Some magazine fans may feel like their favorite publications are dissolving into fragments of their former selves: fractured content distributed throughout the web, social media, digital editions and the surviving print versions.
But something unique to magazines does still hold at the center, and a new report on the future of magazines suggests that the future for both print and digital magazines will be strong.
Within the report are 30 short profiles of creative methods of making magazines fresh and new in an increasingly competitive media environment. The entire report can be purchased online in printed format for 100 euros or as a PDF for 75 euros.
For example, one chapter describes the integration of small video screens into the September 2009 print edition of Entertainment Weekly that played previews of CBS shows, engaging more of the reader's senses in a "hybrid" medium. Another chapter details how magazines have developed online games that entice readers to engage with their brands in new ways. National Geographic's game "Herod's Lost Tomb" alone has been downloaded 15 million times.
FIPP, a London-based industry organization whose 800-plus members represent over 6,000 magazine titles, co-sponsored the report with Innovation, whose international group of researchers gathered creative approaches to magazine content, advertising and sales being tested around the world. The report mimics a similar yearly publication on new ideas in the newspaper business that Innovation has been creating for the last 11 years.
Finding Magazines' Future
The co-editors of the report, Juan Señor and John Wilpers of Innovation Media Consulting, both come from traditional media backgrounds. Señor, a partner at Innovation, has worked for Wall Street Journal TV, CNBC Europe and the International Herald Tribune Television, and was nominated for an Emmy for his work as a reporter at PBS' NewsHour. Wilpers, who is a consultant for Innovation, worked for a variety of U.S. newspapers and most recently has consulted with newsrooms including The Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times on the integration of blogging into their content.
Juan Señor
Though the innovations contained in the report come from around the world, Señor notes that many "came from more innovative markets in Europe, London and New York -- not accidentally, but coincidentally, because a lot of titles are in trouble" in those places.
Señor and Wilpers together formed their researchers' collected ideas into a cohesive and provocative report on the remarkable variety of ways magazine publishers are experimenting with content, advertising and sales, both in digital and print forms.
"We asked publishers, what are you doing that other magazine publishers should know about? Really it was just doing the kind of research that a good reporter would do," says Wilpers, who had a group of 25 freelance researchers working with him on the project. The focus of the report, according to Wilpers, was "initially supposed to be digital innovations, but print still drives so much of our revenue that we wanted to include that."
Whether for digital or print, each innovation described in the report is individually fascinating. Perhaps more compelling, however, is the realization that taken together, these innovations will result in nothing less than the transformation of the magazine industry -- and of the concept of the magazine itself.
Magazine Experimentation
Both Señor and Wilpers were impressed by magazine professionals' willingness to experiment with new storytelling styles, platforms, formats and revenue streams.
"In the newspaper industry, for so long, we saw paralyzing fear," says Wilpers. "And so people, out of fear, did nothing. They hoped that things would get better by going away."
The magazine industry, though, has embraced digital formats and played with creative opportunities, without forgetting its print roots. "Digital is fun, it's exciting, it's sexy, and it's one of the many answers to publishing going forward. But print's going to be around for a while. We just need to figure out how to make it work," Wilpers says.
That isn't a clear-cut process. Today's magazine transformation will never be complete, and shouldn't be, says Señor.
"To be successful, you should be in a constant state of beta," explains Señor. "If you're not, it's very difficult to move things forward."
Aggregation and Curation
Magazines have experimented with both social media and user-generated content. Yet although magazines should engage with social media, Señor says, social media are "the platform, not the message."
"Very few people out there are producing quality stuff," he says. "For spot reporting, [social media are] fantastic, but still somebody has to quiet the noise and tell me what's happening. There's nothing like the role of a journalist to do the editing and selection for you."
Señor and Wilpers believe this editing and selecting process will increasingly be the role of magazines in the future.
John Wilpers
"You'll see magazines like The Nation curating the best political content, even if they didn't write it," says Wilpers. He notes that a magazine's reputation for quality carries over to other content editors choose for readers, and that as magazine staffs shrink, editors can selectively draw upon a wide variety of skilled outside authors and curate the best of their work for the magazine's audience.
"There's such a blog fog out there, so many people producing rubbish," Señor says. "Just tell me what I should be listening to. Tell it to me with the independence and credibility of journalists. That's the importance of an editor as a curator."
The Magazine as 'Content Proposition'
As magazines differentiate their content for multiple platforms, include a variety of content from their staff and other external sources, and use creative new approaches to their content, there is still a center that holds to define magazines.
Señor argues that today's magazines each have their own "content propositions" that define their subjects and styles.
"The magazine doesn't become a paper product, but a brand of journalism," he says. "The magazine can still have a digital destination. It has a design. It has a masthead. It's a brand proposition as opposed to a platform proposition, but it's still doing a specific kind of storytelling."
Each magazine expresses its content proposition in its own unique way, across multiple media and even through different business models.
"Every publication will have a quiver of opportunities, and no two quivers will be the same," says Wilpers. "Everyone's going to have lots and lots of different tools."
Saving Paper
Paper can still be one of those tools. However, paper editions of magazines may no longer be a mass medium. Instead, they could become a special experience distinctive from what digital magazines provide.
Señor compares paper and digital editions to the levels of clothing in the fashion world. Today's digital magazine editions, he says, are like the expensive, rare, high-end haute couture offered by fashion designers to generate public interest in their brands. Print editions are like the cheap, widespread, lower-status prêt-à-porter clothing they offer for a mass market. However, this analogy, Señor says, is about to be reversed.
"[Print] circulation is definitely going to go down, but if you make the magazine a quality product on paper, a premium product, you can charge much more. I see easily charging $10 for the paper version," he says. "In time, the prêt-à-porter will become digital, and paper will become haute couture. But you have to make the paper experience have tremendous quality, not something you offer in other platforms."
As magazines innovate, then, it's not about leaving paper behind. It's about experimenting with the best ways to gather a defined, branded set of content and to distribute it in the most fitting platform. Though all these simultaneous innovations may feel to observers like fragmentation and weakness, it may be the case that some essential quality of magazines will help them survive and even flourish through their transformation.
Susan Currie Sivek, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Mass Communication and Journalism Department at California State University, Fresno. Her research focuses on magazines and media communities. She also blogs at sivekmedia.com, and is the magazine correspondent for MediaShift.
In early March, observers watched as around 20 long-time Christian orphanage workers were expelled from the country they called home. The incident, and others which followed it, have brought to light the debate surrounding Christianity in the Kingdom.
While the official Moroccan line is that 98.7-99 per cent of the population is Muslim (the remainder being approximately 1% Christian and 0.2% Jewish), that statistic includes ethnic Europeans residing in Morocco. Proselytizing is illegal, as is conversion away from Islam. Still, foreign Christians are allowed to practice freely, and a number of churches, mostly from the era of French colonization, remain. In contrast, the country's tiny Jewish population is almost entirely native, and is also allowed free practice of their faith.
Despite guarantees of freedom, it would appear that the government is taking a stronger approach of late to proselytism, both real and perceived. The Moroccan Dispatchesshares a recent incident in which an Egyptian Catholic priest was expelled from the country:
Evangelicals have operated for years in Morocco, with their main purpose being the conversion of Muslims. Catholics have operated for longer, but purposefully have not engaged in proselytizing. So it came as a surprise that a Catholic priest was also detained and then exported during last week's crackdown.
The blogger shares a message he received from the church in Casablanca:
On Sunday the 7th of March, five minutes before mass began; the police in the city of Larache entered our friary and arrested one of our confrères, Rami Zaki, a young Egyptian friar still in initial formation who was spending a year with us. He was ordered to go with the police, had no possibility to collect anything, and was given no explanation for his arrest…
…When Rami was put on the plane, his passport was taken from him and given to the pilot who later surrendered it with Rami to the police in Cairo. He was detained by the police in Cairo for another seven hours for interrogation before he was permitted to telephone his community of friars. From Sunday, the morning of his arrest, to Tuesday afternoon, when he was released – a total of more than 50 hours – Rami was deprived by the police in Morocco and Egypt of any of his human rights.
In another post, the blogger demonstrates that the public has joined in the crackdowns, citing a recent incident in which a cross was removed from its site of many years:
Where a cross once hung in Meknés
This is the place where a cross used to hang in Meknes' medina. The Catholics who teach Moroccans languages and career skills in this building do not engage in proselytism but have caught up in the anti-Christian sentiment following the recent expulsions of Christians. Last week, the cross was knocked down and beaten into pieces.
On a positive note, Moroccans who have benefited from their services have volunteered to reconstruct the cross.
In a more recent post, the same blogger assesses a TelQuel article on the situation, and says of it:
In the main article, it points out that most Moroccans convert to Christianity more as a result of Arabic media and not from foreign missionaries. This jives with my experience: a number of Moroccans I know have had long conversations with Christian missionaries about religion and none have converted. Some defended Islam while smoking hashish just to piss off the Christians, it that gives you an idea of how many Moroccans understand their Islamic identity. This observation about foreign missionaries, of course, undermines the rationale behind the recent expulsions of many foreigners.
Other media critical of the government have been shut down recently. And the same could happen to Tel Quel. But as long as they are still around, there will be at least some debate and critical thinking about current events.
Turkey’s governing party moved this week to further reduce the power of the country’s staunchly secular old guard, submitting a series of amendments to Turkey’s military coup-era 1982 constitution, but passage is far from assured.
A number of the 26 amendments, if passed, would strike at a center of power for the old elite, the judiciary, by opening up its appointment process and expanding its membership.
For generations, Turkey’s judiciary has been controlled by a small class of hard-line secularists with a nationalist ideology, and the European Union, which Turkey hopes to join, has long urged that it be changed. The amendments require 367 votes out of 550 to become law, more than the governing party has. At the same time, the secular opposition party is having trouble gathering the 110 votes needed to kill the package in the Constitutional Court.
Some liberals criticized the measures for falling short of what is needed for deeper democracy in Turkey, while opponents of the party, Justice and Development, say the amendments are an effort by its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to consolidate his power. But supporters say the changes would start to bring Turkey in line with European countries.
“When you actually look at what the amendments propose, you see that all changes are copied from examples that function quite well in E.U. member states,” said Joost Lagendijk, senior adviser at the Istanbul Policy Center at Sabanci University and a former European Parliament member.
The current constitution, which enshrines Turkey’s secular mandate, has been amended several times since it was put in place, and most Turkish intellectuals argue that it should be scrapped entirely.
But Mr. Erdogan’s past efforts to change it have met with ferocious criticism. His party commissioned a new draft in 2008, which was written largely by a group of intellectuals, but was forced to scrap it after the secular opposition party filed suit against Justice and Development, which is Islamic-inspired, and a high court threatened to ban the party.
The government argues that the changes as necessary to break away from a troubled past of military coups and strong control of the state by a small coterie of unelected officials in the bureaucracy and the judiciary. Critics of the newly proposed amendments fear that the key changes — the way appointments are made to the constitutional court, the main watchdog of secularism in Turkey, and to the Senior Council of Judges and Prosecutors, responsible for judicial appointments and monitoring court officials — would damage Turkey’s founding principles. They do not trust Mr. Erdogan, whose party arose from a class of Muslim entrepreneurs that upper class secular Turks long looked down upon.
“The secular democratic state in Turkey is in danger,” said Sabih Kanadoglu, the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals, another powerful court.
Other changes include trying military officers in civilian courts and making it harder to ban political parties.
If Mr. Erdogan fails to pass the changes in Parliament, he has said he would bring them to a nationwide referendum, though some have criticized that approach as too black-and-white for the complexity of the amendments.
The disagreement follows a long-running divide in Turkish society between the broad sector of society that supports Justice and Development and secular Turks, who believe Mr. Erdogan is dismantling the old system to establish a new one that empowers him.
At the same time, liberals who were hoping for bolder change expressed disappointment. One of the principle authors of the 2008 draft, Ergun Ozbudun, a professor of law at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, noted that the amendments offered no concessions to ethnic or religious groups, for example, whose rights in Turkey have been routinely abused.
“The desire deep in their hearts was probably to go more courageously,” he said by telephone, “but they are maybe afraid of the opposition and constitutional court.”
Nor do the amendments lower the steep 10 percent threshold that political parties must meet to claim seats in Parliament, which keeps out smaller political parties, including those that represent ethnic groups such as Kurds, out of Parliament one of the liberals’ central demands.
Ibrahim Kaboglu, a professor of constitutional law at Istanbul’s Marmara University, said the changes would expand the president’s powers, for example by allowing him to choose more members of the constitutional court, and he said he worried that the court, a bastion of secular resistance, would soon be packed with Mr. Erdogan’s allies.
“They seem to be in a rush to fill both institutions with judges and members who are closer to their political line to secure their future,” he said, referring to the Constitutional Court and the Senior Council.
For those used to seeing the faces of slaves in Civil War-era tintypes -- staring at the camera in posed, formal judgment -- it is a shock to see the face of slavery in a shy, adolescent boy.
Majok Majok Dhal, 14 or 15 years old (many former slaves have no idea of their exact age), dimly remembers his capture in the village of Mareng at about age 5. "I ran a little and was taken. I was carried on horseback." He recalls seeing other captives shot and killed after refusing to march north with the raiders into Sudan proper. His master, Atheib, was "not a good person." He forced the boy to tend goats and live with them in a stable. Majok was beaten regularly with a bamboo stick, "if I was not quick and fast." He recalls once being feverish and unable to work. The master "stabbed my leg with a knife. He said, 'I will cut your throat.' " Majok shows me his poorly healed wound. He was forced to address Atheib as "father."
Relating his experience, Majok shows no anger -- until asked about the master's children. "When they beat me up, I couldn't raise my head. If I tried to fight back, the father would kill me." He recounts their taunting. "They would say to me, 'Why don't you go to your own home and eat?' " Majok's voice rises: "If he brought me all the way to take care of goats and cattle, why did he not employ his own children?"
I talk to Majok through an interpreter, under a large tamarind tree, in a setting as bleak as his story. The scenery tests every possible shade of brown: reddish brown, yellowish brown, greenish brown. It is a landscape of thatched, conical huts; circling scavenger birds; rutted mud roads; and wandering goats. A haze of fine red dust blurs the horizon.
Nearby, about 125 recently released slaves are being interviewed by Christian Solidarity International, an organization that has helped redeem and resettle tens of thousands of captives during the past 15 years. Though no more slaves are being taken by northern militias -- the raids generally stopped with the American-sponsored peace treaty in 2005 -- an estimated tens of thousands more are still held within a hundred miles of South Sudan's northern border.
The background of each man, woman and child at the makeshift camp is recorded, reflecting a determination by CSI that none of these people, and none of the crimes they have experienced, be forgotten. A woman is missing teeth from being tied and thrown to the ground. Others reluctantly admit that their genitals were mutilated. One woman tells me she is often awakened by her nightmares.
Slavery is only the most extreme legacy of Sudan's two decades of civil war. With patience, nearly every personal encounter reveals a story of struggle. A pastor tells me how his congregation met for 15 years under a tree so they could quickly move to avoid bombing raids. Cattle herds -- the main source of stored wealth in South Sudan -- were decimated. An estimated 40 percent of people in this region depend on food aid of some sort. There is almost no public health infrastructure. A Sudanese doctor tells me that about every two weeks he diagnoses a new case of leprosy -- a condition almost unknown in the West. Women in rural areas play fertility roulette -- a local aid official estimates that one in six will die from complications during childbirth.
Just months from South Sudan's likely vote for independence, its humanitarian challenges seem overwhelming. International relief organizations provide many services, but the greater need is the building of local capacity -- agricultural development, trained government administrators, a credible national teaching hospital. Direct international aid in the form of cash can encourage local corruption. But technical assistance to build specific capabilities might be the only way to avoid the destructive failure of a new nation. Still, as one U.S. State Department official recently vented to me, "We are doing about 10 percent of what we need to do."
Without leaving the planet, it would be difficult to experience greater cultural distance than meeting a Sudanese goatherd released from slavery. But my main impression of Majok was his profound resemblance to my sons of similar age. It is a hopeful thing about humanity. In a timid smile, in a turn of the head, we see similarity, we see family. We should also see responsibility.
Many Americans may know my country, Azerbaijan, for its oil wealth or for its conflict with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno Karabakh. A March 5 article in The Post portrayed a nation whose ruling family appears to own $75 million worth of luxury villas in Dubai. Few of us in Azerbaijan were surprised by a report that President Ilham Aliyev's family apparently invests assets abroad. What else should be expected from a leader who inherited power from his father through fraudulent elections?
Aliyev's brutal crackdown on the opposition and independent media began with his election in October 2003. Thousands of Azeris protesting the transfer of power -- more succession than an election -- were arrested and beaten. As opposition supporters languished in jail, then-deputy U.S. Secretary of State Richard Armitage phoned Aliyev to congratulate him on his "landslide" victory. Democratic voices of protest were stifled by the blows of police batons. Western powers were eager to work with a new leader they viewed as young and progressive.
Nearly two years later, on the eve of the 2005 parliamentary elections, Azeri democrats inspired by the support Western nations had given to the Rose and Orange democratic revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine decided to again challenge Aliyev's authoritarian regime. Events unfortunately played out along now-familiar lines: The government falsified election results; opposition protests were crushed; yet Washington praised the work of Azerbaijan's Constitutional Court, which had just approved false election results.
Aliyev apparently interpreted the international community's silence as carte blanche to turn a country with long-standing democratic traditions into a fiefdom. The government evicted major opposition parties from their centrally located headquarters. Independent media also felt the wrath. One outspoken editor of an opposition magazine was fatally shot in March 2005; several others received harsh prison sentences on trumped-up charges.
There was a time when Azerbaijan's future looked promising. In the 1980s, Azerbaijan was at the forefront of the democratic movements that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1992, we held our first democratic elections. Abulfaz Elchibey, leader of the Popular Front, won 59 percent of the vote. Elchibey viewed himself as a political heir to the founders of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918. Azerbaijan was the first nation in the Muslim world to establish a parliamentary democracy that granted universal suffrage, preceding many Western countries.
But these days, the only vote that counts is that of Ilham Aliyev. After "winning" his second presidential term last year, in an election with no viable opposition alternative, Aliyev and his rubber-stamp parliament conspired to change the constitution, through a referendum, to lift term limits on the presidency.
The next parliamentary elections are to be held in November. The democratic opposition is once again preparing to challenge the regime. While there are no indications that the government's behavior will differ from that of years past, we have decided to participate in the election process because we recognize that this is our chance to fight for our ideals.
Our platform is simple: We intend to establish a functional democracy in our country. Azerbaijan has a resourceful populace, and we can and must decrease our nation's dependence on oil. We must break the economic monopolies controlled by corrupt officials. Our goal is to establish a free, market-based economy. We want Azerbaijan to integrate into the Euro-Atlantic community of nations, ending its status as a satellite of autocratic Russia.
As we continue our struggle for freedom, it is vital that the United States pursue appropriate action with regard to the largest nation in the South Caucasus. Bilateral relations have long been based on cooperation on energy, security and democratic development. Sadly, many Azeris see U.S. policy as driven by energy interests and the global war against terrorism. To us, it seems that democracy gets short shrift. We hope the Obama administration will make clear to Azerbaijan's leader that democratic reforms and human rights are a priority in U.S.-Azeri relations.
American policymakers should have learned from countries in the Middle East and other areas that authoritarian, corrupt regimes do not make reliable allies. Nor is their "stability" based on the consent of the governed. The democratic opposition in Azerbaijan does not seek intervention or financial assistance from the United States. What we need is the moral support of an America that stands by its own values.
Ali Karimli is chairman of the Popular Front Party of Azerbaijan and co-founder of Azadlig (Freedom) Political Bloc of Opposition Parties.
Recent Hispanic immigrants are more likely to return their census questionnaires than Hispanics born in the United States, according to a new study that suggests a census campaign targeting Spanish speakers has been wildly successful.
A telephone survey of about 1,000 people conducted in the third week of March by the Pew Hispanic Center also found that foreign-born Hispanics are less skeptical that their census information will remain confidential.
The study was released Thursday, which the government dubbed "Census Day" -- the day by which, officials hoped, people would have filled out their forms and mailed them in. To encourage participation, the White House released a photo of President Obama filling out his questionnaire.
The government will continue to promote the census throughout April, particularly in areas with low response rates. At the end of the month, officials will compile lists of addresses from which surveys have not been received by mail. Census-takers will be dispatched to those addresses to try to get survey questions answered.
Major Hispanic groups have said there is widespread fear among immigrants that data will be shared with immigration authorities. In response, groups have stressed the confidentiality of the census in a campaign called "Ya es hora. ¡Hagase contar!" or "It's time to be counted."
"It shows the work we have been doing has had an impact," he said of the effort that enlisted newscasters, entertainers and other prominent Latinos to spread the message that Hispanics should send in their forms regardless of their legal status. "It shows that this population understands what we need do as a community to move forward, to be counted and to be heard."
But, ironically, the survey suggests that the message did not get through so readily to U.S.-born Hispanics. While 91 percent of the foreign-born said they had returned their forms or would do so soon, only 78 percent of the U.S.-born said they would participate. Both figures would be an improvement over the last census, when 69 percent of Hispanic households returned their forms.
Hispanics are the largest ethnic group in the United States, as well as the fastest growing. About 35 million were counted in the 2000 Census, and they were estimated to number 47 million by 2008, or 15 percent of the population.
This year, the Census Bureau mailed bilingual forms to neighborhoods with a large Hispanic presence. It also spent more than $25 million, about one-fifth of its total advertising budget, for Spanish-language media.
The sharp focus on messages in Spanish may have created the disparity in how recent immigrants and natives regard the census.
Maria Teresa Kumar, executive director of Voto Latino, said that recent immigrants are the main consumers of Spanish-language programs aired on Univision and Telemundo, which introduced a census-taker as a character in its top-rated telenovela. Generations born in the United States tend to prefer English-language media.
"The more acculturated you are, the more you have the same views as the rest of mainstream America, and a lot of folks are distrustful of government," she said.
The Pew survey also suggests that a census boycott called by some Hispanic evangelical ministers to protest the lack of immigration reform has been a failure. Only 16 percent said they had heard calls for a boycott.
"We're not sure why it didn't gain traction," said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "We know that when it was announced, there was a very broad effort to counter it."
Carlos Aragon, general manager of Radio Fiesta, which broadcasts in the Washington area, said many Hispanics consider the boycott "ridiculous." He also said he hears myths that the Census Bureau will turn in undocumented immigrants to the authorities.
José Robles, director of Hispanic Ministry in the Phoenix Catholic Diocese, said the concern about information being handed over to authorities is more pronounced among members of the clergy than parishioners. The diocese has heavily promoted the census, but Arizonans are among those who are slower to return forms than the national average.
The states whose response rates are lagging are mostly in the South and Southwest.
SEOUL -- Squeezed by food shortages and financial sanctions, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il appears to be reaching out to China and Chinese investors in a way that could mark an extraordinary opening in the insular nation's shuttered economy.
Kim might soon travel to China, according to the office of South Korea's president and U.S. officials. They cited preparations that appear to be underway in the Chinese border city of Dandong and in Beijing. The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Thursday it does not have information on whether Kim will visit China.
Such a trip could help restart six-party talks, hosted by China, aimed at persuading North Korea to denuclearize in return for economic and political benefits.
Kim is also attempting to accelerate Chinese investment and has ordered the creation of a State Development Bank. Officials from the new bank told a South Korean professor last week that they intend to allow the construction of foreign-owned factories in major North Korean cities. This would allow Chinese firms, many of which are running short of low-cost factory workers, access to North Korea's pool of low-wage laborers.
If the investments move forward, they would represent a major policy reversal by the government. For six decades, North Korea has sealed almost all its citizens off from the "poisons" of capitalism.
Outreach to China comes at a time of sharply increased pressure on Kim's leadership.
Inside North Korea, food shortages have worsened because of botched currency reform, which disrupted the private markets that feed most of the country's 22.5 million people. Kim's medical ills also include kidney failure, and he undergoes dialysis every two weeks, according to the head of a state-run think tank in Seoul.
And outside, U.N. sanctions are reportedly limiting the North's ability to profit from weapons sales. State trafficking in counterfeit cigarettes and illicit drugs appears to be dwindling. In addition, large-scale food aid from South Korea has been stopped until Pyongyang agrees to junk its nuclear weapons.
"Through this State Development Bank, North Korea is trying to lure foreign investment in agriculture, ports, railroads and also light industry," said Lim Eul-chul, a research professor at the Seoul-based Institute for Far Eastern Studies. He spent four days in Pyongyang last week, talking to officials from the bank and to Chinese businessmen.
They told Lim that the bank is offering itself to foreign investors as a one-stop investment shop. With its board including senior members of the military and the ruling party, the bank will be able to conduct transactions with foreign commercial banks and invest in major projects, North Korean state-controlled media have said.
"The North is now planning to open foreign-owned factories not just in closed-off special economic zones, but in major cities like Nampo and Wonsan," Lim said. Until now, the government has confined nearly all foreign business operations to sealed-off economic zones, such as Kaesong near the South Korean border. "The military is closely cooperating with the State Development Bank to try to increase foreign investment."
Although the repressive power of the army and security forces remains strong, the North's command-style economy is a ruin. There were unconfirmed reports of starvation deaths in some areas this winter.
Kim, 68, and showing the effects of a 2008 stroke, is in the early stages of handing power over to his untested 27-year-old son, Kim Jong Eun. But the legitimacy of the succession -- and of the state itself -- is being weakened by the growth of the markets and increased public access to foreign media.
Refugee surveys show that many North Koreans blame Kim's government for food shortages, corruption and incompetence.
"Kim Jong Il doesn't have many cards to play, so there is more and more pressure on him to return to the six-party talks," said Koh Yu-whan, a professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "He is also aiming to get investment from ethnic Korean businesses in China."
In South Korea and China, there is widespread skepticism about North Korea's willingness to create modern banking systems and enforce laws that allow foreign companies to operate under standardized accounting rules.
Companies that have invested in North Korean mineral ventures have complained for years of corruption and outright theft by the government.
Special correspondent June Lee contributed to this report.
A reporter chronicles the revival of the world's most populous Muslim nation a decade after its disintegration
By David Lamb
Smithsonian magazine, April 2010
As reports of riots in Indonesia flashed across the world’s news wires, in May 1998, my wife telephoned the hotel in Jakarta where I was staying to make sure I was OK. “What do you see out your window?” she asked. Flames from burning department stores and Chinese shops and businesses owned by the family of President Suharto spread across the horizon like a magnificent sunset. Army tanks and soldiers with dogs filled the square below. “I see a city burning,” I said, “a city dying.”
At the time it seemed no exaggeration. Indonesia’s economy and its currency, the rupiah, had collapsed in a financial crisis that gripped all of Southeast Asia. In parts of the Spice Islands, which belong to Indonesia, tensions between Muslims and Christians were escalating. In the nation’s province of Aceh, and in Papua, site of one of the world’s richest deposits of copper and gold, the death toll mounted as secessionists skirmished with the army. East Timor was about to fall into anarchy, then secede from Indonesia as an independent country. In Jakarta, the nation’s capital, student protesters seeking to replace three decades of dictatorship with democracy were brutally put down by the military and government thugs, sparking clashes that would claim 1,200 lives and 6,000 buildings. Hardest hit was the Chinese minority, long resented for their entrepreneurial success; their businesses were looted and destroyed, and women were raped by hired military goons. Tens of thousands of Chinese fled the country.
I was then a reporter for The Los Angeles Times, based in Hanoi, and I was covering the civil unrest in Jakarta. One day I came upon an anti-Suharto demonstration at Trisakti, a private university. Students at other colleges sometimes taunted Trisakti’s students, belittling their lack of political involvement by waving bras and panties at them. But on this day Trisakti’s young men challenged the soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder and pushing against their lines. “Don’t get so close. You could get shot and killed,” a friend of 19-year-old Trisakti student Elang Lesmana warned him. “That’s OK,” Lesmana replied. “I’d be a hero.” The soldiers, who had exchanged their rubber bullets for real ones, killed Lesmana and three other students. The deaths galvanized Indonesia, turning the tide of public and military sentiment.
Suharto’s top general, Wiranto—like Suharto and many Indonesians, he has only one name—told the president the military could no longer protect him and had no intention of staging a Tiananmen Square-style massacre in Jakarta. Nine days after the shootings of students, on May 21, Asia’s longest-serving leader resigned. He retired to the family compound in a leafy Jakarta suburb to live out his final decade watching TV, surrounded by a stuffed tiger and bookshelves full of cheap souvenirs and trinkets. Caged songbirds sang on his terrace.
For 32 years Suharto had run Indonesia like the CEO of a family corporation. The Suhartos’ fortune reportedly topped $15 billion, and they had a major stake in more than 1,200 companies. But Suharto left behind more than a legacy of corruption and a military best known for its deadly abuse of human rights. He had also been Indonesia’s father of development, building schools and roads, opening the economy to foreign investment, transforming dusty, tropical Jakarta into a modern capital and lifting millions of Indonesians out of poverty.
The world’s most populous Muslim country, with 240 million people, Indonesia has always been an ungainly place. The archipelago encompasses 17,500 islands—6,000 inhabited—that stretch 3,200 miles across the Pacific Ocean’s so-called Ring of Fire where earthquakes and volcanoes are a constant threat and tsunamis are born. The people—88 percent Muslim—speak scores of local languages and represent dozens of ethnic groups. As recently as the 1950s the population included tribes of headhunters. That this polyglot was born as a single nation in 1949, after 300 years of Dutch rule and four of warfare and negotiations with the Netherlands, was a miracle in itself.
After witnessing the Suharto-era meltdown, I did not return to Indonesia until October 2009, after I had begun hearing about changes unimaginable a decade earlier. On the surface, Jakarta didn’t seem much changed. Traffic remained gridlocked in the humid 90-degree heat. Shantytown slums languished in the shadow of marbled shopping malls where pianists in tuxedos played Chopin next to Valentino and Louis Vuitton shops, and white-gloved valets parked cars. The Indonesians I encountered were, as always, gracious and friendly, and I could walk virtually any street, even at night in a city of nine million people, with no fear for my safety. On one block you’d still find a mosque packed with men who considered alcohol and dancing ungodly, on the next, a nightclub like the Stadium that served alcohol 24 hours a day on weekends and boasted a disco pulsating with lights, thunderous rock music and writhing young bodies.
But beneath the surface, everything was different. Indonesia had recovered from half a century of dictatorship—first under Sukarno, then Suharto—and in the time I’d been away had become what Freedom House, a U.S. think tank, called the only fully free and democratic country in Southeast Asia. The outlying islands were generally calm. Soldiers no longer careered with abandon through city streets in cars bearing the red license plates of the military command. The unthinkable had happened: Indonesia had become one of the region’s most stable and prosperous nations.
People seldom talked about the dark past, not even of the apocalyptic end of the Sukarno regime in the mid-1960s, when the army and vigilantes went on a madhouse slaughter to purge the country of leftists, real and imagined. The killings spread from Jakarta to the Hindu-dominated island of Bali, and by the time order was restored as many as half a million had lost their lives. The mayhem was captured in the 1982 movie starring Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt, The Year of Living Dangerously.
Today Indonesia has joined the Group of 20, the world’s premier forum for economic cooperation. Blessed with an abundance of natural resources—petroleum, natural gas, timber, rubber and various minerals—and a strategic position straddling one of the world’s most important shipping lanes, it is one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies.
“There was great euphoria when Suharto stepped down, but it opened a Pandora’s box,” said Julia Suryakusuma, a Jakarta newspaper columnist. “Yes, we’ve got a real democracy. The world’s third largest after India and the United States. That’s pretty amazing. But what people worry about now is Islamization, the hard-liners who want an Islamic state.”
A soft rain was falling the night Fanny Hananto came to pick me up at my hotel. I jumped on the back of his motorcycle, and we slipped through lines of idling, bumper-to-bumper cars, headed for the mosque he attends. We passed a large group of women with small children, collectively called traffic jockeys, on a sidewalk. Hananto said solo motorists would pay a mother and child 25,000 rupiah (about $2.50 U.S.) to be passengers so the driver could use the lane reserved for cars occupied by three or more people.
I had met the 37-year-old Hananto through a friend. With his scraggly beard and a wife who dressed in black, everything covered but her eyes, and a daughter named for one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, Hananto seemed the very personification of Islamic purity. Had he always been religious?
“Not exactly,” he said. As a younger man, he had worked on a cruise ship, spent nights partying with drugs and alcohol and, referring to the crowd that hung out at the Stadium nightclub, said, “I was one of them.” But about a dozen years ago he grew to fear the wrath of Allah and did a 180-degree turn, embracing Islam through the Kebon Jeruk Mosque, to which he was now taking me. He so deeply trusted the imam who mentored him that when the cleric said he had found a good woman for Hananto, and showed him her picture, Hananto said, “OK, I will marry her.” He did so a short time later, never mentioning his past life to her.
I removed my shoes as we entered the mosque, fearing I might lose them amid the piles of footwear strewn about. Thursday evening prayers had attracted so many men, perhaps 2,000, that I could not even see the visiting Pakistani cleric preaching at the front. The men were members of an apolitical Islamic movement, Tablighi Jamaat, that strives to make Muslims better practitioners of their faith. I squatted on the floor, and men in long, loose-fitting white shirts and turbans nodded in welcome or reached out to shake my hand. Hananto introduced me to his friend, Aminudia Noon, a university professor of civil engineering. I asked him where the women were.
“They’re home praying,” he said. “If they were to come here, it would be like an arrow to the heart from Satan.”
Islam was brought to Indonesia not by conquest but by 12th-century Muslim traders who took cloves, nutmeg and other spices to the West. Its spread was gradual and peaceful. Rather than smothering local culture and religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, mysticism—it absorbed them. The Islam that took root was less doctrinaire and less intolerant than some forms practiced in the Middle East, and no one found it particularly unusual that Suharto meditated in caves and consulted astrologers and clairvoyants.
Both Sukarno and Suharto were leery of fervent Islam. Sukarno feared it could threaten the stability of his diverse, fragile country and at independence rejected the idea of making Indonesia an Islamic republic. Suharto kept his distance from the Arab Muslim world and for years kept Islamists at home on a short leash. Some went underground or left for more comfortable lives in neighboring Malaysia, which is also Islamic.
I told Professor Noon I didn’t understand how Muslim terrorists who had killed countless innocents in Indonesia and other countries could be considered martyrs. “Those who believe that have misinterpreted Islam,” he said. “The basic theme of Islam is love and affection. How can you put people who make bombs in paradise? Suicide bombers are not martyrs. They have lost the blessing of Allah, and they will receive His greatest punishment in the hereafter.”
Indonesia after Suharto’s fall was buffeted by drift, strife and communal conflict. Islamic extremists emerged from the shadows—and with them the country’s first suicide bombers. In Java, the island where Jakarta is located, mysterious assassins brutally killed scores of suspected black-magic sorcerers.
Meanwhile, between 1998 and 2004 three unlikely chief executives shuttled in rapid succession through the presidency—a millionaire engineer educated in East Germany, a nearly blind Muslim cleric, who often dozed off in meetings and was eventually impeached, and Sukarno’s daughter, whose most notable credential was her father’s genes.
Enter, in 2004, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, then a 55-year-old retired general who had been educated in the United States and who, as a youth, had sung and played guitar in a band named Gaya Teruna (Youth Style). He had a clean, graft-free reputation, a dedication to democracy and a belief that Indonesia’s traditionally tolerant, moderate form of Islam—Smiling Islam, Indonesians call it—was the true expression of the faith. The local news media referred to him as “the thinking general” and seemed delighted when, at a campaign stop in Bali, he sang John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in English. No one seemed to mind that it offered a distinctly atheistic outlook:
Imagine there’s no Heaven... No hell below us... And no religion too. Imagine all the people Living life in peace...
On September 20, 2004, some 117 million Indonesians voted in the largest single-day free election the world had ever seen to make Yudhoyono, who had promised to continue to reform the nation and the military and to rein in terrorism, the country’s sixth president. Five years later, he was re-elected in a landslide, collecting more direct votes (74 million) than any candidate had ever won worldwide. (The previous record had been Barack Obama’s 69 million votes in 2008.) In a nod to austerity, Yudhoyono’s second inauguration in October 2009 cost a mere $30,000.
Last year, Time magazine named Yudhoyono one of the world’s 100 most influential people. Not only has he continued with reforms to curb the military’s role in society, but he also struck a peace deal with anti-government rebels in Aceh province on the northern tip of Sumatra, ending a nearly 30-year war that had claimed 15,000 lives. Arrests, executions and raids had seriously weakened Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), a homegrown Al Qaeda look-alike considered Southeast Asia’s deadliest terrorist group. (The name means “Islamic Community.”) Freedoms have continued for the Chinese minority, numbering about five million people or roughly 2 percent of the population, who had become free to use Chinese characters on its storefronts, celebrate Chinese New Year and openly teach the Chinese language. “Things are more secure, much better. We’ll see,” said Ayung Dim, 57, a merchant who had survived the 1998 riots by hiding with his family in his metal shop before fleeing to Malaysia.
The Indonesian government also patched up relations with the United States. It laid the groundwork for the return of the Peace Corps, expelled four decades earlier by the anti-Western Sukarno, who taunted the American ambassador, Marshall Green: “Go to hell with your aid!” Yudhoyono threw his support behind an anti-corruption commission, which caught some big fish, including his own daughter-in-law’s father. Indonesia’s democratic transformation and political reform have brought about a resumption of military cooperation with the United States, which had been suspended because of the Indonesian Army’s abysmal human-rights record.
The day before Yudhoyono’s second swearing-in, I took a taxi to the English-language Jakarta Post to see how the media had fared under him and what had changed since Suharto, when insulting the president or vice president was a crime and newspapers could be closed after printing three objectionable articles.
The privately owned Post, one of 16 national newspapers, had recently moved into a sparkling new building. I was surprised to find an empty newsroom. I asked the editor, Endy Bayuni, where everyone was. “They’re out doing what reporters are meant to do—reporting,” he said. “There are no government restrictions any more, no issues we can’t report on. With all the corruption here, Indonesia is a gold mine for investigative reporters, but our reporters don’t have the skills yet to do that kind of reporting well because we weren’t allowed to do it for so long. We’re retraining them.”
“In the old days,” he went on, “we became famous as the paper you had to read between the lines to understand. We’d push the invisible line as far as we could. It was the only way to keep your sanity as a reporter. Every segment of society has a voice now, even if it’s an unwanted voice” like that of Islamic extremists.
One branch of Islam has resurfaced here in its hard-core, anti-Western jihadist form. The terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah first captured the world’s attention in 2002 when a young suicide bomber with a backpack and a car loaded with explosives leveled two tourist bars, Paddy’s Pub and the Sari Club, on the Indonesian island of Bali. Over 200 people from 23 countries died. A marble memorial now marks the spot where Paddy’s stood, and a new bar has opened nearby with the name Paddy’s: Reloaded. In the next seven years terrorists launched several additional, deadly attacks—on restaurants in Bali and Jakarta, two at the JW Marriott and one each at the Ritz-Carlton and the Australian Embassy.
Though diminished by arrests and internal strife, JI and splinter terrorist groups still pose a big challenge to the fulfillment of Yudhoyono’s campaign promise that “God willing, in the next five years the world will say, ‘Indonesia is something; Indonesia is rising.’”
I met Nasir Abas in a dingy Jakarta coffee shop across the road from Cipinang Prison, which holds some of Indonesia’s toughest criminals and most incorrigible terrorists. Abas’ own terrorist credentials were formidable. He had trained on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, set up a military academy in the jungles of the southern Philippines and taught half a dozen of the young men who carried out the first Bali bombing how to kill. His brother spent eight years in a Singapore prison for plotting a foiled terrorist attack. (He was released in January.) His brother-in-law was executed for his role in the bombing of Paddy’s and the Sari Club. Abas, 40, brought along a sidekick, Jhoni “Idris” Hendrawan, 34, who had taken part in three deadly terrorist attacks in Indonesia and been arrested while counting the money he had robbed from a bank to finance a future attack.
These days Abas has a new role: he works for the police. Abas helped officers question suspects responsible for the second Bali bombing. He has testified against JI operatives in court, leading to their conviction and imprisonment. His encyclopedic knowledge of the terrorist network provided authorities with a trove of intelligence. He is one of the first on the scene of terrorist attacks and often finds clues that only a JI insider would recognize. In his spare time he visits terrorists in Cipinang and other prisons, trying to convince them that killing civilians and innocents is un-Islamic. Some prisoners refuse to talk to him and call him a traitor; others, like Hendrawan, have bought into Abas’ deradicalization program and have forsworn violence. “I thought the students I trained would take part in jihad against forces occupying Muslim lands, like in Afghanistan,” Abas said. “Then the Bali bombing. This wasn’t jihad. Prophet Muhammad said it is wrong to do anything cruel, wrong to kill old men, women and children. After Bali, I came to realize many of my friends and relatives had strange ideas and thought it was OK to kill civilians.”
His conversion, he said, came after his 2003 arrest. “I always thought the police were my enemy.” But they called him Mr. Nasir and, after beating him the day of his arrest, never touched him again. If they had tortured him further, he said he would have been silent or given them false information. “They said, ‘We are Muslim like you. We aren’t against Islam. We just want to stop criminals.’ Even the Christian cops didn’t use bad words about Islam. I changed my mind about the police, and that was one turning point.”
Another, he told me, was when Cipinang’s commander came to see him in prison. “Bekto Suprapto was a colonel and a Christian. He told the ten men guarding me to take off my handcuffs. Then he told them to leave. I’m thinking, ‘What a brave man, because if I want to do something to him, I’m sure I could carry it off.’ We talked about jihad, about Christians and Muslims. He gave me a Bible and I ended up reading it. I started wondering why God hadn’t let me die or be killed. I answered my own question. He hadn’t because there was something God wanted of me. It was to do what I’m doing now.” Abas’ change of direction also had a practical benefit: it won his release from custody.
Abas—and mainstream experts on terrorism—say JI continues to recruit at its 50 schools and in the mosques it operates. But, they add, its leadership and structure have been severely weakened by Yudhoyono’s three-pronged strategy: first, to aggressively pursue terrorists, which has resulted in more than 400 arrests, several executions and the shooting death of JI leader Noordin Mohammad Top in 2009; second, to undercut the popular appeal of militancy by exposing it as un-Islamic; and lastly, to ensure that the government does not create more terrorists by treating prisoners brutally.
Recent elections offer a glimpse into the public’s changing attitudes. In parliamentary elections in 2004, Islamic parties won 38 percent of the vote; in 2009, the percentage dropped to 23. In a poll of Indonesians by a group called Terror Free Tomorrow, 74 percent said terrorist attacks are “never justified.” In another poll, 42 percent said religion should have no role in politics, up from 29 percent the previous year. Apparently, most Indonesians continue to embrace moderation and tolerance.
Indonesia’s ulema, or leading clerics, were long on the fence about terrorism, believing no Indonesians nor any Muslims could have been responsible for the attacks. Many never denounced the Bali bombing but did condemn a police raid in East Java in 2005 in which JI’s leading bomb master, Azahari “Demolition Man” Husin, was killed as a U.S.-trained counterterrorism unit raided his hide-out. Yudhoyono’s vice president, Jusuf Kalla, invited leading clerics to his house for dinner. He spoke with them for 50 minutes. He showed them pictures of huge stockpiles of bomb-making equipment and weapons the police had found at the hide-out. Then he showed them videos of young suicide bombers saying their goodbyes before heading out on death missions in search of martyrdom. “Do you still believe the police shouldn’t have raided the house?” Kalla asked. The clerics all agreed that the raid was justified. It was an important government victory to get influential opinion-makers on the record with a condemnation of terrorism.
“Indonesia has done far better than the United States combating terrorism as far as abiding by the rule of law goes,” said Sidney Jones, a longtime U.S. resident of Jakarta and a conflict analyst with the Belgium-based International Crisis Group. “There have been no witch hunts, no Guantánamos, no water boarding.” The Yudhoyono government, she said, treats terrorism as a law-and-order problem for the police, and the police in turn use what they call a “soft approach,” as they did with Nasir Abas. Everyone is charged in open court with reporters present. “Because of the information coming out of the trials, the Indonesian public became convinced that the terrorists are Indonesians, not CIA and Mossad operatives,” Jones said.
The Indonesia I visited this past October was a different country from the one I left a decade ago. Although 32.5 million of the country’s people still live below the poverty line, most Indonesians no longer wake up hoping they can simply make it through the day. The students’ agenda of the 1990s—democracy, civil order, economic opportunity, respect for human rights—had become the national agenda. Everyone I met seemed aware that Indonesia had been given something some countries never get: a second chance. The optimism was palpable. “If Indonesia were a stock, I’d be buying,” said Eric Bjornlund, co-founder of Democracy International, Inc., a firm in Bethesda, Maryland, specializing in international democratic development.
But many challenges lie ahead. Yudhoyono’s popularity rating remains high—75 percent in early 2010—but has fallen 15 percent since his election, partly because of scandals within his government and criticism that he is indecisive. What if it continues to fall and he alters course, back-tracking into the dictatorial ways of his predecessors? What about deep-rooted corruption, which has drawn protesters into Jakarta’s streets; inertia in the civil service; the gap between rich and poor; and the continuing battle for the soul of Islam between moderates and extremists? In 2009, Aceh province, for instance, adopted a new Shariah law (law of God) that calls for death by stoning for adulterers. To the relief of moderates, concerned about tourism and foreign investment, Aceh has yet to carry out any stonings.
One day, I sat with six students in the shade of a kiosk at Jakarta’s Paramadina University, which includes in its curriculum a course on anti-corruption. The two young women present wore colorful jilbabs, the Islamic scarf that covers the hair and neck. All six spoke excellent English. They wanted to know if I was on Facebook and what I thought of President Obama, who as this story went to press was planning a visit in March to Indonesia, where he lived with his mother and Indonesian stepfather from 1967 to 1971. He has become popular in Indonesia since his campaign and election, and this past December a 43-inch bronze statue was unveiled in a city park, depicting a 10-year-old Obama wearing schoolboy shorts with his outstretched hand holding a butterfly. (A protest campaign that began on Facebook, arguing that Obama is not an Indonesian national hero, succeeded in getting the statue removed from the park. Officials transferred it to Obama’s former school in February.) I asked the students what their goals were. One wanted to be a computer programmer, another an entrepreneur, a third wanted to study in the United States.
“For me,” said 20-year-old Muhammad Fajar, “the biggest dream is to be a diplomat. Indonesia can have a big place in the world, and I want to be part of it. But first we’ve got to show the world that Indonesia is not just about poverty and corruption and terrorism.”
David Lamb, who traveled Asia extensively as a Los Angeles Times correspondent, is a regular contributor to Smithsonian.
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