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Jun 27, 2010
Newsletter 54 | International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)
Vietnamese shrimpers face financial ruin after oil spill
By Ylan Q. Mui
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 27, 2010; A01
NEW ORLEANS -- They came here seeking refuge, but the past few years have brought unexpected hardship to the tightly knit Vietnamese fishing community.
They arrived after the fall of Saigon in 1975, lured by the city's tropical climate and strong Catholic heritage. Shrimping and fishing in the Gulf Coast's bountiful bayous was one of the few familiar touchstones for these mostly unskilled laborers with little English.
An estimated 20,000 Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers live along the Gulf Coast -- about half of the total fishing community -- and many more work at the seafood processing plants, wholesalers and po-boy shops found at every traffic light. Now the sanctuary they found and the lives they built -- and rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina -- are threatened by the hemorrhaging oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Many Vietnamese worry they will not have the energy to start over yet again.
"When I came to Louisiana, this was how people here made a living. I had to follow," 50-year-old shrimper Dung Nguyen says in Vietnamese. "I don't know how I'm going to live."
That's why he got up before dawn last week to stand in line for a food voucher with dozens of other out-of-work Vietnamese fishermen and shrimpers in the concrete alley in front of Mary Queen of Vietnam Catholic Church's community office. The wait can last five, six, even seven hours.
Oversleepers are turned away before they even make it inside.
"If you're a little bit late . . . ," Nguyen warns in Vietnamese, shaking his head.
He knows because he showed up after 5 a.m. for two days and missed out on a $100 grocery store gift certificate, 20 of which are handed out every morning. It is 8:30 a.m. and the office has yet to open, but he is hoping the third time is the charm. Besides, he says, he has nothing to do all day but sit around and think -- about having no work, no money and no options.
Normally Nguyen is on a boat this time of year, coming ashore for a home visit about once a month. His wife, Ut, makes shrimp nets, and his oldest daughter, Lisa, 20, fixes trawls and cleans boats. Now they are all unemployed.
"Get in a straight line, please," a woman calls out in English to the group, mostly men, milling about the alley as staffers open the office door.
The Vietnamese quickly flatten themselves along the wall as aid workers hand out numbered tickets for vouchers to the first in line. Dung secures one, as does his wife, even though the vouchers are technically limited to one per family. Because so many Vietnamese share the same last name and the community is so intertwined, the rule is tough to enforce.
"Three days. One hundred," Nguyen says in his broken English.
Another friend overhears him and laughs. It's not in your hand, yet, he cautions.
Strong bonds strainedNguyen came to this country late, in 1992, and drifted through blue-collar jobs in Arizona and California before he fell into shrimping in Louisiana.
The couple have lived in New Orleans the longest of any place in the United States. The cost of living is cheap, and work seemed plentiful. They rented their first house here and made friends quickly. Nguyen says he recognizes everyone waiting with him in the food voucher line.
More than two months after the oil spill all but shut down the local seafood industry, the bonds that tie the community together are fraying as they face financial ruin.
A fight broke out on a recent morning after aid workers ran out of food vouchers. Now a security officer guards the alley, sweltering in his brown uniform in the soupy heat. A meeting between BP and Vietnamese fishermen dissolved after translators used northern Vietnamese phrases that many here associate with communism.
New interpreters have been installed.
"People are really frustrated," says Tap Bui, a community organizer at the church. "They feel like their sense of life is gone . . . A lot of them feel like they'll never be able to get that back."
Although the Vietnamese community is centered in eastern New Orleans, it stretches from the marshes of Plaquemines Parish through Biloxi, Miss., and Gulf Shores, Ala., and throughout the seafood industry's supply chain. Vinh Tran, 60, began working as a deckhand on shrimp boats when he immigrated 35 years ago and eventually bought his own boats and opened a shrimp dock and wholesale market named St. Vincent's in the one-road bayou town of Leeville, La.
Now his daughter-in-law, Ngoc Nguyen, 27, runs the business and worries that even with aid they will not last through the year. In two months last summer, St. Vincent's took in 2 million pounds of shrimp. This year, they've done less than a third of that. The bait shop next door has already closed.
"This should've been our best season yet," she says.
Ngoc Nguyen, who is not related to Dung, was studying to be a nurse when Katrina hit in 2005 and changed the course of her life. Her now-husband's family needed help with St. Vincent's, so she stepped in. She says they owe $700,000 in loans for the shop and their three boats. Although she and her husband have received some money from BP, Nguyen says it's not enough to cover their expenses, let alone the interest on their loans. The story is the same throughout the Vietnamese community.
"We didn't invest in anything but the seafood business," Ngoc Nguyen says.
To Texas for workIt rains three times before Dung Nguyen's name is called at Mary Queen of Vietnam. He walks into a small room and sits down in front of a large wooden desk while the aid worker reviews his file. He utters no words other than his name and birthdate. The aid worker asks few questions.
After six hours of waiting, Nguyen receives a $100 gift certificate to a local Vietnamese grocery store, Mien Canh. A few minutes later, his wife comes out of a similar meeting with another gift certificate, a canister of rice and two cans of Starkist tuna.
They climb into their minivan and head home, where they get more good news: A shrimp boat captain is looking for deckhands to run out to Texas the next morning. Nguyen has never shrimped that far before, but he says he'll take it.
He makes plans with his neighbor, Trung Le, for the two-hour drive down to the dock to get on the boat. Le will spend the night at Nguyen's house, and by 6 p.m. he's there with his duffel bag, ready to commandeer the couch. They buy spicy boiled crawfish and crack open some Bud Lights. The local news is playing on the TV, and the forecast is gloomy. What if it rains? What if there is a big storm?
"Everything, I don't care," Le says in English. "Go."
But the celebration is cut short when Nguyen gets another call.
The shrimp boat is having mechanical trouble. It will take a day, maybe longer, to fix it. The trip is canceled.
Nguyen hangs up the phone and takes stock of his options. He heard that BP is holding a deckhand training class 20 minutes away in Slidell tomorrow morning, but he's not sure of the address or whether he needs special paperwork to attend. Maybe he can just show up? Or maybe the shrimp boat will get fixed before the morning.
Nguyen doesn't know that he can look up the address of the BP class online. He'd have trouble reading it if he did, not to mention that it will be taught by a white-haired man with a heavy Southern accent who will be talking about subjects like "oil weathering" and "the displacement of vapors heavier than oxygen." He doesn't know yet that the shrimping job will never materialize, and he will be back at square one.
But Nguyen says uncertainty is the nature of his trade. He cannot control when the work comes, how long it will last or even if it will turn up. That's up to the boat captain, to Mother Nature or even BP.
So Nguyen sits on a stool at his coffee table, sips a Bud Light and waits for something to happen.
Jun 20, 2010
New leadership, new policies? - Inside Indonesia
The Nahdlatul Ulama congress in Makassar arrests the slide away from liberal views but shows the organisation's vulnerability to outside political interference
Martin van Bruinessen
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'From the pesantren for Indonesia’Jeremy Menchik |
There was much relief at the outcome of the leadership elections on the final day of Nahdlatul Ulama's 32nd Congress last March. A destructive struggle for the position of Rois Aam, the 'spiritual' leader of the organisation, had threatened to divide the organisation. It had been warded off when the politically ambitious Hasyim Muzadi bowed out at the last moment, leaving this most prestigious position to the incumbent, the venerable Kiai Sahal Mahfudh. The two-stage election of a new chairperson of the executive (the position held by Hasyim Muzadi for the past two terms) had been full of surprises, including the early defeat of the man who had run the best media campaign, Salahuddin Wahid, and the unexpectedly strong showing of Golkar politician Slamet Effendy Yusuf. As a result, the victory of Said Aqil Siradj felt like a victory for the world of the pesantren over outside political interests.
'We had a lot of turbulence, but you see: in the end we made a smooth landing,' one of the senior kiai told me, and at that moment I was inclined to agree with him; NU appeared to have protected itself from too overt political interference. But there were to be a few more surprises before the plane reached the gate.
As Indonesia's largest civil association (and arguably the largest Muslim organisation in the world), Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) remains by its sheer size a force that politicians have to take into account. The major contenders in Indonesia's power struggles generally try to gain its support or at least goodwill. Originally established as an association of traditionalist Islamic scholars (ulama or kiai) who typically lead traditional Islamic boarding schools known as pesantren, NU was, upon Indonesia's independence, transformed into a political party. Later, in 1984, it became a cultural-religious association of moderate views credibly claiming to represent tens of millions of followers.
The dual character of the organisation - an association of ulama and a mass organisation with a large constituency - is reflected in the dual board, in which an ulama council (Syuriyah) led by the Rois Aam is supposed to oversee the chairperson and other managers of the executive (Tanfidziyah). During recent years, the relationship between these two bodies deteriorated as Hasyim Muzadi drew the organisation into political adventures, overriding the objections of Kiai Sahal Mahfudh. The latter's victory at the congress can be interpreted as a strong statement that ulama, not politicians, should hold supreme authority in the organisation and that practical political interests should be kept at a distance. Paradoxically, however, this victory was probably also largely due to outside political interference.
During the past decade, NU had also begun to depart from some of the liberal religious views it had upheld during the 1990s, as part of a general trend towards expression of more 'fundamentalist' religious views that can also be observed in other Muslim organisations. Both Kiai Sahal and Hasyim Muzadi had in fact endorsed this trend, and young NU intellectuals and activists were deeply concerned about the future of liberal and progressive thought in the organisation. In this respect, the congress reaffirmed NU's ability to accommodate widely different views; liberals and progressives found a modest representation in the new board, alongside traditionalists and conservatives.
NU under Hasyim Muzadi
There were good reasons to believe, as many did, that the congress could be decisive for the course of NU in the coming decades, notably its ability to accommodate the expectations and demands of the more highly educated segment of the younger generation. At the previous congress, in 2004, the organisation had moved significantly away from the support for 'liberal' and 'progressive' Islamic thought that had been associated with Abdurrahman Wahid (popularly known as Gus Dur) during his leadership of the organisation in 1984-1999. Hasyim Muzadi, who had succeeded Abdurrahman in 1999 (with more than a little endorsement by the latter), had soon fallen out with his predecessor and shown himself a very different type of leader: a more effective organiser and fund-raiser perhaps, but socially and religiously conservative.
Hasyim distrusted the young activists who had grown up under Gus Dur's protection and placed his own trusted people in control of the organisation at all levels. He adopted a populist, moderately anti-Western discourse and tended to ally himself with the more conservative factions of the military and political establishment. The 2004 congress, at which he secured his re-election, adopted a firm position of rejecting 'liberal' thought, declaring especially the Jakarta-based Liberal Islam Network (JIL) to be at odds with the NU worldview, and by implication also rejecting many of the other NU-affiliated NGOs that challenged established practices and ideas.
The shift in NU was part of a broader conservative turn in Indonesian Islam taking place around that time
This shift in NU was part of a broader conservative turn in Indonesian Islam taking place around that time. At Muhammadiyah's national congress later in the same year, all bodies and committees of the organisation were similarly purged of 'liberals' (who included highly respected university professors with many years of service to the organisation). The following year, the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI) issued its notorious fatwas against the Ahmadiyah sect and against broadly defined 'secularism, pluralism and liberalism'. The Ministry of Religious Affairs also veered to the right under the new minister, Maftuh Basyuni, a confidant of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono with conservative views.
It may not be accidental that Hasyim Muzadi, Maftuh Basyuni and Muhammadiyah's new chairperson, Din Syamsuddin, all were graduates of the well-known pesantren of Gontor, which had once been known as 'modern' but under the influence of the Muslim World League had increasingly become associated with the more puritan and anti-Western currents of Islamic thought and the rejection of modernist interpretations. (Other Gontor graduates playing conspicuous public roles include the militant preacher Abu Bakar Ba'asyir and several prominent Salafis.)
The 2004 purge of the 'liberals' was not as radical in NU as in Muhammadiyah, and there were quite a few NU ulama who disagreed with the sweeping fatwas of MUI. There remained a few independent and original thinkers on the board, notably Masdar F. Mas'udi, who penned a thoughtful refutation of the MUI's anti-liberal fatwas. But they found themselves increasingly marginalised and cut off from decision-making processes in which they should have been taking part. Most of the young NU activists who had felt stimulated, supported and protected by Abdurrahman Wahid complained of being sidelined under Hasyim Muzadi. Many of the kiai appeared to follow the general conservative trend and to endorse Hasyim's anti-cosmopolitan attitude. Some of the most prominent kiai, however, felt unease about Hasyim's unbridled political ambitions, which they felt could harm NU.
Under his leadership, Hasyim drew the NU organisation more deeply into 'practical politics' than it had been since the Situbondo congress of 1984, where it had decided to withdraw from direct political involvement and to prevent its office holders simultaneously holding positions in any political party. Abdurrahman Wahid had, it is true, initiated the return to politics as early as 1999, when he established the National Awakening Party (PKB), to serve as the vehicle for the interests of the NU constituency and his own ambitions, but he maintained a clear separation between the party and NU organisation.
Hasyim, however, used NU itself as the vehicle for his political ambitions, and he used his political connections to strengthen his position within NU. In the 2004 presidential elections he teamed up with Megawati as her vice presidential candidate, and in 2009 he committed himself strongly to Jusuf Kalla's candidacy. Both forays into electoral politics ended in failure (and, some felt, humiliation for NU) but enabled Hasyim to dispense lavish patronage and buy support. On the eve of the congress, Hasyim appeared to be the strongest of the various contenders, having secured promises of support from most of the larger delegations.
Candidates for the leadership
Hasyim had announced well in advance of the congress that he did not envisage a third term as chairperson but wished to move up from the Tanfidziyah (the executive board) to the Syuriyah, the council of leading ulama. The incumbent Rois Aam, Kiai Sahal Mahfudh, appeared to have no intentions to retire, however; and in fact most of the previous Rois Aam had kept that position until their deaths. At Hasyim's initiative, new by-laws were drafted that would limit the duration of this office, as well as that of chairperson of the executive, to a maximum of two five-year periods and thereby would oblige Kiai Sahal to resign.
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Members of the old board at the first session of the congressMartin van Bruinessen |
In response to this manoeuvre, a group of kiai and activists in Central Java appealed to Kiai Sahal to stay in office in order to prevent further politicisation of the organisation. The widely respected and popular kiai, Musthofa Bisri (a.k.a. Gus Mus) was seen by many, especially the younger members, as the ideal person to lead the organisation. None less than Abdurrahman Wahid had, only weeks before his death, attempted to persuade Gus Mus to stand for Rois Aam. However, as long as Kiai Sahal still wanted to continue in that position, Gus Mus did not wish to be a candidate.
Meanwhile, no less than seven men had announced their interest in succeeding Hasyim as chairperson of the Tanfidziyah. Three of them were already members of the executive. Hasyim himself endorsed Ahmad Bagja, a loyal and experienced but otherwise unremarkable bureaucrat of the organisation, who had been Hasyim's campaign manager in his bid for the vice-presidency in 2004. Said Aqil Siradj had run against Hasyim (and ended second) at two previous congresses; Masdar Mas'udi had challenged Hasyim (and come out third) in 2004. Both had been made members of the Tanfidziyah but were kept out of Hasyim's inner circle. A fourth candidate, Ali Maschan Musa, headed the provincial NU executive in East Java.
The other three candidates were relative outsiders. Slamet Effendy Yusuf was a leader of NU's youth movement Ansor in the 1980s but then made a career in Golkar. Salahuddin Wahid, a younger brother of Gus Dur who was educated as an engineer at the Bandung Institute of Technology, had never been active in the organisation, was a consistent and fierce critic of his brother, and was perceived to be close to the conservative wings of reformist Islam. In 2004 he had taken part in the presidential race as Wiranto's running mate, but since that venture into politics he had moved to the family pesantren at Tebuireng and appeared to be emulating his uncle Jusuf Hasjim, who had long been a prominent NU politician (and fierce critic of Gus Dur too).
The most remarkable candidate was Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, the best known member of JIL whose contributions to Muslim discourse had been judged beyond the pale in 2004. It was unlikely that he would stand a serious chance in 2010, but Ulil and his supporters appeared intent on showing that they represented an important voice within NU, with considerable support at the grassroots level, especially among the younger generation.
Money politics
Not only were there more candidates for the position of chairperson than at previous congresses, there was also more talk of vote-buying and attempts by outside interests to influence the outcome of the vote. There had been heavy-handed outside intervention before, notably at the 1994 congress when Suharto attempted to prevent the re-election of Abdurrahman Wahid, but then it had consisted of political pressure and lobbying rather than financial handouts. In 2010, more outside parties were interested in supporting or opposing particular candidates. Another reason why 'money politics' was more conspicuous was the precarious financing of the congress, which made delegates dependent on financial sponsors.
With tens of millions of nominal members - in other words people who feel more or less represented by the organisation - Nahdlatul Ulama is a politically significant entity. But these numbers do not translate into financial strength. Membership dues, paid by only a small minority, constitute an insignificant fraction of the budget, and apart from some real estate the organisation does not control any significant resources. Irregular contributions by various sponsors provided three quarters of the budget over the past five years, which amounted to a modest 40 billion rupiah, about US$ 4.2 million. The single largest sponsor, as Hasyim stated in his report to the congress, had been former vice-president Jusuf Kalla, whose bid for the presidency in 2009 Hasyim had strongly endorsed. It was no accident that the congress was convened in Kalla's home province of South Sulawesi.
In the Suharto era, it had been common for the president and vice-president to pay the bulk of the costs of the large congresses of organisations such as Nahdlatul Ulama. Large companies (among which cigarette manufacturers always were conspicuous) also made significant contributions. Provincial governors commonly contributed to the travel expenses of delegations from their provinces. This time around, there was no such overall funding, and the central board and provincial and local branches had to find their own resources. (In fact, the congress had initially been planned for an earlier date but had been postponed because not sufficient money had been raised.) This opened the door for money politics.
Candidates offered to pay travel expenses and other costs for those delegates who promised to vote for them. Vote buying continued during the congress, as delegates were persuaded to shift their allegiances. A local newspaper reported that votes were sold for 25 million rupiah. This is a ridiculously small sum compared to the amounts that change hands at Golkar congresses but represents a new phenomenon at NU congresses, where other forms of persuasion were previously the norm.
The vote
To all appearances, Hasyim was in firm control of the entire congress. All sessions were chaired by people he could trust; he had in advance dispensed generous patronage to people of influence (which included a well-publicised umrah pilgrimage to Mecca for some regional NU grandees); and a firm majority of the delegates appeared to have pledged their support for his candidacy as the Rois Aam. Many branches in fact seemed to have sent staunch Hasyim loyalists as their delegates - there was a noticeable difference in attitude between the official delegates, who were mostly local organisers, and the other attendees, who included ulama and young NU activists.
However, many of the ulama present thought that Hasyim might be a good manager but lacked the depth of religious learning required of the Rois Aam, and they were scandalised by Hasyim's undisguised attempt to unseat the senior and much more learned Kiai Sahal. Efforts by senior ulama to negotiate a face-saving solution failed because both rivals declined to attend a crucial meeting. The United Development Party (PPP) proposed a senior kiai from its own ranks, Maimun Zubair, as an alternative, and rumours that Hasyim had agreed to endorse this 'political' kiai caused some additional confusion. Behind-the-scene negotiations dragged on and caused the election to be postponed beyond the return flights of some of the delegates.
Tension was high when the voting for the Rois Aam finally began on the fifth and last day of the congress. As usual, there were two rounds: in the first round, the 500-odd delegates put forward names of candidates, and in the second round those who had been proposed by more than 99 delegates and had accepted the candidacy were to compete for the position.
To the surprise of Hasyim and his allies, who had until that moment felt secure of their majority, far more delegates named Kiai Sahal than Hasyim (272 against 179), guaranteeing the former an absolute majority. Visibly shocked and deeply disappointed, Hasyim bowed out and withdrew from the race. His faction pointed the finger at President Yudhoyono, whom they suspected of having orchestrated massive vote-buying in the final days. (Hasyim after all was politically allied with rivals of Yudhoyono, and the latter no doubt had an interest in an NU board that would support him.) Several personalities known to be close to the president could in fact be seen lobbying in the margins of the congress - but so were political operators representing the Golkar, PPP and PKB parties and yet other political interests. No less important was the moral pressure exerted by several senior kiai, who persuaded their peers - and through them many delegates - that it was not 'ethical' to force the incumbent Rois Aam out of office, and that the Syuriah should remain aloof from direct political involvement.
The election of the chairperson of the executive was, if anything, even more politicised. On the eve of the congress, President Yudhoyono had received Said Aqil Siradj and Salahuddin Wahid in his residence at Cikeas, suggesting that out of the seven contenders these were the ones he endorsed. They also appeared to consider themselves the only serious candidates and refused to take part in a televised debate with the other five on their vision for the organisation's future. Salahuddin's supporters had covered the city with hundreds of banners and posters, some representing him as the heir apparent in the dynasty that had dominated NU from its inception (with his grandfather, Hasyim Asy'ari, being a founder and the first Rois Aam, his father, Wahid Hasyim, leading the organisation in the early 1950s, and his elder brother Abdurrahman Wahid the most charismatic recent leader), others with photographs of senior kiai who gave him their blessing. Said's campaign was slightly less exuberant, with banners promising he would take NU 'back to the pesantren'. The other candidates spent less money on this sort of publicity (with the exception of Slamet Effendy Yusuf, who in some huge banners posed as a bureaucrat dressed for Friday prayer, reading an Arabic book), but an overall atmosphere was created that reminded many of a pilkada (an election of a regional government head) rather than of earlier NU congresses.
The televised debate, held on the second day in one of the congress halls in front of an enthusiastic audience, was also a novelty. Slamet and Ulil Abshar-Abdallah used it effectively to present themselves as serious contenders. Slamet could boast he had played a role in preparing the changes adopted at the important Situbondo congress of 1984, and more pragmatically, that he had much experience and many contacts in Golkar (and thereby access to considerable funds). Ulil succeeded in conveying not only that he had deep roots, by family and education, in NU but also that he had reflected more than others about the course NU needed to take to remain significant to its members in a changing world. He appeared to be less isolated in the organisation than the official ban of JIL had suggested.
Ulil's showing in the first round of the vote was low, with 22 delegates putting forward his name, but remarkable under the circumstances. He had had little money to spread around, and the support of only a small but devoted team of friends vetting the delegates. Ahmad Bagja, Hasyim's favoured candidate, ended only slightly ahead of him at 32 votes, and Salahuddin Wahid, who had looked like a potential winner, received only 78, not enough to pass to the second round. The big winners were Said and Slamet, with 178 and 158 votes respectively. In the second round, Said increased his margin and garnered a solid majority of 294 against Slamet's 201. This outcome did not correspond with anyone's calculations based on the prior commitments of delegates, suggesting that many changed their minds during the five days of the congress, or even in the last hours before the voting.
Forming the new board
The Rois Aam and the general chairperson are the only officers of the organisation who are directly elected by the congress. According to the by-laws, both choose their own deputies and together these four, assisted by a number of electors (formatur) 'chosen by the Congress from among those present,' are charged with selecting the other members of the Syuriyah and the Tanfidziyah. Usually care is taken that all factions and groups present at the congress are represented, even if only in some honorary capacity without real influence. Having left little to chance, Hasyim Muzadi had made sure that the final session was chaired by a trusted loyalist, who proposed three electors and had them quickly and without any discussion accepted by acclamation. This enabled Hasyim to continue playing a role, through at least one of these electors, in the final phase, which took place behind closed doors during the weeks that followed the congress.
The trend towards a more fundamentalist and anti-liberal version of traditionalist Islam appears to be reversed
Kiai Sahal chose as his deputy Kiai Musthofa Bisri, who enjoys broad respect within NU as well as outside the organisation. Hasyim Muzadi was also appointed to the Syuriyah, initially even as another deputy Rois Aam, but after some protest as an ordinary member. Said Aqil's choice of a deputy was more controversial: As'ad Said Ali is a well-known NU personality, who wrote an interesting book on the organisation, but he also happens to be a deputy chief of the State Intelligence Agency, BIN. Many NU people used to be proud of having one of their own in a high position in BIN, but the appointment of this high intelligence officer as the deputy chairperson of the organisation gave many others cause for worry over NU's independence. Nor was this the only political appointment: Jusuf Kalla was given an honorary position as a counsellor (mustasyar), as was Jakarta's governor, Fauzi Bowo. A certain Velix Wanggai, who had no prior connection with NU but was a personal assistant to President Yudhoyono, was also named in an advisory position and only later withdrawn after a wave of protest.
Unlike most other contenders, Ulil was not offered a formal position in any section of the board, but another prominent NGO activist, Imam Azis, the founder of LKiS and Syarikat, was appointed to the Tanfidziyah. (Another NGO activist, Hilmy Ali Yafie, was named but resigned out of protest against political interference in the process.) Two other intellectuals commonly identified as 'liberals', Masdar Mas'udi and Mohammad Machasin, retained their positions in the Syuriyah. The composition of the board represents some uneasy compromises and accommodations; various political interests are entrenched in it. Yet the trend towards a more fundamentalist and anti-liberal version of traditionalist Islam appears to be reversed.
Prospects for the progressives
Said Aqil Siradj is himself not close to the liberal and progressive activists of the younger generation, but he has a track record of expressing broad-minded and tolerant views and socialising easily with people of different social and religious backgrounds. Although he obtained a doctorate in Saudi Arabia, he has had good words to say about Shi'ism and has shown an interest in Sufism as well as contemporary philosophical writers. He does not appear to have a grand vision of where to take NU, but he is likely to allow much internal diversity and defend religious tolerance and pluralism.
Kiai Sahal Mahfudh once was heralded by younger activists as the man who could help make traditionalist religious thought relevant to modern social issues, a kiai who was also an intellectual. He was one of a handful of senior kiai who in the 1990s patronised a series of workshops that brought together kiai, NGO activists, and academic experts to speak on contemporary problems and attempt to develop a new religious discourse capable of engaging with such issues. (Masdar had been the driving force and chief creative intellect of these workshops, but it was Kiai Sahal who shielded him against the criticism of more conservative kiai.) Since his election as the Rois Aam in 1999, however, he has not done or said much that was remarkable. He was very critical of Hasyim Muzadi's political ambitions but had stopped short of an open confrontation. Since 2000 he has also been the general chairperson of the Majelis Ulama Indonesia and, though he was not directly involved in its notorious anti-liberal fatwas of 2005, he never made a critical comment on them either.
Given Kiai Sahal's age (72) and apparently poor health, the position of his deputy is potentially crucial. Musthofa Bisri (65) is a colourful person, a poet and amateur painter as well as a kiai, and representative of the most tolerant and broad-minded strand of traditionalist Islam. A lifelong friend of Abdurrahman Wahid, he shared many of the latter's views though not his eccentricities, and he is the man to whom young NU activists look for moral support and inspiration. Moreover, he is Ulil's father-in-law, and appears to generally support his son-in-law even while occasionally disagreeing with him.
With this new board, NU is poised to seek a new balance between the conservatism and politicisation of the past period and the search for a new religious discourse of the 1990s. Various political interests are represented in the board, which may endanger the organisation's independence, but things could have been much worse. The slide towards fundamentalist and anti-liberal religious views is unlikely to continue under the new board and it may even be reversed. Whereas the previous leadership mistrusted the young intellectuals and NGO activists who constituted the progressive vanguard of NU in the 1990s and marginalised them, the new leadership is likely to allow them a larger role. Moreover, the 2010 congress has shown that the younger intellectuals and activists have gained some support among the rank-and-file of the organisation and at various levels of leadership.
Martin van Bruinessen (m.vanbruinessen@uu.nl) is chair for the comparative study of contemporary Muslim societies at the University of Utrecht.
Jun 19, 2010
Soluto Offers a Program to Fix Those Irritating PC Delays
Louiz Green
Soluto, based in Tel Aviv, aims to minimize computer slowdowns with new software. From left are its officers Roee Adler, Ishay Green and Tomer Dvir.
By ANNE EISENBERG
FORGET about desperate housewives. To witness true frustration, watch desperate PC users trying to type, send e-mail or work on a spreadsheet, only to be delayed by those pesky hourglass icons for seconds or even minutes until their computers finally respond.
Now Soluto, a company based in Tel Aviv, aims to help these PC owners with an unusual program intended to minimize irritating slowdowns. The software runs in the background on PCs, collecting data on delays in program responses and sending the information to company servers for analysis, said Tomer Dvir, a co-founder and the chief executive.
As its first service, the company is offering a free program intended to solve a classic computer problem: a slow boot or start-up time. (The program is at the company’s Web site, www.soluto.com.)
Roee Adler, the chief product officer, said the program analyzed the boot-up process, recording how long it took and suggesting ways to trim the time. “Often you can cut your boot in half, or even more,” he said.
I tried the Soluto program, and by following its recommendations, cut my boot time to 1.44 minutes from 2.40 minutes. I removed some applications from the boot sequence, letting them run after the boot was over. I “paused” other applications that I don’t use on a daily basis — for instance, an application that automatically updates Google products. Instead, I’ll wait until the company lets me know when there is an update. (Soluto divides the possible changes in the boot into “no brainers,” “potentially removable apps” and “required, cannot be removed.”)
The company is also working on solutions to other slowdowns, like interruptions while working on Excel or typing in Word when another application suddenly commands Windows resources, causing a timeout. Finding the source of delays is often tricky, Mr. Adler said, because Windows runs on many different computer models; each has its own complement of downloads and devices, all jockeying for attention.
To find the source of each slowdown, Soluto uses a statistical approach, Mr. Dvir said. “Over millions of machines and millions of users, the problems start to repeat themselves,” he said. “There may be 10,000 people with the identical problem, and one of them will find a solution.”
Those millions of users are still in the future, as are their solutions to Windows problems. To acquire those users, Soluto plans to offer free versions of all its products, Mr. Adler said. As it runs on users’ machines, the program will analyze problems and publish solutions. The program won’t reach in and fix the problem directly; the user will have to do that. But if the initial program for boot optimization is any guide, Soluto will be offering suggestions for fixes, letting users know what others have chosen. A premium version that fixes problems automatically will be available for a charge, he said.
Soluto’s approach to PC frustration is novel and highly promising, said Robert Scoble, a video blogger and a former Microsoft employee. “This is innovation at a deep level; they are bringing in the crowd to augment solutions to Windows problems,” Mr. Scoble said.
If Soluto realizes its plans, he said, large companies will be likely to pay for its services. “If each employee saves a few minutes on each machine,” he said, “the hours saved will be worth a fee.”
Soluto also plans to publish lists of machines and software configurations that cause PC problems. That, too, he said, would be worth paying for.
The company has raised $7.8 million in two rounds of financing, Mr. Adler said. Large investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Giza Venture Capital.
Once the initial, boot-optimization program is in full swing — it is now in a beta or test phase — the company will move on to the next slowdown problem on the agenda — for example, delays in using spreadsheets — Mr. Dvir said.
Soluto, he said, does not require users to register, or provide an e-mail address or any demographic information, he said. “All the information is gathered anonymously,” he said.
SO far, the company is doing an intriguing job, said Ed Bott, author of many books about Windows. “The need they’ve identified among users really resonates with me,” he said. “They have a long-range plan to address many issues of frustration. It’s an original and promising approach.”
The program now has a limited user base, he said. “But the more people who use it, the more valuable it will become,” he said, both to them and to the company.
Many other services, including, for example, PC Pitstop, are already on the market to optimize boot-ups and other processes. The PC Pitstop scan is free, said Dave Methvin, the chief technology officer, “and will tell you what it thinks needs to be done.”
“If you decide you want us to do the work,” and fix problems automatically, he said, “you purchase the product,” either for optimization (Optimize, $29.99) or a complete tune-up (PC Matic, $49.99).
Typically, delays on PCs occur because applications like vendor updates are battling for resources. “When you have 10 of those running in the background,” said Mr. Adler at Soluto, “they add up.”
Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social
By STEVEN JOHNSON
“THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.
If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in the book.
Amazon calls this new feature “popular highlights.” It may sound innocuous enough, but it augurs even bigger changes to come.
Though the feature can be disabled by the user, “popular highlights” will no doubt alarm Nicholas Carr, whose new book, “The Shallows,” argues that the compulsive skimming, linking and multitasking of our screen reading is undermining the deep, immersive focus that has defined book culture for centuries.
With “popular highlights,” even when we manage to turn off Twitter and the television and sit down to read a good book, there will a chorus of readers turning the pages along with us, pointing out the good bits. Before long, we’ll probably be able to meet those fellow readers, share stories with them. Combating loneliness? David Foster Wallace saw only the half of it.
Mr. Carr’s argument is that these distractions come with a heavy cost, and his book’s publication coincides with articles in various publications — including The New York Times — that report on scientific studies showing how multitasking harms our concentration.
Thus far, the neuroscience of multitasking has tended to follow a predictable pattern. Scientists take a handful of test subjects out of their offices and make them watch colored squares dance on a screen in a lab somewhere. Then they determine that multitasking makes you slightly less able to focus. A study reported on early this month found that heavy multitaskers performed about 10 to 20 percent worse on most tests than light multitaskers.
These studies are undoubtedly onto something — no one honestly believes he is better at focusing when he switches back and forth between multiple activities — but they are meaningless as a cultural indicator without measuring what we gain from multitasking.
Thanks to e-mail, Twitter and the blogosphere, I regularly exchange information with hundreds of people in a single day: scheduling meetings, sharing political gossip, trading edits on a book chapter, planning a family vacation, reading tech punditry. How many of those exchanges could happen were I limited exclusively to the technologies of the phone, the post office and the face-to-face meeting? I suspect that the number would be a small fraction of my current rate.
I have no doubt that I am slightly less focused in these interactions, but, frankly, most of what we do during the day doesn’t require our full powers of concentration. Even rocket scientists don’t do rocket science all day long.
To his credit, Mr. Carr readily concedes this efficiency argument. His concern is what happens to high-level thinking when the culture migrates from the page to the screen. To the extent that his argument is a reminder to all of us to step away from the screen sometimes, and think in a more sedate environment, it’s a valuable contribution.
But Mr. Carr’s argument is more ambitious than that: the “linear, literary mind” that has been at “the center of art, science and society” threatens to become “yesterday’s mind,” with dire consequences for our culture. Here, too, I think the concerns are overstated, though for slightly different reasons.
Presumably, the first causalities of “shallow” thinking should have appeared on the front lines of the technology world, where the participants have spent the most time in the hyperconnected space of the screen. And yet the sophistication and nuance of media commentary has grown dramatically over the last 15 years. Mr. Carr’s original essay, published in The Atlantic — along with Clay Shirky’s more optimistic account, which led to the book “Cognitive Surplus” — were intensely discussed throughout the Web when they first appeared as articles, and both books appear to be generating the same level of analysis and engagement in long form.
The intellectual tools for assessing the media, once the province of academics and professional critics, are now far more accessible to the masses. The number of people who have written a thoughtful response to Mr. Carr’s essay — and, even better, published it online — surely dwarfs the number of people who wrote in public about “Understanding Media,” by Marshall McLuhan, in 1964.
Mr. Carr spends a great deal of his book’s opening section convincing us that new forms of media alter the way the brain works, which I suspect most of his readers have long ago accepted as an obvious truth. The question is not whether our brains are being changed. (Of course new experiences change your brain — that’s what experience is, on some basic level.) The question is whether the rewards of the change are worth the liabilities.
The problem with Mr. Carr’s model is its unquestioned reverence for the slow contemplation of deep reading. For society to advance as it has since Gutenberg, he argues, we need the quiet, solitary space of the book. Yet many great ideas that have advanced culture over the past centuries have emerged from a more connective space, in the collision of different worldviews and sensibilities, different metaphors and fields of expertise. (Gutenberg himself borrowed his printing press from the screw presses of Rhineland vintners, as Mr. Carr notes.)
It’s no accident that most of the great scientific and technological innovation over the last millennium has taken place in crowded, distracting urban centers. The printed page itself encouraged those manifold connections, by allowing ideas to be stored and shared and circulated more efficiently. One can make the case that the Enlightenment depended more on the exchange of ideas than it did on solitary, deep-focus reading.
Quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks.
Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television.
And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain all of us should be happy to make.
Value to Big Powers May Not Save Kyrgyzstan
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Roza Otunbayeva, the head of the provisional government in Kyrgyzstan, landing by helicopter in the southern city of Osh on Friday, after days of ethnic fighting there.
By ELLEN BARRY
MOSCOW — A year and a half ago, the world’s great powers were fighting like polecats over Kyrgyzstan, a landlocked stretch of mountains in the heart of Central Asia.
The United States was ferociously holding on to the Manas Air Base, a transit hub considered crucial to NATO efforts in Afghanistan. Russia was so jealous of its traditional dominance in the region that it promised the Kyrgyz president $2.15 billion in aid the day he announced he was closing Manas. With the bidding war that followed, Kyrgyzstan could be forgiven for seeing itself as a global player.
And yet for the past week, as spasms of violence threatened to break Kyrgyzstan apart, its citizens saw their hopes for an international intervention flicker and die. With each day it has become clearer that none of Kyrgyzstan’s powerful allies — most pointedly, its former overlords in Moscow — were prepared to get involved in a quagmire.
Russia did send in several hundred paratroopers, but only to defend its air base at Kant. For the most part, the powers have evacuated their citizens, apparently content to wait for the conflict to burn itself out.
The calculus was a pragmatic one, made “without the smallest thought to the moral side of the question,” said Aleksei V. Vlasov, an expert in the politics of post-Soviet countries at Moscow State University.
“We use the phrase ‘collective responsibility,’ but in fact this is a case of collective irresponsibility,” he added. “While they were fighting about whatever — about bases, about Afghanistan — they forgot that in the south of Kyrgyzstan there was extreme danger. The city was flammable. All they needed to do was throw a match on it.” He referred to the city of Osh, which suffered days of ethnic rioting.
Kyrgyzstan might have unraveled anyway, but competition between Moscow and Washington certainly sped the process.
To lock in its claim on the base after the threat of expulsion, the United States offered President Kurmanbek S. Bakiyev $110 million to back out of his agreement with Russia, which had already paid him $450 million. Congratulating itself on its victory, Washington raised the stakes by announcing the construction of several military training facilities in Kyrgyzstan, including one in the south, which further irritated Moscow.
This spring, the Kremlin won back its lost ground, employing a range of soft-power tactics to undermine Mr. Bakiyev’s government. Mr. Bakiyev was ousted by a coalition of opposition leaders in April, and conditions in Kyrgyzstan’s south — still loyal to the old government — hurtled toward disaster.
“Let’s be honest, Kyrgyzstan is turning into a collapsing state, or at least part of it is, and what was partially responsible is this geopolitical tug of war we had,” said Alexander A. Cooley, who included Manas in a recent book about the politics of military bases. “In our attempts to secure these levers of influence and support the governing regime, we destabilized these state institutions. We are part of that dynamic.”
Last week, as pillars of smoke rose off Osh and Jalal-Abad, citizens begged for third-party peacekeepers to replace local forces they suspected of having taken part in the violence.
Roza Otunbayeva, the head of Kyrgyzstan’s interim government, asked Moscow for peacekeepers, and when that request was denied, for troops to protect strategic sites like power plants and reservoirs. She asked Washington to contribute armored vehicles from the base at Manas, which she said would be used to transport the dead and wounded, she told the Russian newspaper Kommersant.
So far, Moscow and Washington have responded mostly with humanitarian aid pledges — late on Friday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Ms. Otunbayeva’s request was still under consideration.
The United States, overextended in Afghanistan and Iraq, has neither the appetite nor the motivation for a new commitment. Russia, the more obvious player, sees the risks of a deployment outweighing the benefits. Russian troops would enter hostile territory in south Kyrgyzstan, where Mr. Bakiyev’s supporters blame Moscow for his overthrow, and Uzbekistan could also revolt against a Russian presence.
Mr. Vlasov, of Moscow State University, said: “Who are we separating? Uzbeks from Kyrgyz? Krygyz from Kyrgyz? Kyrgyz from some criminal element? There is no clearly defined cause of this conflict. It would be comparable to the decision the Soviet Politburo made to invade Afghanistan — badly thought through, not confirmed by the necessary analytical work.”
If the explosion of violence was a test case for the Collective Security Treaty Organization, an eight-year-old post-Soviet security group dominated by Russia, it seems to have failed, its leaders unwilling to intervene in a domestic standoff. In any case, neither the Russian public nor the county’s foreign policy establishment is pressing the Kremlin to risk sending peacekeepers.
“If you send them, you have to shoot sooner or later,” said Sergei A. Karaganov, a prominent political scientist in Moscow. “Then you are not a peacekeeper, but something else.”
Though it seems that the worst of the violence has passed, great challenges remain. Beyond the immediate humanitarian crisis is an unstable state at the heart of a dangerous region. The Ferghana Valley, bordering Afghanistan, is a minefield of religious fundamentalism, drug trafficking and ethnic hatreds.
If Kyrgyz-style violence should radiate across borders in Central Asia, the result could be a rise in Islamic militancy that would directly threaten Russia and the United States.
The failure of international institutions last week should alarm both capitals. President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia began their relationship with the crisis over the Manas base, and as they grope toward tentative collaboration in the post-Soviet space, Kyrgyzstan has dominated their conversation.
Now, Kyrgyzstan needs help building a stable government that knits together the north and the south. Dmitri V. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, suggested that NATO should be working with the members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization to develop a mechanism for collective action. The next time a Central Asian country is wobbling at the edge of a precipice, he said, someone must be prepared to accept responsibility.
“You can abstain from a local conflict in Kyrgyzstan,” Mr. Trenin said. “You can close your eyes to it — it’s bad for your conscience — but you can live with it. If something happens in Uzbekistan, you will not be able to just let it burn out.”
In Eritrea, the Young Dream of Leaving
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN 
AMMAN, Jordan — Long before he learned to dunk on warped wooden backboards, Awet Eyob nursed a dream: to play basketball in America.
He is 6-foot-8, built like an oak tree, and seems to have mastered a behind-the-back dribble and crisp passes from the corner of his eye.
But one big problem stood between him and his dream: his homeland, Eritrea, an isolated, secretive nation in the Horn of Africa that is refusing to let its young people leave.
Eritrea, which fought its way to independence nearly 20 years ago, is ruled by hard-as-nails former guerrilla fighters who have held firm to their revolutionary Marxist policies and who demand that all young people work for the government, sometimes until their 40s. Anyone who tries to buck this national program, according to human rights groups, is subject to cruelly inventive tortures.
So this January, in great secrecy, Mr. Awet gathered four pairs of boxers, two pairs of socks, his high school transcript, his Air Jordans and some cash to pay a gang of human traffickers (or coyotes, as he calls them).
“I remember that first call,” he said. “The coyote said: ‘Hello, this is Sunshine.’ I answered, ‘This is Thunder.’ ”
Mr. Awet, 20, who is now living in Amman, Jordan, is the embodiment of Eritrea’s lost generation. This tiny country is spawning more refugees per capita than just about anywhere else in the world, according to United Nations statistics, and most of them are young men, and often the country’s most promising ones at that.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that hundreds of thousands of people have fled Eritrea in recent years — the total population is less than five million — and nearly every day, 100 new Eritreans risk their lives to cross into Sudan.
The New York Times
Hundreds of thousands have fled Eritrea in recent years.
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Many young Eritreans complain of being chained to government jobs in Asmara.
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Mr. Awet, 20, fled Eritrea and is now staying in an American family’s home in Amman, below. He hopes to get into an American college or prep school.
Some of these defections have been hard to miss. In December, more than 10 players from the Eritrean national soccer team absconded to Kenya during a tournament. In 2004, some Eritrean refugees being sent home from Libya were so desperate not to return that they hijacked the plane.
Many never make it out. One of Mr. Awet’s friends recently won a four-year, $200,000 scholarship to a prestigious American university. “He should have been sent out with a garland of flowers,” said the boy’s father, with tears in his eyes.
Instead, the boy was arrested trying to defect in time to register for classes. He was drafted into the military and deployed near Eritrea’s southern border, one of the hottest places on earth.
Mr. Awet was lucky. Dressed in an extra, extra large gallebeyah (a long flowing gown common in the Muslim world), he sneaked through Sudan and then on to Kenya and Dubai. He is now camped out in the basement of an American family’s home here, doing push-ups, working on his jump shot, playing on a Wii set with the family’s children and trying to get into an American college or prep school.
A big reason why he has gotten this far is Matthew Smith, a gregarious, athletic American diplomat who befriended Mr. Awet a couple years ago on a basketball court in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, where Mr. Smith was working. Mr. Smith was impressed by the young man’s game, but more than that, he was moved by Mr. Awet’s burning ambition to break out of his hermetically sealed world.
“He wanted more, and I could relate to that,” said Mr. Smith, whose father was a taxi driver in Brooklyn. “Who would’ve ever thought the kid of a cabbie and nanny could be a diplomat?”
Mr. Smith matched up Mr. Awet with an American basketball coach in Amman who is now training him.
“His skills were better than I expected,” said the coach, Robert Taylor, who was sitting next to Mr. Awet on a stack of exercise mats in a high school gym. “No offense, Awet, but Eritrea isn’t exactly known for its basketball.”
If Eritrea is especially well-known for anything these days, it is for being a troublemaker in a very volatile neighborhood. The nation has been accused of invading Djibouti in 2008 and fueling chaos in Somalia by arming insurgent groups, prompting sanctions from the United Nations Security Council.
But Eritrea has a proud history, fighting a grueling 30-year guerrilla war to break away from Ethiopia.
Mr. Awet’s name, in fact, means victory. He was born at home, by candlelight, in February 1990, on the eve of independence, right after a legendary battle.
He was always big. He was selected to play for the national basketball team when he was 15, and earned the nickname King A. By Eritrean standards, he had an enviable life, with a wealthy merchant father, good grades and a touch of fame.
But Dan Franch, his high school literature teacher, could tell he was not happy.
“I knew he wanted to leave, and I didn’t blame him,” Mr. Franch said. “This place is becoming inert. You encourage students to apply to college overseas but their chances of going are one in a gazillion.”
On the surface, life for young Eritreans does not look so bad. Asmara is littered with chrome-lined Art Deco cafes where young people sip cappuccinos and munch on pizza. But many young people complain (quietly) of being chained to dead-end government jobs. By law, mandatory national service is supposed to last 18 months. In reality, it is often indefinite, and few can get permits to exit the country until they are done serving. The government justifies this because of a highly militarized, unresolved border dispute with its neighbor, Ethiopia, nearly 20 times its size.
Mr. Awet says he probably will not see his parents for years because now that he has escaped, it will be dangerous to go back home.
At night, when he cannot sleep, he takes out a tiny prayer book his mother gave him — the cover is literally the size of a postage stamp — and thinks of her. Or he stretches out on a single bed with his feet nearly dangling off, listening to rap songs on his MP3 player and nurturing his dream.
“I used to dream about the money and the cars and the girls,” he sings. “But now I see, because I’m sitting on top of the world.”
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