HATE STIRRER THREATENS JOKOWI

 

               Return of the dangerman preacher

It was a full-on snub to history and a challenge to the social and business reforms of President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo.  More worrying is the likelihood of a return to faith-based hate politics in the world’s most populous Muslim country. 

November 10 is Indonesia’s Heroes’ Day commemorating the 1945 Battle of Surabaya, a bloody clash in the East Java city between war-hardened allied forces backing the return of the colonial Dutch and young revolutionaries armed with bamboo spears.

But the thousands who gridlocked Jakarta on that day this month cutting off car and bus access to the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport and delaying flights for hours were not brave revolutionaries. They were the pliant followers of a Muslim priest with a criminal record who wants to turn our giant neighbour into an Islamic state and away from its two-decade journey towards full democracy.

Rizieq Shihab – self-styled Great Imam for life of the Front Pembela Islam (Islam Defenders’ Front) – returned to his homeland last Tuesday after three years exile in Saudi Arabia.  He fled to the kingdom after police alleged offences involving pornography (nude pictures on his cellphone) and insulting Pancasila.

This is the nation’s five-point ideology - religious devotion, humanitarianism, nationalism, consultative democracy, and social justice.  Pancasila was devised by first president Soekarno and his colleagues as a foil to zealots demanding an Islamic state. Although taught in schools so all citizens can chant the words, it’s still considered by extremists to be too secular.

The charges have reportedly since been dropped.

Shihab, regularly tagged ‘firebrand’ by the Indonesian media and involved in ‘hatemonger rallies’, told the welcoming mobs ignoring social distancing rules that his objective was ‘to fight with the people for the moral revolution’.  This was left undefined.  However his real aim is to make mischief which he’ll most likely do in spades.

 Earlier he said his mission was fighting the Omnibus Law.  This is being heavily promoted by the government and corporates as red-tape shredding legislation to create jobs and attract foreign investors.  It also reduces some green-tape environment protections to speed developments.  Although the law has been passed, fist-shaking continues outside government buildings ringed by barbed wire.

Overseas businesspeople watching the FPI’s kerb-to-kerb whitecapped herds crippling the capital might well reconsider plans to put their money into Indonesia.  The Republic suddenly appears heading for division after some earlier clever quelling of disunity following last year’s presidential election.

Before the return of the demagogue, the usually peaceful demos against the new law were running out of energy.  The placard-waving students and unionists were also leaderless. Shihab has refuelled their tanks by stirring religion into an industrial relations row largely concerned with the cropping of employees’ rights so bosses can make hiring and firing easier.

The father of seven and son of an Arab-Indonesian family, Shihab, 55, studied in Malaysia before working as a teacher in a madrasah (Islamic boarding school).  He created the FPI in 1998, the year when second president Soeharto was felled by student riots after 32 years in power. 

Members formed vigilante gangs, notorious for their ‘sweeping’ of hotels during the holy month of Ramadan, seeking people allegedly breaking Islamic laws on dress and behaviour. They also trashed and firebombed businesses they claimed were offending religious norms.  Targets were often ethnic Chinese.

In 2003 Shihab was jailed for seven months for inciting violence.  In 2008 he was convicted on a similar charge and put behind bars for 18 months.  Being labelled a criminal burnished his credentials among his troops and enlarged his status.

The FPI’s biggest triumph came in December 2017 when he led a half-million strong protest again the Christian and ethnic Chinese governor of Jakarta.  Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama was accused of blasphemy – and later jailed for two years.

Shihab claimed he then went to Mecca as a pilgrim and could not return because he’d been ‘exiled’ by the government.  The charge was denied although it’s clear the administration wanted him out of the way during last year’s presidential election campaign.

Shihab supported Widodo’s rival, former general Prabowo Subianto, now the Minister for Defence.  The surprise invitation to join the ministry neutered much opposition to the government and gave Subianto the chance to busy himself on arms-buying sprees abroad while Widodo concentrated on domestic affairs.

That was before the pandemic which has so far infected 444,000 and killed almost 15,000, though these figures are widely believed to be under-estimates.  With the country in recession, there’s nothing in the kitty to purchase bang-bangs, so the ambitious billionaire Prabowo has nowhere to go and little to do.

Whether he’s prepared to side with Shihab again in the hope of contesting the presidency in 2024 when he’ll be 73 – or even scheming to dethrone the president - is the worry that’s now returned with the preacher.  

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 13 November 2020: 
https://johnmenadue.com/duncan-graham-return-of-the-dangerman-preacher/

 

REPORTING FROM AFAR - CLAIMING TO BE CLOSE

 

  No more Chinese Morrisons                                        

Mazoe Ford is billed as the ABC’s ‘South-East Asia Correspondent’.  She’s been reporting on the civil strife in Bangkok – from Sydney.

If TV ‘packages’ on events far away can be cobbled together using agency footage, stories from overseas news services, phone calls to contacts, social media postings and e-mail interviews, what’s the point in being on the spot?

Since the ABC’s Anne Barker (and Ambassador Gary Quinlan) quit Jakarta in April for fear of Covid-19, the corporation has filled the gap with inputs from its Asia Pacific Newsroom in Melbourne.  Apart from the lack of pieces-to-camera at news scenes, the reports are much the same.

A pioneer of the foreign correspondent profession was Australian adventurer and doctor George Ernest ‘Chinese’ Morrison (1862 – 1920).  After two years working at Ballarat hospital he wandered Asia and became The Times first permanent correspondent in Beijing, filing scores of scoops. 

For a fictional version of the job try Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Australian journalist Guy Hamilton in Peter Weir’s classic The Year of Living Dangerously about the 1965 Jakarta coup.

The Morrison model of journalism has been defeated by authoritarian countries’ visa controls, costs and more efficient technology.  No need for porters to carry copy through jungles or bribe telegraph operators to keep tapping Morse.

When Australian correspondents Bill Birtles and Mike Smith pulled out of China after a five-day diplomatic standoff last month, commentators made the case for keeping foreign bureaux open.

In this website former Asia correspondent Hamish McDonald quoted British journalist Robert Fisk, who died last month, saying ‘you cannot get near the truth without being there.’

Michael Pulch, the EU ambassador in Australia, said:  ‘The role of journalists in providing information from around the world is more important than ever, and must be safeguarded with no exception of any kind.’

In The New Daily financial journo Michael Pascoe, who has worked in Hong Kong, wrote: ‘Countries gain from knowing about each other, from being known, from having fewer secrets in situations short of war.

‘A journalist on the ground can do something official communiqués never can: Humanise the concrete facade a government presents. Foreign correspondents can see and report people. They are capable of not confusing the nation with the government.’

Journos who live in the cities where they report have experiences, insights and contacts those filing from afar cannot replicate.  But employing reporters who get to understand the culture through wakening to fajar (the pre-dawn Islamic call to prayer), smelling the pungency of kretek cigarette smoke and chatting at the roadside grilling of chicken sate is becoming a price too high for media managers.

If Jakarta can be covered from Southbank, then it is logical Victoria’s Covid-19 crisis – or any other Australian story – could be covered from the Indonesian capital. When big corporations still employed humans to answer phones they found it cheaper to use call centres in India and the Philippines.  Those days have gone, but the model remains.

Oz-based reporters can sit at their screens and watch on-line news conferences, hear expert commentators on webinars and read all the major newspapers through Press Reader. They’ve never smelt burning tyres, heard the pop of tear-gas launchers or quivered in apprehension at crowd mood changes to give their stories authenticity.  Does it matter?  Apparently not.

What’s the difference between Mary Smith in Sydney phoning the mayor of Grafton, a city she’s never visited, asking for reports of floods, and Sri Mulyani filing from Jakarta on a disaster in Surabaya, the East Java capital she doesn’t know?

One answer comes from Philippe Massonnet, Global News Director of Agence France-Presse:

 “If we want to offer high-quality news products, we need high-quality content, and high-quality journalism – and there is no high-quality journalism without reporters on the ground,” said

‘The media business may not be generating as much money as we would like these days ...but journalists have to stick to their positions, and their principles ...the risk of manipulation is huge. Journalists have to check and double-check their sources, they have to talk to people, they have to be on the ground for that.’

Well, yes, but this is getting academic – literally.  Space fillers of analysis and comment – and sometimes research which generates real news – is widely available from salaried uni staff happy to offer their words for free in exchange for publication.   Why bother with journos?

The days when reporters followed soldiers to the front and wandered diplomats’ offices are gone.  Three decades ago I walked unannounced into our Jakarta Embassy and immediately got an interview with Ambassador Philip Flood. Now the new bomb-resistant building is more fortress than welcome centre with no chance of a casual encounter that can lead to a big story.

The experience of being appointed a foreign correspondent was once described as ‘being knighted in their profession’.  A more cynical view was expressed 20 years ago by John Schauble, former Beijing correspondent for The Age and SMH.  He wrote:

 ‘A decade ago it was suggested that such jobs were more likely doled out as a reward for services rendered or as a means of dealing with a problem within the domestic newsroom. There appears to be little evidence that this situation has changed.’

It has now with the move towards employing locals. We’re getting new by-lines and more respectful titles (‘assistant correspondent’ instead of ‘fixer’) for on-the-spot reporters, like The Australian’s Chandni Vasandani, the AFR’s Natalia Santi and the Nine’s Karuni Rompies.  The ABC’s Max Walden, Erwin Renaldi and Hellena Souisa are based in Melbourne.

All have impressive CVs, often collecting higher degrees from overseas unis. Souisa, for example, is finishing a PhD at Melbourne Uni.

Indonesian journalists fluent in English and who’ve lived in the West can be hired in Jakarta for little more than AUD 1,000 a month, about 20 per cent of an Australian wage and without the removal and accommodation costs. 

With these multi-lingual cosmopolitans at the keyboards knowing more of our ways than we of theirs, the line about needing Australian reporters abroad because they understand readers’ tastes is hard to digest.

The downside is that they’re more vulnerable in police states than foreign reporters who can race home like Birtles and Smith, or get deported.  That’s not yet the situation in Indonesia, though the Republic has banned overseas academic researchers whose work they dislike and is getting testy with critics.

The International Federation of Journalists and the Alliance of Independent Journalists in Indonesia claims local journalists are being harassed and attacked across Indonesia, verbally, physically and through threats of defamation.

First published in Pearls & Irritations, 12 November 2020:
https://johnmenadue.com/off-the-ground-a-new-generation-of-foreign-correspondents/

 

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/