KIDS & POLICY - NOT AN ACID-WATER MIX.

 TAKING THE FOREIGN OUT OF AFFAIRS                     

How to get the young involved in current affairs? Politicians shy from the question fearing Gen Z’s latent power could shrink their authority, so best seek an answer elsewhere. Like Indonesia?

"Now here's another point" : Dr Dino Patti Djalal, (left) versus presidential candidate Dr Anies Baswedan

         The queue was long, wide, pressing, hot and young. It spilled beyond the five-star hotel’s car park and forecourt. Waiters chatted excitedly about the day ahead, surely a Taylor Swift concert?

But the jolliness was jarred by the walk to the venue past ranks of pavement traders selling Palestine flags ready for the street protests to come.

For this was dawn on a Saturday in Jakarta this month and the masses had come to a show with the turn-off title From Non Alignments to Creative Alignments. It featured foreign affairs, international politics and fixes for an ailing world; with wars in Gaza, Ukraine and Myanmar there was no need to fossick for issues.

Why did an estimated ten thousand teens willingly spend a full Saturday getting involved in international relations with the sort of enthusiasm displayed for the Coldplay concert a fortnight  earlier? 

Here’s the formula: Hire a plush monster hall and make tickets free. Get an entrepreneur with headline acts on speed dial, then let him loose unconstrained by the fear and caution of a government department or uni admin. 

Then it supposedly becomes ‘the biggest grassroots foreign policy group in the world …determined to form a large international relations community with mature and sensitive insights on bilateral, regional, and global issues.’

The go-to guy is Dino Patti Djalal, 58.  If Indonesia used silver spoons this fella was born with a mouthful.

He entered the world in Belgrade where his father Hasjim Djalal was a diplomat - and later deputy FM. The lad was schooled in the US, Canada and the UK where he scored a PhD at the London School of Economics.

In 2010 as US ambassador he won fame by inspiring the diaspora to plug back into the nation they’d fled last century when Soeharto was president . But his ambition flew him too close to the sun; he quit Washington for a pitch at the presidency in the 2014 election.

His pedigree and qualifications failed to move the oligarchs who bankroll parties in Indonesia; they prefer clerics, business tycoons and old soldiers to intellectuals too canny to control. Indonesia’s Icarus hit the ground hard and learned a discomforting truth: Openings for used diplomats are rare. 

But he had enough money to start an enterprise, rightly reckoning that the student idealism that had driven out the autocratic Soeharto in 1998 and steered  in democracy was floundering to find the right map to power ahead.

Uni courses in politics were  pedestrian - why not make them energetic and accessible?

Together with academic and policy adviser Dewi Fortuna Anwar, who got her PhD from Monash and has a CV longer than this story, they started the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia. 

FPCI calls itself a ‘non-politic and independent foreign policy organisation to discuss and introduce international relations issues’ to diplomats, government officials, academics and students, business people and journalists.

Sounds good - but impotent without the clout of the Republic’s Foreign Affairs Department.  Despite this handicap the FPCI seems to have captured interest by running workshops and seminars.  

The presenters wear T-shirts and don’t peer down their spectacles at uppity students.   Lecturers are engaging, locals but overseas trained.

In an earlier interview with this writer he said: “Our mission is to promote peace and bring foreign policy to the public.That means finding out how to talk to ordinary people about these issues.  They may not seem interested but that changes when, for example, the price of imports rise.”

At the annual conference this month the bill-toppers included two of the three presidential candidates - former governors Anies Baswedan (Jakarta) and Ganjar Pranowo (Central Java). Cashiered former general and alleged human rights abuser Prabowo Subianto was invited, agreed, and then pulled out.

Dino asked the polis to address issues but not to campaign,  which is like urging a fish not to swim.

Ganjar appeared online from West Papua but Anies turned up and was mobbed by fans. Unlike the average plodding politician  he cracked jokes, exhausted the local media with his availability and avoided the booby-trap question which could have exploded his hopes on the spot.

Who’s his most admired figure? A magazine editor who once published a readers’ poll that put the Prophet in seventh place spent five years in jail for blasphemy. Anies got his sequence right, then added Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi. 

Others on stage during the day included a pondering of international professors telling of their fears and hopes for relations with China. All spoke in English as did many in the audience, students using the show as a chance to dazzle friends.

Ten embassies have caught on to the opportunities running stands promoting their unis. Australia sells quality and proximity, its rivals add scholarships and accommodation. Academic life used to be marketed as austere and sober, Now it’s offered as intoxicating.

To lighten the mood between sessions on the failure of diplomacy to keep fighters in hangars and drones unarmed, a try-hard lady filled in with stand-up comedy. Hopefully, she’ll refine her act before next year’s event.

By then there’ll be a fresh president and government.  The new mob may not be so tolerant of Dr Dino and his bid to poke the noses of the people into the affairs of the State.

First published in Independent Australia, 18 December 2023: 

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/getting-younger-generations-involved-in-politics-,18184

 

NOT ALL EYES ON THE US

 

 

               While the US flounders, China plants

Of all the corroded clichés used in reporting the US election, the most rusty claimed ‘the whole world was watching.’

It wasn’t in the Indonesian streets where the concerns were more parochial:  Rooves springing wet-season leaks, the lack of imported fruit (there are allegedly some rotten deals involving licences and preferred traders starving suppliers), and problems with the government’s health insurance policy under assault by the industry.

But nor was Trump v Biden on the agenda at the top end of town, even on poll eve. While the Anglosphere focussed on the US chaos which purports to be democracy in action, China was busy squirreling away, building   its influence in Southeast Asia.

On 2 November the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia ran a two-hour Virtual Jakarta Forum on ASEAN-China Relations 2020.  The plan was to ‘map a way forward for ASEAN-China economic cooperation towards a sustainable, innovative, and resilient growth in the region.’ 

That’s normally the job of sequestered diplomats, not an NGO driving policy, but the FPCI is becoming Indonesia’s de-facto Kemlu - the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – led by the pedestrian Retno Marsudi, a former ambassador to the Netherlands.

Dr Dino (left) and FM Retno (pic Erlinawati Graham).  

 

There were a couple of offhand comments about the US at the forum, but otherwise the focus was on a near future where China is deeply involved in the region’s trade, aid, finance – and almost every other facet of society.  This included paying with rupiah and renminbi rather than US dollars.

On 14 November the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership is expected to be signed. This is a proposed free trade agreement between ASEAN’s ten members with five of their FTA partners—Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

The world’s largest democracy was originally involved but pulled out last November over fears the ‘Made in India’ programme would be neutered by the deal, and its generic medicine manufactures hit by copyright rules. Despite this absence, the remaining 15 countries carry 30 per cent of the world's population and close to 30 per cent of its GDP.

It was clear from comments at the FPCI forum that China sees the RCEP as a major opportunity to expand and bed-down its interests in Southeast Asia, while other speakers seemed resigned.  The pragmatists recognise Indonesia’s trade and aid ties with Beijing are pushing the world’s third-largest democracy away from Washington.  According to Indonesia’s Finance Ministry, the nation’s debt to China is AUD 25.2 billion.

Although negotiations have dragged on for eight years the RCEP has rarely featured in the Australian mainstream media. The Asian press has been reporting ‘some key players...especially Japan and Australia (have) nagging concerns about a pact in which China's presence looms ever larger.’

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has been quoted as saying worsening diplomatic ties between China and Australia would not get in the way of the progress of the RCEP.

Among the 200 plus participants and onlookers at the FPCI forum were diplomats and scholars from Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.  Australia was not represented. 

Deng Xijun, China’s Ambassador to ASEAN effused about the shift from ‘pandemic control to economic recovery’, the ‘stability of the region’ and the roles his country would take if and when Covid-19 retreats.

These included the manufacture and distribution of a Chinese vaccine should one become available, the extension of the Belt and Road programme of road, rail and port expansion, and improvements in the supply chain, including more direct flights from Chinese cities to the archipelago.

‘We share the Asian values of solidarity and collaboration,’ he said.  Decoded this means the Chinese have the language, deep contacts and subtle skills in handling obstructive bureaucrats that Westerners lack or can’t access.

China is Indonesia’s top trading partner, taking raw materials, mainly coal.  Former Indonesian trade minister Gita Wirjawan, who was educated at Harvard, told the forum that the US had been ‘disingenuous and disrespectful’ in its approach to global warming concerns.

These exports may suffer if China goes ahead with its emissions-reduction programme, leaving Indonesia with limited markets for its low-grade coal.  About 80 per cent of production is exported.
 
As an NGO the FPCI is rapidly becoming the leading initiator of accessible and informed comment on international affairs.  It’s already eclipsing the Centre for Strategic and International Studies which claims to be Indonesia’s leading think tank on social, international, political and economical issues.

The CSIS was founded in 1971 by a group of mainly Catholic fervent anti-Communist Chinese businessmen and generals and advised the despotic second president Soeharto on foreign affairs until the 1980s.  It has since tried to reshape itself as mildly liberal and inclusive, though still tainted by its partisan past.

So far the FPCI does not appear to be in any party’s pockets, though its founder, former Ambassador to the US Dr Dino Patti Djalal, made a lukewarm bid for the presidency as an independent in 2014.  He was educated at the left-leaning London School of Economics and was spokesman for the nation’s sixth president (2004-2014), former General Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, leader of Partai Demokrat.

The FPCI’s 14 ‘partners’ includes the embassies of Australia, Denmark, the EU, Netherlands and Japan and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Foreign Affairs has long been seen as an esoteric discipline accessible only to high-born Francophones.  (Djalal’s dad Hasjim Djalal is a former Indonesian Ambassador to Germany, Canada and the UN.)  The FPCI is making it more democratic, and before the pandemic drew hundreds of young people to its big free events.

It says its ‘mission is to promote and shape positive Indonesian internationalism throughout the nation and to the world.

‘We want to bring foreign policy to the grassroots, and to provide a dynamic meeting point where everyone interact as equals. We aim to be an independent, credible voice for Indonesia’s foreign policy.’  It’s certainly seen by Beijing as the place to plant ideas knowing they’ll get propagated.  .

 First published in Pearls and Irritations 6 November 2020:  https://johnmenadue.com/while-the-us-flounders-china-plants/

MAKING FOREIGN AFFAIRS FUN

 

PUTTING ZING INTO STATECRAFT   

         

Foreign affairs (the political version, not dalliances abroad) is seldom a synonym for fun.

The standard photo has a line of suits trying - and failing - to look human.Their media statements, labelled ‘communique’ to maintain the mystique, are triumphs of euphemism, so bland they make laundry lists sound like Hamlet.

Few would bother to read unless they got paid well for the pain.

Yet in Jakarta this month about 5,000 early post-teens gave up a full Saturday, packing a plush central city auditorium.  They came to hear ambassadors and academics parade their theories on why governments do bizarre and sometimes awful things in the indefinable ‘national interest’.

A Dangerous Drift?  Ideas to fix a Broken World was labelled the World’s Largest Foreign Policy Conference. Who knows - does anyone keep tabs? More important is that it was free and a wild success.

The man responsible for putting diplomacy on Indonesia’s entertainment pages is Dr Dino Patti Djalal, 53, the Republic’s former ambassador to Washington.  

Veteran journalist and Tempo weekly editor Bambang Harymurti (left, with author) was among many in the crowd amazed that so many stayed till 7 pm when the norm is to drift off to coffee after the first break and never reappear.

One reason is because speakers were pushed to use real words instead of acronyms, put up solutions rather than recycle problems, and be brief and punchy. Most were. Another is that the line-up included ‘artists’ meaning TV stars, film actors - and Alya Nurshabrina.

The 22-year old model and ‘beauty queen’ (as labelled by the unreformed local press) is best known as Miss Indonesia 2018, less famous for studying international relations at university and heading a student delegation to Harvard. So she’d earned her place on a panel titled: The Return of the Angels: How the Millennials see the World and what they want to see fixed.

Asking kids - and adults listening? Revolutionary.

Close to half the Indonesian population of 260 million is under 30. The young tend to turn off politics - or the religious smears and brutal accusatory way the dark arts are conducted - but are besotted by ‘celebrities’.

Another well-baited hook was to run the millennials session late and then follow with an on-stage Battle of the Brains, a general knowledge contest involving teams of ambassadors, CEOs and the ‘angels’.

This even got the grey-hairs who’ve spent their lives maintaining tight lips to fracture the rictus and let laughs loose.

Djalal is well-known in Indonesia for using entrepreneurial flair to enliven statecraft.

His father, Hasyim Djalal, 84 and in the audience, was a former ambassador to the UN, Canada and Germany.  His second son’s first degrees were in Canada, then a doctorate from the London School of Economics. 

The young Djalal spent 27 years in government service and was a confidante of the last president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who made him ambassador to the US.

In that job he staged the world’s biggest angklung performance at the Washington Memorial with more than 5,000 participants. The traditional bamboo-tube onomatopoeia-named instruments are rattled to produce a jangling melody.

He ran in the New York Marathon, and in Los Angeles got the Indonesian diaspora together to help the homeland.  In between he probably sparked a few trade deals but these failed to ignite the media.

Then the well-educated Djalal (left) forgot the story of Icarus.  The showman turned candidate got too close to the Jakarta sun while trying to fly into the 2014 presidential election.

Down to earth and ego badly bruised, he remained keen to stay in foreign affairs.  The problem is that the big game’s played by governments.  So he started the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia (FPCI), to expand Indonesians’ understanding of the world and defeat xenophobia.

The NGO runs workshops, seminars, overseas tours and this year’s Dangerous Drift? conference with 20 breakout sessions, including the heavies like climate change, multi-lateralism and terrorism - and the A-team. 

Our man Gary Quinlan was there along with ambassadors from the US, Russia, Japan, India, Canada and the EU. They ran a ‘diplomacy clinic’ to help students’ research. Where else could undergrads get such insights?

Most sessions were in English, lively and challenging.  There were flash videos, up-beat singers and enough energy to power the show if the lights had fused. 

The only damper was a 30 minute wait for the opener, Luhut Binsar Panjaitan the Coordinating Minister for Maritime Affairs, a former Army commander who then ranted about the need for discipline.  Indonesian VIPs often stage late arrivals, supposedly to enhance their status. 

Note to the gentleman: Your nation is now a robust democracy; leaders are respected but no longer held in trembling awe.

“Our mission is to promote peace and bring foreign policy to the public,” Djalal said in an earlier interview.  “That means finding out how to talk to ordinary people about these issues.  They may not seem interested but that changes when, for example, the price of imports rise.

“We want to develop understanding between nations.  Our youth exchange program with China should help reduce Sinophobia”.

A moving moment in the conference came when the North Korean and South Korean ambassadors to Indonesia, An Kwan-il and Kim Chang-beom accepted the FPCI’s Courage for Peace Award on behalf of their leaders.

The men shook hands, hugged and then spoke to the crowd in English; the kids went wild. Will they be a generation that never knows war?

Try that in Australia.  We’d probably call it a stunt.  In Jakarta it felt real.

First published in Pearls and Irritations 30 October 2018:     
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-putting-the-zing-into-statecraft/