By Kornelius Purba, Jakarta
The complaints of a Muslim waitress who works at an all-pork restaurant in a Bandung shopping center and a Jakarta taxi driver who has not picked up a single foreigner for months about the country's economy are very simple, but based on real-life experiences.
And the stories of these two people serve as a direct challenge to the rosy economic picture painted by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in his State of the Nation address two days before Independence Day on Thursday. Even the President's most outspoken critics could not offer such a clear rebuttal to Yudhoyono as this waitress and taxi driver.
"Selling pork is unimaginable for me as a Muslim. But I have no choice. Even selling your own flesh is a tough job these days," the waitress said when asked why she worked in the restaurant. And she is even worried about losing this job because of slow sales.
Judging by the lack of foreigners he has seen in Jakarta, the driver for Putra Taxi is confident in saying that foreign investment has continued to drop off in the past several years.
During the Soeharto years, he could pick up at least one foreigner a day. "But over the last two years, I have gone months at a time without meeting a single foreigner."
In his speech, where he also delivered a draft of the 2007 state budget, Yudhoyono proudly announced the country's economy was growing steadily, and that unemployment and poverty had declined significantly. He also said he was pleased to say that foreign direct investment was increasing.
Listening to Yudhoyono speak was a lot like listening to the annual speeches of his four predecessors -- excluding Sukarno, because I never paid attention to his speeches. Soeharto, of course, is a special case because no one dared to openly criticize his speeches.
As a friend said, Yudhoyono was not entirely wrong when he cited rather outdated data to support his claims about declines in poverty and unemployment. "You can claim that you are fit, citing a clean bill of health given to you by your doctor. You just don't mention the doctor saw you a year ago."
Several senior economists criticized the President's speech, and also blamed his speechwriters and economic ministers for providing misleading statistics. But if their positions were switched, and they were in government, they'd probably do the same thing.
When the waitress said "even selling your own flesh is a tough job", no further explanation is needed to understand how difficult life is here, at least in her view.
The taxi driver may not understand statistics, but even Investment Coordinating Board chairman M. Lutfi would find it hard to argue with his observation that foreign investors have abandoned the country.
The President should not be irritated with his critics. Ordinary people -- the silent majority -- never take his promises seriously. For them it is just a matter of routine for a president to talk about all the good things his government is doing. The President was elected by the people and is being paid to make the country better. And most people are quite happy with him because they know he works very hard (not necessarily very smart).
Ordinary people will not complain much even when their leaders are not able to ease their suffering. Sure, they might get upset if their leaders are so busy enriching themselves they neglect the people. But Yudhoyono is not like that. His ambition is to enrich the nation, although ambition is completely different from reality.
Independence Day passed last week. But please, do not let me wait for another year to make an observation about what freedoms we still have. (Perhaps only freedom of speech is left.)
I met the waitress on the morning of Aug. 17 in Bandung, and the taxi driver later that same day in East Jakarta. For these two, independence means the ability to have an "appropriate job and a decent income".
When the nation celebrated its 61st year of independence on Thursday last week, our founding fathers may have been weeping in their graves as people across the country asked, "Are we really independent?"
Sure, millions of people were happy to celebrate Independence Day and people are always grateful that God granted them independence from colonial powers (although the government often acts more heartlessly than the colonialists, and people are still unable to liberate themselves from the government). In the last eight years, our leaders have continued to boast that the economy is growing and the glory days we enjoyed a long time ago will soon return.
Despite the gloomy situation, I am still confident in saying Indonesia is a great nation. Why? Because we never look back (wise men call it introspection), but continue to prepare ourselves for the incoming disasters and misery! Why should we learn from history when neglecting that history helps us feel there is nothing wrong with us?
The writer can be reached at purba@thejakartapost.com.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Indonesia cuts Bali prison terms
Nine Islamic militants jailed in Indonesia over the 2002 Bali night club bombings have had their sentences reduced to mark Independence Day.It is an Indonesian tradition to cut jail terms on holidays and an Australian drug-smuggler had her 20-year sentence reduced by two months.
The bomb attacks killed 202 people, many of them foreign tourists.
The nine Islamists being held in Bali's Kerobokan prison had their sentences cut by four months, an official said.
It was not immediately clear if other militants convicted over the Bali attacks would get their sentences cut.
Australian citizen Schapelle Corby was jailed in May 2005 for smuggling marijuana into Balihad.
Saturday, August 05, 2006
Why a caning in Indonesia is now everyone's business
By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.
THE old injunction about minding your own business has always been a little problematic, because carried to formal lengths it distresses other laws, laws that have to do with being one's brother's keeper.
From large-scale national perspectives, there are the laws that translate into maintaining balances of power. You can try to ignore it when you hear that Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to maintain your fleet in good condition, never mind if regulating German Jews is other people's business.
Itchy stuff. In the 19th century, moral realities hardened on the subject of slavery. That too had been thought of as other people's business for a long time, even when the "other people" were your neighbors. After a while, it was felt that slavery was other people's business only if the practice of it was removed at least by regional boundaries. And then after a couple of generations, it was resolved that slavery was not a business to be tolerated anywhere within the nation's territory; and so on.
The problem of which communities' practices continue to be sheltered as other people's business is lightly touched on in a huge story in The New York Times on Tuesday about what they are taking to be their own business in a province of Indonesia. Aceh is a straitlaced part of the Muslim community. The big photo shows a man standing in a long white shirt looking down. On his left is a man dressed in black whose face is shrouded by a mask. He is holding what looks like a long stick. In fact it is a rattan cane, about a meter long and 0.75 centimeter thick.
The photo depicts one stroke laid on by the "executor" — that is what the Wilayatul Hisbah are called, the enforcers of Shariah, or Muslim law. The camera caught the swing of the cane because the prisoner was still standing. The story says that on the seventh stroke, he fell down in a faint. His sentence was 40 lashes of the cane, and the eager crowd was promised that when the man came back to life, he would receive the balance due of his sentence, another 33 strokes.
One is permitted to pause in cosmopolitan surprise that seven strokes of the rattan cane, inflicted on a man's back, would cause him to pass out. Old Etonians must be especially skeptical, though their own Wilayatul Hisbahs aimed at buttocks, not backs, but often went on past a seventh stroke, with not much evidence of students fainting.
But the point here being made is that there is in Aceh a revival of Muslim fundamentalism. "Aceh," the reporter tells us, "is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country." We learn that there are more than 40 prisoners arrested for thievery, and it is being deliberated whether to chop off their hands. We are reminded that this remains the practice in Saudi Arabia, and one is left to suppose that it is routine. If it were spectacularly unusual, it would presumably have rated a photo and a story in The New York Times. But engines of the news cannot be alert to mundane torture. If somebody is going to be hanged every morning at Tyburn, after a while one loses interest, and that, really, is the point of this essay.
Much hangs on the development of Muslim practice in the 21st century. It can't remain somebody else's business exclusively if organized communities take to chopping off people's hands. The Times article describes the arrest of three women in Aceh. Their crime? They were sitting in a secluded section of a hotel corridor without their head scarves. Inasmuch as the Shariah is being developed, restored, revived, evolved, it matters greatly in what direction it is developing. We know that cheek by jowl in the Middle East we have had developments along the lines of the Taliban, with torture and death, and along different lines, as in Turkey and Egypt. It is precisely an urgent moral concern what practices will govern life and law enforcement in Iraq — and Lebanon and Syria.
It has been a matter of huge reluctance even to think of, let alone refer to, a great religious-moral collision approaching, setting Islam against the Judaeo-Christian world. The old counsel is to be permissive about what other people do, especially if they are self-governing. But in present circumstances, these do not consolidate as purely local matters. What happens in Aceh, when fundamentalist Islam is reviving throughout Indonesia, is exactly as reported, a matter of profound international concern.
Buckley is a nationally syndicated columnist based in New York.
THE old injunction about minding your own business has always been a little problematic, because carried to formal lengths it distresses other laws, laws that have to do with being one's brother's keeper.
From large-scale national perspectives, there are the laws that translate into maintaining balances of power. You can try to ignore it when you hear that Hitler has ultimate solutions about how to deal with Germany's Jews, but meanwhile it makes sense to maintain your fleet in good condition, never mind if regulating German Jews is other people's business.
Itchy stuff. In the 19th century, moral realities hardened on the subject of slavery. That too had been thought of as other people's business for a long time, even when the "other people" were your neighbors. After a while, it was felt that slavery was other people's business only if the practice of it was removed at least by regional boundaries. And then after a couple of generations, it was resolved that slavery was not a business to be tolerated anywhere within the nation's territory; and so on.
The problem of which communities' practices continue to be sheltered as other people's business is lightly touched on in a huge story in The New York Times on Tuesday about what they are taking to be their own business in a province of Indonesia. Aceh is a straitlaced part of the Muslim community. The big photo shows a man standing in a long white shirt looking down. On his left is a man dressed in black whose face is shrouded by a mask. He is holding what looks like a long stick. In fact it is a rattan cane, about a meter long and 0.75 centimeter thick.
The photo depicts one stroke laid on by the "executor" — that is what the Wilayatul Hisbah are called, the enforcers of Shariah, or Muslim law. The camera caught the swing of the cane because the prisoner was still standing. The story says that on the seventh stroke, he fell down in a faint. His sentence was 40 lashes of the cane, and the eager crowd was promised that when the man came back to life, he would receive the balance due of his sentence, another 33 strokes.
One is permitted to pause in cosmopolitan surprise that seven strokes of the rattan cane, inflicted on a man's back, would cause him to pass out. Old Etonians must be especially skeptical, though their own Wilayatul Hisbahs aimed at buttocks, not backs, but often went on past a seventh stroke, with not much evidence of students fainting.
But the point here being made is that there is in Aceh a revival of Muslim fundamentalism. "Aceh," the reporter tells us, "is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country." We learn that there are more than 40 prisoners arrested for thievery, and it is being deliberated whether to chop off their hands. We are reminded that this remains the practice in Saudi Arabia, and one is left to suppose that it is routine. If it were spectacularly unusual, it would presumably have rated a photo and a story in The New York Times. But engines of the news cannot be alert to mundane torture. If somebody is going to be hanged every morning at Tyburn, after a while one loses interest, and that, really, is the point of this essay.
Much hangs on the development of Muslim practice in the 21st century. It can't remain somebody else's business exclusively if organized communities take to chopping off people's hands. The Times article describes the arrest of three women in Aceh. Their crime? They were sitting in a secluded section of a hotel corridor without their head scarves. Inasmuch as the Shariah is being developed, restored, revived, evolved, it matters greatly in what direction it is developing. We know that cheek by jowl in the Middle East we have had developments along the lines of the Taliban, with torture and death, and along different lines, as in Turkey and Egypt. It is precisely an urgent moral concern what practices will govern life and law enforcement in Iraq — and Lebanon and Syria.
It has been a matter of huge reluctance even to think of, let alone refer to, a great religious-moral collision approaching, setting Islam against the Judaeo-Christian world. The old counsel is to be permissive about what other people do, especially if they are self-governing. But in present circumstances, these do not consolidate as purely local matters. What happens in Aceh, when fundamentalist Islam is reviving throughout Indonesia, is exactly as reported, a matter of profound international concern.
Buckley is a nationally syndicated columnist based in New York.
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