CHEGA! GETTING THE FACTS OUT

Memory as the mother of wisdom                                        

In the 2012 British comedy film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, the ultra-optimistic  manager Sonny explains away his dysfunctional business with the memorable line:  ‘Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end’.

Seasoned Australian human rights campaigner Pat Walsh, 74, has adopted this reasoning to explain his optimism as he struggles to help Indonesians know the facts of their country’s recent history – and take responsibility for the crimes “that have so deeply scarred Timor-Leste”.

His brief on behalf of a non-government organization [NGO] covers the 25-year occupation of East Timor, a Portuguese colony from the 16^th century till invaded by Indonesian troops in 1975.  It’s now the nation of Timor-Leste with a population of about 1.2 million. 

In the August 1999 referendum authorized by Indonesian President BJ Habibie, almost 80 per cent voted for independence.  The Indonesian army (TNI) was outraged. Aided by militants it embarked on what Walsh calls “flat earth retribution.”

He was among official observers of the vote but the team pulled out when it became clear the result would not be accepted peacefully by the TNI. 

Walsh returned three months later to a tragic scene. Up to 2,600 people had been killed or disappeared.  “From the number and destruction of so many Indonesian government buildings in town after town we concluded two things,” he said.

“Indonesia had planned to stay forever, and that having lost, had no intention of coming back.”

But Walsh did come back, and for the next ten years worked in Dili for international agencies, including the United Nations. His main job was with the independent Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, known by its Portuguese acronym as CAVR.

The seven East Timorese commissioners were tasked with ‘truth seeking’ for the period 1974 to 1999. Their  report  Chega! [Portuguese for ‘enough’] was published in Indonesian and Portuguese. To Walsh’s dismay there have been no mainstream media reviews or doctoral theses on the document.

Now a new five volume English version has been edited by Walsh after six months’ work in Jakarta. The study found almost 103,800 civilians died during the quarter-century conflict. Around 18,600 of them were killed or disappeared and at least 84,200 people died from hunger and disease.

The report has evidence from almost 8,000 victims, and includes sickening first person testimonies of rape and torture. Reading these made Walsh “very emotional … distressed and angry.”

His current job is with Asia Justice and Rights [AJAR], a European-funded NGO based in Jakarta ‘to strengthen accountability and respect for human rights’.

Walsh is distributing 1,500 boxed sets of Chega! to university libraries, NGOs  and media organisations. He’s criss-crossing the archipelago, lobbying politicians, showing videos and addressing law students, activists and anyone who’ll cock an ear. Condensed versions of Chega!, including comics, will be released next year.

“Many Indonesians still don’t know the truth about East Timor,” he said. “They accepted  President Soeharto’s line that East Timor was to Indonesia what Cuba was to the US – an offshore Communist enclave which could not be tolerated.

“That wasn’t true.  Fretilin [the political party fighting for independence] was not a Marxist or Communist movement, and it never wanted all Timor. Nor did it want to see the Balkanisation [fragmentation] of Indonesia.”

Walsh was speaking in Batu, East Java at Omah Munir, the museum celebrating the life of human rights activist and lawyer Munir Said Thalib who was assassinated in 2004. Although some of those allegedly involved were jailed, the masterminds behind his poisoning on board a Garuda flight have never been convicted.

Walsh’s presentation was titled Rediscovering Indonesia. The subtitle came from the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus: ‘Memory is the mother of wisdom’.  To this was added: ‘But a lost memory is the mother of a mistake!’.

Walsh has a resume that punctures the image of reconcilers as unworldly theorists who can’t face the rawness of realpolitik outside their aid-funded offices. He has fronted the Vatican and the US Congress to plead for the victims of brutality in East Timor.

Walsh studied military strategy to understand how soldiers think.  He directed the human rights office of the Australian Council for Overseas Aid, and in 1983 co-founded the highly-respected magazine Inside Indonesia, now an Internet journal. 

Two years ago he was awarded the prestigious Order of Australia medal for his contribution to international human rights and reconciliation. These stripes on his sleeve have helped dissuade nationalists getting stroppy because an Australian is telling their history.

“I’m a sitting duck,” Walsh said.  “Many still blame Australia for the referendum and Indonesia losing its most easterly province.  So far no problems. My concerns are with the actions of governments, not the Indonesian people.”

Walsh was raised on a dairy farm in rural Victoria and educated in a seminary. For seven years he was a Catholic priest with the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He taught Latin, then Indonesian.

Walsh eventually left the priesthood, married, fathered three daughters and turned to the quest for a just world.

His studies aroused a strong concern for human rights and abuse of power. In 1975 Indonesia invaded East Timor, and Melbourne became activism central.  Scores of political refugees gathered in the Victorian capital and worked to tell the world what was happening.

When Walsh wasn’t there he was in Indonesia until blacklisted in 1993. Walsh told Immigration they’d got the wrong person because Pat is also a woman’s name; no deal.

The recommendations in Chega! include reparation – from Indonesia and Australia which allegedly supplied arms to the TNI that were used against the Timorese.  So far - nothing.

“I’d like an independent Indonesian commission to examine how history is taught,” Walsh said. “Reparation isn’t money, but social services and support for victims.

“I feel a strong responsibility to ensure their voice gets out. I believe Indonesians will respond to this challenge.”

[Chega! Is on line at www.chegareport.net]

(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 December 2014)

FROM RANGOON TO YANGON

Once regal, now rotting, soon receding

Don’t go to Yangon, the biggest city in Myanmar (formerly Burma) if you’re repulsed by spitters, allergic to birds or find right-hand drive cars using the right lane too alarming.  Do go if you want to experience a living museum of decaying colonial majesty and streetscapes of never-ending interest.  Be quick – all could disappear. Duncan Graham explains:

When the military junta of Than Shwe controlled Myanmar, Reggie Bennett (pictured below) led prayers for the wellbeing of the general’s nemesis, Nobel Peace Prize winner and long-term political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi.

Spies among the congregation at Yangon’s soaring Anglican Cathedral of the Holy Trinity reported the Vicar’s actions and he was visited by men in dark glasses.

“They asked why I spoke about someone who was under house arrest,” he said.  “I told them that I also prayed for the generals, and for that I was thanked. Fortunately things have changed.  I’m no longer asked to explain.”

Maybe the Dean’s pleas to the Deity had an impact, for the guards walked away from Suu Kyi’s gate in 2010 and a year later the 49-year military dictatorship ended, though the army still retains significant power and influence; State TV looks like TVRI under Soeharto with stone-faced reporting of bamboo broom quotas rather than the allegations of human rights abuses against the Rohingya Muslim minority telecast elsewhere.

Suu Kyi can’t stand for president in the 2015 election because her late husband Michael Aris was a foreigner. But her release marked the start of the nation’s transition to some semblance of normality – including tourism.

Visiting Myanmar should be on every journalist’s bucket list as the inspiration for the early work of wordsmith Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) one of the greatest craftsmen of English in the 20^th Century.

 His novel Burmese Days, based on five years as a police officer in the then British colony, is not so well known as Animal Farm and 1984, the dystopian visions of society that seemed to become reality after the 1962 coup that turned an Asian tiger economy into a skunk state.

Pro-democracy demonstrations were cruelly crushed and the generals retreated into a weird world governed by the sinister State Law and Order Restoration Council.  This set about reshaping society and language to form a ‘discipline-flourishing democracy’. Like Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, SLORC warped words to make lies palatable.

In a purge of Western influences, allegedly determined by astrology and numerology, Burma became Myanmar and Rangoon turned to Yangon.  A new capital Naypyidaw was built more than 300 kilometers from Yangon.  Driving on the left, as in Indonesia, was changed to the right.

Sadly the seers failed to notice that Myanmar gets most vehicles second-hand from Japan, a country that also drives on the left, so cars have steering wheels on the right.  The resulting confusion gives passengers a mind-bending experience.

Yangopn's Synagogue

Another is using a zebra crossing. Once the imports arrive they are fitted with a special Pedestrian Pursuit gear.  Anyone who believes Buddhists are non-aggressive hasn’t tried to cross a Yangon street.

As in Indonesia the police find good reasons for stopping law-abiding motorists, particularly outside the city where the roads are wide and well-surfaced, but overall there’s a welcoming absence of uniforms.  In their place are the scavenging house crows, hastening dusk as they go to roost in black clouds.

Myanmar is mainly Buddhist, so there’s a reluctance to kill wildlife even when nature threatens humans. Yangon has about five million residents, a tenth of the Republic’s population, and probably double that number of flying vermin.  

Umbrellas are needed for more than sun and rain protection. Breakfasters at come-and-go sidewalk ‘tea houses’ get their condiments delivered from above. The only logical reason people spit regularly in public is because they glanced skywards with an open mouth.

On the plus side most heavy vehicles are gas powered, so trucks and busses belching black smoke are rare. But the most refreshing regulation bans motorbikes from the city. Jakarta Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama could seek the Yangon authorities’ advice on how to exterminate the two-wheeled pests, and he could tell them how to purge the pigeons. Answer: Give kampong kids slingshots.

Guano may be a great fertiliser but it corrodes and stains, leaving the ancient buildings of Yangon’s Chinatown with a patina of grey to match the sky. Decades of neglect have done the rest, and it’s these once grand blocks of shuttered rooms leading onto tiny balconies that are now close to collapse.

Not because they are overcrowded or foundations insecure, but because international developers heading armies of architects are invading with plans for apartments, hotels and golf courses. 

There’s some hope; A Yangon Heritage Trust formed in 2012 runs 2.5 hour walking tours for US$30 [Rp 370.000]. It’s also assembled a list of buildings worth preserving, though no laws underpin the idea.  Myanmar is perceived as even more corrupt than Indonesia so slowing ‘progress’ will be a tough task.

Unless the government accepts that discerning tourists want more than a five-star hotel pool Yangon could become metropolis anywhere, bland as an airport restroom; a once gracious city of elegance will have all the faux charisma of a shopping mall.

Glance down some streets in Yangon and you could be in Jakarta facing an avenue of plate glass.  Posters of European lovelies draped in branded luxuries above the facades of gold shops could be Jalan Thamrin.  Make a half turn and there’s the imposing fortress of the Maha Bandoola Road Mosque with headscarfed women trading in its shade. Yangon has 12 mosques, Sunni and Shiite.

A further 90 degree twist and behold - the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue run by trustee Moses Samuels to serve just eight families, descendants of traders from Iraq who arrived with the British.

Nearby is the Shri Kali Hindu Temple, built by Tamils brought from India as laborers by the British.  Churches [the most knock-out impressive is the Catholic Cathedral of St Mary](right),  temples and the synagogue welcome strangers, whatever their faith.

And everywhere else – gold-painted Buddhist places of worship, with the city dominated by the Shewdagon Pagoda’s 99-meter high stupa.  Unfortunately the fleece-the-foreigner policy is taking hold, as with some ‘tourism objects’ in Indonesia.

Visitors keen to know more about the teachings of the Enlightened One, admire the sometimes kitsch, often inspiring and altogether overwhelming architecture, or pray have to pay.

White skins attract US$8 [Rp 100,000] entrance fees, as do cameras $US5 [Rp 65,000].  For that money a tourist can hire a cab, cruise the city and have a nourishing meal at a pigeon-proof restaurant with air conditioning – though the power could fail at any moment.

The US dollar is widely accepted and buys about 1,000 kyats.  English is rare among the young after years of educational neglect. At one stage all universities were closed for two years.

Like Bali, Yangon is being corrupted by tourist development.  The locals seem indifferent, cautiously friendly, wondering if the changes are real. Waking from a half century nightmare of totalitarian rule takes some adjustment. Myanmar still needs the Reverend Bennett’s prayers.

Getting there:

Direct flights from Singapore take under three hours.

Public transport is hard to comprehend for outsiders.  Taxis don’t have meters.  Fees are generally cheaper than Indonesia, though gas prices are almost the same.

Hotel costs are far higher than other Southeast Asian nations apart from Singapore.

The wet season is the reverse of Indonesia’s, so it’s now dry till May.

(First published in J Plus 28 December 2014)

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INDONESIA'S CAPITAL PUNISHMENT SOLUTION

Australian-Indonesian relations threatened by executions 

Jokowi and VP Jusuf Kalla;
Not such a jolly image in reality

           

Australians could die cruelly so Indonesia’s new president looks macho.

Barring a political somersault our northern neighbour is heading for major diplomatic confrontations with Australia and other Western nations as it enforces the death penalty for drug trafficking.

New President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has categorically refused to intervene in cases where the courts have ordered executions. Speaking at a university forum in Central Java in December he said: “I guarantee that there will be no clemency for convicts who commit narcotics-related crimes.”

Consequently five are expected to face the firing squad this year and 20 in 2015.  The first batch is reportedly all Indonesians, but the next group could include Australians Andrew Chan, 30, and Myuran Sukumaran, 33.  The two men, members of the Bali Nine drug syndicate caught in 2005 and sentenced in 2006, have exhausted all appeals.

Australia is a world leader in opposing capital punishment and would be duty bound to protest strenuously against the execution of its nationals.

In a final bid to keep their lives, Chan and Sukumaran sought clemency from former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY).  He ducked the issue and retired in October.

To the dismay of human rights activists who expected Jokowi to be more sensitive to moral matters, the new president seems determined to look as hairy-chested as his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. 

During a brutal election campaign the civilian Jokowi was labelled weak against his rival, former army hard man Prabowo Subianto.  Although SBY was a general before entering politics he dithered on decisions concerning religious conflict and drug penalties, leading the electorate to start baying for firmness in its new leader.

During his two five-year terms SBY commuted some death penalties and imposed a four-year moratorium on executions.  Law reformers thought this marked the end of the death penalty and the start of a more nuanced approach to punishment.

It was a false dawn. The firing squads’ M16s were cocked five times in 2013 as SBY reacted to claims he was soft on criminals.  Even his former vice president Jusuf Kalla (now holding the same position under Jokowi) allegedly said  SBY “was loved by drug traffickers for his leniency.”

Paroling so-called ‘Ganja Queen’ Schapelle Corby in February 2014 cheered her Australian supporters but won SBY no applause in his homeland.

Druggies aren’t the only ones to take the brunt of Jokowi’s determination to prove he’s really Rambo in batik.  Foreign fishing boats dropping their lines in Indonesian waters have also been in the President’s sights; literally, as the offending vessels have been used as target practice by the navy.

Curiously terrorism doesn’t get the same brutal treatment. Jokowi has spoken publicly about taking  “softer religious and cultural approaches” as these were better tools in eradicating terrorism than the “security approach”.  He declined to elaborate.

There’s no sophisticated debate on the death penalty in Muslim-majority Indonesia where State-sanctioned killings don’t arouse the abhorrence felt in Europe and Australasia. Even concerns about the innocent dying through flaws in a notoriously corrupt judicial system are muted. Capital punishment is accepted as a just and effective deterrent though the facts say otherwise.

SBY’s moratorium ended in 2013 with five well-publicised executions.  That year British grandma Lindsay Sandiford, 58, was caught carrying almost five kilos of cocaine.  She is also on death row in Bali.

Despite the prominently advertised penalties drug arrests continue to be commonplace with the alleged criminals pictured before cakes of contraband while cops in balaclavas look on. 

One of the latest is Kiwi pensioner Antony de Malmanche, 53, caught in Bali in early December allegedly carrying 1.7 kilos of methamphetamine. He too could be torn apart by fragmenting bullets if convicted.

Indonesian executions are horrific.  In 2008 Catholic priest Charlie Burrows supported two Nigerians facing a midnight firing squad in Central Java.  He later told a Constitutional Court challenge to the death penalty that the men bled and moaned for seven minutes after being shot from a metre away by a dozen policemen armed with assault rifles.

The hooded drug traffickers had been tied to crucifixes with car inner tubes. A target had been put over their hearts by a doctor (presumably breaking the Hippocratic Oath) who did not pronounce them dead till ten minutes after the gunfire ceased.

A Sydney Morning Herald report of Father Burrows’ testimony quoted the priest saying:  “I think it is cruel, the torture.”

Death for druggies is a simplistically attractive solution to a social evil that’s well entrenched in Indonesia, but President Jokowi may soon face the dilemma that so troubled his gun-happy predecessors.  Indonesia has more than four million workers overseas, with 280 on death rows in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

Some of these people are young maids accused of murdering their bosses.  Their defence of responding to employer rape has little impact in Arab states. Indonesian diplomats pleading a stay of the sword on behalf of their citizens find the going tough when reminded that their own country also lacks compassion.

Despite defeating the colonial Dutch for independence in a bloody four-year conflict, and running the world’s third largest democracy, Indonesians retain a strange sense of international inferiority: Banging the nationalist drum always rouses a parade. 

Shelling a Vietnamese fishing boat for TV news, or shredding the torsos of Australian drug runners will go down a treat with Indonesian voters, particularly if the folk next door are enraged. Snubbing mercy pleas by Tony Abbott will damage relations between the neighbours but do Jokowi’s image at home no harm at all.  

(First published in On Line Opinion, 22 December 2014.  For comments see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=16961  )

HANGING ON TO HERITAGE

Sharing a common past    

                             

Decades ago parents entertained their children with a telling ditty about the days before Independence:

Menteng: Immigration Building (1914) now a restaurant

In matters of empire, the fault of the Dutch,                                                              

was yielding too little and taking too much.

After 1945 hostility continued towards Europeans determined to retain influence in the former East Indies.  This climaxed in 1957 when first president Soekarno expelled 40,000 Dutch citizens and nationalised their companies along with other foreign businesses.

New times, new attitudes. The once colonized and the colonialists aren’t just burying their enmity, they’re unearthing their shared past, with people like Dutch author Emile Leushuis helping drive the excavators.

The social geographer and urban historian has no family background in Indonesia’s past; he started backpacking Asia in the late 1980s while still a student at the University of Utrecht, finding the archipelago’s complex history rewarding.

His visits multiplied and became a job. He learned the language.  At first he worked for a Dutch tour company, then an American.  Later he turned freelance setting up tours for Netherlanders keen to know more about the tropical islands their country once ruled. 

Leushuis (right) also wrote articles and lectured, and in 2011 published Gids Historische Stadswandelingen Indonesie (a tour guide to Indonesia’s historic cities). Now in its second printing the book has just been released in a larger format in Indonesian as Panduan Jelajah Kota-kota Pusaka di Indonesia by publisher Ombak.

The company is based in Yogyakarta where Leushuis spends about half his time – the rest back in Holland. He credits his decision to concentrate on Indonesia with a visit to Ubud, the hilltown cultural center of Bali – “my point of no return.”

The book includes specially prepared maps of walks (or cycle rides) in eight Javanese cities - Jakarta, Cirebon, Bandung, Cirebon, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya and Malang – and Medan in Sumatra.

The translation has Jelajah (exploring) in the title, a useful addition as ‘guide’ implies lists of guest houses and bus routes.  Instead the buyer gets well-referenced histories and streetscapes encouraging further exploration.

“When you go to a place, what do you see?” asked Leushuis. “Why does it look like this? I want to explain what’s here and why, what sort of people lived here and took part in trade and administration.”

Unfortunately the Indonesian version has been printed on cheap paper to contain costs.  So the photos lack the eyeball-striking gloss found in the original which sells for 25 Euros (Rp 375,000) compared to Rp 150,000 for the local edition.

The book includes some splendid old pictures, many found in Dutch museums.  These show the beautiful open areas and wide roads that existed before the population growth got out of control and the Honda hordes invaded the highways.

“I certainly plan to publish in English as I think there’s a strong interest from people who can’t read Dutch or Indonesian,” Leushuis said during a promotion tour.  His book was launched at a seminar in the ancient Majapahit era city of Trowulan in East Java, and again before 120 students at Malang State University.

Public open space - well used; the square in front of Jakarta's Town Hall

 “I also want to work with Indonesians to promote cultural tourism and heritage trails. Several organizations do this but their efforts haven’t been well coordinated.”

After several years of running tour groups Leushuis and another Indonesia addict, former public broadcaster Nettert Smit opened IndoTracks Adventure Tours.  It’s based in Holland but accessible from anywhere through the Internet.

 “There are still concerns about safety and the perceived rise of radical Islam, but the Dutch remain curious about Indonesia and want to know more of their country’s roots in Southeast Asia,” Leushuis said.

“There are no cities in Holland that look like those built in Indonesia. The only one based on Dutch town planning and architecture was Batavia in the 16th century.

“The Europeans quickly discovered that chasing away the locals and digging canals didn’t work in tropical conditions.

“They decided to let the locals have their own city and be ruled by their own people, and just add relatively small Dutch quarters with some military presence.

“Semarang remains the best example of an 18th century Dutch quarter in what is now called Little Holland. Northern Bandung and North-eastern Malang show good later development.

 “The alun-alun (open town square, often a garden where families relax and flanked by important buildings) is a local idea. Indonesians should be very proud of the way they’ve adapted to the environment.”

Then there are the statues.  Indonesia does its old mosques, palaces and traditional joglo (four-sided, high ceiling carved timber houses) superbly, but the Soviet realism monuments of muscled men snapping chains are not just metaphorically coarse they are also artistically crude. They stand as reminders of another era’s politics.

When asked if he was optimistic of Indonesian cities being returned to the feet and lungs of their citizens, and where the past is treasured, not trashed, Leushuis uttered some equivocal noises before listing conservation projects now making a difference.

Most have been driven by forward-thinking companies rather than governments. For example, in Menteng the Kunstkring gallery and old immigration office has been preserved as a restaurant.  In Surabaya the De Javasche Bank building (used for several years by Bank Indonesia) has become a museum and function center.

Kota, the old city in Jakarta is certainly cluttered with stalls that encroach on the open area, but the place remains pedestrian friendly and a joy to stroll without fear of being run down.

“I’m hopeful if some of the traffic issues can be resolved,” Leushuis said. “It’s the main problem facing tourists and draws many complaints.  It’s now getting so difficult to move around. Journeys that used to last two hours now take double that time. That’s a worry.”

Panduan Jelajah Kota-kota Pusaka di Indonesia                                                                     

By Emile Leushuis                                                                                                            

Published by Ombak, 2014.       

(First published in The Jakarta Post 8 December 2014)                                                                                            

    

JAVA'S GEN Y HAS A SOUND

Seeking the sounds of Yogya   

                    

If the graffiti and eaves-to-gutter posters aren’t enough to convince that the Y in Yogyakarta stands for Youth, then the music will. The Central Javanese city, long known as the heart of Java’s high culture, has become the hub of the Archipelago’s contemporary music scene with an unique festival.  Duncan Graham reports.

Malioboro is Yogya’s must-stroll street for cheap.  Trashy souvenirs, knock-off artefacts, the lacquer barely dry on the cracking wood, and smudged batik dominate the pop-up stalls.

There’s excellence to be found, but the visitor has to hunt. Though not for the music. On weekend nights when it’s shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic and hardly enough space for the horse drawn buggies to sway, the relief is entertainment.

Bus terminals, town squares and other public spaces across the Republic are plagued by talent-free wannabes fingering two-string packing case guitars.  But Malioboro shoppers get to hear quality, from sitar players who could grace a concert hall to angklung bands finding new ways to thrash bamboo and produce crackling dance beats.

Musicians are fickle folk more interested in tempo than timetables so don’t expect a show a night – and remember they’re free, though donations don’t get rebuffed.

Malioboro is bookended with a small gamelan group near the railway station, while the angklung artists are usually found further down near the old Dutch fort of Vredeburg.

Last month (November) the Yogya Contemporary Music Festival was staged with performers and composers from 15 countries. The YCMF was established in 2003 by composer Michael Asmara who studied in Japan.

“Yogya is the place to be for any aspiring young musician,” said Budhi Ngurah, a music school lecturer and former concert cellist at the archipelago’s most prestigious cultural college, the Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI – Indonesian Arts Institute).

“We have more than 600 active students and they’ve come from everywhere.”

In a shady stairwell on the campus with just enough breeze to dry sweat, about a dozen young people tuned their strings and ventilated their flutes.  The mix was discordant, but the energy real.

 “We teach Western music but ethnomusicology and other forms are becoming popular,” said percussion teacher Ayub Prasetiyo who spent nine years studying at ISI.  He played in symphony orchestras before becoming an academic.

 “New classes are opening to meet the demand.”

ISI graduate Gatot Danar Sulistiyanto, 34, remembers the day the music came.  He was 15, but hadn’t been looking because it had been ever present in Magelang since his birth in the Central Java town.  Why search for water when you’re swimming?

“In the Javanese kampong there’s always sound,” said the director of Yogya’s Art Music Today (AMT), an organization encouraging musicians to work together, share resources and develop skills.  

“It’s the mothers’ lullabies as they nurse their babes; it’s the food sellers calling out in the street; it’s the prayers from the mosques; it’s the gamelan, the cocks crowing, the sheep bleating.  Music is everywhere.”

So the muse came to him. Someone handed him a guitar and showed how.  Hardly necessary.  The instincts were already quivering in his fingers and his soul, though there were no known musical abilities in his ancestors.

He became a fan of Iwan Fals, the balladeer famous for his protest songs during the Orde Baru (New Order) period when the authoritarian President Soeharto was forever suspicious of artists and youth - and even more wary when the two combined.

Gatot enrolled in a trade college to learn the electronic skills that his communications technician father used to feed his family.  However the school’s extra-curricular activities were more electric.  Particularly the rock band.

A brief period of bashing skins, thumping a keyboard or scraping strings seems to be a rite of passage for many acned adolescents, but this one didn’t lose interest as he morphed into a man.

He moved to Yogya because that’s where music mattered, and found a curious scene.  “There were plenty of musicians, bands and composers but everyone was doing their own thing,” he said. “There was no coordination, no information about contemporary music, no archiving.”

His eclectic talents got him into ISI where for eight years he learned to read music, play the classical guitar and move from fiddling chords to becoming a professional.

Gatot’s abilities were sharpened to the point where he was invited to New Zealand as a contemporary composer, and to Holland where he worked with chamber musicians.

Then came Yogya’s day of disaster.  On 27 May 2006 a massive shallow jolt caused immense destruction, killing close to 6,000 people and injuring six times as many.

Like the tsunami which struck Aceh in 2004 and inadvertently led to the end of a prolonged civil war, the Yogya quake impacted the music scene.

“That’s when I started pushing people to work together,” Gatot said.  “The earthquake gave us the impetus to connect.”

He started AMT at the Sangkring Art Space in Nitiprayan village on the outskirts of the city, where many artists have moved to create a semi-rural cultural scene.

According to Gatot about ten new art centers have been built in Yogya since 2006, bringing talented people together and establishing a fertile environment that nurtures creativity, where young people can experiment without being ridiculed.

“A few years ago a contemporary music concert would be lucky to attract 40 people,” Gatot said.  “Now hundreds come and the festival runs for three days.

“I’m really optimistic about the future of music in Yogya – it’s in good shape and will be growing for the next five to ten years.” 

Yogya may have become a magnet for young musicians but Gatot resisted suggestions it was unique. He then rattled off a list of major and minor towns across the nation with professional and experimental performers, tossing in names and contact numbers.

When still a student Gatot’s mother urged him to complete his technical qualifications before following his heart. Good advice; it’s his electronics tradecraft that’s financially most useful. 

As a field producer and sound engineer Gatot said he’s able to care for his opera singer wife Ika Sri Wahyumingsih and their young son by earning Rp 500,000 (US$40 a day), a sum he forecasts to rise as demand grows.

ISI academics Budhi and Ayub agree.  “We expect most of our students to get work when they graduate,” they said.  “Some are already employed.”

Music in Yogya includes the sound of money.

(First published in J Plus 7 December 2014)

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ANTIBIOTICS? NOT TODAY, THANKS

Just Say No To (prescribed) Drugs    

         

Seven years ago The Jakarta Post published a letter from Dutch microbiologist Henri Verbrugh (left) critical of medical prescription practices.  By the normally restrained standards of professional intercourse it was blunt.

“It is perhaps not polite to be critical of my hosts,” he wrote.  “But in the large majority of the cases presented to me antibiotics were used irrationally… doctors in general have only marginal knowledge about antibiotics.

“A study of 4,000 patients and their relatives in Semarang and Surabaya found most of the antibiotics were prescribed without proper indication.”

Jump to the present. “My comments did attract some attention,” he said wryly during a return visit to attend conferences and deliver lectures at medical schools, including Malang’s Brawijaya University.

“There was some blushing, but overall the letter was accepted readily enough.”

Other critics might not have fared so well.  A citizen of a former colonial power jabbing the needle into local nerves? Send him back! Who does he think he is?

Fortunately this fault-finder was well armored against the barbs.  The descendant of an Indonesian grandmother and son of a mining company doctor, young Henri once lived in Belitung, also known as Billiton. 

The islands off Sumatra’s east coast were the lad’s playground from his birth in 1949 till 1958 when President Soekarno ordered the Dutch to begone or become Indonesian citizens.

The family chose option one and left for Holland where Professor Verbrugh is now a leading scientist, head of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Rotterdam’s Erasmus Medical Center.

He is also an advisor to the Scientific Program Indonesia-Netherlands (SPIN), a long-term joint collaboration project to boost scholarly inquiry in the Republic. Indonesia has fallen behind nations like Iran and Egypt in publishing scientific research.

Professor Verbrugh’s words may have wrinkled brows, but there’s no doubt he had the qualifications to comment, a right he’s still exercising.

“Antibiotics are very useful drugs, but they have to be used cautiously,” he said.  “Microbes adjust and adapt quickly and soon produce drug-resistant strains of bacteria.  These are much harder to treat.

“The situation has improved since I wrote that letter, and there are protocols on antibiotic use in the government hospitals, though not all private hospitals follow these.

“There’s still a lack of collaboration among many doctors and administrators who continue doing things their way. Indonesia is an archipelago of medical kingdoms.

“I tell students this has to stop and they should work together.  They also need to be disobedient and not accept what they’re told without questioning.”

His comments are not a lone cry. Last month (November) the World Health Organization urged Southeast Asian nations to boost plans to combat the ‘rapidly increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance … that will be devastating in this age of emerging infectious diseases.’

So how can we stay well without resorting to antibiotics?

“The problem is not the drugs but the way they are being used; sometimes we need to get back to basics, like washing with disinfectant soap,” Professor Verbrugh said, advice which must send the drug companies feverish.  

“Just screening out patients from surgery if they are carrying heavy loads of bacteria drops hospital infections significantly.  So does nasal cream (the nose harbors bacteria) and antiseptic baths.

“Reducing the use of antibiotics also brings down costs to the health system.”

Apart from educating doctors about the danger of shooting up antibiotics first and asking questions later, the public also has to be alerted, Professor Verbrugh said.

Questioning a treatment is never easy when feeling unwell; in a culture where doctors are often seen as gods it takes a courageous patient to challenge a physician.

Overseas governments, particularly those with national health schemes, restrict the right to authorize certain medicines to specialists  In Indonesia the public can treat themselves by buying antibiotics over the counter.

Professor Verbrugh alleged that some Indonesian doctors routinely include antibiotics as treatment for dengue fever, and for new-borns who appear to be having breathing problems, when these responses were unnecessary. There were also links between doctors and drug companies seeking to promote their products, he said.

Indonesian doctors told him they use antibiotics as a preventative measure because they fear disease, even when patients are suffering from viruses that antibiotics can’t kill.

“Getting out of these habits may take a while, but I have positive feelings,” he said. “We must focus on the next generation of doctors – they have to clean up the mess we’ve made.”

Forgetting to do the dishes

It’s one of the most famous stories of serendipity in modern medical history, and the excuse smart kids use for not washing up after dinner.

On the morning of 28 September 1928, Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming turned up for work as usual at his London laboratory.

He’d been careless.  The night before he’d forgotten to cover a glass dish of the staphylococcus bacteria that he’d been studying.  Unsurprisingly he found the sample spoiled, contaminated by a green mould.

‘Staph’ infections are common as the bacteria are often present on the skin.  Staph usually causes few problems apart from pus in minor wounds, but it can kill if it gets in the blood.

Instead of tossing the dish in a sink and wondering if he was getting too old for the job (he was then 47), Fleming looked more closely at the mess and noticed the bacterial growth around the mould had stopped.

This, he reasoned, meant that the mould could kill bacteria. And so penicillin was born, a drug destined to father a great family of antibiotics.  There are now more than 150.

Professor Verbrugh said that Fleming, who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery, realised penicillin’s limitations.  He cautioned that other diseases could become resistant as the super smart microbes adapted to this new threat. 

But the world, dazzled by the wonder kill-all-bugs medicine was little interested in the early warning. Which is why we have a crisis today.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 10 December 2014)

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LOVE UNDER A PAPERMOON

Collaborators, manipulators and imagineers     

                  

There’s something slightly unnerving about these contemporary art forms.  They wave no flags of jingoistic nationalism so labels don’t stick.  They’re burdened by neither the dogma of religion, nor the baggage of ideology. 

Though dumb they can speak to every one of the seven billion on this planet in a universal tongue of shared concerns and experiences.  Though blind they can see what we wilfully ignore.  Yet paradoxically they lack what we have:  Life.

In the hands of talented artists puppets can reduce us to tears, or raise us to nobility, and next month (December) Indonesian audiences will get the chance to see some of the world’s best.

“Puppets are a blank canvas,” said Dean Petersen from Melbourne’s Cake Industries (‘Media Artists, Future Makers’) while tinkering with switches in a Yogyakarta workshop. “We can project our feelings onto them.  We can bring the inanimate to life.”

Together with Jesse Stevens the two Australians, ‘heavily influenced by 1950s science fiction dystopia’, will be using robotics to animate figures and objects at Yogya’s International Biennial Pesta Boneka (puppet festival).  This will be held between 5 and 7 December in the Central Java city and the nearby village of Kedek.

This is the hometown of Beni Sanjaya, one of the creative workers at Yogya’s Papermoon Puppet Theater.  Recently he helped stage a carnival in Kedek using giants, showing that the traditional wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performances aren’t the only way to entertain.

Papermoon is a group of out-of-the-box artists assembled after the 2006 Yogya earthquake.  Their original quest was to help citizens reassemble shattered lives through brief escapes into fantasy and shared compassion.

In the Pesta Boneka Papermoon will be supported by performers from Australia, Mexico, Thailand, Spain, the Philippines, Hungary, Japan and Iceland.  Like migrating birds, modern puppeteers ignore political boundaries and fly to where they are most loved.

What they have in common is passion, the desire to swap concepts, expand imagination, entertain and inspire. They graze the Internet as a garden of delights, a place to sow seeds and garner ideas.  If a TV series was created about these fertile folk it would be titled The Collaborators.

Thai puppeteer Jae Sirikarn Bunjongtad (see breakout) was inspired by the work of puppeteers from Scandinavia. Some of her wayang kulit creations look Indonesian enough to alert the culture cops, but Jae said similar styles are found in Thailand and Malaysia.   She’s stitched costumes and spun stories in Kazakhstan, Cambodia and South Korea.

The pockets of mannequin movers like Dean (left) and Jesse are never short of an AA battery or a LED light. They should be called The Adaptors, using old car window wipers to sway, rams to lift and toggles to twist, employing anything discarded that can serve a higher purpose. If the raw materials are from natural products then their contentment is sustainable. 

Contemporary puppeteers tend to share, not lock ideas into cages of copyright.  Some offer their work through Creative Commons, licensing that only requires attribution. While film makers like Hobbit director Sir Peter Jackson offload millions on special equipment to quicken the dead and hire security guards to keep sets secret, puppeteers scavenge rather than spend, and welcome the curious behind the scenes.

 “People used to say puppets were just for kids, and we had the same thinking,” said artist Iwan Effendi waggling one of Papermoon’s early glove creations.  He started the company with his wife Maria Tri Sulistyani, a children’s book illustrator.

“Then we noticed how many adults were interested.  We’d seen the same thing in the US where we met the family that runs the company of the late Jim Henson.

(Henson created the Muppets that revolutionized early childhood education through the TV series Sesame Street. )

“So Papermoon began developing new stories and characters, and then staged a R18 show. That was a success.”

Later the company produced and toured the US with Mwathirika ‘about the loss of history and the history of loss’, proving that this art form can share the sharp end of political comment along with experimental theater. This non-verbal play explored the genocide that followed the 1965 coup d’état, still a taboo topic in many families and communities.

Said one overseas reviewer:  ‘Papermoon … has transformed puppets the way graphic novels changed comics.(Its work) is intellectually challenging, emotionally chilling and visually bold.’

Papermoon has no studio, just a decrepit rented house that serves as a maternity room for the dolls born through a marriage of nimble minds and fingers to match. After the applause some just hang around in corners, or take it easy in cupboards, smiling wistfully at the world through glass doors, their fixed expressions waiting to be liberated by a human hand.

 In the dusty yard outside is a giant face built by Octo Cornelius who, like his colleague Beni, learned the hows and how nots through the University of Trial and Error.

“I started making puppets from vegetables,” he said.  “Now I’ve graduated to rattan and bamboo.”

Chaos in the Neighborhood

The uncle loves growing plants.  The green caterpillar likes eating them.  The little boy wants to protect the insect from his vengeful relative.

Who can’t relate to such a tale whatever their background?

For the youngster understands that the caterpillar is on its way to become a butterfly and needs only a few more bites of uncle’s leaves before it turns into a chrysalis.

So at some cost to family harmony he stops the caterpillar from being killed.  Eventually a beautiful butterfly emerges to the joy of all, and ready to help pollinate uncle’s plants.

Chaos in the Neighborhood is one of many stories in the repertoire of Thai puppeteer Jae Sirikarn Bunjongtad (above) (stage name Kankak Naga Tan), in Indonesia to perform at the Pesta Boneka. 

In Papermoon’s workshop she drew sketches, made models, plotted moves, sewed backdrops, edited scripts and adjusted halogen light filaments she’s using to illuminate her sets.

“I have to do everything myself,” she said.  “When I studied theater arts at university in Bangkok there was only one unit on puppetry, so I’ve had to develop my own skills. That includes management.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 5 December 2014)

CHALLENGING THE SLURS- A JAVANESE WOMAN'S STORY

Crushed by colonialism – or just hapless?                          

I once berated Australian newspaper colleagues for using the words ‘Indo’ and ‘Indons’.  They countered that the terms were legitimate because ‘Indonesian’ was too long for a snappy headline, and everyone understood the meaning.

Not everyone. In Indonesia it refers to mixed race people, usually the offspring of European fathers and Indonesian mothers.  These are the creamy-hued but black-haired beauties often seen promoting skin whiteners, vitamin supplements and Jakarta condos on television.

Do they feel insulted by the term ‘Indo’, like African - Americans bristle and call their lawyers when referred to as ‘negroes’?  Many Australian Aborigines dislike ‘blacks’, a prejudicial word Down Under, though not in the US.

Early last century when the Dutch still ruled the archipelago, it was certainly derogatory in the mind of  a fictional unmarried mother of two ‘Indos’; the slur was one of the many burdens born by the principal character in Jakarta journalist and historian Hanna Rambe’s novel Mirah of Banda.

This was first published in Indonesia in 1986 during Soeharto’s repressive Orde Baru (New Order) government that saw books as subversive, so don’t expect an allegory. It’s now available in English thanks to a translation by Toni Pollard, who has been teaching Indonesian in Australia for four decades, and Jakarta publisher Lontar as a volume in its Modern Library of Indonesia series.

This is not a literary work, which is obvious from the hackneyed opening: ‘As soon as the taxi had screeched to a halt at Ambon’s Pattimura Airport the driver jumped from the car to open the trunk.”  Fortunately the prose improves later, enough to justify turning the pages.

The book’s value is more as historical drama, the life story of a much put-upon Javanese woman kidnapped as a child to work on a Dutch nutmeg plantation in the Malukus (also known as the Moluccas), the islands sprinkled between Sulawesi and West Papua.

When Mirah matures she becomes the plantation owner’s concubine after his wife has an affair with a European and quits the estate. Mirah bears her lover two children (‘Indos’) that carry his name. 

He wants her to convert to Christianity and marry, but she refuses; Mirah fears being humiliated by the Dutch wives as a nyai, a kept native woman with no rights, but she also wants to die a Muslim.

Here was a chance to explain why holding her faith was so important because there are no other revelations about Mirah’s beliefs.  Instead we read that this was the religion of her parents – ‘I’m afraid of the angels at the graveside. I’m afraid of God’s Judgement Day.’

When the Japanese invade her de-facto husband is arrested and later dies in internment. Her children are also seized and her daughter Lili conscripted and sent to Papua as a ‘comfort woman’, the vile euphemism for forced prostitution. Here she becomes pregnant to a caring Japanese officer.

Back in Banda, her Dutchman gone, Mirah weds a childhood sweetheart but the marriage is barren and turns bad.  The couple split.

If the reader is supposed to have sympathy for the lady’s problems then the author fails, for Mirah is no national heroine like Kartini, challenging the system and arguing for women’s rights. 

Instead she takes the victim position, constantly telling herself and others that she is ‘just an ignorant servant’ … ‘a contract worker’ … ‘a coolie’, even when opportunities are available     to escape her plight. In the jargon of modern psychology Mirah would be a good candidate for a course in empowerment.

Yet earlier in the book she proves she has teeth, literally; while still young she preserves her virginity by savagely biting the genitals of a plantation overseer who tries to rape her. 

Mistress of the plantation homestead, loved by her kind Dutchman (she only bites his tongue), surrounded by local friends and given every freedom except to linger with men, she instead pines for the squalor of the plantation  laborers’ barracks, where she can be with the people she knew as a child.

Some readers may see Mirah’s meek acceptance of her fate and reluctance to buck the ugly system she encounters as proof that generations of colonization can numb an individual’s spirit.

Others may read this as a story of Javanese fatalism and proof that Indonesians rank the company of their friends and relatives above all else, including comfort and relative security.

More practically Mirah was unschooled, far from her hometown, and ignorant of the war and the struggle for Independence. She remains a bewildered onlooker.  Yet with a little tweaking by her creator Mirah could have been a keen observer, giving the 21^st century reader insights into those dramatic times.

Instead we get little more than brief mentions of the momentous events that are known to every schoolchild who’s done basic history.  Sadly there’s no sign of deeper research that could have given the book more substance. 

There are also errors:  The Battle of Hollandia (now Jayapura) when Allied forces routed the Japanese occurred in March 1944. The book says that ‘lasting peace was still more than two more (sic) years away.’ The Japanese surrendered to the Allies on 15 August, 1945.

The device of Mirah telling her story to glamorous Wendy Morgan fails in the chapters on Lilli’s fate, when the author has to step in with a third-person account to fill in the gaps.

Despite these issues the book is an easy read, although the ending is unsatisfying because it stops short of revelation and reconciliation, surely the just dues of someone whose life seems to have been little more than a leaf in the winds of history.

Mirah of Banda  by Hanna Rambe (translated by Toni Pollard)   Lontar, Jakarta 2010,                                                                                                               

(First published in The Jakarta Post 1 December 2014)

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