Category Archives: Southeast Asia

by Joel | 27 February 2004 · 10:41 pm

After 500 Years: Muslim-Christian Fratricide in Central Maluku

Two earlier posts about Muslim-Christian violence in Maluku, Indonesia, have summarized a three-year retrospective on 1999-2001 by reporters for the Jakarta Post and a ten-year retrospective based on my own travels in the area in 1991. This final post in a three-part series summarizes a 500-year retrospective by Dieter Bartels in an online draft of an article, “Your God Is No Longer Mine: Moslem-Christian Fratricide in the Central Moluccas (Indonesia) After a Half-Millennium of Tolerant Co-Existence and Ethnic Unity” (2000).

In the shadow of the recent carnage of the East Timor independence struggle and the equally vicious ongoing battle for Aceh, other parts of Indonesia are torn apart by pernicious strife and the huge and populous island nation is threatened with disintegration. One of the crisis hearths is the eastern island group of Maluku where there is an ongoing internecine struggle between Moslems and Christians. Some of the most heated clashes have been occurring between Ambonese Moslems and Protestant Christians in the Central Moluccas. Beginning on January 19, 1999 Moslems and Christians, seemingly without warning [but arising from a criminal incident perpetrated by outsiders], started to attack one another, burning down each others houses and killing one another in both the provincial capital of Kota Ambon (Ambon City) and villages on the islands of Ambon, Haruku, Saparua, Buru, and Seram. Similar incidents occurred also in the Northern and Southern parts of Maluku involving not only Protestants but also Roman-Catholics. Thus far, the seemingly senseless confrontation, which became known as kerusuhan (unrest), left thousands of people dead and precipitated the devastation of property worth millions of dollars, wiping out much of the economic progress made in the province since Indonesian independence.

It’s worth pointing out that January 1999 is when former President Suharto’s embattled successor, B. J. Habibie, agreed to an East Timorese referendum on whether to accept wide-ranging autonomy within Indonesia or to go for independence. The vote, in August 1999, was overwhelmingly (nearly 4:1) in favor of independence.

The conflict can be divided into two rather distinct phases: Phase I began in January of 1999 and closed at the end of April 2000. This phase was characterized by mutual attacks of native Christians and Moslems using largely primitive home-made weapons and bombs (rakitan). Generally, there was an equilibrium of strength. Phase II, having began in May 2000, is characterized by the massive arrival of non-Ambonese, mostly Javanese, Moslem vigilante group, called Laskar Jihad (“Holy War Forces”). They brought with them sophisticated modern weaponry and allied themselves with the Moslem personnel of the military which constitutes about eighty percent of the troops. These developments totally destroyed the previous balance, tipping the scale in favor of the Moslems.

From the very beginning, provocateurs, often said to be associated with the old Suharto regime, have been blamed for the unrest. The Army also has been accused playing a key role in triggering and fomenting the fratricidal violence in order to destabilize the Indonesian state as a means of restoring its political might and economic interests. Among the accusers is the Moluccan sociologist Tamrin Amrin Tomagola who believes that continuous riots will not only upgrade once again the status of the military, and tighten its territorial grip, but also derange President Abdurrahman Wahid and the National Commission on Human Rights which has implicated five generals, including former military chief and ex-cabinet minister, Wiranto, in the post-ballot atrocities in East Timor. Tomagola goes on to state that violence in Moslem areas triggers solidarity among Moslems and heightens their negative feelings toward the President and the commission (Jakarta Post 02/04/2000). Calls in January 2000 for a Jihad (Holy War) against Moluccan Christians at mass demonstrations in Jakarta and attacks of Moslem youths on Christian churches in Lombok seem to strengthen Tomagola’s arguments. The use of automatic weapons in the January 23, 2000 attack by Moslem villagers on their Christian neighbors in the villages of Haruku-Sameth on the island of Haruku further points to military involvement.

Bartels then outlines some of the key factors that led up to the recent violence.

The influx of Moslems from outside the area, especially Bugis and Makasar migrants from Sulawesi into Ambon City, and Javanese settlers (‘transmigrasi‘) into rural areas. Initial Christian attacks were against these outsiders, not fellow Moslem Ambonese.

The failed model of religious tolerance. “As recently as November 1998, during Moslem-Christian clashes in Jakarta, then President B. J. Habibie had singled out the Moluccas as the model of religious tolerance.” Moluccan exiles in the Netherlands and elsewhere “asked what happened to the traditional Moslem-Christian brotherhood and its safeguards like pela, the traditional inter-village alliance system.”

Creeping religious polarization. “Actually, the only thing that should be surprising about these clashes is their vehemence and unbridled violence.” Some of this was visible even during the 1970s.

The legacy of different colonizers. “The successive colonizers, Portuguese, Dutch, and Japanese, all tried to manipulate Moslems and Christians, as did the latest, and current, rulers of the Moluccas, the Javanese.” However, “throughout most of colonial history, it seems that, at least at the village level, Moslem and Christians have coexisted in a climate where cooperation seems to have been more common than polarity and discord. Under duress, they have frequently closed ranks and as far back as the Portuguese period and in the early Dutch era, Moslem and newly converted Christian villages allied themselves against the foreign intruders who tried to force a spice monopoly onto them. Again, during the so-called Pattimura uprising in 1817, both religious groups were united in a last, failing effort to rid themselves of the Dutch yoke.”

Christian rise to superiority in late colonial period. The Dutch favored “Christian Moluccans as soldiers and administrators, allowing them a certain amount of western schooling denied to the Moslems…. In some cases, Christian villagers had Moslem children live with them in order to give them access to schools denied to Moslem commoners by the Dutch while raising them according to Moslem customs.”

Moslem ascendency during Japanese occupation. “During the Japanese occupation, the Christians suddenly saw the roles reversed as the Japanese seemingly favored the Moslem population. Christians accused the Moslems of collaboration.”

The proclamation of an independent Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS) after Indonesia declared independence after WWII. “During the ensuing struggle with the Indonesian armed forces, Christian guerrilla forces attacked some Moslem villages which were suspected of being Indonesia sympathizers. There were also instances in which Christian soldiers prevented such attacks when their home village had an alliance with the Moslem village in question.”

The breakdown of the pela alliance system. This is elaborated further below.

Some of these inter-village alliances have their origins in the distant past, long before Europeans invaded the Spice Islands in search of cloves and nutmeg. It probably started as an alliance system in the context of head-hunting, but during the Portugese and Dutch conquests in the 16th and 17th centuries, the system was utilized to resist the foreign intruders, and to help each other in times of need. As a matter of fact, quite a few of the still existing pela pacts were founded during that period, often binding Moslem and (recently converted) Christian villages together. Many new pela arose during the last desperate struggle against Dutch colonialism, the Pattimura war at the beginning of the 19th century. After this struggle was lost and the region experienced an economic depression, pela was utilized as an instrument gaining access to foodstuffs when many poor villages of Ambon-Lease established ties with the sago-rich villages of West-Seram. In the first three decades of Indonesian rule, pela was still in full bloom, mainly as a vehicle of Moluccan identity in the pan-Indonesian state and also to further village development without governmental aid….

Most alliances are between Christian villages but a considerable number are between Christian and Moslem villages, thus spanning religious boundaries. Purely Moslem pela do not exist. In contrast to Christians who use adat [local custom] rather than their common religion to establish formal ties between villages, Moslems consider themselves all part of the Islamic community (ummat) and thus find no need to further strengthen the ties among one another. However, there are a few pela, all based on genealogical ties, involving several Christian and Moslem villages and in this case the participating Moslem villages also consider each other as pela partners….

The system as described above worked still very well in the Central Moluccas from the end of World War II until about the 1980s. Attempts of the Indonesian government of political centralization and cultural uniformity since Independence led to a general fear of loss of a distinct Ambonese ethnic identity. Both Moslems and Christians had also become quite conscious about the threat that the ongoing religious polarization posed for Moslem-Christian unity. While urban politicians were fighting for the spoils offered by the new system, people at the grassroots level reacted to the twin threat of loss of identity and social disunity through placing a renewed emphasis on pela, whose dense web spanning across the islands and religious boundaries was traditionally the major force of integration. The earlier listed economic incentives, based on reciprocal mutual aid, further helped to cement the interfaith relationship.

Elevation of global religion (agama) above tradition (adat). Increasing Christianization and Islamization after independence.

Indonesization of Ambonese social system: Replacement of traditional village leadership. Globalization in a manner that benefitted the urban (often outsider) elite. Large-scale relocation of (Moslem) ‘transmigrasi’ from Java. Overpopulation, land scarcity, feuding and fission. Urbanization, with outsiders dominating commerce.

Bartels tries to find some hope for the future in his final section.

Mending the Torn Fabric

Once the fighting stops, Moslem and Christians will indeed have to come together and redefine their relationship and strive for a new intra-ethnic symbiosis in a contemporary context. First and foremost, the intertwined problems of overpopulation, land shortages, and immigration have to be solved. As a next step, it seems likely that the Ambonese in the Central Moluccas will have to do what the Ambonese exiles in the Netherlands have been doing ever since they arrived in the Netherlands in 1951, namely engage in a continuous process of reinventing adat to reflect contemporary socio-political reality. Pela on the village level can still have its uses in restoring overall harmony. Before visiting the Central Moluccas in June and July 2000, I was very pessimistic about the survival of interreligious pela. Most people who don’t have pela with a Moslem village believe that these pela are forever destroyed. However, people who do have such pacts are not as ready to pronounce their alliances dead. This was certainly the case in Haria. Villagers from Samasuru (Seram) who have pela with Islamic Iha on Saparua do not dare stay there overnight as they did before when visiting Saparua but it seems they do it more out of consideration for Christian villages adjacent to Iha but are still in communication with Iha. They had given Iha land in the 1960s which was laid to waste during the unrest by outsiders. Iha insisted that Samasuru was innocent and that their alliance is still intact. The heavy attacks and counterattacks between Moslems and Christians in North Saparua occurring between September 22 and 24 were apparently instigated by the Laskar Jihad. As a result, many villagers from Iha fled to some of nearby Christian villages, seemingly to trying themselves to escape the Laskar Jihad. Their peaceful reception in these villages is perhaps one of the indicators that not all bridges have been burned.

The following story also shows some hope, though it may not immediately apparent: After the total destruction of Christian Kariuw on Haruku in the early phase of the conflict by neighboring Moslem villages of Pelauw and Ori, their Moslem pela partner Hualoi (Seram) sent a delegation with food to the village of another partner in the same alliance, Aboru (Haruku), where many Kariuwans had found refuge. The wounds were still too fresh and the food was rejected. Hope also can be found in the example of Wayame, a non-traditional, mixed Moslem-Christian settlement across the bay opposite Ambon City, which thus far which had been untouched by the conflict until late November 2000. Even then, it was not an internal conflict but an attack from the outside by Laskar Jihad forces. However, attempts by surrounding Moslem villages to officially declare Waai, a Christian village destroyed in July 2000, as a Moslem village and the intention to rebuild the mosque at exactly the same spot where it supposedly stood in 1670 when Waai was still Islamic, will inflame passions again. The suggestion was made by the chief commander (panglima) of the Laskar Jihad, Ja’far Umar Thalib, and thus it is quite likely that this declaration was made under duress….

Perhaps, and rather ironically, the simultaneous suffering of the Ambonese Moslem community under the reign of terror of the Laskar Jihad and certain army factions, may soften the existing bitterness and hatred between the two indigenous groups and facilitate ethnic reconciliation.

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by Joel | 21 February 2004 · 11:51 am

Southeast Asia Picture Archive

Anyone interested in Southeast Asia who wants to do some online sightseeing will enjoy browsing through the huge picture archive of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam are particularly well represented, but there are also pictures from Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

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by Joel | 16 February 2004 · 9:28 pm

Aging Asia

“The impending tempo of population aging in China is very nearly as rapid as anything history has yet seen,” says Nicholas Eberstadt in “Power and Population in Asia” in the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review, No. 123. “Although China’s population will hardly be as elderly as Japan’s by 2025, its impending aging process promises to generate problems of a sort that Japan does not have to face. The first relates to its national pension system: Japan’s may be financially vulnerable, but China’s is nonexistent.”

At this juncture … sub-replacement fertility is thought to characterize every country and locale in East Asia save tiny Mongolia. In Southeast Asia, Singapore and Thailand are already sub-replacement societies, and Indonesia appears to be rapidly closing in on the replacement fertility level. As for South and Central Asia, Sri Lanka and Kazakhstan are outposts of sub-replacement fertility within the region.

Russia’s decline is much farther along.

Modern Russia has given the lie to the ameliorative presumption that literate, industrialized societies cannot suffer long-term health declines during times of peace. According to Moscow’s official calculations, the country’s life expectancy was lower in 2001 than it had been in 1961-62, four decades earlier. For Russia’s men, life expectancy had dropped by almost five years over that interim–but female life expectancy was also slightly down over that period. This anomalous circumstance could not be entirely attributed to the deformities of communist rule, for both male and female life expectancy were lower in 2001 than in 1991, the last year of Soviet power….

In absolute arithmetic terms, this Russian mortality crisis qualifies as a catastrophe of historic proportions. Over the extended period between 1965 and 2001, age-standardized mortality for Russia’s men rose by over 40 percent. Perhaps even more surprising, it also increased for Russia’s women by over 15 percent.

Another looming problem for East Asia is the sex ratio, expressed in terms of the number of males for every 100 females.

China’s tilt toward biologically impossible sex ratios at birth seems to have coincided with the inauguration of its coercive antenatal “one child policy,” which was unveiled in 1979. Is Beijing’s population control program responsible for these amazing distortions? A tentative answer would be yes–but not entirely. In other Chinese or Confucian-heritage populations where oppressive population control strictures were not in force–Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea–unnatural sex ratios at birth also emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. In these other spots, the confluence of son preference, low fertility, and sex-selective abortion likewise have distorted the sex ratio at birth–although nowhere so much as in China today. In most of those other locales, moreover, recent data suggest that sex ratios at birth are lower than they were in the early 1990s (Taiwan, South Korea) or even the 1980s (Singapore), while China’s rise shows no signs of reversing…. Only two provinces in the entire country–the non-Han regions of Tibet and Xinjiang–reported sex ratios within the biologically normal human range. At the other end, three provinces (Hubei, Guangdong, and Anhui) tabulated child sex ratios of almost 130–while three others (Hainan, Hunan, and Jiangxi) returned with ratios of over 130.

So where can we look to balance these trends?

Interestingly enough, the Asian Pacific power with the most strategically favorable profile may be one that we have not yet discussed: the United States.

By the UNPD’s [United Nations Population Division’s] medium variant projections, the United States is envisioned to grow from 285 million in 2000 to 358 million in 2025. In absolute terms, this would be by far the greatest increase projected for any industrialized society; in relative terms, this projected 26 percent increment would almost exactly match the proportional growth of the Asia/Eurasia region as a whole. Under these trajectories, the United States would remain the world’s third most populous country in 2025, and by the early 2020s, the U.S. population growth rate–a projected 0.7 percent per year–would in this scenario actually be higher than that of Indonesia, Thailand, or virtually any country in East Asia, China included.

In these projections, U.S. population growth accrues from two by no means implausible assumptions: (1) continued receptivity to newcomers and immigrants and (2) continuing “exceptionalism” in U.S. fertility patterns. (The United States today reports about 2.0 births per woman, as against about 1.5 in Western Europe, roughly 1.4 in Eastern Europe, and about 1.3 in Japan.) Given its sources, such population growth would tend, quite literally, to have a rejuvenating effect on the U.S. population profile–that is to say, it would slow down the process of population aging. Between 2000 and 2025, in these UNPD projections, median age in the United States would rise by just two years (from 35.6 to 37.6). By 2025, the U.S. population would be more youthful, and aging more slowly, than that of China or any of today’s “tigers.” (Furthermore, to state the obvious, neither a resurgence of HIV/AIDS nor an eruption of imbalanced sex ratios at birth look to be part of the U.S. prospect over the decades immediately ahead.)

Of course, such population projections always assume that humans will just keep doing what they always do, regardless of changing conditions. Fortunately, most humans have minds capable of adapting their behaviors to new circumstances.

via Arts & Letters Daily

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by Joel | 7 February 2004 · 8:58 pm

Recap of Three Years of Violence in Maluku, Indonesia, 1999-2002

In January 2002, two reporters for the Jakarta Post, Edith Hartanto in Jakarta and Oktavianus Pinontoan in Ambon, published a special report entitled “Three years of bloody Maluku conflicts leave nothing but disaster.”

AMBON, Maluku (JP): Three years ago, a petty dispute between a local and two migrants in the Ambon capital of Maluku degenerated into a full-scale sectarian riot which up to this year has killed 9,000 people and forced more than 500,000 people out of their homes.

The involvement of outsiders and provocateurs in the ensuing violence worsened the tension among what was once a harmonious community of various races and religions. The community became divided by blood, rage and deceit.

It all began on Jan. 19, 1999 at 3 p.m. local time when local public minivan driver Jopi Leuhery, from Ahuru, Central Maluku, became involved in a quarrel with two male migrants from Bugis-Makassar [Sulawesi], named Nursalim and Tahang.

The two men apparently tried to extort money from Jopi at the Batu Merah bus terminal and threatened to slash him with sickle.

Upset by their action, Jopi ran back to his house, picked up a machete and along with several friends went after the two extortionists.

In their account before the court, where they were being tried for a purely criminal offense, both Nursalim and Tahang said they fled to the predominantly Muslim Batu Merah Kampung area near the bus terminal and yelled: “There is a Christian who wants to kill us”….

Nursalim’s action on that fateful day led to a fierce communal brawl, in which a group of angry Batu Merah residents went after Jopi, but failed to find him. The mass then burned a welding shop and a house belonging to a Christian in the border town of Batu Merah and the predominantly Christian Mardika [‘Independence’] area. [See map, photos.]

At around 5 p.m. local time on Jan. 19, 1999, the first place of worship, the Sinar Kasih Church in Waihaong, was set alight by rioters.

Rumors spread and tension began to take hold in the area, and unidentified people roamed the streets, spreading rumors of attacks. Who they were and what their roles were in the riots are still unknown.

Angered by the attacks, Mardika people with the rest of the Christian community conducted retaliation assaults on mosques in the area.

On the morning of Jan. 20, 1999 a false rumor spread that the Grand Al-Fatah Mosque was on fire. By this time people were already divided in their own respective areas according to their religion. People donned bandannas to signify their religion: red for Christian, white for Muslim….

Analysts have said that if the security forces and the intelligence units had been quick to respond to the situation in the early stages of unrest in 1999, widespread communal conflicts could have been avoided.

From a criminal dispute, the Maluku riots developed into sectarian conflict that was loaded with economic and political interests, while the players in the conflict freely roamed the islands.

The involvement of outsiders such as the Jihad Force, which pledged to wage a holy war in Maluku, and small elements of the outlawed South Maluku Republic (RMS) separatist movement, have also contributed to the already complex strife.

(The reference to the RMS is a lame attempt at moral equivalence. The RMS was supported by Muslims as well as Christians, but some of the jihadis have rechristened it Republik Maluku Serani [‘Christian Maluku Republic’].)

Frustrated by the prolonged violence and losses in both Maluku and North Maluku, in a desperate effort the central government imposed a state of civil emergency in the territory on June 27, 2000….

The implementation of the state of emergency, if not too late, was undermined by the fall of the police base in Maluku during the Tantui incident on June 23, 2000, by which time security forces on duty in the province were already divided by religion.

What undermined the state of emergency was not some chance incident. Instead, it was (in the words of area specialist Dieter Bartels) the “massive arrival of non-Ambonese, mostly Javanese, Moslem vigilante group, called Laskar Jihad (‘Holy War Forces’). They brought with them sophisticated modern weaponry and allied themselves with the Moslem personnel of the military which constitutes about eighty percent of the troops. These developments totally destroyed the previous balance, tipping the scale in favor of the Moslems.”

Having built up their forces since May, the Laskar Jihad entered the fray in force on June 23, mounting a combined land and sea attack on the elite Police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) base in Tantui, a few kilometers from downtown Ambon. They attacked the police station to make sure the Christians were disarmed.

The assailants went on a rampage and burned the whole compound, including police housing complex, arsenal, hospital, provincial and high-ranking officers residences.

They assassinated the Brimob deputy commander in Maluku Maj. Edi Susanto (whose name is Javanese) and looted the police arsenal for weapons and ammunition. On July 1, with some wearing white robes and others in military-style uniforms, the thugs went on to attack three predominantly Christian communities, Poka, Rumah Tiga, and Waai, and to destroy the whole campus of Pattimura University.

The state of civil emergency was finally lifted in September 2003, by which time the Laskar Jihad militia had moved on to West Papua.

In the last few months there have been only a few minor incidents which can be attributed to the small number of militants still in the area. However, given that the investigation into the Bali bombing unearthed evidence of terrorists from Jemaah Islamiah and other organisations using Maluku as a training and recruitment area, the authorities need to remain vigilant for any renewed militant activity….

The Maluku conflict, which began in 1999, has left some 10,000 dead and over half a million displaced. Many areas remain segregated along religious lines. [See map.]

A Muslim-Christian interfaith council is slowly trying to piece the shattered community back together.

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by Joel | 7 February 2004 · 8:47 pm

Royal Dutch Marines vs. South Moluccan Terrorists, 1977

Most baby boomers (scroll to the bottom at the link) should have a vague memory of this incident.

One bright May morning in 1977, the children of Bovendsmilde were settling down for their lessons when four South Moluccan terrorists stormed the school. Armed with submachine guns and grenades, they took 105 children and 4 teachers hostage. A short time later, just outside of town, nine heavily armed South Moluccans boarded a commuter train, taking 60 hostages. After 14 long hours, the terrorists begin issuing their political demands. As negotiations dragged on for an interminable two weeks, the Royal Dutch Marines were taking action. See how the elite counter-terrorism and commando squad used thermal imaging and listening devices to formulate a rescue plan. This double siege is the most famous mission of the Royal Dutch Marines and is still studied by counter-terrorism units worldwide as a textbook example of how to handle a hostage crisis.

This was just one of many, many terrorist incidents during the 1970s. And the number of such incidents seems to have grown with each passing decade.

What were the South Moluccans on about, anyway? Well, according to the UNPO (Unrepresented Nations and People’s Organization, whose membership includes East Turkestan, Kurdistan, the Hungarian minority in Romania, and Ka Lähui Hawai‘i), they were very unhappy when the Dutch ceded sovereignty to Sukarno’s Federal Republic of Indonesia in 1949, and more unhappy when Sukarno then began to turn the federal republic into a unitary state under tight Javanese control. The European Academy continues the story.

In 1950, a rebellion against the Indonesian central government broke out in the South Moluccas, calling for an independent republic. In the same year, however, the revolt was struck down. Many South Moluccans emigrated to the Netherlands, and in the 1970s tried to compel the government there to petition the Indonesian government to allow south Moluccan independence using terrorist methods.

Unfortunately for them, such methods backfired badly. In 1978, the Dutch parliament ceased to recognize the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS) government in exile.

For a fuller understanding of the history of the South Moluccan exiles in the Netherlands, read “From Black Dutchmen to White Moluccans: Ethnic Metamorphosis of an East Indonesian Minority in the Netherlands,” by Dieter Bartels. It begins thus:

After returning to Indonesia after World War II, the Dutch employed 25,000 Moluccan soldiers in their attempt to foil the movement for Indonesian Independence. With the transfer of sovereignty in 1949, 12,000 of these troops were demobilized, 6,000 were discharged, and 1,000 entered the Indonesian army (TNI). Circa 2,000 soldiers stationed in the South Moluccas became the core forces of a movement to establish an independent South Moluccan Republic, the RMS. About 4,000 others, mostly stationed on western islands, mainly on Java, refused to be mobilized or discharged anywhere but in the Moluccas or (then still) Dutch New Guinea ….

The problem was solved by “temporarily” moving the troops, and about 8,500 family members, to the Netherlands in 1951. Over 75 percent of them were Protestant Christian ethnic Ambonese from the Central Moluccan islands who were dominating the political actions of this minority. Fanatically anti-Indonesian, they were never allowed back and over the next two decades their population increased to approximately 40,000. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Moluccan youth became restless and shocked the world with a number of spectacular acts of terrorism in futile attempts to force the Dutch to help them to return to their homeland to be freed of Indonesian rule.

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by Joel | 4 February 2004 · 8:43 pm

Impressions of Eastern Indonesia, 1991 and 2001

In 1991, I accompanied a Fulbright group research tour to Eastern Indonesia. Our Garuda flight from Honolulu landed first in Biak, West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), our port of entry into Indonesia. It seemed like many other places in Melanesia, except that Indonesian, not an English- or French-based pidgin, was the national language.

By the time we landed in Ujung Pandang (Makassar) on Sulawesi (Celebes), we were clearly out of Oceania, with its sea breezes, root and tree crops, and easygoing lifestyle, and into Southeast Asia, with its monsoons, endless rice paddies, and hustle-bustle. Ujung Pandang was as far west as we got. We avoided the well-trodden tourist routes of Bali and Java, concentrating instead on booming, Southeast Asian, largely Muslim Sulawesi, and the faded glory of Oceanic, largely Christian Maluku (the Moluccas), the Spice Islands.

We were parceled out to host families at IKIP Ujung Pandang, the local teacher’s college. My host was a professor who had been trained at Manado, perhaps the top teacher-training college on Sulawesi, located in a mixed Christian-Muslim city on the tip of the far northern peninsula near the Philippines. The family was Muslim, very genteel, prosperous, and cosmopolitan. Voices were never raised in that household, at least not during my stay. They had relatives from the countryside living with them and helping with the housework. Neither my host mother nor her very demure and attractive college-age daughter wore head scarves, although the mother affected considerable shock one evening at an immodestly dressed female performer we saw on TV. (Nothing approaching current MTV standards, of course.) I jokingly offered to send her some black lipstick so she could keep up with the latest styles. My generous hosts were also kind enough to take me for an overnight trip to their rustic bungalow in Rappang, where they owned rice fields. The only intrusion of international tensions occurred when the son and daughter were showing me around their campus, Universitas Hasanuddin, where a few students at some distance away started chanting “Saddam, Saddam” when they saw foreign visitors. My hosts quickly moved us on.

Our group next took a scenic bus ride over sometimes dangerous mountain roads up to Rantepao, in Tana Toraja, where the heavily anthropologized highlanders were mostly Christian. The local governor had an American anthropology degree and showed us pictures of the Toraja float that had appeared in a recent Rose Bowl parade. The Toraja are famous for their huge, boat-shaped rice barns and their famously elaborate and gory funeral celebrations, featuring animal sacrifices and often a sizable contingent of foreign funeral tourists. I was one of those who preferred instead to spend a quiet day walking the cool mountain paths between rice fields, through hamlets where the sound of dogs and the smell of pigs served as reminders that we were in Christian territory.

Our next destination was the old Dutch colonial outpost of Ambon (Amboina), Maluku (Moluccas). Again we were parceled out to host families, this time near Universitas Pattimura, where the faculty was mostly Christian. My hostess was a dietician who lived in the Rumah Tiga neighborhood off campus and who cooked meals rather more Dutch than Indonesian. She was Christian and was not amused when I once greeted her with a “Salaam Aleykum.” From Ambon we visited a Christian village far up in the mountains, where we sampled coconut toddy; visited a very rustic resort near a Muslim village on the far side of the island, where baskets of drying sardines and cloves lay outside nearly every house; and made a side trip to an old Portuguese fort on the north side of the island, from where we could gaze across the straits at the huge island of Seram in the distance.

Our last major excursion was to the old sultanates of Ternate and Tidore and their formerly heathen, and now Christian hinterland on Halmahera. Our bus misaligned its rear axle early on, and spent a long time in the middle of nowhere driving over large rocks trying to knock it back into alignment, while we passengers waited beside the road. Finally, the drivers gave up and drove carefully to the next town large enough to have a repair shop, all the while steering against the sideways drift of the back wheels. After repairs, we finally reached Galela at the northern tip of Halmahera. There we spent a day at a small village of only recently converted (Christian) highlanders who had just moved down from the mountains. We enjoyed their betelnut and their outdoor cooking, with rice steamed in green bamboo roasted over open fires. Much to our collective relief, we took an airplane back to Ambon.

Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world, and each year sends more pilgrims to Mecca than any other country but Iran, or so they said at the time. But the country is really many nations in one, and the government at that time saw religious intolerance as a threat to unity. I came away impressed with the modernizing influence of Islam in Indonesia, its tradition of learning, egalitarianism, enterprise, and openness to the outside world. But foremost in my mind are memories of warm hospitality, hot weather, wonderful food, boring lectures, vehement discussions, time to think, grueling bus trips, the joy of language-learning, and the sunrise and sunset calls to prayer.

By 2001, Ambon had turned into another Beirut, and the whole area had become another Lebanon.

Pattimura University and the neighborhoods that hosted us in Ambon, Maluku, were all burnt to the ground. My hostess may well have been killed. The whole island has now been carved up into armed enclaves.

The root causes in Ambon may include local Muslim resentment of local Christian dominance, coupled with local Christian fear of being overwhelmed by the huge Muslim majority of Indonesia as a whole. The factors that ignited and fueled that unrestrained outbreak of violence include the Asian economic crisis that hit in 1997; the subsequent collapse of the discredited Suharto regime and its authoritarian commitment to a unified secular state; the brutal, corrupt, and demoralized Indonesian military, which has done little to control the violence and much to worsen it, especially by allowing the influx of thousands of well-armed mujahidin (including foreigners) from the training camps of the Laskar Jihad paramilitary in Java. It is hard to imagine how to address any root causes until these thugs and local militias are disarmed and either detained or deported by some credible peacekeeping force. The Javanese-dominated Indonesian military has unfortunately not been such a force. The sectarian and ethnic violence is beginning to subside in Ambon, as it finally did in East Timor (only after foreign intervention), but it continues to escalate in West Papua, where many of the thuggish militias have reconstituted themselves after leaving Maluku.

In future blogposts, I plan to examine in more detail some of these events and their historical contexts.

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by Joel | 3 February 2004 · 11:17 pm

Cultural vs. Situational Factors in East Asian Industrialization

In 1991, Ezra Vogel published a slim volume that attempted to analyze for lay audiences some of the reasons why certain East Asian nations achieved notable success in industrializing. He compared Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which he labelled the “Four Little Dragons.” Here are some highlights, from a book review published in 1994.

British and American advocates of minimal government interference in the marketplace will be countered not just by how different the role of Hong Kong’s government has been from the other little dragons, but by the historical perspective offered in the introductory chapter, where Vogel notes that only the earliest wave of industrialization, in England and later the United States, had the luxury of a rather leisurely pace of industrialization with relatively little government direction. The later waves in continental Europe and then East Asia had to rely much more heavily on government to secure the ever larger amounts of capital, complex technology, and skilled labor needed to leap the ever-widening gap between preindustrial and industrial society. Each new entrant in the race to industrialize had a clearer view of the finish line and ran down a better-trodden path to get there.

East Asian nationalists who, like European and American imperialists before them, tend to credit their success primarily to their own harder work and superior cultural heritage, will be forced to consider Vogel’s lists of the many situational factors that aided their efforts. And anti-American nationalists will object to the prominent position of U.S. aid on those lists. Vogel enumerates new global opportunities offered by the postwar world: (1) The United States, supremely self-confident and fervently anticommunist, was willing to open its markets and universities and share industrial technology with its allies to an unprecedented degree. (2) Thanks to the demise of colonialism and to bitter lessons learned during the prewar depression, international trade was far less restricted than before. (3) The growth of mass consumption enabled smaller countries to achieve manufacturing economies of scale that their domestic markets could not have supported. (4) Large Western corporations acquired a multinational outlook that placed loyalty to profits above loyalty to country of origin, making them willing, for profit, “to buy, sell, and lend anywhere in the world” (p. 11).

Vogel also lists more particular situational advantages East Asia enjoyed during the postwar period: (1) The U.S. poured in massive amounts of aid to build a bulwark against communism. Just as the Japanese economy benefited from U.S. procurement during the Korean War, the other regional economies benefited during the Vietnam War. (2) Confucian conservatives were discredited and large landowners were dispossessed. The postwar governments were not beholden to the traditional elite, so they were free to concentrate on production of new goods, not control of existing assets. (3) A keen awareness of external military threats and of inadequate land and natural resources lent an urgency that made leaders more willing to cooperate and citizens more willing to sacrifice for the common good. (4) Each country had large numbers of refugees and displaced people who comprised an “eager and plentiful labor force” (p. 88) dependent on their labor, not their land, for income. (5) Japan’s pioneering effort provided the little dragons with a goal, a way to get there, and the confidence that they could succeed in their drive to industrialize. As wages rose in Japan, corporations there were willing to transfer limited technology and manufacturing capacity to the other East Asian countries. However, some of those countries, most notably South Korea, succeeded in transferring more technology than Japan intended.

Did particular cultural traditions shared by East Asian societies confer any advantages? Vogel begins his chapter on explanations by downplaying the role of Confucianism in the spread of industrialization. He asks whether the ongoing industrial transformations of Islamic Malaysia and Turkey, Buddhist Thailand, and Roman Catholic Brazil and Mexico will not utterly invalidate cultural tradition as an explanatory factor. He further notes that Confucianism was blamed just as frequently during the 1940s and 1950s for retarding modernization, and asks why China, the heartland of Confucianism, has been slower to industrialize than the periphery, even before the socialist era. In answer, Vogel offers a tantalizing suggestion:

“If anything, just as Max Weber found that the greatest drive to industrialize in his time came in areas located far from Catholic orthodoxy, so in East Asia industrialization prospered in areas far from the centers of traditional Confucian orthodoxy, where trade and commerce were most highly developed. And successes occurred not under the old Confucian-style governments but in societies that had cast them aside for new governments, with very different political systems.” (p. 84) …

It is long past time to lay aside such vague, chauvinist notions as the Protestant ethic, the Confucian ethic, or the samurai spirit, and examine instead the more specific cultural traditions that aided industrialization. Vogel identifies four such traditions shared by Japan and the little dragons: (1) a “meritocratically selected bureaucracy” (p. 93) that not only implemented policy decisions, but formulated them; (2) an entrance examination system that afforded the means to overcome feudal favoritism and channel the most talented people into key leadership positions; (3) an emphasis on group loyalty and subordination of individual to group demands that well suited the level of centralized coordination needed to effect a modern industrial transformation; and (4) a tradition of lifelong self-cultivation.

Of course, the challenge today is not just to find a way for all nations to climb onto an industrial plateau, but to find ways to keep scaling new heights of innovation and growth in a postindustrial world. Orthodoxies of all kinds still seem to be among the primary obstacles.

SOURCE: Review of The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia, by Ezra F. Vogel (Harvard U. Press, 1991).

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by Joel | 1 February 2004 · 9:24 pm

Torajan Carvers in Exotic England

Anthropologist Nigel Barley invited a team of Indonesian woodcarvers from Torajaland to build an exhibit at the British Museum. They found the British to be an exotic people.

The first shock for them was that all British were not white. West Indians look to them like Irian Jayans, the Indonesian half of New Guinea, so they tended to expect them to talk Indonesian. Chinatown did not surprise them. ‘Chinese are good at business. They get everywhere.’ Indians they would assume to be Arabs. The most mortifying experience was to discover that there was no slot ‘Indonesian’ in English folk categories and that they themselves would be regarded as Chinese.

A second shock was that all Europeans were not rich. Admittedly, they had seen young puttypersons [i.e., orang putih ‘white person’, like orang utan ‘inland person’] in Torajaland playing at being poor, but everyone knew they would be carrying larger sums of money than a Torajan farmer would see in a lifetime. Why did I have no servants, no car, and no chauffeur? They were distressed by the drunks who roam the streets of London, being unused to situations where you pretend that people shouting at you are not there. That people should have no work and receive money from the government staggered them like right-wing Tories. Surely they had misunderstood. Were these people not pensioners? Had they not at some time been in the army and were receiving money for their wounds?

They arrived at a moment of high political activity, just days before a General Election, and were amazed at the lack of respect we show politicians. ‘We would go to jail for that!’ was their constant cry. Yet it should not be assumed that they envied us our freedom. To them, it appeared more as lack of order, as messy and reprehensible ill-management. Johannis summed it up swiftly, ‘I see that England is a place where no one respects anyone.’

The position of the Queen puzzled them too. Like many foreigners they found it hard to imagine the relationship between a female prime minister and a female sovereign and drew the inevitable conclusion that only women are eligible for positions of power in this strange land. ‘It is like the Minang people of Sumatera,’ they opined with appropriate ethnographic example. ‘There it is the women who own everything and the poor men are sent abroad to work for them. You are just like them. We feel sorry for you.’

SOURCE: Nigel Barley, Not a Hazardous Sport (Henry Holt, 1988), pp. 182-183.

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by Joel | 28 January 2004 · 5:40 pm

Music through the Dark

There must have been many “reluctant elements” in Cambodia at that time because every night the soldiers took someone to kill. At first they did not kill in the light of day. The soldiers always took people at night and killed them in the animal world of the forest.

The soldiers were constantly looking for mistakes, indications of sabotage, enemies. They became more and more irrational. At first just the staff and military officers of the former government were killed. After a while, the definition of enemies expanded to include anyone with an education, anyone wearing glasses, then the families, even small children, of the enemy. People were killed for the smallest imperfection–asking a soldier a question, eating food other than that rationed to them, being late to work, anything at all. We used to say these men had pineapple eyes: hundreds of eyes looking for mistakes and reasons to kill.

One of the men I had been in the forest with made the fatal mistake of missing his family. he had not adjusted to living in the cooperative and became depressed. His depression made him careless, however, and he began to talk about missing his wife and children, missing his home in Phnom Penh, misisng the feeling of being full. So one night the soldiers pulled him from his hammock and took him to the forest. We heard a single shot. They wanted to kill his idea of what society should be. That was how the soldiers were. They believed that in order to kill an idea, you must kill the body.

I came to know all of this not at once but gradually over a number of weeks. When I realized what had happened, I cried to myself, “This is not Cambodia and these are not my people! Where is my Cambodia?” I could not comprehend.

SOURCE: Music through the Dark: A Tale of Survival in Cambodia, by Bree Lafreniere (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 81-82. The speaker is Daran Kravanh, whose love for music endangered his life and whose accordion-playing helped save it.

I cannot tell you how or why I survived; I do not know myself. It is like this: love and music and memory and invisible hands, and something that comes out of a society of the living and the dead, for which there are no words.

UPDATE: By coincidence, the January 29 edition of The Guardian carries a story about a remarkable documentary film, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by one of the few survivors of Tuol Sleng.

Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death centre. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after “confessing” that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi: anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families were confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written:

1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.

2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be obtained.

“Doing something” might mean only changing position in the cell, and the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines were small ammunition boxes labelled “Made in USA”. For upsetting a box of excrement the punishment was licking the floor with your tongue, torture or death, or all three.

Of course, the reporter is John Pilger, so the chief culprits are Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, whose work “Pol Pot completed” (that notorious capitalist lickspittle!).

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by Joel | 28 January 2004 · 5:38 pm

Music through the Dark, cont.

Weeks went by and word reached the cooperative leader that I was able to play music. This leader was a woman named Miss Khon. She replaced Mr. Nhek when he was taken away to be killed because the Khmer Rouge believed he had been disloyal.

One day, Miss Khon came to see me while I was cutting a log. She asked me, “Are you the one who plays the strange instrument?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Then I order you to play!”

I was so scared I jumped down and ran to get my accordion and find Mr. Chhoeun. I looked for him everywhere and finally I saw him and exclaimed, “We must play music right away for Angkar!”

We returned to the leader, who stood waiting. Armed bodyguards were on either side of her. She did not have a gun. She did not need one. If she wanted someone to die, she just used her voice. I was nervous, and my arms were shaking from having cut logs all day. I wondered how well I’d be able to play. Miss Khon asked, “What do you call that instrument?”

“It’s called an accordion,” I said.

“Is that a Cambodian word?” she asked.

“No,” was all I said.

“Did you make that instrument yourself?” she asked.

“No,” is all I said again.

I grew more tense. I waited for Mr. Chhoeun to tune his mandolin. Miss Khon grew impatient and yelled at us to hurry. When we were ready to start, I asked the leader what song she wanted. She said she wanted to hear a song called “The Children Love Angkar without Limit.” I played and she listened while staring at the accordion. Then she sat down and asked for another song. I don’t remember what that song was. Then she requested a third song, “The Children Work on the Railroad.”

The last song she asked for was a song about how the capitalists killed the Khmer Rouge by hanging them from trees. The Khmer Rouge loved this song because it filled them with emotion and gave them a taste for revenge. As the leader sang along with the music, it appeared some distant emotions were flooding back to her. I recognized the look because I had seen the same expression on my mother’s face. Tears formed at the edges of her eyes. I pretended not to notice. After we had finished she stood up, put her hand on my shoulder, and said: “I want you to come play for me at my house.” Many times after that she ordered me to play.

Once when I went to the leader’s house, she asked me if I would like a bag of jewelry in exchange for my music. But what good was jewelry to me? I said, “Thank you so much. But may I have some sugar and oranges instead?”

She told me, “Yes, take what you like.”

I took the sugar and oranges and left her house running to share them with the others. Giving another person an orange was not just giving them an orange. It was giving them a day of life.