GASSED BY COPS

 

 

 

        The raging signs of troubled times

The most widespread slogan stencilled on the Indonesian city’s walls, scrawled on posters, splashed on bedsheets in red and draped from powerlines and bridges is Usut Tuntas. 

The formal translation - investigate thoroughly - doesn’t carry the raw anger and pent-up mix of distress, impotence and fear which hang like a radioactive cloud over the Central East Java hilltown of Malang that’s lost 131 sports fans in one suffocating and avoidable tragedy.

The police marshal traffic, bunch together, avoiding eye contact.  They’ve chosen not to rip down the homemade signs, fearing to antagonise. In any case, there are too many. The slogans are often in English, scrawled savagely:  F… the cops, we hate you.

Posts on the centre strip of the city’s main drag carry black flags sodden with wet-season rains. Another popular tag is Gas air mata v Air mata Ibu - tear gas versus mothers’ tears.

The blame game is underway.  The messages are blunt, the implications deadly.  The cops are the crims.

A society that sets itself against the security agencies it supports and needs can collapse public order like Mexico’s murder capital Tijuana where gangs rule

Older Indonesians know of terror times. In the early 1980s, the government's solution to thug power was penembak misterius (mysterious shooters).  The words were squashed into Petrus, a new term for dread. 

Army death squads and snipers worked overnight, leaving the corpses on the streets to intimidate come dawn.  The policy of extrajudicial killings worked, though hundreds - maybe thousands - died before the police could regain control.

This month authorities knew there’d be strife at the soccer game between Malang’s Arema and its bitter rival Persebaya from the provincial north-coast capital Surabaya.

They expected a bit of biffo because not all are drawn by the beautiful game. Turbo-charged hormonal youths keen to show off find sports grounds good for their theatre. The crowds are mostly lads, for in this culture the easy intermingling of the sexes remains rare.

Indonesian has pinched and warped hundreds of English words like ekonomik, politik and teknologi. Reverse contributions are few.  The standout is amuck, which is what happened on Saturday 1 October when the visitors won the Premier League event 3-2 and the locals turned feral because Arema had been top dog for the past 23 years.

Although gambling is illegal, betting on games is commonplace and scores are allegedly often settled before kick-off, such is the corruption.

The death toll of 131 and more than 500 injured makes this the world’s second-largest soccer disaster after the 1964 Peru stampede which killed 328.  Police also used tear gas and fans were squashed to death at the gates.

The 1989 Hillsborough stadium crush in the UK  killed 97 and caused 766 injuries.  Officials tried to blame hoons, but an inquiry eventually found police and ambulance services failed their duty of care.

That’s the result expected from examinations of the Malang catastrophe, though whether that will lead to real change is doubtful. The incompetence of the organisers is already clear.

So far there are six publicly named suspects, match organisers and officers. The probe is being run by the police, whose image has already been bashed by gross scandals as this website has reported, so will have negligible credibility.

The location was the Kanjuruhan stadium - blunder one, for this is Arema’s HQ.  A neutral arena in another city would have been smarter.

The ground held 38,000.  Four thousand more tickets were sold, and if anyone thought this urge for more money might strain facilities and personnel, they didn’t speak up. Mistake two. 

Where were the casualties? Reports are contradictory.  Were the gates open, or was the gap too narrow to handle a surging crowd fleeing tear gas?  Flaw three:  The nerve agent is prohibited by world soccer's governing body FIFA, the  Federation Internationale de Football Association.

It also condemns the use of riot gear that police wore at Kanjuruhan. 

High fences to protect players and wide exits are essential in all stadia, a basic that architects and construction engineers learn in first-year uni, but ignored here.  Error four. 

It was held on the first Saturday of this month and at night. Gaffe five.  The police wanted it scheduled in the afternoon. They were overruled by the organisers.  In most countries the police would have the final say.

To its credit, the ABC sent a TV crew to Malang.  Other media covered from afar - one Australian report from Bangkok as though an Asian dateline bestows authenticity for a geographically illiterate readership.  Darwin and Perth are closer.

Health and safety in Indonesia are in the same era they occupied in Australia before unions successfully pushed for federal legislation to ensure public buildings are safe for all users.

Tragedies like Kanjuruhan will be repeated unless President Joko Widodo’s orders for an audit of stadia are bulldozed through all obstacles, commercial, political and bureaucratic.

A  headline in The Conversation said it clumsily but accurately: Indonesia is where the authority is not the solution, but the problem.

This truism Robbie Gaspar knows well.  The President of the Perth-based Indonesia Institute who was once an international professional soccer player including seasons with a local team in Malang, said ‘the sad thing is, this could have been prevented.

‘While Indonesian football has grown so much over the last few decades, investment, infrastructure and the authorities’ relationship with fan groups sadly haven’t progressed. 

‘I hope Indonesian football can properly review what went wrong and why … My hope is that from now on, no one goes to a game in Indonesia and experiences violence, unsafe infrastructure and loses their life because of a football match.’ 

Hear, hear.  But the deeper concern is that these fears aren’t confined to soccer.  They’ll be on the loose, prowling our streets if the current fury against the police goes unaddressed.

 The signs on Malang’s streets show a seething city demanding more than soothing words.

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 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 13 October 2022:

https://johnmenadue.com/the-raging-signs-of-troubled-times/

THE BOMBS THAT KILLED & MAIMED PEOPLE - AND NATIONS

 

    The blasts that blew neighbours apart

 

 

 The Kuta memorial Credit The Conversation.

The Bali bombings of two decades ago and remembered with anger and sadness did much more than kill 202 partygoers, wound 209 and scar families for years. The blasts also ripped a relationship that’s slumped into indifference.

The early 1990s marked a zenity in Indonesia-Australia friendships.  We saw possibilities, not problems.  President Soeharto’s dictatorship was rupturing as millions learned to bypass censorship finding that official accounts of their nation didn’t tally with facts.

The enthusiasm was electric. Sensing change, our schools and unis pushed Indonesian language and culture, boosted by increasing trade and diplomatic contact aided by PM Paul Keating’s famous 1994 statement: ‘No country is more important to Australia than Indonesia’. His successors have run similar though less portentous lines.

Few tourists who descended on the Hindu province of Bali realised they were in the world’s most populous Muslim nation.  Currency changers in Perth airport advertised ‘Bali Money’.

Even if they’d been aware, concerns would have been anaesthetised by politicians and traders bent on business-as-usual.  They chorused the unexamined assurance that Indonesian Islam was moderate and the people benign.  What about the 1965 genocide?  Hush, hush, they were killing Reds, not Whites.

The Asian Monetary Crisis of 1998 fuelled student dissent and Soeharto quit after 32 years of authoritarianism and kleptocracy. Then came the former aerospace engineer Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie and all seemed well until the third president deliberately or accidentally misread a letter from John Howard.

The PM had cautiously suggested a slow resolution to the ‘pebble in the shoe’ problem, the irritating East Timor independence movement supported not just by Aussie lefties but also Diggers who’d fought the Japanese on the island.  On 19 December 1998 Howard wrote to Habibie: 

‘It has been a longstanding Australian position that the interests of Australia, Indonesia and East Timor are best served by East Timor remaining part of Indonesia’, before suggesting an eventual  ‘autonomy package’.

Although Europe-educated Dr Habibie (he died in 2019) was smart and multilingual, his countryfolk thought him eccentric. He reacted impetuously to Howard’s note with a referendum believing reports that the Timorese loved their invaders.

Those who thought military intelligence an oxymoron feared a breakaway could inspire other provinces, the so-called ‘domino effect’, a popular metaphor at the time.

 In the 1999 vote 80 per cent opted to break free.  Indonesian soldiers reacted by scorching the earth.  Australia headed a UN peacekeeping mission.

The friendship fractured and the split was seismic.  We were no longer mates, but a perceived agency of disunity.  The national motto Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, unity in diversity, has the force of holy writ.  

On the evening of Saturday 12 October 2002, hundreds were drinking and dancing at Paddy’s Pub in Kuta when a suicide bomber triggered his backpack device.  The crowds rushed outside seeking safety in the street.  A parked Mitsubishi L 200 van was waiting for them laden with a tonne of high explosives.  

Nationals from 23 countries were victims, the majority Australians and Indonesians (88 and 38).  The outrage was condemned as terrorism by world leaders.  

The faith identifier was added when the transnational extremist Jemaah Islamiyah (Islamic Congregation) claimed responsibility, apparently to avenge the West’s support for the East Timor referendum. 

Then the Sunni Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda founded by the Arab businessman  Osama bin Laden of 9-11 infamy said it was behind the Bali blast because of  ‘the American war on terror’. A third bomb was set outside the US Consulate in Bali with no casualties.

The stated reasons were political, not religious.  The perpetrators were Muslims but that was largely incidental.  Their violence also felled fellow believers.

The fact that East Timor (now Timor Leste) was overwhelmingly Catholic rarely bothered Jakarta during its 25-year control.   Soeharto even gave a ‘present’ - the 27-metre-high Cristo Rei (Christ the King) statue which dominates the capital Dili.

It’s cruel to write and no comfort to the victims, but some positives have come from the outrage.  As Jakarta-based researcher Sidney Jones of the international NGO Human Rights Watch has written: 

‘The bombing served to strengthen the power and capacity of the police at a critical time, underscore Indonesia’s then strong commitment to democratic norms, and add an important new dimension to the Australia–Indonesia relationship.’

That’s true at the highest levels where both countries appear united in tackling terrorism. However, tactics differ as Indonesia considers many offenders to be pious people who’ve gone astray and are worthy of rehabilitation. Forgiveness isn’t just a Christian virtue. 

The feared anti-terror squad Densus 88 tends to point first and ponder later.  Late one night on a toll road in December 2020, police killed six alleged supporters of the banned radical Islam Defenders Front and its oft-imprisoned leader Rizieq Shihab.  No prisoners or witnesses. Since then reports of terrorism have been rare.

Boomers fantasise that as the US ‘deputy sheriff’ we plan to invade, plunder the natural resources and ‘Balkanise’ the nation. Later generations who’ve never heard of Yugoslavia have drifted into indifference. Zoomers reckon South Korea - which vigorously promotes its culture - is cool and Oz sclerotic.

Meanwhile, we harbour images of 273 million fanatics bent on converting a continent of 25 million godless hedonists.  If not, why make access to visas tougher for Indonesians than Malaysians and Singaporeans?

It took a decade to get a free trade agreement because both nations did better stuff-ups than drunk Oz hoons pissing in temples. President Joko (Jokowi) Widodo ignored high-level pleas to save two of the Bali Nine drug smugglers from the firing squad, angering millions. Australian agencies refined arrogance by hacking the phone of sixth president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, till then a fan of the people next door.

Some are trying to repair the damage, though not the media which has largely abandoned Jakarta. A few unis and NGOs run seminars and exchange programmes.  All good, though not penetrating pubs, clubs and shopping malls.

Perhaps guidance can come from the new monarch whose subjects -according to a UK uni survey - are almost three times more likely to hold prejudiced views of Islam than of other religions – a position probably duplicated here.

In 2010 HRH, who once tried to learn Arabic, offered this insight: ‘The Islamic world is the custodian of one of the greatest treasuries of accumulated wisdom and spiritual knowledge available to humanity’.   We may not want Charlie on our $5 note, but on this issue his views carry currency.

First published in Peals & Irritations, 10 October 2022: https://johnmenadue.com/the-blasts-that-blew-neighbours-apart/

 

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JUNGLE LAW: OUR DATA IS BIGGER THAN YOURS

 

  Apes, fires and bans - jungle data politics    

Outsiders doing business in Indonesia are urged to be polite and follow cultural norms. That also goes for academics, and the ones in this story have been exemplars of courtesy. But that hasn’t stopped their findings from getting rubbished and motives trashed.

 

 

Image - Betahita

Hollywood horrors give apes a bad name. Mistaken identity - the shaggy red-furred orangutan (man of the forest) aren’t gorillas, though in the same family, and don’t scramble up skyscrapers.  

They’re the real tree-huggers.  Their two-metre arms aren’t for swatting fighter planes like mozzies but to reach forest fruit. With 96 per cent of our genes, we could call them rellies. They’re no danger but they do challenge our greed.

Where they live threatens plans for their habitat.  Orangutans could enjoy free meals and medical care in zoos but prefer the wild to welfare.

They’re on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list as ‘critically endangered’.   An Indonesian trekking tour company asserts habitat loss and poaching have left the Bornean orangutans ‘struggling to reproduce fast enough to make up for the fallen numbers’. 

A decade ago there were an estimated 230,000.  There could be fewer than 50,000 by 2025, according to independent researchers.

Five from Brunei, the US, Malaysia, Germany and the UK who have been raising alarms boast ‘a combined 105 years of experience in orangutan and great ape conservation science’.   That suggests their concerns deserve serious examination.

Though not for the Indonesian government which reckons the doomsayers don’t know what they’re talking about.  

Conservationists everywhere would hope the authorities’ no-worries version is right, and likewise investors in palm oil and forestry.  If the great apes are flourishing and have swinging space to spare, then more land can be cleared. 

On International Orangutan Day (19 August) Environment and Forestry Minister Siti Nurbaya announced that  populations weren’t under threat: ‘Ground-based evidence confirms that Sumatran, Tapanuli and Bornean orangutans are far from extinction and instead will continue to have growing populations.’

Foresthints, a website of opaque provenance, headlined Nurbaya’s address as Indonesia ‘leading the way in orangutan protection’.

It reported the Minister suggesting some conservationists were publishing ‘not to collaborate but rather to generate benefits for themselves’ by running ‘unproductive and unconstructive campaigns’.

Two of the five researchers, Dutchman Erik Meijaard and American Julie Sherman then wrote in The Jakarta Post suggesting the long-term bureaucrat-turned-politician might not be reading the right data. The criticism was respectful but blunt:

‘A wide range of scientific studies … show that all three orangutan species have declined in the past few decades and that nowhere are populations growing.’

Statistics should be contested and research methods picked apart.  That’s how academic inquiry gets to the truth, though only if there’s open discussion. Instead, the Ministry rejected offers to scrutinise the foreigners’ figures and told them to get lost, banning them from entering National Parks and conservation areas.

Not because they’re trampling rare plants, tossing trash and frightening the beasties with camera flashes, but for ‘discrediting the government’.

Further work must now be supervised to ‘safeguard the objectivity of their results’. Functionaries watching keystrokes looks more like Pyongyang than Jakarta. Meijaard who works out of Brunei (located on Borneo) didn’t reply to this writer’s request for comment on the ban.

The edicts have led some to argue the government is ‘anti-science’ - a follow-on from early Health Ministry dismissals of reports that Covid was dangerous.  Some leaders do appear over-sensitive particularly when counter-views come from aliens.

A 2019 law imposes strict requirements on visiting researchers.  Violators can be jailed. Indonesian biologist Berry Juliandi feared damage to international collaborations.

 In 2020 the Environment Ministry scrapped its forest conservation partnership with the World Wide Fund for Nature alleging agreement violations.

Meijaard and mates let the slurs go through to the keeper:  ‘The minister’s comment about engaging the palm oil and forestry sectors in a multi-stakeholder approach to managing remaining orangutan metapopulations in production landscapes is also spot on. 

‘Indonesia’s recent successes in reducing deforestation rates are commendable and both the government and the private sector have played important roles.’ That wasn’t sufficiently soothing.

Foresthints defended the minister with reasoning which tested the English-language outfit’s ability to argue at their contestants’ level.

The ‘press company’ is run out of a Jakarta high-rise with Western editors and has been online since 2016.   It doesn’t carry adverts or appeal for subscriptions so appears to be government-backed greenwashing.  Requests for info on funding sources went unanswered.

Indonesian academic Herlambang Wiratraman asserted ‘the anti-science narrative in Indonesia is getting stronger as the Indonesian government continues to suppress the academic freedom of researchers in disseminating their research’.

He reminded readers that two years ago French landscape ecologist Dr David Gaveau, a deforestation expert who’d been working in the country for 15 years, was allegedly booted for a ‘visa violation’.

Gaveau wrote: ‘The Indonesian government deported me for publishing a preliminary estimate of the damage from Indonesia’s 2019 fires for seven provinces that exceeded the government’s own numbers (1.2 million).’

He said 1.6 million hectares had been burned,  Further research made this 3.11 million. Chief Investment Minister Luhut Binsar Panjaitan called for audits of NGOs spreading ‘fake news’ about deforestation.

During the 32-year rule of President Soeharto, whatever their expertise few within the Republic dared express opinions in public which undermined the government’s position.  When democracy came this century it was assumed freedom of expression was trotting close behind.

Maybe Gaveau and the orangutan researchers have got their data wrong.   Years of study doesn’t equal infallibility.  But resorting to argumentum ad hominem is worrying many, including networks Indonesian Caucus for Academic Freedom, and Scholars at Risk.

In a joint submission this year to the UN Universal Periodic Review of Indonesia the lobbyists declared the state and some unis were trying to ‘punish and silence dissent, inquiry, and academic expression’.

Notes to their document added that ‘scholars and students play an important role in Indonesia’s vibrant civil society, from promoting social justice and human rights to publicly discussing government corruption and environmental concerns.

‘Without fertile ground, Indonesian scholars and students are hindered in their ability to drive the country’s scientific, social, economic, and cultural progress.’

In Indonesia experts sounding alarms about local issues usually get noticed, though not always respected if they’re from abroad. Targeting authors is easier than critiquing their work.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 7 October 2022:

https://johnmenadue.com/apes-fires-and-bans-jungle-data-politics/

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