LOOKS LIKE PYONGYANG? NO, IT'S JAKARTA

CONTROL THE PAST -THEN THE FUTURE. THUS SPOKE ORWELL            

It’s been argued that Indonesia’s next President may be good for Australian interests; for domestic progressives that’s doubtful.

It’s not just computer apps that get updated. Indonesian President Joko ’Jokowi’ Widodo is fiddling with the future by rewriting history and binning the past.  It’s a task made easier by voter ignorance.

The remake started when Jokowi made Prabowo Subianto - his main rival in the 2014 and 2019 elections - Minister of Defence.  That gave the loser a public platform as part of the government.

Some saw this as a political masterstroke based on the writings of Chinese General Sun Tzu  (probably 544–496 BC) of keeping friends close but enemies closer.

The move pruned Prabowo as the only real thorn, for by then Jokowi had recruited small parties into his coalition.

Prabowo’s promotion also gave the notoriously inflammable wannabe poli something to do.  He could now openly talk guns and bombs with men in uniform as he did before he was cashiered.

That was amid the 1998 revolution which saw the authoritarian Soeharto - also a former general - quit the presidency after 32 years of despotic rule.

The revival of democracy wasn't a good year for Prabowo. He was stripped of his ribbons for alleged insubordination after Soeharto's replacement Vice President Bacharuddin Jusuf (BJ) Habibie took control.

Prabowo then fled to exile in Jordan following his divorce from Soeharto's daughter Siti. He returned in 2008 after his former father-in-law died and tried to get into politics failing at every attempt to join an established party.

So he started his own and called it Gerindra (Great Indonesia Movement). It now has 86 seats in the House of Representatives where it’s the third largest party and its leader president-elect.

 It’s labelled right-wing by the Western media but that’s too facile. It’s certainly bombastically nationalistic and carries a whiff of  fascism.

In this year's February election, Prabowo won convincingly against two opponents with 55 per cent of the popular vote.  (The Constitution prevented Jokowi from standing again for a third term.)

Now Prabowo’s backers are erasing mentions of his alleged human rights abuses that saw him refused entry to the US and Australia earlier this century.

The bans have been quietly lifted. Other subtle changes are underway, particularly descriptors of  Prabowo as ‘general, retired’, even used by the supposedly neutral academic journal The Conversation.

Wikipedia now calls him a 'retired honorary army general.' In the partisan Indonesian media this title has become commonplace with no mention of past villainies, like the seizure of 13 student protesters by his commandos and never seen again.

Since 2007 their parents have protested silently every Thursday before the State Palace in Jakarta demanding to know what happened to their sons.  Jokowi once promised an inquiry.  That hasn’t happened.

Prabowo responds that he’s never been charged, which is true, and that it’s time to focus on the future. That’s the standard line for all who want no probe into their past.

Now Jokowi has gone further, reinstating his successor as a four-star honorary general. When kicked out of the army in 1998 he had three stars.

NGOs have taken legal action to rescind the award but neither Prabowo nor Jokowi fronted the court.

Next came the police with their highest honour, Bintang Bhayangkara Utama (star of meritorious service ) “awarded to individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to advancing the Indonesian National Police, going beyond their duties.”  

Curious praise: A 2022 survey showed the police ranked as the least trusted of all law enforcement bodies. Last century the army ran the police.  Separation has been incomplete; soldiers can often be seen with cops acting as security at sporting events.  

How can all this happen in a society with easy Internet access to Prabowo's bio?   It's a question also being asked in the US of Trump, where Republican diehards ignore his lies and failings to win power.

It's not that bad yet in Indonesia.  One theory about support for Prabowo blames 32 years of bibliophobia when Soeharto ruled;  rote learning at schools and widespread censorship led electors away from critical thinking and into blandly accepting party propaganda.  

As Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future.”

Completing 12 years of education for 50 million students is supposed to be mandatory,  six at primary and three years each at middle and high school.

Public schooling is allegedly free for the first two stages but uniforms and subtle add-ons make education expensive. Many kids drop out in the mid-teens to work or help their parents.

A 2018 report by the Lowy Institute claimed the system had been a "high-volume, low-quality enterprise that has fallen well short of the country's ambitions for an internationally competitive system".

It blamed not enough money and poor management but "most fundamentally a matter of politics and power."

There’s little evidence the situation has improved, though the public may be ahead of their leaders. A Kompas newspaper survey claimed more than 88 per cent of respondents agreed that "political education was crucial to be pursued as a section strengthening democracy.”

By the time Prabowo,73, is inaugurated on 20 October the world's third-largest democracy will welcome its eighth president.  By then the embarrassing version will have been erased.

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  First published in Pearls & Irritations, 29 June 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/control-the-past-then-the-future-thus-spoke-orwell/

 WHAT YE SOW YE REAP

There’s nothing profound about the Biblical quote; variations are embedded in many religions and cultures.  

So it needs no prophet, seer or conman to make this prediction:  After a war like the current one in Gaza has cooled, the survivors will be bent on revenge.

The ancient tragedy is underway just next door in Papua, bleeding now and  for years to come as the hate goes on.

Canberra expresses its horror at the Middle East conflict 14,000 km distant and calls for peace, but looks away from what’s happening in the neighbourhood just 250 km to the  north.

Last year the late NZ journalist John McBeth reported that Papua independence leader Egianus Kogoya’s  determination to fight for freedom started after his father, Daniel Yudas Kagoya (correct) was killed by Indonesian troops.

Many in his group of armed partisans have become guerrillas for the same reasons.

They're now old enough to confront those they blame for the slaughter of their parents, relatives and friends and the destruction of their homes and livelihoods; so they've started killing and are getting killed.

The ore-rich province with the world’s fifth largest gold mine reserves has been a simmering low-level civil war zone since Jakarta took over the western part of New Guinea from the Dutch colonialists.  That was in 1969 following a staged ‘referendum’ using 1,025 hand-picked voters who unanimously supported integration.

One estimate has half a million indigenous Papuans dying in the past half-century through starvation and resisting Indonesian control.

No one knows if the figure is correct as journalists are banned.  Thousands of soldiers from across the archipelago are in Papua. How many is not publicised though last year it was reported that 'an additional 2,355 military members' had been deployed.

The conflict shows no signs of lessening.  In 2014 when President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo took office he told the Australian media he intended to give  Papua “special attention”.

It was benignly assumed that this meant peace talks because Jokowi was not a gung-ho militarist but a civilian, his wife Iriana had been named after the island’s old title and his visits were regular and friendly.

However his “special attention” was infrastructure, not independence: Roads, health services and education - all necessary, but secondary to the self-rule the rebels demanded.  Pacifying the insurgents and listening to their emotional concerns wasn’t on the agenda.

In 2022 Jokowi  started carving up the territory confusing locals and outsiders by amplifying bureaucracy and control. The four new provinces are Papua Selatan (South Papua), Papua Tengah (Central Papua), Papua Pegunungan (Mountain Papua) and Papua Barat Daya (South-West Papua).

For this story, we'll use ‘Papua’ to cover all.  The population of 4.4 million is largely Melanesian and Christian. However transmigration programmes bringing in poor farmers from Java who are mainly Muslim, has been diluting the indigenous population for decades.

Jokowi's predecessor, former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said he’d  “take quick and appropriate steps to deal with Papua” after violent clashes.  His ‘solution’ was force.  More died but little changed.

At the time the SMH reported that “(SBY’s) money and good intentions were squandered by corruption, cronyism and bureaucratic dysfunction.”

After a decade in office, Jokowi's legacy is  "a better armed, better resourced, more coordinated pro-independence insurgency,"  according to a Jakarta research group the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict. 

“(There are) higher civilian casualties; and the failure after a year to secure the release of a New Zealand pilot held hostage by the guerrillas.”

 (Phillip Mehrtens, then 37,  was seized on 7 February last year and his Cessna used for ferrying construction workers and  owned by an Indonesian company was torched. It’s believed he’s still alive.)

The IPAC report said Jakarta’s approaches can be characterized as: “Get them to like us”, “Hit them without mercy”, “Divide and rule”, “Give them money”, “End their isolation” and very occasionally, “Talk to them”. 

It recommends that "(Jokowi's) successor needs to radically change course."  But that's Prabowo Subianto a general who served in Papua before being cashiered for insubordination in 1998 and fleeing to exile in Jordan.

In his new leadership role he's offered to send a peacekeeping force to Gaza if there’s a ceasefire.  

The idea is saturated in irony: Indonesia has no relationship with Israel. All remnants of Jewish life during the Dutch era - including cemeteries - have been trashed. Most troops are Muslims, and Prabowo has allegedly committed human rights abuses on the island last century.

Veteran Australian journalist Hamish McDonald, author of Demokrasi: Indonesia in the 21st Century has written that in 1984 Prabowo "led troops from Kopassus, the army's Special Forces Command, across the border into Papua New Guinea to search for fighters from the Free Papua Movement Organisasi Papua Merdeka - OPM.

"In 1996, he led a Kopassus operation to free World Wildlife Fund hostages taken by the OPM. The mission was controversial because soldiers travelled via a white helicopter previously used by Red Cross negotiators"

Indonesia is still far from winning the hearts and minds of its Papuan citizens or erasing its image as a ruthless neo-colonial power.  It’s treating the OPM much as the Dutch handled the Javanese partisans during three centuries of European rule - split, discredit, threaten, arrest, kill.

That didn’t work and Indonesia is now an independent republic, largely because the Western world - including Australia, turned against the colonials and demanded change.  Weapons and money were denied to a Netherlands weakened by World War II.

That's unlikely to happen in Papua in the lifetimes of our readers.  The mines are too rich and involve influential international players. Indonesia is the world's fourth-largest nation with more Muslims than any other country.

Australia speaks strongly about human rights but does little; there’s a deep reluctance to advocate a break in the circle of violence in Papua and infuriate Jakarta.

Much like the situation with Jerusalem and the Gaza war.

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First published in Pearls & Irritations, 21 June 2024:   https://johnmenadue.com/what-ye-sow-ye-reap/

 

 

 

 

 

FIVE RULES FOR ONLINE NEWSLETTER EDITORS

  ETHICS FOR NEWSLETTER EDITORS 

 

RESPOND: If  you invite submissions; acknowledge receipt and say when you’ll reply.

DISCIPLINE: Stick to the response date.

READ right to the end- that might make some questions unnecessary.

BE HONEST: Don’t tell  authors you’re overwhelmed with copy so can’t fit in theirs. If  true, stop inviting submissions.

DON’T WHINGE:   Freelancers have difficulties aplenty getting placed and paid - they don’t want to hear the problems of salaried staffers.

 

ONCE UPON A TIME ... GLORY OR GORY?

 THE PAST IN INDONESIA IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY

As  it is with all legends, the more distant the memory, the greater the reverence and the sketchier the details.

This pithy observation comes towards the close of Herald van der Linde’s new history Majapahit, the story of East Java’s golden century and its international clout. (Monsoon Books).

The alert should have been at the start, a warning to politicians everywhere prone to anointing themselves in the imagined successes of yesteryear to stay in office, forgetting their messy failures and hoping voters do the same.

The Majapahit era, named after the bitter maja (stone apple) fruit, thrived under Emperor Hayam Wuruk (1350-1389), a relatively civilised leader.

During his time the epic story/poems the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the wayang kulit puppets defined Javanese culture and still do.

The Hindu-Buddhist empire circled the Brantas River trade route, no longer navigable and now dubbed Kali Plastik.  Its fertile floodplains are still largely hand-cultivated.

Majapahit rule probably stretched from what's now Malaysia through the archipelago to the southern Philippines and even Thailand.

Does studying the past cloud or clarify the present?  It depends on whether the learner has access to all and not just an authority's sanitised version.

Indonesia is already planning its 2045 celebrations of a centenary of independence so there's time to honestly ponder where the Republic is heading and where it has come from.

 Here  Majapahit could be a splendid guide.  Unfortunately, thoughtful analysis is often swept aside by economic stats that are so much easier to grasp.

Current president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo forecasts a population of 309 million enjoying a per capita income of AUD 44,000 in the world's fourth largest economy within the next 21 years.

If there are any progressives around by then they'll be urging historians to address the difficult along with the triumphs to ensure balance.

 van der Linde's collected yarns of conquest and success long ago are the difficult-to-disprove stories governments prefer. Recent histories, such as accounts of the genocide of the mid-1960s  still arouse great emotion.

An estimated half-million real or imagined Communists were slaughtered; the dirty deals that felled founding president Soekarno and raised General Soeharto as his successor are not well known.

"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there," wrote British novelist Leslie Poles Hartley. Maybe for Westerners, not for Indonesians. Here the past is ever present.

The story of the mainly 15th-century Majapahit rule only needs individual, date and city name changes to be an account of politics today.

Fortunately backstabbing is now a metaphor so the Kris (the traditional wavy-blade Javanese dagger often used for murders and considered magical) isn’t needed to despatch rivals.

The way now to cripple an opponent is by making allegations of corruption or leanings towards Communism.

Indonesia as a modern secular democracy is the official version of the Republic born in 1945.  The parallel universe continues as a nest of scheming oligarchs forever working to amass fortunes, build feudal dynasties and leave a legacy of great structures for future admirers.

Just as it was in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

Much of the little that we know comes from the Nagarakretagama, a eulogy and travel history written on lontar leaves by the court poet Mpu Prapanca in 1365, and now in the National Museum in Jakarta.  In 1894 it was rescued by a Dutch philologist from a fire in a Lombok palace when attacked by the colonialists.

Other sources include inscriptions on monuments and the walls of abandoned temples including Borobudur.  The world's largest Buddhist monument was rediscovered by Stamford Raffles when he was Governor of the Dutch East Indies between 1811 and 1817 and recounted in his History of  Java.

Pulling all the sources together with the gaps filled by an imaginative writer we have a well-written treasury of good research.  Almost 20 per cent of Majapahit is footnotes and bibliography, but no index - a gnawing frustration for dippers and recallers.

The collapse of the empire around 1527 came through a confluence of attacks by Islamic armies, factional feuds, fights over succession, incest, natural disasters and the apparently bloodless death at 74 of the era's architect Gadjah Mada.  

The 'rutting elephant' was once the most powerful person in a court of thrusting schemers and betrayers.   An image shows a plump-faced man, not a Tom Cruise action adventurer, though that was also his role.

He was the low-born schemer of the time, able to out-think all around him and come out on top, advancing the empire and himself.

A devious ambitious military and political strategist he's now praised as the hero of Indonesia and his name embellishes the military and academia.

When militant Islam set out to cleanse the land of other faiths the Majapahit capital (now Trowulan and much restored) was trashed and the people fled east. Which is why Bali is now a majority-Hindu province.

Dutch banker/historian van der Linde spends much time in Indonesia when not in Hong Kong. His book is subtitled 'Intrigue, betrayal and war in Indonesia's greatest empire.'

The plots are complex, the characters even more so, but although the events happened centuries ago they resonate still, much like Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Today we have a president abandoning a party and its matriarch that put him into power - then levering his son to take his place through a cunning plot worthy of a Majapahit conspiracy.

This young businessman, Vice President Gibran Rakabuming, is linked for the next five years to a disgraced former military general twice his age. All the ingredients are here for a sinetron (TV soap opera) or a political crisis.

Centuries ago leaving a legacy meant building temples to honour the reigns of royals. Today it’s the construction of the Jakarta replacement Ibu Kota (capital) Nusantara in East Kalimantan dominated by a grand presidential palace.

It's doubtful this will be as enduring as the candi of the Majapahit era and the tales of the time.   

Despite van der Linde's meticulous squirrelling among the archives and ruins, we'll never know how much is true because victors write history's first drafts.  But many of Majapahit's yarns are entertaining, often bloody yet helpful in understanding Indonesia and its people today.

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    First published in Australian Outlook, 19 June 2024: 

https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/australianoutlook/book-review-majapahit-intrigue-betrayal-and-war-in-indonesias-greatest-empire/

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See another review here: https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/book-review-majapahit-intrigue-betrayal?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=5fcu&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

INDONESIA'S CARBON CRISIS: WILL ISLAM GET DIRTY HANDS?

 Duncan Graham

Coal River - Samarind

Nahdlatul Ulama (revival of the scholars) is Indonesia and the world's largest Islamic organisation claiming almost 100 million members. If it digs coal it could become mega-rich.  How dirty work marries with sending souls to paradise only Allah knows.

President Joko ’Jokowi’ Widodo has four months left in office, enough time to sow division before handing the job on to the elected former cashiered general Prabowo Subianto.

In May Jokowi signed a decree letting religious groups apply to be the first shovel in the ore for special mining concessions. Not quite a gift from the gods as the Republic is supposed to be monotheistic, but pretty close.

This allows him to make good on an old promise to religious groups to take over mining concessions to raise funds. What the hell has coarse commerce got to do with matters of faith?

One answer:  Politics, or as the Jakarta Post described it clumsily because pig meat is taboo to Muslims, “halal-certified state-sponsored pork barreling”.

It added: “The government has come out with one of the most ridiculous policies in the history of this nation … It’s now up to the country’s largest Muslim organization to back out on moral grounds.”

But will the lure of lucre prevail over Islam’s obligations to be honest, fair and righteous?

NU supported the Prabowo ticket in the February presidential election as did Jokowi who was constitutionally barred from taking a third five-year term.

Instead, he engineered for his eldest son Gibran Rakabuming to contest as number two. He's now Vice-President elect.

The lead-up to the inauguration is a time to settle debts and cement alliances. If enough minor parties join the Prabowo-Gibran winning team, opposition will be left to NGOs.

Most are poor and poorly equipped to do more than their narrow roles, like advocating for human rights.

The churches have already knocked back Jokowi’s offer saying that fossil fuels are not their job and they’re better at consulting holy books than mining manuals. The mosques are dithering.

Second behind NU is Muhammadiyah (followers of Muhammad) with 60 million members. It tends to attract the better-educated middle class.

At present it’s pondering the Jokowi offer, but observers reckon nothing will happen as the gift has been pegged only for the NU.

The six government-approved religions, Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism have charity wings.  They run schools, hospitals, clinics and retirement homes principally for their members and could probably improve their work with mining profits.

But supping with this devil will need a long-arm excavator.

Investment Minister Bahlil Lahadalia was reported as saying  the handout was "in return to their past services during and after the country's struggle for independence … you are investing for the hereafter." That's something most religions have been doing for millennia.

The government says any faith group that accepts the deal has to run the show themselves.  This means they can’t flog off a mining permit or farm out business to an established company, even though it has the gear and expertise.

That rule crimps expectations of the beneficiaries only needing bigger truck parks and tips to take Haulpaks of rupiah.

A few right-wing congregations believe the earth is for exploitation;  the rest take a more environmentally conscious position accepting that despoiling nature is not part of any Deity’s plan.

The better read will know that most responsible nations are moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources.

Indonesia is the world's largest coal exporter and third biggest producer; to the distress of those worried about global warming it shows no sign of slowing down; the compound annual growth rate has been seven per cent since 2019.  This year it expects to produce 710 million tonnes.

There are precedents for Jokowi’s generosity though unfair and distressing.  

Last century then president Soeharto gave forestry concessions. Tens of thousands of hectares of virgin growth mainly in Kalimantan (Borneo island) to relatives and mates, particularly army generals, establishing vast business enterprises.

Many wield enormous power today and are part of the oligarchy. We've yet to hear how the profiteers feel about sharing their spoils with the pious.

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 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 18 June 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/indonesias-carbon-crisis-will-islam-get-dirty-hands/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GREAT IDEA - BUT FIRST GET LAND AND MONEY

 RUNNING LOW ON CASH AND TIME         

           

At the end of 2023, there were three clear signs that Indonesia's new capital city project on Borneo island - personally driven by President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo - was not going well.

Now it's in deep strife with the show's two top bosses quitting the AUD 45 billion-plus Ibu Kota (capital) Nusantara  plan to relocate sinking, polluted, overcrowded Jakarta to an isolated forest site in East Kalimantan.

(Nusantara is the old Javanese name for the archipelago.)

Displaced Suku Balik people were angry about the compensation they’d been offered for leaving land held for generations.

Earlier they’d taken their case to a UN Human Rights session in Geneva on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples claiming forced removal would destroy their identity.  

Although some families wouldn't move construction work alongside their houses continued, flooding homes. Hardly the best way to win community support.

These were major matters for the wee folk that could have been foreseen during early planning, but the real concern didn’t need to be found by interviewing distressed villagers:  The sign was obvious.

Lines of idle trucks (one had 85) blocked a lane of the main road. They were queuing for diesel outside fuel stations that had run out of supplies.

 This worrying scene was not a one-off but repeated regularly. Ironically the bowsers were surrounded by vast plantations of palms that can be used to make bio-diesel.

Closer to the unfortunately named Ground Zero rises the grandiose  presidential palace where diggers and crawlers were churning the wet season mud. Vehicles regularly spun off the tracks.

For anyone familiar with the security and safety of  Australian construction sites this was chaos.

The 250,000-hectare zone is more than a three-hour drive from the port of  Samarinda. A closer airport is being built.

Locals seemed nonplussed, comforted by regular statements that all was well.  Apart from Jokowi assurances came  from the IKN head  Bambang Susantono, hand-picked from the Asian Development Bank,  and his sidekick Dhony Rahajoe, an architect and real estate developer.

All changed at the start of June when the two men walked off the job ten weeks before the first stage grand official opening planned for 17 August, the Republic's National Day.

This is now to be a split ceremony with VIPs in IKN and Jakarta.

Indonesia’s most credible newspaper Kompas questioned whether the bosses had been sacked weeks earlier than the official resignation announcement. This said they’d left for ‘personal reasons’. At least it omitted the cliche about ‘spending more time with the family.’

In September 12,000 civil servants are set to relocate from Jakarta, 1,200 km south in Java. Jokowi has said he’ll be among them once the plumbing is fixed.

The quitters kept their mouths closed but it soon became obvious that the issue was legal access to land and lack of money to pay the contractors and their 10,000 workers.

IKN had started using public money (by law limited to 20 per cent) while the President dashed around the world seeking investors - including Australians.

He told them he imagined  ‘a smart forest city concept, a modern and environmentally friendly city' with  70 per cent of land in ‘green areas… envisioned to be a heterogeneous forest emulating a rainforest.'

A Melbourne University study offered a different picture: 'Removing genuine public participation ensures (IKN) …will not be a city for all Indonesians. Instead, it looks like (it)  will serve the interests of political and business elites and the people who back them.'

Mulawarman University anthropologist Martinus Nanang told this reporter in Samarinda:‘My colleagues and I asked for all reports and surveys but we’ve never seen them.

‘We fear many decisions are being made without research. They (government planners) are afraid of the reaction by global environmentalists.’  

An Australian-led research team claimed ‘Everyone acknowledged the project was political.’

Under the Indonesian Constitution, a president can run for only two five-year terms.  Jokowi will stand down in October when the new president-elect Prabowo Subianto is inaugurated.

In this year's election campaign, he was supported by Jokowi because it was believed the newcomer would maintain his predecessor's legacy.  

Prabowo has yet to comment on the resignations.

The only serious investor interest came from  Japan's SoftBank Group which reportedly talked of a US$100 billion loan. That hope collapsed in March 2022.

 Big money wants guarantees of good returns, tricky when the proposal  is about administration rather than manufacturing.

There’s also concern about corruption, sadly commonplace in Indonesia, particularly infecting big public works.

Reuters reported Arya Fernandes, an analyst with the Indonesian Center for Strategic and International Studies saying: "The question is how to convince investors that there is no problem.”

The government rushed in two government ministers as replacements for the quitters while Jokowi said he’d be announcing investments soon, naming the United Arab Emirates as the likely saviour.

Ancient kings of Java in the Hindu-Buddhist era built splendid temples to honour their reigns.  Jokowi seems to have similar ambitions.  

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First published in Independent Australia 17 June 2024: https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/indonesias-new-capital-city-project-is-an-ongoing-disaster,18692

 TYRANNY OF PROXIMITY Duncan Graham

The pundits are already in a tizz: What’ll happen to defence, AUKUS, trade and other relationships should Trump win in November? More pressing and certain is how we’ll cope when Indonesia’s  President-elect Prabowo Subianto takes office in October.

Next door there’ll be a leader “with demonstrated disregard for the rule of law …seen by many as a war criminal” and not the person most  voters wanted in the February poll.  

Proof is that two earlier stabs at the Presidency and one at the VP job by the disgraced and aging former general had all been dumped by the electorate.

Prabowo only won this year when coupled with Gibran Rakabuming son of the current and popular President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo with voters hoping the lad will be Dad Version Two.

It’s widely accepted that the youngster’s  presence on the ticket has put right-wing Prabowo in power.

But for how long? The life expectancy for Indonesian men is 68. Prabowo will be 73 when inaugurated.  About half the population of the world’s fourth largest nation is under 30.

Should  plump, hot-tempered Prabowo become too unwell to govern, Vice President-elect, Gibran, 36, will be the youngest leader in Indonesian history - and probably the world.

He’s a Singapore-educated businessman from the regional city of Solo where he’s been mayor.  His wife accountant Selvi Ananda was a Catholic but had to convert to Islam to marry. He has no military background.

Prabowo is the Republic’s version of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.  There's little Indonesian material online to back that slander of fascism;  most comes from Australian researchers.

Instead, locals get details of Prabowo's massive electoral victory - 55.5 per cent in a three-man contest - won through playing the role of an avuncular and caring statesman.  Cartoon images contrived through his PR team have whitewashed his alleged villainy.

Missing are at-length interviews with independent Western journalists for Prabowo is afraid.  Not from misunderstanding questions in English, a language in which he’s fluent from schooling in London,  but because he’s a - let’s be careful here - stranger to frank talk with a free press.

He knows he’ll be asked about his past; however much he spins his sins of yesteryear and tries to push them away as unproved and unimportant, all the while claiming the future is the only thing that matters.  A pub-test fail.

For an oversight of the man who’ll lead the world’s fourth most populous nation with more Muslims than any other country - and our neighbour - the best analysis is a 12-page background briefing here.

It comes from Australian writer and human rights activist Pat Walsh who was seconded by the UN to help establish and advise the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CAVR) after the 1999 East Timor referendum.

It's a damning document that should have provoked legal challenges, but wasn't on TikTok so passed with little notice.  It's also possible Prabowo wasn't keen to fuel international publicity.

A shortened version was published ahead of the February election in the prestigious magazine Inside Indonesia with the heading: Is Prabowo fit and proper to be Indonesia’s next president?

This is Walsh’s answer: 

"Until he is cleared of allegations of wrongdoing, Prabowo is not fit and proper to serve as the president of this great nation.

"If Prabowo is elected a dark cloud will settle over Indonesia. Indonesia will be perceived as regressive, prepared to forget rather than remember and learn, and to tolerate impunity when, in fact, it could be a beacon of democracy and champion of the rule of law in a much-troubled region and world."

Corrosive, but the reality is that this is the man Canberra will have to deal with for the next five years.

Some of Walsh’s analysis is based on evidence given to CAVR; this concluded that the commando Kopassus Special Forces “were responsible for committing crimes against humanity and war crimes during Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor, 1975-1999.

“As a member and then a commander of Kopassus, Prabowo undertook at least four tours of duty in East Timor…They show (he was) anything but an innocent or bit player.”

Walsh’s voice is not isolated. Tim Lindsey, professor of Asian Law at Melbourne Uni has written:

“There are claims of human rights abuses against him (including alleged kidnappings, forced disappearances and war crimes by troops under his command); and his campaign was marred by accusations of unethical conduct and collusion.

“Prabowo has been very clear in the past that he thinks the democratic reforms that followed the fall of Soeharto in 1998, should be wound back.

“...as he settles into office, a further gradual dismantling of democratic checks and balances, institutions and individual freedoms is very likely. Critics of Prabowo have good reason to be concerned.”

After he was cashiered for disobeying orders, and his marriage with President Soeharto’s daughter Siti hit the rocks, Prabowo fled to exile in Jordan.

He returned years later as a businessman backed by his billionaire younger brother Hashim Djojohadikusumo who helped bankroll his third campaign.

Since the poll, Jokowi has restored Prabowo's rank as a four-star general.  He'd earlier made him Minister for Defence.

So how does Walsh feel now?

“I am shocked by the ease with which Prabowo won,” he told your correspondent. “That he pulled it off in one round against credible alternative candidates and despite his obvious unsuitability is stunning.

“That his military failures and dismissals, violations of human rights and the rule of law, international pariah status (declared persona non grata by three US presidents and Australia), age, lack of legislative and government experience and previous electoral failures, were ignored, beggars belief.”

International diplomacy protocols ensure Prabowo will be treated with respect by PM Anthony Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong whatever they feel personally. Indonesia is too big, too close and too important to snub.

Should he come to Australia he’ll be shielded from physical harm; but don’t expect any open media conferences.

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First published in Pearls & Irritations, 14 June 2024: https://johnmenadue.com/tyranny-of-proximity-link-out-answer/