The Nation (“Bangkok’s Independent Newspaper”) recalls the end of absolute monarchy in Thailand:
“On that morning, we heard about the coup at the golf course,” Queen Rambai Barni said, recalling the revolution that ended the Siamese Monarchy on June 24, 1932.
via Asiapages
Filed under Thailand
The overthrow of the old religions–religions linked to the earth and animals and the deities of a particular place or tribe–by the revealed religions is one of the haunting themes of history. Even when there are texts, as with the ancient Roman-Christian world, the changeover is hard to follow. There are only indications. It can be seen that the earth religions are limited, offering everything to the gods and very little to men. If these religions can be attractive now, it is principally for modem aesthetic reasons; and even so, it is impossible to imagine a life completely within them. The ideas of the revealed religions–Buddhism (if it can be included), Christianity, Islam–are larger, more human, more related to what men see as their pain, and more related to a moral view of the world. It might also be that the great conversions, of nations or cultures, as in Indonesia, occur when people have no idea of themselves, and have no means of understanding or retrieving their past.
The cruelty of Islamic fundamentalism is that it allows only to one people–the Arabs, the original people of the Prophet–a past, and sacred places, pilgrimages, and earth reverences. These sacred Arab places have to be the sacred places of all the converted peoples. Converted peoples have to strip themselves of their past; of converted peoples nothing is required but the purest faith (if such a thing can be arrived at), Islam, submission. It is the most uncompromising kind of imperialism.
SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 63-64
Filed under Indonesia
My first eighteen years were spent two oceans away, on the other side of the globe, in the New World, on an island in the mouth of one of the great South American rivers. The island had no sacred places; and it was nearly forty years after I had left the island that I identified the lack.
I began to feel when I was quite young that there was an incompleteness, an emptiness, about the place, and that the real world existed somewhere else. I used to feel that the climate had burnt away history and possibility. This feeling rnight have had to do with the smallness of the island, which we all used to say was only a dot on the map of the world. It rnight have had to do with the general poverty and the breakdown of the extended family system that had come with us from India. It might have had to do with the wretched condition of India itself; and with the knowledge at the same time that we who were Indian were an immigrant people whose past stopped quite abruptly with a father or grandfather.
Later, years after I had left–knowledge of things never corning all at once, but in layers–I thought that the place was unhallowed because it hadn’t been written about. And later still I thought that the agricultural colony, in effect a plantation, honored neither land nor people. But it was much later, in India, in Bombay, in a crowded industrial area–which was yet full of unexpected holy spots, a rock, a tree–that I understood that, whatever the similarities of climate and vegetation and formal belief and poverty and crowd, the people who lived so intimately with the idea of the sacredness of their earth were different from us.
There would have been sacred places on the island, and in all the other islands to the north. On the tiny island of St. Kitts, for example, there were–hidden by sugarcane fields–rocks with crude pre-Columbian carvings. But the aboriginal people who knew about the sacred places had been destroyed on our island, and instead of them there were–in the plantation colony–people like us, whose sacred places were in other continents.
Too late, then, I remembered with a pang a story I had heard about when I was a child, and later read another version of (in Charles Kingsley’s At Last, 1871). Every now and then, according to this story, groups of aboriginal Indians in canoes came across the gulf from the continent (where remnants of the tribes still existed), walked to certain places in the woods in the southern hills, performed certain rites or made offerings, and then, with certain fruit they had gathered, went back home across the gulf. This was all that I heard. I wasn’t of an age to want to ask more or to find out more; and the unfinished, unexplained story now is like something in a dream, an elusive echo from another kind of consciousness.
Perhaps it is this absence of the sense of sacredness–which is more than the idea of the “environment”–that is the curse of the New World, and is the curse especially of Argentina and ravaged places like Brazil. And perhaps it is this sense of sacredness–rather than history and the past–that we of the New World travel to the Old to rediscover.
So it is strange to someone of my background that in the converted Muslim countries–lran, Pakistan, Indonesia–the fundamentalist rage is against the past, against history, and the impossible dream is of the true faith growing out of a spiritual vacancy.
SOURCE: Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), pp. 51-52
Filed under Indonesia
In his book Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples (Vintage, 1998), V.S. Naipaul profiles an Islamic fundamentalist from Sumatra. The profile concludes thus:
Near the end of our talk that Sunday morning I asked him again about his outspokenness in the late 1970s and his troubles then with the government.
He said, expanding on what he had learnt in jail in 1978 and 1979 from the former foreign minister, Subandrio, “Never criticize Suharto. He’s a Javanese. Young people shouldn’t criticize older people, especially big people.” For Imaduddin–not so young in 1977: forty-six to President Suharto’s fifty-six–this went against the grain. “I was trained in the Dutch way and then in the American way, where criticism is O.K. And I was born in Sumatra: I can argue with my father. I had to learn the Javanese way.”
The Sumatran way, which came naturally to Imaduddin, was the forthright, religious way, the fundamentalist way. For Imaduddin it had historically been a source of Sumatran strength.
He had told me earlier, “The Dutch when they came could conquer Java relatively easily, but they couldn’t conquer Aceh and Sulawesi because the people were very religious.”
Mr. Wahid had spoken of the new steamship travel that had from the thirties of the nineteenth century made Mecca more accessible for pilgrimage and study. Out of this there had developed, in colonized Java, the new Islamic village schools, like the one run by Mr. Wahid’s grandfather.
In the independent kingdoms or sultanates of Sumatra, however, the effect of these journeys to Mecca had been more violent. Just as one hundred and fifty or sixty years later colonial students, often the first in their families to travel abroad for university degrees, were to go back home with borrowed ideas of revolution; so these Sumatran students and pilgrims in Mecca, influenced by Wahabi fundamentalism, and a little vain of their new knowledge, were to go back home determined to make the faith in Sumatra equal to the Wahabi faith in Mecca. They were determined to erase local errors, all the customs and ceremonies and earth reverences that carried the taint of the religions that had gone before: animism, Hinduism, Buddhism. There had followed religious wars for much of the century; it was what had drawn the Dutch in, at first to mediate or assist, and then to rule.
This was the missionary faith that lmaduddin had inherited. Java, rather than Sumatra, was rich in the monuments of the pagan past. But nothing outside or before the faith was to be acknowledged, not even a great Buddhist monument like Borobudur, one of the wonders of the world. One of Imaduddin’s criticisms of the government in 1979 was that the Indonesian embassy in Canberra looked like a Hindu building. As for Borobudur, that was for the international community to look after.
I asked him about that. He said–like a man whose position now required him to be more statesmanlike–that I had misunderstood. What he had said or meant to say was that money that could be used to feed “hungry Muslims” shouldn’t be used on Borobudur.
In spite of the statesmanlike softening intention, the old Sumatran unforgivingness showed through. For the new fundamentalists of Indonesia the greatest war was to be made on their own past, and everything that linked them to their own earth.
Filed under Indonesia
Thailand
The polity now known as Thailand was generally referred to as “Siam” for many centuries. Nationalists renamed it in 1939 in an attempt to be more inclusive of people, particularly in the north, northeast, and south, who had never considered themselves “Siamese” (i.e., indigenous subjects of the state centered on Ayutthaya or Bangkok) but might be persuaded to think of themselves as “Thai.” After World War II “Siam” briefly was restored as the country’s name in 1946, but little more than a year later “Thailand” became permanent.
The term itself is a neologism, combining the traditional ethnic identity “Thai” with “land” (prathet in Thai). As the word “Thai” also means “free,” some people translate the country’s name as “Land of the Free,” but it is unlikely that that was the original meaning. Many other peoples speaking closely related languages live nearby in Myanmar, China, Laos, and Vietnam; for purposes of convenience, linguists and other scholars sometimes label all of them, along with the Thai, as “Tai” (without the “h”).
There is wide variation among systems of transliteration of Thai into the Western alphabet, but in general place-names in this book follow those adopted by the Board on Geographic Names, as used on most published maps.
Laos
The word “Laos” was first used by European missionaries and cartographers in the seventeenth century to pluralize the word “Lao,” the name of the country’s predominant ethnolinguistic group. In the Lao language, which is closely related to Thai, there is no orthographic distinction between plural and singular nouns. In Lao, Laos is known as pathet lao or muang lao, both meaning “Lao country” or “Lao-land,” along the lines of prathet thai (Thailand).
The French used the term “Laos” as the name for their protectorate in the colonial period. After independence in 1954, the country became known as the Kingdom of Laos. In 1975, when the communists came to power and the monarchy was abolished, it was renamed the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.
SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)
Australia’s Herald Sun (12 June 2004) reports on advances in treating elephantine root canals.
VETERINARIANS and dentists in northern Thailand have adapted human root canal techniques to treat elephants suffering from potentially fatal tusk infections, it was reported today.
Doctors at Chiang Mai University developed the technique to mend the infected stumps of tusks sawn off and sold for their ivory by unscrupulous elephant handlers, according to [Thailand’s] The Nation newspaper.
Tusk infections could threaten local pachyderm populations, elephant welfare organisations said.
Handlers often fill the severed tusks with soil and bark, which can cause tetanus and lead to death, the newspaper reported, citing research by dentists and veterinarians from several Thai elephant protection organisations.
Veterinarians throughout northern Thailand will be trained to care for elephants using the new technique, which employs the same material used to fill human cavities.
Then they cover the stump with a gold crown?
Filed under Thailand
Malaysia
The name “Malaysia” is derived from the term “Malay,” long applied by locals and foreigners to the Malay Peninsula in recognition of the predominance there of Malay-speaking peoples (whose geographic extent, however, also includes much of Sumatra and other islands of the archipelago). The peninsula became widely known from the late eighteenth century simply as “Malaya” and, in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when its individual states fell under British colonial rule, as British Malaya. British Malaya also included the three Straits Settlements on the fringe of the peninsula: the islands of Penang and Singapore and the small west coast state of Melaka (Malacca). When the Malay states (including Penang and Melaka but not at that time Singapore) became independent in 1957, they did so as the Federation of Malaya. In 1963 a larger federal unit called Malaysia was formed, bringing together the Federation of Malaya, Singapore, and the British-ruled protectorates of Sarawak and Sabah in northern Borneo. The oil-rich protectorate of Brunei, situated between British North Borneo and Sarawak, declined to join Malaysia, and Singapore was expelled in 1965.
Much of Malaysia has been the recipient during the past two centuries of immigrants of other than indigenous stock (which is held to include local Malays, the aborigines or orang asli [“original people”] of the peninsula, the tribal peoples of the Borneo states, and immigrants from Java, Sumatra, and elsewhere in Indonesia). The largest immigrant group was “Chinese,” a term used for individuals hailing originally from many different parts of south China, often speaking distinct local languages. Those immigrants referred to as “Indian” included Muslims as well as Hindus from Tamilnadu in south India, Bengalis, and others, in addition to many from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). One political result of the large immigrant influx has been the coining of a term that seeks to distinguish between Malaysians who are of Malay or other local descent and those who are not (no matter whether locally descended or long resident): bumiputera (“son[s] of the soil”), which confers constitutionally derived advantages of various sorts. The Malay language, now the national language of Malaysia, is known either simply as Malay or as Bahasa Melayu.
The Philippines
The Philippines was named by Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century for the prince who would become King Philip II of Spain. The national language, adopted from Tagalog in the twentieth century and spoken by most inhabitants of the capital city, Manila, has been called at various times Pilipino or Filipino. All of the indigenous languages are linguistically related to Malay, although many Spanish, Chinese, and English loan words have been incorporated.
The Spanish called most of the indigenous inhabitants indios (Indians) using the term “Filipino” only as an adjective or to describe Caucasians born in the archipelago. These were white-skinned, not brown: creoles, of European ancestry but born in the empire rather than on the Iberian Peninsula. Since the late nineteenth century the term “Filipino” has been transformed to describe any person born in the archipelago who chose to owe allegiance to the Philippines, while the term indio is generally considered derogatory. “Mestizos” (literally people of “mixed” ethnic ancestry) may have Caucasian and indio blood, Chinese and indio heritage, or a combination. In sharp contradistinction to many other places throughout Southeast Asia and the world (where the comparable term “half-caste” is a pejorative), to be mestizo in the Philippines carries no negative connotation or constraint.
There are many Hispanic names in the Philippines, but after the United States took over, most Filipinos began to abandon the use of accent marks on these names. We will follow this practice and omit accent marks on the names of persons living after 1898.
The Spanish referred to the various Muslim peoples of the south, such as the Tausug and the Magindanao, as “Moros” (Moors), a term they brought with them from their long encounters with the Muslims of North Africa. This term, which was originally rejected by Filipino Muslim communities as a slur, has recently been embraced by them as a marker of their separatist dream.
SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)
Cambodia
“Cambodia” is the English-language rendering of a Sanskrit word usually transliterated as “Kambuja” and pronounced “Kampuchea” in modern Khmer. The word, which means “born of Kambu,” a mythical, semidivine forebear, was part of the name Kambujadesa (Cambodia-land), which the empire of Angkor, centered in what is now northwestern Cambodia, gave itself after the tenth century C.E. The nomenclature remained in use after the abandonment of Angkor in the sixteenth century.
Under the French colonial protectorate (1863-1954) the kingdom’s name came to be written “Cambodge” in French but was still written and pronounced in Khmer as “Kampuchea.” The transliteration “Kampuchea” reappeared briefly in documents written in French in March 1945, when Cambodia was told to declare independence by Japanese forces occupying the region, and it renamed itself the Kingdom of Kampuchea. By November 1945, when the French returned to power, the kingdom’s name in French had reverted to Cambodge (Cambodia for English speakers).
In 1970, following a coup against Norodom Sihanouk, the country named itself the Khmer Republic. When the Republican regime was defeated by local communists five years later, the Marxist-Leninist government that took power called the country Democratic Kampuchea. A Vietnamese invasion in December 1978 drove this regime from power and the newly established, pro-Vietnamese government came to office under the name of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. When the Vietnamese withdrew their forces in 1989, the ruling party remained in power, but its leaders renounced Marxism-Leninism and renamed their country the State of Cambodia. This name lasted until 1993, when Sihanouk, who had abdicated the throne in 1955, became king for a second time, and the country restored its pre-1970 name, the Kingdom of Cambodia.
The word “Khmer” refers to the major ethnic group in Cambodia, comprising perhaps 90 percent of the population, and also to the language spoken throughout the country. The etymology of the word is obscure, but it has been in use to describe the inhabitants of the region for over a thousand years. In general the terms “Khmer” and “Cambodian” are interchangeable, and in conversation most Cambodians refer to their country as sruk Khmer (Khmer-land).
Vietnam
“Vietnam” is a relatively recent name for the kingdom of the “Viet” people. (“Viet” is cognate with the Chinese “Yue,” a generic term for ethnic groups in what is now southern China and beyond.) Its official use began only in the nineteenth century. From the eleventh century to 1800, Vietnamese rulers usually called their country as a whole the “Great Viet” (Dai Viet) domain.
Of the other premodern names for the country, “Annam” is probably the most familiar. This Chinese colonial term emerged in the late seventh century, when the Tang empire named its colony in northern Vietnam the “Pacified South” (Chinese: Annan) protectorate. Vietnam stopped being a Chinese colony in the tenth century, but the Chinese continued to refer to their now independent southern neighbor as “Annam” until the end of the 1800s, rather as if the British were to continue to call Zimbabwe “Rhodesia” for the next nine centuries. Many Westerners picked up on this locution and referred to the country as “Annam” (and its people as “Annamites” or “Annamese”), although Vietnamese generally did not appreciate this terminology. The nomenclature was further confused when the French, in dividing Vietnam administratively into three parts, called the middle one (centered on Hue and Danang) “Annam,” as distinct from “Tonkin” to the north and “Cochinchina” to the south.
In the early 1800s the new Nguyen dynasty tried to secure international (i.e., Chinese) recognition of a new name for the country: “Nam Viet.” But to the rulers of China the term (Nan Yue in Chinese) conjured up memories of an ancient state of that name, founded by a dissident Chinese general, which had existed in modern Guangdong and Guangxi between 203 and 111 B.C.E. Chinese rulers feared that their acceptance of the term “Nam Viet” might signal approval of resurrected Vietnamese claims to south China. They therefore reversed the components of the proposed new name to detoxify it politically, and thus “Viet Nam” (Vietnam) came into existence. Nineteenth-century Vietnamese rulers, not liking it, privately preferred to refer to their country as the “Great South” (Dai Nam).
SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)
The term “Indonesia” was first used in 1850 by the British anthropologist J. R. Logan to designate islands called the “Indian Archipelago” by other Western writers. For Logan, “Indonesia” did not designate a political unit but a cultural zone that included the Philippines. The forebears of today’s Indonesians had no term for the region or concept of a single political unit linking communities across seas. From ancient times Java had been known by that single name, but most of Indonesia’s islands derive their names from European labeling. Early European traders at the port of Samudera named the entire island Sumatra, and visitors to the sultanate of Brunei called the whole island Borneo.
The Dutch named their colonial possessions Indië (the Indies). Initially the Indies meant Java and a few ports scattered across the archipelago. Between 1850 and 1914 Dutch power engulfed over three hundred separate sultanates and communities, and welded them into a single administrative unit called the “Netherlands Indies.” Subjects were called “Natives,” a legal category alongside “Europeans” and “Foreign Orientals” (local Chinese and Arabs), replacing the terms “Moor,” “Christian,” and “Heathen” used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Associations in the early years of the twentieth century identified themselves by geography and generation, such as “League of Sumatran Youth” and “Ambonese Youth.” As ideological identities developed, parties took the colonial unit as their geographic marker but opted for Logan’s “Indonesia” instead of the Dutch “Indies.” The first to do so was the Communist Party of Indonesia, founded in 1921. Opponents of the Dutch understood “Indonesia” as both a political and a cultural entity; they adopted as a common language a variant of Malay spoken in Sumatra, already widely used as a lingua franca, and called it the “Indonesian language” (Bahasa Indonesia). The political unit they eventually won was the Dutch colony stretching from Sabang Island off northern Sumatra to Merauke on the border with Papua New Guinea, but many wanted the cultural definition of “Indonesia”–Islamic and Malay-speaking–translated into a state that would include Malaya, southern Thailand, the southern Philippines, all of Borneo, and Portuguese East Timor.
Following independence Indonesian place-names were substituted for the Dutch. Batavia became Djakarta; Buitenzorg, Bogor; and Borneo, Kalimantan. Indonesian spelling was revised in 1972, making Djakarta Jakarta and Atjeh Aceh. In this book Indonesia designates the state established by Sukarno on 17 August 1945; for the period before 1945, it is used as a shorthand for the islands constituting today’s republic.
SOURCE: The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History, edited by Norman G. Owen (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2005)
Filed under Indonesia
Here’s the U.S.-Indonesia Society’s latest report on the upcoming presidential elections in Indonesia.
Five slates of candidates were formally approved by the National Election Commission (KPU) to compete in the July 5 Presidential Election. The slate of former President Abdurrahman Wahib (PKB) and Marwah Daud Ibrahim of Golkar was not certified, however, because of Gus Dur’s health; he is appealing his disqualification to the courts, although his reclama to the General Elections Supervisory Committee (Panwaslu) was denied on May 28.
The five contending presidential tickets are:
- Megawati Sukarnoputri (PDI-P) and Hasyim Muzadi
- Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (PD) and Jusuf Kalla
- Wiranto (Golkar) and Solahuddin Wahid
- Amien Rais (PAN) and Siswono Yudhohusodo
- Hamzah Haz (PPP) and Agum Gumelar
Tracking Poll Favors SBY
A tracking survey issued by the International Foundation for Election Systems (IFES) on May 31 assessed the popularity of the main candidates, based on face-to-face interviews with 1250 respondents throughout the 32 provinces of Indonesia. Although this survey included potential candidates other than in the above approved slates, the top contenders scored as follows:
41.0% Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY)
11.2% Megawati Sukarnoputri
10.0% Wiranto
4.4% Amien Rais
3.0% Hamzah HazSBY emerged as the top choice in all regions of the country except for Sulawesi, where Wiranto obtained 35% support in contrast to 29% for Yudhoyono. SBY was also the top choice of both men and women, as well as all age groups. As IFES observes, only in the 55 and above age group is another candidate, Megawati, close to SBY with 19% support compared to 21% who support Yudhoyono. [Comment: Since other than the top candidates were included in this poll, and political party alignments have shifted since the survey was taken, we would caution that the above results are only relative and general indications of popular support.]
Relative Strengths and Weaknesses
As assessed by the Jakarta consulting firm of Van Zorge and Heffernan, the relative strengths of the presidential candidates can be summarized as follows:
- Susilo Bambang Yudohyono: Strong momentum, clean image, attractive to secular voters, running mate Jusuf Kalla is an asset in eastern Indonesia, seemingly popular among armed forces dependents; the main debits is the lack of a strong campaign organization.
- Megawati Sukarnoputri: Loyal PDI-P constituency, value of incumbency, running mate Hasyim Muzadi can attract NU-PKB voters; main weaknesses are lackluster performance as President and declining public image.
- Wiranto: Golkar organizational support and financing, strong campaign team, former military and dependents’ support, media and public presence, running mate Solahuddin Wahid could pick up NU-PKB votes; principal debit is anti-militarism and allegations of past, mainly domestic, human rights abuses.
- Amien Rais: Strong campaign team and media friendliness, loyal Muhammadiyah following, “clean” pro-reform image; minus factors are low drawing power of running mate Siswono and Rais’ erratic reputation.
- Hamzah Haz: Loyal backing of traditional PPP voters; downsides: poor public image and running mate has no significant public following.
[Note: For further analysis, please refer to the biweekly Van Zorge Report at www.vanzorgereport.com, or call (62-21) 3190-3939 in Jakarta.]
Campaign Nuggets:
- Golkar and the National Awakening Party (PKB), affiliated with the NU, have signed an electoral compact to support General Wiranto and Solahuddin Wahid, brother of former President Abdurrahman Wahid (“Gus Dur”). Although the PKB’s institutional weight will be behind the Wiranto team, uniform support of NU and PKB followers cannot be assured because NU chair Hasyim Muzadi is running with President Megawati and some may support the SBY-Kalla ticket.
- Five minor parties have wheeled in behind National Mandate Party (PAN) candidate Amien Rais. The Marhaenism National Party, Freedom Bull National Party (PNBK), United Indonesia Party (PSI), Socialist Democratic Labor Party (PBSD) and Reform Star Party (PBR) have declared their support for the Rais-Siswono ticket. The Reform Star Party won 13 seats in the April 5 legislative election and two other of the small parties garnered one seat each. Observers do not believe that their endorsement will translate into a significant number of votes.
This is the fifth year since Indonesia began implementing comprehensive political and economic reforms in response to the onset of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and a leadership change that occurred in 1998. Indonesia is simultaneously addressing multiple crises – from terrorism and inter-ethnic, sectarian and separatist violence to endemic corruption and rising poverty.
For more information about Indonesia, the upcoming elections, and relations with the United States, please visit www.usindo.org; tel: 202 232-1400; fax: 202 232-7300; email: usindo@usindo.org
Filed under Indonesia
Far Outliers 