Jakarta (Jakarta is coming)

Detail, from monument at Lubang Buaya

Why is this?

Malnutrition kills 21 Indonesia toddlers

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) – At least 21 toddlers have died of malnutrition in eastern Indonesia in recent months due to a food shortage that threatens the lives of thousands more children, a local health official said Thursday.

An additional 116 youngsters have been admitted to clinics and hospitals in critical condition, said Stephanus Bria Seran, who heads the health department in East Nusa Tenggara province.

“We urgently need medicine and nutritional foods to save the children,” he said. “We are racing against time because they need nutritious food within 30 days if we want to save their lives.”

The food shortages have been caused by flooding and drought. Farmers fear the next harvest may also fail due to excessive rainfall and landslides.

Children’s diets began lacking sufficient nutrients, causing diseases, hospitalizations and deaths over the past six months, he said.

In the same period, nearly 85,000 children have been registered as malnourished in the province, one of the country’s least developed.

The figures show a sharp jump from the whole of 2007, when 10 toddlers died out of 68,000 registered as malnourished in the province. …> go to article

Or this?

Hungry monkeys raid farmland around Indonesia’s Borobudur temple

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP): Bands of starving monkeys have destroyed crops around Indonesia’s famous Borobudur Buddhist temple in search of food their habitat can no longer supply, an official said Wednesday.

Thousands of long-tailed macaques went searching for sustenance in several villages of Central Java province, said Dedi Rinyadi, who works for the Natural Resources Conservation Agency.

The population of monkeys has exploded due to dwindling predators, but drought has led to food shortages, Rinyadi said.

The monkeys have stolen crops and destroyed about 990 acres of farmland – including around the 7th-century Buddhist temple complex of Borobudur outside the sultanate of Yogyakarta.

Some have invaded villagers’ yards in search of fruit, vegetables and rice. Distressed farmers have used firecrackers and air rifles to chase them away.

Farmers are worried they are so occupied fighting off the monkeys they will not be able to tend their land, Rinyadi said.

“Monkeys are another threat to food production during this dry season,” Rinyadi said. …> go to article

There certainly appears to be something amiss in Central and East Java.  What does this have to do with Jakarta? Jakarta is the capitol of Indonesia. It is the center of national government, it is the center of the banking and communication sectors. Jakarta also produces and consumes a large percentage of the GDP.

Can you blame Jakarta for malnourished children, rampaging monkeys, the weather?

Jakarta Urban Blog’s focus is, of course, Jakarta but it would be amiss to think that Jakarta sits in isolation from distant events elsewhere in Indonesia and amiss to think that Jakarta sits in isolation of larger global events outside of Indonesia.

“Jakarta is coming”

The date is September 11, but not September, 11, 2001, it is September, 11, 1973. This is the date of the coup led by Augusto Pinochet and the CIA against the freely elected government of Salvador Allende. This was the date of the beginning of a dark night of torture and draconian economic policies which would last in Chile for the next seventeen years. The night spread its dark wings to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and later to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. Vibrant emerging economies and political systems would be overthrown in the name of “free markets” while tens of thousands of people were “disappeared” and hundrends of thousands tortured in the jails of CIA backed juntas.

This is the story of a new book which has come across my desk recently. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, Metropolitan Book, 2007, 558 pages.

From The Shock Doctrine:

“Suharto…had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto and his henchmen. Ralph McGhee, a senior CIA operations manager during the years of the coup, said Indonesia was a “model operation…You can trace back all major, bloody events run from Washington to the way Suharto came to power. The success of that meant that it would be repeated, again, and again”.

The other crucial lesson from Indonesia had to do with the pre-coup partnership between Suharto and the Berkeley Mafia. Because they were ready to take up top “technocratic” positions in the new government and had already converted Suharto to their worldview, the coup did more than just get rid of a nationalist threat; it transformed Indonesia into one of the most welcoming environments for foreign multinationals in the world.

As momentum began to build toward Allende’s ouster, a chilling warning began appearing in red paint on the walls of Santiago. It said,  ‘Jakarta is coming’.”

The shock in Indonesia left perhaps one million dead. It was hailed by the CIA as the “perfect model” to be repeated “again and again”. The Berkeley Mafia, as Klein points out, were those Indonesian economists which were educated at the University of California at Berkeley since 1956 and funded by the Ford Foundation where they returned home to the University of Indonesia to “build a faithful copy of a Western-style” economics department.  After Suharto consolidated power key financial posts were filled by these Berkeley educated economists where they “passed laws allowing foreign companies to own 100 percent of these resources, handed out “tax holidays”, and within two years, Indonesia’s natural wealth – copper, nickle, hardwood, rubber, and oil – was being divided among the largest mining and energy companies in the world”.

But the Berkeley Mafia were small players compared to those which came out of the Chicago School of Economics under Milton Friedman. These were the people who carried the banner of the true economic orthodoxy, the so-called neoliberals, who advocated a “pure” laissez-faire economics, whose economic philosophy was the antithesis of that of John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith.

Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom “laid out what would become the global free-market rulebook and in the U.S., would form the economic agenda of the neoconservative movement.

First, governments must remove all rules and regulations standing in the way of the accumulation of profits. Second, they should sell off any assets they own that corporations could be running at a profit. And third, they should dramatically cut back funding of social programs… …Friedman’s vision coincided with precisely with with the interests of large multinationals, which by nature hunger for for vast new unregulated markets. In the first stage of capitalist expansion, that kind of ravenous growth was provided by colonialism- by “discovering” new territories and grabbing land without paying for it, then extracting riches without compensating local populations. Friedman’s war on the “welfare state” and “big government” held out the promise of a new font of riches- only this time, rather than conquering new territory, the state itself would be the new frontier, its public services and assets auctioned off for far less than they were worth”.

As Klein states in her introduction:

“Some of the most infamous human rights violations of this era, which have tended to be viewed as sadistic acts carried out by antidemocratic regimes, were in fact either committed with the deliberate intent of terrorizing the public or actively harnessed to prepare the ground for the introduction of radical free-market “reforms“.

Reforms which were neither liberal, free, or democratic.

It was not just a matter of “regime change” that the CIA and the U.S. government was concerned with but also to apply, after appropriate shocks to the population, literal in terms of the torture employed and the economic hardships endured, a “pure” and “orthodox” economic theory.

These shocks, as Klein so well documents, were carried through into events as seemingly divergent as the Solidarity movement in Poland, Thatcher’s war in the Falklands, Tiananmen Sqaure, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Asian economic crisis of 1997-1998, the Septemebr 11 attacks in the United States, and the war in Iraq. The shocks are not just limited to political or economic crisis but now are also those natural disasters such as the tsunami of 2004 or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.  These tragic events are now seen as opportunities to deregulate, privatize, cut back social services, and to turn a profit for the elite.  In the case of Iraq, the war has been privatized, the population “shocked and awed” and for those who oppose there awaits Abu Ghraib, the jails of Baghram, the torture of Guantanamo, or rendition into the void. This, in the name of profit and the free market.

Is this why children die from malnourishment in East Java, why monkeys run amok in Central Java, why the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund manufacture a world food crisis and speculate on the price of a barrel of oil?

Klein has written a remarkable book.  It is a book which exposes over thirty years of crimes perpetrated on the people of the world in the name of corporate profit. To expose this is not only courageous but gives us the tools to fight back. This is always the case when one is armed with the truth.

Naomi Klein

Democracy Now!

Focus on the Global South

UPDATE 6/15/2008

From: Bloomberg.com: Asia

Indonesia’s Mulyani to Head Economic Affairs, Jakarta Post Says

By Nesa Subrahmaniyan

June 15 (Bloomberg) — Indonesian Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati has been appointed acting coordinating minister for economic affairs, the Jakarta Post reported, citing Sudi Silalahi, the cabinet secretary.

Mulyani, who will retain her post as finance minister, take over from Boediono, who has become head of the central bank, the newspaper said.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono signed a decree for the appointment on June 19, the report said.

From: Perspective on World History and Current Events

Sri Mulyani Indrawati
Minister of National Development Planning
Chairperson of the National Planning Agency (Bappenas)

Name: Dr Sri Mulyani Indrawati

Profile: Born in Tanjungkarang, Lampung, on 26th August 1962, Mulyani received her doctorate in economics from the University of Illinois. She is an executive director of the International Monetary Fund, representing 12 economies in Southeast Asia. In 2001 Mulyani left for Atlanta, United States, to serve as a consultant with the U.S. Aid Agency USAID for programs to strengthen Indonesia’s autonomy. She lectured on the Indonesian economy at Georgia University. A prominent economist, Mulyani was appointed a member of the National Economic Council during Abdurrahman Wahid’s administration.

Source The Jakarta Post

In light of what has been said above I will leave this without comment.

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Jakarta (Nasution, Fundamentals of Guerrilla War, the CIA)

 

Photo from: Jakarta: students protest against fuel price hikes

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-05/27/content_8260424.htm

After my last post I think I left some business undone regarding CONFRONTATION: THE WAR WITH INDONESIA 1962 – 1966 by Nick van der Bijl, Pen and Sword, 2008.

I wrote that this is a kind of “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun” war book. Which it necessarily must be because it involves the British.  Of course it is much more serious than that. Lives were lost in ‘Confrontasi’, both British and Indonesian. It was all very serious business along the North Borneo line of action. That is a fact.

There was that and also this.

From Nick van der Bijl:

“During his enforced period of reflection, in 1953 General Nasution had published the Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare. This is a thesis on guerrilla and anti-guerrilla warfare based on his own experiences and although one of several publications written by contemporary guerrilla leaders, such a Mao Tse Tung, Vo Nguyen Giap, and Che Guevara, it is the product of independent analysis through his experiences in guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency. In making a clear division between the ‘constructive’ nature of irregular operations and the ‘destructiveness’ of conventional war, he analyses guerrilla warfare as: “The guerrilla movement is only the result, not the cause of the problem… A guerrilla war, sufficiently active behind the front line of the enemy, can engage an enemy ten to thirty times its number. Thus the enemy is forced to decrease the number of troops used in the actual front line. At the right time, the army can go over to the offensive in order to destroy and annihilate the enemy’s army”.

As in Appendix I:

Fundamentals of Guerrilla War

A summary of the theories of Colonel Nasution are:

1. War in this century has become a total people’s war.
2. Guerrilla warfare is a war of the weak against the strong.
3. Guerrilla warfare cannot, by itself, bring final victory: guerrilla warfare can only weaken the strength of the enemy.
4. A guerrilla war is usually an ideological war. Warfare is a total people’s war.
5. Guerrilla warfare does not mean that all the people are fighting.
6. A guerrilla war must not consist of unorganized destruction; it must be of systematic character.
7. A guerrilla movement has its base within the people. The people support, care for and conceal the guerrillas.
8. The enemy’s arsenals are the guerrilla’s sources of weapons.
9. The principal requirements for guerrilla warfare are: a people who will give assistance, sufficient geographical room, and a war of long duration.
10. A total people’s war needs a unified leadership, not only at national level but also down to the local level.
11. The anti-guerrilla war must aim at severing the guerrilla fighters from their base, ‘the people’, and must therefore emphasize political, psychological and economic movements. The guerrilla must be opposed with his own tactics.

In a chapter entitled ‘The Guerrilla and our Future War’, Nasution predicted that guerrilla warfare would govern the strategic defense of Indonesia after 1953, and was therefore relevant to Indonesian strategy during Confrontation. Unfortunately, mostly because of political reasons, this strategy was not followed by Indonesian forces in Borneo. If it had been the outcome there might have been different or possibly ‘Confrontasi’ would have escalated into something Indonesia could not have sustained over the long run if British forces would have, say, bombed Jakarta or Surabaya.

In other words, as Nasution writes, “have your umbrella ready before it rains”. This is a good first rule for any venture.

Nasution also recognized that “official corruption, political cronyism, economic instability and ineffective security forces were major factors in inducing unrest”.

Here are a few other notes by Nasution quoting Nick van der Bijl:

“Volunteers are worth ten pressed men”.

“Guerrilla warfare is, by nature, long and exhaustive”.

“While guerrilla warfare is necessarily localized by nature, attacks on Indonesia are also likely to be localized so that the regular army would fight in urban areas while the guerrillas dominated the rural areas and interior”.

Nasution wrote that Security Forces must: “demonstrate political, psychological, social and economic skills in order to win the hopes and faith of the people gradually… The anti-guerrilla forces movement must be able to realize what are the politico-ideological and socio-economic problems that give rise to and nourish such guerrilla resistance; in essence that good intelligence is a vital element in security forces… Anti-guerrilla warfare is patrol warfare”.

 

Nastution is a voice out of Indonesia’s past but these ideas which he has set forth remain quite valid and are worthy of further pondering. What has changed most since his day is the character of the global city and the global city emerging as the stage on which modern warfare is conducted. A case in point is the Iraq War where major battles have been named after cities: Baghdad, Basra, Falluja, Sadr City, to name a few. The IED and the cell phone have combined to make a very potent urban weapon. It would be interesting to know who is reading Nasution today.

This written in 1999 from: A Future Full of Urban Operations

Conference Summary,URBAN WARFARE: OPTIONS, PROBLEMS AND THE FUTURE by: Daryl G. Press, January 1999. (citations here)

“Wars tend to draw troops into urban areas. Cities have historically played an important role in military campaigns because roads and rail lines usually intersect in cities, and ports and airfields are frequently located near major metropolitan centers. Movement into a theater through ports and airfields, or within a theater on roads or rail, requires the control of major cities.

There are reasons to believe that America’s future conflicts will involve more urban operations than those in the past. First, the world is becoming more urban. About half of the world’s population lives in cities today; 70% will live in urban areas in 25 years.2 As the number and size of cities grow, so will the frequency that overseas wars involve urban fighting. Second, cities are the political and economic centers of modern countries. Whatever America decides to fight for in future decades, the chances are good that it, and the people who control it, will be located in cities.3

Finally, Americans will frequently be drawn into cities because no enemy’s military can compete with U.S. forces in open terrain. Urban terrain, for reasons described below, negates many U.S. advantages and capitalizes on America’s unwillingness to kill non-combatants.4 Enemies will put their forces — conventional or guerrilla — in cities to fight on the most advantageous ground possible”.

Some notes on the CIA

From Nick van der Bijl:

“In February 1958, when Sukarno was out of the country, several senior Army officers in Sumatra and Celebes, prompted by the CIA, proclaimed the Pemerintah Revolusionir Republik Indonesia (PRRI – Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia). On 18 May, the shooting down of a CIA B-25 bomber on an arms supply mission over Ambon, and the capture of its pilot, Allen Pope, gave Sukarno the opportunity to accuse the US of supporting the rebels and prompted him to develop closer relations with the Soviet Union, and more especially, the People’s Republic of China. By the mid-1950s, British Intelligence and the CIA had jointly developed a strategy of undermining revolutionary and nationalist groups by supposedly supporting their aspirations and then by double-crossing them, and attacking the credibility of top echelons. In fact, the CIA were double-crossing the PRRI by passing information to Jakarta and ensured that weapon drops were seized by Sukarno’s forces. When, in the middle of the year, Colonel Achmad Yani, under orders from General Nasution, suppressed the rebellion with ruthless efficiency, Lubis (leader of a 1956 coup attempt and later involved with the PRRI) accused the US of treachery”.

This seems to be a never ending theme in US foreign policy in the last half of the twentieth century and up through current times. Time after time it is demonstrated that  military expertise is thrown overboard by ideology, politics, and an ignorance, as in the case of Iraq, so appalling it borders on national treason.

Jakarta (berita baru, “the mad doctor”, and wisdom)

 

 

 

Citayam

berita baru

Jakarta Urban Blog would like to note (since the last post) the passing of Ali Sadikin on May 20, 2008.  Ali Sadikin was governor of Jakarta from 1966 through 1977.  Since his death most comments I have seen seem to be favorable about his tenure as governor. 

From Jakarta Post, May 25, 2008, Ali Sadikin an inspiration for Indonesia’s younger generation, Abdul Khalik/Tifa Asrianti

“Former Jakarta governor Ali Sadikin, who died Tuesday, is remembered by Indonesia’s youth as a consistent and brave champion of the poor”.

Sadikin is known for much in the history of Jakarta and for his  “vibrant, colorful, immediate and compelling charm” as Abeyasekere writes. Sadikin was a dashing kick-ass Indonesian Marine and his vision of Jakarta was as a METROPOLITAN CITY (as Abeyasekere says this was always in captial letters and we might as well make them bold in addition). He and his staff wrote the Jakarta Master Plan (1965-1985) which was passed as a law in 1967 to adress the city’s problems in a systematic way and to plan future land use. 

Systematic he was and he is known for land clearances, street clearnces of street vendors and prostitutes, the arrest and jailing of beggars, the notorius seizure and destruction of the becak, and to even declaring Jakarta “a closed city” to further migration.  Ultimately, as Abeyasekere notes, Sadikin had to resign himself to the fact of a very large and growing population of urban poor.  On the one hand there was supression of undesirable elements like the beggars and prostitutes and on the other a concerted effort to improve the condition of the kampungs. Sadikin achieved success in part as the Jakarta economy, at least to 1974, was booming under the New Order and their motto of ‘Development’. Dangdut music was the new wave and Golkar lost the 1974 elections in Jakarta. His later participation in the ‘Petition 50′ in 1980 is also noted.

In the end Sadikin’s efforts were such that Jakarta was made even more attractive than before to those in the search for the “good life”.  As usual it’s a hard luck story.

Of all Jakarta’s governors since long gone Batavia  he was the best.  There is a certain political courage seen in Sadikin’s later life and lasting until the end.

Two new books have recently crossed my desk and are worth looking at.

CONFRONTATION: THE WAR WITH INDONESIA 1962 – 1966 by Nick van der Bijl, Pen and Sword, 2008.

This is a kind of “only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun” war book.

As described, “At any one time up to 50,000 troops (half of the Army’s strength today) were deployed along a 1,000 mile front. Their enemy were the communist led Indonesians whose leaders were determined to seize the states of Sarawak, Sabah and the oil rich Brunei, all of whom for their part wished to maintain their Commonwealth links. The catalyst for the war was the 1962 uprising in Brunei which was quickly crushed by the bold intervention of British army units”. 

Most of the book is about how the British knocked the crap out of Indonesian “confrontasi” through the skilled command of British led forces. There is a lot of operational detail in the book. The political background to these events is well outlined.   The British called Soekarno “the mad doctor”.  The book is full of revelations about the heavy involvement of the CIA in the politics of the time, supporting insurgencies through Indonesia and then betraying them to regular Indonesian forces.  The book also outlines the roles of the PKI and the development of the Indonesian TNI and their relationships to events in North Borneo.

There is one item the book includes as Appendix I,  Fundamentals of Guerrilla War, summarizing the theories of Colonel Nasution. Nasution, of course, led Indonesian forces in 1948, was twice appointed Army Chief of Staff, and otherwise had quite an eventful career.  Nasution’s first fundamental is “War in this century has become a total people’s war”.   Some of these theories were thrown together as Nastion contemplated the prospect of having to take the war to the Dutch with bases in the villages of the mountains of Java.  In light of  students on the streets of Jakarta being arrested for protesting fuel price increases Nasution is worth reading, at least for those who realize the people’s war must now be an urban one.

 

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani, W.W. Norton, 2008.

The editorial review calls it as  ”a flame-throwing epidemiologist talks about sex, drugs, and the mistakes (dismal), ideologies (vicious), and hopes (realistic) of international AIDS prevention”.

This book is about how we need a new paradigm.  Her web site The Wisdom of Whores is also worth looking at.