You wouldn’t read about it
In Australia it’s ‘border security’, an imagined armada of desperates eing persecution and seeking sanctuary in the Great South Land. This is being used to spook voters ahead of a general election, probably in May.
In Indonesia it’s the sale of books which might rouse readers to favour the return of Communism as the 17 April Presidential vote looms in the world’s third largest democracy.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is warning that law changes, forced through Parliament by the Labor Opposition and Independents this month, will threaten electors’ comfortable lives. Deep in the psyche of many is the guilt of occupying a vast resource-rich continent of only 27 million when the archipelago next door has ten times the population.
The changes allow seriously ill asylum seekers currently held on Nauru Island and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to be transferred to the mainland for medical treatment. Mr Morrison claims this will give the green light to Indonesian people smugglers keen to restart their nefarious trade.
There are about 14,000 Middle Easterners, mainly young men, stranded in Indonesia. They flew into the Republic earlier this decade lured by promises they’d be ferried across the Arafura Sea. Their dreams have been thwarted by the Australian Navy turning back boats, a policy with the jingoistic title ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’.
While sailors from Down Under have been scouring the horizon for SIEVS (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels), though in reality rickety wooden inshore fishing smacks, Indonesian soldiers have been rummaging stores in Kalimantan, Sumatra and Java hunting publications they claim will endanger the state.
Their principal targets are revisions of the coup last century, which took General Soeharto from Army barracks to the Presidential Palace where he stayed for 32 years wielding absolute power. He stepped down in 1998 after mass protests and died a decade later.
The publications tend to be histories which don’t conform to the official line of what happened on 30 September 1965; that night six generals and a lieutenant were murdered in Jakarta, allegedly by members of the Communist Party (PKI). A dreadful bloodletting followed with an estimated half million real or suspected Reds slaughtered in a purge of the party.
The Soeharto story has always been that the massacres were a spontaneous response of pious Muslims outraged by the actions of the godless Marxists. This has been proved false through the scholarship of overseas academics writing in English.
Some of this research is being picked over and re-worked by Indonesian authors, then printed locally in Indonesian.
Last year Canadian Geoffrey Robinson, professor of history
at the University of California, Los Angeles released his account of the 1965
events in The Killing Season.
Months earlier Australian post-doctoral fellow at Yale
University Jess Melvin published her meticulous sifting of Indonesian Army
documents from the period in The Army and the Indonesian Genocide stating
categorically that the slaughter was organized by the army.
There have been many earlier accounts, like the University
of British Columbia professor John Roosa’s Pretext for Mass Murder,
which was translated and banned, though none quite so definitive as Dr Melvin’s
work.
Governments having problems with dissidents like island
solutions. Survivors of the post-putsch putdown were sent to forced labor
camps, like Buru Island, 2,300 kilometers north east of Jakarta. Here the writer and Nobel Prize nominee
Pramoedya Ananta Toer was held for 13 years along with 12,000 others, mainly
intellectuals and creatives.
Robinson, who was formerly with Amnesty International,
called Buru a ‘concentration camp’ and ‘penal colony’. The New York Times
label was ‘Soeharto’s Gulag.’ The government’s terms were ‘resettlement projects for political
rehabilitation.’
For a while it seemed President Joko Widodo was inclined to
side with the human rights activists who have been urging an open inquiry into
the events of the 1960s and a search for reconciliation.
.
That hope slipped away with his 2016 appointment of Wiranto
as coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs. Robinson claims the former armed forces
commander has said the 1965-66 violence was ‘legally justifiable’, which
doesn’t mean it was morally right.
The Indonesian Army is claiming that even though the
Communist Party is officially banned, only they can stop the PKI’s resurgence,
so an authoritarian policy is essential, which includes burning books. Yet this is illegal, according to a 2010
Constitutional Court decision which overthrew Soeharto’s censorship laws.
The boat-banning Australian Government says the 1,000 men
left on Manus and Nauru will never be allowed to settle in Australia. (Some proven refugees have been accepted by
the US in a swap deal with South Americans.)
Opponents of the island camps call them ‘hell holes’ (the
official term is ‘Regional Processing Centre’). The detainees wait in a political limbo hoping some other country
will come to their aid, or that conditions will improve in their homelands and
it will be safe to return.
That seems as remote as the islands. According to the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees more than 65 million people have been ‘forcibly
displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights
violations.’
With those number the fate of a few hundred
in the far-away Pacific rocks no boats in Europe and North America. A New Zealand offer to take 150 a year has
been knocked back by PM Morrison claiming they could eventually get citizenship
and move across the Tasman.
Cynics also note that closing Manus and
Nauru would deny Australian politicians the stick to whack their opponents in
an election season. In the spirit of
not letting the facts spoil a good yarn, the government has stayed silent on
revelations that in 2017 almost 28,000 people sought Australian protection
visas.
But they came individually, smartly
dressed and by air, often masquerading as students or tourists before seeking
sanctuary. It’s not an image terrifying voters like that of a fleet of
over-crowded boats heading Down Under.
Do fear campaigns still work? We’ll know in about three months.
##
First published in Strategic Review, 26 February 2019: http://sr.sgpp.ac.id/post/elections-alert-beware-of-boats-and-books
No comments:
Post a Comment