Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by | 12 June 2004 · 2:31 pm

Thai Dentists Perform Elephantine Root Canals

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?

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by | 11 June 2004 · 7:14 pm

Changing Names: Malaysia, the Philippines

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)

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by | 10 June 2004 · 6:59 pm

Changing Names: Cambodia, Vietnam

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)

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by | 7 June 2004 · 8:59 pm

Origin of the Name "Indonesia"

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)

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by | 7 June 2004 · 7:34 pm

USINDO Presidential Election Countdown

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 Haz

SBY 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

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by | 4 June 2004 · 7:33 pm

Santepheap, the Cambodia Weblog

Here’s a sample post from Santepheap (Peace), a promising new blog on all things Cambodian.

Leaving the House of Ghosts by Sarah Streed chronicles the lives of three Cambodian refugees who were sponsored by an American family in the early 1980s.

Jack and Joan Streed from Excelsior, Minnesota, took three teen-age refugees into their home to live with them and their four children. Having survived the traumas of auto genocide in their homeland by escaping to refugee camps in Thailand, these boys had major hurdles to overcome in living through the nightmares of their past horrors, becoming a part of their new family, attending high school and learning the ways of the American culture.

Sarah Streed, the oldest child of the family, was amazed at the stories told by her foster brothers. She decided to record their stories and the stories of many other survival victims of the Pol Pot slaughter. Her extensive research on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime provide the beginning of the history of Cambodian immigration to the mid-western United States.

The strength of character and determination is well illustrated by both the host family and their newly adopted boys. This is a must read book for anyone interested in the cause of assisting Cambodians to rebuild their country.

Leaving the House of Ghosts is available on Amazon.com.

KNOWING CAMBODIA is a weekly feature on the Santepheap Weblog that highlights organizations, people and other things that give insight into Cambodia and overseas Cambodians. It appears every Thursday.

via Instapundit

And here’s a plug for another new book on Cambodians: In the Shadows of Angkor, edited by Sharon May, featuring photographs by Richard Murai (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2004).

Every year, when my family finds reason to gather–for a holiday, birthday, graduation, and sometimes just because–when the coconut curry is cooked and smoke swirls heaven-bound from burning incense, the ghosts come home to feed.

Before any guests are allowed to eat, my mother prepares a tray of food, her best dishes–sticky rice, glass noodles fried with banana buds, steamed pork buns–and my father lights a handful of incense sticks. Setting these on an altar, we pray to the spirits of our dead relatives and invite them to the feast.

These spirits are the ghosts of my uncle, Sao Kim Yan, a math professor; my grandfather, Khan Reang, a rice farmer; my aunt, Koh Kenor, a housewife who was married to a businessman; and so many others who died during the war in our homeland. They are the restless ones who cross oceans and continents to find my family, now safe and comfortable in America. They are the ones who did not make it while they were living.

–From “The Dinner Guests” by Putsata Reang

See also earlier excerpts from Music in the Dark, about Daran Kravanh.

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by | 8 May 2004 · 9:26 pm

Ethnicity, Peasants, and Tribes in Vietnam

Vietnam is a multi-ethnic state composed of fifty-four officially recognized ethnic groups. It is unique among Southeast Asian countries, but similar to China, in that its ethnic minorities constitute only a relatively small fraction of the national population but occupy a vast part of the national territory, giving them a strategic importance greatly disproportionate to their numbers. The Vietnamese minorities, even those in the Central Highlands, also primarily occupy sensitive borders. The minorities are thus an extremely important component of Vietnamese society and ethnic relations are a matter of intense concern to the ruling Communist Party and the state.

Vietnam’s ethnic minorities make up only 14 per cent of the national population. The lowland Vietnamese, who are officially designated as Kinh, form the vast majority … almost 66 million [in 1999] …

All of Vietnam’s ethnic groups live in the uplands with the exception of the Kinh, Hoa (ethnic Chinese), Khmer (Cambodians), and Cham [who speak Austronesian languages apparently most closely related that spoken in Aceh, Indonesia]….

From a political standpoint, perhaps the most significant distinction between groups is whether they have tribal or peasant forms of social organization. Shifting cultivators, … who are often collectively referred to by the French term ‘montagnards’, and the H’Mong and Dao of the northern mountains, display a tribal form of organization. Tribal society is relatively egalitarian and highly individualistic with leadership based on personal achievement rather than holding of a formal status. The Muong, Tay and Thai of the northern uplands were formerly organized as rank-stratified chiefdoms with people divided into nobles and commoners. Today, like the Cham and Khmer of the south they are peasant societies, as are the Kinh. Their social organization is hierarchical with centralized and institutionalized leadership. Of course, since 1954, all these groups have been integrated into the Vietnamese nation-state and their traditional forms of socio-political organizations largely supplanted by state administrative organs. But, at the local level, behaviour is still strongly shaped by traditional cultural institutions and values. These patterns have strongly influenced the extent to which different ethnic groups have been integrated into the socialist nation-state. Peasant societies were readily integrated into the nation-state by a simple substitution of administrative elites in which communist cadre took the place of traditional mandarins or local nobility. Integration of tribally organized groups has proved to be more difficult, reflecting the fact that leadership of such societies is charismatic rather than based on ascribed status or bureaucratic position, making it difficult for the state to either co-opt tribal leaders or replace them with their own cadre. Pan-tribal associations such as clans also provide ready-made channels of communication among different communities within the ethnic group and facilitate organization of separatist movements that are very difficult for state security organs to penetrate. Thus it is among tribal societies that separatist tendencies remain most evident. [emphasis added]

SOURCE: “Vietnam,” by A. Terry Rambo [really!], in Ethnicity in Asia, ed. by Colin Mackerras (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 108-112

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by | 7 May 2004 · 9:17 pm

Communism and Buddhism in Vietnam during the Colonial Era

On the 50th anniversary of the end of the long battle of Dien Bien Phu, in which French colonial forces were decisively defeated at terrible cost to both sides, it seems appropriate to feature a revisionist book that argues that what most appealed to the reading public in Vietnam during the colonial era was neither Confucianism, nor nationalism, nor modernism, nor even communism, but Buddhism, so central to Vietnamese national identity.

In this ambitious and path-breaking book, Shawn McHale challenges long held views that define modern Vietnamese history in terms of anticolonial nationalism and revolution. McHale argues instead for a historiography that does not overstress either the role of politics in general or Communism in particular. Using a wide range of sources from Vietnam, France, and the United States, many of them previously unexploited, he shows how the use of printed matter soared between 1920 and 1945 and in the process transformed Vietnamese public life and shaped the modern Vietnamese consciousness.Print and Power begins with an overview of Vietnam’s lively public spheres, bringing debates from Europe and the rest of Asia to Vietnamese studies with nuance and sophistication. It examines the impact of the French colonial state on Vietnamese society as well as Vietnamese and East Asian understandings of public discourse and public space. Popular taste, rather than revolutionary or national ideology, determined to a large extent what was published, with limited intervention by the French authorities. A vibrant but hierarchical public realm of debate existed in Vietnam under authoritarian colonial rule.

The work goes on to contest the impact of Confucianism on premodern and modern Vietnam and, based on materials never before used, provides a radically new perspective on the rise of Vietnamese communism from 1929 to 1945. Novel interpretations of the Nghe Tinh soviets (1930-1931), the first major communist uprising in Vietnam, and Vietnamese communist successes in World War II built an audience for their views and made an extremely alien ideology comprehensible to growing numbers of Vietnamese. In what is by far the most thorough examination in English of modern Vietnamese Buddhism and its transformations, McHale argues that, contrary to received wisdom, Buddhism was not in decline during the 1920-1945 period; in fact, more Buddhist texts were produced in Vietnam at that time than at any other in its history. This finding suggests that the heritage of the Vietnamese past played a crucial role in the late colonial period.

SOURCE: Shawn McHale, Print and Power: Confucianism, Communism, and Buddhism in the Making of Modern Vietnam (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2003).

RECOMMENDATION: Adjust your speakers, click on the Dien Bien Phu link, and explore the site for 10 minutes while you listen to the haunting Concerto de l’adieu of Georges Delerue © SCPP, 1999/2000. Whatever one thinks of the cause for which either side fought, there were no “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” at Dien Bien Phu.

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by | 7 May 2004 · 6:10 pm

China’s Changing Policies toward Tibet, and Indonesia’s toward West Papua

The East-West Center has published two more studies, one on China’s evolving policy toward Tibet and the other on Indonesia’s toward West Papua. Abstracts follow. The full reports are available for download.

Beijing’s Tibet Policy: Securing Sovereignty and Legitimacy, by Allen Carlson. Policy Studies 4. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. ix, 71 pp. Paper, $5.00.

This paper examines the main contours of Beijing’s Tibet policy since the start of the reform era (1979 to the present). It argues that throughout this period China’s position on Tibet has always been concerned with defending Chinese sovereignty, more specifically jurisdictional sovereignty, over the region. Since 1979, the ways in which the Chinese acted to secure such rights, however, have varied significantly, in two distinct phases. During the initial phase, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese position was marked by the implementation of relatively moderate policies. In the second phase, which began in late 1987, and continues today, the Chinese position on Tibet has been defined by highly critical discursive moves, pointed diplomatic activity, a renewed commitment to use force to silence all opposition to Chinese rule, and the utilization of economic development programs to augment such efforts. This essay contends that three forces were crucial in determining Chinese policy on Tibet during these two periods: the underlying strategic value of Tibet to Beijing within the regional security dynamic, the persistence of historically conditioned, sovereign-centric values within elite circles in China, and the internal and external pressures created by Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening” line. The complexity of these factors suggest that understanding how Beijing acts vis-à-vis Tibet requires that students of international relations and security studies, as well as policymakers and activists, look beyond parsimonious explanations and single-faceted policy directions when considering the “Tibet issue.”

The Papua Conflict: Jakarta’s Perceptions and Policies, by Richard Chauvel and Ikrar Nusa Bhakti. Policy Studies 5. Washington, DC: East-West Center Washington, 2004. x, 82 pp. Paper, $5.00.

“Without Irian Jaya [Papua], Indonesia is not complete to become the national territory of the Unitary Republic of Indonesia.” In recalling this statement of President Sukarno, her father, Megawati Sukarnoputri gave voice to the essence of the nationalists’ conception of Papua’s place in Indonesia and its importance. Indonesia today confronts renewed Papuan demands for independence nearly three decades after Jakarta thought it had liberated the Papuans from the yoke of Dutch colonialism. Indonesia’s sovereignty in Papua has been contested for much of the period since Indonesia proclaimed its independence–challenged initially by the Netherlands and since 1961 by various groups within Papuan society. This study argues that even though Indonesia has been able to sustain its authority in Papua since its diplomatic victory over the Netherlands in 1962, this authority is fragile. The fragility of Jakarta’s authority and the lack of Papuan consent for Indonesian rule are both the cart and the horse of the reliance on force to sustain central control. After examining the policies of special autonomy and the partition of Papua into three provinces, the authors pose the question: If Jakarta is determined to keep Papua part of the Indonesia nation–based on the consent of the Papuan people–what changes in the governance of Papua are necessary to bring this about?

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by | 3 May 2004 · 6:25 pm

Thailand: Dangers of Jihadi Reprisal

The South Asia Analysis Group has just posted an analysis of the recent clash between Muslim youth and Thai police in the Pattani area of southern Thailand.

3. The tactics adopted by the poorly-armed Muslim youth bring to mind more that of the LTTE in the early years of its struggle against the Sri Lankan Armed Forces or of the Maoists of Nepal or of the tribal insurgents of India’s North-East than that of the jihadi terrorists active in the South-East Asian and South Asian region. The LTTE, the Maoists and the Indian tribal insurgents used to adopt such tactics to replenish their stocks of arms and ammunition.

4. What these young Muslims have exhibited in common with their co-religionists in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere is their fierce motivation and not the modus operandi adopted by them. They do not appear to be bandits or narcotics smugglers as projected by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand and his officials. They are politically and religiously motivated fighters, with no evidence so far of any external influence–either from the Jemaah Islamiyah of the South-East Asian region or the jihadi organisations of Pakistan and/or Bangladesh–on their mind.

5. Attacking in large numbers with machetes is not the known modus operandi of any of the identified jihadi organisations of the International Islamic Front (IIF). They do slit the throat of their victims with a knife just as they slit the throat of a sacrificial goat with one, but they do not indulge in massive attacks on posts of the security forces and the police carrying only machetes.

At the same time, Nirmal Ghosh in the Straits Times reports:

PATTANI – A top security adviser to the [Thai] government said yesterday that an underground shadowy movement that has been building its ranks for almost a decade was behind the recent spate of violence in the country’s restive south.

And the Weekend Australian reports:

SUSPECTED Islamic militants killed by security forces at a south Thailand mosque may have been trained abroad by the al-Qaeda linked South-east Asian terror network Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a news report said today.

Pattani is just across the piracy-plagued Straits of Malacca from Aceh.

Hat tip: Winds of Change

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