Detail, from monument at Lubang Buaya
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.
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.
