Bangkitlah
Indonesia
Kita
Ikrar Nusa Bhakti
Profesor riset di Lembaga Ilmu
Pengetahuan Indonesia
KITA memang
sering sekali menjadi
bangsa yang
suka terkaget-kaget.
Kita juga sering kali lambat
untuk memiliki kesadaran baru.
Tengok, misalnya, ketika pesawat
Merpati Nusantara Airline
jatuh di Kaimana, Papua Barat.
Banyak orang yang kaget mengapa
kita membeli pesawat
buatan China MA-60 dan bukan
menggunakan produk bangsa
sendiri CN-235? Ketika hasil
survei Indo Barometer diumumkan
minggu lalu, banyak
orang yang kaget pula karena
salah satu kesimpulannya ialah
responden menilai Orde Baru
lebih baik daripada situasi saat
ini. Ketika Komisi Pemberantasan
Korupsi (KPK) menangkap
Sekretaris Kementerian Pemuda
dan Olahraga Wafi d Muharam
bersama dua orang yang
diduga melakukan penyuapan,
Mindo Rosalina Manulang dan
M El Idris, kita juga terhenyak,
bagaimana mungkin masih ada man
u s i a
Indonesia
yang tega mengorupsi
anggaran
untuk pembangunan
fasilitas olahraga
untuk SEA Games 2011
di Palembang. Kita makin
kaget ketika muncul tuduhan
bahwa Wafid Muharam
adalah kader Partai Keadilan
Sejahtera (PKS) dan mereka
yang terlibat suap-menyuap
antara lain adalah Bendahara
Umum Partai Demokrat M
Nazaruddin dan Angelina
Sondakh, anggota DPR RI dari
Partai Demokrat. Mungkin kita
bertambah kaget lagi saat membaca
berita utama surat kabar
Ibu Kota minggu lalu yang
menyebutkan hampir semua
partai politik tersandera kasus
korupsi! Betapa menyedihkannya
negeri ini.
Kita seakan baru sadar, jika
kelakuan manusia Indonesia,
khususnya kaum elite yang
berada di eksekutif dan legislatif,
amat korup, lebih mementingkan
diri sendiri dan
kelompoknya, bagaimana
pula nasib bangsa ini
ke depan. Di tengah
bangsa-bangsa lain di
Asia Tenggara yang
sedang menggeliat
untuk dapat
bersaing di era
globalisasi
politik dan
ekonomi,
I n d o -
nesia
seakan
m a s i h
t e r k u n g -
kung oleh perilaku
elite politiknya
yang korup
dan kurang memiliki
rasa kebangsaan untuk lebih
mendahulukan penggunaan
produk bangsa sendiri ketimbang
bangsa asing. Slogan
‘cintailah produk-produk Indonesia’
serasa tanpa makna
jika jajaran elite di kabinet sendiri
lebih cinta untuk membeli
produk China pesawat MA-60
ketimbang hasil karya anakanak
bangsa CN-235.
Kita tidak sadar bahwa bangkitnya
Jepang setelah Perang
Dunia II disebabkan adanya
kesadaran warga Jepang untuk
lebih mencintai produk-produk
negaranya sendiri ketimbang
barang impor. Generasi Indonesia
yang lahir pada 1950-an pasti
mengetahui bagaimana produk
Jepang pada era 1960-an atau
1970-an dinilai tidak berkualitas,
cepat rusak, dsb. Namun, melalui
kecintaan orang Jepang pada
produknya sendiri ditambah dengan
inovasi-inovasi baru untuk
menciptakan teknologi baru
yang lebih canggih daripada
teknologi yang diciptakan bangsa-
bangsa Eropa dan Amerika
Serikat, barang-barang Jepang
menjadi barang yang amat berkualitas
di dunia. Melalui sistem
dumping pula barang Jepang
meluas ke seantero dunia dan
dicintai dunia.
Kita juga melihat bagaimana
geliat ekonomi Korea Selatan
sejak 1980-an dan China sejak
1990-an. Produk Korea Selatan
awalnya juga dinilai tidak bermutu.
Kini siapa yang tidak
tahu merek dagang LG, Samsung,
Hyundai, KIA, Daewoo?
Siapa pula di dunia ini yang
tidak pernah membeli suvenir
di luar negeri yang ternyata
buatan China? Siapa yang
tidak sadar betapa produk
alas kaki, tekstil dan produk
tekstil, mainan anak-anak atau
elektronik murahan China menguasai
pasaran dunia? Siapa
yang tidak tahu bahwa China
adalah negara utama yang
membeli surat utang Negara
Amerika Serikat? Siapa pula
yang tidak tahu bahwa perusahaan
kimia dan minyak China
berusaha untuk menguasai
ladang-ladang minyak dunia
termasuk di Indonesia? Sadarkah
kita bahwa pemerintah
Indonesia lebih mendahulukan
perusahaan minyak China untuk
mengeksplorasi minyak di
ladang Madura Barat dan bukan
sebagian besar diberikan
kepada perusahaan
BUMN Pertamina?
Kita jangan kaget
bila ada pejabat
I n d o n e s i a
yang akan
m e n g a -
takan,
“This
i s
nothi
n g t o
do with nationalism,
this
is purely business!”
Kita tentunya akan terus
mengelus dada jika
ada petinggi Republik yang
lebih tunduk pada China atau
AS demi uang atau politik, dan
mengesampingkan kepentingan
nasional kita. Jika kebijakan
ekonomi Indonesia dijadikan patokan, mungkin akan banyak
data bermunculan bahwa
eksekutif dan legislatif kita semuanya
sudah melenceng dari
konstitusi negara kita, Undang-
Undang Dasar Negara Republik
Indonesia 1945.
Sadarkah kita bahwa pemerintahan
SBY-Boediono amat
takut untuk mengajukan usulan
kontrak baru PT Freeport
yang lebih menguntungkan
Indonesia? Padahal pada 1994
Freeport mengajukan kontrak
baru karena area produksinya
diperluas. Kita memang tidak
memiliki elite politik seberani
Bung Karno yang mengatakan,
“Go to hell with your aid,” yang
kini bisa ganti dengan kalimat
‘Go to hell with your moneyÊ atau
‘Go to hell with your investmentÊ
jika investasi atau uang China,
AS, atau negara lain yang diinvestasikan
di negeri kita
tidak memberikan manfaat bagi
bangsa dan negara kita, tetapi
hanya untuk mengeruk kekayaan
kita dan memiskinkan
rakyat.
Kita di Indonesia terasa terhenyak
ketika barang-barang
China yang masuk ke Indonesia
ternyata bukan saja barang khas
China, melainkan juga batik
yang notabene adalah produk
khas Indonesia. Entah sampai
kapan kita tetap lebih memilih
untuk menggunakan batik
produk Indonesia ketimbang
produk China. Ini bukan soal
antiglobalisasi atau antiasing,
tapi sadarkah kita kalau di
negara-negara maju seperti di
Australia, AS, dan negara-negara
Eropa banyak kalangan yang
sangat antiglobalisasi dan ingin
memproteksi produk atau hasil
pertanian dari negara mereka
sendiri.
Sadarlah para elite politik
kita di kabinet dan
elite ekonomi kita yang
tergabung di Kamar
Dagang dan Industri
(Kadin) mengenai
gempuran barang-barang
murah dan tidak
bermutu dari China tersebut. Kini China bahkan
sudah merambah ke teknologi
dirgantara, yakni dengan menjual
produk yang di negerinya
sendiri kurang laku, pesawat
MA-60!
Orde Baru lebih baik?
Kita sering tercengang jika
masih ada orang yang mengatakan
bahwa Orde Baru lebih
baik daripada Orde Reformasi
atau Soeharto lebih baik daripada
SBY. Pandangan bahwa
Orde Baru lebih baik daripada
era reformasi bukanlah hal
yang baru. Sejak awal reformasi
pun banyak orang yang menilai
seperti itu, bukan hanya dari
kalangan kroni atau elite politik
yang diuntungkan era otoriter
itu, melainkan juga rakyat miskin
kota.
Sanjungan terhadap Orde
Baru disebabkan anggapan
bahwa di era Soeharto stabilitas
politik dan keamanan
terjaga, pertumbuhan ekonomi
meningkat, pemerataan
juga terjadi. Di era Soeharto
tak dapat dimungkiri harga
barang-barang dan pangan
terjangkau, sekolah dan kuliah
murah, kesehatan juga
terjamin karena puskesmas
ada di hampir semua wilayah
Tanah Air.
Namun, sadarkah kita bahwa
segala yang ada saat itu ada
pula yang bersifat semu? Stabilitas
politik dan keamanan
kita saat itu tercapai karena
politik deparpolisasi dan
depolitisasi yang dilakukan
pemerintah terhadap partaipartai
politik. Demonstrasi mahasiswa
juga hanya sekali-kali
terjadi pada 1974 (Malari), 1978
(saat Sidang MPR RI untuk
melantik Soeharto kembali jadi
presiden), dan 1979 (saat pemerintah
menerapkan normalisasi
kehidupan kampus dan badan
koordinasi kemahasiswaan--
NKK dan BKK--serta pembubaran
Dewan Mahasiswa di
seluruh universitas negeri).
Demonstrasi besar baru terjadi
pada 1997 dan 1998 saat Indonesia
mengalami persoalan
ekonomi besar sejalan dengan
krisis keuangan dan ekonomi
kawasan Asia Tenggara yang
berakhir dengan jatuhnya Soeharto.
Stabilitas politik dan
keamanan juga tercipta karena
semua organisasi sosial adalah
bagian dari korporatisme negara,
dari PWI, KNPI, karang taruna,
sampai ke MUI sekalipun.
Stabilitas politik dan keamanan
juga terjaga karena Indonesia
berada di bawah sepatu lars
tentara, tak ada aspek kehi-
dupan dalam masyarakat yang
lepas dari intervensi ABRI.
ABRI saat itu bukan memiliki
dwifungsi ABRI, melainkan
hanya satu fungsi, ‘that ABRI
was running everything!Ê.
Sadarkah kita betapa persoalan
hak asasi manusia menjadi
persoalan pelik di negeri kita,
baik saat Soeharto dan dalam
kadar yang lebih rendah hingga
saat ini? Sadarkah bahwa perilaku
aparat negara masih belum
berubah secara total menuju
yang lebih manusiawi?
Kita juga masih melihat betapa
korupsi masih merajalela
di eksekutif dan legislatif. Politisi
di eksekutif dan legislatif
dapat dikatakan sebagai
penyumbang terbesar dari
korupsi di negeri ini. Jika para
elite politik yang korup itu
ditangkapi dan ditahan, bukan
mustahil negeri ini akan masuk
Guinness Book of Record sebagai
negara dengan elite politiknya
dari Sabang sampai Merauke
memenuhi rumah-rumah tahanan
dan lembaga-lembaga
pemasyarakatan kita.
Bangkitlah negeriku
Indonesia adalah milik kita dan
kita untuk Indonesia. Demokrasi
kita memang belum matang. Namun,
bila tingkah laku para elite
parpol dipaksa untuk diubah
melalui penerapan penegakan
hukum yang konsisten dan
tanpa pandang bulu, bila pemilu
dijalankan tanpa politik uang,
bila pendidikan politik rakyat
dan para elite partai berjalan
baik, penulis percaya, dalam tiga
pemilihan umum mendatang
Indonesia akan terbentuk menjadi
negara dengan kematangan
demokrasi yang baik.
Bila kita semua mencintai
produk Indonesia, bukan mustahil
kuantitas dan kualitas
produk kita akan semakin baik.
Mari kita jadikan Indonesia
sebagai surga bagi produkproduknya
sendiri sehingga
tanpa kebijakan proteksionis
pun negeri ini akan terhindar
dari deindustrialisasi yang
semakin masif.
Mari kita bangun kembali
keindonesiaan kita sehingga
‘seribu bunga dapat berkembang
dan menghiasi taman nasionalisme
Indonesia!’. Tanpa
rasa kebangsaan kita, negeri
ini akan terus tercabik oleh
konfl ik antaretnik dan agama
yang semuanya terkait dengan
pertarungan antarelite.
Indonesia akan bangkit jika
semua anak bangsa sadar bahwa
kita milik Indonesia dan
Indonesia milik kita!
Showing posts with label Inside Indonesia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Inside Indonesia. Show all posts
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
Monday, 21 March 2011
NASKAH PROKLAMASI ASLI
“Bahwa sesungguhnya kemerdekaan itu ialah hak segala bangsa, dan oleh sebab itu maka penjajahan di atas dunia harus dihapuskan, karena tidak sesuai dengan peri-kemanusiaan dan peri-keadilan. Bangsa Indonesia di zaman dahulu telah mempunyai riwayat mulia dan bahagia, yang batas-batasnya meliputi seluruh kepulauan Indonesia sampai ke Papua, malah melampaui ke daratan Asia sampai ke batas-batas tanah Siam; negara merdeka, yang dalam perhubungan perdamaian dan persahabatan dengan negara-negara merdeka di daratan Asia, menyambut tiap-tiap bangsa yang datang dengan kemurahan hati.
Kedatangan bangsa-bangsa Barat di Indonesia, membawalah bencana kepada bangsa Indonesia itu. Lebih dari tiga abad meringkuklah bangsa Indonesia di bawah kekuasaan Belanda dengan haluan politik jahat: memecah-mecah persatuan kita, mengina, menginjak-injak rasa kehormatan kita, menghina, menghisap-memeras kekayaan kita untuk kepentingan bangsa Belanda sendiri.
Perkosaan yang jahat itu tidak dapat persambungan dalam dunia seterusnya, yang di dalamnya bertambah-tambah kehebatan perlombaan imperialisme Barat, berebut kekayaan segenap dunia. Dan lama-kelamaan bangkitlah kembali dengan sehebat-hebatnya semangat perlawanan bangsa Indonesia, yang memang tak pernah padam dan tak pernah dipadamkan, dalam lebih 3 abad perkosaan oleh imperialisme Belanda itu. Sejarah kolonialisme Belanda di Indonesa adalah sejarah berpuluh-puluh pemberontakan bangsa Indonesia melawan imperialisme Belanda itu. Bergeloralah lagi di dalam kalbu bangsa Indonesia tekad yang berkobar-kobar berbangkit kembali sebagai satu bangsa yang merdeka dalam satu negara yang merdeka, melahirkanlah pergerakan teratur dalam bangsa Indonesia, yang didasarkan atas cita-cita keadilan dan kemausiaan, menuntut pengakuan hak kemerdekaan tiap-tiap bangsa. Tidak tercegah, tidak tertahan tumbuhnya, meluas dan mendalam pergerakan ini dalam segenap lapisan dan segenap barisan bangsa Indonesia, betapa pun kerasnya, betapa pun buasnya betapa pun ganasnya kekuatan pemerintah Belanda berikhtiar mencegah dan menindasnya.
Di saat memuncaknya gelagat pergerakan itu yang seperti barat saat kelahiran anak dari kandungan ibunya, maka Tuhan Yan Maha Kuasa telah membelokkan perjalanan riwayat dunia, mengalih/memindahkan perimbangan kekuasaan di muka bumi, istimewa di daerah lautan Teduh, untuk membantu pembinaan kelahiran itu.
Tuntutan Dai Nippon Teikoku, bertentangan dengan tujuan-tujuan imperialisme Barat, yaitu tuntutan hak kemerdekaan Asia atas dasar persamaan hak bangsa-bangsa, serta politik yang dengan tegas dan tepat dijalankan olehnya, menuju pembangunan negara-negara merdeka dan lingkungan kemakmuran bersama Asia Timur Raya, akhirnya telah menyebabkan Dai Nippon Teikoku menyatakan perang kepada Amerika Serikat dan Inggris. Perang Asia Timur Raya ini, yang berkebetulan dengan saat memuncaknya perjuangan kemerdekaan bangsa Indonesa dan pergerakan kemerdekaan bangsa-bangsa Asia yang lain, menjadilah sebagai puncak pertemuan perjuangan kemerdekaan segala bangsa Asia di daratan dan di kepulauan Asia.
Dengan mengakui dan menghargai tinggi keutamaan niat dan tujuan Dai Nippon Teikoku dengan Perang Asia Timur Raya itu, maka tiap-tiap bangsa dalam lingkungan Asia Tmur Raya atas dasar pembelaan bersama, wajiblah menyumbangkan sepenuhnya tenaganya dengan tekad yang sebulat-bulatnya, kepada perjuangan bersama itu, sebagai jaminan yang seteguh-teguhnya untuk keselamatan kemerdekaannya masing-masing.
Maka sekarang, telah sampailah perjuangan pergerakan kemerdekaan Indonesia kepada saat yang berbahagia, dengan selamat sentausa menghantarkan rakyat Indonesia, adil dan makmur, yang hidup sebagai anggota sejati dalam kekeluargaan Asia Timur Raya. Di depan pintu gerbang Negara Indonesia itula rakyat Indonesia menyatakan hormat dan terima kasih kepada semua pahlawan-pahlawan kemerdekaannya yang telah mangkat.
Atas berkat rahmat Allah yang Maha Kuasa, berdasar atas segala alasan yang tersebut di atas itu, dan didorong oleh keinginan luhur supaya bertangung-jawab atas nasib sendiri, berkehidupan kebangsaan yang bebas, mulia, terhormat, maka rakyat Indonesia dengan ini:
MENYATAKAN KEMERDEKAAN.
Kedatangan bangsa-bangsa Barat di Indonesia, membawalah bencana kepada bangsa Indonesia itu. Lebih dari tiga abad meringkuklah bangsa Indonesia di bawah kekuasaan Belanda dengan haluan politik jahat: memecah-mecah persatuan kita, mengina, menginjak-injak rasa kehormatan kita, menghina, menghisap-memeras kekayaan kita untuk kepentingan bangsa Belanda sendiri.
Perkosaan yang jahat itu tidak dapat persambungan dalam dunia seterusnya, yang di dalamnya bertambah-tambah kehebatan perlombaan imperialisme Barat, berebut kekayaan segenap dunia. Dan lama-kelamaan bangkitlah kembali dengan sehebat-hebatnya semangat perlawanan bangsa Indonesia, yang memang tak pernah padam dan tak pernah dipadamkan, dalam lebih 3 abad perkosaan oleh imperialisme Belanda itu. Sejarah kolonialisme Belanda di Indonesa adalah sejarah berpuluh-puluh pemberontakan bangsa Indonesia melawan imperialisme Belanda itu. Bergeloralah lagi di dalam kalbu bangsa Indonesia tekad yang berkobar-kobar berbangkit kembali sebagai satu bangsa yang merdeka dalam satu negara yang merdeka, melahirkanlah pergerakan teratur dalam bangsa Indonesia, yang didasarkan atas cita-cita keadilan dan kemausiaan, menuntut pengakuan hak kemerdekaan tiap-tiap bangsa. Tidak tercegah, tidak tertahan tumbuhnya, meluas dan mendalam pergerakan ini dalam segenap lapisan dan segenap barisan bangsa Indonesia, betapa pun kerasnya, betapa pun buasnya betapa pun ganasnya kekuatan pemerintah Belanda berikhtiar mencegah dan menindasnya.
Di saat memuncaknya gelagat pergerakan itu yang seperti barat saat kelahiran anak dari kandungan ibunya, maka Tuhan Yan Maha Kuasa telah membelokkan perjalanan riwayat dunia, mengalih/memindahkan perimbangan kekuasaan di muka bumi, istimewa di daerah lautan Teduh, untuk membantu pembinaan kelahiran itu.
Tuntutan Dai Nippon Teikoku, bertentangan dengan tujuan-tujuan imperialisme Barat, yaitu tuntutan hak kemerdekaan Asia atas dasar persamaan hak bangsa-bangsa, serta politik yang dengan tegas dan tepat dijalankan olehnya, menuju pembangunan negara-negara merdeka dan lingkungan kemakmuran bersama Asia Timur Raya, akhirnya telah menyebabkan Dai Nippon Teikoku menyatakan perang kepada Amerika Serikat dan Inggris. Perang Asia Timur Raya ini, yang berkebetulan dengan saat memuncaknya perjuangan kemerdekaan bangsa Indonesa dan pergerakan kemerdekaan bangsa-bangsa Asia yang lain, menjadilah sebagai puncak pertemuan perjuangan kemerdekaan segala bangsa Asia di daratan dan di kepulauan Asia.
Dengan mengakui dan menghargai tinggi keutamaan niat dan tujuan Dai Nippon Teikoku dengan Perang Asia Timur Raya itu, maka tiap-tiap bangsa dalam lingkungan Asia Tmur Raya atas dasar pembelaan bersama, wajiblah menyumbangkan sepenuhnya tenaganya dengan tekad yang sebulat-bulatnya, kepada perjuangan bersama itu, sebagai jaminan yang seteguh-teguhnya untuk keselamatan kemerdekaannya masing-masing.
Maka sekarang, telah sampailah perjuangan pergerakan kemerdekaan Indonesia kepada saat yang berbahagia, dengan selamat sentausa menghantarkan rakyat Indonesia, adil dan makmur, yang hidup sebagai anggota sejati dalam kekeluargaan Asia Timur Raya. Di depan pintu gerbang Negara Indonesia itula rakyat Indonesia menyatakan hormat dan terima kasih kepada semua pahlawan-pahlawan kemerdekaannya yang telah mangkat.
Atas berkat rahmat Allah yang Maha Kuasa, berdasar atas segala alasan yang tersebut di atas itu, dan didorong oleh keinginan luhur supaya bertangung-jawab atas nasib sendiri, berkehidupan kebangsaan yang bebas, mulia, terhormat, maka rakyat Indonesia dengan ini:
MENYATAKAN KEMERDEKAAN.
Saturday, 19 March 2011
Newsbriefs Historical context
Newsbriefs
Historical context
The current commander of the army's special forces (Kopassus), Maj. Gen. Sriyanto, is being charged by the Attorney General for his involvement in a 1984 massacre. He is among 14 being charged for the massacre at Tanjung Priok in northern Jakarta. The government's case states that 33 persons were killed although the real toll could be higher. At the time, Sriyanto was head of the operations section of the local district military command (Kodim) whose troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators. When Sriyanto was asked by journalists whether he had violated human rights, he replied, 'Human rights only became a big thing recently. At that time there wasn't all this human rights stuff.'
Kompas 16 November 2002
Pleading poverty
Armed forces (TNI) commander Gen. Endriartono Sutarto stated before a parliamentary commission on September 16 that TNI foundations earned the military at most Rp 50 billion (US$5.5 million) per year. In response to the suggestion that one foundation, Kartika Eka Paksi (YKEP), was worth Rp 32 trillion (US$3.5 billion), Endriartono laughed, 'Goodness me! If the government gives the TNI a budget of 16 trillion rupiah and our businesses are worth 32 trillion rupiah, everybody will want to be TNI commander.'
Endriartono denied that the TNI was stirring up trouble in conflict areas to boost its budget. 'Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing accusations, while my soldiers are being killed, that they are engineering unrest for money,' he said in a high pitched voice.
Earlier in the year, an internal military report outlined a plan to relinquish TNI ownership of companies. The military also hired the accounting firm, Ernst & Young, to audit the foundations. In a press briefing in late August, Endriartono said, 'Being engaged in business is not the job of the TNI.' In their report, the auditors noted that military's businesses lacked focus, had assets whose owners were often unknown, relied too much on outsourcing practices, and were often indebted. According to Endriartono, 'The report can be accessed by the public.' What Endriartono did not clarify is that the foundations do not include all the businesses of the military.
Jakarta Post, 3 September 2002; BBC Worldwide Monitoring 17 September 2002.
Miraculous Recovery
When former president Suharto was wanted for questioning on charges of corruption two years ago, doctors judged him to be too ill to appear before the police. He was said to be confined to a wheelchair, barely able to speak, and suffering from brain damage. But on 29 October 2002 he was not only able to make a trip to Solo in Central Java, he was able to walk unaided for 200 meters and climb steps to visit the graves of his late wife and mother. He also visited his son Tommy and long-time crony Bob Hasan in prison.
Tempo 10 November 2002
Sacred Images
Two activists, Muzakkir, alias Aceh, and Nanang Mamija, became the first persons to be convicted of insulting President Megawati Soekarnoputri and Vice President Hamzah Haz. They were sentenced on October 24, 2002 to one year in prison for stomping and soiling the official pictures of the two leaders. They were charged with violating Article 134 of the Criminal Code concerning the deliberate intent to insult the president or vice president. A violation carries a maximum penalty of six years in prison.
'The pictures are supposed to be treated with honour just like other state symbols such as the symbol of Garuda,'said presiding judge Sirande Palayukan, referring to the mythical bird on the official seal of the Republic of Indonesia. 'If a certain group insults the President and the Vice President, it would spark debate among the public about their actions that could lead to divisiveness,' the judge added.
One factor that prompted the panel of judges to hand down stiff sentences was the defendants lack of remorse. Muzakkir, 21, told the court that he 'felt satisfied for pouring rotten rice on the pictures of Megawati and Hamzah because they deserved it.' He said that both Megawati and Hamzah must be made to realise how hard it is forcommon people to get a spoonful of rice. Clad in red shirts and bandannas, both defendants looked calm upon hearing the verdict.
The Jakarta Post, 25 October 2002
Military Out in 2004
The upper chamber of parliament, the MPR, during its ten-day annual session in August 2002 voted to terminate the military's presence in parliament. Presently, the military has 38 seats. The MPR had voted two years earlier to retain the military's seats until 2009. The new vote ends the military's representation in 2004.
Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2002
Public Relations
Amid rising public suspicion toward the U.S.-led war on terrorism, the U.S. government released a series of mini-documentaries on the lives of Muslims in America. One of the films, a 10-minute movie titled 'Common Ground: Muslim Life in America,' is meant to show to the Muslim world that the U.S. allows Islam to spread and develop in the country. 'These represent an effort to reach out and bridge some gaps in communication,' U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Ralph Boyce said in a news conference in Jakarta after a showing. He said Indonesia was given the first opportunity to watch the documentaries due in part to its status as the world's most populous Muslim country. The ambassador also said that the campaign would be aired throughout the Muslim fasting month, with several Muslim countries also airing the same campaign.
Jakarta Post 30 October 2002
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Historical context
The current commander of the army's special forces (Kopassus), Maj. Gen. Sriyanto, is being charged by the Attorney General for his involvement in a 1984 massacre. He is among 14 being charged for the massacre at Tanjung Priok in northern Jakarta. The government's case states that 33 persons were killed although the real toll could be higher. At the time, Sriyanto was head of the operations section of the local district military command (Kodim) whose troops fired on a crowd of demonstrators. When Sriyanto was asked by journalists whether he had violated human rights, he replied, 'Human rights only became a big thing recently. At that time there wasn't all this human rights stuff.'
Kompas 16 November 2002
Pleading poverty
Armed forces (TNI) commander Gen. Endriartono Sutarto stated before a parliamentary commission on September 16 that TNI foundations earned the military at most Rp 50 billion (US$5.5 million) per year. In response to the suggestion that one foundation, Kartika Eka Paksi (YKEP), was worth Rp 32 trillion (US$3.5 billion), Endriartono laughed, 'Goodness me! If the government gives the TNI a budget of 16 trillion rupiah and our businesses are worth 32 trillion rupiah, everybody will want to be TNI commander.'
Endriartono denied that the TNI was stirring up trouble in conflict areas to boost its budget. 'Frankly, I am sick and tired of hearing accusations, while my soldiers are being killed, that they are engineering unrest for money,' he said in a high pitched voice.
Earlier in the year, an internal military report outlined a plan to relinquish TNI ownership of companies. The military also hired the accounting firm, Ernst & Young, to audit the foundations. In a press briefing in late August, Endriartono said, 'Being engaged in business is not the job of the TNI.' In their report, the auditors noted that military's businesses lacked focus, had assets whose owners were often unknown, relied too much on outsourcing practices, and were often indebted. According to Endriartono, 'The report can be accessed by the public.' What Endriartono did not clarify is that the foundations do not include all the businesses of the military.
Jakarta Post, 3 September 2002; BBC Worldwide Monitoring 17 September 2002.
Miraculous Recovery
When former president Suharto was wanted for questioning on charges of corruption two years ago, doctors judged him to be too ill to appear before the police. He was said to be confined to a wheelchair, barely able to speak, and suffering from brain damage. But on 29 October 2002 he was not only able to make a trip to Solo in Central Java, he was able to walk unaided for 200 meters and climb steps to visit the graves of his late wife and mother. He also visited his son Tommy and long-time crony Bob Hasan in prison.
Tempo 10 November 2002
Sacred Images
Two activists, Muzakkir, alias Aceh, and Nanang Mamija, became the first persons to be convicted of insulting President Megawati Soekarnoputri and Vice President Hamzah Haz. They were sentenced on October 24, 2002 to one year in prison for stomping and soiling the official pictures of the two leaders. They were charged with violating Article 134 of the Criminal Code concerning the deliberate intent to insult the president or vice president. A violation carries a maximum penalty of six years in prison.
'The pictures are supposed to be treated with honour just like other state symbols such as the symbol of Garuda,'said presiding judge Sirande Palayukan, referring to the mythical bird on the official seal of the Republic of Indonesia. 'If a certain group insults the President and the Vice President, it would spark debate among the public about their actions that could lead to divisiveness,' the judge added.
One factor that prompted the panel of judges to hand down stiff sentences was the defendants lack of remorse. Muzakkir, 21, told the court that he 'felt satisfied for pouring rotten rice on the pictures of Megawati and Hamzah because they deserved it.' He said that both Megawati and Hamzah must be made to realise how hard it is forcommon people to get a spoonful of rice. Clad in red shirts and bandannas, both defendants looked calm upon hearing the verdict.
The Jakarta Post, 25 October 2002
Military Out in 2004
The upper chamber of parliament, the MPR, during its ten-day annual session in August 2002 voted to terminate the military's presence in parliament. Presently, the military has 38 seats. The MPR had voted two years earlier to retain the military's seats until 2009. The new vote ends the military's representation in 2004.
Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2002
Public Relations
Amid rising public suspicion toward the U.S.-led war on terrorism, the U.S. government released a series of mini-documentaries on the lives of Muslims in America. One of the films, a 10-minute movie titled 'Common Ground: Muslim Life in America,' is meant to show to the Muslim world that the U.S. allows Islam to spread and develop in the country. 'These represent an effort to reach out and bridge some gaps in communication,' U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia Ralph Boyce said in a news conference in Jakarta after a showing. He said Indonesia was given the first opportunity to watch the documentaries due in part to its status as the world's most populous Muslim country. The ambassador also said that the campaign would be aired throughout the Muslim fasting month, with several Muslim countries also airing the same campaign.
Jakarta Post 30 October 2002
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
The Bali Bombing Understanding the tragedy beyond al-Qaeda and Bush's 'war on terror'
The Bali Bombing
Understanding the tragedy beyond al-Qaeda and Bush's 'war on terror'
Thomas Reuter
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, 12 October 2002 a devastating attack was launched at the beachside town of Kuta on the island of Bali. Two bombs exploded in quick succession in Paddy's Irish Pub and outside the Sari Club. The blast and subsequent fires left more than 190 people dead and several hundred injured, most of them young holiday-makers from Australia and other Western countries.
Mainstream media reports quickly pointed the finger of blame at the international terrorist network al-Qaeda and its local operatives. Little attention was given to the national let alone local socio-political context in which this attack took place. Attacks of a similar kind, if not scope, have occurred with increasing regularity since the collapse of Suharto's military dictatorship in 1998. As a consequence, the tragedy of October 12 was co-opted prematurely and uncritically into the global political agenda and rhetorical paradigm of the United States government's 'War on Terror'.
National context
The task of addressing the issue of terrorism, or of assessing whether or not the Indonesian and Western governments are addressing it appropriately on our behalf, is made difficult by the secret nature of terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. At the time of writing (late October), no verifiable evidence of al-Qaeda involvement in the Bali attack has been made available to the public.
Even when it comes to the general question of al-Qaeda's presence in Southeast Asia, the evidence is scanty and often impossible to verify. On 15 September 2002, for example, Time Magazine claimed to have seen 'secret CIA documents' stating that the Kuwaiti militant and alleged al-Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, recently arrested in Indonesia and delivered to the US military, had confessed to the CIA, perhaps under torture, how he had been ordered to coordinate a series of attacks on US and other foreign interests in Southeast Asia. Many Indonesians do not accept the claims based on such intelligence leaks, not surprisingly given that the US government by its own admission considers it legitimate to spread misinformation for strategic purposes.
Al-Qaeda should not be considered as a singular organisation with an international agenda and a central authority. It is able to maintain a power base in numerous parts of the world because it is a network of rather loosely affiliated national or local extremist groups. What needs to be explored are the reasons for its successful expansion into countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where the vast majority of Muslims have been consistently classified as moderates by generations of Western scholars.
While a unitary organisation's expansion conceivably can be halted by pursuing a smallish group of key culprits through intelligence or military operations, a bottom-up process can be expected to self-perpetuate unless underlying political and socio-economic causes are removed. The implications for foreign policy are serious and far-reaching.
This is not to deny that an internationalisation of terrorism has been taking place. Radical Islamic groups in Indonesia have had international links for at least two decades. The now-infamous leader of Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI, Council of Indonesian Mujahideen), Ba'asyir and many of his closest associates had established such links on their own initiative after having participated in the armed struggle against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan during the 1980s, a struggle for which the US was the major backer. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was also a watershed in that it provided the model case for establishing an Islamic state. Nevertheless, the main focus of political consciousness among such groups has been the Indonesian state itself.
It may be safe to assume that a network of radical Islamic groups with international links is present in Indonesia today, and that elements in some of these groups at least are willing to use terrorism as a political tool - with or without help from their affiliates and donors abroad. The political ambitions of these radicals most likely are still focused firmly on national objectives, even though their discourse may reflect an international rhetoric of fighting for the glory of Islam and against the great Satan America.
The problem in allocating blame for the Bali blast is that radical Islamic groups like Jemaah Islamiyah are not the only groups in Indonesia today who may be willing and capable of committing or supporting acts of terrorism. There are many causes and perpetrators of violence in contemporary Indonesia. Inter-religious conflicts, vigilante-style killings of petty criminals and other undesirables, institutionalised protection and extortion rackets, and the alarming spread of paramilitary groups are all part of this phenomenon. Different groups even within the government's own security forces have been fighting turf wars. This diffusion of violence makes it difficult to pinpoint a single person or group as the likely perpetrators in any particular case.
Balinese context
In Bali itself, there has been increasing tension between Hindu Balinese and Muslim labour migrants from neighbouring islands. Many fear this wave of spontaneous immigration could marginalise the Balinese as an ethnic and religious minority on their own island, as has been the fate of other peoples in the outer islands. More immediately, however, the problem is one of competition for jobs, and also social envy. Some of the migrants are not economic refugees at all, but wealthy Javanese investors who have established major businesses in Bali, ranging from hotels and restaurants to taxi companies.
As early as April 1999 there have been violent attacks on Javanese street sellers. Several Javanese informants residing in Bali told me only a few weeks before the attacks how they no longer dared to be seen outdoors after 10pm for fear of being abducted and murdered, following threats and a spate of mysterious disappearances in their circle of friends and acquaintances. In turn, my Balinese informants told me that the Java-based Laskar Jihad (LJ, 'Holy Warriors') had begun to build a presence especially in northern Bali, allegedly to 'protect our down-trodden Muslim brothers in Bali' (from an undated LJ propaganda pamphlet distributed in Central Java in late 2001). Days after the Bali blast, this militant group disbanded or went underground, depending on how one chooses to look at it. LJ, in any case, has rarely acted on its own. In Aceh, Ambon and West Papua, for example, the group appears to have enjoyed extremely cordial relations with the army, and there is wide speculation that LJ has been encouraged to cause trouble in order to maintain a sense of crisis throughout the country.
In recent years, the Balinese have also responded to a number of serious security issues in relation to organised crime. My informants claim that the illegal drug trade, prostitution as well as extortion rackets, particularly in Kuta and Sanur, are firmly in the hands of immigrants, who are in turn protected by elements within the official security forces. In Sanur, for example, traditional Balinese community organisations have been fighting a pitched battle against the prostitution industry and its patrons. Note in this context that the main reason why the destroyed Sari Club had a policy of barring entry to Indonesians was to keep out sex workers, who had already swamped and changed the character of most other major bars and nightclubs in the area.
A key indicator of the state of the tourism industry, Bali's hotel occupancy rate had dropped from over 70 % before the attack to just 5 % by 29 October. This shows that that the main losers in the attack on Bali, apart from the victims themselves and their families, are the island's residents, irrespective of whether or not they are ethnically Balinese. The Hindu Balinese majority seem to have realised this and, until now, have shown restraint by not lashing out at Muslim immigrants in their midst.
Already destabilised by the attack, President Megawati has been under enormous pressure from Washington to take stern measures against terrorists. How is she to do this without the military, or with it, given that it is widely suspected in Indonesia that the military could have been implicated in the attack? Are the Indonesian police and intelligence up to the task? Could wanton arrests trigger a Muslim backlash? We may have to be patient. Too much pressure now could help to derail Indonesia's emergent democracy. The US and Australia, considering their interests in Indonesia now, should be aware of this peril. We should move forward by supporting the reform of the Indonesian military and the engagement of the mass of Muslim Indonesians in the democratic process.
Thomas Reuter (thomasr@unimelb.edu.au) is a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council, located at the School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
Understanding the tragedy beyond al-Qaeda and Bush's 'war on terror'
Thomas Reuter
Shortly before midnight on Saturday, 12 October 2002 a devastating attack was launched at the beachside town of Kuta on the island of Bali. Two bombs exploded in quick succession in Paddy's Irish Pub and outside the Sari Club. The blast and subsequent fires left more than 190 people dead and several hundred injured, most of them young holiday-makers from Australia and other Western countries.
Mainstream media reports quickly pointed the finger of blame at the international terrorist network al-Qaeda and its local operatives. Little attention was given to the national let alone local socio-political context in which this attack took place. Attacks of a similar kind, if not scope, have occurred with increasing regularity since the collapse of Suharto's military dictatorship in 1998. As a consequence, the tragedy of October 12 was co-opted prematurely and uncritically into the global political agenda and rhetorical paradigm of the United States government's 'War on Terror'.
National context
The task of addressing the issue of terrorism, or of assessing whether or not the Indonesian and Western governments are addressing it appropriately on our behalf, is made difficult by the secret nature of terrorist and counter-terrorist operations. At the time of writing (late October), no verifiable evidence of al-Qaeda involvement in the Bali attack has been made available to the public.
Even when it comes to the general question of al-Qaeda's presence in Southeast Asia, the evidence is scanty and often impossible to verify. On 15 September 2002, for example, Time Magazine claimed to have seen 'secret CIA documents' stating that the Kuwaiti militant and alleged al-Qaeda operative, Omar al-Faruq, recently arrested in Indonesia and delivered to the US military, had confessed to the CIA, perhaps under torture, how he had been ordered to coordinate a series of attacks on US and other foreign interests in Southeast Asia. Many Indonesians do not accept the claims based on such intelligence leaks, not surprisingly given that the US government by its own admission considers it legitimate to spread misinformation for strategic purposes.
Al-Qaeda should not be considered as a singular organisation with an international agenda and a central authority. It is able to maintain a power base in numerous parts of the world because it is a network of rather loosely affiliated national or local extremist groups. What needs to be explored are the reasons for its successful expansion into countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, where the vast majority of Muslims have been consistently classified as moderates by generations of Western scholars.
While a unitary organisation's expansion conceivably can be halted by pursuing a smallish group of key culprits through intelligence or military operations, a bottom-up process can be expected to self-perpetuate unless underlying political and socio-economic causes are removed. The implications for foreign policy are serious and far-reaching.
This is not to deny that an internationalisation of terrorism has been taking place. Radical Islamic groups in Indonesia have had international links for at least two decades. The now-infamous leader of Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia (MMI, Council of Indonesian Mujahideen), Ba'asyir and many of his closest associates had established such links on their own initiative after having participated in the armed struggle against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan during the 1980s, a struggle for which the US was the major backer. The Iranian revolution of 1979 was also a watershed in that it provided the model case for establishing an Islamic state. Nevertheless, the main focus of political consciousness among such groups has been the Indonesian state itself.
It may be safe to assume that a network of radical Islamic groups with international links is present in Indonesia today, and that elements in some of these groups at least are willing to use terrorism as a political tool - with or without help from their affiliates and donors abroad. The political ambitions of these radicals most likely are still focused firmly on national objectives, even though their discourse may reflect an international rhetoric of fighting for the glory of Islam and against the great Satan America.
The problem in allocating blame for the Bali blast is that radical Islamic groups like Jemaah Islamiyah are not the only groups in Indonesia today who may be willing and capable of committing or supporting acts of terrorism. There are many causes and perpetrators of violence in contemporary Indonesia. Inter-religious conflicts, vigilante-style killings of petty criminals and other undesirables, institutionalised protection and extortion rackets, and the alarming spread of paramilitary groups are all part of this phenomenon. Different groups even within the government's own security forces have been fighting turf wars. This diffusion of violence makes it difficult to pinpoint a single person or group as the likely perpetrators in any particular case.
Balinese context
In Bali itself, there has been increasing tension between Hindu Balinese and Muslim labour migrants from neighbouring islands. Many fear this wave of spontaneous immigration could marginalise the Balinese as an ethnic and religious minority on their own island, as has been the fate of other peoples in the outer islands. More immediately, however, the problem is one of competition for jobs, and also social envy. Some of the migrants are not economic refugees at all, but wealthy Javanese investors who have established major businesses in Bali, ranging from hotels and restaurants to taxi companies.
As early as April 1999 there have been violent attacks on Javanese street sellers. Several Javanese informants residing in Bali told me only a few weeks before the attacks how they no longer dared to be seen outdoors after 10pm for fear of being abducted and murdered, following threats and a spate of mysterious disappearances in their circle of friends and acquaintances. In turn, my Balinese informants told me that the Java-based Laskar Jihad (LJ, 'Holy Warriors') had begun to build a presence especially in northern Bali, allegedly to 'protect our down-trodden Muslim brothers in Bali' (from an undated LJ propaganda pamphlet distributed in Central Java in late 2001). Days after the Bali blast, this militant group disbanded or went underground, depending on how one chooses to look at it. LJ, in any case, has rarely acted on its own. In Aceh, Ambon and West Papua, for example, the group appears to have enjoyed extremely cordial relations with the army, and there is wide speculation that LJ has been encouraged to cause trouble in order to maintain a sense of crisis throughout the country.
In recent years, the Balinese have also responded to a number of serious security issues in relation to organised crime. My informants claim that the illegal drug trade, prostitution as well as extortion rackets, particularly in Kuta and Sanur, are firmly in the hands of immigrants, who are in turn protected by elements within the official security forces. In Sanur, for example, traditional Balinese community organisations have been fighting a pitched battle against the prostitution industry and its patrons. Note in this context that the main reason why the destroyed Sari Club had a policy of barring entry to Indonesians was to keep out sex workers, who had already swamped and changed the character of most other major bars and nightclubs in the area.
A key indicator of the state of the tourism industry, Bali's hotel occupancy rate had dropped from over 70 % before the attack to just 5 % by 29 October. This shows that that the main losers in the attack on Bali, apart from the victims themselves and their families, are the island's residents, irrespective of whether or not they are ethnically Balinese. The Hindu Balinese majority seem to have realised this and, until now, have shown restraint by not lashing out at Muslim immigrants in their midst.
Already destabilised by the attack, President Megawati has been under enormous pressure from Washington to take stern measures against terrorists. How is she to do this without the military, or with it, given that it is widely suspected in Indonesia that the military could have been implicated in the attack? Are the Indonesian police and intelligence up to the task? Could wanton arrests trigger a Muslim backlash? We may have to be patient. Too much pressure now could help to derail Indonesia's emergent democracy. The US and Australia, considering their interests in Indonesia now, should be aware of this peril. We should move forward by supporting the reform of the Indonesian military and the engagement of the mass of Muslim Indonesians in the democratic process.
Thomas Reuter (thomasr@unimelb.edu.au) is a Queen Elizabeth II Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council, located at the School of Anthropology, Geography & Environmental Studies, The University of Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 73: Jan - Mar 2003
A moderate majority A deep local tradition of tolerance defends against militancy
A moderate majority
A deep local tradition of tolerance defends against militancy
The Hon Justice Marcus Einfeld AO QC PhD
It is clear that we have entered a new and dangerous phase of horror in human relations. This phase has necessarily drawn Indonesia, Australia and the whole of our region into the nucleus of the struggle.
Indonesia was aware that she needed to get tougher on terrorists - all of us knew that we should take more determined action to deal with the terrorist curse.
But this is not the time to lay blame in the crude sense of the word. It is time to work in unison to protect our world from the malevolence of terrorists and their brutal exploits. Our strategy must be twofold. We must pull out all stops to root out the criminals committed to and involved in the wholesale murder of civilians, put them on trial, and punish the guilty. And we must also look to the issues which allow fanatics to arouse and inflame the passions of those who would commit dastardly crimes.
Hopefully the Indonesian authorities will find the political and public support to clamp down heavily on extremists linked to terrorism. President Megawati's task is arduous and unenviable, but she really has only one choice.
The greatest defence against militancy in Indonesia is the deep local tradition of moderation and tolerance.
The vilification of Muslims since these attacks is a disgrace. What pedigree of humanity are we, to typecast a substantial portion of the world's population because a few of its number have committed atrocities? All religions have something to answer for in terms of violence and atrocities. Islamic nations have not decided to attack all Christians or commit general acts of pestilence akin to that which occurred in Bali. Has the lesson of Hitler's genocide of Jews not yet been learnt?
But as Bali grieves, and we all grieve for what it now stands for, not even the venerated intelligence agencies the world over can supply convincing proof that al Qaeda was involved in it, or even who and what that organisation is. In the face of such an elusive foe, logic is the first casualty. Better co-ordination between the Indonesian police and military is essential in reducing contradiction. If the army takes the lead role and undermines all the work that has been done in the last three years to build up the police as a civilian agency responsible for internal security, the stronger will develop the idea that the army was somehow involved in the bombings in the first place and the more the scepticism of an al Qaeda role.
We must also review the tenacity of our relationship with the US. Must the American dream manifest itself in the form of civilian bloodshed? The deaths we have witnessed in Indonesia were ugly, divisive and pointless. Are we about to be again forced to watch nightclubs, shopping centres or schools being bombed in Baghdad? Will the disarming of Saddam Hussein be achieved over the bodies of taxi drivers, shopkeepers and shoppers, mothers taking their children to school? Will it be achieved at all?
It is time for us all to look for a durable, feasible and sustainable international solution to Muslim extremism. Any solution will necessarily be found outside of war. Despite the extraordinary statement of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that compared to Iraq, the Israel/Palestinian dispute is a 'sideshow', a settlement of that conflict is not the only solution but it is a necessary pre-requisite to a solution to Muslim extremism and militancy. The consequence of failure is more bloodshed and suffering. The dividend of success is too obvious to need stating.
We must commit ourselves to move forward towards a future free from terror, where tolerance for disparate cultures spans the globe and the safety of people free from hate becomes the religion of us all.
The Hon Justice Marcus Einfeld AO QC can be reached at einfeldm@ozemail.com.au
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
A deep local tradition of tolerance defends against militancy
The Hon Justice Marcus Einfeld AO QC PhD
It is clear that we have entered a new and dangerous phase of horror in human relations. This phase has necessarily drawn Indonesia, Australia and the whole of our region into the nucleus of the struggle.
Indonesia was aware that she needed to get tougher on terrorists - all of us knew that we should take more determined action to deal with the terrorist curse.
But this is not the time to lay blame in the crude sense of the word. It is time to work in unison to protect our world from the malevolence of terrorists and their brutal exploits. Our strategy must be twofold. We must pull out all stops to root out the criminals committed to and involved in the wholesale murder of civilians, put them on trial, and punish the guilty. And we must also look to the issues which allow fanatics to arouse and inflame the passions of those who would commit dastardly crimes.
Hopefully the Indonesian authorities will find the political and public support to clamp down heavily on extremists linked to terrorism. President Megawati's task is arduous and unenviable, but she really has only one choice.
The greatest defence against militancy in Indonesia is the deep local tradition of moderation and tolerance.
The vilification of Muslims since these attacks is a disgrace. What pedigree of humanity are we, to typecast a substantial portion of the world's population because a few of its number have committed atrocities? All religions have something to answer for in terms of violence and atrocities. Islamic nations have not decided to attack all Christians or commit general acts of pestilence akin to that which occurred in Bali. Has the lesson of Hitler's genocide of Jews not yet been learnt?
But as Bali grieves, and we all grieve for what it now stands for, not even the venerated intelligence agencies the world over can supply convincing proof that al Qaeda was involved in it, or even who and what that organisation is. In the face of such an elusive foe, logic is the first casualty. Better co-ordination between the Indonesian police and military is essential in reducing contradiction. If the army takes the lead role and undermines all the work that has been done in the last three years to build up the police as a civilian agency responsible for internal security, the stronger will develop the idea that the army was somehow involved in the bombings in the first place and the more the scepticism of an al Qaeda role.
We must also review the tenacity of our relationship with the US. Must the American dream manifest itself in the form of civilian bloodshed? The deaths we have witnessed in Indonesia were ugly, divisive and pointless. Are we about to be again forced to watch nightclubs, shopping centres or schools being bombed in Baghdad? Will the disarming of Saddam Hussein be achieved over the bodies of taxi drivers, shopkeepers and shoppers, mothers taking their children to school? Will it be achieved at all?
It is time for us all to look for a durable, feasible and sustainable international solution to Muslim extremism. Any solution will necessarily be found outside of war. Despite the extraordinary statement of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that compared to Iraq, the Israel/Palestinian dispute is a 'sideshow', a settlement of that conflict is not the only solution but it is a necessary pre-requisite to a solution to Muslim extremism and militancy. The consequence of failure is more bloodshed and suffering. The dividend of success is too obvious to need stating.
We must commit ourselves to move forward towards a future free from terror, where tolerance for disparate cultures spans the globe and the safety of people free from hate becomes the religion of us all.
The Hon Justice Marcus Einfeld AO QC can be reached at einfeldm@ozemail.com.au
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Renegotiate the debt! Civil society intervenes in multilateral aid meeting
Renegotiate the debt!
Civil society intervenes in multilateral aid meeting
Ngurah Karyadi
In January 2003, the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) met in Bali and concluded with US$2.7 billion pledge in disbursements for 2003. CGI is a consortium of government representatives and donor agencies, convened by the World Bank, which meets annually to pledge aid disbursements to Indonesia. When it met on 21 and 22 January 2003, the Indonesian government lobbied CGI for additional aid to assist with recovery from the Bali bombing. Ngurah Karyadi attended the meeting as a civil society observer for the Indonesians People's Forum, and presented the following intervention. The 12 October bombing in Kuta resulted in a tragic loss of lives and triggered an unprecedented crisis in Bali. The sudden mass exodus of tourists altered its economy overnight. While the effects have been most visible on the economy, the potential for social tensions has also increased.
Culture of fear
After the Kuta bombing, many businesses were threatened with bankruptcy and many people were laid off. In Bali, the economic crisis has manifested an escalating xenophobia. Increasingly, people from outside the island are seen as a threat to Balinese people's economic and social stability. At the socio-political level, a number of groups are capitalising on a general atmosphere of fear by taking steps towards remilitarising society, reminiscent of the New Order period. For example, in Bali, local thugs (preman) now command their own price to maintain security. At the national level, some politicians have demanded that the government reinstate the Anti-Subversion Law. Parallel to this, the Australian government has promoted Kopassus as their partner in the War on Terror. Many of the recovery efforts have done little to address these issues and their regressive social effects.
A better political and economic order
Governments need to examine the political and economic contexts in which terrorist organisations evolve. Certainly, economic insecurity breeds terrorism. In Bali, recovery efforts need to take this into account. Ultimately, priority must be given to economic and social development, as well as justice and law enforcement.
Many world leaders espouse that free trade, open markets and public-private partnerships are key to overcoming the political, economic and even social instability. But these efforts mean little if the community is not involved. In Indonesia, free trade needs to include the democratisation of political and economic power, placing the military under civilian control, and the ongoing devolution of power from the centre.
The Indonesian government has asked CGI participants to help with the recovery effort by funding new development programs in Bali. But the government really needs to utilise this opportunity to renegotiate the current foreign debt. Unfortunately, Indonesian leaders have focused too much on adherence to IMF structural adjustment policies, at the expense of common Indonesians. Raising prices of basic commodities during the crisis created by the Kuta bombing reveals a lack of insight.
A number of crucial actions remain to be taken at the macro-economic level, in the interests of overseeing a complete recovery in the bomb's aftermath. Firstly, the government must provide for basic human needs, including food, health, education and a clean environment through a social security system. Priority should be given to those who have been directly affected by the Kuta bombing. It should also create employment through spending on much needed infrastructure in Bali as well as Indonesia.
Secondly, bureaucratic processes by which people register their businesses should be streamlined. This would enable such businesses better access to capital investment and over the long term, legitimate businesses will generate more tax revenue for the local government. This in turn would allow the government to assist farmers in rural areas, who are indirectly affected by the economic crisis.
Thirdly, a moratorium on Indonesia's debt needs to be instituted immediately. Donor institutions need to be made accountable for loans made in bad faith, where official corruption was ignored or factored into the terms of the agreement. This is vital, as it would help to restore the Indonesian people's faith in global financial institutions. It would also temporarily relieve fiscal pressure and ensure the availability of funds needed to get through the crisis.
The tragedy has become a learning process as well as a time for reflection for us all. It is essential to the future of Indonesia that together we build the faith necessary to create a better social and economic order, free of fear, in an atmosphere of democracy, justice and responsibility.
Ngurah Karyadi (gembrong@ eudoramail.com) has been active in Balinese student and non-government organisations since the late 1980s.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Civil society intervenes in multilateral aid meeting
Ngurah Karyadi
In January 2003, the Consultative Group on Indonesia (CGI) met in Bali and concluded with US$2.7 billion pledge in disbursements for 2003. CGI is a consortium of government representatives and donor agencies, convened by the World Bank, which meets annually to pledge aid disbursements to Indonesia. When it met on 21 and 22 January 2003, the Indonesian government lobbied CGI for additional aid to assist with recovery from the Bali bombing. Ngurah Karyadi attended the meeting as a civil society observer for the Indonesians People's Forum, and presented the following intervention. The 12 October bombing in Kuta resulted in a tragic loss of lives and triggered an unprecedented crisis in Bali. The sudden mass exodus of tourists altered its economy overnight. While the effects have been most visible on the economy, the potential for social tensions has also increased.
Culture of fear
After the Kuta bombing, many businesses were threatened with bankruptcy and many people were laid off. In Bali, the economic crisis has manifested an escalating xenophobia. Increasingly, people from outside the island are seen as a threat to Balinese people's economic and social stability. At the socio-political level, a number of groups are capitalising on a general atmosphere of fear by taking steps towards remilitarising society, reminiscent of the New Order period. For example, in Bali, local thugs (preman) now command their own price to maintain security. At the national level, some politicians have demanded that the government reinstate the Anti-Subversion Law. Parallel to this, the Australian government has promoted Kopassus as their partner in the War on Terror. Many of the recovery efforts have done little to address these issues and their regressive social effects.
A better political and economic order
Governments need to examine the political and economic contexts in which terrorist organisations evolve. Certainly, economic insecurity breeds terrorism. In Bali, recovery efforts need to take this into account. Ultimately, priority must be given to economic and social development, as well as justice and law enforcement.
Many world leaders espouse that free trade, open markets and public-private partnerships are key to overcoming the political, economic and even social instability. But these efforts mean little if the community is not involved. In Indonesia, free trade needs to include the democratisation of political and economic power, placing the military under civilian control, and the ongoing devolution of power from the centre.
The Indonesian government has asked CGI participants to help with the recovery effort by funding new development programs in Bali. But the government really needs to utilise this opportunity to renegotiate the current foreign debt. Unfortunately, Indonesian leaders have focused too much on adherence to IMF structural adjustment policies, at the expense of common Indonesians. Raising prices of basic commodities during the crisis created by the Kuta bombing reveals a lack of insight.
A number of crucial actions remain to be taken at the macro-economic level, in the interests of overseeing a complete recovery in the bomb's aftermath. Firstly, the government must provide for basic human needs, including food, health, education and a clean environment through a social security system. Priority should be given to those who have been directly affected by the Kuta bombing. It should also create employment through spending on much needed infrastructure in Bali as well as Indonesia.
Secondly, bureaucratic processes by which people register their businesses should be streamlined. This would enable such businesses better access to capital investment and over the long term, legitimate businesses will generate more tax revenue for the local government. This in turn would allow the government to assist farmers in rural areas, who are indirectly affected by the economic crisis.
Thirdly, a moratorium on Indonesia's debt needs to be instituted immediately. Donor institutions need to be made accountable for loans made in bad faith, where official corruption was ignored or factored into the terms of the agreement. This is vital, as it would help to restore the Indonesian people's faith in global financial institutions. It would also temporarily relieve fiscal pressure and ensure the availability of funds needed to get through the crisis.
The tragedy has become a learning process as well as a time for reflection for us all. It is essential to the future of Indonesia that together we build the faith necessary to create a better social and economic order, free of fear, in an atmosphere of democracy, justice and responsibility.
Ngurah Karyadi (gembrong@ eudoramail.com) has been active in Balinese student and non-government organisations since the late 1980s.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Taken by surprise The Bali bombings reveal the failings of Australian-Indonesian intelligence co-operations
Taken by surprise
The Bali bombings reveal the failings of Australian-Indonesian intelligence co-operations
David Wright Neville
The terrorist bombings of the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar last October confirmed what many Indonesia watchers had been loathe to admit; that a small number of Indonesian Muslims have embraced a violent fanaticism once viewed as a peculiarly Middle Eastern phenomenon.
That this might be the case proved difficult to accept mainly because it challenged accepted wisdom that Indonesian Islam was and remained culturally discrete - a mostly benign tradition unsullied by the demagoguery of extremist Islamist agendas in other parts of the world.
As writers such as Bob Hefner have pointed out, Indonesian Islam has always been marked by a vibrant pluralism. Moreover, those who would compartmentalise it into a neatly defined 'apolitical' category were guilty of a romantic Orientalism that denied historical and contemporary realities. Indonesian Islam has never been impervious to cultural and political influences in other parts of the world, and nor will it be in the future.
Short-sighted
For anybody even remotely aware of the cultural dynamics in a globalised world, it should have come as no surprise that some Indonesian Muslims would find parallels between their own predicament and the worldviews and political messages emanating from distant corners of the Islamic world. It was similarly predictable that those who peddle such messages would target Indonesian Muslims. Yet these possibilities appeared to have been lost on both the Australian and Indonesian intelligence communities.
Right up until early 2002, Indonesia watchers in the Australian intelligence community dismissed reports of growing contacts between al Qaeda and militants in Indonesia as irrelevant. One especially sceptical senior intelligence official ridiculed such reports with a dismissive wave of the hand coupled by a derogatory reference to 'mad muzzies'.
This short sightedness is partly attributable to the resilience of stereotypes of Indonesians, and other foreigners for that matter, within the Australian foreign policy and security bureaucracy. But it also reflects a general ignorance, at senior policy levels in particular, of global cultural and political dynamics and their impact on individual communities.
In the case of the Australian intelligence community, these shortcomings are rooted in the rarefied atmosphere within which analysts work. In brief, it is an environment that discourages open exchange with outside experts, especially in academe or the private sector. There is a refusal to accept that such exchanges can be useful even without the disclosure of classified material.
More than a decade ago the CIA recognised the intellectual atrophy that can incubate within an overly restricted analytical environment. After all, the CIA habitually over-estimated the former Soviet Union's military prowess and then failed to predict its collapse.
Since then, CIA analysts have actively solicited counter-views to those that prevail within the intelligence establishment. Conferences are regularly convened with outside experts, including critical and even leftwing voices, to try and minimise the dangers posed by analyses generated within closed environments. If, in the American case, good analyses fail to generate good policies, at least there is the White House to blame.
Not so in Australia. After failing to predict the fall of Suharto, the pogrom in East Timor, the election of Abdurahman Wahid, his fall, and the rise of Islamist terrorism one would think that the CIA's Australian counterparts would be seeking to solicit a similar range of views, if for no other reason than to expose the Indonesia 'experts' to a dose of reality. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.
Dummy
Supplementing engagement with 'outside experts' are bilateral intelligence exchanges, or 'Intellex', whereby Australian officials from Australian agencies meet with their foreign counterparts to discuss issues of mutual interest. Mostly these exchanges with Asian counterparts amount to little more than a diplomatic t�te-�-tote, with generalities exchanged but very little discussion of specifics.
On rare occasions such meetings generate valuable snippets of information and analytical insights. Yet there is little chance of this happening with Indonesian services because since the East Timor crisis Indonesian agencies, the State Intelligence Co-ordinating Agency (Bakin), the Armed Forces Strategic Intelligence Agency (Bais) and the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), have refused to meet formally with their Australian counterparts.
On-going indignation within Indonesian intelligence circles at Australia's alleged support for pro-independence groups in East Timor has meant that Australia's meagre intelligence assets in Indonesia have had to take on the burden. This makes the task of mapping the organisational spread and operational strength of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah extremely difficult.
It may surprise many to learn that Australia has a comparatively small foreign intelligence capability, effectively 'out-sourcing' much of the information it needs to exchanges with friendly services within the UK-USA alliance that links Australian intelligence to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. At the very least, Australia's small intelligence capabilities belie the delusions of regional grandeur evinced by that antipodean Napoleon John Howard and his nonsensical threats of unilateral pre-emptive military action against suspected terrorist targets in the region.
But herein lies another major problem from the Australian perspective. There is a perception in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia more generally, that Australia is an unreliable intelligence partner. In particular, the soothing affirmations of camaraderie and regional brotherhood whispered by Canberra's Southeast Asian diplomats are belied by Australia's image as an outpost of US foreign policy, Washington's Far Eastern branch office within which John Howard serves proudly as chief clerk.
Moreover, in the current climate, with Washington determined to play the lead and supporting roles in the War on Terror (and Australia reduced to a walk-on bit part) Jakarta knows it can deal directly with Washington on counter-terrorism issues. In other words, why talk to the dummy when you can go straight to the ventriloquist?
Australian officials have worked hard to overcome this problem which, to be fair, is more the making of political leaders in Canberra and Jakarta rather than intelligence officials per se. And since the Bali attacks it appears as though some sensibility has been reinjected into the relationship in the form of a new spirit of cooperation between the Indonesian police and the Australian Federal Police.
However, it remains to be seen whether the relationship can be rebuilt on the back of the Bali investigation. But even if it can, there are other problems that need to be dealt with.
Risks
There is little doubt about the determination of some Indonesian intelligence officials to work closely with their Australian counterparts. But their efforts are often hobbled by several deeply embedded structural problems; in particular, the politicisation of Indonesian intelligence and inter-service rivalries.
There is little evidence to suggest that military intelligence in particular has reformed its ways. It is difficult to separate Bakin from TNI's overall command structure, and just as regional TNI commands are riddled by corruption and a sense that they alone know what's best for their own region and the nation as a whole, so too do Indonesian intelligence agencies connected to TNI, notably Bais and Bakin.
This is not to suggest that BIN is much better. The erratic performance of BIN's mercurial head, Hendropriyono, his mishandling of allegations of an al Qaeda-linked training facility in Poso, as well as allegations he was complicit in the murder of Papuan separatist leader Theys Eluay, not to mention his own shady business dealings, have already been well documented.
Of particular concern is evidence that certain elements within the Indonesian intelligence community remain hostile to any negotiated peace in Aceh, West Papua or other trouble spots. The allegation that TNI had a hand in the murder last August of two US citizens and an Indonesian national near the Freeport mine is just one example of the organisation's troubled image. If true, this allegation, and others relating to ceasefire violations in Aceh, raises serious questions about the value of working with Indonesian intelligence.
Why? Because recent research into the evolution of terrorist groups around the world suggests a close correlation between brutalisation at the hands of the state and the tendency by some individuals and groups to resort to terrorism as a mode of political agitation. By cooperating more closely on intelligence matters with an unreformed TNI, Canberra thereby risks abetting a worsening of the terrorist problem in Indonesia.
This risk is especially acute in the area of counter-terrorism, and it would arise in cases where uncorroborated information about a certain individual or group was passed to Indonesian military intelligence for verification. In such a scenario, it would not be unusual for the information to implicate individuals not involved with terrorism per se, but either knowingly or unknowingly associated with insurgency groups or even organisations involved in basic human and civil rights movements.
There is a real risk that such information passed from Australian agencies in the name of counter-terrorist cooperation could enhance TNI's ability to brutalise dissident groups. Apart from the obvious ethical issues involved, co-operation between Australian and Indonesian intelligence agencies in such a scenario risks contributing to the types of abuse of power that feed the community anger and frustrations upon which terrorists feed.
Of course criticisms of this type have been made before. The usual reply, from spokespeople for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Defence (because Australian intelligence officials will neither confirm nor deny), is that intelligence co-operation, like that of defence co-operation, is designed to protect Australian lives. And, they remind us, don't forget those Australian government programs that teach Indonesian security officials how to respect human rights.
This is bunkum. If the Indonesian intelligence community's behaviour up until the East Timor crisis is evidence of the benefits of close cooperation with their Australian counterparts, then it is the type of cooperation that Australians and ordinary Indonesians could well do without.
Dr David Wright Neville (David.WrightNeville@arts.monash.edu.au)is a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Project.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
The Bali bombings reveal the failings of Australian-Indonesian intelligence co-operations
David Wright Neville
The terrorist bombings of the Sari Club and Paddy's Bar last October confirmed what many Indonesia watchers had been loathe to admit; that a small number of Indonesian Muslims have embraced a violent fanaticism once viewed as a peculiarly Middle Eastern phenomenon.
That this might be the case proved difficult to accept mainly because it challenged accepted wisdom that Indonesian Islam was and remained culturally discrete - a mostly benign tradition unsullied by the demagoguery of extremist Islamist agendas in other parts of the world.
As writers such as Bob Hefner have pointed out, Indonesian Islam has always been marked by a vibrant pluralism. Moreover, those who would compartmentalise it into a neatly defined 'apolitical' category were guilty of a romantic Orientalism that denied historical and contemporary realities. Indonesian Islam has never been impervious to cultural and political influences in other parts of the world, and nor will it be in the future.
Short-sighted
For anybody even remotely aware of the cultural dynamics in a globalised world, it should have come as no surprise that some Indonesian Muslims would find parallels between their own predicament and the worldviews and political messages emanating from distant corners of the Islamic world. It was similarly predictable that those who peddle such messages would target Indonesian Muslims. Yet these possibilities appeared to have been lost on both the Australian and Indonesian intelligence communities.
Right up until early 2002, Indonesia watchers in the Australian intelligence community dismissed reports of growing contacts between al Qaeda and militants in Indonesia as irrelevant. One especially sceptical senior intelligence official ridiculed such reports with a dismissive wave of the hand coupled by a derogatory reference to 'mad muzzies'.
This short sightedness is partly attributable to the resilience of stereotypes of Indonesians, and other foreigners for that matter, within the Australian foreign policy and security bureaucracy. But it also reflects a general ignorance, at senior policy levels in particular, of global cultural and political dynamics and their impact on individual communities.
In the case of the Australian intelligence community, these shortcomings are rooted in the rarefied atmosphere within which analysts work. In brief, it is an environment that discourages open exchange with outside experts, especially in academe or the private sector. There is a refusal to accept that such exchanges can be useful even without the disclosure of classified material.
More than a decade ago the CIA recognised the intellectual atrophy that can incubate within an overly restricted analytical environment. After all, the CIA habitually over-estimated the former Soviet Union's military prowess and then failed to predict its collapse.
Since then, CIA analysts have actively solicited counter-views to those that prevail within the intelligence establishment. Conferences are regularly convened with outside experts, including critical and even leftwing voices, to try and minimise the dangers posed by analyses generated within closed environments. If, in the American case, good analyses fail to generate good policies, at least there is the White House to blame.
Not so in Australia. After failing to predict the fall of Suharto, the pogrom in East Timor, the election of Abdurahman Wahid, his fall, and the rise of Islamist terrorism one would think that the CIA's Australian counterparts would be seeking to solicit a similar range of views, if for no other reason than to expose the Indonesia 'experts' to a dose of reality. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.
Dummy
Supplementing engagement with 'outside experts' are bilateral intelligence exchanges, or 'Intellex', whereby Australian officials from Australian agencies meet with their foreign counterparts to discuss issues of mutual interest. Mostly these exchanges with Asian counterparts amount to little more than a diplomatic t�te-�-tote, with generalities exchanged but very little discussion of specifics.
On rare occasions such meetings generate valuable snippets of information and analytical insights. Yet there is little chance of this happening with Indonesian services because since the East Timor crisis Indonesian agencies, the State Intelligence Co-ordinating Agency (Bakin), the Armed Forces Strategic Intelligence Agency (Bais) and the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), have refused to meet formally with their Australian counterparts.
On-going indignation within Indonesian intelligence circles at Australia's alleged support for pro-independence groups in East Timor has meant that Australia's meagre intelligence assets in Indonesia have had to take on the burden. This makes the task of mapping the organisational spread and operational strength of groups like Jemaah Islamiyah extremely difficult.
It may surprise many to learn that Australia has a comparatively small foreign intelligence capability, effectively 'out-sourcing' much of the information it needs to exchanges with friendly services within the UK-USA alliance that links Australian intelligence to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. At the very least, Australia's small intelligence capabilities belie the delusions of regional grandeur evinced by that antipodean Napoleon John Howard and his nonsensical threats of unilateral pre-emptive military action against suspected terrorist targets in the region.
But herein lies another major problem from the Australian perspective. There is a perception in Indonesia, and Southeast Asia more generally, that Australia is an unreliable intelligence partner. In particular, the soothing affirmations of camaraderie and regional brotherhood whispered by Canberra's Southeast Asian diplomats are belied by Australia's image as an outpost of US foreign policy, Washington's Far Eastern branch office within which John Howard serves proudly as chief clerk.
Moreover, in the current climate, with Washington determined to play the lead and supporting roles in the War on Terror (and Australia reduced to a walk-on bit part) Jakarta knows it can deal directly with Washington on counter-terrorism issues. In other words, why talk to the dummy when you can go straight to the ventriloquist?
Australian officials have worked hard to overcome this problem which, to be fair, is more the making of political leaders in Canberra and Jakarta rather than intelligence officials per se. And since the Bali attacks it appears as though some sensibility has been reinjected into the relationship in the form of a new spirit of cooperation between the Indonesian police and the Australian Federal Police.
However, it remains to be seen whether the relationship can be rebuilt on the back of the Bali investigation. But even if it can, there are other problems that need to be dealt with.
Risks
There is little doubt about the determination of some Indonesian intelligence officials to work closely with their Australian counterparts. But their efforts are often hobbled by several deeply embedded structural problems; in particular, the politicisation of Indonesian intelligence and inter-service rivalries.
There is little evidence to suggest that military intelligence in particular has reformed its ways. It is difficult to separate Bakin from TNI's overall command structure, and just as regional TNI commands are riddled by corruption and a sense that they alone know what's best for their own region and the nation as a whole, so too do Indonesian intelligence agencies connected to TNI, notably Bais and Bakin.
This is not to suggest that BIN is much better. The erratic performance of BIN's mercurial head, Hendropriyono, his mishandling of allegations of an al Qaeda-linked training facility in Poso, as well as allegations he was complicit in the murder of Papuan separatist leader Theys Eluay, not to mention his own shady business dealings, have already been well documented.
Of particular concern is evidence that certain elements within the Indonesian intelligence community remain hostile to any negotiated peace in Aceh, West Papua or other trouble spots. The allegation that TNI had a hand in the murder last August of two US citizens and an Indonesian national near the Freeport mine is just one example of the organisation's troubled image. If true, this allegation, and others relating to ceasefire violations in Aceh, raises serious questions about the value of working with Indonesian intelligence.
Why? Because recent research into the evolution of terrorist groups around the world suggests a close correlation between brutalisation at the hands of the state and the tendency by some individuals and groups to resort to terrorism as a mode of political agitation. By cooperating more closely on intelligence matters with an unreformed TNI, Canberra thereby risks abetting a worsening of the terrorist problem in Indonesia.
This risk is especially acute in the area of counter-terrorism, and it would arise in cases where uncorroborated information about a certain individual or group was passed to Indonesian military intelligence for verification. In such a scenario, it would not be unusual for the information to implicate individuals not involved with terrorism per se, but either knowingly or unknowingly associated with insurgency groups or even organisations involved in basic human and civil rights movements.
There is a real risk that such information passed from Australian agencies in the name of counter-terrorist cooperation could enhance TNI's ability to brutalise dissident groups. Apart from the obvious ethical issues involved, co-operation between Australian and Indonesian intelligence agencies in such a scenario risks contributing to the types of abuse of power that feed the community anger and frustrations upon which terrorists feed.
Of course criticisms of this type have been made before. The usual reply, from spokespeople for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), and Defence (because Australian intelligence officials will neither confirm nor deny), is that intelligence co-operation, like that of defence co-operation, is designed to protect Australian lives. And, they remind us, don't forget those Australian government programs that teach Indonesian security officials how to respect human rights.
This is bunkum. If the Indonesian intelligence community's behaviour up until the East Timor crisis is evidence of the benefits of close cooperation with their Australian counterparts, then it is the type of cooperation that Australians and ordinary Indonesians could well do without.
Dr David Wright Neville (David.WrightNeville@arts.monash.edu.au)is a Senior Research Fellow at Monash University's Global Terrorism Research Project.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
A hybrid order No joy for extremists in post-bomb Indonesia
A hybrid order
No joy for extremists in post-bomb Indonesia
Ed Aspinall
Immediately after the bombings in Bali on 12 October, there was much speculation in the foreign, especially Australian, press, that this was a watershed event for Indonesian politics. Nothing in the country would now be the same, or so the commentators argued. Political alignments would shift, the military would reassert itself, Islamic radicalism surge and the country face international isolation.
Certainly, it is possible to imagine circumstances in which some of the dramatic predictions might have been realised. In particular, the way that the government responded to the bombings was crucial for Indonesia's relations with the outside world. If foreign powers like Australia and, especially, the US had judged it was not seriously investigating the attack, or, worse still, turning a blind eye to its perpetrators, then Indonesia could have become a pariah state, with disastrous consequences.
Instead, the outcome on this score has been close to the reverse. There was unprecedented, large-scale and effective cooperation between Indonesian and foreign police. Within weeks, those responsible began to be arrested and foreign officials heaped praise on the government and police. Indonesia had won its spurs as a reliable ally in the War on Terror.
In the context of the surprisingly effective police response, most of the more dramatic predictions have not come true.
The myth of military omnipotence
In particular, the Bali bombing did not become a pretext for a political resurrection for the Indonesian military (TNI), even if some generals tried to use it for this purpose. For example, immediately after the bombing, the hardline Army Chief of Staff, Ryamizard Ryacudu, ordered the army hierarchy to 're-open the intelligence network' and stated that there should be no further talk of abolishing the military's territorial structure.
It is true that the post-September 11 world and Megawati's Indonesia represent an increasingly benign climate for the TNI. Immediately after the downfall of President Suharto in May 1998, the TNI was excoriated domestically and internationally for its record of human rights abuses. Officers felt that their institution was under siege.
Nowadays, President Megawati herself is sympathetic to the views of many of the more hardline generals (Ryamizard is reportedly a personal favourite). After September 11 and, especially Bali, senior US, Australian and other Western officials made many public comments about the need to restore military cooperation with Indonesia, adding further to TNI officers' views that human rights are moving off the international agenda.
It is no surprise that there are reports that some officers privately believe that it is only a matter of time before military dominance over politics will be restored. There have certainly been many signs of increased military confidence, such as the string of acquittals in the East Timor human rights trials. On the ground, especially in places like Papua and Aceh, military brutality remains common.
However, Indonesia still has a very long way to go before the military's dominance is restored. New anti-terrorism regulations, for example, do little to enhance the military's power. Even on core issues of security policy, there are signs that the hawks do not have it all their own way. For example, the December 2002 peace agreement in Aceh (see the article in this issue) may be vulnerable to sabotage by military hardliners, but it came about despite their frequently-stated objections to dialogue with 'separatists'.
Despite the existence of hardline elements within it, the TNI remains greatly constrained by continuing public suspicion and hostility. While there has been much disillusionment with the outcome of reformasi, there is not (yet) any general clamour in the urban middle classes, let alone other parts of the population, for the return of authoritarian rule. One poll, conducted by the newspaper Kompas last October, revealed that only 42 per cent of respondents believed that the TNI had a 'good image', down from 58 per cent a year earlier.
Most officers recognise this poor public image, and it accounts for their circumspection when dealing with political issues. Hence, Armed Forces Commander General Endriartono Sutarto repeatedly stressed that TNI would not take advantage of the new anti-terrorism rules and the post-bombing climate to stage a political comeback.
The bombings and associated security atmosphere may thus have marginally strengthened the hands of the military, but not to the dramatic degree first feared.
Challenges for Muslims
A second important consequence of the Bali bombings has been to increase the isolation of hardline Islamist groups which advocate violence, although here too we shouldn't exaggerate the impact.
It is well known that the majority of Indonesia's Muslim community supports religious tolerance and pluralism. Even so, since 1998 small hardline and violent groups have flourished. Underlying causes are complex, but immediate political factors have been influential. For example, it is widely believed that elements from TNI supported some militant groups, including the Jihad Militia (Laskar Jihad) which sent several thousand fighters to participate in communal conflict in Maluku.
In addition, leaders of mainstream Islamic organisations (former President Abdurrahman Wahid was a notable exception) were often reluctant to confront the militants and their ideas. Vice-President Hamzah Haz, head of the Muslim United Development Party (PPP) even visited Ja'far Umar Thalib, the head of Laskar Jihad, and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged Jemaah Islamiyah leader, when they were being detained for, or accused of instigating, violent acts. Some mainstream Muslim leaders also tacitly endorsed violence when they believed Muslims were under attack (for example, Amien Rais, speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly, in 2000 publicly backed groups which wanted to go to Maluku to engage in jihad).
Early after the bombing, as Greg Fealy explains in this issue, there were widely aired views in the Islamic community that such a heinous act could not possibly have been perpetrated by Muslims and must instead have been the work of foreign intelligence agencies. The police investigation initially reinforced suspicions about victimisation of Muslim groups, but the evidence it turned up eventually, it seems, convinced much of the public that an Islamist network was indeed responsible. This has significantly changed the climate in which militant Islamist groups operate. Leaders like Hamzah Haz have been forced to disavow their former flirtation with hardline groups.
There have also been signs (actually first visible some weeks before the bombings) that the security forces are taking a tougher line against violent groups, evidenced by arrests of leaders of Laskar Jihad and the 'anti-vice' vigilante group, the Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI). After the Bali bombings, General Endriartono Sutarto several times stated that all informal militia in the country should be disbanded, a step taken by Laskar Jihad and FPI (although at least in the former case apparently having more to do with internal problems than government pressure).
In the wake of the bombings, many liberal Muslim intellectuals adopted a primarily defensive posture, reiterating that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. At times, it appeared there was almost a syndrome of denial that Islamic doctrine could be used to justify violence. Some Muslim leaders, however, took the offensive and moved to more vigorously promote religiously liberal and pluralistic ideas (see box).
Consolidation of a new political order
A third conclusion one may draw after the Bali bombings is that, despite the authorities' successes in tracking down the perpetrators, Megawati's government has been unable to reap many political benefits. Much public praise has been directed toward the police (with many letter-writers telling newspapers that this was the first time they had ever felt proud of the Indonesian police forces).
But in the highest ranks of government there were many signs of the familiar bickering among cabinet members and policy drift. Megawati herself initially reacted astutely, visiting the site of the bombing the day after it took place. But within days, she had reverted to her normal remote style, and there was little sign of either symbolic or effective policy leadership on her part.
Megawati's performance thus reinforced growing dissatisfaction with her personal leadership style, not only in the broad public but also in within the ranks of her own party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). Sections of the party were critical of her decision to endorse the re-election of Jakarta mayor Sutiyoso (who is widely believed by Megawati's supporters to be responsible for a 1996 military attack on their party's headquarters). In recent months some senior party members have voiced increasingly explicit criticisms of the government and its performance.
Even so, Megawati still ranks consistently highest in popularity polls for future presidential candidates. Despite early predictions in some quarters, the Bali bombing and its aftermath have not appreciably improved the prospects of a 'green' Islamic ticket (probably with Amien Rais as its chief candidate) in 2004 elections.
Overall, then, what can we conclude about Indonesian politics after the Bali bombings? Above all, the violence and the response to it seem to have reinforced previously visible trends. Some of the tumult of the immediate post-Suharto period is dying down (though it can easily erupt again, especially in response to Indonesia's economic and social crisis, as a series of large demonstrations against price rises in January illustrate). The more extreme and violent Islamist groups are on the defensive. The worst communal violence in places like Maluku and Poso in Central Sulawesi seems to be declining. There are even signs, if not of permanent solutions, at least of reduced tensions in Aceh and Papua. The military is more confident. The government is still ineffective, but it looks stable.
A new hybrid political order is settling into place. Indonesia does not have a perfect democracy with full-scale civilian supremacy, human rights, effective law enforcement, social justice and the like. But nor is it a system where the military and central government bureaucrats determine the fate of the country like they once did.
Ed Aspinall (edward.aspinall@ asia.usyd.edu.au) is an IRIP board member and lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
No joy for extremists in post-bomb Indonesia
Ed Aspinall
Immediately after the bombings in Bali on 12 October, there was much speculation in the foreign, especially Australian, press, that this was a watershed event for Indonesian politics. Nothing in the country would now be the same, or so the commentators argued. Political alignments would shift, the military would reassert itself, Islamic radicalism surge and the country face international isolation.
Certainly, it is possible to imagine circumstances in which some of the dramatic predictions might have been realised. In particular, the way that the government responded to the bombings was crucial for Indonesia's relations with the outside world. If foreign powers like Australia and, especially, the US had judged it was not seriously investigating the attack, or, worse still, turning a blind eye to its perpetrators, then Indonesia could have become a pariah state, with disastrous consequences.
Instead, the outcome on this score has been close to the reverse. There was unprecedented, large-scale and effective cooperation between Indonesian and foreign police. Within weeks, those responsible began to be arrested and foreign officials heaped praise on the government and police. Indonesia had won its spurs as a reliable ally in the War on Terror.
In the context of the surprisingly effective police response, most of the more dramatic predictions have not come true.
The myth of military omnipotence
In particular, the Bali bombing did not become a pretext for a political resurrection for the Indonesian military (TNI), even if some generals tried to use it for this purpose. For example, immediately after the bombing, the hardline Army Chief of Staff, Ryamizard Ryacudu, ordered the army hierarchy to 're-open the intelligence network' and stated that there should be no further talk of abolishing the military's territorial structure.
It is true that the post-September 11 world and Megawati's Indonesia represent an increasingly benign climate for the TNI. Immediately after the downfall of President Suharto in May 1998, the TNI was excoriated domestically and internationally for its record of human rights abuses. Officers felt that their institution was under siege.
Nowadays, President Megawati herself is sympathetic to the views of many of the more hardline generals (Ryamizard is reportedly a personal favourite). After September 11 and, especially Bali, senior US, Australian and other Western officials made many public comments about the need to restore military cooperation with Indonesia, adding further to TNI officers' views that human rights are moving off the international agenda.
It is no surprise that there are reports that some officers privately believe that it is only a matter of time before military dominance over politics will be restored. There have certainly been many signs of increased military confidence, such as the string of acquittals in the East Timor human rights trials. On the ground, especially in places like Papua and Aceh, military brutality remains common.
However, Indonesia still has a very long way to go before the military's dominance is restored. New anti-terrorism regulations, for example, do little to enhance the military's power. Even on core issues of security policy, there are signs that the hawks do not have it all their own way. For example, the December 2002 peace agreement in Aceh (see the article in this issue) may be vulnerable to sabotage by military hardliners, but it came about despite their frequently-stated objections to dialogue with 'separatists'.
Despite the existence of hardline elements within it, the TNI remains greatly constrained by continuing public suspicion and hostility. While there has been much disillusionment with the outcome of reformasi, there is not (yet) any general clamour in the urban middle classes, let alone other parts of the population, for the return of authoritarian rule. One poll, conducted by the newspaper Kompas last October, revealed that only 42 per cent of respondents believed that the TNI had a 'good image', down from 58 per cent a year earlier.
Most officers recognise this poor public image, and it accounts for their circumspection when dealing with political issues. Hence, Armed Forces Commander General Endriartono Sutarto repeatedly stressed that TNI would not take advantage of the new anti-terrorism rules and the post-bombing climate to stage a political comeback.
The bombings and associated security atmosphere may thus have marginally strengthened the hands of the military, but not to the dramatic degree first feared.
Challenges for Muslims
A second important consequence of the Bali bombings has been to increase the isolation of hardline Islamist groups which advocate violence, although here too we shouldn't exaggerate the impact.
It is well known that the majority of Indonesia's Muslim community supports religious tolerance and pluralism. Even so, since 1998 small hardline and violent groups have flourished. Underlying causes are complex, but immediate political factors have been influential. For example, it is widely believed that elements from TNI supported some militant groups, including the Jihad Militia (Laskar Jihad) which sent several thousand fighters to participate in communal conflict in Maluku.
In addition, leaders of mainstream Islamic organisations (former President Abdurrahman Wahid was a notable exception) were often reluctant to confront the militants and their ideas. Vice-President Hamzah Haz, head of the Muslim United Development Party (PPP) even visited Ja'far Umar Thalib, the head of Laskar Jihad, and Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, alleged Jemaah Islamiyah leader, when they were being detained for, or accused of instigating, violent acts. Some mainstream Muslim leaders also tacitly endorsed violence when they believed Muslims were under attack (for example, Amien Rais, speaker of the People's Consultative Assembly, in 2000 publicly backed groups which wanted to go to Maluku to engage in jihad).
Early after the bombing, as Greg Fealy explains in this issue, there were widely aired views in the Islamic community that such a heinous act could not possibly have been perpetrated by Muslims and must instead have been the work of foreign intelligence agencies. The police investigation initially reinforced suspicions about victimisation of Muslim groups, but the evidence it turned up eventually, it seems, convinced much of the public that an Islamist network was indeed responsible. This has significantly changed the climate in which militant Islamist groups operate. Leaders like Hamzah Haz have been forced to disavow their former flirtation with hardline groups.
There have also been signs (actually first visible some weeks before the bombings) that the security forces are taking a tougher line against violent groups, evidenced by arrests of leaders of Laskar Jihad and the 'anti-vice' vigilante group, the Islamic Defenders' Front (FPI). After the Bali bombings, General Endriartono Sutarto several times stated that all informal militia in the country should be disbanded, a step taken by Laskar Jihad and FPI (although at least in the former case apparently having more to do with internal problems than government pressure).
In the wake of the bombings, many liberal Muslim intellectuals adopted a primarily defensive posture, reiterating that Islam has nothing to do with terrorism. At times, it appeared there was almost a syndrome of denial that Islamic doctrine could be used to justify violence. Some Muslim leaders, however, took the offensive and moved to more vigorously promote religiously liberal and pluralistic ideas (see box).
Consolidation of a new political order
A third conclusion one may draw after the Bali bombings is that, despite the authorities' successes in tracking down the perpetrators, Megawati's government has been unable to reap many political benefits. Much public praise has been directed toward the police (with many letter-writers telling newspapers that this was the first time they had ever felt proud of the Indonesian police forces).
But in the highest ranks of government there were many signs of the familiar bickering among cabinet members and policy drift. Megawati herself initially reacted astutely, visiting the site of the bombing the day after it took place. But within days, she had reverted to her normal remote style, and there was little sign of either symbolic or effective policy leadership on her part.
Megawati's performance thus reinforced growing dissatisfaction with her personal leadership style, not only in the broad public but also in within the ranks of her own party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P). Sections of the party were critical of her decision to endorse the re-election of Jakarta mayor Sutiyoso (who is widely believed by Megawati's supporters to be responsible for a 1996 military attack on their party's headquarters). In recent months some senior party members have voiced increasingly explicit criticisms of the government and its performance.
Even so, Megawati still ranks consistently highest in popularity polls for future presidential candidates. Despite early predictions in some quarters, the Bali bombing and its aftermath have not appreciably improved the prospects of a 'green' Islamic ticket (probably with Amien Rais as its chief candidate) in 2004 elections.
Overall, then, what can we conclude about Indonesian politics after the Bali bombings? Above all, the violence and the response to it seem to have reinforced previously visible trends. Some of the tumult of the immediate post-Suharto period is dying down (though it can easily erupt again, especially in response to Indonesia's economic and social crisis, as a series of large demonstrations against price rises in January illustrate). The more extreme and violent Islamist groups are on the defensive. The worst communal violence in places like Maluku and Poso in Central Sulawesi seems to be declining. There are even signs, if not of permanent solutions, at least of reduced tensions in Aceh and Papua. The military is more confident. The government is still ineffective, but it looks stable.
A new hybrid political order is settling into place. Indonesia does not have a perfect democracy with full-scale civilian supremacy, human rights, effective law enforcement, social justice and the like. But nor is it a system where the military and central government bureaucrats determine the fate of the country like they once did.
Ed Aspinall (edward.aspinall@ asia.usyd.edu.au) is an IRIP board member and lecturer in Asian Studies at the University of Sydney.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Preaching fundamentalism The public teachings of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir
Preaching fundamentalism
The public teachings of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir
Tim Behrend
Two weeks after the attacks on the Kuta nightclubs, Indonesian police arrested Abu Bakar Ba'asyir on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities in Indonesia. The charges against him relate to a series of bombings which preceded, and do not include, the Bali bombing, but he has gained international notoriety for his links to the alleged perpetrators of the Bali attack, many of whom referred to him in their confessions to Indonesian police (see box). According to the International Crisis Group, an independent think tank based in Belgium, Ba'asyir is unlikely to have masterminded the bomb, but probably knows more about it than he is willing to divulge. In the article below, Tim Behrend argues that Ba'asyir's public teachings do not advocate violence. Clearly, Ba'asyir is a controversial figure. Is he a misunderstood preacher, or does he mean to incite violence? We welcome readers' reactions to the following article, which attempts to understand this ambiguous figure.
Government authorities in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United States have singled out an Indonesian cleric, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, accusing him of being the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a shadowy organisation of Islamic extremists 'aim[ing] to set up a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia ' through terrorist means and revolution'. They have assumed links beween JI and al Qaeda, and dubbed Ba'asyir the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia. From December 2001 they were urging Indonesia to take a stand against international terrorism and arrest Ba'asyir, basing their concern on information gained through the intense interrogation of mostly uncharged, untried political detainees rounded up in post-September 11 terrorist dragnets.
Indonesian officials resisted, claiming rightly that there was no basis in Indonesian law to act on these requests. But after the horrific Kuta nightclub bombings on 12 October 2002, Ba'asyir was fingered by those same governments as the probable Indonesian point man for the attack. Subsequently, Indonesian police arrested Ba'asyir in relation to an earlier series of bombings; charges have not yet been entered for the Bali crime.
The international media remains as convinced today as in the first hours after the blast that Ba'asyir, JI, and al Qaeda are linked to the Bali ombings. Experts on the international lecture circuit continue to expound on Ba'asyir's politics and religious teachings, though few of them have first hand access to the sermons and writings in which Ba'asyir has widely expressed his views; fewer still have the language and cultural skills required to analyse these materials.
In this article, I temporarily put aside the secret prison confessions of uncharged political detainees, the circumstantial evidence of personal and religious associations, and the fear-mongering hype of pundits in the corporate media, and instead examine Ba'asyir's persona on the basis of what he has verifiably said and done. He is, after all, a public figure, not a cave-dwelling shadow. He has been actively engaged in an open exchange on what Indonesia is and should be. What he has contributed to that discourse should not be treated as if it didn't exist.
Abubakar who?
Ba'asyir was born in 1938 in a small town in East Java. His father and grandfather were Hadrami immigrants, his mother of mixed Yemeni and Javanese descent. He boarded from 1959-1963 at Gontor, a well-known modernist Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in Madiun. Afterwards he continued his studies at an Islamic university in Solo majoring in dakwah, the Islamic equivalent of missionary studies.
His politics began in the Islamic Masyumi party, but became progressively radicalised. He indulged in provocative symbolic resistance to the Suharto regime, refusing to fly the Indonesian flag or display presidential icons at the Islamic boarding school, al mukmin, based in the Ngruki neighbourhood of Solo, Central Java, that he co-founded in 1971. Further, he generally considered the secularist Indonesian state to have no validity for Muslims and publicly resisted accepting the state Pancasila philosophy as the formal foundational principle for all social organisations.
Ba'asyir was jailed without trial for a number of years. In 1985 he and others fled to Malaysia to escape further imprisonment. Only after Suharto's fall did he return from exile, part of a tidal flow of repatriating Islamist refugees.
Back in Indonesia, Ba'asyir returned to Ngruki as a teacher and helped found an Islamist non-government organisation called the Council of Indonesian Mujahidin (Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia MMI), and resumed his roles as polemicist and preacher with a growing national reputation. After September 2001 he was catapulted to regional then international notoriety by the accusations made against him in the reactive anti-terror campaigns. With Bali he became one of the most recognisable figures of the world terrorist pantheon.
Suddenly print and broadcast media from CNN to the local radio station were populated by newly minted analysts and commentators, themselves anxious to understand, and help explain to others, what was happening in Indonesia. Many were forced to scramble their way up a steep learning curve, in the process cannibalising one another's ideas in a frenzy of mutually uncited paraphrasing. One idea that continuously appeared was the notion that a radical redrawing of national boundaries was a central tenet of Southeast Asian Islamists. 'The plan is breathtaking - to create one Islamic state from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore to parts of the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar,' according to CNN's Maria Ressa in one version of this idea. Ba'asyir was said to openly campaign for this Islamic super state.
Ba'asyir's public profile
In November and December 2002, I spent several weeks interviewing Ba'asyir, his associates at al Mukmin, members of MMI, and other 'hard line' Islamists. Based on those interviews, a review of Ba'asyir's available writings, and a five-hour underground video CD series of his sermons entitled Understanding Key Concepts in the Teachings of the Islamic Faith, I have not found evidence to suggest that he preaches the overthrow of Indonesia and its replacement with a pan-Southeast Asian Islamic super state.
Ba'asyir does speak regularly and in blanket terms of the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian state. He preaches the absolute and unique veracity of 'Islam', the need to promote it in society. He rejects the legitimacy of the secular state out of hand (see box).
But he goes farther than simple, if strident, moral absolutism. His political analysis travels far into the realm of conspiracy theory in which international and Indonesian Christianity, together with a cartoonishly-drawn cabal of Jews/ Zionists/ Israelis/ Mossad, combine to divide, corrupt, and undermine Muslims and Islam. A similarly deep vein of anti-Semitism is found in the ideas of other leading members of MMI, particularly its functional chief, Irfan Awwas. In their view the US either perpetrated or allowed September 11 to happen; the American government was also the Machiavellian sponsor of the Bali bombings.
With the exception of his ideas of Islamic moral and civilisational superiority and racially tainted theories of international politics, the thrust of Ba'asyir's teachings is eminently moral: discipline, simplicity, poverty, responsibility, cleanliness, honesty, hard work, dedication, good parenting, good citizenship. Revision of Indonesia's constitution so that it incorporates shari'ah is necessary to enable these virtues to be publicly and universally inculcated. For Ba'asyir, the current environment is far too permissive in general, and fatally flawed by its establishment on kafir principles, including popular democracy, a usurious banking system, social equality of the sexes, and licensing of immoral (and culturally unacceptable) behaviour for economic gain.
But Ba'asyir does not himself publicly advocate violence against the perceived ungodliness of the political system. It must also be emphasised that despite endlessly repeated media claims to the contrary, Ba'asyir does not speak in formal or concrete terms about either the establishment of a Daulah Islam Nusantara, or Southeast Asian Emirate. This political configuration is no more than a gossamer ideal whose formation neither he nor his MMI confederates seriously espouse or actively promote.
Ba'asyir is personally a man of simplicity, religious devotion, abstinence, and discipline. His politics are naive, and only selectively informed. He is devoid of critical, comparative knowledge of world history. He is deeply rooted in a tradition that nourishes anti-Jewish sentiment - as well as other forms of ethnic prejudice - and he in turn has come to embrace conspiratorial forms of anti-Semitism. In short, there is little about Ba'asyir's politics that can be praised, and much that is troublesome.
Despite his patent monoculturalism, Ba'asyir's message challenging the assumptions of American and Western dominance (which he calls cultural terrorism) and offering an alternative view of modernity is timely and fully in tune with international currents. And it is certainly not illegal. An Indonesian democracy worthy of the name must protect even the grating voice of Ba'asyir until proven guilty, however outside the mainstream of majoritarian politics, however out of harmony with the generally liberal and secular opinions that characterise Indonesia today. Anything less would be a step backwards towards the repressive policies and Muslim-muzzling of the Suharto years.
Tim Behrend (t.behrend@auckland.ac.nz) is a lecturer at Auckland University. A more detailed version of this article can be viewed at www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/ asia/tbehrend/
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
The public teachings of Abu Bakar Ba'asyir
Tim Behrend
Two weeks after the attacks on the Kuta nightclubs, Indonesian police arrested Abu Bakar Ba'asyir on suspicion of involvement in terrorist activities in Indonesia. The charges against him relate to a series of bombings which preceded, and do not include, the Bali bombing, but he has gained international notoriety for his links to the alleged perpetrators of the Bali attack, many of whom referred to him in their confessions to Indonesian police (see box). According to the International Crisis Group, an independent think tank based in Belgium, Ba'asyir is unlikely to have masterminded the bomb, but probably knows more about it than he is willing to divulge. In the article below, Tim Behrend argues that Ba'asyir's public teachings do not advocate violence. Clearly, Ba'asyir is a controversial figure. Is he a misunderstood preacher, or does he mean to incite violence? We welcome readers' reactions to the following article, which attempts to understand this ambiguous figure.
Government authorities in Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and the United States have singled out an Indonesian cleric, Abu Bakar Ba'asyir, accusing him of being the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a shadowy organisation of Islamic extremists 'aim[ing] to set up a pan-Islamic state in Southeast Asia ' through terrorist means and revolution'. They have assumed links beween JI and al Qaeda, and dubbed Ba'asyir the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia. From December 2001 they were urging Indonesia to take a stand against international terrorism and arrest Ba'asyir, basing their concern on information gained through the intense interrogation of mostly uncharged, untried political detainees rounded up in post-September 11 terrorist dragnets.
Indonesian officials resisted, claiming rightly that there was no basis in Indonesian law to act on these requests. But after the horrific Kuta nightclub bombings on 12 October 2002, Ba'asyir was fingered by those same governments as the probable Indonesian point man for the attack. Subsequently, Indonesian police arrested Ba'asyir in relation to an earlier series of bombings; charges have not yet been entered for the Bali crime.
The international media remains as convinced today as in the first hours after the blast that Ba'asyir, JI, and al Qaeda are linked to the Bali ombings. Experts on the international lecture circuit continue to expound on Ba'asyir's politics and religious teachings, though few of them have first hand access to the sermons and writings in which Ba'asyir has widely expressed his views; fewer still have the language and cultural skills required to analyse these materials.
In this article, I temporarily put aside the secret prison confessions of uncharged political detainees, the circumstantial evidence of personal and religious associations, and the fear-mongering hype of pundits in the corporate media, and instead examine Ba'asyir's persona on the basis of what he has verifiably said and done. He is, after all, a public figure, not a cave-dwelling shadow. He has been actively engaged in an open exchange on what Indonesia is and should be. What he has contributed to that discourse should not be treated as if it didn't exist.
Abubakar who?
Ba'asyir was born in 1938 in a small town in East Java. His father and grandfather were Hadrami immigrants, his mother of mixed Yemeni and Javanese descent. He boarded from 1959-1963 at Gontor, a well-known modernist Islamic boarding school (pesantren) in Madiun. Afterwards he continued his studies at an Islamic university in Solo majoring in dakwah, the Islamic equivalent of missionary studies.
His politics began in the Islamic Masyumi party, but became progressively radicalised. He indulged in provocative symbolic resistance to the Suharto regime, refusing to fly the Indonesian flag or display presidential icons at the Islamic boarding school, al mukmin, based in the Ngruki neighbourhood of Solo, Central Java, that he co-founded in 1971. Further, he generally considered the secularist Indonesian state to have no validity for Muslims and publicly resisted accepting the state Pancasila philosophy as the formal foundational principle for all social organisations.
Ba'asyir was jailed without trial for a number of years. In 1985 he and others fled to Malaysia to escape further imprisonment. Only after Suharto's fall did he return from exile, part of a tidal flow of repatriating Islamist refugees.
Back in Indonesia, Ba'asyir returned to Ngruki as a teacher and helped found an Islamist non-government organisation called the Council of Indonesian Mujahidin (Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia MMI), and resumed his roles as polemicist and preacher with a growing national reputation. After September 2001 he was catapulted to regional then international notoriety by the accusations made against him in the reactive anti-terror campaigns. With Bali he became one of the most recognisable figures of the world terrorist pantheon.
Suddenly print and broadcast media from CNN to the local radio station were populated by newly minted analysts and commentators, themselves anxious to understand, and help explain to others, what was happening in Indonesia. Many were forced to scramble their way up a steep learning curve, in the process cannibalising one another's ideas in a frenzy of mutually uncited paraphrasing. One idea that continuously appeared was the notion that a radical redrawing of national boundaries was a central tenet of Southeast Asian Islamists. 'The plan is breathtaking - to create one Islamic state from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore to parts of the Philippines, Thailand and Myanmar,' according to CNN's Maria Ressa in one version of this idea. Ba'asyir was said to openly campaign for this Islamic super state.
Ba'asyir's public profile
In November and December 2002, I spent several weeks interviewing Ba'asyir, his associates at al Mukmin, members of MMI, and other 'hard line' Islamists. Based on those interviews, a review of Ba'asyir's available writings, and a five-hour underground video CD series of his sermons entitled Understanding Key Concepts in the Teachings of the Islamic Faith, I have not found evidence to suggest that he preaches the overthrow of Indonesia and its replacement with a pan-Southeast Asian Islamic super state.
Ba'asyir does speak regularly and in blanket terms of the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian state. He preaches the absolute and unique veracity of 'Islam', the need to promote it in society. He rejects the legitimacy of the secular state out of hand (see box).
But he goes farther than simple, if strident, moral absolutism. His political analysis travels far into the realm of conspiracy theory in which international and Indonesian Christianity, together with a cartoonishly-drawn cabal of Jews/ Zionists/ Israelis/ Mossad, combine to divide, corrupt, and undermine Muslims and Islam. A similarly deep vein of anti-Semitism is found in the ideas of other leading members of MMI, particularly its functional chief, Irfan Awwas. In their view the US either perpetrated or allowed September 11 to happen; the American government was also the Machiavellian sponsor of the Bali bombings.
With the exception of his ideas of Islamic moral and civilisational superiority and racially tainted theories of international politics, the thrust of Ba'asyir's teachings is eminently moral: discipline, simplicity, poverty, responsibility, cleanliness, honesty, hard work, dedication, good parenting, good citizenship. Revision of Indonesia's constitution so that it incorporates shari'ah is necessary to enable these virtues to be publicly and universally inculcated. For Ba'asyir, the current environment is far too permissive in general, and fatally flawed by its establishment on kafir principles, including popular democracy, a usurious banking system, social equality of the sexes, and licensing of immoral (and culturally unacceptable) behaviour for economic gain.
But Ba'asyir does not himself publicly advocate violence against the perceived ungodliness of the political system. It must also be emphasised that despite endlessly repeated media claims to the contrary, Ba'asyir does not speak in formal or concrete terms about either the establishment of a Daulah Islam Nusantara, or Southeast Asian Emirate. This political configuration is no more than a gossamer ideal whose formation neither he nor his MMI confederates seriously espouse or actively promote.
Ba'asyir is personally a man of simplicity, religious devotion, abstinence, and discipline. His politics are naive, and only selectively informed. He is devoid of critical, comparative knowledge of world history. He is deeply rooted in a tradition that nourishes anti-Jewish sentiment - as well as other forms of ethnic prejudice - and he in turn has come to embrace conspiratorial forms of anti-Semitism. In short, there is little about Ba'asyir's politics that can be praised, and much that is troublesome.
Despite his patent monoculturalism, Ba'asyir's message challenging the assumptions of American and Western dominance (which he calls cultural terrorism) and offering an alternative view of modernity is timely and fully in tune with international currents. And it is certainly not illegal. An Indonesian democracy worthy of the name must protect even the grating voice of Ba'asyir until proven guilty, however outside the mainstream of majoritarian politics, however out of harmony with the generally liberal and secular opinions that characterise Indonesia today. Anything less would be a step backwards towards the repressive policies and Muslim-muzzling of the Suharto years.
Tim Behrend (t.behrend@auckland.ac.nz) is a lecturer at Auckland University. A more detailed version of this article can be viewed at www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/ asia/tbehrend/
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Tall tales Conspiracy theories in post-bomb Indonesia
Tall tales
Conspiracy theories in post-bomb Indonesia
Greg Fealy
In the months following the 12 October 2002 Bali bombings, Indonesia was awash with conspiracy theories regarding the identity of the perpetrators and the methods used to blow up the two nightclubs. Most of these theories attributed blame for the attacks to foreigners of one sort or another. The most popular accounts claimed that the US government masterminded the attacks and provided the necessary high explosive materials and bomb-making expertise. A succession of media polls in late October and November showed a majority of respondents thought the US was behind the bombings and one 'Detikcom' survey revealed 70 per cent blamed the CIA (see box). Other theories suggested Mossad, MI-6 or one of Australia's intelligence agencies was involved, and several asserted that the bombings were the work of foreign al-Qaeda operatives.
With the exception of a number of allegations that the Indonesian armed forces or intelligence services might have been complicit, nearly all the conspiracy theories downplayed or denied the involvement of Indonesians, particularly in planning the attack and assembling the bombs. It was argued that Indonesian extremist groups lacked both the ability to organise such a sophisticated operation and the expertise to put together bombs as powerful as that which destroyed the Sari Club. Such theories remained popular even after the police arrested a string of key suspects and began releasing detailed information regarding the terrorist activities of Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members.
Conspiracism
This preoccupation with conspiracy theories, often referred to as conspiracism, is not unique to Indonesia. There is a substantial scholarly literature recording the phenomenon at many points in history and in many parts of the world. Conspiracism is especially common in deprived, traumatised or repressed communities where reliable information is scarce, intra-communal mistrust is high and the state is given to arbitrary abuse of its citizens.
In the Indonesian case, seldom has conspiracism been so pervasive as in the aftermath of Bali bombings. This would seem to reflect a sense that the world is now more hostile towards Indonesia and that Western nations and foreign corporations are seeking to exploit the country's economic and political problems for their own ends. Many Indonesians cite the 1997 financial crisis and East Timor's independence as evidence of the West's role in undermining national integrity. There is also a widespread view that separatist movements in West Papua and Maluku receive Western support.
Indonesian conspiracy theorists therefore tended to see the attacks in Bali as a continuation, if not culmination, of a broader US project of domination. Many believe that the US carried out or sanctioned the attacks in order to discredit and weaken Indonesia as well as reinforce perceptions of Islam as a violent religion. The US could thus step up pressure on the Megawati government to crack down on Islamists and support the Bush administration's proposed war against Iraq.
Part of the reason for the popularity of the conspiracy theories following the Bali bombing was the extent of press coverage given to them. Predictably, the more strident sections of the Islamist press such as Sabili, Media Dakwah and Jurnal Islam gave prominence to alleged international plots.
The case of Republika
Perhaps less expected was the role of Republika, the leading 'Islamic' daily, in promoting conspiracy theories about the Bali bombing. For the past decade, Republika has claimed to represent the quality end of the Islamic press with high standards of reporting, analysis and presentation. But in fact, of all the major dailies, Republika's coverage was the most journalistically questionable and served to fan conspiracy theories relating to the bombing.
In late October and early November, a number of conspiracy theories were given prominence in Republika. The first was that the Australian government may have played a role in the bombing and was engaged in a cover-up. It reported that a 'key eyewitness' to the Paddy's Bar bombing, Kadek Alit Margarini, had been 'forcibly' evacuated by Australian officials without the approval of her family and Indonesian doctors and had died in an Australian hospital on 19 October. She was cremated shortly afterwards, without the family's permission and without an autopsy.
The paper said various aspects of the Kadek case were suspicious. It reported staff at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar as saying that the patient was stable prior to evacuation, but that Australian doctors had insisted she be flown to Perth. A later story quoted an unnamed Indonesian doctor as being shocked by news of her death, saying that her condition had not been that serious. Furthermore, it quoted an Indonesian forensic expert as asking why there had been no autopsy prior to cremation. 'If the victim was cremated immediately, then the question arises - what was there to hide?' (25 October and 15 November 2002). Although not stated explicitly, the articles insinuated that Australian officials had irresponsibly expatriated Kadek, and possibly played a hand in her demise, in order to prevent her from telling what she had seen.
Republika also reported that the corpses of four Australian soldiers had mysteriously 'disappeared' from the bombsite without ever being registered with the Sanglah Hospital morgue. Furthermore, it reported that nurses handling corpses had been told by the hospital not to discuss the issue. An unnamed forensics expert said that the bodies may have disappeared because they were 'important material evidence' or were 'closely connected to the Bali bombing case'. The article went on to mention that several US and Australian navy ships had docked in Balinese ports in the months preceding the bombing. It said that one of the Australian vessels, the 'logistics' ship Westralia, made an 'unofficial visit' (12 November 2002). No direct connection was drawn between the 'missing corpses' and the naval visits, but the placement of the stories seemed designed to suggest to the reader that the soldiers may have entered Bali on one of the ships.
In its search for far-fetched accounts of the bombing, Republika turned up the Western Australia-based Joe Vialls, whom it generously described as a 'private investigator' and 'explosives and intelligence analyst'. Vialls might be more accurately labelled an extreme right-wing professional conspiracy theorist. His website (www.geocities.com/vialls/) is filled with virulently anti-Semitic and anti-US views. For example, he asserts that the Bali bombing, the Port Arthur massacre and the death of Princess Diana were all sinister international plots and that Australia had become a 'test bed' for the 'New World Order'.
Republika quoted Vialls as saying that the Bali bomb had actually been a micro-thermonuclear device, not conventional explosive as had been asserted by the Indonesian and international investigators. (This theory seems to have first appeared on the website of the conservative US radio talk program, the Hal Turner Show in mid-October). He also claimed that the Australian government had tried to cover up evidence supporting this finding by deleting the eyewitness account of an army captain on the Australian army's official website and had also ordered raids against Indonesians suspected of JI involvement in order to divert public attention away from the issue. He furthermore asserted that the US, Israeli and Australian governments pressured the investigators to blame Muslims for the bombing (10 and 13 November 2002). Vialls was reported as an expert commentator and no attempt was made to test the plausibility of his theories.
Perhaps the most surreal theory carried in Republika was that CIA, Mossad, MI-6 and Asio agents had descended on Bali before and after the bombing because they had heard there was going to be 'war' between 'narcotics networks'. These agencies 'wanted to use (menumpangi - lit., ride on) the war for their own objectives'. The rival intelligence services were then said to have got involved in a 'battle' which had left 20 Australian agents dead. The source for this story was 'intelligence sources' (12 November 2002). No supporting evidence was presented in the article and there was no indication of any attempt to corroborate the story.
At one level, Republika's peddling of conspiracy theories regarding the Bali bombings represents a lamentable failure to uphold journalistic standards, particularly in a paper that aspires to be a journal of record. The most improbable of explanations were routinely passed off as worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, insinuation and implication took the place of rigorous investigation and analysis. In effect, Republika alluded to sinister covert forces having responsibility for the Bali attacks and left the rest to its readers' imaginations.
Republika's lapse in standards might easily be dismissed as nothing more than journalists surrendering to their prejudices. But as scholars of conspiracism have shown, conspiracy theories can have a profound impact on public perceptions and actions. In particular, it can distort public debate, inclining people to believe what is dubious or untrue. In Indonesia, as in many other countries, conspiracy theories have in the past fuelled community conflict, provoked mass protests and led to ill-advised government decisions. The Bali bombings and subsequent revelations about Indonesia-based terrorism raise important issues that require informed and thoughtful responses. Republikaohas served its readers poorly by focussing on fanciful conspiracy theories rather than substantive reporting.
Dr Greg Fealy (greg.fealy@anu.edu.au) is a research fellow and lecturer in Indonesian politics at The Australian National University. He is currently teaching at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
Conspiracy theories in post-bomb Indonesia
Greg Fealy
In the months following the 12 October 2002 Bali bombings, Indonesia was awash with conspiracy theories regarding the identity of the perpetrators and the methods used to blow up the two nightclubs. Most of these theories attributed blame for the attacks to foreigners of one sort or another. The most popular accounts claimed that the US government masterminded the attacks and provided the necessary high explosive materials and bomb-making expertise. A succession of media polls in late October and November showed a majority of respondents thought the US was behind the bombings and one 'Detikcom' survey revealed 70 per cent blamed the CIA (see box). Other theories suggested Mossad, MI-6 or one of Australia's intelligence agencies was involved, and several asserted that the bombings were the work of foreign al-Qaeda operatives.
With the exception of a number of allegations that the Indonesian armed forces or intelligence services might have been complicit, nearly all the conspiracy theories downplayed or denied the involvement of Indonesians, particularly in planning the attack and assembling the bombs. It was argued that Indonesian extremist groups lacked both the ability to organise such a sophisticated operation and the expertise to put together bombs as powerful as that which destroyed the Sari Club. Such theories remained popular even after the police arrested a string of key suspects and began releasing detailed information regarding the terrorist activities of Indonesia-based Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) members.
Conspiracism
This preoccupation with conspiracy theories, often referred to as conspiracism, is not unique to Indonesia. There is a substantial scholarly literature recording the phenomenon at many points in history and in many parts of the world. Conspiracism is especially common in deprived, traumatised or repressed communities where reliable information is scarce, intra-communal mistrust is high and the state is given to arbitrary abuse of its citizens.
In the Indonesian case, seldom has conspiracism been so pervasive as in the aftermath of Bali bombings. This would seem to reflect a sense that the world is now more hostile towards Indonesia and that Western nations and foreign corporations are seeking to exploit the country's economic and political problems for their own ends. Many Indonesians cite the 1997 financial crisis and East Timor's independence as evidence of the West's role in undermining national integrity. There is also a widespread view that separatist movements in West Papua and Maluku receive Western support.
Indonesian conspiracy theorists therefore tended to see the attacks in Bali as a continuation, if not culmination, of a broader US project of domination. Many believe that the US carried out or sanctioned the attacks in order to discredit and weaken Indonesia as well as reinforce perceptions of Islam as a violent religion. The US could thus step up pressure on the Megawati government to crack down on Islamists and support the Bush administration's proposed war against Iraq.
Part of the reason for the popularity of the conspiracy theories following the Bali bombing was the extent of press coverage given to them. Predictably, the more strident sections of the Islamist press such as Sabili, Media Dakwah and Jurnal Islam gave prominence to alleged international plots.
The case of Republika
Perhaps less expected was the role of Republika, the leading 'Islamic' daily, in promoting conspiracy theories about the Bali bombing. For the past decade, Republika has claimed to represent the quality end of the Islamic press with high standards of reporting, analysis and presentation. But in fact, of all the major dailies, Republika's coverage was the most journalistically questionable and served to fan conspiracy theories relating to the bombing.
In late October and early November, a number of conspiracy theories were given prominence in Republika. The first was that the Australian government may have played a role in the bombing and was engaged in a cover-up. It reported that a 'key eyewitness' to the Paddy's Bar bombing, Kadek Alit Margarini, had been 'forcibly' evacuated by Australian officials without the approval of her family and Indonesian doctors and had died in an Australian hospital on 19 October. She was cremated shortly afterwards, without the family's permission and without an autopsy.
The paper said various aspects of the Kadek case were suspicious. It reported staff at Sanglah Hospital in Denpasar as saying that the patient was stable prior to evacuation, but that Australian doctors had insisted she be flown to Perth. A later story quoted an unnamed Indonesian doctor as being shocked by news of her death, saying that her condition had not been that serious. Furthermore, it quoted an Indonesian forensic expert as asking why there had been no autopsy prior to cremation. 'If the victim was cremated immediately, then the question arises - what was there to hide?' (25 October and 15 November 2002). Although not stated explicitly, the articles insinuated that Australian officials had irresponsibly expatriated Kadek, and possibly played a hand in her demise, in order to prevent her from telling what she had seen.
Republika also reported that the corpses of four Australian soldiers had mysteriously 'disappeared' from the bombsite without ever being registered with the Sanglah Hospital morgue. Furthermore, it reported that nurses handling corpses had been told by the hospital not to discuss the issue. An unnamed forensics expert said that the bodies may have disappeared because they were 'important material evidence' or were 'closely connected to the Bali bombing case'. The article went on to mention that several US and Australian navy ships had docked in Balinese ports in the months preceding the bombing. It said that one of the Australian vessels, the 'logistics' ship Westralia, made an 'unofficial visit' (12 November 2002). No direct connection was drawn between the 'missing corpses' and the naval visits, but the placement of the stories seemed designed to suggest to the reader that the soldiers may have entered Bali on one of the ships.
In its search for far-fetched accounts of the bombing, Republika turned up the Western Australia-based Joe Vialls, whom it generously described as a 'private investigator' and 'explosives and intelligence analyst'. Vialls might be more accurately labelled an extreme right-wing professional conspiracy theorist. His website (www.geocities.com/vialls/) is filled with virulently anti-Semitic and anti-US views. For example, he asserts that the Bali bombing, the Port Arthur massacre and the death of Princess Diana were all sinister international plots and that Australia had become a 'test bed' for the 'New World Order'.
Republika quoted Vialls as saying that the Bali bomb had actually been a micro-thermonuclear device, not conventional explosive as had been asserted by the Indonesian and international investigators. (This theory seems to have first appeared on the website of the conservative US radio talk program, the Hal Turner Show in mid-October). He also claimed that the Australian government had tried to cover up evidence supporting this finding by deleting the eyewitness account of an army captain on the Australian army's official website and had also ordered raids against Indonesians suspected of JI involvement in order to divert public attention away from the issue. He furthermore asserted that the US, Israeli and Australian governments pressured the investigators to blame Muslims for the bombing (10 and 13 November 2002). Vialls was reported as an expert commentator and no attempt was made to test the plausibility of his theories.
Perhaps the most surreal theory carried in Republika was that CIA, Mossad, MI-6 and Asio agents had descended on Bali before and after the bombing because they had heard there was going to be 'war' between 'narcotics networks'. These agencies 'wanted to use (menumpangi - lit., ride on) the war for their own objectives'. The rival intelligence services were then said to have got involved in a 'battle' which had left 20 Australian agents dead. The source for this story was 'intelligence sources' (12 November 2002). No supporting evidence was presented in the article and there was no indication of any attempt to corroborate the story.
At one level, Republika's peddling of conspiracy theories regarding the Bali bombings represents a lamentable failure to uphold journalistic standards, particularly in a paper that aspires to be a journal of record. The most improbable of explanations were routinely passed off as worthy of serious consideration. Moreover, insinuation and implication took the place of rigorous investigation and analysis. In effect, Republika alluded to sinister covert forces having responsibility for the Bali attacks and left the rest to its readers' imaginations.
Republika's lapse in standards might easily be dismissed as nothing more than journalists surrendering to their prejudices. But as scholars of conspiracism have shown, conspiracy theories can have a profound impact on public perceptions and actions. In particular, it can distort public debate, inclining people to believe what is dubious or untrue. In Indonesia, as in many other countries, conspiracy theories have in the past fuelled community conflict, provoked mass protests and led to ill-advised government decisions. The Bali bombings and subsequent revelations about Indonesia-based terrorism raise important issues that require informed and thoughtful responses. Republikaohas served its readers poorly by focussing on fanciful conspiracy theories rather than substantive reporting.
Dr Greg Fealy (greg.fealy@anu.edu.au) is a research fellow and lecturer in Indonesian politics at The Australian National University. He is currently teaching at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Inside Indonesia 74: Apr - Jul 2003
What is the TNI's Aceh agenda? The TNI wants more than just the defeat of GAM
What is the TNI's Aceh agenda?
The TNI wants more than just the defeat of GAM
Carmel Budiardjo
Since Megawati Sukarnoputri took over as President in July 2001, replacing Abdurrahman Wahid who had tried to push for reform of the military — ultimately, the cause of his downfall — the Indonesian armed forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI) have succeeded in building a common front with the country’s political elite, the president herself and the parties represented in parliament, the DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, House of Representatives). This common front centres around the determination to preserve Indonesia’s territorial integrity, the so-called Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia (NKRI, Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia). Not surprisingly, there is a deep sense of humiliation at the ‘loss’ of East Timor, felt particularly keenly by the TNI, and a determination not to ‘lose’ any more territory.
The top echelon in the armed forces, the TNI commander-in-chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, and the army’s chief-of-staff, General Ryacudu Ryamizard, have frequently insisted that the NKRI project can only be secured by giving the military a greater, and indeed the decisive, role in fighting separatism.
These statements were soon followed by the publication of a Defence White Paper, by the minister of defence, Matori Abdul Djalil. This White Paper argues that while Indonesia does not face any immediate threat of a foreign invasion, it faces numerous ‘non-traditional’ threats ranging from terrorism, communal conflicts, illegal logging and trafficking in people to separatism. It argues further that as long as such threats remain at a ‘low-intensity level’, they can be handled by the police but the more Jerious they become, the more incumbent it is on the TNI to handle them.
The White Paper also argues for a reversal of a much-mooted major reform project for the TNI, the dismantling of the territorial command system. Instead of dismantling the system, it will be retained. Indeed, in the recent past, two new territorial command structures have been established, in North Maluku and Aceh, while others are likely to be established when Papua is split up into three provinces, a project close to the heart of the TNI.
Using the argument that underpinned the role of the armed forces during the Suharto New Order era, that the army is ‘the army of the people and must remain close to the people’, the territorial command structure ensures the army a presence at every administrative level of society, from provincial down to district, sub-district and village levels.
The Defence White Paper also emphasises the role of the TNI in facing ‘the threat of armed separatism in Aceh and Papua’. It laments the fact that these armed struggles have intensified during the past decade and have ‘even won sympathy and support for their causes in other countries’. In the case of Aceh, while welcoming the ‘cessation of hostilities accord’ (COHA) signed in December 2002, it states unequivocally that the Indonesian government will pursue that accord by ‘persuading GAM [Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Free Aceh Movement] to return to the fold of the motherland and accepting the framework of NKRI’. This was one of the demands that led to the final breakdown of talks between Indonesia and GAM in Tokyo in the weekend of 17-18 May, leading to the declaration of Martial Law in Aceh on 19 May.
With regard to Papua, the White Paper states that the separatist Free Papua Organisation (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM) group is still active, and is using ‘propaganda, incitements, terror, robberies and pressurising the population’, resulting in widespread unrest and fear. While stating that it is the task of the TNI to ‘overwhelm’ the OPM separatists so as to preserve NKRI, this will be pursued in the first place ‘by persuading the separatists to re-unite with their brothers in NKRI’. But should the response to this approach not be positive, ‘the government will consider using more effective methods’.
Combating separatism is clearly at the top of the TNI’s agenda as it rolls back the process of reform.
While commentators were still absorbing the contents of the Defence White Paper and working out their responses, along came yet another move, the publication of a draft bill on the TNI. Without waiting for any discussion in parliament, the chairmen of the two national legislative chambers, Akbar Tanjung (recently sentenced to three years imprisonment in a fraud case) who is still functioning as chairman of the DPR, and Amien Rais, chairman of the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), announced their endorsement of the bill.
The draft has provoked a storm of protest focused in particular on Article 19 which grants the power to the TNI commander to mobilise his forces in a situation which he perceives to be an emergency, without consulting the head of state. Some commentators describe this as the loophole for a ‘legal coup’. By granting to the TNI commander the authority to establish defence policy and deploy national resources in promotion of that policy, the authority of the minister of defence has been overridden and the principle of civilian control over the armed forces has been removed. Moreover, Article 19 speaks about the need to act to ‘prevent greater damage being inflicted on the state’. The elucidation that accompanies the Bill defines this as meaning ‘mass unrest and other things’.
The Indonesian armed forces are now engaged in two major military operations, in Aceh and Papua. In Aceh, civil society which includes a whole range of non-governmental organisations dealing with human rights, the monitoring of atrocities and the humaniüarian needs of the many thousands of internally displaced people, are being forced to curb their activities and activists are fleeing the province in fear of their lives. Foreign journalists and aid agencies have now been banned from operating in war-torn Aceh, while Indonesian journalists have been ordered to support the army’s line in all their reports, to support the ‘national interest’ and to display a sense of patriotism in everything they write about Aceh.
Allegations in the Indonesian press that all the persons killed so far are GAM members or sympathisers have been challenged by activists who we have been able to contact inside the province. They say that, as in every previous phase of military brutality in Aceh, the majority of victims are ordinary members of the public. The TNI’s vicious little war against the people of Aceh is daily reaching new heights and the chances of monitoring the situation are being strangulated by censorship and the gradual exclusion of foreign observers.
In Papua, an incident in Wamena on 4 April when an army ammunition dump was raided by alleged members of the OPM has been used as the pretext to recall the army’s elite corps, Kopassus, just recently ordered to leave the province. Since then, units of Kopassus and Kostrad, the army’s foremost combat forces, are conducting continual operations ostensibly to find the missing weapons. Dozens of people have been arrested, one of whom died under torture while in police custody. Sweepings of villages in the vicinity of Wamena have so terrified the inhabitants that thousands have fled into the forests, abandoning their gardens and living without proper shelter. Already there are reports of deaths due to lack of food and exposure to the cold night air. The military has meanwhile blocked attempts to conduct an investigation into an incident last August in the vicinity of the Freeport copper-and-gold mine when three teachers, one Indonesian and two Americans, were shot dead. Initial investigations by the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Hak Asasi Manusia, ELSHAM), Papua’s leading human rights organisation, and the local police reached the conclusion that Kopassus members were almost certainly responsible for the murders. Their purpose is to send a clear message to the mining company to continue to use their services to ‘protect’ the mine, for which the company pays handsomely.
Both these incidents have given the authorities the potential to point the finger of accusation at the OPM and, more importantly, to provide justification for the TNI to bolster their presence in Papua on the grounds of fighting separatism.
‘Fighting separatism’ has the unstinting support of Indonesia’s political elite, from the president down, who are giving the armed forces carte blanche to conduct operations as they see fit. The policy poses a grave threat not only to the people of Aceh and Papua but also the Indonesian people as a whole who may one day wake up to find themselves in the grip of a new kind of military power, just as menacing as the military power under which they suffered for more than three decades during Suharto’s New Order.
Carmel Budiardjo (tapol@gn.apc.org) is with TAPOL, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign in the United Kingdom.
Inside Indonesia 76: Oct - Dec 2003
The TNI wants more than just the defeat of GAM
Carmel Budiardjo
Since Megawati Sukarnoputri took over as President in July 2001, replacing Abdurrahman Wahid who had tried to push for reform of the military — ultimately, the cause of his downfall — the Indonesian armed forces (Tentara Nasional Indonesia, TNI) have succeeded in building a common front with the country’s political elite, the president herself and the parties represented in parliament, the DPR (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, House of Representatives). This common front centres around the determination to preserve Indonesia’s territorial integrity, the so-called Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia (NKRI, Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia). Not surprisingly, there is a deep sense of humiliation at the ‘loss’ of East Timor, felt particularly keenly by the TNI, and a determination not to ‘lose’ any more territory.
The top echelon in the armed forces, the TNI commander-in-chief, General Endriartono Sutarto, and the army’s chief-of-staff, General Ryacudu Ryamizard, have frequently insisted that the NKRI project can only be secured by giving the military a greater, and indeed the decisive, role in fighting separatism.
These statements were soon followed by the publication of a Defence White Paper, by the minister of defence, Matori Abdul Djalil. This White Paper argues that while Indonesia does not face any immediate threat of a foreign invasion, it faces numerous ‘non-traditional’ threats ranging from terrorism, communal conflicts, illegal logging and trafficking in people to separatism. It argues further that as long as such threats remain at a ‘low-intensity level’, they can be handled by the police but the more Jerious they become, the more incumbent it is on the TNI to handle them.
The White Paper also argues for a reversal of a much-mooted major reform project for the TNI, the dismantling of the territorial command system. Instead of dismantling the system, it will be retained. Indeed, in the recent past, two new territorial command structures have been established, in North Maluku and Aceh, while others are likely to be established when Papua is split up into three provinces, a project close to the heart of the TNI.
Using the argument that underpinned the role of the armed forces during the Suharto New Order era, that the army is ‘the army of the people and must remain close to the people’, the territorial command structure ensures the army a presence at every administrative level of society, from provincial down to district, sub-district and village levels.
The Defence White Paper also emphasises the role of the TNI in facing ‘the threat of armed separatism in Aceh and Papua’. It laments the fact that these armed struggles have intensified during the past decade and have ‘even won sympathy and support for their causes in other countries’. In the case of Aceh, while welcoming the ‘cessation of hostilities accord’ (COHA) signed in December 2002, it states unequivocally that the Indonesian government will pursue that accord by ‘persuading GAM [Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Free Aceh Movement] to return to the fold of the motherland and accepting the framework of NKRI’. This was one of the demands that led to the final breakdown of talks between Indonesia and GAM in Tokyo in the weekend of 17-18 May, leading to the declaration of Martial Law in Aceh on 19 May.
With regard to Papua, the White Paper states that the separatist Free Papua Organisation (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, OPM) group is still active, and is using ‘propaganda, incitements, terror, robberies and pressurising the population’, resulting in widespread unrest and fear. While stating that it is the task of the TNI to ‘overwhelm’ the OPM separatists so as to preserve NKRI, this will be pursued in the first place ‘by persuading the separatists to re-unite with their brothers in NKRI’. But should the response to this approach not be positive, ‘the government will consider using more effective methods’.
Combating separatism is clearly at the top of the TNI’s agenda as it rolls back the process of reform.
While commentators were still absorbing the contents of the Defence White Paper and working out their responses, along came yet another move, the publication of a draft bill on the TNI. Without waiting for any discussion in parliament, the chairmen of the two national legislative chambers, Akbar Tanjung (recently sentenced to three years imprisonment in a fraud case) who is still functioning as chairman of the DPR, and Amien Rais, chairman of the People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat, MPR), announced their endorsement of the bill.
The draft has provoked a storm of protest focused in particular on Article 19 which grants the power to the TNI commander to mobilise his forces in a situation which he perceives to be an emergency, without consulting the head of state. Some commentators describe this as the loophole for a ‘legal coup’. By granting to the TNI commander the authority to establish defence policy and deploy national resources in promotion of that policy, the authority of the minister of defence has been overridden and the principle of civilian control over the armed forces has been removed. Moreover, Article 19 speaks about the need to act to ‘prevent greater damage being inflicted on the state’. The elucidation that accompanies the Bill defines this as meaning ‘mass unrest and other things’.
The Indonesian armed forces are now engaged in two major military operations, in Aceh and Papua. In Aceh, civil society which includes a whole range of non-governmental organisations dealing with human rights, the monitoring of atrocities and the humaniüarian needs of the many thousands of internally displaced people, are being forced to curb their activities and activists are fleeing the province in fear of their lives. Foreign journalists and aid agencies have now been banned from operating in war-torn Aceh, while Indonesian journalists have been ordered to support the army’s line in all their reports, to support the ‘national interest’ and to display a sense of patriotism in everything they write about Aceh.
Allegations in the Indonesian press that all the persons killed so far are GAM members or sympathisers have been challenged by activists who we have been able to contact inside the province. They say that, as in every previous phase of military brutality in Aceh, the majority of victims are ordinary members of the public. The TNI’s vicious little war against the people of Aceh is daily reaching new heights and the chances of monitoring the situation are being strangulated by censorship and the gradual exclusion of foreign observers.
In Papua, an incident in Wamena on 4 April when an army ammunition dump was raided by alleged members of the OPM has been used as the pretext to recall the army’s elite corps, Kopassus, just recently ordered to leave the province. Since then, units of Kopassus and Kostrad, the army’s foremost combat forces, are conducting continual operations ostensibly to find the missing weapons. Dozens of people have been arrested, one of whom died under torture while in police custody. Sweepings of villages in the vicinity of Wamena have so terrified the inhabitants that thousands have fled into the forests, abandoning their gardens and living without proper shelter. Already there are reports of deaths due to lack of food and exposure to the cold night air. The military has meanwhile blocked attempts to conduct an investigation into an incident last August in the vicinity of the Freeport copper-and-gold mine when three teachers, one Indonesian and two Americans, were shot dead. Initial investigations by the Institute for Human Rights Study and Advocacy (Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Hak Asasi Manusia, ELSHAM), Papua’s leading human rights organisation, and the local police reached the conclusion that Kopassus members were almost certainly responsible for the murders. Their purpose is to send a clear message to the mining company to continue to use their services to ‘protect’ the mine, for which the company pays handsomely.
Both these incidents have given the authorities the potential to point the finger of accusation at the OPM and, more importantly, to provide justification for the TNI to bolster their presence in Papua on the grounds of fighting separatism.
‘Fighting separatism’ has the unstinting support of Indonesia’s political elite, from the president down, who are giving the armed forces carte blanche to conduct operations as they see fit. The policy poses a grave threat not only to the people of Aceh and Papua but also the Indonesian people as a whole who may one day wake up to find themselves in the grip of a new kind of military power, just as menacing as the military power under which they suffered for more than three decades during Suharto’s New Order.
Carmel Budiardjo (tapol@gn.apc.org) is with TAPOL, the Indonesian Human Rights Campaign in the United Kingdom.
Inside Indonesia 76: Oct - Dec 2003
Organising Australia - Indonesia solidarity Street campaigning is crucial to solidarity
Organising Australia - Indonesia solidarity
Street campaigning is crucial to solidarity
Pip Hinman
The Indonesian government’s military operation in Aceh, like the 1975 assault on East Timor, began with a terrifying display of military might — air, land and sea assaults, rocket and bomb attacks and even parachute commandos. Just as happened in East Timor, the indiscriminate killing of innocent people and the displacement of tens of thousands are being kept away as much as possible from the prying eyes of journalists and human rights workers who have been ordered out of Aceh, or imprisoned and shot at.
The Australian government’s response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding to our north is to say that it’s in our ‘national interest’ to support Indonesia’s ‘territorial integrity’. Aceh is an internal problem for Indonesia, Canberra says. At the same time, it is already increasing collaboration with the feared Kopassus Special Forces units.
But Canberra is not an innocent bystander: successive Australian governments covered Indonesia’s back while it invaded East Timor and for the next two decades upheld the occupation as ‘irreversible’. They said nothing about President Suharto’s terror campaign in Aceh in the 1980s and ’90s; the regime’s 1996 crackdown on the Indonesian democracy movement; and atrocities carried out in West Papua against pro-independence supporters.
Economic interests
Since Suharto’s drive to fully integrate Indonesia into the global capitalist economy, Canberra’s policy gamble has been that extra political and economic clout would flow from being a close ally of the regime. Since 1965, this thinking has driven the ‘special relationship’ status, a policy that was given added weight by former ALP Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who cultivated personal connections with Suharto and the ruling clique.
Canberra’s support for Indonesia’s generals waging war in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua flows from its interest in ensuring ‘stability’ for capital. This is also why it supports Western-backed creditor institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have forced Indonesia to undertake huge tariff and subsidy cuts despite their catastrophic impact on the economy.
Australia supported the US position of forcibly disarming the left in 1948; it provided military support for ultra-rightist military rebellions from 1956–58; it participated in the British attacks against Indonesian and Sabah/Sarawak guerillas in Kalimantan from 1959–1965; and it gave immediate financial, political and military support to the Suharto dictatorship during and after the massacre of some 1–2 million leftists.
Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser’s de jure recognition in 1978 of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, reaffirmed by Hawke in 1985, was largely about getting access to the oil and gas spoils in the Timor Sea. A ‘special relationship’ with Suharto was cultivated to ensure that Australian capital wasn’t totally cut out by US, European, Japanese and Korean rivals.
Since the 1970s economic downturn, and since then the continuing global economic stagnation, Australian companies have remained on the hunt for new profitable mega-projects and new markets to exploit. Some, like BHP and Rio Tinto, managed to establish major investments in Indonesia and West Papua.
The renewed push by Keating to promote Australian business interests in Indonesia was twinned with a policy aimed at strengthening security and military ties with the TNI. More recently, under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, this policy has been strengthened by the Howard government.
Today, the Howard government is taking steps to repair the ‘special relationship’ after its souring in 1999 over East Timor. Since the declaration of martial law in Aceh on 19 May, it has been vocal in reaffirming Jakarta’s ‘territorial integrity’. It also remains com-mitted to establishing closer ties with Kopassus — the ‘best anti-terrorism’ force in Indonesia according to defence minister Robert Hill.
Aksi!
Just before the Dili massacre, a campaign to build support for the fledgling democracy movement in Indonesia was begun by Indonesia Solidarity Action (Aksi). In the late 1980s, despite Suharto’s draconian laws, new worker, student and peasant organisations sprung up across Indonesia.
Aksi, which formed in 1990, began highlighting these important political developments. Aksi toured Indonesian student activists who inspired us with their campaigns against state censorship and harassment, the massive fee hikes on universities, assisting rural workers to reclaim lands seized by the military and protecting the environment.
The first activists to tour were from environmental groups, like the Indonesian Forest Protection Network (SKEHPI). They were followed by student leaders and worker activists. Later former political prisoners such as Dita Sari and Budiman Sujatmiko, now leaders of the National Front for Indonesian Workers’ Struggle (FNPBI) and the radical People’s Democratic Party (PRD), toured Australia to talk up the re-emergence of the new movement.
Aksi sought to link the East Timorese independence and Indonesian democracy struggles, arguing that as both were struggles against the Suharto dictatorship a victory for one would assist victory for the other. Australia-wide activist tours of Indonesian and East Timorese leaders helped cement closer ties between the two struggles.
The formation of the PRD in 1994 marked a turning point in the struggle for democracy in Indonesia. This was the first radical party to emerge since the Suharto regime crushed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1965, and the first to champion the rights of the East Timorese, the Acehnese and the West Papuan peoples.
In 1996, Aksi became Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET) to highlight the close connection of the struggles, and to more accurately reflect the work being done. That same year, ASIET helped establish broader coalitions to pressure the Australian government to end its de jure recognition of Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor.
International campaign
Following the Suharto regime’s crackdown in July 1996 on Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democratic Party and the democracy movement, ASIET initiated an international campaign to demand an end to military rule and release scores of political prisoners who had been hunted down by the dictatorship. This resulted in protests and hunger strikes in Australia, the US, Germany, France, Holland, UK, South Africa, India, Nepal and the Philippines.
In 1997, we could not have predicted what we were soon to witness — and to play some part in: the demise of the 32-year-long dictatorship of President Suharto, brought down by a popular uprising led by students in May 1998, and, a year later, the independence ballot in East Timor.
There’s no doubt that the solidarity movement here and overseas played a key role in forcing a referendum in East Timor and ousting the TNI. The mobilisation of mass sentiment on the streets in support of the Timorese people’s right to independence was critically important to their victory in 1999. While the Australian government has conveniently rewritten history on this score, it’s important that this point not be forgotten.
Even while the militias and TNI were on their post-ballot rampage, the Howard government was arguing that Indonesia had ‘responsibility’ for security in East Timor. But after the Sydney and Melbourne protests of 30,000 and 40,000 respectively in September 1999, and the prospect of tens of thousands more remobilising the following weekend, the government was forced into an about-face. Its ‘special relationship’ policy was no longer tenable.
Militarisation
The 9/11 terror attacks in the US and the implications of the US-declared ‘war on terrorism’ in Asia sparked another shift in campaign focus. The increase in US militarism in the region and associated calls for assistance from democracy forces including from Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea and Burma prompted ASIET to relaunch itself in 2002 as Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific (ASAP).
But we will continue to insist that the recidivist generals who presided over the war on East Timor — some of whom are commanding operations in Aceh — face an international tribunal, like the criminals responsible for atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
There must be no repeat of the bipartisan wrong policy on East Timor. Canberra must pressure Jakarta to end its war on the Acehnese people, starting with the diversion of the Indonesia/Australia Defence Cooperation Program, worth some $5 million annually, to a special humanitarian fund for the victims of the war in Aceh. The only way this will happen is if we do what we managed to do for East Timor — develop a mass force for change. That’s the power of solidarity.
Pip Hinman (asap@asia-pacific-action.org) is the national convenor of Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific. For more information about ASAP and its solidarity work go to http://www.asia-pacific-action.org
Street campaigning is crucial to solidarity
Pip Hinman
The Indonesian government’s military operation in Aceh, like the 1975 assault on East Timor, began with a terrifying display of military might — air, land and sea assaults, rocket and bomb attacks and even parachute commandos. Just as happened in East Timor, the indiscriminate killing of innocent people and the displacement of tens of thousands are being kept away as much as possible from the prying eyes of journalists and human rights workers who have been ordered out of Aceh, or imprisoned and shot at.
The Australian government’s response to the humanitarian crisis unfolding to our north is to say that it’s in our ‘national interest’ to support Indonesia’s ‘territorial integrity’. Aceh is an internal problem for Indonesia, Canberra says. At the same time, it is already increasing collaboration with the feared Kopassus Special Forces units.
But Canberra is not an innocent bystander: successive Australian governments covered Indonesia’s back while it invaded East Timor and for the next two decades upheld the occupation as ‘irreversible’. They said nothing about President Suharto’s terror campaign in Aceh in the 1980s and ’90s; the regime’s 1996 crackdown on the Indonesian democracy movement; and atrocities carried out in West Papua against pro-independence supporters.
Economic interests
Since Suharto’s drive to fully integrate Indonesia into the global capitalist economy, Canberra’s policy gamble has been that extra political and economic clout would flow from being a close ally of the regime. Since 1965, this thinking has driven the ‘special relationship’ status, a policy that was given added weight by former ALP Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who cultivated personal connections with Suharto and the ruling clique.
Canberra’s support for Indonesia’s generals waging war in East Timor, Aceh and West Papua flows from its interest in ensuring ‘stability’ for capital. This is also why it supports Western-backed creditor institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which have forced Indonesia to undertake huge tariff and subsidy cuts despite their catastrophic impact on the economy.
Australia supported the US position of forcibly disarming the left in 1948; it provided military support for ultra-rightist military rebellions from 1956–58; it participated in the British attacks against Indonesian and Sabah/Sarawak guerillas in Kalimantan from 1959–1965; and it gave immediate financial, political and military support to the Suharto dictatorship during and after the massacre of some 1–2 million leftists.
Liberal PM Malcolm Fraser’s de jure recognition in 1978 of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, reaffirmed by Hawke in 1985, was largely about getting access to the oil and gas spoils in the Timor Sea. A ‘special relationship’ with Suharto was cultivated to ensure that Australian capital wasn’t totally cut out by US, European, Japanese and Korean rivals.
Since the 1970s economic downturn, and since then the continuing global economic stagnation, Australian companies have remained on the hunt for new profitable mega-projects and new markets to exploit. Some, like BHP and Rio Tinto, managed to establish major investments in Indonesia and West Papua.
The renewed push by Keating to promote Australian business interests in Indonesia was twinned with a policy aimed at strengthening security and military ties with the TNI. More recently, under the guise of ‘fighting terrorism’, this policy has been strengthened by the Howard government.
Today, the Howard government is taking steps to repair the ‘special relationship’ after its souring in 1999 over East Timor. Since the declaration of martial law in Aceh on 19 May, it has been vocal in reaffirming Jakarta’s ‘territorial integrity’. It also remains com-mitted to establishing closer ties with Kopassus — the ‘best anti-terrorism’ force in Indonesia according to defence minister Robert Hill.
Aksi!
Just before the Dili massacre, a campaign to build support for the fledgling democracy movement in Indonesia was begun by Indonesia Solidarity Action (Aksi). In the late 1980s, despite Suharto’s draconian laws, new worker, student and peasant organisations sprung up across Indonesia.
Aksi, which formed in 1990, began highlighting these important political developments. Aksi toured Indonesian student activists who inspired us with their campaigns against state censorship and harassment, the massive fee hikes on universities, assisting rural workers to reclaim lands seized by the military and protecting the environment.
The first activists to tour were from environmental groups, like the Indonesian Forest Protection Network (SKEHPI). They were followed by student leaders and worker activists. Later former political prisoners such as Dita Sari and Budiman Sujatmiko, now leaders of the National Front for Indonesian Workers’ Struggle (FNPBI) and the radical People’s Democratic Party (PRD), toured Australia to talk up the re-emergence of the new movement.
Aksi sought to link the East Timorese independence and Indonesian democracy struggles, arguing that as both were struggles against the Suharto dictatorship a victory for one would assist victory for the other. Australia-wide activist tours of Indonesian and East Timorese leaders helped cement closer ties between the two struggles.
The formation of the PRD in 1994 marked a turning point in the struggle for democracy in Indonesia. This was the first radical party to emerge since the Suharto regime crushed the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) in 1965, and the first to champion the rights of the East Timorese, the Acehnese and the West Papuan peoples.
In 1996, Aksi became Action in Solidarity with Indonesia and East Timor (ASIET) to highlight the close connection of the struggles, and to more accurately reflect the work being done. That same year, ASIET helped establish broader coalitions to pressure the Australian government to end its de jure recognition of Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor.
International campaign
Following the Suharto regime’s crackdown in July 1996 on Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democratic Party and the democracy movement, ASIET initiated an international campaign to demand an end to military rule and release scores of political prisoners who had been hunted down by the dictatorship. This resulted in protests and hunger strikes in Australia, the US, Germany, France, Holland, UK, South Africa, India, Nepal and the Philippines.
In 1997, we could not have predicted what we were soon to witness — and to play some part in: the demise of the 32-year-long dictatorship of President Suharto, brought down by a popular uprising led by students in May 1998, and, a year later, the independence ballot in East Timor.
There’s no doubt that the solidarity movement here and overseas played a key role in forcing a referendum in East Timor and ousting the TNI. The mobilisation of mass sentiment on the streets in support of the Timorese people’s right to independence was critically important to their victory in 1999. While the Australian government has conveniently rewritten history on this score, it’s important that this point not be forgotten.
Even while the militias and TNI were on their post-ballot rampage, the Howard government was arguing that Indonesia had ‘responsibility’ for security in East Timor. But after the Sydney and Melbourne protests of 30,000 and 40,000 respectively in September 1999, and the prospect of tens of thousands more remobilising the following weekend, the government was forced into an about-face. Its ‘special relationship’ policy was no longer tenable.
Militarisation
The 9/11 terror attacks in the US and the implications of the US-declared ‘war on terrorism’ in Asia sparked another shift in campaign focus. The increase in US militarism in the region and associated calls for assistance from democracy forces including from Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Malaysia, South Korea and Burma prompted ASIET to relaunch itself in 2002 as Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific (ASAP).
But we will continue to insist that the recidivist generals who presided over the war on East Timor — some of whom are commanding operations in Aceh — face an international tribunal, like the criminals responsible for atrocities in Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
There must be no repeat of the bipartisan wrong policy on East Timor. Canberra must pressure Jakarta to end its war on the Acehnese people, starting with the diversion of the Indonesia/Australia Defence Cooperation Program, worth some $5 million annually, to a special humanitarian fund for the victims of the war in Aceh. The only way this will happen is if we do what we managed to do for East Timor — develop a mass force for change. That’s the power of solidarity.
Pip Hinman (asap@asia-pacific-action.org) is the national convenor of Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific. For more information about ASAP and its solidarity work go to http://www.asia-pacific-action.org
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