The Informed Jakarta Reader

Reading between the lines: Indonesian coverage

Content Updated 09 Aug 1999

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Why read this?

Many foreign residents in Indonesia feel that International news coverage of Indonesian events is giving a misleading view. Indonesia is a large and complicated nation, and short news pieces collapse this complexity: "Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear". Events that happen hundreds of kilometres apart, on completely different islands, appear like they happened in the same place. A fight between two ethnic groups appears to be a religious war. A five minute piece on the latest clash is made up of four minutes of old footage.

This is partly due to bad journalism and bad editing, but also it reflects necessary limitations of the mainstream media. We saw similar distortions in the Gulf War: I remember an oil slick that made Monday's page 1, apparently the result of dastardly Iraqi environmental terrorism, but by Wednesday was an oil tanker hit by stray Allied gunfire. On page 5.

With a little background knowledge, you'll be able to sift the stories coming your way, throwing away the chaff.

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Quick facts: check your perspective

I have travelled in Shanghai, New York, Chicago, London, Seoul, Inchon, Melbourne, Sydney and Singapore. The only city I have ever been mugged in is Sydney.
I was approximately as close to the Sydney bushfires as I have been to any rioting in Jakarta. In both cases I had ash falling on my roof.
Most Jakartans learn about riots in their city from television, when they go home after work.
I visited Sydney a few weeks ago. There was a newspaper story about a police station being shot at, and a group of teenage hoodlums attacking people in a public swimming pool. Both of these events happened way out in Sydney's west, where most of my Sydney friends haven't been even once in the last five years, so they don't pay much attention. Sydney is only one quarter the size of Jakarta.
Private firearm ownership in Indonesia is almost unheard of.
Nine out of every ten student rallies passes without incident (that's a back-of-the-envelope calculation).

Some basic facts about Indonesia

Indonesia is the world's 4th largest country by population, with 200 million people. It is often called the world's largest Muslim nation. Indonesia is very important strategically. It has large oil, gas, mineral and gold reserves, and controls major shipping lanes. Since the 1960s its economy has grown rapidly: at that time it had about the same GDP per head as India, but by 1996 the GDP per head was three times that of India. Literacy, life expectancy and poverty levels also improved dramatically in that time. Indonesia is or was regarded as a remarkable success.

The "Asian Crisis" has hit Indonesia harder than any other country, and exposed very poor quality institutions and terrible corruption. However, the basic social and political structures seem largely unthreatened (the removal of Soeharto from power is a lot less significant than it may appear); the country is a long way from being in a revolutionary state, and predictions of mass starvation have, thankfully, failed to happen. The economy is, however, badly hurt, particularly the urban economy of the large cities. The more agricultural regions are, relatively, doing well.

There are about 6000 inhabited islands in the Indonesian archipelago. There is no historical precedent for an Indonesian nation: the boundaries are a mixture of Dutch ruled areas and bits that were not conclusively ruled by anyone.

Indonesia's 1975 annexation of East Timor is not recognised by the United Nations. Its 1969 annexation of Irian Jaya is.

Indonesia was a Dutch colony for around 300 years. Indonesian independence was won through a two year armed struggle against the Dutch, (initially the Indonesians fought British and Australian forces who were minding shop, planning on handing the country back to their European ally. In some fighting, British commanders used Japanese prisoners of war to fight the Indonesians). Indonesia was controlled by the Japanese during WWII, who despite being harsh and exploitative rulers, trained an Indonesia elite for independence once it was clear the war was lost. Much of the wealth of the Netherlands was built on the colonial exploitation of Indonesia, home to fabled spices and a rich source of coffee, sugar and rubber.

Post independence, Indonesia had around ten years of democratic rule, and then fell into dictatorship under Sukarno and Soeharto. Sukarno is revered by the Javanese, young and old, with as many as 500,000 still visiting his grave each year. Soeharto commands no love and little respect. His family and cronies are despised.

Background: Race

The people belong to many different ethnic groups: the official Indonesian view is about 27 ethnic groups (according to a mural in the national museum), but since this counts all of Irian Jaya's peoples as one, it is obviously a vast understatement.

The level of cultural sophistication ranges widely. Java has a long history of advanced civilisations and a very organised, rich society, although the island had never been under the rule of one authority before the arrival of the Dutch. In contrast, some of the ethnic groups from Sumatra were until recently subsistence, hunter-gatherer head-hunters. The Irianese were stone age people. Almost the entire archipelago is isolated and mountainous, leading to very many very different groups living in what on a non-topographical map appears to be close proximity. These different groups speak different languages, often have different religions, and have a history of disputes going back hundreds of years.

The nation's motto is "unity through diversity", but despite that the Javanese dominate the nation in all ways. The national language, Bahasa Indonesia, is spoken as a second language or lingua franca by nearly all Indonesians. It has first-language status only in Jakarta.

Background: The Chinese

The Chinese/non-Chinese split is the biggest single tension in Indonesia. The Chinese make up only 4% of the population, but dominate the economy; by some measures, such as stock-market valuations, they control up to 80% (this statistic seems a bit silly given the agricultural, rural nature of Indonesia's economy, but it is widely quoted). They live in the large urban centres, and within these cities there are Chinese areas. Soeharto assisted a few Chinese tycoons to amass great wealth as part of his divide and conquer strategy. For shares in their ventures, he offered them protection, but denied the Chinese their own political voice. This policy was a disaster for ordinary Chinese-Indonesians. Fierce anti-Chinese riots have been a feature of Indonesia for 200 years. The bureaucracy discriminates against Chinese Indonesians in almost every way. Their identity cards are often coded to indicate race (a practice supposedly stopped), and they are subject to frequent petty discrimination. Life in Indonesia for people of Chinese descent is not much fun.

The Chinese control most of the retail and trading markets. They immigrated to Indonesia as laborers, but through hard work and perceived racial superiority earned the favour of the Dutch, who established them as the middle class. My feeling is that their culture and immigrant status gives them advantages in the Indonesian environment, just as it has throughout the ASEAN nations. Most Chinese are simply middle class. There are some Chinese tycoons, but there are also very many poor Chinese. Chinese cultural identify is still quite strong, although Chinese language skills are not that common any more. Intermarriage is reasonably common today.

Background: Java

About 110 million people live on Java. Java's land area is about 60% that of Victoria's, the smallest mainland Australian state (with a population of about 5 million). Java is one of the most densely populated islands on earth. It has very rich soil, and is close to being self-sustaining in staple foods. Traditional, agricultural life is almost sacred, understandably. When Indonesians talk about the Javanese, they usually mean those who come from central and east Java. The people living in the West Java mountains are Sundanese. Their language is completely different to Javanese, and they are physically slightly different. Cultural differences are minor to the outsider, and there is absolutely no hostility between the Javanese and the Sundanese. The traditional inhabitants of Jakarta, a coastal area in West Java, are known as the Batawi (indirectly taking the name of a Germanic people inhabiting, until the 4th century AD, what is now the Netherlands). For many purposes, it is an acceptable approximation to refer to all inhabitants of Java as Javanese.

Background: Religion

There are five official religions, two of which are Christian: Islam, Christianity (meaning Protestant), Roman Catholic, Hinduism and Buddhism. All Indonesians are supposed to belong to one of these five. There is no recognition of the animist religions of the Irianese or other traditional peoples outside of Java, and no recognition of the traditional blended beliefs followed by many millions of rural Javanese, who are officially regarded as Muslims (Islam is a large influence but a strict Muslim may be unhappy at a somewhat ambiguous commitment to monotheism found in the traditional beliefs, not to mention the fondness for Javanese astrology and spirits). There is no recognition of Chinese Confucianism/ancestor worship. Most ethnic groups are identified with a certain religion, but I don't know of an ethnic group that is exclusively one religion. Javanese are usually regarded as Muslim, although quite a number of the elite Javanese are Catholic (more later). Most Chinese are identified with Protestant Christianity, even though many are actually Buddhist or Confucist. The East Timorese are Catholic, the Balinese are Hindu (although there are Muslim Balinese), Bataks have their own Lutheran church, even though as many as a third of the Bataks are Muslim, and so on.

Background: Ideology

The three major ideologies in Indonesia have been Communism, Nationalism and Islamism.

Communism was eventually destroyed in a civil war in the mid 1960s. Around 500,000 thousand people lost their lives in anarchic mass purges, analogous to the Cultural Revolution. Nationalism has been dominant over political Islam almost by definition: Indonesia can never be an Islamic concept, since it includes many peoples and territories that are not Muslim. In any case, Nationalism has been by far the more popular ideology of the overwhelmingly Muslim Javanese. A great debate on this issue raged from the declaration of independence up until the 1950s, but the Islamicists were never able to muster the numbers, even via the two democratically elected parliaments, to bring about constitutional changes to end the secular state. Later, the army assumed the dominant political role, and saw Nationalism as its defining role. The early armed challenges to the secular state mainly came from Muslim territories, so political Islam was seen as the enemy of the state. The New Order regime elevated Catholic Javanese to positions of power within the army far, far greater than their numerical proportion. The uprisings in East Java, Aceh and elsewhere were brutally suppressed. In Jakarta, the military massacred an Islamic mob rioting in the poor areas of Jakarta in 1984 (the Tanjung Priok massacre).

Background: Transmigration

A few years ago, the Indonesian Government had the bright idea of resettling some of the urban poor from Java onto outlying islands. This was called Transmigration. The government gave the settlers land and just a little bit of money, not enough for them to afford to come back to Java. The transmigrated Javanese have never been too fond in these remote destinations, and it has caused a great deal of trouble. A lot of the recent disputes have been indigenous people fighting the settlers. The numbers involved would never have made much of an impact on the huge population of Java, so I don't doubt transmigration has been much more trouble than it was worth.

Background: East Timor

The great debate of modern Indonesia, Islamic state Vs Nationalist secular state, is about to begin again, and Catholic East Timor has the potential to be a proxy battlezone for the two ideologies: presumably, the Islamicists will encourage it to leave Indonesia, and the Nationalists will fight for East Timor to remain in Indonesia. In my opinion, this proxy status represents the greatest threat to East Timor gaining independence.

The ordinary Indonesian is now much more likely to see the parallels between Indonesian brutality in East Timor and Dutch brutality in Indonesia, and you now almost never hear the educated middle class parroting the propaganda about how much good Indonesian development has done the East Timorese people. A remarkable change in two years.

Background: The Media

The print media is currently thriving. The threat of censorship has been removed, and there exists genuine independence and high standards in some of the publications. The most respected publications are Tempo, a weekly journal that was closed down by Soeharto but it now back (with the last laugh), Kompass, the most important Bahasa Indonesia daily, and the Jakarta Post, the most important English daily, are from the same publishing house (which is Gramedia, a large Catholic Javanese company). Another important daily is Republika, the newspaper of ICMI, a political, modernist Islamic group, established to rival the dominance of Kompass.

Background: Key People and Organisations

Habibie: the president. Long time friend of Soeharto. German educated engineer. Close to ICMI. Habibie is manoeuvring to stay president, which is a vain ambition that could only be achieved by a drastic corruption of the electoral process.

Gus Dur aka Abdurrahman Wahid: liberal intellectual Muslim leader of NU (Nahdlatul Ulama), the largest Muslim group. Deeply suspicious, to the point of being an enemy, of political Islam. Will not run for president or political office. Regarded by some as the most important person in Indonesia. He is so liberal I find it hard to believe he is not seriously out of touch with his followers, but he apparently commands their loyalty. He also seems to have trouble maintaining consistent positions and alliances.

Amien Rais: The other major Muslim political leader. A modernist, who is quite liberal but is also in favour of a stronger political role for Islam, although whether to the point of ending the secular state is unknown. He claims he is in favour of a secular state, but others are sceptical. Said a woman could be president, if there were no acceptable male candidates. Will run for president. Megawati's main rival.

Megawati: daughter of the first president Sukarno. Megawati is the flagbearer of the nationalists. In any fair election for president she would win, according to expert opinion, opinion polls and common sense. In addition to fervent mass popular support, I think ABRI will rally around her. Some Islamic opponents have already begun attacking her, both as a woman and as someone who is seen as too close to the (non-Muslim) Balinese. Has a long-standing and good grass roots organisation (she even has her own newspaper: Mega Pos). Her popularity seems to stem firstly from her father and secondly from Soeharto's stupidity in making her a martyr. Even if she was just a figurehead (the jury is still out in my opinion), there is an impressive and broad organisation coalescing around her, perhaps because her "figurehead" status means she is seen as open to influence.

ICMI: Association of Muslim Intellectuals. Calling for a greater role for orthodox Islam. Targets Catholic Javanese influences, by rivalling the newspaper Kompass with Republika, for example. Habibie was the patron but resigned after becoming president. Many Muslims and nearly all non-Muslims are suspicious of ICMI.

General Wiranto: Commander of ABRI, the armed forces. Lost of lot of popular support over the November 1998 shootings of students. I regard him as the most important person in Indonesia. ABRI is loyal to him, he seems committed to some form of democratisation, although I think less than most people may expect, and he keeps his distance from Habibie. In his hands lies the future of Indonesia. He is keeping a low profile at the moment, but will make decisive incursions into Indonesian politics over the next 12 months.

ABRI: The Indonesian armed forces, including the police. ABRI is the backbone of Indonesia. It is the proud descendent of the forces that fought the Dutch, and it is by far the most disciplined and effective institution in the country. It has always held a major political role.

The Students: There are many student groups, but most of them are pro-democracy, pro-secular (including the Muslim groups) and fierce enemies of Habibie. The Australian ambassador recently described them as the only group to have consistently improved their political capital. The are more influential then anyone would have imagined, and command wide respect for their incredible bravery and tenacity. They are very idealistic and naive in their demands, but hey, someone has to be. For instance, they have tried very hard to bring Megawati and Amien Rais together in union against Habibie, but these two are natural political opponents.

Golkar: The political organisation of Soeharto and the New Order regime. Collapsing, but still has the best grass-roots organisation, and layers and layers of patronage and loyalty starting in every village and kampung.

Background: Jakarta

Jakarta is a very large city, of between 8 million and 15 million people depending on where you draw the lines. It has significant populations of just about every ethnic group. It has been a magnet for economic migrants and the middle class from other parts of Java and the whole nation. It has attracted millions of young laborers to work in its factories, just like the Industrial Revolution. These millions of people, uprooted from their families and traditions, are vulnerable, particularly as many of their factories have closed down and the cost of living in the city has soared with inflation of 80%. They are overwhelmingly Muslim, but not yet very Islamicised.

The underclass live in shanty towns in the north of Jakarta. People below the middle class are not very mobile, as public transport is poor and expensive. Jakarta is quite compartmentalised. Thus, Jakarta takes on very different complexions depending on where you are looking.

Kampungs are urban villages, perhaps with only a few roads in, leading to a walled-city feeling. In Jakarta, particularly in South Jakarta, many of the kampungs have come a long way from their village origins. The roads are narrow but sealed, there are car parking areas well policed, and every house has electricity. Telephones are generally still communal. Houses are small, but the ones I have visited are comfortable. Kampung populations are usually a few thousand or so, but they can be larger. There are a few small mosques in each kampung, each equipped with very effective loudspeakers.

South Jakarta, where most expats and upper-middle class Jakartans live, is wealthy. It includes graceful old areas like Kemang and Pejaten, where mansions co-exist with Betawi kampungs, and Pondok Indah, a 1960s town planning effort that has recreated suburban America or Australia, complete with cul-de-sacs, monstrous houses in nouveau riche style and shopping malls surrounded by ugly acres of car-parks. There is even a large mosque surrounded by acres of car park. There are no slums (perhaps compensation for large areas of great architectural poverty), and no kampungs.

In complete contrast, North Jakarta is home to many Chinese and also the poorest class of Jakartans, an unfortunate and volatile mix. It is flat, swampy and hot. Most riots happen in North Jakarta, which is a world away from South Jakarta. I suspect that people who have lived in Johannesburg will know immediately what I mean. Those middle class Jakartans who usually can not afford to live in South Jakarta, tend to go even further south, outside the boundaries of Jakarta, or to new middle-class satellite cities like Bekasi.

Applying your new knowledge ...

When you see this ...	Perhaps you need to stop and think about this ...
Muslims fighting Christians: the Crusades in reverse!	Are there clear ethnic demarcations in the groups fighting? Perhaps it's Dayuks and immigrant Javanese at war?
A Muslim politician speaking about changes to the government	It does not presage an Islamic revolution: it could be one of the liberal, democratic Muslim leaders

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