VIOLENT INDONESIA EXPOSED

A troubling tour through a pained land                                         

Visiting outlying islands in this sprawling archipelago reveals the unease felt about Java, ‘the denominator of Indonesia’.  From Aceh to West Papua live citizens who see the nation’s largest ethnic group as oppressive colonialists.

First President Soekarno used a common language, universal education and the non-denominational Pancasila philosophy to create the ‘unitary state’.

When these haven’t worked persuasion has turned to force.  Human rights activist Andreas Harsono’s new book Race, Islam and Power shows the damage caused to ‘wonderful Indonesia’ by violence.

This was never meant to be a jolly travelogue; the author quotes West Sumatran poet Leon Agusta (1938-2015): ‘They’re the two most dangerous words in Indonesia: Islam and Java’.  To which Harsono adds: ‘Muslim majority and Javanese dominance’.

Despite the best efforts of people like the author, in this year’s election campaign human rights issues were largely a yawn.

Perhaps some electors voted against Prabowo Subianto because questions haunt the former general about his actions in the army. Others might have rejected Joko Widodo, reasoning he’s dodged confronting the post-1965 pogroms, despite earlier promising to open debate.

 Little has happened to reconcile the state with the survivors and the families of the real or imagined Communist victims who were never charged under the law.  The guilty still control.

(Dealing with unresolved shame isn’t an exclusive Indonesian problem.  Australians are grappling with a new understanding of their nation’s past as historians reveal massacres of Aborigines right into last century.)

Consider the continuing cruelties: In Aceh men who love each other and unmarried women who love men get whipped in medieval public rituals, smartphoned for kicks.  People who’ve made mild comments about faith are behind bars for blasphemy.

Across the country hate fermented against gays is brewed by religious leaders. Ahmadiyah sectarians get persecuted, as do followers of minority mainstream faiths.

Indonesians love the outsider-imposed label of tolerance, but this fine quality is continually threatened; robust analysis mainly comes from without - foreign academics, safe on campuses far away.

At last a critic with credibility from within. As a local Harsono risks confrontations. In pre-independence East Timor a soldier demanded: ‘Are you red and white?’ (A nationalist). Harsono said he was an impartial journalist.  Fortunately only his visit was terminated.

Born in 1965 he was given the Chinese curse / journalist’s blessing: ‘May you be born in interesting times.’ During Soeharto’s authoritarian New Order government this Indonesian with ethnic Chinese heritage would have understood discrimination is pervasive.

In Salatiga’s Satya Wacana Christian University (Central Java) he followed lectures by the late George Aditjondro.  The sociologist and author was such a powerful critic of Soeharto (he likened the president to an octopus) that he fled to Australia to avoid arrest.

His teachings and writings pricked questions about Indonesia’s governance and the nature of Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined community’. The late US scholar also quashed the view that only Westerners can be colonialists.  Harsono has become torchbearer for the freedoms they championed.

Although he enrolled in electronic engineering, writing for student unions revealed a talent for journalism.  After a year with this newspaper he became Jakarta correspondent for Bangkok’s The Nation English language daily.

He also won a prestigious Nieman Fellowship to study journalism at Harvard.

Through reporting he’s seen far more of his country than most; along the way he realized daily reporting was inadequate for the world to understand Indonesia. 

The result is this ‘political travelogue’ subtitled Ethnic and Religious Violence in post-Soeharto Indonesia. The title is clumsy, the cover drab.  There’s no index, but a handy list of sources. The prose is excellent.

This is a discomforting read for anyone who cares for the moral development of this nation. It’s also a counterweight to the glossy mags promoting Indonesia as a land fit for hedonists.

This is sweaty and edgy journalism. It can also be dangerous. In 2004 activist Munir Said Thalib was assassinated on a Garuda flight to Europe.  The case remains unsolved.

For 15 years Harsono has been where the pain is raw, where the wee folk live, work, travel and get jailed, hearing their authentic stories of discrimination and repression, their anger and puzzlement: Was this the land our heroes promised in 1945?

 ‘What they learned at school was totally different from what they saw in their real life,’ he writes. ‘I hear this over and over throughout Indonesia.’

Race, Islam and Power has been published in Australia in English, the language Harsono used, ‘trying to speak to an international audience about violence in Indonesia …especially policy makers, academics, opinion leaders.’ 

No local press would handle the typescript proving the author’s point about fear of confronting the past; yet society’s betterment depends on its citizenry knowing their state’s real history.

Harsono’s work aims to build a better nation by exposing truths.  Those cheering George W Bush’s snarl ‘you’re either with us or against us’ might rank the author a traitor; yet critics can be finer patriots than jingoists – and more effective.  

Harsono has been a Jakarta-based researcher since 2008 with the international NGO Human Rights Watch and often its spokesman.  His statements are measured and fact based – as they are in this book.

This is important because villainy thrives when far from public view.  When atrocities are revealed, doubt dampens outrage if accusations are shrill and facts vague.  Could these gentle friendly folk really be so brutal – and if so, why?

Sadly, tragically, yes.  There’s been slaughter and dispossession from Sabang to Merauke, the route Harsono has traveled and meticulously recorded.  Much has been contrived for base reasons.

Democracy is ‘people power’ though not for losing politicians trying to force their interests through street protests.  They tread a dangerous track.

Likewise those howling religious hate.  This book shows these roads will never lead to the respected nation the founders imagined and the people desire.

Race, Islam and Power by Andreas Harsono.                                                                                                Monash University Press, 2019.                                                                                          (First published in The Jakarta Post 5 May 2019)

RI KIDS IN OZ JAILS SEEK COMPO

An international wrong                           

For the last few months Australian lawyers and their fixers have been scouring remote villages in the eastern islands of the world’s largest archipelago.

They’ve been seeking young Indonesian men illegally jailed in Australia’s adult prisons earlier this decade alongside hardened criminals and sex offenders. 

The men were sentenced for crewing people-smuggler boats. Yet they were children at the time and under the law should have been repatriated.

Imagine the outrage if Aussie kids had suffered the same fate in Indonesia.  In 2011 the then Prime Minister Julia Gillard got involved in the case of an Australian teen arrested in Bali on alleged drug charges.

The boy was briefly detained then repatriated after a furious media campaign.  This much larger and more serious case got some coverage at the time, but has since slipped below the horizon.

So far 123 young men have signed up to a class action for compensation. Another ten to 20 could join if they can be traced.  The lawyers say they are waiting for a formal response from the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) . In turn it’s hanging out for comment from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.

The illegal jailings could have been blamed on sloppy bureaucracy compounded by cultural ignorance.  But political factors were also in play.  The Australian Government has been exercising tough laws to placate voters fearful of a tsunami of asylum-seekers from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran transiting Indonesia, while at the same time cosying up to then Indonesia President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, known as SBY.

If there’s no out-of-court settlement the claimants will head to the Australian Federal Court.  If successful their win could cost Australian taxpayers millions and make the victims rich.

So far, so good. But this tale is tangled.  There’s a dispute between Australian and Indonesian lawyers over representation and jurisdictions.

If the victims get nothing the bitterness could linger for years. Whatever the outcome Australia’s reputation as a compassionate nation that honors international law and doesn’t put kids in adult prisons has already been shredded.

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The story started eight years ago.  The whistle-blower was Justice of the Peace (JP) Colin Singer.

The West Australian doesn’t need to scratch his balding dome or flick through old diaries to remember the date with precision.

It was 9 am on 23 April 2010 and Singer was paying a routine visit to Western Australia’s Hakea Prison in the Perth suburb of Canning Vale.

According to the Department of Justice the 1,225-bed jail ‘manages male prisoners who have been remanded in custody while waiting to appear in court or those who have just been sentenced’.  So murderers, thugs, paedophiles and thieves checking in and out of the legal terminal, queue together. Around 7,000 a year go in and out.

JPs like Singer are unpaid community-minded citizens nominated by members of Parliament or magistrates.  They witness signatures, approve police search warrants and in remote areas sometimes sit in courts to hear minor charges.

On that Friday Singer was on duty for the Office of Custodial Services, an independent statutory authority charged with monitoring jails and checking that inmates are treated decently.

Hakea is for men, not boys.  Children, defined as those under 18, must be held apart from adults under the 1990 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Australia is a signatory.  So is Indonesia.

In the jail Singer was approached by the medical director Dr Brian Walker. “He told me: ‘there are kids in here’,” Singer told the Strategic Review. “I thought this impossible. I had great faith in the Australian justice system and believed it to be fair.

“Then I saw them - they were Indonesians, pre-pubescent frightened children, certainly not men.”

The prisoners were deckhands hired by people smugglers to illegally ferry asylum seekers fleeing conflict zones and who had made it to Indonesia. They then sailed for Australia on Indonesian fishing boats but had been caught by the Australian Navy.

Singer is a businessman who has worked in the oil and gas industry in Indonesia since 1989. Originally from Scotland he’s an Australian citizen married to an Indonesian and with homes in West Java and Perth.

Among the kids he spoke to was Ali Yasmin (also known as Jasmin), from the basic settlement of Balauring on the tiny island of Lembata east of Flores. “He was alone and clinging to a fence, clearly traumatized,” Singer recalled.

Yasmin told Singer that in December four Indonesian men and 55 Afghans were on the wooden craft labelled by the Australian Navy as SIEV (Suspected Illegal Entry Vessel) 86.  He said he’d been offered 15 million rupiah (US$1,000) to work as a cook.

To Australian prosecutors that sum - equal to a year’s work or more - was proof the teen knew something wrong was afoot.  But Western reasoning doesn’t work in a tiny village more than 2,500 kilometres from cosmopolitan Jakarta. 

If a stranger from afar rocks in and offers big money for a small job why check the dentures of this gift horse? Yasmin, who quit school at 12 to support his mother after his Dad died, said he knew little of the outside world and nothing about people smuggling.

He also said he was 13 and the youngest on board, but wasn’t believed because he had no identification. Westerners abroad carry driving licences, credit cards and passports proving ID, but not hangabout Indonesian kids taking one day at a time.

“I immediately contacted the Department of Justice and the Indonesian Consul General in Perth,” said Singer  “I was naive.  I thought this was an administrative error that would be rapidly fixed.  I was wrong.” 

Singer claimed 60 juveniles were in WA’s adult jails. The government said there were none because Yasmin and others had been confirmed as adults by the AFP using wrist X-rays.  They referenced a 1942 US bone atlas devised for Caucasians and with a four-year plus-or-minus margin of error. On these grounds it was decided  that Yasmin was 19. 

Two years later the AHRC published An Age of Uncertainty, an inquiry into ‘an inherently flawed technique’. It said the wrist test had already been publicly ridiculed by leading specialists and professional medical societies as ‘unreliable and untrustworthy’.

But at the time voter fear of boat people had become almost paranoiac; the AFP dismissed the doubters and recruited Perth radiologist Dr Vincent Low to verify the procedure.

AHRC Commissioner Catherine Branson’s 313-page report found that ‘the evidence is overwhelming that using skeletal age to assess chronological age is an imprecise technique...

‘…the AFP, the Office of the Commonwealth (Australian) Director of Public Prosecutions and the Attorney-General’s Department engaged in acts and practices that led to contraventions of fundamental rights; not just rights recognized under international human rights law but in some cases rights also  recognized at common law, such as the right to a fair trial.’

Although the document made no reference to compensation, calls for redress came from Indonesian lawyer Lisa Hiariej who has been working through Jakarta courts.  More of her later.

Singer continued to pursue the issue because “when you encounter a moral wrong you can’t let it rest”.  However he frustrated journalists by refusing to have his name revealed, even demanding his voice be altered on TV lest he be banned access to the prisoners.  The ploy fooled few for there were no stirrers so agitated and identifiable as Singer with his strong Gaelic brogue.

Certainly the Australian government knew because Singer says he was called into the Australian Embassy in Jakarta; he said he was asked whether he was associated with the Greens political party  - a weird question to someone in the mining industry. 

Singer said he got the impression that nothing would be done which might disturb relations with Indonesia, then at a high following a successful address to the Australian Parliament by President SBY

Singer was also vice president of the Perth-based Non-Government Organization, the Indonesia Institute (II). President Ross Taylor alerted the media.

In 2013 TV journalist Hamish Macdonald was the first Australian to visit Yasmin’s family in Balauring where he saw school records.  These showed the lad had been born in 1996, though there were discrepancies over dates.

The documents had been faxed to the Indonesian Consul General in Perth but Yasmin’s defence lawyer David McKenzie told Macdonald they were legally unverified so could not be admitted as evidence. 

The child was then sentenced to the mandatory period of five years jail as a people smuggler under a new Australian law which was supposed to scare these villains into halting their noxious trade.

Human rights lawyers object to mandatory sentences claiming these are often introduced as populist measures, can lead to unfairness and miss their targets.  In this case the law of unintended consequences took over. 

The people smuggler Big Guys safe in Jakarta had already got their cash.  Undeterred by Canberra’s chest-thumping they continued selling high-price passages to Australia while the beardless youngsters they recruited were doing time. 

Why didn’t the court view the scared lads in the dock not through an X-ray tube but the consciences of Singer and the Hakea Prison staff who saw “pre-pubescent frightened children”? 

Proper legal procedures may have been followed but the rules don’t include common sense. Why didn’t the Indonesian government scream outrage and fan an international crisis?  And why weren’t there more agitators? (The Greens have been prominent along with some Labor Party  politicians.)

Had the papers been presented and accepted by the court, Yasmin would have been whisked out of the country. Instead he was sent to prison in icy Albany, WA’s most southerly town, latitude 35 degrees. His hometown Balauring is just below the equator.

Yasmin was put to work in the prison laundry.  Under demands from the Australian Government, WA prison regulations were changed to prevent the Indonesians sending their meagre earnings back to their families. (State jails are used to house federal prisoners.)

There was further petty malice to show an anxious electorate that no way would government resolve slip into solicitude.  When some kids were eventually repatriated they were dumped in Bali with no means of getting back to their remote homes.  Only after the International Organisation for Migration got involved were escorts provided and fares back to the villages.

Singer kept pushing.  In the early stages he was a gruff and prickly personality who tended to headbutt issues and fire off clumsy statements. In retrospect this may have been the right way because it made him a compelling force not easily dismissed and a counterpoint to the tractable Indonesian deckhands signing anything on an official’s clipboard.

II president Taylor described them as ‘generally the most liked, respected and cooperative people to be ever apprehended in Australia’.

Singer’s approach put him at odds with the more diplomatic Taylor,  so Singer quit the NGO and went public. He remains appalled at the kids’ plight but now he’s more measured. “This experience has changed me - and for the better,” he said. Taylor and Singer have since reconciled.

The doubts about age got too loud to ignore. Yasmin and 14 others were released ‘on licence’ in 2012.  Five years later the WA Court of Criminal Appeal quashed Yasmin’s sentence. 

The judges wrote they were ‘satisfied that a miscarriage of justice … has occurred.  If the appellant was aged under 18 years when he allegedly committed the offence, the mandatory minimum penalty … for an adult, did not apply to him.’

The average time spent in detention by the Indonesian kids was 31.6 months.  A wrong had eventually been recognised but not righted.  Despite all the current legal busyness there’s no certainty the Indonesians will be recompensed for their misery, fear and lost years.

The AHRC cannot order compensation.  It can only ask questions and try to conciliate. If the Government won't play ball then the lawyers can ask a court to order compensation.  This process can take years and decisions can be appealed. 

Canberra legal firm Ken Cush and Associates says it is acting pro-bono for the former detainees and taking a racial discrimination position. Practice lawyer Sam Tierney said there was no formula for compensation.

“We are comfortable that there are substantial grounds to show the Commonwealth has racially discriminated against these children resulting in their improper treatment and detention,” he said via e-mail.

“If the Commonwealth chooses not to compensate the children, we will litigate the cases and ask the Federal Court to determine the cases and entitlements to damages.”

Sounds good, but the success rate isn’t encouraging. The Australian Institute of Criminology reports that 'most Australian jurisdictions are not generous, nor are they transparent in awarding compensation ...most wrongfully convicted people in Australia do not get any compensation'.

Ferdi Tanoni, who lives in Kupang on the island of Timor in the Indonesian archipelago, has been the go-to guy for Australian supporters of the former prisoners living in the east end of Indonesia. 

He also chairs an ‘advocacy team’ fighting for compensation through Australian courts for seaweed farmers allegedly affected by the 2009 Montara wellhead oil spill off the WA coast.

“I tell the boys that although the lawyers I’ve spoken to believe there’s a 70 per cent chance of success, the case could take a year or more,” he said.  “In the end they may not get anything. I tell them to keep praying.”

Back in Balauring Yasmin was alarmed to read the appeal decision was headed ‘Yasmin v The Queen’, and asked how he’d harmed the monarch.  This took some explaining, as it would to many Australians. (‘The Queen’ is the legal term for the State.)

Yasmin said he was optimistic that he’d eventually get some money.  Now 22 he’s married and has a daughter.  He speaks confidently on the phone in excellent English that he learned in prison and said he bears no animosity - except towards the defence lawyers who didn’t tell the court they had the papers confirming he was a child.

“Yasmin is an Indonesian hero,” said Singer.  “He helped the others settle in.  He calmed things down in jail and acted as an interpreter.  He’s had a horrendous time but his resilience has been spectacular.

“In all this I found most prison staff to be compassionate.  My criticism is for the bureaucrats, politicians and lawyers who turned away from their responsibilities and ignored the rights of children.”

Meanwhile more snafus in Indonesia.  Last year Lisa Hiariej, the lawyer who four years earlier had said she was seeking compensation, appeared in the Jakarta District Court claiming to represent Indonesian boys held in adult prisons in Australia between 2008 and 2012.

She said some of her clients had signed up with Ken Cush but they had returned to her after she’d visited them in Kupang in February this year.  Speaking by phone from Jakarta she said:  “I have the power of attorney for 115 boys and I’ve been working on this for six years.

“This is my case.  These are uneducated people, many don’t even speak Indonesian, (meaning they speak a regional language) and so they just sign. I won’t go to the AHRC and there’s no way I can work with the Ken Cush lawyers.

“I am disappointed; this (the tussle over representation) is so sad. I’m only doing this for the kids. I’m asking for one trillion rupiah (US$100 million) to be split among the boys. 

“It has cost me about US$150,000. I’ve financed everything by myself and with my family.  There’s been no support from political parties or religious groups, only backing by the KPAI.” (Komisi Perlindungan Anak Indonesia - the Indonesian Child Protection Commission).

In March this year the Jakarta Court ruled against Hiariej’s claim. “The case is now in the  Pengadilan Tinggi (High Court ) for appeal,” she said. 

“If unsuccessful I may refer the case to the International Court of Justice.”

The Australian Government didn’t attend the earlier Jakarta hearing arguing that the court has no jurisdiction over Australian matters. 

“Ms Hiariej has no role with our firm,” said Tierney. “Some of our clients were previously represented by Ms Hiariej but have withdrawn those instructions and revoked any authority that Lisa may have had to act on their behalf including in any Indonesian Court proceedings.”

If the tortuous legal road looks likely to end in a dead end, political lobbying to pay up and shut down the shame may be the better recourse.

“Imagine the outcry if an Australian child had been imprisoned in Indonesia,” Singer said. “We’d have public outrage, ministerial involvement and condemnation of the Indonesian judiciary.

“Yet when it’s the other way around the majority have no interest at all.  We think Australia is better than other countries. It saddens me to say that we are not.”

The Fisher’s Story

I saw my first Indonesian people smugglers in February 2012.  They were X Riyan and X Hadi and they were being led into the Perth District Courtroom 7.1 by uniformed security guards.

From their curious titles it seemed they were protected informants given codenames; the reality was more mundane but a telling example of cultural differences.  Many Indonesians have only one name – a practice that Australian bureaucracy can’t accept.  So both men were labelled X.

Riyan was 28; Hadi’s age was unknown but the prosecution said he was an adult. We now know he wasn’t and is on the list of claimants. Through an interpreter they pleaded ‘not guilty’ to the charge of unlawfully transporting aliens into Australia.

Facing them across the wide and almost empty court (an Indonesian diplomat occasionally popped in as an observer) sat the jury of 12 Australian citizens. 

Also confronting them as witnesses for the prosecution were several smartly dressed and confident Afghan men who had sailed with the Indonesians and were now living in the Australian community as legitimate refugees. They confirmed the prosecutor’s claims.

Hadi’s statement said that in May 2010 he crewed a boat carrying coconuts to  Flores. The job done, he thought they were heading back to Batam, a small Indonesian island near Singapore.

Instead they went to Probolinggo on East Java’s north coast. Offshore and at night the boat collected 54 Afghan men and headed west, then south. On 3 June they were boarded by the Australian naval patrol boat HMAS Maryborough.

Hadi says he didn’t get paid and hadn’t negotiated a salary. Prosecutor Anthony Eyers thought this incredible. Through an interpreter Hadi replied that Indonesians don’t quibble and that he didn’t know where the boat was going.

But, responded Eyers,  inside the hull was water and food along with lifejackets and mattresses.  So why didn’t Hadi protest when the Afghans clambered aboard, and demand to get off?

He told the court he was seasick at the time. 

The Head of Chancery at the WA Indonesian Consulate-General office, Syahri Sakidin, said Hadi had tired of constant questions about his age.  Speaking outside the court he said: “In prison he gets good food, high quality medical care, and earns AUD $30 (US$22) a week doing kitchen chores.

 “The people smuggling mafia are using poor fishermen …you have to understand the irony. It’s shameful they’re getting money that way but you have to see it through their eyes.”

When sentencing Riyan and Hadi to the mandatory five-year minimum (they have since been deported), Judge Richard Keen said jailing the men would “bring home the message” that Australia treats people smuggling seriously.  

The message settled well with Australian voters, less so among the estimated 14,000 mainly Middle-East asylum seekers still squatting in Indonesia with little hope of making it to the Great South Land.

The boat people trade now appears to have sunk, but not the cargo of legal and moral wrongs.  Recovery is taking years,and may never be successful.

(First published in Strategic Review, 4 March 2019:  https://sr.sgpp.ac.id/post/An-international-wrong

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MANY STILL FAVOR BOMBASTIC AUTOCRATS

Why didn’t Joko Widodo do better?

Slowly, carefully, nervously, Indonesia is retreating from the threat of a bloody revolution following the 17 April election.

The danger has been real as senior supporters of the megalomaniacal presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto called for the result to be challenged through ‘people power’. 

This is a euphemism for rioting. The last time it happened on any scale was in 1998 when more than a thousand died in Jakarta after second president Soeharto abdicated.  Shops and offices were torched and ethnic minorities targeted.  Sectarian violence also occurred in eastern islands.

The official figures of this year’s election won’t be known till 22 May but ‘quick count’ results from separate reputable agencies show Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo with a ten-point lead and heading for his second, and final, five-year term.

Widodo is a commoner, the first to win the nation’s top job traditionally held by a member of the military, business and religious elite.  Some in the oligarchy find this unacceptable.

Among them is Subianto, the fiery former son-in-law of dictator Soeharto.  He’s claiming 62 per cent of the vote and shouting that the poll was marred by corruption and voter manipulation, though offering little evidence.

At one level this is standard loser’s sulks, and the source of many jokes.  But in a Republic where demonstrators can be bought by the thousands, the potential for serious strife is ever-present.

So far the police have struck first, banning protests at the 100 hectare Merdeka (Freedom) Square in Central Java and keeping roads clear.  Religious leaders have also been urging calm. Heavy rain and massive flooding in Jakarta has also dampened enthusiasm to riot.

Police have reportedly been questioning politician Eggi Sudjana over alleged ‘people power’ threats and hate speech in a video posted on social media.  This has encouraged some agitators to tone down. 

There were demos last week, but by Indonesian standards these were next to no-shows, suggesting that Subianto, 67, has run out of puff.  However some believe he’s using threats of disorder to wring post-poll concessions out of Widodo.

The absence of vice-presidential candidate Sandiaga Uno, 49, at rallies suggests the canny business tycoon has checked the figures and knows the truth. The official explanation for his absence has been ‘hiccups’.

Although Widodo has acknowledged the quick count results he hasn’t been partying.  . He’s asked supporters to be patient and wait for official results from the Electoral Commission (KPU).

Booth problems have been reported, unsurprising when maybe 160 million voted – a turn-out of around 80 per cent.  This is an extraordinary result in a nation where participation is voluntary; a campaign run to get electors to stay away as a gesture  against lack of reforms seems to have been a fizzer.

It was our neighbour’s first simultaneous presidential and legislative election and will probably be the last. Apart from the world’s third largest democracy selecting its leader voters also had to choose local and national legislators.

Doing it all on the same day seemed a good time and cost saving exercise when originally mooted.  Instead it became a logistic nightmare with at least 240,000 candidates running for more than 20,000 posts.  Punters were unfolding ballot papers which made Australian Senate selection sheets look like A6 notepaper.

There have been reports that more than 100 booth workers and volunteers died during the exercise and 500 fell ill from exhaustion. In 2024 the vote will probably be run across two days.

Subianto’s ‘we wuz robbed’ charges are attributed to the former general’s folie de grandeur.  He’s expected to appeal to the Constitutional Court as he did when he lost in 2014.

Social psychologists call this phenomenon ‘pluralistic ignorance’.  Their obfuscating definition is: ‘A situation where no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes’.  That’s a concept harder to unravel than a One Nation policy.

Who is this Subianto make-believer from a separate universe? ‘He’s a Trumpian figure who lives in a self-created bubble of imagined greatness,’ Dr Marcus Mietzner of the ANU's College of Asia and the Pacific told the ABC.

‘Any disturbances to that fantasy world are met with further manipulative additions to his own reality.’

What should be a concern is the low vote for the winner. An election where the incumbent seeks another term is also a referendum on his or her record in office.  In all the exuberance (and relief that Subianto had lost) only one observer pointed out that support for Widodo was underwhelming.

Kevin O'Rourke, publisher of the Jakarta newsletter Reformasi Weekly, said that Jokowi’s re-election ‘failed to attain the psychological 60 per cent level that had seemed within reach.  Prabowo performed better than expected.’

In the 2009 election another former general, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won more than 60 per cent of the vote in a three-way contest to seal a second go, though his first period in office was lackluster.

By contrast Widodo’s term has been marked with massive infrastructure projects, the introduction of a health insurance programme, a raft of welfare initiatives to aid the poor and a stable economy.
Why he failed to do better is a puzzle. 

One explanation is that there’s a residual hankering in society for a return to the good ol’ days of last century.  That’s when a tough guy ruled, men with guns enforced their law and most problems could be fixed with cash-stuffed envelopes.

None of this messy democracy business to disrupt daily life.

First published in Pearls and Irritations, 2 May 2019:
http://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-why-didnt-widodo-do-better-why-didnt-widodo-do-better-why-didnt-joko-widodo-do-better/

NOT ALL DISASTERS ARE MADE BY NATURE

Tumbledown tragedies; some can be prevented

Richter Scale Day (26 April) honors the 1900 birth of Charles Richter. He’s the American seismologist who invented the scale which measures earthquakes.  

The biggest in Indonesia last year was the magnitude 7.5 Palu quake and tsunami in Central Sulawesi.  Engineers blamed poor construction and houses built on land prone to soil liquefaction for some of the 4,400 deaths.

It doesn’t always need a quake to smash and kill. Among the many urgent tasks facing the new national and provincial governments is to enforce building regulations.  Duncan Graham reports from Cirebon:

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Monday 16 April last year dawned like any other in the village of Gegesik outside the port city of Cirebon, 220 kilometers east of Jakarta.

Samini, 40, had sent her daughter Tri Hana Sita, 10, off to primary school.  Her eldest son Aridh Newton Rachman, 22, was working far away.

At the rear of the family’s house was a small studio built of pre-cast concrete blocks and constructed the year before.  Here Samini’s husband Suherman bin Basan, 48, a dahlang (puppet master) was leading a gamelan orchestra rehearsal with the couple’s second son, Aziz Isaac Fathur Rachman, 20, and eight local children.

Members of the Hidayat Jati group were getting ready for shows later in the month.

“It was about 10.30. I just went out to buy a gas bottle and a few other things,” said Samini. “I wasn’t more than 100 meters away, but I didn’t hear anything.  Then I saw people running to our house.”

An old nine-meter high barn alongside the studio had collapsed.  The windowless building had small openings to encourage walet (native swifts) to breed.  Their nests are harvested to make Chinese soup.

But the birds had deserted the empty building before it suddenly tumbled onto the studio. Seven died instantly, including Suherman and Aziz, their bodies brutally disfigured by the tumbling bricks. Two girls and a boy were injured but have since recovered.

In the West there’d be a coronial inquiry and charges laid against the barn owner for failing to keep the building sound.  The local government would also be held responsible for not ensuring regulations were followed.

The builders of the studio would also be summonsed.  The remaining walls, only eight centimeters thick, show a jerry-built construction using low-quality mortar easily crumbled by hand.  There’s no obvious reinforcement and the blocks are not in-line.

“There was no wind, no rain and no earthquake,” said Samini.  “Some said the foundations had not been properly dug, but the barn had been in place for more than ten years.”

In villages other explanations have to be found.  Inevitably they involve the supernatural – and it’s hard to remain skeptical.

A pink-flowering bush is a splash of color amid the grey rubble of smashed bricks and shattered asbestos sheets that was once the music studio.  It’s the only living thing in the debris and Samini says it wasn’t planted by her or anyone else.  It thrives on the spot where her husband died.

Then there’s the question of the swifts abandoning their home.  Did they sense earlier movements in the walls and roof?

Suherman and Umer’s lives were not insured.  Nor was the building.  Apart from big companies and the rich, few buy insurance in Indonesia.

As a dahlang Suherman was said to be gifted with paranormal powers.  Before his sudden death he told his wife he had a dream of her becoming wealthy.

Since the accident she’s received compensation from the government and the barn owner, though doesn’t want the sums published for fear of arousing envy among neighbors.  She’s also received support from a city almost 8,000 kilometers away.

Cirebon has a longtime link to Wellington, the quake-prone capital of NZ. In the 1970s the late ethnomusicologist Dr Allan Thomas, who had been studying in Cirebon, bought a ten-piece gamelan set and 140 wayang kulit shadow puppets that were threatened by fundamentalists seeking to stamp out local culture.

Some of the instruments were 400 years old and hadn’t been played for half a century.  In Wellington they were restored with the help of the Indonesian Embassy; they were called The First Smile and used for concerts

Dance teacher and musician Jennifer Shennan said her late husband often spoke of music going beyond business and politics, helping people from different cultures get to know and understand each other better through feeling.

So when the Kiwis heard of the Gegesik tragedy they held a concert and raised enough cash to help Samini develop a business.  The money has been used to build a warung (shop) on the front of her house where she plans to sell necessities.

She remains doubtful about the logical explanations for the building’s collapse and keeps asking why it happened, and why then. 

“Some people were jealous of my husband and his success and for reviving the wayang kulit,” she said.  “Maybe he was cursed by someone using black magic.”

Or maybe the curse should be put on the builders who cut costs and corners, and the bureaucrats who failed to police the regulations.

Late last year a major road in Surabaya suddenly collapsed.  Fortunately no deaths were reported.  Some blamed an earthquake or sinkhole, but Sutopo Purwo Nugroho of the National Board for Disaster Management said it was caused by construction errors, again highlighting the lack of controls in the building business.

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First published in The Jakarta Post 25 April 2019)