BARBIE MAKES A DASH IN ASEAN

                     

 IT'S A DOLL'S LIFE

 

 

Geo-politics is played on a world chessboard often by sad oldies in sober suits. To keep membership exclusive the polymath gamers use polysyllables and foreign tongues. Clearly not the place for a perky American doll.

 

Yet Barbie has made it to the top without studying at the Sorbonne. She’s getting into the space of Xi Jinping and Joe Biden, though not through intellect and learning - qualities sadly absent in Disney princesses.

 

 In her latest film (43 so far) the hedonistic Barbie World collapses into Real World where  misadventures start. Here she encounters the ASEAN Way.  It started in Jakarta and once had purpose, even its own anthem with English lyrics.  Now it’s marching in circles.

 

Indonesia is not the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, but there’d be no such grouping without the world’s fourth most populous nation to hold the show together. It was set up by the Republic’s second president General Soeharto at the behest of the US as an anti-Red barrier during the Cold War.

 

This ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.  That should have marked ASEAN’s time to terminate.  However,  like Hollywood escapism the league lived on, largely in its birthplace which still bans Communism.

 

Ironically ASEAN now includes two Red states - Vietnam and Laos. Cambodia leans towards China while the rest are equivocally pro-US.

 

Four of the ten members are ’flawed democracies’ according to The Economist Intelligence Unit – Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore. The others include places where truth-tellers, liberal academics, dissidents and journos live in dread.

 

In a Barbie World Australia should be in the mid-North Atlantic, close to people, cultures and acronyms we can understand, like NATO and the EU. 

 

ASEAN is neither an economic block nor a defence grouping. It wants to be the pivot of the region’s geopolitics, but can’t fix a thing because all ten members must agree on any decision, and must not interfere in internal affairs. 

 

Fine ideals, lousy reality. 

 

Walter Lohman, director of the US conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation has been scathing: ‘ASEAN aims to be a big presence on the regional stage … but its ability to navigate great power politics relies on it being relevant to the most critical challenges the region faces.

 

‘That relevancy is being called into question on two key issues: turmoil in Myanmar and the continued territorial impasse in the South China Sea.’

    

 

This is where Barbie debuted. A coarse ‘map' in the film with a few minuscule dashes considered likely to inflame Chinese sensitivities has triggered a ban in Vietnam of the comedy.

 

The Philippines thinks it might follow suit lest Big Beijing huffs and puffs.  Inland ASEAN states don’t care.  So much for unity.

 

This is so juvenile it’s surely a spoof or a film publicist creating controversy to fill US cinemas. The squint-and-it’s-gone moment looks more like a Rorschach inkblot test than a cartographer’s creation.

 

More serious is the human crisis in Myanmar, formerly Burma, and a democracy till the military (Tatmadaw) pounced two and a half years ago. Eight weeks after soldiers seized the elected State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, ASEAN leaders held an ‘emergency summit’ to scratch their skulls.

 

The result was a ‘five-point plan’. This seeks an end to violence; constructive dialogue; appointment of a special ASEAN envoy; access to Myanmar and all parties, and humanitarian assistance. 

 

Even before the coup, Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims were being brutally persecuted. Almost a million have fled to ‘the world’s largest refugee camp’  in  neighbouring Bangladesh.

 

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi asserts there’s been much quiet diplomacy going on as though the generals are rational men open to reason. Civil society groups in Myanmar have called for the plan to be ditched.  

 

Even Indonesian president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo  who has taken reputational risks by trying to play peacemaker as current ASEAN chair. has admitted there’s been ‘no significant progress’.

 

 

In this month’s meeting in Sydney, Jokowi and PM Anthony Albanese ‘reaffirmed their commitment to ASEAN centrality and the importance of an inclusive ASEAN-led architecture for regional peace, stability, and prosperity.’

 

A week later FM Penny Wong was in Jakarta reading from the same DFAT script about: ‘ASEAN at the centre of a stable, peaceful and prosperous region. We have deep family, education, tourism and business connections with the countries of Southeast Asia, and our future is tied to the future of the region we share.

‘A strong ASEAN is indispensable to the stability of our region. Australia will continue to work in partnership with ASEAN to shape the kind of region we all want.’

This sits awkwardly alongside the Oslo-based Peace Research Institute finding that at least 6,000 civilians were killed in the first 20 months following the Myanmar coup.

 

The report was published three weeks before the leaders’ ‘communique’ on their talks. This mentioned Myanmar thrice,  expressed ‘deep concern’, repeated the ineffective five-point plan and spruiked ASEAN 25 times.

 

Here’s why. About 666 million people / consumers, live in ASEAN states. There’s already an Australia-NZ free trade agreement AANZFTA in place. This will be updated at an ASEAN meeting in Jakarta in September.

 

Although inter-nation bonds are being discussed with other countries in the broader region, like India, South Korea and Japan, only ASEAN plugs into the smaller more disparate states where Australia wants to sell its wheats and meats.

 

If Australia can’t, or won’t, call out the faults, Malaysia can. Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim reckons it’s time to review the ASEAN non-interference principle to provide  ‘a new vision that could give us some flexibility in order to navigate and manoeuvre the way forward.’

 

With the present structure, such reform won’t happen. Best dissolve and start again. There’s a precedent. Before ASEAN the Southeast Asian Treaty Organisation  was a sort of NATO in Asia.

 

Although headquartered in Bangkok it was dominated by non-Asian nations - Australia, France, NZ, the UK and the US. It arose in 1954 and collapsed in 1977.

 

British diplomat Sir James Cable once described SEATO as ‘a fig leaf for the nakedness of American policy’, and a ‘zoo of paper tigers’. The latter line fits ASEAN.  It also sounds like a place in Barbie World.

First published in Pearls & Irritations,  13 July 2023:  https://johnmenadue.com/barbie-makes-a-dash-in-asean/

FAR TOO LITTLE, FAR TOO LATE

 A  genocide howling for an apology gets ‘regrets'

 

Before he left for a brief trip to Sydney, Indonesian President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo took a stab at reconciliation.  It’s unlikely to succeed.

 

It’s a truism of politics: Leaders whose time  is up sometimes get an itch to tidy up wrongs unmentioned when pitching for power. 

 

The Indonesian Constitution restricts presidents to two five-year terms. So Jokowi will bow off the stage after the election next February.

 

Suddenly he’s remembered that the  unresolved violence of the past impacting millions needs attention. This is what human rights activists have been pushing him and his predecessors to recognise and repair for decades, only to be told to forget and move on.

 

In a speech last month Jokowi acknowledged a dozen ‘human rights violations’ since 1965. The most serious erupted that year when an estimated half-million were hacked or shot in a military-organised purge of real or imagined Communists. 

 

Their mutilated corpses were tossed in rivers and gullies, families fearing retrieval for burial lest being painted Red.

 

As with the Holocaust, there have been deniers. However, a much-awarded young Australian researcher Dr Jess Melvin has conclusively proved the slaughter was a genocide orchestrated by second President and former army general Soeharto.

 

Seventh president Jokowi has spent the past nine years concreting his legacy with much-needed infrastructure projects like toll roads and new rail lines, all leading to the future.

 

The past is painful and tougher to fix. Too many festering sores for too long. Millions of families with relatives who were thought to be on the left have been affected. Even now some victims’ relatives fear talking to journalists lest the guilty seek revenge.

 

Jokowi has announced a ‘programme’ to examine the issues, which at first glance seems an honest bid to settle unfinished business. However close reading shows it will only please the alleged perpetrators. 

 

These include Presidential candidate and disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto, who was allegedly involved in the persecution and disappearance of student dissidents in 1998. He’ll not be fronting any court. There’s also no talk of compensation, only memorials in parks.

 

Coordinating Minister of Political, Legal, and Security Affairs Mahfud MD said ‘the victims' rights would be fulfilled simultaneously by ministries and government agencies involved in the process.

 

‘In the recommendation for a non-judicial resolution, there is no apology from the government to the public because of the incidents; however, the government acknowledges that the incidents did occur, and the government regrets that the incidents occurred,’

 

His conditional statement screams absence of political will;  it maintains the pattern of seeing the sickness but failing to cure.

 

In 1993 the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas-HAM) was set up by the Soeharto government to mollify the UN.

 

Reports on alleged abuses threatened the Republic’s international reputation as a good deal for investors.  Overseas shareholders were getting sensitive and demanding social responsibility.

 

Since then the Commission has produced reports which have jerked awareness though not the levers of power. The Indonesian Law Review commented that Komnas HAM doesn’t have ‘the authority to resolve the problem of gross human rights violations.’ It can’t force corporations to participate in its investigations or be involved in mediation.

 

In a burst of post-Revolusi cleansing the government started a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (KKR) to resolve human rights cases.  It ran for two years before a 2006 court ruled it unconstitutional. There’s been no replacement.

 

State-sanctioned brutality collides with the image of Indonesia as a progressive nation of moderates. An oft-recycled media cliche tags the people as ‘the friendliest and most cheerful in the world’. 

 

This over-worked claim is meaningless in an archipelago of 275 million individuals.  Many are indeed fine folk and a few pure evil - a reality not exclusive to Indonesia.

 

There have been other outrages since the 1965-66 genocide, including the 1982-85 Petrus (mysterious killings), overnight murders of thousands of alleged criminals whose bodies were left in the streets warning others against challenging authority.

 

In 1998 several hundred mainly ethnic Chinese were raped and murdered in the chaos following the fall of Soeharto. Student activists were allegedly arrested and tortured - at least 13  ‘disappeared’ when Prabowo was in command of the troops involved.

 

There were other secret killings and bashings that have never been prosecuted. One of the few Indonesian words absorbed by English reflects these terrors - to run ‘amok’.

 

Jokowi made his pseudo-reconciliation announcement at the site of a demolished torture centre in the province of Aceh. A guerrilla insurgency between 1976 and 2005 took the lives of 15,000 civilians and soldiers as Jakarta failed to forcibly crush the GAM (Free Aceh Movement) separatist movement.

 

Australian academic Dr Damien Kingsbury was closely involved in the Helsinki peace talks which eventually settled the dispute by giving Aceh a degree of autonomy.

 

Amnesty International Executive Director Usman Hamid reportedly stressed that a non-judicial resolution of ignored atrocities ‘must not negate the state's obligation to fulfil the victims' rights to reveal the truth.

 

‘The accountability of the perpetrators is an important part in settling cases of gross human rights abuses.’

 

That won't happen. Many with blood on their khaki have died, but their descendants remain determined to hide the stains. 

 

When announcing his latest attempted fix  the President said the purpose was: ‘To heal the nation's wounds as a consequence of past gross human rights violations that have left behind a heavy burden for the victims and the families of victims. These wounds must be healed quickly so that we can move forward’. 

 

There have been more than 40 Truth and Reconciliation Commissions across the world in the past three decades. The most successful was in South Africa, driven by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.   Jokowi’s latest attempt to heal is not based on telling the truth .

 

 ##

 First published in Pearls & Irritations, 4 July 2023:

https://johnmenadue.com/a-genocide-howling-for-an-apology-gets-regrets/

THE GREEN CITY IS HEADING INTO THE RED

  

A white elephant in the jungle needs a diet of dollars       

 

    

 

Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo is scheduled to visit Australia next month, his fifth and likely last trip south as Indonesian President. He’ll be talking trade, querying the AUKUS deal and again urging better visa access for his citizens. However, there’s an extra item in his baggage.

 

The word from Canberra is that Jokowi will be shopping for  lithium for his nation’s Chinese-brand electric vehicle factories in a bid to export cars to Australia. But the leader of 275 million people in his second and final five-year term will be driving another agenda, as he does at every opportunity.

 

He wants foreign investors to back a project which he hopes will define his legacy after a decade of running the world’s fourth most populous nation.  His idea is big, ambitious and risky - shifting the overcrowded, over-polluted and over-stressed capital from Java 1,300 km north to Borneo. 

 

Indonesia holds 73 per cent of the island which it calls Kalimantan.  The rest belongs to Malaysia and Brunei.

 

Jakarta’s population is 11 million, triple that number if the greater metro area is included. Java has 145 million, Kalimantan 17.5. Indonesia’s population growth rate is 1.1 per cent.

 

The case for taking the weight off Jakarta - literally because it’s sinking in parts at 25 cm a year - is watertight.  But why not build new in Java, particularly as it’s reported Jakarta will remain the nation’s commercial and financial centre? 

 

The resolute president explained the selection was not by geography but geometry: ‘We want the relocation to demonstrate the idea of Indonesia-centric instead of Java-centric. We have drawn a line from west to east, north to south, and found the centre at East Kalimantan province.’  That’s a short walk from the equator.

 

 Maybe he should have checked next door in more practical Malaysia where the administrative and judicial centre is Putrajaya. It’s only 32 klicks south of Kuala Lumpur which remains the nation’s capital. The 1999 shift was pushed by some of  the same factors now threatening Jakarta.

 

Jokowi consulted many about his vision but Queensland University planner Dr Dorina Pojani, author of Trophy Cities, was not among them:

 

‘The new capitals created since 1900 have been, for the most part, great planning disasters. They are dreary, overpowering, under-serviced, wasteful and unaffordable. In short, they are extremely expensive mistakes.’

 

Her book claims that in 1900, the world had only around 40 capitals; now there are nearly 200 with five more planned.

 

Work on the new city of Nusantara (‘archipelago’ in Sanskrit) has so far been funded by the State. But if the US $ 35 billion-plus project is to rise from a 56,000-hectare site in the jungle by next year it will need megatonnes of foreign fiscal fertilisers.

 

Through past visits by Australian bankers Jokowi knows of his southern neighbour’s cashed-up super funds (currently holding $ 3.5 trillion), so is offering tax holidays, deductions, zero withholding tax and many other goodies. There are reports that the project already has ‘commitments’ from investors in UAE, China, South Korea, and Taiwan and ‘offers’ from European countries.

 

However no independent verifiable details from the Ibu Kota Nusantara (capital city authority) as the agency refuses to respond to inquiries by this correspondent or allow a site visit.

 

So we don’t know whether these are hard deals or daydreams. Probably  the latter; if ink had dried on watertight contracts then Jakarta would be crowing loud so others would dash to the trough.

 

In January 2020 the public was told Japan’s SoftBank Corporation had US $40 billion ready to lend. Staff were sent to peer and ponder before saying no thanks.

 

Late last year the US Bloomberg business website reported: ‘Not one foreign party—state-backed or private—has entered into a binding contract to fund the project.’

 

Potential investors may see a chance to earn hefty returns from building infrastructure and, of course, a grand palace for the next president, but will the elected one  maintain Jokowi’s enthusiasm?

 

There are currently three contenders for the top job. The present leader is Central Java Governor Ganjar Pranowo, a member of Jokowi’s party and said to be in favour of Nusantara. Likewise his rivals, disgraced former general Prabowo Subianto and former Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan.

 

Building the new capital is now law so the project must proceed. But there’s nothing in the legislation about pace, or a clause stating that if money can’t be prised out of foreigners, the ‘city of tomorrow’ has to be given priority over health, education and other demands on the national budget

 

In any future financial crisis Nusantara would be an early sacrifice. The  public servants scheduled to move from their homes, families and friends in Jakarta are not as keen on Nusantara as their boss.

 

Once he’s gone back to his home in Solo, Central Java next year, their opposition will be easier to express. Unlike Australians, Indonesians are reluctant re-locators.

 

The present schedule has 17,000 government workers moving north in 2024 with 60,000 more shifting a year later. All will require homes, schools, hospitals and all the other necessary facilities and services for a modern metropolis.

 

Also needed will be squadrons of small entrepreneurs to care for householders’ needs as they do in Java; they’ll probably seek help to try their luck in a new and uncertain market - an expense outside the present budget.

 

China has been the major investor during Jokowi’s rule, tipping billions of renminbi into toll roads and nickel smelters. These cash generators offer more certain dividends than a possible white elephant.

 

The other worries for Western investors are corruption (Indonesia ranks 110 / 180 on Transparency International’s World Scale  where zero is pure) and the reported shrinking of democracy which includes adherence to the rule of law.

 

All investments in dreams are perilous, but Nusantara looks more disturbing than most. In the July chill of Canberra the normally reserved President will be hard pressed to energise the enthusiasm of Australian fund managers.

First published in Indonesia at Melbourne, 13 June 2023:  https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/indonesias-white-elephant-in-the-jungle-will-be-reared-on-foreign-capital-or-will-it/