Blogging the democratic revolution
Miss Indonesia Universe, crowned Aug. 25, 2006 Source: Reuters, via Yahoo! News! Miss Kazakhstan World 2005, Miss Kazakhstan Universe 2006 Source: Missosology Miss England World 2005 Source: Yahoo!, via My Pet Jawa Miss Afghanistan Earth 2003 Source: Wikipedia What do these girls have in common? They’re all Muslim beauty queens, showing off their hair, faces, arms, legs, and much more. Nothing remarkable about that in modern society – everyone’s got to wear a bathing suit sometimes, and no, I don’t mean this – but for perverse, repressed, bitter, dirty-minded Islamofascists, it’s something that’s utterly forbidden. The Age of Democratic Revolution…
Abu Bakar Bashir, Southeast Asia’s Leading Terror Mullah Source: The Sydney Morning Herald I get a visceral reaction every time I see this guy. I first heard of Abu Bakar Bashir, the leading terror cleric in Southeast Asia, in early 2002 from Sidney Jones, who was then with Human Rights Watch. She knew her stuff on Indonesia and she sounded the alarm loudly about this bastard well before the first Bali bombings in October 2002. She was absolutely adamant about the danger he posed as leader of Jemaah Islamiyah and the sleepiness of the Indonesian government to the threat he…
East Timor, with less than a million people, is like a small town, with small-town niceness … and small-town small-mindedness. It’s also coming off a 25-year populist guerrilla war for independence, meaning that there are a lot of unemployed soldiers and guerrillas around, without a purpose. The barely-developed half-island won its independence from Indonesia in a 1999 referendum that came about by fluke, when, in an unguarded moment, the loose-tongued, clownish Soeharto successor, BJ Habibie, said that if the Timorese really wanted a referendum, he’d darn well give it to them. It turns out they did. And independence, after decades…
A few days ago, I was blogging about the tombs of Imogiri, near Yogyakarta, in central Java, discussing them as the place I was at onset of Indonesia’s democratic revolution in 1998. Today, those tombs are at the epicenter of the deadly earthquake in Indonesia, centered in Bantul. Hospitals are overflowing and more than 3000 are known dead in the first 12 hours, it will soar much higher. I noted earlier that Indonesia has a lot of eerie coincidences. I just wish this wasn’t one of them. There are people I know there, and I am quite worried. I will…
Dear old Gus Dur of Indonesia is the one of the best Muslims I have ever known. He’s a holy man whose life of prayer reflects vividly in the life he leads. He is humble, gentle, kindly and noble. I used to talk to him back in Jakarta, years ago, before he became Indonesia’s first democratically elected president as Abdurrahman Wahid. Gus Dur is his Javanese nickname and he was the leader of the PKB party in the post-Soeharto ruins, and with Amien Rais of the more Islamic-fundamentalist Muhammadiyah/PAN faction, and Megawati Soekarnoputri of the very secular, abangan, ecumenical PDI-P,…
I was somewhere outside Yogyakarta on this day eight years ago, within sight of Mount Merapi volcano. One of the greatest democratic revolutions in history was about to erupt but I didn’t know it then. I was at a mysterious Javanese graveyard of tombs outside Yogyakarta, where old and young many of them in traditional Javanese dress of batiks in ancient cinnamon and indigo dyes, alongside boulevards of tombs and walls, a lot of dark palms shading it all, mysteriously gloomy, even as amid the equatorial sun its shade made it all refreshingly cool. The old women, like the men,…
Amid all the smoke and dust of urbanized Jakarta – motorcycles, white Islamic veils, clove cigarettes, blue jeans, smoking satay on the street grill – in a megalopolis of something like 21 million people – there is a real Java, Indonesia, too. This one isn’t revolutionary, but eternal. By eternal, I mean it seems to resist EVERY change in favor of itself, its OWN identity. Java is the same as it always was. Not that it is always easy to live this way, of course, it’s just that it’s frequently done. You might ask why such a post belongs on…
Via Real Clear Politics, the Washington Post has an astounding article about a young rock band in Indonesia that is defying the vicious local Islamofascists by singing innovative songs against Jihad terrorism. Every time the terrorists threaten to blow them up, the youthful band comes up with a new song, calling it their next new ‘smart bomb’ aimed at the Islamists. They are literally defying death by singing songs condemning terrorism. And they just keep doing it. There are signs that this group is changing Indonesia, a nation that is full of intelligent, interesting young people who have no interest…
The weekend’s terror attack on the Indonesian island of Bali was a monstrous atrocity. Does it have revolutionary implications? I think it does, because it’s closely aligned with Indonesia’s brave self-transformation into an authentic democracy in 1999. The terrorists who struck Bali were trying to destroy Indonesia’s fragile democracy – at a sensitive time. With fuel costs soaring and the rupiah battered, these evil people were going after an economic power center, and they intended their attack as economic warfare. It’s something they are betting can topple democracy. Do I think they can do it? No. Indonesians treasure their democracy…
One of the biggest triggers to revolution in any country is the concept of ‘rent-seeking.’ It’s a concept that’s largely foreign to us Americans, but perfectly understood by many people in other cultures. It’s the concept of someone exacting unfair payments over others because of some fundamental and resented privilege. If you were in the mafia, you would call it ‘skimming.’ Tommy Soeharto and all the Soeharto kids were perfect living embodiments of rent-seeking – what those guys did during Indonesia’s longest-running dictatorship was to either own or exact “protection money” from the airplane you flew in to Jakarta on,…
Indonesia is at the boiling point with a whole string of frightening developments. Oil prices are going through the moon and the indonesian government, which subsidizes oil, is being crushed by those higher prices. That’s sent the miserable-anyway currency, the Indonesian rupiah, to its lowest levels in four years as capital flight takes off. Meanwhile, Bird Flu is prompting additional fears of an epidemic in Jakarta, one of the world’s most densely populated cities. There is even a row with China now that the Indonesian navy has fired on a Chinese fishing boat, killing a crewmember. They are in a…
They’re so darn dumb. How does anyone get that dumb? Rule Number One: You DO NOT do drugs in Asia. Rule Number Two: You DO NOT transport drugs in Asia. Rule Number Three: You DO NOT associate with anyone who does drugs in Asia. Rule Number Four: You read the signs at airports, the ones in great big red letters that say ‘Drug Dealing Will Be Punished By Death’ and drop your drugs in that convenient trash receptacle right under that sign before you go see Mister Asian Customs Man. Rule Number Five: You do not violate any of this,…
The first time most people on this side of the world had ever heard of Aceh was late last year on Dec. 26, when an enormous tsunami swept over the land and killed over 130,000 people. It’s part of Sumatra, an island of 4.1 million in Indonesia, and home to three decades of a rebel war for independence that has killed several thousand more. But the tsunami has yielded good news, as tragedy begets the best in people. Due to the overwhelming need to distribute aid to the victims of the tsunami, a deal by both the government and the…
Today’s 20-year verdict against Schapelle Corby, supposedly for drug possession and drug running on the island of Bali, has radicalized a major part of Australia. The 27-year-old surfer insists she didn’t do it, but was the victim of an airport smuggling ring that forgot to retrieve its pot from her boogie board bag. Conveniently for them, the film of the baggage sequence has disappeared from airport custody. And no fingerprints were taken from the pot, something Schapelle says would exonerate her. Meanwhile, Indonesia tried her with a real charmer of a judge who said he didn’t believe in acquitting anyone…
I was bothered by Indonesia’s Abu Bakar Bashir verdict and realized it was going to amount to a political struggle in Indonesia’s six-year-old democracy, because voters there had just elected a new president who ran for office on an anti-terror platform. That sham verdict is going to pose some problems for Indonesia’s new president as terrorists grow emboldened there.