I have posted Tom Allard’s excellent reporting from the Sydney Morning Herald here in full. This is just a small part of the Indonesian puzzle. There is Timor, Ache, Trisakti, and Semanggi… Ambon and Kalimantan… There are just too many cockroaches of the Soeharto era to stamp out. Some are even prominent politicians.
Starting here would be a good thing.
Survivors … Sumini and Anwar Umar. Photo: Tom Allard
MOST Thursday afternoons, octogenarians Sumini and Anwar Umar take a bus from their homes in Jakarta’s suburbs to the city centre and set up camp outside the presidential palace in the city centre.
They join a smattering of other elderly Indonesians. Each of them are victims of the brutal crackdown on leftists that wracked the country from 1965 to 1966. The massacre of about 500,000 people, and imprisonment without trial of about 1 million others, ranks as one of the worst mass killings of the 20th century.
Yet this meagre, if heartfelt, protest each week across the road from the offices of the President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, is testament to the ambivalence many feel about the slaughter and its inability to reconcile the actions of the perpetrators, the military and vigilante groups from Indonesia’s mass Islamic organisations.
The spark for the bloodletting was the failed coup in 1965,which began with the abduction and murder of six generals but lasted barely one day.
Crushed by an obscure general, Suharto, who would later become a long-standing dictator, the forces behind the coup remain a subject of debate.
But, with the support of the United States and the acquiescence of Australia, the army began a propaganda campaign that blamed the treasonous uprising on the Communist Party, then a major force in society.
Whipping up a frenzy of anti-communist hatred before it launched its killing spree, members of the Communist-linked Indonesian Women’s Movement, or Gerwani, were accused of cutting off the genitals of the generals. The women, so the reports went, then took part in a sexual orgy with Communist cadres and sympathetic air force officers at the very place the bodies of the generals had been thrown into a well.
Sumini was a member of Gerwani, living in Central Java and working as a kindergarten teacher. She remembers the propaganda campaign. “I did not believe it,” she said. “Gerwani was good … Its statutes said we should help the illiterates, children from poor families.”
It was a couple of months after the failed coup that Sumini was detained by an army officer and sent to prison, along with her sister and cousin. It was another 10 years before she was released.
“I remember my sister being stripped and electrocuted,” she said.
Mr Anwar, who was a secretary-general of a civil servants union, spent 12 years in prison. He, too, was electrocuted, beaten with a chair and fists. The worst thing, though, was being separated from his family.
They had no idea what had happened to him, but remained ostracised for his affiliation with the union movement. Three of his children had died – including one who committed suicide – before his release.
Like all those identified as leftists, Sumini and Mr Anwar were unable to get work after their release, their identity papers marking them as former political prisoners.
Even so, compared with other victims, Mr Anwar and Sumini got off relatively lightly.
The mass killings were particularly gruesome. Some were lined up and shot by the military. Many more were beheaded, garrotted or had their throats slit by Islamic militias with knives or machetes.
“It was done face to face,” says Greg Fealy, of the Australian National University. “It’s not like the mechanical process that the Nazis had, or Pol Pot’s farms [in Cambodia].”
Mr Fealy will be among about 30 academics who will congregate in Singapore next week for the biggest conference ever held on the massacres.
It is perhaps instructive that the conference is not being held in Indonesia and that most of the participants are not Indonesians.
Despite some steps towards accounting for the events of 1965 and 1966 after the fall of Suharto, Indonesia’s efforts to undertake a detailed official investigation into the coup and its aftermath have been stillborn.
The Parliament set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Suharto was deposed, but it never got off the ground after Mr Yudhoyono failed to appoint delegates and the Constitutional Court ruled it unlawful.
The highly sanitised history of the period taught at schools was briefly abandoned in 2004.
But the old texts, depicting the events as a patriotic campaign that resulted in less than 80,000 deaths, were reintroduced in 2006 following protests by Islamic groups and the military. The offending text books from 2004 were burnt.
Katherine McGregor, a University of Melbourne academic and the convener of next week’s conference, said there remained a lack of political will from the highest levels to tackle the legacy of the massacres.
As the Indonesian scholar Asvi Warman Adam notes, Mr Yudhoyono’s father-in-law, Sarwo Edhie Wibowo, was the military officer who led the killings in Central Java.
As the 63rd anniversary of free Indonesia approaches perhaps it might be appropriate to review some recent history.
The curtain rises in the year of 1996.
The stage: Jakarta.
As in a Greek tragedy there is an odd but compelling cast of characters.
There are kings and princes, sycophants, embezzlers, corrupt ministers, murderers, bigots, cronies, mutes, the blind, back stabbers, oracles, and a few (very few) heroes.
There is a youthful angry chourus.
And the curtain rises with the words, “Raid PDI Headquarters”.
“Kevin O’Rourke graduated from Havard University before moving to Jakarta, where he has worked for eight years as an investment banker, consultant and political risk analyst. Throughout the height of the political transition, he scrutinised events first-hand by authoring the Van Zorge Report, an indepedent bi-weekly journal on politics and economics”… so says the overly polite blurb on the back cover of his book.
Of course that was written in 2002, the year in which his book was published and where the narrative of Reformasi ends.
A check of the Van Zorge Report’s own cast of characters does not turn up his name but that still does not prevent me from wishing I had the $750.00 US for a year subscription or an offer to work in their Jakarta office.
” ‘Raid PDI Headquarters.’ That simple command, issued by President Soeharto to his security forces in July 1996, triggered the extraordinary political power struggle that would consume Indonesian for years to come.”
The fourth paragraph reads, “After several years, and after the loss of thousands of lives, the forces of change would triumph and Indonesia would become the world’s third largest democracy – or at least so it would appear. In fact, appearances can be misleading in Indonesia, and triumphs can prove ephemeral.”
And that, in short, is what the book is about. You could leave it at that except for the next 416 pages a riveting and detailed narrative of events of epic proportions which occured over an six year period of Indonesian history unfolds. It is a narrative that is written so well about a subject so compelling that it is hard to put the book down.
The characters are striking and the events terrible and bizarre. No fiction writer could ever imagine the scenario.
Beginning with Cedana Inc. and the KKN (corruption, cronyism, and nepotism) economy of Indonesia under Soeharto, O’Rourke works through the events of the economic crisis of 1997, the corrupt banking practices which allowed Cedana Inc. and friends to loot the Indonesian treasury for years; the Indonesian university students who demanded democratic reforms, reformasi, many of which were wounded or killed in demonstrations at Trisakti and Semanggi; the Jakarta riots, a twisted and manipulated spree of looting, arson, and rape; the fall of Soeharto; at every turn violence on a scale which had not been seen in Indonesia since the 1965 coup and communist purges which brought Soeharto to power.
From the streets of Jakarta to Aceh to East Timor to the Dyaks of Kalimatan to Maluku to the mysterious killings of dukun in East Java, Indonesian was stricken with a stunning series of horrific events.
All the while the machinations (and there were multitudes of them!) of Habibie, Megawati (whose PDI offices were raided), Abdurrahman Wahid, and Amien Rais are played out for the public like a shadow puppet play.
Soeharto drifts in and out, on and off stage. He casts a long shadow even in the pitch black of night. His power is like magic. His money is like magic. This is the game. It threatens to swallow the nation.
Reformasi is divided into four parts: Part I, Hubris of the Elite; Part II, Tyranny of the Elite; and Part III, Melee of the Elite; and Epilouge. There is a preface, a map of Indonesia, a map of Jakarta, extensive notes, bibliography, glossary (you need it for sure), notes on the text, photos, and index. There are also Appendices: Appendix I, Rupiah Exchange Rate (1996-2001), which tells its own story, and Appedix II, Short Biographies, which also tells a few stories.
There are 109 short biographies. It’s not a Who’s Who of Indonesia and I don’t think it accounts for everyone mentioned in the book but it does give a good outline of the main players.
Let’s take a look at four, in order of appearance. Biographies are referenced to 2002.
“MAKARIM, Zacky career Special Forces intelligence officer who helped perpetrate the PDI Headquarters raid in 1996 as head of Directorate A of the intelligence agency, Bais; subsequently promoted to major-general and given command of Bais, which he commanded during the the riots of May 1998; entrusted by Wiranto in 1999 with paramount authority over military operations in East Timor. as commander of the Taskforce on the East Timor Consultation (P3TT); named by both the Human Rights Commission and the attorney general’s office as a suspected perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
SOEHARTO, Tommy also known as Hutomo Mandala Putra. Shoeharto’s third son; owner of the Humpass Group with holdings in shipping, manufacturing and energy. Embroiled in controversy over rent seeking facilities such as the clove monopoly and the Timor national car program. Accused by President Wahid of fomenting violence in retaliation for efforts to prosecute his father. Sentenced to jail in October 2000 but escaped custody and became a fugitive; finally captured in 2001. (He was implicated in and directly involved with assassination and bombings).
SUBIANTO, Prabowoaristocrat and son-in-law of Soeharto; Special Forces commander responsible for abducting pro-democracy activists in 1998; promoted to lieutenant-general and Kostrad commander in March 1998; blamed Wiranto for masterminding the May 1998 riots; discharged in August 1998. (Not only was he responsible for abducting pro-democracy activists there is testimony of torture and “disapperances” under his command. His claim about Wiranto is on the mark. )
WIRANTO Central Java native who pursued a lacklustre army career before being noticed by senior generals in the 1980s; brought tp Jakarta and became presidential adjutant from 1989 to 1993; revolved through most pf the army’s most strategic posts, in rapid succession, from 1994 to 1998; appointed armed forces commander in February 1998. Touted as Soeharto’s anointed successor, but acquiesced to the president’s overthrow in May 1998; vowed to protect Soeharto and his family. While he served as armed forces commander in 1998-99 various elements of the military perpetrated the Trisakti shootings, the Semanggi I killings, the Bantiqiyah maasacre, clashes with police in Maluku , the East Timor scorched-earth campaign, the Semanggi II killing and other assorted abuses. Promoted to co-ordinating minister for politics and security in October 1999; after a tense standoff with President Wahid, sacked in January 2000. Named by both the Human Rights Commission and the attorney general’s office as a suspected perpetrator of crimes against humanity.”
And where are these people today?
16 months ago: Former Indonesian Chief of National Intelegent Agency (BIN) Zacky Anwar Makarim attends a hearing held by Indonesian-East Timor Truth and Friendship Commission in Jakarta, 28 March 2007. The Indonesia-East Timor Truth and Friendship Commission is due to hear from military officials and expects to collect testimony from 70 people overall.
E Timor CASE CLOSED after CTF submits final report
Nusa Dua, Bali ANTARA News 6/15/2008 – The human rights violation case prior to and after East Timor`s independence referendum in 1999 was officially closed after the Commission for Truth and Friendship (CTF) submitted its report to the both governments.
“With CTF`s final report, the human rights violation case before and after the 1999 referendum is closed and would not be brought to legal process,” Indonesian Foreign Affairs Minister Hassan Wirajuda said here Tuesday. …> go to article
Soeharto`s son counter-sues in Indonesia graft case
Jakarta ANTARA News 8/13/2008 – The youngest son of former president Soeharto formally denied corruption allegations Tuesday and filed a counter-suit against the Indonesian government seeking millions of dollars in damages, lawyers said.
The counter-suit was filed in the central Jakarta district court at the same time as Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra responded in writing to the finance ministry accusations of corruption.
The ministry alleges Tommy” illegally sold off assets from troubled car importer PT Timor to five of his companies at a discount to avoid paying off state loans made to Timor during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
In a document received by AFP, defence lawyer Otto Cornelius Kaligis said the accusations were “legally baseless” as Tommy’s PT Timor had no connection with the companies listed as defendants.
He said the finance ministry had brought the allegations to court to justify maintaining a freeze of his assets in Guernsey, a British crown dependency off the French coast.
“It’s obvious that they want to use this as evidence for the Guernsey court to continue extending a freeze on a BNP Paribas account belonging to my client,” he said.
“We see the accusations as defamation against my client, so we have decided to countersue,” he said, adding they were seeking some 21.8 million dollars in compensation from the finance ministry.
They also demanded a public apology to be issued in the local media.
An Indonesian court in February rejected a separate corruption case against Tommy, awarding him 550,000 dollars in a countersuit. …> go to article
As for Probowo and Wiranto?
Wiranto Probowo Subianto
They are candidates for President of Indonesian in 2009.
I sometimes ask my wife about those times and it seems, even now, she cannot believe what she saw and lived through. It was crazy and very scary. To try to make sense of it even harder, especially if you are just trying to survive it all.
I think that O’Rourke does a very good job at making sense of it. The tone of his narrative is confident. Where he speculates about events and motives his opinions are rooted in long observation and careful investigation.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
During the authoritarian regime of president Suharto (1967-98), public displays of Chinese culture were banned, and many Chinese were asked to change their names to Indonesian ones if they wished to be eventually considered for citizenship. “Suharto’s government saw Chinese characters and culture as political. We were not even allowed to make candles,” said Yu Le, a member of a Buddhist temple.
He said he now prefers to use his Chinese name rather than his adopted Indonesian one of Suherman. “Around the temple there were always police and military. We could not celebrate Imlek here. People were afraid to come. We had to do it at home, hiding.” …>go to article
At the start of the Chinese lunar new year it is tradtional to make predictions about the character of the coming year. In this Year of the Rat it appears CAUTION will be the watchword as Chinese fortune tellers predict financial and political rumblings, tsunamis and epidemics in the year ahead…
“The mounts of Anak Krakatau, Merapi and Kelud, which last year did not generate a relatively huge explosion, may spew their infernal lava this year,” Jakarta-based feng shui expert Master Tan told The Jakarta Post, placing the eruptions between March and August. “To tell you the truth, I am so worried about these three volcanos… I hope this time my prediction misses.” While mainstream Chinese astrology lists this year as an “Earth” year, Master Tan says it is a fire year, combining the sky element with its positive soil and the earth element with its positive water, producing “fire thunder”. Surabaya-based feng shui practitioner Putri Wong Kam Fu has had the same vision of the three volcanoes. “I don’t know when they will erupt. But if we all repent, they will not explode as a volcanic eruption is actually an admonition of us humans,” she said. …>go to article
One does not necessarily need to be a feng shui practitioner to make predictions regarding the coming year for Jakarta. A close review of the news will do. As per Indonesia: volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis are a sure thing. No difficulty there.
I offer a few of my own predictions here:
Soeharto’s “hero status”. Not going to happen.
The oddest (perhaps not) scandal relating to that came at the conference of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption held on Bali on Februrary 2, 2008. Delegates were asked to bow their heads in a minute of silence to observe the passing of Indonesian dictator Soeharto. SBY jetted off to attend the funeral. The Sydney Morning Hearald reported that, “Dismayed by the irony of the conference’s condolences for Soeharto, Filipino activist Vincent Lazatan took the stage on Wednesday to present civil society groups call for stronger, quicker action to combat corruption – demanding a transparent, effective review mechanism”. First, he asked all delegates to stand for a second time. “Please, a minute’s silence for all those who have died fighting corruption,” Mr Lazatan demanded. They stood”. The whole thing seemed simply and utterly strange.
Another interesting development which may tarnish the hero status thing is reported by TempoInteraktif.
“Cendana” Family’s Wealth May be Confiscated as Guarantee Tuesday, 05 February, 2008
TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta: The state attorney team from the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) is of the opinion that the assets of Suharto’s beneficiaries can be included in the list of guaranteed confiscation in the Supersemar Foundation civil case. According to Yoseph Suardi Sabda, one of the attorneys from the AGO, it can be the responsibility if the foundation’s assets are insufficient to meet the claim’s value. “The AGO can include it by a request during the trial,” he said in Jakarta last Saturday (2/2). …>go to article
If the family moves assets the AGO can move to confiscate them. Nice.
While the Golkar Party proposes Soeharto as a hero of Indonesia the people dispose. The voices of his victims still live, the historical record too concrete for this to ever happen, now or later. Of interest is the recent annoucement by the Univerity of Westminster to fund Innovative film project to document Indonesia’s hidden genocide …>go to article
Floods. There will be more.
Haven’t we been here before? As Jakartass has recently written, “Jeez”. My comment there was, “welcome to the new Jakarta (or old Jakarta as the case may be). Soon some enterprising individual will start a water taxi service. Jakarta will be the Venice of the Java Sea”.
Miko added, “already happened Thomas, when Jalan Thamrin turned into a tributary of the Ciliwung river I watched as several enterprising individuals rowed boats down along the Busway picking up passengers and dropping them off at the nearest dry spot. The most ingenious chap for me was the sampah man (scavenger) who used his cart to take people across the flooded car park of Sarinah to the relative dryness of the overpass, for a small fee I hope.
Curiously I couldn’t help but notice the complete lack of Jakarta’s finest money earners who normally populate Jalan Thamrin in large numbers but who seemed to have disappeared completely.
Traffic was directed by street boys, the old and infirm were assisted by passers-by but nary a peeler was to be seen”.
This, of course, jogged my memory of the Jakarta floods of February 2007, where I saw on MetroTV vegetable sellers using rafts to bring their produce to flooded upscale neigborhoods.
Perhaps SBY will have to tow a boat behind his Mercy Benz so he does not get his feet wet (again).
Still, Jakarta as the Venice of the Java Sea has quite a ring to it. I can see the tourist brochures even now. As the Official Indonesian Tourism web site quotes Frieda Pinto from India, “Everything in Indonesia are great, I never thought about it the moment I came here…“ Or Wai Lok from Hongkong, “I’ll tell them, that the negative thing we heard about Indonesia is a fake news”.
Thought about what? Fake news? Am I missing something here?
In any event flooding is a trend and emergent property which is here to stay.
More ominously…
H5N1. I have written on this subject before below.
Flu burung, bird flu. It is out there in Jakarta stewing and brewing. The virus is extremely lethal and while only 103 people have died from it so far there remains a huge uncertainty of where this is all going, except that it is not going away. This is yet another trend and emergent propety of Jakarta living.
AFP 2.6.2008
‘Mysterious’ bird flu baffles Indonesian scientists
JAKARTA (AFP) – Indonesian scientists and officials said they were baffled by the “mysterious” behaviour of the bird flu virus here, which has already claimed nine lives this year in the world’s worst-hit nation.Indonesia has reported 126 cases of H5N1 bird flu, 103 of them fatal, since 2005. This year’s victims have all come from the capital Jakarta and its satellite cities. …>go to article
Traffic. I predict there will be a traffic jam in Jakarta in 2008.
Barack Obama. Jakarta’s favorite son polls 75% of the 100 expat votes cast.
Reuters 2.6.08
Many Indonesians cheer Obama in Democrat race …>go to article
If you cannot predict you can hope…
How am I doing so far? When it comes to Jakarta it is not difficult to end up talking or writing in circles.
As the novelist Haruki Murakami has written, “On the flip side of everything we think we absolutely understand lurks an equal amount of the unknown. Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings. In the world we live in, what we know and what we don’t know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion”.
…If everything is so rosy, then, why are so many Indonesians so loath to mourn their late president? After all, he reduced inflation from 650 per cent to single digits in a few years, lifted gross domestic product per capita from $50 to $1,000, won awards from the United Nations for his family planning programmes, made the country self-sufficient in rice and unified the peoples of 17,500 islands and 350 ethnic groups.
It is because several other, less savoury aspects of Suharto’s rule are so deep-rooted that the country has barely made inroads into tackling them, analysts say. Many Indonesians believe that it is only when the country has seriously tackled corruption, addressed the human rights abuses that saw anywhere between hundreds of thousands and 2m people killed and built properly functioning institutions that the nation can really claim to be developed. …>go to article
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The United States declassified documents Monday detailing how Washington propped up ex-Indonesian leader Suharto, who died at the weekend, at the expense of democracy and human rights.
The documents, declassified following requests under a freedom of information law, showed the US administration did not use its leverage to bring Suharto to account during his 32-year reign until his last months in office.
“One thing that is clear from the tens of thousands of pages of which we had declassified concerning US ties with Suharto from 1966 to 1998 — at no moment did US presidents ever exercise their maximum leverage over his regime to press for human rights or democratization,” Brad Simpson of the National Security Archive told AFP. …>go to article
This begins the third week since Soeharto entered the hospital, his condition critical, and his family by his side. His team of forty doctors gave him a 50/50 chance of recovery or not. Then reports appeared that his condition was critical, near certain death.
A stream of dignitaries followed to his bedside- President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Vice president Joseph Kalla, then Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, followed by Matahir of Malaysia, and the third President of Indonesia, Habibie.
Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie educated in Germany, a technocrat in the Soeharto regime, and a very unlikely candidate to assume the role of President after the troubles of 1997-1998. He and Soeharto were close, like father and son. Habibie tells a story in his memoirs something like this: when Soeharto resigned the presidency he expected Habibie to follow and do the same. But he didn’t. Habibie assumed the role of president. The two have not spoken since those events of 1998.
Habibie recently flew out from Germany, where he has a home, to pay his respects and pray at Soeharto’s bedside. When he arrived at the hospital he was refused entry. It was said that he could not see Soeharto because of doctor’s orders. Perhaps the feud between the two lingers on.
What strikes me about this is that Habibie may be a true hero of Indonesia. If he had resigned in 1998 it would have left only the Army generals to contest for power. This would likely have led to yet another Indonesian bloodbath. Perhaps even the return of Soeharto to power. Maybe this is the situation Soeharto was aiming for but prevented from by a most loyal subject. As events transpired there was a peaceful transition of power under the rule of constitutional law. Elections followed and Indonesia has now emerged as one of the most democratic nations of the region. A thought almost impossible to think ten years ago.
This is just small side story but then there appears to be many small side stories as Soeharto lay dying (or not).
If you go to Google News and type in “Jakarta News” there are (as of this writing) some 275 news articles about Soeharto. It would take too long to link them all here. First there is his condition. He’s sick, near death, the doctors do not give him a chance, he’s recovering, he has a blood infection, his condition worsens, he’s getting better, doctors amazed that that he is hanging on, the military prepare his family crypt in Solo for burial, the funeral has been planned, the grave is being readied, passes have been issued to the media, preparations made for an influx of world leaders… and it goes on and on. This is just what I can gather from the internet sitting here at my desk.
I am sure the Jakarta news is a daily Soeharto circus. It also must have put a crimp in some of the big news services as they have already written their Soeharto obituary and it now sits on a shelf somewhere ready to go to press but can’t go to press. Some stories I have seen appear to be edited obituaries which instead of speaking of Soeharto in the past tense must speak of him still in the present tense.
The kicker is that today the Associated Press header is “Doctor: Soeharto could recover”, Bloomberg, “Suharto is less Dependent on Respirator as Condition Improves”, Reuters, “Doctors treating Indonesia’s Soeharto more optimistic”.
Make of this what you will but apparently it is hard for Soeharto to die.
This leads me to yet other side stories.
When I told my wife about the news that Soeharto was about to die she told me not to say anything bad about him. It was not the Muslim way. Even if he did bad things you don’t readily trumpet the list of his evil deeds. You wait out of respect and then do it later after things have cooled down. Later, because it appears he can not readily die, either because he is plugged into all those medical machines or maybe for other reasons. It seems this state of affairs suggests that he has not lived a decent life, but rather has much to account for and that keeps him lingering on, dying this long death.
My wife had seen this before and tells the story of a local village leader who took advantage of his position, was corrupt, took land and money from the village, and enriched himself at the expense of others. When he lay dying he could not die. This was surely an indication that he had much to account for from his past and everyone in the village knew it and it bothered them. So, the village came together and discussed this problem and it was decided that they would just let it all go. Not to forget. Not to forgive. But just let it go. The man quickly died soon after their meeting.
As much confusion as all this seems to have raised in the minds of Indonesians it would be a good bet that the idea of a long death as being representative of a life not so well lived is more than apparent to everyone. Whether or not this is stated openly is another thing altogether.
Then there is all the debate going on about to forgive and forget, forgive and not forget, not to forgive and not to forget, and not to forgive and to forget. Who remembers what and when? Who benefited from the Soeharto regime and who were its victims? Should Soeharto be held accountable or not? Should there be a trial or not? Lee Kuan Yew comes and says something stupid like “what’s a few billion looted from the Indonesian people when so much was done to modernize Indonesia and raise the standard of living” and blah, blah, blah. Piss on Lee Kwan Yew.
All manner of talk is going on. I think if Soeharto had come to the hospital and simply died on the spot we would not get to see and read something of what people are thinking and saying. This discussion is valuable. And very interesting.
The Indonesia blogs and press are full these sorts of articles. The Aroengbinang Project has a blog titled “Forgive and Forget” with 19 comments, Jakartass has a blog tilted “An addendum to an obituary (which I haven’t beem able to post yet), and Indonesia Matters has a blog titled “Forgiveness” with 83 comments. If you want to see how this debate is going go there to take a look.
In fact, yet another side story comes to mind from a comment posted on that article in Indonesia Matters from a reader named Jamma which, in passing, mentions the following,
”…my husband says he [Soeharto] can’t die so easily cause he’s got too much ilmu, some designated person will have to cross a river with Soeharto’s underpants on their head so he can die”.
According to my bahasa dictionary ”ilmu” means “supernatural knowledge”, it may be a Javanese word, but I assume it can also mean something like “magic” or “power” or in Hawaii we say “mana”.
So, the side story is about “dukun”. I am surprised that “Culture Shock: Jakarta” has no mention of them. My dictionary defines “dukun” as an “indigenous medical practitioner, shaman”. But a dukun is far more than just that. Dukun can summon the essence of human beings, jinni, ghosts, demons, or any life force from a creature, natural or supernatural. They can borrow the souls of living people as they sleep. There are stories of disembodied heads floating through space or rolling along the ground, humans transforming into animals. Inanimate objects which speak. You laugh, but I assure you this is serious business.
The Indonesian newspaper classifieds are full of advertisements for dukun offering love, wealth, power or protection from other dukun. Soeharto claimed that he himself was a dukun and there is real evidence that he studied under one. This was part of his mystique, a little more reason for him to be feared. This is not widely mentioned in the ongoing debate, but again, I am sure, this is yet another aspect which people are thinking about. Soeharto is the living dead, his magic so powerful as to be feared even from the grave. Another reason he cannot die a clean fast death.
A few last notes.
I am not Indonesian. I write as an outsider. From what I have seen there is nothing but good to be had by the ongoing discussions regarding Soeharto. Perhaps there may never be justice. Perhaps this will all be buried in some collective amnesia. I do not know. It is for Indonesians to decide and that is exactly the process they are in now. This will work itself out.
Through all this debate (an example is provided from 101 East video in the previous post below) there is no mention of the role the United States Central Intelligence Agency had in bringing Soeharto to power, their role in providing names of PKI, their continued role in supporting the Indonesia military. No mention of Henry Kissinger’s “realpolitik” and the rain of death which fell on the people of Timor. Soeharto is an amateur compared to Kissinger and his like (of which there are many). Perhaps the Indonesians are too polite to mention this, perhaps now too inward looking. So, I add this to the discussion.
I cannot speak for my government but as a citizen of the United States I wish to offer my most sincere and heartfelt apologies to the people of Indonesia for what these people have done.
At last, let’s see, just as an experiment of sorts, what would happen if we do not forget and do not forgive but simply let go.
“The embodiment of all that is worst in Asian despots of the 20th century. He combines the blood thirstiness of Cambodia’s Pol Pot and the greed of the Phillippines’ Ferdinand Marcos”. [1]
As The New York Times reported on January, 8, 2008: “In September, the United Nations and the World Bank put Mr. Suharto at the top of a new list of world leaders who had embezzled the most from state coffers. They quoted an estimate by Transparency International, a private anticorruption organization, that he stole $15 billion to $35 billion in state assets while in power”.
I will not forget when I visited Sultan’s palace at Yogayakarta. We had walked through the palace led by an elderly docent who helped explain some of the history of the place. He had probably been doing this for tourists for dozens of years. Not a tall man, wore thick glasses, distinguished, soft spoken. Toward the end of the walk somehow our conversation, in my poor bahasa Indonesia and his better English, turned to the recent poilitcal situation of Indonesia of the day. Soeharto was gone. The country had survived through Habibe, Gus Dur, and now Megawati was President. We spoke a little about each of them but when we got to Soeharto he simply told me, with a slight disgust in his voice, that ”Soeharto is a mass murderer”. It was his only comment regarding Soeharto. I was aware of what had happened to the PKI. I had not brought it up with him. Afterward I realized that he would have been a young man during the troubles of 1965. He likely had some stories, maybe known some people, had been touched by those events.
1965, the Year of Living Dangerously, still shrowded in mystery, still running deep as a subtext of Indonesian history. 1965, the beginning of the New Order.
Betrand Russell, in 1966, would comment that “…in four months five times as many people died in Indonesia as in Vietnam in twelve years”.
“In 1965-66 Central and East Java were the main killing fields for US’ Indonesian enemies… The extent of the slaughter throughout Indonesia led to lurid reports about rivers red with blood. In December 1965, Time reported that Communists and their “entire families” were being killed in such numbers that small rivers and streams “have been literally clogged with bodies”; and that the disposal of the corpses had “created a serious sanitation problem in parts of the country (17/12/65). Similarly, there were horror stories of bodies floating all over the Malacca Strait. and washing up in various places like the canals of Surabaya. As a bloodbath, the Indonesia massacre was certainly one of the worst of the 20th Century, a fact freely admitted by the CIA itself. Most of the killing took place in a matter of a few months, a massively swift, systematic, savage phenomenon”. [2]
“Second, on the periphery of Indonesia, the state’s repression of self-determination gave rise to another set of massive crimes. The war against the East Timorese is only the best known of these. Indonesian intelligence agents began by coercing the leaders of several groups of conservative and anti-independence East Timorese into signing a ‘request’ (which the Indonesians had dictated) for assistance. Indonesian armed forces then invaded the former Portuguese colony on December 5th, 1975.
In the following four years, the population of East Timor decreased by 200,000 people. They died as a result of direct Indonesian army killings and bombings, but also through forced re-locations and the starvation and disease that followed the invasion. Since then, torture has been a standard operating procedure for Indonesian forces”. [3]
Aceh. “The Suharto regime, after very limited hostilities with GAM in the late 1970’s, turned Aceh into a free-fire zone in 1990. The terror has been fairly constant since then. The only let-up (and that only partial) was in 1998-99 when the nation’s politcal system was in crisis after Suharto’s fall. During that brief reformist pause, the govenrment sanctioned human rights investigation that conservatively estimated that the military had killed 2,000 to 4,000 people from 1990 to 1998″. [4]
Where are the monuments to these dead?
Complicit in these events was the United States CIA. In Iran, Indonesia, Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Iraq you can still find their bloody finger prints.
Survivors … Sumini and Anwar Umar. Photo: Tom Allard
