted measures if it wants to spare this nation from disintegrating. Barring complete separation, the ultimate form of autonomy is federalism.... Ultimately, the real threat to disintegration.... comes from Jakarta.
The New Order regime from its inception in 1966 constructed a state-system in which two factors predominated. First was an idealised nation conceived in the official motto of 'Unity in Diversity' (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). Second were notions of an 'integralistic' state resting on 'family' principles, designed to protect an archipelaegic unity (wawasan nusantara). From its very beginning in 1945 there has been a crucial contradiction in the Indonesian state-system between ideal legal principles of regional autonomy, and the reality of an increasingly centralised national state.
The collapse of the Suharto presidency in 1998 may mark the end of a century-long process of bureaucratic centralism in state building. That process began with the consolidation of the imperial state of the Netherlands Indies at the turn of the 20th century. In its later stage, Suharto's presidency came to resemble the imperial governor-generalships, supplemented with resonances of pre-colonial divine kingship. Suharto's presidency ended amid a massive loss of popular legitimacy. National government itself was perceived widely as corrupt and nepotistic, responsible for abuses by the military, greedily appropriating regional resources, and culturally arrogant.
In the past decade, coherent independence movements emerged in several territories of the state. East Timor is now on the road to full independence. Aceh seems destined to achieve either independence or some kind of special 'federalist' relationship with Jakarta in the immediate future. Irian Jaya has just been divided into three provinces, creating increased local resentment against what is perceived as a further example of Jakartan imperialism. Increasingly coherent movements for regional 'autonomy' are now also active in the Moluccas (in two areas), Sulawesi (more than one!), Riau, West and East Kalimantan, West Sumatra, and Bali.
Dispersal
How will the new government headed by President Abdurrahman Wahid deal with these movements? Executive government is vastly weaker than a decade earlier. The legislature is now more powerful and more legitimate than at any time since the mid-1950s. It has successfully restricted presidential incumbency to two five-year terms, and made the president answerable to parliament once a year. The chairman of the Peoples' Consultative Assembly (MPR), Amien Rais, is a prominent advocate of a federalist state. Popular legitimacy of the internal security functions and political role of the military is now lower than at any time in the history of independent Indonesia. The ruling oligarchy of the New Order no longer dominates the economy to the extent it did prior to the economic crisis of 1997-98. Conditions are ripe for a significant dispersal of power within the Jakartan empire.
Supporters of Wahid and vice-president Megawati Sukarnoputri present their political partnership as an integrating leadership 'duality' (dwitunggal), echoing that of Indonesia's two independence 'proklamator's Sukarno and Hatta. Like them, Wahid and Megawati reflect a partnership of Islamic identity and secularist orientation. Similar echoes of the earlier dwitunggal are heard in Wahid's stated preference for a federalist Indonesia, while Megawati has emphasised commitment to her father's vision of a centralised unitary state. However, unlike the symbolic regional duality of Java/Bali and Sumatra/'outer islands' of the Sukarno-Hatta dwitunggal, Wahid and Megawati constitute an emphatically Javanese variant of national political culture.
The new cabinet has been designated the Cabinet of National Unity. In reality it is a cabinet of compromise and coalition building. It brings together conflicting political forces - rural Javanese Islam, modernising reformist Islam, secularist nationalism, federalists, unitarists, military professionals, internationalists, protectionists, liberal democrats. It reflects the broad coalition that Wahid built within the MPR in October to gain the presidency. In a sense this was less a coalition to ensure that Wahid became president than to ensure that Megawati did not. Once the Wahid-Megawati dwitunggal was in place, the cabinet had to accommodate the wide range of interests behind it. These negotiations saw the cabinet increase from Wahid's initially intended 25 to an eventual 35 portfolios. Policy coherence might prove impossible. Executive government instability is a distinct likelihood.
Alongside 'reformasi', 'referendum' has entered the dominant national discourse. The former emphasises a new era of 'moral' politics, with national leaders seeking popular legitimacy as a matter of priority. The latter discourse, on display most vocally in East Timor and Aceh, has placed the debate about federalism and secessionism at centre stage. The 'Jakartan empire' is facing far-reaching structural change.
Michael van Langenberg (mvl@asia.usyd.edu.au) is a private consultant and researcher on contemporary Indonesia and Southeast Asia, and fractional employee in the School of Asian Studies, University of Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Indonesia and Australia over the long haul, as if ethics mattered.
Richard Tanter
It's a bad time to talk about relations between Indonesia and Australia as if ethics were important. Over the bodies of East Timorese, Australian and Indonesian political leaders matched each other, measure for repulsive measure, each marked by racialised nationalism, self-interest and brazen hypocrisy.
Even as United Nations teams began their investigations of Indonesian atrocities in East Timor, the country's soon-to-be fourth president Abdurrahman Wahid declared that Australian pressure on Indonesia to fulfil its international obligations in East Timor amounted to 'pissing in our face'. This was no isolated remark by a politician with an eye to a domestic audience. With an astonishingly small number of honourable exceptions such as Onghokham and brave little groups like Kiper and Solidamor, Indonesian intellectuals were paralysed by the nationalism that saturates political thinking in that country. Nationalism in denial prevented them from seeing the truth of the quarter century-long Indonesian colonial project in East Timor.
Yet the Australian government was no less hypocritical than the Indonesian if anything, more egregiously so. John Howard, a man who proudly displays his 1950s white Australian fantasies, accepted a journalist's summary of his position on East Timor as one where Australia was the 'deputy sheriff' of the United States. More importantly, he used the catastrophic end of Indonesian colonialism in East Timor to recycle populist Anglo-Australian images of Australia as an outpost of civilisation perennially faced with always potentially barbaric peoples to our north. The constantly reiterated phrases of 'Australian values' and 'European civilisation' were carefully spoken, but in the codes of Australian politics after Pauline Hanson, the message was clear.
The Indonesian reaction was understandable. After all, the two governments had been partners in crime for more than two decades.
Moreover, Australian politicians and media commentators seem to have a talent for hypocrisy. The same people who less than a few months earlier were still denouncing any possibility of Timorese self-determination or substantial Australian pressure on the Suharto dictatorship, overnight discovered the cause of freedom and democracy.
So it may well be a bad time to talk about exploring a completely different kind of long-term relation between these two peoples. Yet that makes it all the more important to do exactly that. I want to imagine a relationship between these two societies in the lifetime of my now young children a relationship built on the assumption that ethics and justice mattered. We think ethically about all the rest of our lives. Why should international relations alone be severed from the mutual expectations of fairness and right that even children possess? The core ethical assumption must surely be that what applies to me applies to the other person. What do East Timor and Kosovo show us if not the fact that moral communities do not stop at borders?
'Indonesia' and 'Australia' are today part of the same global social and economic system. The hurricane of the Southeast Asian currency crisis arose from the same forces of globalising capital that induced the Hawke, Keating, and Howard governments to transform the industrial structure of Australia in the 1980s and 1990s in the name of 'deregulation'.
Indeed the two countries were formed by the same social forces that are still transforming the world today. A hundred years ago the now neighbouring states of Indonesia and Australia did not exist. Extraordinary violence, as well as periods of great hope and sacrifice, accompanied their formation into two nation states. A century ago the armies and capital of the Netherlands and Britain were still conquering the Malay archipelago. Ten years before Australian federation in 1901, Dutch imperial forces were in the last stages of invading Aceh. Until the coming of a new wave of imperialists in January 1942, Dutch imperialism broke the frame of indigenous Indonesian society and reworked it, at grotesque human cost, to Dutch advantage.
The new post-war Indonesian state followed exactly the outlines of the state the Dutch had carved out in blood. It was marked at its birth and for the next fifty years by the Cold War, and never quite recovered. Always it was a partial state and a dependent economy. Thirty years of Suharto's militarisation was built on oil, American and Japanese economic aid, and American strategic hegemony.
For the indigenous peoples of Australia meanwhile, the British invasion which began in 1788, and which was still in process of unfolding in the north and centre within living memory, brought almost every form of desolation imaginable. The invading settlers from two small islands in the North Sea built a new colonial society founded on extraordinary state violence towards the lower orders, and on a callous solidarity of a caste of all 'white men' over all others, indigenous and foreign.
By slim good fortune, the new Australian settler capitalism was characterised by a continuously expanding imperial need for agricultural commodities, and by a perennial labour shortage throughout the nineteenth century. As a result the scales of class conflict were weighted sufficiently to the left to generate at least an appearance of social democracy, at least for those whose skin was pale enough.
These shared imperial origins extend into the twentieth century. Australian soldiers died in Southeast Asia in their thousands to defend European empires against a newer imperialism, thinking they were defending themselves. The next generation fought in Korea and Vietnam for a cause no less imperial.
Future
Today we stand at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If we look forward in time for comparable periods, what can we see for these entities we call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'?
In 1933 the German literary critic Walter Benjamin wrote a terse set of Theses on the philosophy of history. In one, Benjamin meditated on a Paul Klee painting he owned and kept with him in his harried exile from Nazi Germany.
'A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the debris before him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress.'
This storm shaped our countries, and has not abated; there are more dead, and yet more to make whole. After the linked catastrophic pasts of Australia and Indonesia and East Timor, there is a possibility of a shared future, if we can find it and face it.
Let me start with an extreme proposition. Unless there is some radical change in political dynamics, there will be war between Indonesia and Australia in the lifetime of my young children. This is not a matter of extrapolation of domestic trends visible at the moment, but of normal politics between neighbours with deep differences in a highly militarised world system in which war is normal over the long term.
Unless something surprisingly new happens, the two societies will continue to misrecognise each other. Each will still see the other through unacknowledged racist stereotypes. Australia will still suffer from a deeply deforming misperception of Islam that has deep roots in unexamined but ancient European ideas.
John Marsden is undoubtedly Australia's most popular fiction writer of recent years. A remarkable talent, Marsden has just published the last in a seven-book series of novels for young people known as the Tomorrow series, beginning with Tomorrow, when the war began. This is the story of a group of teenagers in a rural area of south-eastern Australia who return from a remote bush camping trip to find their country successfully invaded, and all adults, including their parents, brutally imprisoned.
A writer of subtly delineated character and strong narrative, Marsden's series is the story of the group's fight to survive, resist, and help turn back the invasion. For our purposes what is important is the setting of invasion, the sense of violation of a relationship with land and space, that Marsden handles equally well, but with a curious and probably deliberate lack of precision.
The invaders are unnamed. Their language is not English. Many of their soldiers have darker skins than most of the Australians, though they are in fact a varied lot. Their army is brutal. Though the invader is not named, the friends of Australia are firstly New Zealand and Papua New Guinea; somewhat more hesitantly, the United States. Who then is the unnamed enemy? It is unlikely that many in his huge audience would have considered too many alternatives to Suharto's Indonesia.
For all Marsden's considerable achievement and his attempt to avoid the worst aspects of the genre, the Tomorrow series is the latest and most successful example of the long-running Australian genre of invasion novels, of which there have been hundreds over the past century or longer. To be a little unfair to Marsden, who is so much better than this suggests, the basic confrontation remains pacific white Australia versus the invading brutal non-whites from the north.
Marsden is at pains to acknowledge and hence neutralise the worst of this. His wonderful protagonist Ellie is well aware that she is the beneficiary of an earlier invasion, and wonders about the ghosts of the losers as she moves through the bush she knows and loves. Most importantly, she thinks about one of the basic moral issues: by what right do we monopolise this continent?
If I sit in the bush, and try to catch an imaginative glimpse of what it may have been like for people of another culture to have lived there, I cannot fail to wonder what it will be like for yet another culture to make the same attempt. For we must surely accept that there will be another shift at some point. For me, the important question is whether the next great historical transformation visited on the Australian landscape will be as violent and bloody, as ecologically ruthless, as the last.
Quite likely, the Southeast Asians will indeed come. But perhaps, too, that coming will be, not the stuff of a 'yellow peril' nightmare, but in some sense a return to the pre-imperial Southeast Asia in which borders mattered less.
Asian Community?
Imagine, just for a moment, that ethics did matter, and that there was a decision to treat the peoples within the two societies we now call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia' as members of a single system, with shared moral responsibilities. Almost immediately infantile fantasies arise: in the 'Australian' case, the fear of loss, the fear of being swamped. Not racist in themselves, but the constitutive racism of Australia certainly gives such elemental fantasies added power. I cannot really imagine the 'Indonesian' side of the well of fantasy, but it would be deep.
Now let those night fears return to sleep, and try to imagine a path we might tread towards this single system involving an 'Indonesia' and an 'Australia'. A path in which ethics mattered.
Let me put another extreme proposition. Within 50 years let us say 100 years to be conservative - the states we now call 'Indonesia' and 'Australia' will not exist, and the shape and location of the underlying societies will be quite different.
The end of the Cold War apart, the most startling change in international relations in the past 50 years has been the establishment of the European Community. Beginning from the construction of a 'common market', the European Community is now halfway to living up to its name. There are EC-wide legislative, executive and judicial institutions, each of which has a complex but precisely defined constitutional relationship to national counterparts. National sovereignty has not disappeared, but it is greatly circumscribed.
Is it absurd, starting from our two instances of 'Australia' and 'Indonesia', to think about an Asian Community, or a Southeast Asian Community? Already both countries are part of the stuttering Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) Forum, which is attempting under US leadership to eliminate barriers to trade within a much larger region in the name of economic deregulation. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, understandably concerned about the ideology of blanket deregulation and excessive US influence on Apec, has proposed a Japan-centred East Asian Economic Caucus, though Japan's public disinterest has stalled further discussions.
These trade-centred models of 'community' present only one limited aspect of the possibilities. Why not begin with some simple re-thinking about borders between 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'? The oldest tradition of foreign trade in Australia long antedates western colonialism. For at least 300 years before 1907, Makassan fishing praus brought Indonesian fishermen to the northern coastline of Australia searching for trepang. Aboriginal people, in places hostile, in places friendly to the visitors, received new technologies, new diseases and vocabulary for their languages. Some accompanied their visitors back home. At the end of the nineteenth century, the South Australian government imposed a tax on 'foreign' trepang harvesting, killing the Makassan trade in a decade. Yet while the colonial legal borders were inviolate, the memories of the trade remain in both Sulawesi and Arnhem Land even today.
Building on the Mabo case which led to recognition of prior ownership of the Australian continent by its indigenous inhabitants, Campbell Watson has proposed that Australia recognise the traditional fishing rights of Indonesian fishermen from the island of Roti. For more than 400 years these people have fished for shark, trepang, trochus, sponges and molluscs in the shallow waters around Ashmore Reef off north-western Australia. The Mabo decision of Australia's High Court in 1992 rendered notions of land title and land usage less singular and absolutist. In the same way of thinking, our borders would become just slightly more permeable. As we know from exemplary models such as the joint management of Uluru-Katatjuta National Park in Central Australia, our ability to understand and protect the environment is strengthened rather than weakened by fusing indigenous and industrial approaches to land management.
How should such issues be settled? The present approach is that 'the line is the line'. International law puts the 200-mile exclusive economic zone at a certain point on the seabed. But the truth of the matter is that the rulings of international law represent frozen power, the embodiment of past victories and defeats. It represents a moral advance on violence, but its moral limits lie in its inability to question its origins. Even here in our outermost sea-boundaries, the core questions confront us.
And what of two other fundamental questions: immigration and labour? Let us never forget that the first act passed by the first Australian parliament was an immigration control act to secure 'Australia for the white man'. Much has changed since then, but immigration control is a universal preoccupation of Australian politics. Anglo-conservatives worry about the changing character of 'our part of the country', to use Geoffrey Blainey's telling phrase. Serious environmentalists rightly fret about the impact of even the present dispersed population level on a largely arid environment. Moreover, the achievements of Australian labour were built on the exclusion of non-white labour.
Yet the mobility of capital in this age of globalisation mocks and exploits the caste solidarities of national labour. Nothing is easier than to close a factory in Wangaratta and move it Tangerang. If we were to take ethics seriously in this single system, we would be looking for ways to equalise labour conditions in the two places. That is in fact already happening, but on the worst possible terms for both sides. What is needed is some framework that will begin to allow a flow of labour between the two parts of this single, imaginary system of 'Indonesia' and 'Australia'. At the same time there should develop a 'levelling-up' (instead of the current 'levelling-down') of the political and environmental playing field in which labour is bought and sold.
Democracy is a remarkably universal value. Indeed all the contemporary arguments for the reform of both Indonesian and Australian politics use the idiom of 'democracy'. Yet our existing democratic institutions are derived from eighteenth century European political thinking about regulating power within nation-states. The global capitalist economy flows over and through this system of nation-states. Today the globalisation of international finance and the dominant ideology of government deregulation has rendered national governments, democratic or otherwise, almost powerless.
Democracy, in Australia as much as Indonesia, needs rethinking on the basis of shared trans-national interests to regulate highly mobile capital. What is needed is a new stage of democratic innovation that operates above and beyond borders, that identifies areas of shared responsibilities and risks, and where moral notions of 'citizenship' and 'obligation' rise above the seas that divide the two geographies. An Asian version of the European Community would involve a great deal more than Apec's deregulation of trade barriers. After centuries of nationalist war, Europe has invented a new category of citizenship the European, that co-exists in carefully defined ways with national citizenship. Is a new category of shared 'Indonesian-Australian' citizenship inconceivable?
It's a bad time for these thoughts after thirty years of Suharto plus Timor. But for those long years Indonesia was not the expression of the shared aspirations of Indonesians. On the contrary, Australia, together with the United States and Japan, made possible the violation of Indonesia. In time, there is a good chance of decent government in Indonesia. And there is always the historical chance of regression in Australia.
But what if ethics were to matter? We might then expect that the needs of 210 million or more 'Indonesians' have some claim in addition to those of 20 million 'Australians'. A new framework of decision-making, a new concept of trans-national democracy, a recognition that ecology, economics and morality mock borders. This is the new agenda that might show the way to unfreezing the arbitrary results of colonial history, and bring a measure of justice.
Richard Tanter (rtanter@hotmail.com) recently co-edited a special issue of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars on 'East Timor and the Indonesian crisis' (http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/bcashome.html).
Inside Indonesia 61: Jan - Mar 2000
Don't let Aceh be
President Gus Dur said in mid February he had a new ideology called 'let-it-be'-ism (biarinisme). Problems, he said, were of two kinds - those that had to be solved, and those that solved themselves. Aceh, apparently, falls into the latter. 'We can't play God. Anyway God is always relaxed', he said in his disarming manner. 'For me it's quite simple. If God wants our state to fly apart, it certainly will, but if he doesn't, it won't. What's the fuss?'
Gus Dur's humour and humility have endeared him to many. And on some issues he has been far from 'let-it-be'-ist. But we should hope that 'let-it-be'-ism does not extend to Aceh. Neither Aceh nor most of the other regions wanting change are likely to solve themselves
A human tragedy is unfolding in Aceh that cannot be ignored. Jakarta clearly remains determined to refuse Aceh independence. But unless it wants to continue the violent repression plus elite cooptation model favoured under Suharto, Jakarta will have to engage in a political process that takes the Acehnese seriously. Acehnese overwhelmingly want a referendum on their association with Indonesia. Even if Jakarta cannot handle this demand, it can at least start by accounting for past human rights abuses, and giving more local control over the territory's natural resources.
Unfortunately Jakarta has until now been reluctant even to go this far. The military seem intent on sabotaging a special Acehnese human rights tribunal. And new laws that will by April 2001 begin returning resource revenues to the regions will probably operate not at the provincial level but at the district (kabupaten) level. This will ensure a big bunfight among Aceh's districts next year.
President Wahid's options are constrained because he runs a compromise government that still includes some of the same elites who ran the New Order. But 'let-it-be'-ism is not good enough for the people over whom he governs.
This edition of Inside Indonesia is again the work of many people, of whom only a few are named. Their satisfaction comes from knowing that you the reader will become just that little bit more engaged with the issues facing the people of the world's fourth largest nation.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
With Suharto gone, Indonesia's most outrageous anti-Suharto artist chooses exile. Why?
Astri Wright
Born in blood by the authority of guns, the New Order's preferred art was sweetly decorative and/ or abstract-spiritual. Fine art genres in themselves, they were also seen as politically toothless, thus 'safe' to a regime which in terms of citizens' rights could bear no scrutiny. However, the injustices of Suharto's New Order, in combination with its ultra-conservative art establishment, ensured the return of politically engaged art by activist painters and poets. Beginning after a ten-year hiatus following the decimations of the 1965 massacres, this gradual return ensured a tenuous existence for engaged art from the late 1970s onwards.
By the early 1990s, the upsurge in Indonesian artists' interest in installation art coincided with a broader interest in political dimensions to art, to the point where the two combined to become a 'must' for artists desiring international visibility. From now on, politically engaged art bore the two faces of fashion and serious concern. No doubt, the last two years have conscientised larger numbers of artists than at any time in the last thirty-two years. At the same time, the intense uncertainty and hardship of this time of transition has led to some surprising changes for artists, which reflect the larger confusion: after the tyrant is gone, what does one put in his place?
Semsar Siahaan, now in his late 40s, was on the art-activist barricades from the late 1970s, one of the most outraged and outrageous of them all. While others limited their critiques of Indonesia's establishment aesthetics and internal colonialisms to their art and private conversations, Semsar went several steps further. He made the news by burning one of his art teacher's sculptures, Sunaryo's West Irian in torso, at the Bandung Art Academy (ITB) in 1981. This avowed 'cremation' led to Semsar's expulsion from the school. The event launched him as someone who placed the private completely within the political realm and who felt that any means were valid, as long as his point was made, and made the public think. The last twelve years, Semsar has received significant attention at home, in Japan and in Australia, with his large, even monumental canvases that depict the struggle of the people against the greed and hypocrisy of the business and political elites, ever witnessing and holding up to view events that could not be discussed freely.
So how can it be that, today, with Suharto gone and a new Indonesia in the pangs of being birthed, and after twenty-odd years of fighting, Semsar has chosen to go into exile? And not to a country with any Indonesian resistance in exile, like Germany, Australia, Holland, or even the USA - but to Canada?
Semsar is not the only one who has left Indonesia in the last few years. Several activist artists have left for shorter or longer stays abroad. The mental toll of going against the dominant grain of their nation year after year, with the apparatus of control reaching right into their homes, is heavy. But none has sought permanent domicile elsewhere. Of all people, Semsar has.
Going Canadian
In February 1999, Semsar Siahaan arrived in Canada as a visiting artist and speaker at the University of Victoria, in 'Beautiful British Columbia' (also known as 'Britishful Beauty Columbia'). His visit was arranged in record time, via nightly letters, faxes, memos and phone calls back and forth to Singapore after he contacted me in early January, sick and depressed. Semsar arrived thin and drawn, his hair all grey - no longer the energetic young fighter I had met eleven years earlier while doing my PhD research. After setting him up in a rented room and a studio and catching up on news, the task of networking to draw people to his talks began.
As luck would have it, Semsar's first week here coincided with the week-long visit of radical young writer-journalist Seno Gumira Adjidarma, and the brief visit of another Indonesian writer-journalist living abroad, Dewi Anggraeni, from Australia. This brought a sense of community to people interested in Indonesia. Semsar's three months hosted by the University of Victoria brought many people into contact with what to them was a completely unknown context beyond the issue of East Timor. To those who had experienced Indonesia through travel, work or activist lobbying, Semsar and Seno's presence provided a shot of vital energy for likeminded people.
Whether professors of art history, writers living in exile in Canada from South Africa, students of bahasa Indonesia or the Asia-Pacific region, activists or local artists staging a solidarity exhibition for the struggle in Chiapas - most of those who attended were moved by Semsar's public talks and found his work interesting. His speaking style balanced between the informal and the informative, packaged as a charismatic blend of humour and stubborn adherence to principle and his own role as upholder of truth.
Semsar also began to paint and sketch, both indoors and outdoors. The question arose: what does an activist painter paint after he has become completely worn out by his political and personal traumas? What does an activist painter do who has 'lost his nerve' (as Semsar admitted before eighty people on March 1st, 1999) and left his country, whether temporarily or for good?
In mid-March, Semsar finished his first painting in Canada, a large canvas entitled Black orchid (ca.200cm x 140 cm) begun only a few weeks earlier. The composition centres on the artist's self portrait. As the focal point in the canvas, his face binds together the disparate, turbulent scenes represented all around. In the upper left of the canvas, a mother screams in pain with her head held back and her arms flung out to the sides. Her breasts are shrunken, milk-less, and the infant who desperately clutches at her body is dying. In the upper right of the canvas, men with arms raised threateningly shout and point accusing fingers. Below the artist's face is a pond which reflects his features. But beneath the reflection, under the water, the outlines of still bodies are visible. These represent the sixteen activists Semsar knew who 'disappeared' the year before.
In the early stages of painting, done in pale washes later painted over till the canvas glowed with bright colours, Semsar depicted himself with his mouth tightly closed. In the finished painting, however, his mouth is open. In the end, he claimed the role of active, audible witness to history. Merely observing the events all around him was not enough.
While the guest of our department, Semsar gave two large public talks and had a solo exhibition at the university gallery. On his own initiative, he joined a group exhibition at Open Space, an alternative gallery downtown. Semsar's visit, then, was successful for all parties. But apparently Semsar harboured longer-term plans as well. A few months after his arrival, his request for a political refugee visa was granted. Even more surprising was the news recently that Semsar has now become a 'landed immigrant'. This means he can now officially work, collect regular social welfare (as opposed to the refugee welfare he was getting), and cannot leave the country for more than six months at a time.
At present Semsar is preoccupied with the immigrant's shifting identity. In July 1999 he painted a huge painting on paper entitled Confusion (c.500 x 340 cm), which was exhibited at a show featuring 'Vancouver Island Artists.' His instant membership in such a group perhaps said as much about the curators' desire to host a more cosmopolitan spread than one generally sees in this small government and university town whose main industry is tourism. In this canvas, Semsar depicted his own and other ghostly figures, of people in his past as well as characters from his symbolic cast. Reclining, struggling and reaching across a space defined from left to right, the stage was set between a banana palm tree and an oak, with the outline of European style buildings which resemble Victoria's parliament in the centre. Hard questions
What, one wonders, does an activist artist in exile, enforced or self-imposed, dream at night? How does exile change their work? Other artists in modern Indonesian art history have lived in exile: Basuki Resobowo, Sudjana Kerton, Hendra Gunawan, are some of the better-known examples. Their art fared variously, but none of them ceased to paint Indonesia.
As for future art work, Semsar has some impassioned ideas. One is for a painting and installation exhibition which would feature the New Order as a huge slaughterhouse. While this thematic obviously could not have been realised under Suharto or Habibie, perhaps it will see the light of day in the near future. But will it be shown primarily in Canada, where there is only minimal interest in contemporary Asian art (and mostly Chinese, at that), or will it be seen where it has the most immediate value, in Indonesia itself?
While Semsar from early on played an important role as the extremist exception in an otherwise relatively 'naughty-free' art world, the cumulative effect of observing his style and his work over the last two decades has made some people question the point at which opportunism and self-righteousness take centre stage and push righteousness and integrity to the side. While painting heroes, Semsar's verbal narratives seem to spare no one in the intellectual, activist and artistic world from scathing criticism. While frequently placing himself centrally in the canvas as witness, one begins to get the feeling that he needs to depict himself as an almost godlike presence. While painting women as often as he paints men (and often in sexually explicit poses), to hear Semsar talk about his own suffering, one gets the impression that most of it is caused by women, from childhood onwards.
Analysing the work and the man, many questions arise. While Moelyono created his exhibition commemorating the murdered labour activist Marsinah in August 1993, on the 100th day after her death, why did Semsar only paint his work of Marsinah more than a year after the fact? Was he in fact throwing himself on the wave of the growing democracy-discourse celebrating Marsinah-as-martyr? The ensuing painting, which is stunning, was used as a poster during the Women's NGO conference in Beijing in 1995. But why are the faces of all four women in this painting (entitled Women workers between factory and prison) elongated versions of his own face? What is more, they all wear the same exact expression as Semsar's in a photo of the same year, standing before the painting entitled Selendang abang (1994).
In the last decade Semsar's heroic figures increasingly wear his own features. If not earlier, this began to be evident in his black/ white and oil work exhibited in 1988. The working class hero wearing the yellow hard hat in the monumental oil painting Olympia is clearly a self-portrait. Instead of the technique of playwright Ratna Sarumpaet, which Carla Bianpoen calls 'becoming the figure she personifies', Semsar seems to make his heroes, male and female, into himself. Rather than reaching beyond and transcending his own ego-boundaries, Semsar's is a process of imposing his own marks and signs on others, one might even say of appropriating their heroic deeds for himself.
While Moelyono, Harsono, Arahmaiani, Tisna Sanjaya and others are vocal in post-Suharto Indonesia, and Dadang Christanto is extremely visible teaching and exhibiting in Australia and in exhibitions in Europe and Korea, what is Semsar doing getting permanent residenceship in Canada? And that in a city without an Indonesian population and no visibility, internationally, except as a city of flowers and mock-English scenography for tourists? What is Semsar doing participating in local exhibitions that feature 'Vancouver Island Artists', a few months after he arrives? And what are all the tortured, windblown images of his own features about, watching or reaching out to mostly naked women, both Asian and not?
Going private
Pointing at the water in the lower half of Black orchid, Semsar said in February 1999: 'This is Canada.' He had been painting studies of the pond behind his lodgings. Its reflective surface and revealing depths represented the artist's time away from Indonesia - the chance to withdraw, remember, think and work, living without the constant fear caused by extreme social turmoil and state-sponsored violence.
Perhaps Semsar, now nearly fifty, has decided that there is after all a separation between the individual and the group struggle, between the private and the public. Perhaps, after a life of throwing stones and shouting: 'Down! Down!', Semsar has decided to tend to his own glass-house, first. To spend extensive time alone, far away from everything and everyone, not fighting. And to discover the deeper challenge of how and what to build, constructively, in the nation, after rebuilding the soul.
Astri Wright (astri@finearts.uvic.ca) is Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Art at the University of Victoria in western Canada. For a longer discussion on activist art see her chapter in Timothy Lindsey & Hugh O'Neil (eds), 'AWAS! Art from contemporary Indonesia' (Melbourne: Indonesian Art Society, 1999), pp.49-69. For more on Semsar see www.javafred.net
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol will benefit Indonesia's forests
Merrilyn Wasson
On February 28 and 29, forty Indonesian and international experts on climate change met in Bogor to discuss the implications of carbon trading for Indonesia's forests. Led by Assistant Environment Minister, Pak Aca Sugandhy and scientific advisor, Professor Daniel Murdiyarso, the theme of the meeting was the potential impact of Clean Development Mechanism investment in the forest sector. There was consensus on the potential value of carbon trading through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). But there was considerable debate on how the CDM could or should operate in practice, in the current climate of reform in Indonesia's forests.
One fundamental issue had to be addressed first at the Bogor consultation. Should Indonesia's ecologically sensitive and economically valuable forest sector, with its troubled history of deforestation, tenure uncertainty and timber companies with a reputation for corruption, be part of the growing global market in carbon emission reductions?
The CDM is set up by Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol. It enables industrial nations to help meet their greenhouse emission reduction targets by investing in emission reduction projects in developing nations. These investments must meet three essential criteria: they must result in measurable emission reductions, the investment must promote sustainable development, and it must benefit the host developing nation.
Investment in forests and other land-based carbon 'sinks' has the additional benefit of actually reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Article 3 of the Kyoto Protocol has the effect of limiting investment in forest sinks to projects which promote reforestation, or the 'afforestation' of land that has historically been used for other purposes.
Given these criteria, and the fact that CDM investment is Foreign Direct Investment which does not increase national debt, as well as the fact that deforestation in Indonesia has now reached an estimated 1.6 million hectares annually, CDM investment in reforestation seems highly desirable.
Controversy
Unfortunately, in the international negotiations on climate change and the Kyoto Protocol, controversy still surrounds the inclusion of forestry projects as recipients of CDM investment in developing nations. Political and economic tensions between the industrial or Annex I nations complicate this debate. As a result, the 'reality check' of tropical deforestation tends to be ignored.
Tropical deforestation accounts for 28% of all greenhouse gas emissions annually. That's 2.2 gigatonnes of carbon. According to the calculations of Indonesia's international expert on greenhouse emissions, Professor Daniel Murdiyarso, the 1997/8 trans-boundary haze crisis from forest fires added another gigatonne of carbon to the atmosphere.
Given these figures, international opposition to investment in CDM projects in tropical forests borders on the absurd. Indeed, opposition to the inclusion of carbon emission reductions in tropical forests would be absurd but for one factor. There is genuine concern among some international and Indonesian NGOs dedicated to the protection of forest ecosystems, that investment in CDM projects might lead to the unintended outcome of increased deforestation. How real is this possibility?
The year 2000 is the official start for banking carbon credits from CDM projects. It coincides with an ongoing process of political and economic reform in the forest sector in Indonesia. Reform has so far encompassed revelations about the extent of timber corporation indebtedness, as well as customary (adat) claims over forest land held by the state. In the future it will result in the decentralisation of forest resource allocation to the provinces. To add to the complexity, the day after the Bogor consultation ended, hot spots from fires in Sumatra's Riau and Jambi provinces were located by monitors in Singapore.
Against this background, can CDM investment in Indonesia's forest sector be a mechanism for reform, or will it be another drain on forest resources? Specifically,
Will it slow or increase the rate of deforestation of natural forest?
Will CDM projects improve the sustainable production of timber products?
Can CDM investment support more equitable access to forest resources for all socio-economic groups?
How will the Indonesian economy benefit?
Investment must be restricted to reforestation or rehabilitation of degraded forests, or to plantations established on land used historically for other purposes. CDM reforestation and rehabilitation projects must satisfy the criteria of sustainable forest management, ensuring soil conservation and the protection of water quality. It may also be possible to invest in protected forests if it can be demonstrated that they are in danger of deforestation. So far so good, and there is more.
To make sure that all three criteria for CDM projects are fulfilled, an international examination board will be set up to verify the 'credit worthiness' of each project. In addition, the host nation has the final control over investment guidelines and can prevent or abort projects which do not adhere to national guidelines and the criteria of Article 12 of the Kyoto Protocol.
No system is immune from human ingenuity to produce socially undesirable outcomes. But this double check on CDM projects at both the national and international level will comprise a new development in the monitoring of forest resource use.
There is another consideration. Far too much money has been invested in Indonesia's pulp, paper and plywood industry. This is a critical problem. It is a major cause of deforestation and, possibly, social unrest. Concentrating investment instead in sustainable reforestation and rehabilitation is a partial solution to the reconstruction of the forestry industry after the crony capitalism of the New Order regime.
Equitable
Can CDM investment support more equitable access to forest resources for all socio-economic groups? The investor from an Annex I nation can only strike a CDM project contract with the owner or concession holder of the land or forest sector to be reforested, afforested or protected. But the presence of a CDM project need not retard a change of ownership envisaged by advocates of more equitable forest access, so long as the Indonesian government acts as guarantor for the continuation of the project. This solution is in harmony with the people-based concept of forest ownership under Indonesia's constitution, and enables the CDM project to continue while still allowing for changes in 'ownership' of the project area.
The willingness of the Indonesian government to act as guarantor is essential, as the credit worthiness of some sink investments may require a period of time longer than the current concession tenure.
How will the Indonesian economy benefit? Obviously, payment will be made for the tonnes of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere by the trees, or prevented from entering the atmosphere. This can either be made to a central fund, like the existing Reforestation Fund (Dana Reboisasi), for redistribution to other economic priorities, or it can be kept by the host community or company.
A CDM project will not have a monopoly on forest use. The distribution of other profits from the harvesting and sale of timber products is likely to be a matter for negotiation between investor and host, taking into account the transaction and establishment costs and risks associated with the CDM project.
Perhaps the greatest economic benefit will come from the contribution of reforestation and sustainable forestry to the environment. For example, the government has estimated that loss of fisheries costs the country US$4 billion per annum. Mangrove reforestation restores fish breeding habitats, controls land-based pollution and protects other fish habitats like sea grasses and coral reefs. This is one example of an ecological benefit from reforestation which has direct economic benefits. And there is the benefit of additional employment.
Like every nation, Indonesia is vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change. And like every nation, Indonesia makes a contribution to the problem, especially when land-clearing fires burn out of control. Yes, there are risks associated with CDM investment in the forest sector. But the benefits effortlessly eclipse them.
Merrilyn Wasson (wasson@rsbs.anu.edu.au) is a researcher in the biological sciences at the Australian National University in Canberra. She attended the Bogor consultation.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Agus P Sari
Climate change happens due to the so-called 'greenhouse effect' (see picture). The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon necessary for life as we know it. If there were no greenhouse effect, the earth would be 32 degrees celsius colder than it is now, rendering it uninhabitable. Too much greenhouse effect, however, will lead to global warming and climate change, with disruptive effects on human well-being. The greenhouse effect occurs due to the presence of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. These gases - water vapour, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), nitrous oxide (N2O), and tropospheric ozone (O3) - act like a blanket that slows the loss of heat from the earth's atmosphere.
The concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere are steadily increasing. Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was about 350 parts per million (ppm, by volume) in 1990, already one-fourth higher than that in the preindustrial era (circa 1750 - 1850). The concentration of methane at 1.72 ppm in 1990 was more than twice that in the preindustrial era. CFCs are strictly of human origin.
Carbon dioxide has contributed approximately 60 percent of increased global mean air-surface temperature 'forcing' by greenhouse gases over the last 200 years, followed by methane at 20 percent, CFCs at 10 percent, and other gases at 10 percent. Based on a modeling exercise, **IPCC expects that a doubling of greenhouse gas concentrations will increase the global mean temperature by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. Thus, IPCC suggests cutting current emissions levels by 60 to 80 percent just to stabilise current atmospheric concentrations.
Carbon dioxide, the most prominent anthropogenic gas, arises primarily from the combustion of fossil fuels and from the burning and clearing of forested land for agricultural purposes. Worldwide consumption of fossil fuels in the period of 1860 to 1949 is estimated to have released 187 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. Between 1950 and 1990, fossil fuel use had accelerated and carbon dioxide emissions are estimated at an additional 559 billion metric tons.
Agus P Sari (apsari@pelangi.or.id) is executive director of Pelangi, a Jakarta-based environmental think tank. He has followed the climate change negotiations since their inception and has been part of the Indonesian official delegation the last three years.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Sustainable development puts demands on both the industrialised west and forest-rich Indonesia
Agus P Sari
Climate change is probably the most prominent global environmental issue of the millenium. About 3000 scientists from all corners of the world associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have concluded that human beings have a 'discernible' impact on climate stability. The IPCC recommends an immediate worldwide reduction of 60 to 80 percent to stabilise atmospheric greenhouse gases at today's levels. The costs of doing nothing can be enormous. Climate change is a global problem that requires global collective actions. Countries around the world have been negotiating on the best possible actions. We now have the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that stipulates limitations to emit these vicious gases.
Climate change is caused by unsustainable development processes (see box). The term 'sustainable development' was first coined at the World Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 in Stockholm. Climate change was first mentioned in 1988 in Toronto, Canada. This Conference on the Changing Atmosphere called for immediate action to develop a 'comprehensive global convention as a framework for protocols on the protection of the atmosphere'. The participants also called for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions 'by approximately 20 percent of 1988 levels by the year 2005' as an initial goal.
Sponsored by the United Nations General Assembly, the First World Climate Conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland, in the same year. The conference mandated the formation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. As a follow-up, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) established the IPCC with a mandate to compile a scientific assessment on climate change to be reported at the Second World Climate Conference in 1990.
The The Hague Conference in 1989, sponsored by the Dutch government, emphasised the desirability of negotiating 'the necessary legal instruments to provide an effective and coherent foundation, institutionally and financially', for 'combating any further global warming of the atmosphere'. In the same year, the Governing Council of UNEP requested the Heads of UNEP and WMO to begin preparation for negotiations on a 'framework convention on climate change'. Also in the same year, the G-7 Summit in Paris stated that it was 'strongly advocating common efforts to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases which threaten to induce climate change'. G-7 groups the seven economically dominant countries in the world.
In 1990, the IPCC reported its findings at the Second World Climate Conference, which led to the formation of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate Change (INC-FCCC, or INC in short). The INC had five negotiating sessions prior to signing the convention at the 'Earth Summit', the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June of 1992.
Four more negotiations were needed before the convention was finally ratified by 50 countries, which made it a legally binding international law. The First Conference of the Parties (COP1) of the convention was convened in Berlin in 1995. Here the Parties unanimously agreed that current commitments by the Parties to the convention were not adequate to meet the convention's ultimate objectives. Responding to the findings, the Association of Small Island States proposed a protocol based on the agreement made in Toronto in 1988 to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent from 1988 levels by the year 2005 (the 'Toronto Target'). The Parties also adopted the 'Berlin Mandate'.
These negotiations led to the landmark COP3 in Kyoto in 1997, where the Kyoto Protocol was finally adopted. Far away from the original 'Toronto target' of 20 percent of 1988 levels reductions by the year 2005, let alone the IPCC's recommendation of 60 to 80 percent immediate reductions, the Kyoto Protocol only commits the industrialised countries to reduce their collective emissions by approximately 5 percent of 1990 levels in the period between 2008 and 2012.
The quantitative emissions limitation and reduction objectives range from 8 percent reduction by the European Union member countries collectively, 7 percent by the United States, 6 percent by Japan, to a 1 percent increase by Norway, 8 percent increase by Australia, and 10 percent increase by Iceland. It is important to note that emissions from the industrialised countries were already roughly 5 percent below their 1990 levels, making the Kyoto target merely keeping emissions at 1995 levels until 2012. The industrialised countries that made the limitation and reduction commitments are listed under Annex I of the Climate Convention (thus the reference to Annex I countries in the press), and their commitments are listed under Annex B of the Kyoto Protocol.
The emissions limitation and reduction commitments can be met by reducing emissions from their sources, or by enhancing sinks to remove the existing greenhouse gases, which can be done domestically or overseas. Indeed, the provision that provides for meeting commitments overseas is a very important one in the Kyoto Protocol. There are four of these so-called 'flexibility' mechanisms.
Emissions Trading refers to trading parts of an Annex I country's commitments with those of another country. Joint Implementation refers to investment by an Annex I country in another Annex I country in a specific project that leads to a reduction of emissions. The emissions reduced by the project are credited to the investing country. Another mechanism is the treatment of the EU member countries as an entity with a collective commitment.
There is also the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the only creditable emissions trading that may involve developing countries ('Non Annex I countries'). An investment in a project in a developing country by an (industrialised) Annex I country that leads to certified emissions reduction can be credited to the investing country. Unfortunately it is not explicitly clear in the Article on the CDM as to whether enhancement of sinks, especially reduction of deforestation and expanding forest cover, can be attributable to meeting the commitments of the Annex I countries. It is very likely, however, that the next negotiating session in The Hague in November 2000 will adopt a decision to include projects in the forestry sector as part of CDM. CDM will facilitate resource and technology transfers to developing countries.
Until today, however, the Kyoto Protocol - and all of the flexibility mechanisms it allows countries to meet their obligations - is just a piece of paper that binds no country. It can only bind the signatories, thus 'enter into force', after 55 countries have not merely signed but also ratified it. Moreover, the Annex I country Parties that ratify it must represent 55 percent of Annex I emissions in 1990.
This last condition is the tricky part. The United States represent about 36 percent of Annex I emissions in 1990 - the largest emitter globally. The member countries of the European Union collectively represent roughly 25 percent, Russia 18 percent, Japan 8.5 percent, and the rest of the Central and Eastern European countries 7.5 percent. These figures suggest that at least two of the three major emitters - the United States, the European Union collectively, and Russia - should ratify.
Knowing a little bit of its domestic politics, where its Republican-dominated Congress refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol with an overwhelming vote of 95 to 0, there is only a very slight possibility that the United States will ratify the Kyoto Protocol any time soon. The only possibility for the Protocol to enter into force without the United States is if Russia and Japan can break out of the 'Umbrella Group' (referring to countries that have similar negotiating positions with the United States) and join the European Union to ratify the Protocol early enough. This situation is as difficult to imagine as the European Union taking action without the United States. That is why it remains crucial that the United States must ratify to make the Kyoto Protocol work. Until the United States gets its act together, there will be no legally binding Kyoto Protocol, there will be no CDM, and hence no transfer of resources to developing countries.
Indonesia
In Indonesia, climate change will alter the daily lives of millions. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is expected to double to about 550 parts per million by the middle of this century. In that case the mean temperature in Indonesia is predicted to increase by approximately 3 to 4.2 degrees Celsius. Changed rainfall patterns, prolonging droughts and floods, will threaten food security. This is probably the most devastating impact of climate change.
While the correlation between the El Nino and La Nina climatic events and long-term climate change is still debatable, the impacts of these events have demonstrated how vulnerable Indonesia's agriculture and ecosystem is. In the early 1980s an increase in the average temperature of the ocean water of between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius caused massive coral bleaching that killed about 80 to 90 percent of corals.
Rainforests are prone to fires when precipitation is less than 100 mm per year, such as has happened during El Nino events. The 1997 forest fires were as devastating as forest fires in 1982 and 1983, when precipitation was only 35 percent of the usual level. On each occasion, the Kutai National Park in Kalimantan was totally damaged. Secondary forests were more heavily damaged than primary ones. In the logged areas, literally no trees survived the fires. Forest fires deemed the worst in history took more than 10 million hectares of productive forests in just the three years 1997-99, with a socioeconomic toll of billions of dollars.
Sea level rise is another prominent impact of climate change. Hosting the largest number of islands, more than 17,000, and a total coastline exceeding 81,000 kilometres, the second longest after Canada, Indonesia will suffer significantly even from a small rise in sea level. Industrial infrastructure and population are concentrated in low-lying coastal areas. Four-fifth of Indonesians live in coastal areas. Approximately 2 million lived in places less than 2 metres above sea level in 1990.
In crisis-laden Indonesia, however, all environmental issues are still considered a luxury, let alone climate change. Indeed, the 700 million tons of carbon dioxide that Indonesia emitted in 1990 were only 2.5 percent of the global emissions of 28 billion tons that year. The 3 tons per person were still lower than the 4.5 tons per person global average and only one-sixth of the average American emissions of 18 tons.
More than four-fifths of the emissions came from land use change and deforestation. Nevertheless, some of the emissions were not unavoidable. In the forestry sector, for example, limiting forest degradation will help limit the effect on greenhouse gas emissions from the sector. It will also reduce local impacts and preserve biodiversity. Sure enough, the strongest opponents of reducing forest degradation in Indonesia are either logging companies who have already gained too much from the corrupt sector full of crony-capitalists, or the corrupt bureaucrats themselves.
Indonesia will benefit from reduced deforestation. But so will the whole of humanity. The demand at international negotiations that Indonesia should preserve the so-called 'lungs of the world' should be compensated. The emissions offset mechanism, especially the Clean Development Mechanism CDM, can do just that. If Indonesia can prove that the efforts that it makes beyond its normal obligations to slow down deforestation can benefit the world in slowing down climate change, then Indonesia may be able to claim some - if not a large amount - of the funds that could potentially flow in through the CDM.
Agus P Sari (apsari@pelangi.or.id) is executive director of Pelangi, a Jakarta-based environmental think tank. He has followed the climate change negotiations since their inception and has been part of the Indonesian official delegation the last three years.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Revisiting two Nike factories in West Java after the economic crisis
Peter Hancock
In 1997 I published an article in Inside Indonesia (No.51, July-September 1997) titled The walking ghosts of West Java. It reported research among 20 factories and 323 female workers in rural West Java in a place called Banjaran. I found that, of all the factories studied, the two Nike factories treated their female workers extremely poorly. Women who worked in the two Nike factories (Feng Tay and Kukje) were overworked, exploited, underpaid and abused by management. In 1999/ 2000 I returned to Banjaran to conduct a follow-up study designed to measure the impact of the Asian Crisis upon factory women. Again the two Nike factories 'stood apart' from the other 18 factories. Nike continues to exploit young women (many of whom are underage), causing unnecessary hardship to its workers.
The Asian Crisis affected Indonesia more severely than any other country in the region. The purchasing power of the rupiah declined by over 140%. As a result, between 1997 and 1998 (a) the labour force in manufacturing declined from 4.2 million to 3.5 million; (b) the growth rate of manufacturing declined from 6.42% to minus 12.88%; (c) the number of establishments declined from 22,386 to 20,422. Remaining factories either shed staff, increased quotas or decreased wage costs to cope.
On the surface, Banjaran had 'boomed' during the crisis. Two large shopping malls had been built. Most of the families I revisited showed no signs of serious impacts from the crisis. However, in-depth research revealed a more accurate picture. The average monthly wages of factory women had increased from Rp 142,000 a month in 1997 to Rp 340,000 in 1999. But given the high inflation levels this increase barely accommodates the crisis. Eleven percent of the women reported that the crisis had plunged them and their families into serious poverty and their wage increases did not cover basic living expenses. All stated that the Asian Crisis made their lives very difficult and that the biggest impact were the massive price increases of staple goods. (The price of rice in the largest open market near Banjaran increased from Rp 1,008 per kilo in 1996 to Rp 2,320 per kilo in 1998). According to my household surveys, the Asian Crisis caused prices of food, cooking oil and transport to increase by 200-300% while factory salaries had only increased by just over 100%.
Government data reveal that 'real' wage costs among large and medium shoe factories decreased from Rp 3.96 billion in 1996 to Rp 3.91 billion in 1998 - a real decline despite massive wage increases. The women coped with this situation by not spending money on luxury goods and services (meat, soap, clothes, entertainment, transport or consumer goods). With the help of their families, they budgeted their wages for basic survival only.
Sixteen percent of the women surveyed also stated that, as a result of the crisis and loss of employment in other sectors, they had become the main breadwinner in the family. Their small factory wages were crucial. Only 3% claimed that their factories had become more exploitative in terms of forced overtime, working for illegal pay or in abusing women as a result of attempts to increase productivity levels. However, in focus groups and open interviews this story changed dramatically, especially among women from the two Nike factories. I quickly understood that the women were scared of losing their jobs and had been warned not to discuss their employment with researchers. This was due to the fact that the results of my previous research in 1996, once published, had impacted directly upon factory women and upon one Nike factory, Kukje.
Kukje
When the Korean-run factory Kukje changed to produce Nike shoes in 1996 it changed from one with a good local reputation to one which was highly exploitative (forced overtime, holidays cancelled and abusive managers) simply to keep Nike happy. However, in early 1998 I was informed by one of the mid-level managers at Kukje that Nike had withdrawn its contract and had used my article in Inside Indonesia as an excuse for so doing. I was informed that the general manager of Kukje became so angry that he called in government officials to Banjaran to find out who I was and who I had talked to (not realising I had interviewed him briefly in 1996). The government officials were not able to find any workers who I had interviewed, because I had completed my research carefully to ensure that none of my respondents would suffer simply for telling the truth. The result being that Kukje lost a highly lucrative Nike contract and was forced to lay off a few hundred casual daily workers, most of whom found employment in the other large Nike factory next door to Kukje, Feng Tay. In 1999, however, Kukje workers were fearful because Feng Tay were about to take over Kukje. In the interim Kukje was working to fill backorders from other factories, including Nike shoes from Feng Tay.
At first glance it may seem that Nike cancelled its contract with Kukje because it was concerned about worker exploitation and child labour in Banjaran. However, if Nike were genuinely concerned after reading my publications in 1997 they would have cancelled Feng Tay's Nike shoe-making contract as well as Kukje's, as Feng Tay was undoubtedly the worst of the 20 large and medium factories studied in 1996/97.
Remembering that Kukje is still making some Nike shoes and that it is being, or about to be, controlled by Feng Tay, the results of research among women who worked there during the follow up study are relevant, and do reflect Nike production practices. Workers at Kukje worked on average 17.2 hours of overtime each week, on top of their mandatory 40 hours per week. The average overtime hours for the entire cohort of women studied in 1999/ 2000 was only 9 hours per week. Kukje women stated that their employment was unstable despite high levels of overtime and that the factory did not pay full wage rates regulated by the government. Despite the fact that Kukje workers completed about twice as much overtime as the average for the cohort, they were in fact paid less than the average of Rp 340,000 per month. The average wage for Kukje workers each month was Rp 330,000. Considering the large amount of overtime these workers completed, their wages should be much higher than the average.
Feng Tay
Feng Tay has blossomed as a result of the Asian Crisis. Instead of shedding staff it was able to increase workers in line with larger orders for Nike shoes in 1999/ 2000. Nike women worked on average 24.6 hours of overtime per week and were often required to work on Sundays due to orders. However, Nike women at Feng Tay were being paid relatively well. On average they earned Rp 490,000 each month. But this came at a cost. Feng Tay does not provide buses for local women, who must pay for their own transport costs. It does, however, provide free buses for workers outside the region. The women I interviewed claimed this was because management thought that local women were too lazy and made trouble. Bringing in outside labour was a new phenomenon designed by Feng Tay management to offset 'local' worker disputes.
Another interesting aspect was the lack of uniforms at Feng Tay, as all other factories used uniforms. In 1996 they usually wore pink uniforms. In 1999 they were not issued uniforms because women were 'in and out' so quickly that uniforms were not needed.
Women usually leave after a few months, exhausted by the constant overtime and lack of holidays, on top of which comes a very sound system of managerial exploitation and domination of young women. Further, Feng Tay is continuing with the illegal practice of sick leave arrangements described in my 1997 article. Feng Tay has a new policy now, which also goes against national labour laws. Sick women must report to the factory doctor and get a medical certificate. If not they are docked Rp 30,000, even if they have a certificate from another 'non-partisan' doctor. Forcing sick women to treck down rough mountain roads to the factory reflects the attitude of Feng Tay to workers and the fact that factories in Indonesia continue to make up their own laws.
To cope with increased orders, Feng Tay management has diverted some to Kukje or created quotas. Women are given a very large quota and paid overtime and a bonus. However, the bonus is paid in the form of a T-shirt and not money as traditionally expected. Recent strikes in Jakarta reflect this trend to replace money bonuses for hard work and the meeting of difficult quotas with nominal gifts. Another new trend I learned of was that the leftover Nike shoes which could not be sold were destroyed by management. The workers could not understand why they were not given to the workers, and claimed that some workers tried to steal them to sell due to the crisis, but most were caught and sacked.
Fifty four percent of the women who were asked about the impacts of the Asian Crisis upon their factory life reported no real change except the high cost of living. The remaining 46% stated that the crisis meant that either more overtime was required, that their bonuses were stopped or that their working life became more stressful as a result of increased quotas. These 46% were predominantly from Feng Tay or Kukje. To be fair to Feng Tay there was one garment factory in Banjaran from which the average overtime worked among women was 31 hours per week. However, these women were all piecemeal workers earning very poor wages in a sector renowned for exploitative practices.
The labour force in manufacturing was actually funding the battle against the impacts of the Asian Crisis in Indonesia. I saw plenty of evidence of this in Banjaran, and specifically at Feng Tay. In 1997 I concluded that 'Feng Tay is the negative result of the combination of international capital, Indonesian capital, a Western corporation (Nike) and a developing country's desire to industrialise quickly'. I see no reason why my conclusions in 2000 should change. Indeed, the crisis has provided industrialists more power.
In April 1999 Nike became a member of the Global Alliance for Workers and Communities. An alliance designed to assess and improve working conditions in overseas factories and communities. I have some ideas in those areas.
Peter Hancock (hancock@deakin.edu.au) lectures in International Development Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Will Australia now break with the past?
Geoffrey A McKee
In November 1991 our medium-sized oil exploration company was awarded a slice of acreage in the Timor Gap, becoming a joint venture partner in ZOCA-13. In the same month the Australian media was saturated with news on the massacre of unarmed civilians in a Dili graveyard. Earlier that year, Portugal initiated proceedings against Australia before the International Court of Justice in The Hague over the legality of the Timor Gap Treaty.as usual' was not going to be easy, it seemed.
The treaty has as its foundation a 'model of reality' which described the troubled territory - without question or qualification - as 'the Indonesian province of East Timor'. Yet empirical data suggested an alternative reality: a low intensity war Indonesia could never 'win'.
It became apparent to me that until the East Timor conflict was resolved, exploration expenditure in the Timor Gap was subject to significant political risk. My colleagues in the oil and gas industry did not share this view. At that time the stock response was 'the Indonesians will never leave'.
Successive Australian governments became hostage to the integration model - now consolidated into national legislation through the Timor Gap Treaty, making it effectively 'irreversible'. Integration was now a bipartisan doctrine.opinions became heretical.
In early 1996 I reviewed a US$1 million engineering study to develop the Bayu field, prepared by Bechtel for our joint venture operator, Phillips Petroleum. This was a world class and exciting offshore petroleum project. But how could the required capital investment be secured when the project's legal and fiscal regime had such shaky foundations?
Around this time, in May 1996, Richard Woolcott, former head of Australia's Foreign Affairs and Trade Department, reassured the oil industry by declaring East Timor's independence a 'lost cause'. A short time later, Jose Ramos-Horta predicted independence would be achieved by the end of the century. History has now shown who was the true realist and who was simply shortsighted.
On August 17, 1975, just before the invasion, the same Woolcott, then Australian ambassador in Jakarta, had advised Canberra that 'a treaty on the oil and gas-rich seabed could be more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal or independent Portuguese Timor'. What was meant and understood by this statement was that Indonesia, if it were allowed control of Portuguese Timor, would accede to 'joining the Timor gap' in the seabed boundary agreed in 1972 between Australia and Indonesia (see map). Portugal's view had been that it would be inequitable to simply join the 'gap'.
The 1972 seabed treaty was based on the now superseded international law principle of 'natural prolongation' of the continental shelf. In October 1972 when this treaty was concluded, Canberra had celebrated a 'diplomatic coup', having gained sovereignty over 85% of the maritime area under negotiation. When Professor Mochtar, the leader of the 1972 Indonesian delegation, arrived back in Jakarta, he was roundly condemned for having 'sold the farm'. However the young 'New Order' regime, born in violence and needing international legitimacy, may have benefitted in other ways by giving so much ground to Australia.
Before the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor, Australia had asserted its sovereignty right up to the seabed boundary 'gap' by issuing two oil exploration permits. An alarmed Portugal in December 1974 issued overlapping permits to a Denver-based company, Oceanic Exploration.
In October 1976 when informal talks between Australia and Indonesia commenced, the sticking point was the legal status of East Timor. Indonesia wanted de jure recognition as a precondition to seabed boundary talks. Australia finally relented in February 1979. Having got what it wanted from a poorly advised Australian government, Indonesia now moved to adopt new thinking in international law - already supported by Portugal - which emphasised equity and distance rather than seabed geomorphology. This position - today well understood by East Timorese leaders - can be described as the 'median line settlement'.
But in 1979 it would have been politically impossible for Australia to agree to Indonesia's median line claim. How would the editorial writers react if, having already betrayed the East Timorese, Australia received nothing of material value from Indonesia? It was also difficult for a nationalistic Indonesia to now agree to Australia's demand that they 'join the gap'. In the words of Foreign Minister Mochtar, Indonesia was 'taken to the cleaners' by Australia in the 1972 seabed negotiations. The Indonesian team was not about to repeat the same mistake.
The resulting stalemate was never resolved. It took twelve years of talks before both sides, possibly from 'negotiation fatigue', agreed to disagree. A compromise joint development zone (JDZ) was created and sealed with a toast in an airplane over the Timor Gap on December 11, 1989. The treaty was not 'readily negotiated' as Woolcott had foreshadowed. On the contrary, the long and laborious negotiations were a setback to oil exploration and resulted in a treaty as unstable today as it has always been.
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) in December 1982 strengthened the Indonesian position and would have pressured Australia to give ground. However when the Timor Gap Treaty was signed, UNCLOS had not yet entered into force. This occurred only in November 1994, when it had received the required 60 ratifications.
Lessons
There are two lessons here for current East Timorese negotiators. The first is summed up by Jeffrey J Smith, a Canadian oceanographer and barrister who has been researching East Timor's maritime boundary claims for the past 12 months:
'The legal irony of East Timor's ocean claims thus becomes apparent. The passage of time has entitled the new state to the full benefit of recent developments in international law, developments not available to Indonesia as it attempted to maximise continental shelf claims in the Timor Sea. Those developments strongly suggest that a median line will ultimately form the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) boundary between East Timor and Australia'
The second lesson is that inflexible pragmatism has its inherent risks, since today's interests may be shortsighted tomorrow. Compliance with now well-defined international law principles may offer more long-term stability.
For the past two years the 'successor state scenario' has been the primary focus for interested parties, having been first gently introduced in July 1998 by the CNRT in what is believed to have been a tactical policy switch. The CNRT statement served to rob the Australian government, editorial writers, and the Timor Gap contractors of reasons for arguing that independence in East Timor would 'tear up the Timor Gap Treaty'. Under this position, East Timor would simply replace Indonesia in the existing Timor Gap Treaty. The maritime area would remain a zone of disputed sovereignty and the two nations would agree to equally share the benefits of the offshore petroleum.
Prior to the 1998 CNRT statement, Jose Ramos-Horta was quoted as supporting the median line policy, effectively claiming East Timor sovereignty over the entire Zone A including the proven Bayu-Undan petroleum reserves. Recently Mari Alkatiri, the CNRT's Timor Gap spokesman, has resurrected speculation that the CNRT is considering the pro's and con's of moving back to the median line policy position. The move from principle to perceived pragmatism and then back to principle simply illustrates the dilemma facing diplomats balancing these often-conflicting forces.
The successor state model was given a boost in August 1998 by a 'paradigm-shifter' in the form of media headlines shouting 'BHP talks to jailed guerilla leader'.
The Australian Labor Party took note of developments. On September 16 1998, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Laurie Brereton supported the CNRT statement by asserting that an independent East Timor can 'stand in the shoes of Indonesia' in relation to the Timor Gap Treaty. Brereton, ably assisted by his key researcher/ adviser Dr Philip Dorling, would issue several groundbreaking Timor Gap press releases over the ensuing months, each one 'moving the goal posts' for his counterparts on the government benches.
In February 1999, Indonesian resources minister Kuntoro Mangkusubroto confirmed that Indonesia would relinquish its claim to the Timor Gap if East Timor voted for independence. Finally, the Australian Government gave its official blessing to the successor state model through the Attorney General's Department submission to the East Timor Senate Enquiry on 19 April 1999.
In March 1997 Australia, then believing East Timor would never become an independent state, concluded another treaty with Indonesia. This created a permanent 'water column boundary' between East Timor and Australia coincident with the median line or the southern boundary of Zone A. The median line is also the earlier (1981) Provisional Fisheries Surveillance and Enforcement Line (PFSEL). The 1997 treaty 'delimited' the two nations' overlapping EEZ's in accordance with modern international law. However, the seabed boundary (governing oil and gas) was left unresolved to honour the existing Timor Gap Treaty.
An East Timorese policy favouring a permanent seabed boundary with Australia and under UNCLOS would be based on the same logic as already used by Australia to create a permanent water column boundary - that is, based on the median line. Put simply, it is not logical to have a seabed boundary separated from the water column boundary.
When signing the Timor Gap Treaty, Australia actually endorsed the principle that an agreed seabed boundary is preferable to the treaty itself. The treaty regards itself as provisional and has a wind-up clause triggered when 'the two Contracting States have concluded an agreement on a permanent continental shelf delimitation in the area covered by the Zone of Cooperation'.
Australia formally conceded to the international community in its submissions in the 1995 Timor Gap ICJ case (Portugal v. Australia) that the treaty would not bind an independent East Timor.
Cash flows
The graphs give indicative cash flows from Phase 1 of the Bayu-Undan gas project in 'Zone A' of the Timor Gap (details at www.phillips66.com/bayuundan/). Phase 1 denotes the production of natural gas liquids (LPG and condensate), returning the lean gas back into the reservoir. Phase 2 - involving the desired sale of over 3 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - is more challenging since a market for the gas does not currently exist. I have presented indicative revenue from Phase 1 only, to avoid excessive expectations arising from the 'upside potential' represented by Phase 2.
These figures are based on the Timor Gap Treaty fiscal regime with price and production assumptions generally accepted within the industry. Assumptions can change from day to day. The joint venture partners assess likely risks and rewards by studying how each variable impacts on profitability. It is clear that East Timor will benefit significantly by 'stepping into the shoes of Indonesia'. However, a median line settlement under UNCLOS will enable East Timor to receive almost twice the benefit offered by a treaty Indonesia and Australia concluded in darker times.
The wisdom of the transition period concept, always strongly promoted by Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos-Horta, is now apparent. The successor state model, now enthusiastically embraced by Australia, requires a state to succeed the treaty. The CNRT cannot make any binding decisions until it is duly constituted as a legitimate democratically elected government. UNTAET likewise cannot commit the East Timorese people to any binding agreement. This appears to be the cause of considerable frustration for Australian government officials eager to ensure the continuation of the treaty. But for the East Timorese, the transition period presents a great advantage, for it will protect them from the current Australian pressure to make a hasty decision.
East Timorese policy makers will of course have a pragmatic desire to work with Australia. Nevertheless, there are multiple factors tilting the balance towards a permanent median line seabed boundary settlement.
Indonesian-educated East Timorese activists may challenge 'selling the farm' by their Portuguese-educated leaders. They do understand the issue.
The Joint Authority under the present treaty will, more likely than not, lead to episodic operational difficulties, given that East Timorese representatives will play 'second fiddle' to Australia.
The Timor Gap Treaty fiscal regime, modeled on the Indonesian Production Sharing Contract (PSC) system, is onerous by world standards and discourages development of smaller discoveries. A median line settlement will allow the future East Timorese government to give significant tax concessions to joint venture partners. This will have a hugely positive effect on development economics. The oil companies will support it.
Time is on East Timor's side, enabling the young nation to pursue its own national interests based on sound research. Overworked CNRT officials are at present vulnerable to being overly influenced by the Australian point of view. Funds are needed so their representative can attend reputed training courses at non-Australian centres of maritime boundary research, such as at the University of Durham, UK.
As explained by one maritime law specialist, 'The median line settlement of an overall EEZ is preferred, wholly supported and even mandated by the present customary international law of the sea'. Australia by making the 1997 EEZ delimitation treaty with Indonesia has put itself in a weak position internationally if it wishes to argue that the seabed boundary (governing oil and gas) should be at a different location than the water column boundary (governing fisheries).
Australia's foreign minister raising a champagne glass with his Indonesian counterpart is the treaty's unforgettable symbol. Asking the East Timorese to 'honour' the treaty indicates a certain insensitivity on the part of Australia. There will be strong public pressure for East Timor to make a symbolic break with the past.
An historic opportunity now exists to remove the Timor Gap from the very short list of the world's disputed maritime areas. The ideal procedure is direct talks between Australia and a democratically constituted government of East Timor. Failing that, the dispute can always be resolved by international arbitration.
Geoffrey A McKee (gamckee@ozemail.com.au) is a chemical engineer with wide experience in the oil and gas industry. Interested readers are invited to email him for the full text of this abridged article.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
America's foremost Indonesia scholar was an activist for peace
Daniel S Lev
As word spread around the world of George Kahin's death on 29 January, at age eighty-two, the many who knew him or his work must have paused for a time to reflect on the huge empty space. Judging from an obituary in the New York Times, even those who fought with him had to concede that this was an extraordinary scholar filled with integrity, honesty, and courage.
One can reasonably argue that he was above all a research scholar or educator or political activist, each with persuasive evidence. A former student of his once came up with the pat analysis that Kahin had two distinct sides, scholar and activist. It missed the point completely. Kahin drew no lines between the demands of scholarship and those of public engagement or undergraduate and graduate education. They were bound up with one another inextricably by a powerful sense of intellectual and personal responsibility unfettered by anything like a hungry ego. Kahin never hedged on the purposes of knowledge, but assumed that whoever possessed it was obliged to make it useful wherever it might count for the sake of a universal public good. If he was a genuinely capable scholar and teacher, he was also a genuinely moral man with a sense of justice the size of Mt Everest.
The sheer volume of Kahin's work during the last half century seems unlikely for one man, and the variety of it is astonishing. Along with the late John Echols he developed Cornell University's Modern Indonesia Project and the Southeast Asia Program, which drew graduate students from around the world. As director of the CMIP, Kahin sought out promising students, encouraged and supported them, gave advice, not orders, and treated them as colleagues, not underlings. (His courtesy and consideration, as most of his students will attest, knew few bounds; he once talked with John Smail and me for half an hour before either of us understood he thought we should get haircuts before our Ford grant interviews.)
Kahin's scholarship was not flashy or pretentious, but consistently careful, solid, uncluttered, and trustworthy. His first book, Nationalism and revolution in Indonesia (1952), remains a standard work, fifty years later, required reading for anyone who wants to understand modern Indonesia. His essays and articles from the 1950s, and the short book on the Bandung Conference, are still worth reading for what they have to say about Indonesian politics and the problems of American foreign policy in Southeast Asia. The texts he edited in the early 1960s on Modern Governments of Asia and Governments and Politics of Southeast Asia, largely the work of his students, are long since out of print; nothing since on Southeast Asia matches the quality of the latter, unfortunately.
Critic
By the time the Vietnam War began to take shape in the mid-1960s, Kahin, long immersed in America's adventures throughout Southeast Asia, was well prepared to deal with it. He quickly became one of the most active and best known critics of the war, and in some circles is better known in this connection than for his Indonesian studies. At the first national teach-in in May of 1965, Kahin led off for the anti-war position against a stand-in for McGeorge Bundy, who had withdrawn. It was no match. He and John Lewis later wrote The United States in Vietnam (1967, 1969), which helped to define the arguments against the war. A decade later Kahin's book, Intervention: How America became involved in Vietnam (1979, 1986) provided ample detail on the disaster. By then, Kahin had become one of the most persistent critics of American foreign policies in Southeast Asia. Returning to his Indonesian interests, he and his wife Audrey, a specialist in modern West Sumatran history, published Subversion as foreign policy, which related the destructive relationship between the United States and Indonesia from the revolution onwards; another book that will last.
Kahin did not relax much after his retirement from Cornell in 1988, despite serious health problems. At a United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) meeting in Washington, DC, near the end of 1999, meant to discuss fifty years of American-Indonesian relations, Kahin, then suffering congestive heart failure and more, led off with a paper that was vintage Kahin: detailed evidence, careful analysis, no punches pulled. His friend Soedarpo, about the same age as George, followed suit in supportive comments, making it hard for anyone there inclined to celebrate American contributions.
In an age of self-advertisement and career manoeuvres, not least among academics, Kahin's character isn't all that easy to understand. He grew up in Seattle, the son of a respected lawyer and a mother who taught part-time at the University of Washington, went to one of the city's best private schools, did his undergraduate education at Harvard, a master's degree at Stanford, and his PhD at John Hopkins. He was not an outsider, clearly, but one of those few anywhere who did not choose the obvious route to quiet success. At the start of the second world war, still a student at Harvard, he devoted himself to helping Americans of Japanese descent who were about to be shipped off to internment camps. He never stopped criticising the arrogance, injustices, brutalities, and stupidities of state power, wherever, and spent little time worrying about the consequences for himself. He won honours for his work; he was elected president of the Association for Asian Studies, his books were well reviewed, his colleagues and students admired him, and he made capable opponents sweat. Kahin showed little interest in his own prominence, however, and took in stride the disfavour power visits on critics. During the late 1940s or early 1950s, the American government blocked his passport for a time. The New Order government in Indonesia denied him a visa but also awarded him a medal, which sums up nicely his odd impact in high places.
Daniel S Lev (dlev@u.washington.edu) recently retired as professor in political science at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Why did over a hundred black magic practitioners die in East Java late in 1998?
Jason Brown
On September 1, 1998, Pak Tafsir and his wife Bu Miswa had just finished their evening meal and were preparing for bed when they heard a shout from outside their small bamboo home. 'Grandfather, can I borrow a match?'
The elderly couple were confused. It was pitch-black outside; there was no electricity for their simple home isolated in the middle of a rice paddy. As Bu Miswa groped around in the darkness searching for a match, Pak Tafsir set out to investigate.
But he was scared. He sensed menace lurking in the darkness outside, so armed himself with a large club. When Pak Tafsir opened the front door he faced a mob of angry attackers - shadowy figures, some in ninja-style masks, who moved in quickly to grab the 70-year-old farmer.
Although he managed to ward off one of the attackers with a heavy blow from his club, Pak Tafsir was no match for the hysterical mob who tied a rope around the old man's neck then dragged him more than 50m to the roadside of this small East Javanese village. The attackers disappeared into the night. Bu Miswa had fled terrified into the jungle behind her home, and Pak Tafsir's lifeless form lay dumped by the roadside to be discovered by villagers early the next morning.
Pak Tafsir's gruesome murder was just one of an estimated 150 bizarre executions of suspected black magic practitioners, or dukun santet, in the Banyuwangi region of East Java during 1998. What began as a few sporadic murders from early February of that year soon erupted into a mysterious killing spree which was to drive fear and terror into the Banyuwangi community. At the same time the organised nature of the murders along with an apparent terror campaign against local Islamic clerics, or kyai, gave rise to a multitude of political conspiracy theories.
Who was masterminding the dukun santet slayings? Were elite politicians working behind the scenes, as some high-profile political leaders claimed, including Abdurrahman Wahid, then head of Indonesia's largest Islamic organisation Nahdlatul Ulama? Was it a military exercise designed to create chaos throughout East Java in the wake of Suharto's resignation? Were forces at play to disrupt a major congress of Megawati Sukarnoputri's Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) planned for Bali, just half an hour by ferry from Banyuwangi? Were the dukun santet simply scapegoats in a carefully manipulated campaign designed to disrupt and discredit the emerging post-New Order political forces in the staunchly Islamic province of East Java?
Now, more than one year since the terror of Banyuwangi reached its peak, most of these political conspiracy theories remain largely unanswered. The often horrific murders, once described by Indonesia's press as 'Banyuwangi's killing fields', have simply become a haunting memory of human rights abuse joining Indonesia's lengthy list of socio-political ills which include problems in Ambon, Aceh, Irian Jaya and the former East Timor.
Sifting through the facts, half-truths and lies that lurk behind the Banyuwangi affair is a difficult task. I spent three months in the small village of Gintangan, about 20km south of Banyuwangi city, gleaning information from village heads, black magicians, white magicians, muslim clerics, lecturers and local culture experts, prisoners and family members of murder victims. What emerged were not the political conspiracy theories bandied about daily in the headlines of Indonesian and international press, but rather two distinct events. What began as a cultural phenomenon quickly became a vehicle for political manipulation both actively at the local level and passively at the national level.
Magic
In order to understand how such violent murder could emerge from the social fabric of Banyuwangi we must first consider the depth of belief in the paranormal that pervades this ethnically diverse community.
Banyuwangi has long been known as one of the most powerful centres of black magic in Indonesia, along with Banten in West Java and the island of Lombok. According to anthropologist Kusnadi, from the University of Jember, Banyuwangi's fertile land has bred a farming culture with close links to the spiritual world. As a buffer zone between the islands of Java and Bali, Banyuwangi also has a long history of violent struggle which in the past often met with failure. This combination of fertility and failure led to an obsession with sorcery among the peoples of Banyuwangi.
According to one history, black magic practised today in Banyuwangi is a blend of animistic belief and Islamic mysticism which arose out of inter-religious conflict during the Mataram court from the 16th century onwards. Another account tracks the origins of Banyuwangi's black magic to Tulung Agung - a region in the west of East Java.
Whatever its origins, today black magic, together with white magic such as fortune telling, love magic, healing massage and countless other forms, continues to play a dominant role within Banyuwangi cosmology. Nearly everyone I spoke to, from lecturers and journalists to farmers and housewives, believe in it wholeheartedly. All disasters - be they personal or communal - are attributed to black magic. Unusual or sudden death, crop failure, death of livestock, and marriage problems are all caused by a local dukun santet.
Black magic in Banyuwangi takes on two major forms. The first is sihir - black magic used to kill another person. This generally comes in the form of busung, where the victim's stomach will grow grotesquely in size. It is believed various items such as knives, nails, broken glass, even small frying pans or animals can be found inside the stomach. Busung victims rarely escape death.
The second is rapuh - sorcery designed to make the victim suffer throughout their lifetime. Symptoms include sudden blindness or deafness, paralysis or uncontrollable shaking and trembling.
Dukun santet are feared, and feelings of revenge permeate the social psyche. However, prior to 1998 revenge killings of dukun santet were rare. Banyuwangi villagers have long kept black magic in check at the local village level. A code of ethics among Banyuwangi dukun santet forbids them from using their magic against people in the same village. If this occurs the accused dukun must undertake an oath of innocence in the local mosque. Before 1998, a dukun found guilty by fellow villagers was usually exiled from the village and perhaps his home and possessions torched.
Good and bad
But in 1998, with the nation reeling under tremendous social change following the downfall of Suharto, the people of Banyuwangi abandoned cultural restraints and took the law violently into their own hands.
Between February and July 1998, cases of dukun santet murders in Banyuwangi were still relatively few - about five. However in August this figure leapt to 47 cases and in September 80 cases. In fact, during September and October 1998 the situation was akin to a bloodbath. According to figures compiled by a Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) investigation team, 143 suspected dukun santet were murdered in Banyuwangi along with another 105 murders in neighbouring regions of East Java such as Jember, Sumenep and Pasuruan after the phenomenon spread throughout the province.
I believe all of the murders were essentially a social phenomena grounded in the reformation process, along with various other social factors, which allowed deep-set feelings of revenge to emerge and be enacted upon indiscriminately.
Throughout Indonesia the reformation process quickly produced a dichotomy between 'good' and 'bad' in the political sphere. 'Good' was viewed as the new emerging reformation political forces. 'Bad' were those politicians with links to Suharto's New Order. The purging of the political 'bad' was particularly strong in East Java.
This 'good-bad' dichotomy also entered the collective consciousness at the village level. Dukun santet - those members of the community seen as responsible for all unexplainable hardship - became the 'bad' which needed to be purged from the social landscape.
A number of social factors allowed this simple 'good-bad' dichotomy to enter the social sphere. The monetary crisis threw many below the poverty line and created despair. The tremendous events of May 1998 in Jakarta, in which a social uprising, complete with looting and rioting, went largely unprosecuted, created a misconception among the villagers of Banyuwangi regarding the power of the state, particularly the military and police. As the killings reached their peak in September and October 1998 the villagers, bonded in solidarity, felt themselves to be above the law.
In the aftermath of May 1998, police were reticent to act with overt force and were anyway often outnumbered by hysterical mobs baying for dukun blood. On a number of occasions villagers protested outside police stations for the release of friends arrested in connection with the dukun santet slayings.
These factors allowed the killing spree to continue virtually unhindered until late October and early November, when the military finally sent in crack forces to quell the violent murders.
Not all of the dukun santet murders were spontaneous mass mob lynchings. Evidence I gathered from the field indicates that some assassins were paid - usually by villagers wishing to enact revenge upon a certain dukun santet but who were not brave enough to do it themselves. I also found evidence of local provocateurs who gave small amounts of money to teenagers and local hoodlums in order to buy alcohol. Once drunk, these people were more easily persuaded to join in a lynching mob.
Ninjas
The issue which captured the imagination of the Indonesian and foreign press and led to widening political conspiracy theories was the emergence of 'ninjas', who were often described as highly trained assassins with links to the military.
I don't believe such ninjas existed in Banyuwangi. Instead we have mainly villagers or local provocateurs who wanted to disguise their identity from fellow villagers by tying a t-shirt around their face.
>However, a 'ninja issue' certainly did exist. It was accompanied by what seems to have been a terror campaign against local muslim clerics, Islamic ulama and Nahdlatul Ulama activists. This is where we see the crossover from social phenomena to politically motivated campaign. The 'ninja issue', as I call it, emerged at the height of the dukun santet killings. Aided by a sensationalising mass media, the 'ninja issue' spread like wildfire throughout East Java and beyond. Now not only dukun santet were considered targets, but the entire Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) community.
Throughout East Java, Islamic communities established private security forces to protect their local muslim clerics. In Banyuwangi for example, as night fell the city was as though under siege, with bands of armed residents manning private security posts. All strangers were considered potential ninja assassins and rumours of ninja sightings intensified in a community gripped by panic and hysteria.
The 'ninja issue' reached its gruesome peak near the East Javanese city of Malang when on October 24, 1998, five suspected ninjas were murdered by villagers. One victim was burnt to death while another was beheaded and his head paraded around the small city of Godanglegi.
These murders had no direct relationship to the dukun santet slayings, which were of a cultural nature. But the 'ninja issue' does indicate a politically motivated anti-Nahdlatul Ulama campaign. The very fact that NU clerics were being terrorised throughout East Java led to claims of a national anti-NU conspiracy. The dukun santet murders were merely a lever designed to create chaotic conditions in East Java, unsettling the staunch NU region and disrupting the formation of Abdurrahman Wahid's National Awakening Party (PKB).
Fortunately the national conspiracy theories have remained just that - theories. But there is more evidence of an anti-muslim cleric campaign at the local level. The fall of Suharto and the arrival of the reformation process heralded a new phase in the political empowerment of local religious leaders. Muslim clerics, or kyai, have long played an important social role as informal village leaders. In Banyuwangi villagers will often approach their kyai for assistance on all kinds of matters be they spiritual or personal, while the village head ( kepala desa) is usually only approached when official business is required, i.e. a government stamp.
With the arrival of political reformation, these respected informal village leaders had the opportunity to move from the social to the political sphere. These muslim clerics posed a major threat to local politicians, including village heads, district heads and even the Banyuwangi Bupati, or regent, who was forced to resign in the wake of the dukun santet slayings and NU terror campaign.
Local political figures, fearful of the threat posed by muslim clerics and the new strong political arm of NU, may have used the dukun santet slayings for their own political interests by latching onto the 'ninja issue' in order to launch a terror campaign against the NU community.
In Banyuwangi of the 143 suspected dukun santet who were murdered only one was a Koranic teacher. This man had recently moved from the north of the region following accusations he practised black magic. While it is true that a NU investigation team found that 83 of the 143 killed were actually NU members, this is not particularly unusual given that Banyuwangi has always been a staunch NU stronghold.
I believe there are two main reasons why the terror campaign, or 'ninja issue', spread out of Banyuwangi to the rest of East Java. Firstly, local politicians in the various regions of East Java were similarly threatened by the political empowerment of muslim clerics, while in some regions there existed tensions between the Islamic community and the local political and security apparatus. Secondly, NU spokesmen often overreacted to the situation by calling on the community to protect their local muslim cleric, creating a scene of hysteria throughout the entire province.
Whether local or national conspiracy, the anti-NU terror campaign ultimately failed. In East Java the National Awakening Party won convincingly in last year's election, while the party's leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, is now Indonesia's third president.
Meanwhile in the villages of Banyuwangi belief in black magic remains as strong as ever. Villagers continue to fall ill and die as a result of black magic practices. Feelings of revenge continue to mount and the possibility of another uprising against the 'bad' of society always lurks dangerously on the horizon.
Jason Brown (pakjason44@hotmail.com) was a field project student in Malang, East Java, with Acicis (the Australian Consortium of In Country Indonesian Studies) in late 1999.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Indonesia's surprising new president
Greg Barton
The media regularly remind us that the president is a 'half blind, frail Muslim cleric'. Uncomfortable in suit and tie, clumsy assisted by aids on right and left, Abdurrahman Wahid seems almost as incongruous in the role as his elfish predecessor BJ Habibie. This revered but eccentric leader of the peasant-farmer based Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) seems an unlikely choice to lead a nation wracked by a radical collapse of confidence.
Almost everyone expected the regal and immensely popular Megawati Sukarnoputri to win the top office. Her serene visage had stared presidentially forth from tens of thousands of banners, whilst the folksy and decidedly unphotogenic Gus Dur was barely seen. Megawati's party PDI-P garnered a third of the votes at the June 7 general elections. Abdurrahman's party PKB, largely lacking support outside rural East Java, gained just twelve percent.
When Abdurrahman, backed by the Muslim right, the military and Suharto's Golkar party, trounced Megawati in a parliamentary vote for the presidency on October 20, many could not accept the result. That Wednesday night Jakarta burned. Only when Megawati won the vice-presidency the following day did the nation begin to breathe easy. Even then, some were hardly reassured when Abdurrahman announced a 'National Unity' cabinet several days later. Where was the opposition? Could democracy thrive in such a climate of compromise and 'solidarity making'?
But Abdurrahman Wahid, or Gus Dur as he is popularly known, has been grossly underestimated by the Australian media in particular. Behind the avuncular facade lies a profoundly complex individual of surprising measure. He faces some extraordinary challenges, not least the fear of 'Balkanisation' in this fatigued and brittle nation-state. If he proves equal to them, the entire nation will acknowledge him, as many already do, as in a Churchillian way the very best leader for the hour.
Polyglot father
Abdurrahman comes from one of Indonesia's more remarkable families. His grandfather Hasjim Asj'ari was an outstanding Islamic scholar (ulama). One of the founders of NU in 1926, he had influence not just among traditionalist Muslims but within the nationalist movement. His father Wahid Hasjim also played a key leadership role within NU and was Minister for Religious Affairs under Sukarno. Two major roads in central Jakarta bear the names of these two men - testimony to the esteem in which they are held.
Abdurrahman grew up in the early 1950s in affluent and cosmopolitan Central Jakarta. As a key figure within Indonesia's small elite, Abdurrahman's polyglot father regularly entertained a diverse range of personalities, including many foreign ambassadors. Abdurrahman spent enough time with a German friend of his father to learn a love of Beethoven and other classical European composers.
After completing junior high school he spent his late teenage years studying classical Islamic learning at several religious boarding schools (pesantren). Even in these most traditional of institutions, in his spare time (of which he had plenty for he found his classical Arabic studies easy) he read western philosophy, psychology, sociology and politics, both in English and French. A wardrobe filled with European texts remains at one pesantren as a tribute to this most unusual student.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this rich interior life Abdurrahman describes himself as a teenager locked in a difficult personal struggle. In his mid-twenties he was sent to Cairo's famous thousand year old Al Azhar University to complete his Islamic studies. However he soon found the formal Al Azhar rote-learning tedious and the subjects not greatly advanced on what he had already covered in some of Java's better pesantren. Instead he spent his time reading in the library of the American University, joining in intellectual cafe discussions, and watching French cinema and soccer. (The latter 'education' proved invaluable when years later he was asked to comment on World Cup matches on Indonesian television.)
In Cairo Abdurrahman became a committed liberal. As a teenager he had gone through a phase of, as he puts it, 'Islamic extremism', but in Cairo he left this behind. In 1966, after two years in Cairo, he moved to Baghdad, then the Arab world's most cosmopolitan capital. He spent four years there studying not Islamic studies but Arabic literature and society. This was followed by a year in Europe, were he had hoped to continue his studies, before returning to Java in 1971.
His unorthodox educational experience enabled him to synthesise modern western thought and classical Islamic learning in a most productive fashion. Back in Java he plunged into the task of reforming the pesantren system.
Underdog
By 1978 he was an intellectual activist in Jakarta. Through his essays in Tempo weekly magazine he explained NU's arcane traditionalist Islam to Indonesia's urban elite. He was an innovative religious thinker and sharp social commentator. He spoke up for Indonesia's Chinese and other minority communities and eloquently declared intolerance antithetical to the true spirit of Islam.
In the early 1980s he became a key figure within a movement to reform NU. In December 1984 he was elected chairman of NU, a post he would hold for 15 years. One of his first initiatives was to withdraw NU from the political party PPP. He explained that 'church and state' should be separated, and declared that NU would return to its original charter as a social and religious organisation. This aversion to 'political Islam' meant that Suharto initially welcomed his ascension to lead the 30 million strong NU. The president soon had reason to revise his judgement, however, as Abdurrahman emerged as one of his most outspoken critics.
By the early 1990s Suharto was actively courting support from the 'political Muslims' he had persecuted a decade earlier, in an effort to balance the power of the military. His main vehicle was the Association of Islamic Intellectuals (ICMI), which he placed under the care of BJ Habibie. Abdurrahman's refusal to join ICMI, and his criticism of it for fostering sectarianism, enraged Suharto. At the November 1994 five-yearly NU congress Suharto did his best to block Abdurrahman's re-election to a third term as chairman. Despite his unparalleled resources, Suharto lost. It is difficult to conceive of any one else being able to stand up to Suharto and win in the way that Abdurrahman did. Megawati, for example, was not able to do so two years later when a similar assault within PDI saw her toppled from the leadership.
During the second half of the 1990s the political atmosphere chilled. Abdurrahman had to make some tough choices. In the face of unrelenting pressure from Suharto and the military he stepped back from the edge. Together with Megawati and Amien Rais he knew he could exert enormous pressure on Suharto's increasingly brittle regime, but he chose to bide his time until they could be certain of a lasting victory. For this he was greatly misunderstood.
Abdurrahman is a realist-idealist. His idealism is unambiguous and rooted in his religious convictions. For him Islam is a religion of justice, compassion and tolerance. He consistently champions inter-communal cooperation. He made three visits to Israel during the 1990s and has made diplomatic normalisation with Israel a personal project as president. Abdurrahman has a rich appreciation of how much we all share as human beings. This humanitarianism is reflected in his love of the novels of Orthodox Jewish writer Chaim Potok, and perhaps even more surprisingly, those of Salman Rushdie, whose freedom he has taken pains to defend.
But Abdurrahman is also a realist. Throughout his 15 years at the helm of Nahdlatul Ulama, the largest organisation with a grass-roots network outside of the military-backed regime itself, he went out of his way to maintain good working relations with the military. Leading an organisation larger than many mid-sized nations made him familiar with the dynamics of real politik. To have opposed the military outright would have meant bloody repression, as the East Timorese are only too aware. Even as president he remains cautious of pushing too hard too fast. He recently signalled that he is prepared to consider pardoning a repentant Suharto 'but not his family members or cronies', arguing that 'Suharto still has many powerful supporters'.
For this reason, reform of the Indonesian military will be gradual. His instincts are to push for evolution over revolution, and to as far as possible avoid confrontation. As NU leader he had a pastoral concern for his tens of millions of members, and this same concern colours his presidential style.
Reckless
For those who know him, however, the great irony and frustration is that his personality is shot through with a reckless streak. Had he taken greater care of his health, eating well and exercising regularly, he would not have suffered as he has from the effects of adult-onset diabetes. Better control of his blood pressure might have avoided the almost fatal stroke of January 1998 and arrested the erosion of his eyesight.
On another front, if he had only refrained from regularly declaring Megawati 'well intentioned but stupid' he would have saved his supporters considerable heartache. Abdurrahman's earthy wit has often gotten the better of him. His lack of discipline reveals itself in other areas as well. Had he learned to become a responsible administrator, his three terms at the helm of NU might have better equipped him for the presidency.
Whether this reckless streak is the product of his unusual childhood is impossible to know. But his abiding sense of destiny most certainly is. On a fateful day in April 1953 Abdurrahman was travelling with his father by car. He was twelve years old. He sat in the front with the driver, his father sat behind. The car was struck from behind by another vehicle and Wahid Hasjim was fatally injured. His mother, a strong woman whom Abdurrahman loved and a real power within NU, made it clear that his father's mantle had now passed to him. He was to become a leader and to serve the nation. He has been driven ever since.
Greg Barton (gjbarton@deakin.edu.au) teaches studies in religion at Deakin University, Geelong, Australia.
Inside Indonesia 62: Apr - Jun 2000
Page 49 of 68
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