THE PRUDES' PRINCIPLE: SEX = SIN

 

No sex please – we’re Indonesians

 

 

For rationalists it’s screamingly obvious:  Sex without consent is rape and a criminal offence which all should know. Though to Indonesian fundamentalists that’s a shortcut to immorality.

Indonesians like visually polluting public places with spanduk (banners).  Those degrading the streetscape are usually adverts for smokes, but on university campuses they carry practical info about enrolments and guest lectures.

Brawijaya in East Java has more students than the unis of SA and WA combined.  Its green grounds have hundreds of pennants and streamers celebrating the institution’s upcoming 59^th birthday, but only one warning staff and students they’re entering an area free of sexual violence and bullying.

The sign was erected after Education, Culture, Research and Technology Minister Nadiem Makarim signed regulations to tackle campus sexual violence.  One section prohibits ‘intentionally displaying one's genitalia without the victim's consent.’

Another forbids ‘taking, recording, and/or circulating photographs and/or audio and/or visual recordings which have a sexual nuance without the victim's consent.’

At first glance that all sounds reasonable, though not to the Republic's peak Islamic body, the Indonesian Ulama  (Scholars’) Council, and the mass organisation Muhammadiyah.

They want the phrase ‘without the victim’s consent’ deleted arguing the regulation contradicts Indonesia’s religious culture by implying sex is OK if the parties consent.  In their interpretation this legalises adultery.

(Similarly twisted logic is surfacing with the teaching of English. Puritans say learning should be limited to terms used in industry and employment lest students absorb Western cultural values and practices along with verb conjugations.  The most feared infection from the Anglosphere’s vaults of vice is ‘free sex’.  The puzzling phrase is always in English.)

Under Islamic law sex outside marriage is haram (forbidden) but that doesn’t mean Indonesians’ libido is any less than the rest of humanity.  The birth rate is 2.3 children per woman.  It used to be much higher till the government ran a major Dua anak cukup contraceptive campaign (two kids are enough) last century.

In Indonesia, there’s usually a way around rules including those imposed by religions. Adulterers keen to satisfy their passion and retain their faith find corrupt clerics who ‘marry’ them before the tryst and then offer a ‘divorce’ next morning - a system known as nikah siri (unregistered marriage).  MBA is a higher degree and a pregnancy outside wedlock – ‘married by accident’.

While the government says it’s trying to tackle sexual violence it condones public floggings of unmarrieds and gays caught having naughties, along with gamblers and boozers.

As part of a peace deal negotiated in 2005 between Jakarta and the separatist Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh Movement), the province at the top end of Sumatra is allowed to use some aspects of shariah (Islamic law). 

Amnesty International Indonesia Executive Director Usman Hamid called the punishments ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading … disgraceful and ruthless – no one deserves to be brutalized and humiliated in this way.’  In the past decade more than 500 have been caned, some sentences of 100 strokes with reports of victims collapsing.

Till recently supermarkets in Java stocked lubricants and condoms, but these items have largely disappeared (not in Hindu Bali) to appease conservatives who seem to believe the sight of contraceptives on health shelves encourages horizontal refreshment.

So far Makarim has refused to shift his position, though that may change as the Islamic heavyweights start cracking knuckles.  In February, the Harvard graduate initiated a joint ministerial decree banning public schools from making jilbab (headscarves) mandatory for non-Muslim students. After howls and threats by conservatives, the Supreme Court revoked the ruling.

During a webinar last week the minister, a dollar multi-millionaire businessman co-opted by President Joko Widodo to modernise the state’s creaking and crumbling education system, said he was trying to tackle ‘a sexual violence pandemic’ on campuses, not legalise consensual lovemaking:

“The ministry does not support any acts that are not aligned with religious and moral norms. The regulation was designed to tackle a specific type of violence, which is sexual violence, with clear definitions.”

His claim that tertiary education institutions are halls of deviance came from a 2020 department survey showing 77 per cent of lecturers said allegations of sexual violence had occurred at their universities, though most acts went unreported.

What’s also propelling Makarim’s initiatives are statements by courageous women following the Me Too movement in the West. Before the pandemic claims of staff groping students were surfacing and campus authorities were slow to realise the old norms no longer fitted needs.

The latest claims getting widespread publicity come from a student at Riau University (on the east coast of Sumatra) alleging her thesis supervisor tried to kiss her in a closed office. When she complained to the department secretary she said she was told not to tell anyone.

 “They laughed in my face about it,” she said. “There was no protection, no empathy for what I had gone through. They tried to protect [the lecturer] instead, without caring about what had happened.” So she made a video, posted it on Instagram and told the cops.

The lecturer retaliated with defamation proceedings claiming Rp 10 billion (AUD 955,000) in damages.

Makarim’s regulation is supposed to force tertiary institutions to develop ways to handle allegations of sexual harassment or violence. The student’s lawyer has reportedly said the case could be a turning point for the implementation of the new regulation.

Andy Yentriyani Chair of Komnas Perempuan (the National Commission on Violence against Women), backed Makarim’s moves.  Like the Minister, she was also educated abroad – in London. Although KP had received only 67 reports of sexual violence on campus, she said most cases were unreported or unresolved:

“Victim blaming has been the biggest bottleneck as universities refuse to admit that sexual violation does happen.”

First published in Pearls & Irritations,  20 November 2021:https://johnmenadue.com/conservatives-undermine-push-against-sexual-violence-on-indonesian-campuses/

 

NO JOKE, PAK JOKO

 

                                  Indonesia’s Augean task

 

 

Photo - Kaltimber

 

Indonesia went to the COP26 climate summit with an impressive set of tasks for the next three decades. The list is broad, ambitious and admirable.  Unfortunately, the jobs won’t get done without the vision and force of a leader like the late Singapore PM Lee Kwan Yew.

 

 

Joko Widodo isn’t that man.  The Indonesian President has the numbers and just enough time (election in 2024) to start cleaning the Augean Stables, deep in the excrement of corruption and maladministration. Sadly Widodo is no Hercules – and his reforms are already being challenged from within.

Indonesia is particularly vulnerable to sea levels rising with beach and estuary settlements 14 times more exposed than previously realised according to some research.  Apart from pollution the nation’s most infamous contribution to world warming is forest clearing for palm oil plantations in provinces like Kalimantan on Borneo Island.

Widodo told COP26 that Indonesia was already preventing worsening climate change by replanting three million hectares of cleared land.

‘The rate of deforestation has declined significantly, the lowest in the last 20 years,’ he said. ‘Forest fires also declined by 82 per cent in 2020. We’ve also started rehabilitating 600,000 hectares of mangrove forests by 2024, the largest area in the world’.

At first, it seemed reform was real when Indonesia joined 127 other nations in a pledge to end deforestation by 2030.  But before Widodo had returned to Jakarta the plan – and the President’s credibility - had been put through the wood chipper by Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar.

(Ironically, her name translates as ‘burn’.  The former career bureaucrat is not in Widodo’s ruling party, but coalition member National Democrats.)

‘Forcing Indonesia to zero deforestation in 2030 is clearly inappropriate and unfair’, Bakar said on Twitter. ‘The massive development of (Widodo’s) era must not stop in the name of carbon emissions or the name of deforestation.’

Kiki Taufik, head of Greenpeace’s Indonesian forests campaign, said Bakar’s statement was ‘completely at odds with the declaration’.

It’s the sugar season in East Java.  Day and night eight-tonne trucks carrying top-heavy loads of cane grind their way along pot-holed and congested roads from field to factory. On every incline, they belch fumes so thick headlights can’t penetrate.

 

Indonesia has rules covering exhaust emissions, and occasionally the police run checks.  Truckies know the testing locations and take Jalan tikus - literally ‘rat roads’ but meaning rural tracks to avoid the cops.

 

There’s nothing exceptional about this behaviour. Indonesians are skilled in avoidance – not by confrontation but by agreeing and then ignoring. Politicians flick aside rules, protocols and conventions in a way that make their Canberra counterparts look amateur.

 

On paper, the world’s number ten top polluter with 615 million tonnes annually of CO2 (China outclasses all with more than ten billion) claims it’s trying to recreate a clean and cooler planet with policies locked into law.

There’s even that most foul phrase banned Down Under – carbon tax. The levy is Rp 30,000 (AUD 2.80) per tonne of emitted CO2, which critics claim is too tiny to deter polluters. The figure proposed before the big end of town hit the phones was Rp 75,000.  The EU rate is Euros 62.45(AUD 97 a tonne.)

Within 18 years the sale of petrol-powered motorbikes is supposed to stop.  Indonesia has around 112 million of the beasties so the dream of going renewable is electric.  Cars will follow a decade later, but so far no mention of heavy transport.

 

Curiously the pedelecs dashing across Europe and now the US have barely reached Indonesia.  The bikes, mainly imported from China, are often half the cost of those sold in Australia, though few buyers, probably for cultural reasons. Bicycles are for the poor or sport-crazies.  Pedalers are peripheral.

 

The volts needed to power the two and four-wheelers currently comes from burning

fossil fuels – 40 per cent oil, 24 per cent natural gas and around 30 per cent coal.

 

In the early years of second president Soeharto’s rule (1965-98), building dams was all the go.  There are now 30 hydroelectric plants and eleven geothermals, but together these meet only six per cent of the nation’s needs.

 

Within this decade there’ll have to be a massive rejig of the economy for Widodo to be remembered as a reformer.   Farewell smokestacks and LPG imports, so no ‘gas-fired recovery’. 

 

Instead a welcome to solar arrays delivering 42 per cent of power.  There’s not enough suitable space for square kilometres of collectors, and smog often smothers the sun.  Undersea cables from Australia may have to deliver, though that’s not stated.

 

Oil wells are going dry, so a nation once self-sufficient now imports.  To cut costs the state-owned power provider Perusahaan Listrik Negara is turning to coal despite a pledge to start weaning consumers off carbon.

 

 

Image - Greenpeace

The archipelago has huge reserves and has become the world’s top exporter of thermal coal - making a fortune supplying to China in place of the black stuff banned from Australia. The mines belong to a few oligarchs unlikely to easily abandon their businesses by 2055 as proposed.

 

How to change the formula?  The Indonesian Way is nuclear with the first fission in 2045.  The archipelago embraces the Ring of Fire and is one of the world’s most unstable regions.  Last year the country was shaken by 22 quakes magnitude six or above, 214 between five and six and 11,000 at lower levels.

 

Where the reactors will be built, how locals will be induced to accept radioactivity in their region, and how the technicians will be trained are like The Australian Way, matters for appendices which are yet to be written.

 

To date, Indonesia has largely ignored solar technology.  The glistening panels which smother Australian rooves are seldom seen even as hot-water providers.  Although units are available there’s been no real push to market except in Bali which is more open to Australian influences.

 

PLN is still trying to decide how to regulate domestic feeds into the grid, and what to pay for surplus electricity.

 

Unless there’s a massive community attitude shift and Widodo gets tough on enforcing policies, truck fumes will still be fogging highways in 2060 and the mosquito hordes of piston-engine motorbikes will continue to make motoring hell.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 8 November2021:

https://johnmenadue.com/indonesia-short-of-the-ability-and-will-to-fight-climate-change/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

YOUR PROBLEM, NOT OURS

 

Why bother? Everyone speaks English.         

 

                        

Pic: Oxford Uni

There are no votes in getting to know the neighbours.

How else to explain why successive Australian governments continue to ignore the crash of numbers learning Indonesian, and disregard the continuous and earnest appeals of teachers and academics to halt the slide?

It wasn’t always so.  Late last century, learning the words now used by more than 270 million - plus a further 32 million in Malaysia where the language is similar - was widely accepted.

 In large part the bonding was encouraged by former Prime Minister Paul Keating and his 1994 statement that ‘no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia.’

Successive leaders have said much the same but have failed to follow through.

Indonesian was once the most popular Asian language in Australian classrooms.  Now it’s Japanese and Mandarin with more students exploring vernaculars from distant Europe. Other nations teach the language next door: Spanish in the US, French in the UK.

Philistines might ask - so what?  Indonesian ranks tenth in the world’s top tongues and is little used outside Southeast Asia. Bengali and Arabic are more widespread.  But the Republic is tipped to become an economic world power when Covid-19 is controlled; Australia wants a part and already has a trade agreement in place.

The reluctance can be blamed on xenophobia.  In 1999 Australia supported the referendum on the future of the Indonesian province of East Timor where the locals voted 80 per cent in favour of independence.

Indonesians who expected the reverse result blamed Australia.  A security agreement developed by Keating was shredded by Jakarta.

The scorched-earth campaign by retreating troops and militia was universally condemned as Australia led the international peace-keepers. Then followed the 2002 Bali bombs, the 2004 Jakarta Embassy car blast and other attacks sourced to fundamentalists. 

The Indonesian government was as outraged by the terrorism as its counterpart Down Under but the long-term damage to the relationship continues.  The Lowy Institute’s annual opinion polls measure attitudes to our neighbours.   LI’s Southeast Asia Programme director Ben Bland commented:

‘Whether asked about their warmth toward Indonesia, confidence in its leaders, or even their level of basic knowledge about their biggest neighbour, Australians tend to show a combination of disinterest and distrust.’

Cuts in Australian newsrooms and the withdrawal of correspondents from Jakarta has left the media focussing on natural disasters and controversial issues, like the Supreme Court striking down school enforcement of girls wearing  jilbab (headscarves), charging people with blasphemy and banning alcohol.

In 2005 the Indonesian Majelis Ulama (Islamic Scholars’ Council) issued a fatwa (Islamic law ruling) banning liberalism, pluralism and secularism.  The edicts aren’t binding in civil law but are influential.

Australians who only know relaxed Hindu Bali and not the political, social and religious debates in Java and other islands found these news reports disquieting.

Likewise with Indonesians bemused by stories of Aboriginal deaths in custody, more than 100,000 homeless in a rich nation with universal welfare and importing fruit pickers when 626,000 are unemployed.

The public tone must influence parents and teachers when advising students on courses to pursue. For all their soothing clichés, politicians know electors run cold on Indonesia; why bother helping schools and unis train future generations in understanding our region when there are no ballot box advantages in relating to foreigners except as customers?

It seems the motivation in Canberra for maintaining interest in Indonesia is based on the STDs - Security, Trade and Defence.  It’s certainly not to develop mateship.

Former PM and Liberal Party elder statesman John Howard didn’t help with a display of Anglo arrogance.  Last year he was reported  saying we shouldn’t be too worried about the slump in Asian language learning as English was ‘the lingua franca of Asia’.

True in the five-star hotels where politicians and business executives discuss policies, though false elsewhere across the archipelago. Some ministers and executives are cosmopolitan, though not Joko Widodo.  The president has a poor command of English and shows little enthusiasm for foreign affairs. 

Although learning English is compulsory in Indonesian schools, it’s given little time and badly taught.  Anecdotally interest is also waning fast. School leavers can parse verbs but few can communicate. Native speaker teachers are rare outside expensive private schools.

Data from Melbourne University’s Asia Education Foundation shows how badly the situation has deteriorated.  Five years ago 14,418 Australian primary students were studying Indonesia.  By year 12 the number had ‘fallen off a cliff’ (say educators) to 353.  These are the kids most like to seek further education, but their choices are shrinking.

Of our 42 unis, only a dozen will be meeting needs.  In 1992 Indonesian was taught on 22 campuses to around 2,000 students.

In a bid to persuade parents, students and teachers to abandon hostility towards intercultural learning, the AEF has released its ‘rationale’, Why Indonesia matters in our Schools. The colourful six-page brochure argues that ‘young Australians must learn to engage in the global community, particularly with our neighbours in the Indo-Pacific region.’

Although the AEF ‘partners’ with the Australian Government there’s little to show its advocacy has been effective.  Foundation executive director Hamish Curry has written that ‘Without nation-wide policies, consistent data, funding and collective support, Indonesian could be relegated to a forgotten corner of our education experiences.’

Simon Merrifield, a senior diplomat and first ambassador to ASEAN, has reportedly been appointed to review Australia’s relationship with Indonesia.  He could start by first listening to educators.

First published in Australian Outlook, 5 November 2021:

##https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/why-bother-everyone-speaks-english/