Report of the U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission To Indonesia

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USINDO






FOR RELEASE: IMMEDIATE July 26, 2010




CONTACT:

Alysson Oakley, U.S.-Indonesia Society, 202-232-1400 or aoakley@usindo.org

Sharon Witherell, Institute of International Education, 212-984-5380 or switherell@iie.org

Derek Ferrar East-West Center, 808-944-7204 or ferrard@eastwestcenter.org

Paul F. Hassen, APLU, 202-478-6073 or phassen@aplu.org
Washington, DC, July 26, 2010 – Four U.S. non-governmental organizations today call for a “comprehensive re-invigoration” of the U.S.-Indonesia relationship in higher education in 2010 through the combined efforts of the two countries’ public, private, university and NGO sectors.

The call to action is contained in the document, Report of the U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission To Indonesia: Recommendations on U.S.-Indonesia Enhanced Cooperation In Higher Education Under The Planned “Comprehensive Partnership.” The report was issued today by the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (A۰P۰L۰U), the Institute of International Education (IIE), and the East-West Center.

In the report, the four organizations say 2010 offers the best chance there will ever be for a major United States-Indonesia bilateral initiative on education. The organizations call for a systematic and collaborative public and private effort to:

• enhance the quality, volume, and diversity of exchanges of students, faculty, and researchers, including doubling the number of Indonesians studying in the United States, and tripling the number of Americans studying in Indonesia;

• strengthen the capacity of Indonesian institutions to improve educational performance, educate Indonesians to an international standard, and attract American students and faculty in new fields of study;

• significantly expand U.S.-Indonesian institutional partnerships, including research partnerships in areas of global significance and shared concern;

• build the capacity of American institutions to teach Americans about Indonesia, participate in study and research on Indonesia, and receive Indonesian students;

• work with Indonesia to facilitate U.S. investment in strengthening Indonesia’s education sector.

To address these goals, the report calls for the formation of a “Joint U.S.-Indonesia Council on Higher Education Partnership.” The Council will engage the energies and resources of the private sector, private and public universities, foundations, and the NGO community in each country, in cooperation with the two governments.

“To make progress on such a far-reaching program over the next several years will require the combined energies and resources of governments, universities, foundations, corporations and committed individuals in each country,” said Ambassador David Merrill, president of the U.S.-Indonesia Society (USINDO). “Our organizations look forward to playing an active role in contributing to a deep and robust U.S.-Indonesian bilateral educational partnership.”

The report was based on the findings of the July 2009 U.S. Higher Education Leaders Mission to Indonesia to explore opportunities for expanding higher education programs under the planned U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership. The Higher Education Leader’s Mission was led by four co-chairs representing non-governmental parties involved in the U.S-Indonesia higher educational relationship: Gregory L. Geoffroy, president of Iowa State University and representative of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (A۰P۰L۰U); Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education; Ambassador David Merrill, president of the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO), and Charles E. Morrison, president of the East-West Center.

For a full copy of the press release and a list of the delegation, click here.

For a PDF of report, please click here.


The United States-Indonesia Society (www.usindo.org) is dedicated to expanding understanding of Indonesia and of the importance of the United States-Indonesia relationship. As the world's third largest democracy and the fourth most populous country, Indonesia is one of the United States' most important partners on trade and security issues. The mission of the United States-Indonesia Society (USINDO) is to expand mutual understanding in the areas of politics, economics, history, culture, and the importance of the bilateral relationship, through work with leaders in government and nongovernmental organizations, educators, the media, business, and the general public.

The Institute of International Education (www.iie.org), an independent, nonprofit organization founded in 1919, is the world’s most experienced global higher education and professional exchange organization. IIE has a network of 18 offices worldwide, more than 1,000 college and university members, and more than 5,000 volunteers. IIE designs and implements programs of study and training for students, educators, young professionals and trainees from all sectors with funding from government and private sources. These programs include the Fulbright and Humphrey Fellowships and the Gilman Scholarships administered for the U.S. Department of State.

East-West Center (www.EastWestCenter.org) is an education and research organization established by the U.S. Congress in 1960 to strengthen relations and understanding among the peoples and nations of Asia, the Pacific, and the United States. The Center contributes to a peaceful, prosperous, and just Asia Pacific community by serving as a vigorous hub for cooperative research, education, and dialogue on critical issues of common concern to the Asia Pacific region and the United States. Funding for the Center comes from the U.S. government, with additional support provided by private agencies, individuals, foundations, corporations, and the governments of the region.

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (www.aplu.org) is an association of public research universities, land-grant institutions, and state university systems, founding in 1887. A۰P۰L۰U member campuses enroll more than 3.5 million undergraduate and 1.1 million graduate students, employ more than 645,000 faculty members, and conduct nearly two-thirds of all academic research, totaling more than $34 billion annually. As the nation’s oldest higher education association, A۰P۰L۰U is dedicated to excellence in learning, discovery and engagement.

Verdict Due in the Trial of a Khmer Rouge Figure

NYTimes.com

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, via Associated Press

Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch. 

By SETH MYDANS

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — A United Nations-backed tribunal on Monday found a 67-year-old former prison warden of the Khmer Rouge guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes for overseeing the torture and killing of more than 14,000 prisoners. He was the first major figure to be tried in the murderous regime since it was toppled 30 years ago.

But in a sentence that was likely to be considered shockingly lenient here, the court sentenced him to serve 19 years in prison — 35 years minus 16 years for time already served. Prosecutors had sought 40 years. There is no death penalty in Cambodia.

The defendant, Kaing Guek Eav, commonly known as Duch, had admitted in an eight-month trial to many of the accusations against him. He oversaw a system that came to symbolize a regime responsible for the deaths of 1.7 million people from 1975 to 1979.

Dressed in a blue button-down shirt, sipping sometimes from a glass of water and carrying what appeared to be a Bible, he listened impassively as a judge read out the charges and verdict against him. The packed courtroom included some survivors of the prison he ran — three of whom had testified about the torture inflicted upon them.

The tribunal, which began work in 2006, now moves to “Case Two,” for which four high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials are in custody awaiting trial sometime next year. The Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, died in 1998.

Duch’s own plea was unclear. On the final day of the trial, in November, he unexpectedly asked to be set free, seeming to contradict a carefully constructed defense in which his lawyers sought to minimize his sentence through admissions of guilt mixed with assertions that he was just one link in a hierarchy of killing.

“I am accountable to the entire Cambodian population for the souls that perished,” he said at one point. “I am deeply remorseful and regret such a mind-boggling scale of death.”

But he added: “I ended up serving a criminal organization. I could not withdraw from it. I was like a cog in a machine. I regret and humbly apologize to the dead souls.”

Many of his victims, along with outside observers, questioned the sincerity of his remorse, particularly as it was coupled with a sometimes aggressive and arrogant demeanor in the courtroom and evasiveness regarding many specific allegations.

Despite those doubts, David Chandler, a historian of Cambodia, noted that Duch was the only one of the five defendants to have admitted guilt.

“He’s a guy who’s thought about it, faced up to some stuff,” said Mr. Chandler, the author of “Voices From S-21,” a book about the prison, known as S-21 or Tuol Sleng. “Duch is the only human on trial. The others are monsters.”

A former schoolteacher, Duch took obvious pride in the efficiency of his operation, where confessions — some of them running to hundreds of typed pages — were extracted by torture before the prisoners were sent in trucks to the killing fields.

He disappeared after the Khmer Rouge was driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion and was discovered in 1999 by an Irish journalist, Nic Dunlop, living quietly in a small Cambodian town, where he said he had converted to Christianity.

At one point in his testimony, in an extravagant display of contrition, Duch appeared to compare himself with Christ.

“The tears that run from my eyes are the tears of those innocent people,” he said. “It matters little if they condemn me, even to the heaviest sentence. As for Christ’s death, Cambodians can inflict that fate on me. I will accept it.”

It is more common among Cambodians — most of whom are Buddhists — to believe in spirits. Tuol Sleng is now a museum, and when part of its roof collapsed last week during a storm, some people said the ghosts of the dead were crying out for justice.

Running parallel with courtroom testimony, the tribunal has faced criticism as it tries to apply international standards of justice within a flawed Cambodian court system.

“The court has struggled to deal with allegations of kickbacks involving national staff, heavy-handed political interference from the Cambodian government, bureaucratic inefficiency and incompetence, and disturbing levels of conflict between international and national staff,” said John A. Hall, a professor at the Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif., who has been monitoring the trials.

“Indeed, perhaps one of the most surprising things so far is that the tribunal has not collapsed,” he said.

In an innovation, the trial made room for about 90 “civil parties,” who registered to apply for reparations and were represented in court by lawyers who acted as additional prosecutors.

“For 30 years, the victims of the Khmer Rouge waited while a civil war raged, international actors bickered and the leaders of the Khmer Rouge walked free,” said Alex Hinton, director of the Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution and Human Rights at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Now, for the first time, one of them has been held accountable. The importance of this moment can’t be underestimated.”

But over the years, Cambodia has moved on, with new generations, new concerns and new horizons. Many young people know little about the Khmer Rouge era, and many older people have chosen to forget.

“I go around the country and not a lot of people ask about the trial,” said Ou Virak, president of the independent Cambodian Center for Human Rights, which holds forums on issues of concern to the public. “Not even my mom — and my dad was killed by the Khmer Rouge.”

Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert

NYTimes.com

The Conflict in Afghanistan

• 1979 The Soviet Union invades Afghanistan. Mujahedeen — Islamic fighters — from across the globe, including Osama bin Laden, come to fight Soviet forces.
• 1989 Last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan.
• 1996 The Taliban take control of Afghanistan, imposing fundamentalist Islamic law. Osama bin Laden takes refuge in the country.
• Sept. 2001 After the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush gives the Taliban an ultimatum to hand over bin Laden; the Taliban refuse, and in October the U.S. leads a campaign that drives the Taliban out of major Afghan cities by the end of the year.
• 2002 Hamid Karzai becomes interim president of Afghanistan. The Taliban continue to wage guerrilla warfare near the border with Pakistan.
• 2004 New constitution is ratified, making Afghanistan an Islamic state with a strong president. Later, Mr. Karzai wins the country’s first presidential election.
• Feb. 2009 President Obama orders 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.
• Aug. 2009 President Karzai wins re-election in a vote marred by fraud.
• Dec. 2009 President Obama issues orders to send 30,000 troops in 2010, bringing the total American force to about 100,000.

By MARK MAZZETTI, JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and ANDREW W. LEHREN

Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

The documents, made available by an organization called WikiLeaks, suggest that Pakistan, an ostensible ally of the United States, allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan, and even hatch plots to assassinate Afghan leaders.

Taken together, the reports indicate that American soldiers on the ground are inundated with accounts of a network of Pakistani assets and collaborators that runs from the Pakistani tribal belt along the Afghan border, through southern Afghanistan, and all the way to the capital, Kabul.

Much of the information — raw intelligence and threat assessments gathered from the field in Afghanistan— cannot be verified and likely comes from sources aligned with Afghan intelligence, which considers Pakistan an enemy, and paid informants. Some describe plots for attacks that do not appear to have taken place.

But many of the reports rely on sources that the military rated as reliable.

While current and former American officials interviewed could not corroborate individual reports, they said that the portrait of the spy agency’s collaboration with the Afghan insurgency was broadly consistent with other classified intelligence.

Some of the reports describe Pakistani intelligence working alongside Al Qaeda to plan attacks. Experts cautioned that although Pakistan’s militant groups and Al Qaeda work together, directly linking the Pakistani spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, with Al Qaeda is difficult.

The records also contain firsthand accounts of American anger at Pakistan’s unwillingness to confront insurgents who launched attacks near Pakistani border posts, moved openly by the truckload across the frontier, and retreated to Pakistani territory for safety.

The behind-the-scenes frustrations of soldiers on the ground and glimpses of what appear to be Pakistani skullduggery contrast sharply with the frequently rosy public pronouncements of Pakistan as an ally by American officials, looking to sustain a drone campaign over parts of Pakistani territory to strike at Qaeda havens. Administration officials also want to keep nuclear-armed Pakistan on their side to safeguard NATO supplies flowing on routes that cross Pakistan to Afghanistan.

This month, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in one of the frequent visits by American officials to Islamabad, announced $500 million in assistance and called the United States and Pakistan “partners joined in common cause.”

The reports suggest, however, that the Pakistani military has acted as both ally and enemy, as its spy agency runs what American officials have long suspected is a double game — appeasing certain American demands for cooperation while angling to exert influence in Afghanistan through many of the same insurgent networks that the Americans are fighting to eliminate.

Behind the scenes, both Bush and Obama administration officials as well as top American commanders have confronted top Pakistani military officers with accusations of ISI complicity in attacks in Afghanistan, and even presented top Pakistani officials with lists of ISI and military operatives believed to be working with militants.

Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said that Pakistan had been an important ally in the battle against militant groups, and that Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officials had worked alongside the United States to capture or kill Qaeda and Taliban leaders.

Still, he said that the “status quo is not acceptable,” and that the havens for militants in Pakistan “pose an intolerable threat” that Pakistan must do more to address.

“The Pakistani government — and Pakistan’s military and intelligence services — must continue their strategic shift against violent extremist groups within their borders,” he said. American military support to Pakistan would continue, he said.

Several Congressional officials said that despite repeated requests over the years for information about Pakistani support for militant groups, they usually receive vague and inconclusive briefings from the Pentagon and C.I.A.

Nonetheless, senior lawmakers say they have no doubt that Pakistan is aiding insurgent groups. “The burden of proof is on the government of Pakistan and the ISI to show they don’t have ongoing contacts,” said Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat on the Armed Services Committee who visited Pakistan this month and said he and Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee chairman, confronted Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, yet again over the allegations.

Such accusations are usually met with angry denials, particularly by the Pakistani military, which insists that the ISI severed its remaining ties to the groups years ago. An ISI spokesman in Islamabad said Sunday that the agency would have no comment until it saw the documents. Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, said, “The documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground realities.”

The man the United States has depended on for cooperation in fighting the militants and who holds most power in Pakistan, the head of the army, Gen. Parvez Ashfaq Kayani, ran the ISI from 2004 to 2007, a period from which many of the reports are drawn. American officials have frequently praised General Kayani for what they say are his efforts to purge the military of officers with ties to militants.

American officials have described Pakistan’s spy service as a rigidly hierarchical organization that has little tolerance for “rogue” activity. But Pakistani military officials give the spy service’s “S Wing” — which runs external operations against the Afghan government and India — broad autonomy, a buffer that allows top military officials deniability.

American officials have rarely uncovered definitive evidence of direct ISI involvement in a major attack. But in July 2008, the C.I.A.’s deputy director, Stephen R. Kappes, confronted Pakistani officials with evidence that the ISI helped plan the deadly suicide bombing of India’s Embassy in Kabul.

From the current trove, one report shows that Polish intelligence warned of a complex attack against the Indian Embassy a week before that bombing, though the attackers and their methods differed. The ISI was not named in the report warning of the attack.

Another, dated August 2008, identifies a colonel in the ISI plotting with a Taliban official to assassinate President Hamid Karzai. The report says there was no information about how or when this would be carried out. The account could not be verified.

General Linked to Militants

Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul ran the ISI from 1987 to 1989, a time when Pakistani spies and the C.I.A. joined forces to run guns and money to Afghan militias who were battling Soviet troops in Afghanistan. After the fighting stopped, he maintained his contacts with the former mujahedeen, who would eventually transform themselves into the Taliban.

And more than two decades later, it appears that General Gul is still at work. The documents indicate that he has worked tirelessly to reactivate his old networks, employing familiar allies like Jaluluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whose networks of thousands of fighters are responsible for waves of violence in Afghanistan.

General Gul is mentioned so many times in the reports, if they are to be believed, that it seems unlikely that Pakistan’s current military and intelligence officials could not know of at least some of his wide-ranging activities.

For example, one intelligence report describes him meeting with a group of militants in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, in January 2009. There, he met with three senior Afghan insurgent commanders and three “older” Arab men, presumably representatives of Al Qaeda, who the report suggests were important “because they had a large security contingent with them.”

The gathering was designed to hatch a plan to avenge the death of “Zamarai,” the nom de guerre of Osama al-Kini, who had been killed days earlier by a C.I.A. drone attack. Mr. Kini had directed Qaeda operations in Pakistan and had spearheaded some of the group’s most devastating attacks.

The plot hatched in Wana that day, according to the report, involved driving a dark blue Mazda truck rigged with explosives from South Waziristan to Afghanistan’s Paktika Province, a route well known to be used by the insurgents to move weapons, suicide bombers and fighters from Pakistan.

In a show of strength, the Taliban leaders approved a plan to send 50 Arab and 50 Waziri fighters to Ghazni Province in Afghanistan, the report said.

General Gul urged the Taliban commanders to focus their operations inside Afghanistan in exchange for Pakistan turning “a blind eye” to their presence in Pakistan’s tribal areas. It was unclear whether the attack was ever executed.

The United States has pushed the United Nations to put General Gul on a list of international terrorists, and top American officials said they believed he was an important link between active-duty Pakistani officers and militant groups.

General Gul, who says he is retired and lives on his pension, dismissed the allegations as “absolute nonsense,” speaking by telephone from his home in Rawalpindi, where the Pakistani Army keeps its headquarters. “I have had no hand in it.” He added, “American intelligence is pulling cotton wool over your eyes.”

Senior Pakistani officials consistently deny that General Gul still works at the ISI’s behest, though several years ago, after mounting American complaints, Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, was forced publicly to acknowledge the possibility that former ISI officials were assisting the Afghan insurgency. Despite his denials, General Gul keeps close ties to his former employers. When a reporter visited General Gul this spring for an interview at his home, the former spy master canceled the appointment. According to his son, he had to attend meetings at army headquarters.

Suicide Bomber Network

The reports also chronicle efforts by ISI officers to run the networks of suicide bombers that emerged as a sudden, terrible force in Afghanistan in 2006.

The detailed reports indicate that American officials had a relatively clear understanding of how the suicide networks presumably functioned, even if some of the threats did not materialize. It is impossible to know why the attacks never came off — either they were thwarted, the attackers shifted targets, or the reports were deliberately planted as Taliban disinformation.

One report, from Dec. 18, 2006, describes a cyclical process to develop the suicide bombers. First, the suicide attacker is recruited and trained in Pakistan. Then, reconnaissance and operational planning gets under way, including scouting to find a place for “hosting” the suicide bomber near the target before carrying out the attack. The network, it says, receives help from the Afghan police and the Ministry of Interior.

In many cases, the reports are complete with names and ages of bombers, as well as license plate numbers, but the Americans gathering the intelligence struggle to accurately portray many other details, introducing sometimes comical renderings of places and Taliban commanders.

In one case, a report rated by the American military as credible states that a gray Toyota Corolla had been loaded with explosives between the Afghan border and Landik Hotel, in Pakistan, apparently a mangled reference to Landi Kotal, in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The target of the plot, however, is a real hotel in downtown Kabul, the Ariana.

“It is likely that ISI may be involved as supporter of this attack,” reads a comment in the report.

Several of the reports describe current and former ISI operatives, including General Gul, visiting madrasas near the city of Peshawar, a gateway to the tribal areas, to recruit new fodder for suicide bombings.

One report, labeled a “real threat warning” because of its detail and the reliability of its source, described how commanders of Mr. Hekmatyar’s insurgent group, Hezb-i-Islami, ordered the delivery of a suicide bomber from the Hashimiye madrasa, run by Afghans.

The boy was to be used in an attack on American or NATO vehicles in Kabul during the Muslim Festival of Sacrifices that opened Dec. 31, 2006. According to the report, the boy was taken to the Afghan city of Jalalabad to buy a car for the bombing, and was later brought to Kabul. It was unclear whether the attack took place.

The documents indicate that these types of activities continued throughout last year. From July to October 2009, nine threat reports detailed movements by suicide bombers from Pakistan into populated areas of Afghanistan, including Kandahar, Kunduz and Kabul.

Some of the bombers were sent to disrupt Afghanistan’s presidential elections, held last August. In other instances, American intelligence learned that the Haqqani network sent bombers at the ISI’s behest to strike Indian officials, development workers and engineers in Afghanistan. Other plots were aimed at the Afghan government.

Sometimes the intelligence documents twin seemingly credible detail with plots that seem fantastical or utterly implausible assertions. For instance, one report describes an ISI plan to use a remote-controlled bomb disguised as a golden Koran to assassinate Afghan government officials. Another report documents an alleged plot by the ISI and Taliban to ship poisoned alcoholic beverages to Afghanistan to kill American troops.

But the reports also charge that the ISI directly helped organize Taliban offensives at key junctures of the war. On June 19, 2006, ISI operatives allegedly met with the Taliban leaders in Quetta, the city in southern Pakistan where American and other Western officials have long believed top Taliban leaders have been given refuge by the Pakistani authorities. At the meeting, according to the report, they pressed the Taliban to mount attacks on Maruf, a district of Kandahar that lies along the Pakistani border.

The planned offensive would be carried out primarily by Arabs and Pakistanis, the report said, and a Taliban commander, “Akhtar Mansoor,” warned that the men should be prepared for heavy losses. “The foreigners agreed to this operation and have assembled 20 4x4 trucks to carry the fighters into areas in question,” it said.

While the specifics about the foreign fighters and the ISI are difficult to verify, the Taliban did indeed mount an offensive to seize control in Maruf in 2006.

Afghan government officials and Taliban fighters have widely acknowledged that the offensive was led by the Taliban commander Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, who was then the Taliban shadow governor of Kandahar.

Mullah Mansour tried to claw out a base for himself inside Afghanistan, but just as the report quotes him predicting, the Taliban suffered heavy losses and eventually pulled back.

Another report goes on to describe detailed plans for a large-scale assault, timed for September 2007, aimed at the American forward operating base in Managi, in Kunar Province.

“It will be a five-pronged attack consisting of 83-millimeter artillery, rockets, foot soldiers, and multiple suicide bombers,” it says.

It is not clear that the attack ever came off, but its planning foreshadowed another, seminal attack that came months later, in July 2008. At that time, about 200 Taliban insurgents nearly overran an American base in Wanat, in Nuristan, killing nine American soldiers. For the Americans, it was one of the highest single-day tolls of the war.

Tensions With Pakistan

The flood of reports of Pakistani complicity in the insurgency has at times led to barely disguised tensions between American and Pakistani officers on the ground.

Meetings at border outposts set up to develop common strategies to seal the frontier and disrupt Taliban movements reveal deep distrust among the Americans of their Pakistani counterparts.

On Feb. 7, 2007, American officers met with Pakistani troops on a dry riverbed to discuss the borderlands surrounding Afghanistan’s Khost Province.

According to notes from the meeting, the Pakistanis portrayed their soldiers as conducting around-the-clock patrols. Asked if he expected a violent spring, a man identified in the report as Lt. Col. Bilal, the Pakistani officer in charge, said no. His troops were in firm control.

The Americans were incredulous. Their record noted that there had been a 300 percent increase in militant activity in Khost before the meeting.

“This comment alone shows how disconnected this particular group of leadership is from what is going on in reality,” the notes said.

The Pakistanis told the Americans to contact them if they spotted insurgent activity along the border. “I doubt this would do any good,” the American author of the report wrote, “because PAKMIL/ISI is likely involved with the border crossings.” “PAKMIL” refers to the Pakistani military.

A year earlier, the Americans became so frustrated at the increase in roadside bombs in Afghanistan that they hand-delivered folders with names, locations, aerial photographs and map coordinates to help the Pakistani military hunt down the militants the Americans believed were responsible.

Nothing happened, wrote Col. Barry Shapiro, an American military liaison officer with experience in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, after an Oct. 13, 2006, meeting. “Despite the number of reports and information detailing the concerns,” Colonel Shapiro wrote, “we continue to see no change in the cross-border activity and continue to see little to no initiative along the PAK border” by Pakistan troops. The Pakistani Army “will only react when asked to do so by U.S. forces,” he concluded.


Carlotta Gall contributed reporting.

Indonesians’ Focus on Language Is Often English

NYTimes.com

Kemal Jufri for The New York Times

Children learning to prepare coffee at Kidzania, an amusement park in Jakarta that lets children try out jobs; both Indonesian and English are used there

By NORIMITSU ONISHI


JAKARTA, Indonesia — Paulina Sugiarto’s three children played together at a mall here the other day, chattering not in Indonesia’s national language, but English. Their fluency often draws admiring questions from other Indonesian parents Ms. Sugiarto encounters in this city’s upscale malls.

But the children’s ability in English obscured the fact that, though born and raised in Indonesia, they were struggling with the Indonesian language, known as Bahasa Indonesia. Their parents, who grew up speaking the Indonesian language but went to college in the United States and Australia, talk to their children in English. And the children attend a private school where English is the main language of instruction.

“They know they’re Indonesian,” Ms. Sugiarto, 34, said. “They love Indonesia. They just can’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. It’s tragic.”

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.

The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.

The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation’s official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though.

“These schools operate here, but don’t offer Bahasa to our citizens,” said Suyanto, who oversees primary and secondary education at the Education Ministry.

“If we don’t regulate them, in the long run this could be dangerous for the continuity of our language,” said Mr. Suyanto, who like many Indonesians uses one name. “If this big country doesn’t have a strong language to unite it, it could be dangerous.”

The seemingly reflexive preference for English has begun to attract criticism in the popular culture. Last year, a woman, whose father is Indonesian and her mother American, was crowned Miss Indonesia despite her poor command of Indonesian. The judges were later denounced in the news media and in the blogosphere for being impressed by her English fluency and for disregarding the fact that, despite growing up here, she needed interpreters to translate the judges’ questions.

In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.

Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. “If you spoke Javanese, you were below,” he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. “If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top.”

Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English.

“During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung,” said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. “It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.”

With Indonesia’s democratization in the past decade, experts say, English became the new Dutch. Regulations were loosened, allowing Indonesian children to attend private schools that did not follow the national curriculum, but offered English. The more expensive ones, with tuition costing several thousand dollars a year, usually employ native speakers of English, said Elena Racho, vice chairwoman of the Association of National Plus Schools, an umbrella organization for private schools.

But with the popularity of private schools booming, hundreds have opened in recent years, Ms. Racho said. The less expensive ones, unable to hire foreigners, are often staffed with Indonesians teaching all subjects in English, if often imperfect English, she added.

Many children attending those schools end up speaking Indonesian poorly, experts said. Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages and also owns the local franchise of Kidzania, an amusement park where children can try out different professions — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status.

“Sometimes they look down on people who don’t speak English,” she said.

She added: “In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. That’s sad.”

Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed “a negative pride” that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.

“Sometimes the parents even ask the baby sitters not to speak in Indonesian but in English,” Ms. Ariani said.

It is a sight often seen in this city’s malls on weekends: Indonesian parents addressing their children in sometimes halting English, followed by nannies using what English words they know.

But Della Raymena Jovanka, 30, a mother of two preschoolers, has developed misgivings. Her son Fathiy, 4, attended an English play group and was enrolled in a kindergarten focusing on English; Ms. Jovanka allowed him to watch only English TV programs.

The result was that her son responded to his parents only in English and had difficulties with Indonesian. Ms. Jovanka was considering sending her son to a regular public school next year. But friends and relatives were pressing her to choose a private school so that her son could become fluent in English.

Asked whether she would rather have her son become fluent in English or Indonesian, Ms. Jovanka said, “To be honest, English. But this can become a big problem in his socialization. He’s Indonesian. He lives in Indonesia. If he can’t communicate with people, it’ll be a big problem.”

Transcending personality politics

Inside Indonesia

The election of Anas Urbaningrum suggests Partai Demokrat can survive without its founder, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono

Luke Barrett

The leader that will be? Yudhoyono’s son, Ibas Luke Barrett

The constant chanting of 'Demokrat, Demokrat, SBY, SBY' by party members at the second Democratic Party (PD) congress, which took place in Bandung from 21-23 May, neatly described the dilemma facing the party. Most observers have painted PD as the personal vehicle of President Yudhoyono since his victory in the 2004 presidential elections. This interpretation explains PD's rise as the result of Yudhoyono's charismatic personality and his ability to reach voters through the mass media. Some have even gone so far as to claim that Yudhoyono is PD, and that with nothing to offer voters beyond its famous patron, the party is likely to vanish after Yudhoyono leaves the presidency in 2014. In this context, party members delivered a surprising result at the Bandung congress, with Yudhoyono's preferred candidate as party chairperson, the Minister for Youth and Sports, Andi Mallarangeng, and then second choice, House of Representatives Speaker Marzuki Alie, both losing to the leader of the party's group in national parliament, Anas Urbaningrum. Such an outcome suggests that, internally if not yet electorally, the party is not merely the creature of its famous patron, but lives up to its 'democratic' title.

To any observer in the week prior to the Bandung congress, Anas's victory would have come as something of a surprise. If, as many claim, Indonesian politics is an arena for those with media, money and a strong political machine, then Andi Mallarangeng seemed to be the certain victor in the contest to become chairperson. Andi has been a prominent member of the Indonesian political elite since the fall of Suharto in 1998. He was a member of the 'Team of Seven' that was charged by the country's third President, B.J. Habibie, with drafting a package of new laws about political parties, elections and regional government in preparation for the first post-Suharto election in 1999. During those elections he served as a member of the general election commission (KPU). Andi was also a founding member of the United Democratic Nationhood Party (PPDK) in 2002, but left less than two years later to join PD. While there was widespread media coverage of all three candidates in the lead up to the congress, Andi was the most prominent, in terms of the number of both stories about his candidacy and advertisements supporting his campaign. This media blitz culminated in Andi having thousands of his campaign posters hung in the areas near the congress venue, as well as along Bandung's major streets and the highway leading to the city from Jakarta. Andi's media-heavy strategy, which was formulated with the help of Fox Indonesia, a media consulting company headed by his brothers Rizal and Choel, seemed designed as a test for the campaign he might run should he be chosen as PD's candidate for the presidential election in 2014.

Trying to build a sense of inevitability to his election, a major part of Andi's strategy was to emphasise his close links to Yudhoyono and to try to portray himself as the president's choice for the position. While Yudhoyono did not make a public statement in support of any of the candidates, the media reported the participation of a number of government ministers from PD in Andi's campaign team and the presence of the president's youngest son, Edhie Baskoro Yudhoyono (Ibas), at Andi's campaign events, as clear signs of the president's wishes. And, when Andi launched a book about his vision for the party at Bandung's Sheraton Hotel the night before the congress opened, party officials told me about rumours that Yudhoyono himself was pressuring Anas to withdraw from the contest.
The heir apparent falters

Andi's strategy started to unravel almost as soon as the congress began. In a speech to the congress on the Saturday morning, which was much more alive and engaging than his dour performance in his opening address the previous night, Yudhoyono again refrained from endorsing any candidate for party chairperson. Instead, he explained that he respected the party's internal democracy, because the interests of the party were 'above any individual' such as himself, who was 'only the chairperson'. For that reason, Yudhoyono said that he would not sit in on the congress proceedings to ensure that he did not exercise too much influence, but that if conflict emerged, he was available to provide a solution.





The blimp didn’t help: Andi’s campaign was lavish, but ineffective
Luke Barrett


Yudhoyono apparently did not anticipate the ensuing debates to be so fiercely contested. From the very start of the congress, the discussion was bogged down in acrimony and debate on a procedural point: whether the election of the party's chairperson should take place before or after debate about the party's statutes. The debate turned into a test of strength between the candidates, with supporters of Anas and Marzuki carrying the day in favour of immediately electing the party chairperson. This issue was resolved in their favour by a vote on Saturday night, after almost ten hours of debate. While delegates continued their discussions after this vote, many other agenda items were rushed through as delegates turned their thoughts towards the election of a new chairperson.

As the final day of the congress began, the first agenda item was the re-election of Yudhoyono as the chairperson of the party's central guidance board, an event that occurred without debate or contestation. In his acceptance speech, which doubled as an opening address for the final day's events, Yudhoyono urged the contenders for chairperson to accept defeat and continue to work together for the interests of the party. He then left the hall, signaling to party delegates that they were free to vote as they chose. After the counting began in mid-afternoon, it was soon evident that the question was no longer whether or not Andi would win, but which of Marzuki and Anas would triumph, as the two built an overwhelming lead over the predicted victor. The first round of voting ended with Andi having received 82 votes, or 16 per cent of the total, while Marzuki obtained 209 votes (40 per cent) and Anas finished in the lead with 236 (45 per cent). After the congress chair allowed for one hour of further discussion prior to the final vote, Andi directed his supporters to back Marzuki, who was also said to be the favoured candidate of Yudhoyono in the run-off.

However, if Andi really did give such instructions, they were not obeyed by the delegates, with Anas winning the second round by a margin of 280 votes, 53 per cent of the total, to 248 for Marzuki (47 per cent). This victory provides evidence that PD is not simply beholden to the personal will of president Yudhoyono. At least, when Yudhoyono signals that party members are free to make up their own minds, they will take him at his word and not simply bend to what they see as his will.
A victory for democracy

The election for party chairperson illustrates that there is a burgeoning internal democracy within PD, though it is one that is still mixed with a dose of old-style patronage politics. One illustration of these contradictory trends was how all of the candidates made substantial efforts to win support from grassroots party members by paying for their travel to the convention, and for their hotel rooms, food and spending money while there. Yet it was obvious that Andi spent much more than his opponents on such activities, which became almost as integral as the use of media to his style of campaigning. Outside the convention venue, Andi even had a tent set up for his supporters where food and beverages were served during the day, along with musical entertainment and full massage treatments. However, Andi's strategy did not appeal directly to the PD members who were eligible to vote for the chairperson, even though it was generally effective with ordinary party members. As I talked with Andi supporters in the tent a few hours before the congress opened, I did not meet a single voting delegate, and only a few who had passes allowing them inside the hall where the congress would take place. The methods of populist campaigning with direct appeals to the 'masses' don't necessarily translate well to an internal party election.





Party time: few of the people hanging out in Andi’s tent had voting rights
Luke Barrett


Andi's defeat shows that PD's internal democracy is still largely dominated by the professional politicians who constitute the backbone of the party structure in the regions. The only party members actually allowed into the congress venue were those who were invited from PD's central, provincial and branch leadership boards, the central guidance board and the branches established by the party to represent members overseas. Furthermore, each of these levels of the party organisation had a different number of votes in the election for chairperson: the central guidance board was allocated five votes, the central leadership board three, provincial leadership boards two each, and district and overseas branches a single vote each. As such, the party had generally issued invitations to only the chairperson and treasurer of each party board, both of whom tended to be members of provincial or district legislatures or executive governments.

Anas and Marzuki emerged as the leading candidates precisely because of their hard work in building close relationships in this layer of middle-level party leaders. In canvassing for support amongst PD branches, both were able to draw on their previous experiences in navigating organisational, as opposed to image, politics. Anas had been chairperson of Indonesia's largest student organisation, HMI (Islamic Students Association), from 1997 until 1999, and retained a lot of good will amongst many of its former members who had later joined PD. Anas had also, unlike Andi, been a member of the PD central board since 2005, which allowed him to develop relationships with party officials throughout the country. He could rely on such people to support his candidacy as chairperson. Though Anas's networking skills were vital to his victory, he did not feel that networking alone would be sufficient to win; he also spent a substantial amount of money on television advertisements and banners.

Marzuki, on the other hand, who spent no money on media advertising and officially declared his candidacy only a day before the congress began, wholly focused on a strategy of internal party networking. Marzuki, after a stint as a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance, began working for a state-owned cement company in his home city of Palembang, becoming the director in 1999 and holding the position until 2006. After joining PD in 2003, Marzuki rose quickly to the post of secretary general, responsible for the party's administrative matters. He held this position from 2005 until 2009, enabling him to build a network of supporters throughout the party apparatus in a way that Andi, who was at that time the president's spokesperson and then a cabinet minister, could not. Many of Marzuki's supporters were lower-level party officials who wanted to repay a secretary-general whom they felt had taken a personal interest in their concerns.
An absent ideology

Anas's victory was a result of a campaign strategy that, in broad terms, focused on how to ensure that PD survives as an electoral force after Yudhoyono steps down from the presidency. In press conferences prior to the congress, Anas openly stated that PD would no longer be able to rely exclusively on Yudhoyono's image in 2014 and had to plan accordingly by becoming more strongly institutionalised. Anas's main promise in this regard was that he would decentralise the internal structure of PD to allow local party branches more control over matters such as the selection of candidates for local government elections. Such a move would significantly alter the existing party structure in which all decision-making power rests, whether officially or not, in the hands of Yudhoyono and a body called the high assembly (Majelis Tinggi). The assembly, established by the endorsement of delegates at the Bandung congress, is simply a further avenue for Yudhoyono to exercise his dominance over the party because, as its chair, he has the right to pick six out of its other eight members. The establishment of the Majelis Tinggi shows that there are contradictory trends within the party: on the one hand, centralisation of power in the hands of Yudhoyono, on the other, a strong desire for decentralisation on the part of many local branch leaders.

Yet at the congress, it was the promise of decentralisation that proved decisive to Anas's victory. The rancorous debate on the agenda which opened the congress becomes understandable from this perspective. The push to hold the election for party chairperson prior to the discussion of the party statutes was led by Anas's supporters. They hoped that, if Anas won, they would be able to rewrite the statutes in line with Anas's promises of decentralisation. This stratagem became clear after the election when congress participants divided into three commissions that were to discuss, respectively, the party's rules and structures, its ideological vision, and its strategy for the upcoming election period. The commission that focused on party rules and structures had the most attendees, and as soon as it opened, a number of participants voiced objections that the draft document was too centralistic and gave the central guidance board too much power. Others protested that, with only one hour allocated to the discussion, which was one third of what the initial program had allowed, there was not enough time to 'synchronise' the party structure with Anas's vision of devolved decision-making power. Still others called for the commission not to adopt the draft statutes and, instead, to recommend that the congress allow more time for discussions. Although the committee members eventually agreed on a compromise recommendation that the document be adopted in principle and rewritten later with a greater emphasis on decentralisation, this solution provided yet another example of party leaders being democratically out-manouvered by ordinary delegates.





The leader that is: Yudhoyono chose not to intervene in the party leadership election
Luke Barrett


The strong support for Anas's program of decentralisation is especially interesting in light of how little the three candidates discussed substantive ideological or programmatic issues during the congress. In fact, Anas's proposal for decentralisation of the party's internal structures was the only substantive aspect from any of the candidate's programs, which were instead full of vague phrases about 'modernisation' of party structures or how to develop PD as 'middle party', without any detailed explanation of what these terms meant. Party members did express loyalty towards the 'nationalist-religious' and 'middle party' formulations which Yudhoyono has used to depict PD as a party that adheres to neither political Islam nor secular nationalism, but occupies a position somewhere between the two. Yet no one, including Yudhoyono, outlined what these phrases meant in terms of a precise political agenda for Indonesia. One observer told me that, in contrast to the commission that deliberated the party's rules and structures, there was no controversy, and not even much debate, in the commission that discussed PD's ideology.
A strong personality

We should not jump too quickly to the conclusion that PD has become completely democratic internally. Though the outcome reflected the views held by party members, Yudhoyono was re-elected as chairperson of the central guidance board by acclamation rather than a formal vote. Also, just as Anas's victory began to look increasingly likely, rumours began to circulate that Yudhoyono's son, Ibas, would become the next secretary-general of PD, despite his youth and limited political experience. While some observers dismissed this possibility, the rumours intensified in the weeks after the congress, with media outlets reporting favourable comments about Ibas's candidacy by senior party figures, including Anas. Ibas's appointment to the post was announced to the media on June 22.

We can see from the Bandung congress that PD and its patron face a paradoxical future. The rejection of Yudhoyono's favoured candidate, as well as his own lack of interference in congress deliberations are encouraging signs that the party may be able to outlive its founder. However, much will depend on whether Yudhoyono himself is ready to let 'Demokrat, Demokrat' move beyond the phenomenon of 'SBY, SBY'.

Luke Barrett (lbarrett33@gmail.com) in 2009 wrote an honours thesis at the Australian National University about Indonesian party politics. He wishes to thank PD for generously providing access to all sessions of its congress and Marcus Mietzner for arranging access and for his input.




Inside Indonesia 101: Jul-Sep 2010

Theatre of life

Inside Indonesia

A new generation of Indonesian theatre activists is staging performances based on the everyday experiences of local communities

Andy SW and Muhammad Abe





Scene from the play je.ja.l.an by theatre group Garasi.
Mohamad Amin


On 29 November 2009, a group of young performers from the central Javanese cities of Solo, Semarang and Yogyakarta met in the rehearsal space of the Bengkel Mime theatre in Yogyakarta. The gathering was small, but the issue was a challenging and important one: how to form a support network for small, independent theatre groups like themselves. Groups like those represented at the meeting share a commitment to socially relevant and artistically innovative theatrical performance; they also face the same problems in finding sources of funding and spaces to rehearse and perform. They were keen to hear about each other's experiences, to get fresh ideas and develop joint strategies.

One of those attending the Yogyakarta meeting was Afrizal Malna, a well-known theatre critic and poet. Not long after the event, Afrizal published a report in the national daily Kompas entitled 'A Meeting: Theatre of Death'. The report acknowledged the enthusiasm of the theatre groups represented at the gathering, but Afrizal claimed that in contemporary Indonesia theatre is dead, its life and energy taken over by performance art and new digital media. He cited the example of his friend, Boedi S. Otong, former director of the path-breaking 1990s theatre group Teater SAE. In recent years, Boedi has moved completely away from theatre to performance art. In Afrizal's view Indonesian theatre has lost the connection to society and ordinary people that it once had. He sees it as isolated from life, absorbed with technological innovation and consumerist values, a 'theatre of death'.

For those present at the meeting in Yogyakarta that night nothing could be further from the truth. Groups such as Roda Gila from Semarang, Teater EKS from Solo, and Seni Teku from Yogyakarta may be small, and their lack of any financial backing means they often perform in spaces like backyards and street stalls rather than theatre buildings. But this means they get to interact with ordinary people in everyday places, rather than just those who can afford to buy tickets and watch a performance in a hired venue.





Cool dude in Paper Moon puppet theatre's production On a Journey
Gemaliel W. Budiharga


Groups like this are proof that Indonesian theatre is very much alive. They consist of young actors who believe they can influence society, and they have something to say to people. For them, theatre is a struggle to establish a place for themselves and their work, and they want to link up with other theatre activists to work out ways to advance this struggle. But why do these young people need to establish a new network, to start up something new? What has happened to the theatre networks of previous years?
Indonesian theatre after 1998

The fall of Suharto's New Order affected every aspect of Indonesian life. In the theatre world, the hallmarks of the long period of New Order authoritarianism had been a shared mission of political criticism and resistance to state oppression. After that era ended, many groups who had grown up in these conditions lost their focus and energy. A few of them kept going, but many abandoned theatre altogether, feeling that their work had no meaning in the new cultural context of reformasi.

But the period after 1998 was also marked by the appearance of many new groups, led by a younger generation, who were not attached to any political movement or viewpoint. These younger generation theatre activists look for new, fresh idioms that come from Indonesian daily life, new urban values and reinterpretations of village traditions in the contemporary context. They are active in various cities and regions, including Lampung (Teater Satu), Jakarta (PM Toh and Teater Syahid), Bandung (Mainteater), Solo (Komunitas Wayang Suket and Sahita, and Yogyakarta (Teater Garasi, Teater Gardanalla and Papermoon Puppet Theatre).

The theatre groups that have grown up since 1998 are richly varied in their approach. There is no one dominant idea about theatre form; each group has its own artistic idiom. They are also open to influences from other media. Some work with practitioners of visual art, music or digital technology, engaging with the cultural context of today. They also use their performances as a means to create new alternative spaces to build Indonesian cultural movements outside the mainstream culture created and controlled by government or global industry.

Their performances deal with themes taken from modern Indonesian history, as they try to present more subtle and complex perspectives than the confrontation with the state that characterised activist Indonesian theatre in the past

Performances after 1998 also represent the efforts of some theatre groups to create new forms of awareness in society. Their work raises issues of identity, gender, capitalism and religion, and deal with themes taken from modern Indonesian history, as they try to present more subtle and complex perspectives than the confrontation with the state that characterised activist Indonesian theatre in the past.

The group Garasi stages complex, sophisticated multi-layered performances reflecting on major issues in contemporary Indonesian society. Their production Waktu Batu (Stone Time), for example, combined figures from ancient Javanese myth with contemporary images to suggest the ongoing, problematic heritage of Javanese cultural tradition; Je.ja.l.an (Streets) depicted the confusion and lack of shared direction of modern Indonesian life through colourful, chaotic, conflict-ridden encounters between people on Indonesian streets.

Other groups stage simpler shows with a local focus. Slamet Gundono's Komunitas Wayang Suket, for example, criticises the booming construction of shopping malls in the city of Solo. Slamet, a shadow puppeteer, staged a wayang performance in front of a mall; he invited children to play games with him as part of the performance, to show how the attractions of the mall have replaced children's traditional games and threaten local cultural values.

Papermoon Puppet theatre uses human-sized puppets rather than real actors as performers. Each moved by a single actor, these puppets can walk, speak, express sadness, happiness, laugh, or even cry. Once the group brought their puppets to a traditional morning market and held a performance there. They asked the audience to help create a story about an old husband and wife who keep on selling vegetables in the market. Ria, the Papermoon director, explained that the performance was aimed at entertaining the traditional market visitors and seeing their response to this kind of event. Ria was surprised that many people laughed and enjoyed the show, and tried to interact with the puppets.





Family threatened by wild dog developers in Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah
Ana Franz Surya


Some other groups stage performances that connect in daring and innovative ways with their social context. Mak! Ana Asu Mlebu Omah (Mum! There's a Dog Coming into the House), a play written and directed by Andy SW about the real-life takeover of a Yogya neighbourhood by developers, was performed by local actors in the front yard of an old house in the very community where the events portrayed had taken place. Kintir (Drifted), written and directed by Ibed Suragana Yuga and performed by the group Seni Teku, mixes Javanese myth with modern everyday life. It depicts children deprived of their playground, who play on a dark and ghostly swamp until one of them falls and drifts away. His mother has already lost seven children in this way, like the goddess Gangga in a shadow puppet story from the Mahabharata epic, who gives up seven children to the river, then must farewell her last son, Bisma, as he leaves for the battle that will claim his life. The performance was staged in a village pendopo, an open pavilion traditionally used for shadow puppet performances, watched by an audience of villagers sitting around on mattresses.
A new theatre culture

All these groups are trying to build theatre culture in a contemporary context, creating their own language by writing new texts for their performances. More than their New Order predecessors, they are attuned to global cultural networks that are calling for openness and inclusiveness in social and political life as well as in performance art.

Far from being a 'theatre of death', as Afrizal suggested, they are breathing new life into Indonesian theatre and reconnecting it with the society from which it has evolved. The meeting last November did not solve their shared problems and challenges. But it did give rise to intensive debate on email discussion lists and plans for future meetings and joint performances.

Most importantly it strengthened their sense of participation in a dynamic and diverse new movement, their commitment to ongoing sharing of ideas and experiences, and their confidence that what they are doing is artistically exciting and socially worthwhile.

Andy SW (andysw80@yahoo.com) is the artistic director of Bengkel Mime Theatre.

Muhammad Abe (Muhammad.abe@gmail.com) is a theatre activist studying theatre at Gadjah Mada University.




Inside Indonesia 101: Jul-Sep 2010

Minority leaders leaving Karzai's side over leader's overtures to insurgents

Image via Wikipedia

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 23, 2010; A01


PANJSHIR VALLEY, AFGHANISTAN -- The man who served as President Hamid Karzai's top intelligence official for six years has launched an urgent campaign to warn Afghans that their leader has lost conviction in the fight against the Taliban and is recklessly pursuing a political deal with insurgents.

In speeches to small groups in Kabul and across northern Afghanistan over the past month, Amarullah Saleh has repeated his belief that Karzai's push for negotiation with insurgents is a fatal mistake and a recipe for civil war. He says Karzai's chosen policy endangers the fitful progress of the past nine years in areas such as democracy and women's rights.

"If I don't raise my voice we are headed towards a crisis," he told a gathering of college students in Kabul.

That view is shared by a growing number of Afghan minority leaders who once participated fully in Karzai's government, but now feel alienated from it. Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek politicians have expressed increasing concern that they are being marginalized by Karzai and his efforts to strike a peace deal with his fellow Pashtuns in the insurgency.

Saleh's warnings come as the United States struggles to formulate its own position on reconciliation with the Taliban. While U.S. officials have supported Afghan government-led talks in theory, they have watched with apprehension as Karzai has pursued his own peace initiatives, seemingly without Western involvement.

NATO's senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, Ambassador Mark Sedwill, cautioned recently that "any political reconciliation process has to be genuinely national and genuinely inclusive. Otherwise we're simply storing up the next set of problems that will break out. And in this country when problems break out, they tend to lead to violence."

Still, with war costs and casualties rising, U.S. policymakers are increasingly looking for a way out, and a power-sharing deal between Karzai and the Taliban may be the best they can hope for. One senior NATO official in Kabul described Saleh as "brilliant." But the official said Saleh's hard-line stance against negotiations does not offer any path to ending the long-running U.S. war.

Saleh, 38 and a Tajik, began his intelligence career in this scenic valley north of Kabul working for the legendary guerrilla commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. He said he is not motivated by ethnic rivalries with the majority Pashtuns or by a desire to undermine Karzai, whom he describes as a decent man and a patriot.

Rather, Saleh said he wants to use nonviolent, grass-roots organizing to pressure the government into a harder line against the Taliban by showing that Afghans who do not accept the return of the Taliban are a formidable force. Saleh resigned last month as director of the National Directorate of Security after he said he realized that Karzai no longer valued his advice.

"The Taliban have reached the gates of Kabul," Saleh said. "We will not stop this movement even if it costs our blood."

Proceeding carefully

Karzai spokesman Waheed Omar declined to comment on Saleh's analysis. Karzai's government has made reconciliation a top priority, and officials say they are proceeding carefully. Karzai has invited Taliban leaders to talk, but he has said insurgents must accept the constitution, renounce violence and sever their links to foreign terrorists before they can rejoin society.

Those conditions do little to mollify Afghan minority leaders, many of whom had backed Karzai in the past but are now breaking with the president. Some are concerned that a deal between Karzai and the Taliban could spawn the sort of civil war that existed in Afghanistan prior to the U.S.-led invasion in late 2001.

"The new political path that Karzai has chosen will not only destroy him, it will destroy the country. It's a kind of suicide," said Mohammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara leader and former Karzai ally.

With the defection of Saleh and the transfer of another Tajik, Bismillah Khan, from his position as chief of army staff to interior minister, Karzai critics see an erosion of strong anti-Taliban views within the government. Khan, many argue, was more important to the war effort in his army post than at the interior ministry, which oversees the police.

"Now Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks, they are not partners in Karzai's government, they are just employees," said Saleh Mohammad Registani, a Tajik parliament member from the Panjshir. "Karzai wants to use them as symbols."

To spread his message, Saleh has sought out young, educated students and university graduates. Through them he intends to form groups across the country to apply grass-roots political pressure. His aims are nonviolent, he said, and not intended to further ethnic divisions, but he has said they must prepare for the worst.

Saleh was born in the Panjshir Valley before the family moved to Kabul. He joined the armed opposition, or mujahideen, rather than be conscripted into the Afghan army and in 1997 started as an intelligence officer with Massoud's forces.

Saleh was appointed to run Afghanistan's fledgling intelligence service in 2004, and developed a reputation among U.S. officials as one of the most effective and honest cabinet ministers.

In Saleh's view, Karzai's shift from fighting to accommodating the Taliban began last August. The messy aftermath of the presidential election, in which Karzai prevailed but was widely accused of electoral fraud, was taken as a personal insult, Saleh said.

"It was very abrupt, it was not a process," Saleh said of Karzai's changing views. "He thought he was hurt by democracy and by the Americans. He felt he should have won with dignity."

Frayed relations

After the election, Afghan relations with the United States plunged to new lows, as Karzai railed against Western interference in his government and threatened to join the Taliban. Saleh said Karzai believes that the United States and NATO cannot prevail in Afghanistan and will soon depart. For that reason he has shifted his attention to Pakistan, which is thought to hold considerable sway over elements of the insurgency, in an attempt to broker a deal with the Taliban.

"We are heading toward settlement. Democracy is dying," Saleh said. He recalled Karzai saying, "'I've given everybody a chance to defeat the Taliban. It's been nine years. Where is the victory?'"

In his speeches, Saleh recounts Taliban brutalities: busloads of laborers lined up and executed, young men chopped in half with axes, women and children slain before their families. His rhetoric is harshly critical of Pakistan.

"All the goals you have will collapse if the Taliban comes back," he told a gathering of college students under a tent outside his house in Kabul. "I don't want your university to be closed just because of a political deal. It will be closed if we do not raise our voices."

Saleh believes the Taliban will not abide by a peaceful power-sharing deal because they want to regain total authority. Despite a significant U.S. troop buildup this year and major NATO offensives, he estimated that insurgents now control more than 30 percent of Afghanistan. He said the Taliban leadership -- about 200 people, many of them in the Pakistani city of Karachi -- are financed, armed and protected by Pakistan's intelligence agency. "The inner circle is totally under their control," Saleh said. Pakistan has long denied it supports the Taliban.

The second ring of Taliban leadership -- about 1,700 field commanders -- oversees a fighting force of 10,000 to 30,000 people, depending on the season, Saleh said. Under former NATO commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, 700 of these Taliban commanders were captured or killed, Saleh said, only to be replaced by a new crop.

"The factory is not shut," he said. "It keeps producing."

Special correspondent Javed Hamdard contributed to this report.

A place for race on Obama's agenda

Image via Wikipedia

By Karen Tumulty
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A03


Two years ago, in a powerful speech in Philadelphia, presidential candidate Barack Obama warned that Americans will not be able to overcome their divisions if they continue to "tackle race only as a spectacle."

This week, however, the subject of race returned to the forefront as just that: A spectacle over a selectively edited Internet video that led to the hasty firing of Agriculture Department official Shirley Sherrod for seemingly making racist comments. Then came a rush of recrimination and vindication when a fuller version revealed that she had actually been giving a speech about overcoming prejudice.

On Thursday, Obama called Sherrod from a private study off the Oval Office to apologize for his administration's missteps, but Sherrod insisted that there was much more that he should do.

"The president, if he could actually look at this in the way that he should, he could help bring this front and center and do a lot to help at least start the process," she told Washington Post editorial writer Jonathan Capehart in an interview a few hours before she talked to Obama. "I don't think he can solve it by himself. But being in the position he's in, he could do a lot to help this nation get to the point where we can deal with it."

"What happened to me," she added, "was an attempt to run away from it."

Whether that is true or not, the subject of race has had a way of catching up with Obama.

His apology to Sherrod came on the one-year anniversary of a news conference in which Obama kicked up the first racially charged controversy of his presidency by declaring that the Cambridge, Mass., police had "acted stupidly" by arresting his friend Henry Louis Gates Jr., an African American professor at Harvard and one of the nation's preeminent scholars. The ensuing storm of criticism led to the "beer summit" at which Gates and the officer who arrested him shared brews in the Rose Garden with Obama and Vice President Biden.

Officials conceded privately that one of the reasons the White House kept its distance from the Sherrod controversy when it first erupted, with the posting of the misleading video by blogger Andrew Breitbart, was that it didn't want to ignite yet another round of racism accusations against the administration by conservative media.

As Obama himself has pointed out many times, it would have been naive to think that the election of the nation's first African American president would be enough to make the country a paradise of racial harmony.

"If there's a lesson to be drawn from this episode," Obama told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview taped Thursday, "it's that rather than us jumping to conclusions and pointing fingers at each other, we should all look inward and try to examine what's in our own hearts and, as a consequence, I think we will continue to make progress."

Though he rarely addresses the subject of race explicitly, Obama's advisers insist that he has not failed to honor the promises he made in that Philadelphia speech two years ago.

But it can require something of a bank shot to make that case. "Look at an issue like education," where the administration has launched an initiative to reward states that lift their standards, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said. "Many civil rights leaders talk about education as a civil rights issue."

His allies say that Obama has so much else on his plate, with a recession at home and two wars overseas, that there is no room left for much else right now. And they contend that it would be difficult for him to lead a dialogue on race when he is the subject of some of its more corrosive story lines.

"You can't have this conversation when the political environment is so polluted," said Donna Brazile, an African American and a Democratic political strategist. "A healthy part of this conversation has to start with the fact that, since his election, those who oppose him have redoubled their efforts to somehow prove that he is not an American, to question his legitimacy."

Conservatives, meanwhile, say they are the ones who have had their legitimacy unfairly questioned. Since Obama became president, they say, accusations of racism have too often been hurled at his opponents when they have a difference with him over policy or philosophy.

"The left has used race as a weapon for a very long time," Erick Ericson wrote Tuesday on his RedState.com blog. "They have devalued what racism means -- which is a terrible shame if you actually care about stopping real racism or remembering it in our history. The word now connotes disagreeing with the left instead of what it actually means."

Although civil rights leaders say they do not expect -- or necessarily even want -- Obama to use the Sherrod episode to launch a dialogue on race, they say that it showed he still has work to do in one area: making sure that his own government reflects the country at large.

"I really believe there is an experience gap in this administration," a lack of diversity in its upper echelons, said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the highest-ranking African American in Congress. "I really believe those kinds of experiences need to be shared at the highest levels of government."

Status symbol: Facebook is ubiquitous, but is it really an antisocial network?

Image via Wikipedia

By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A01


Earlier this week Facebook acquired its 500 millionth user. This means that more people are on Facebook, which got its start a mere six years ago, than live in the United States, Canada and Mexico combined. Fewer people live on Facebook than in China, but Facebook is banned in China. If it weren't, then Facebook would have even more users.

How to mark this moment? The social network has taught us, above all else, the value of the brief and tangential -- the "ambient intimacy" that social scientists use to describe the site, where users become close simply by absorbing the casual status updates on each other's lives.

So, updates, then. A series of scattered ways to think about our relationship with this sprawling, looming thing. "What's become ordinary is that you are interacting with hundreds of people in the same space," that the compartments we once created for our interactions are dissolving, says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County who studies the social impacts of technology.

"You're having connections that were never before possible," Tufekci says. "It's profoundly altered our relationships."

Uh-uh.

But maybe, yes?

* * *

Facebook: It has rendered obsolete from the English language the phrase, "I wonder whatever happened to . . . "

Facebook: The bigger it gets, the more grumbly we get. In a recent survey on Web site satisfaction conducted by ForeSee Results, Facebook was ranked behind Google, Wikipedia, Bing, behind almost everything in its category, at 64 points out of 100. It's never doing quite what we want, even when we don't know what we want it to be doing. (We want it to stop changing its privacy settings.)

Facebook: The nostalgia, the elation, the lazy weekend afternoons spent with fingers poised over keys, trying to recall names. The kid from AP Chem. Whatshisname. Jason Whatshisname. The gratification when we found him, living in El Paso, maybe, working in pharmaceuticals.

Facebook: It's bigger than Jason Whatshisname. The vastness of the network's size means that our connection webs are increasingly complicated, too. "We usually think of connectedness as one-to-one, connecting to another person or connecting with information," says William Powers, the author of technology liberation manifesto "Hamlet's BlackBerry." "But in a larger sense, what we're really connecting to is the crowd," to that barbaric yawp of humanity. We're deciding how public we want to be, and what we want that public to think of us.

Facebook True Story No. 1: "I used to respond immediately to friend requests," says Madeeha Syed, a music writer in Pakistan who has been on the site for a few years. "But in the past six months I'm tired. I'm just tired." She no longer recognizes the people who are friending her. She used to deny these strangers, but two weeks later they would try again, forgetting they'd already been rebuffed once. Now she just lets the requests build up into a teetering pile that looms over her sanity. It's up to 447 now. "Four hundred and forty-seven requests is very intimidating," she says.

* * *

Maybe the exhaustion is generational, with digital natives -- under 30s -- bringing different expectations to the site than the older digital immigrants. "Technology doesn't create a separate world," Tufekci says. "But it does create some new norms." Digital immigrants, says Tufekci, might never comprehend the semantics of a site that labels both your priest and your ex-boyfriend's ex-roommate as "friends."

Another thing: Seriously, Mom. You do not need to sign your name to your wall posts.

Facebook: It is a fact that the people who lead the least interesting lives will post the most updates on them. These updates will be about how they can't wait for Friday, how they are glad Friday is here and how they are sad Friday is gone.

Defriend. Defriend. Defriend. Defriend.

Facebook True Story No. 2: "I thought I'd been very discriminating" with friend selections, says Renee McGivern, a consultant in Minnesota. But now she's wondering what she really has in common with these people at all. "It's really starting to be like the old telephone party line, where the vast majority is all idle gossip." Isn't it ironic, she says, that we're going back to that?

As a solution, "I'm hiding people like crazy." She lowers her voice. "And they don't know it! How do you tell people you're hiding them? They see me and they assume I've been reading all of their posts."

The guilt. The guilt you used to have over forgetting a friend's birthday is now magnified because it's always someone's birthday, somewhere in your network.

Gone are the days of unfolding conversations, news revealed in person and with dramatic pauses: We are . . . getting . . . married!

Now we enter everything mid-discussion, already debriefed.

Facebook: Oxygen Media released a recent survey in which 42 percent of single women 18 to 34 said it was okay to post drunken pictures of themselves. Who are these women?

Facebook: It's ruined our concept of privacy.

On the other hand, says David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," maybe that privacy is a dated construct -- at least according to the site's philosophy. The company's ethos implies that people should "have one identity -- that perhaps it's unethical to present one identify at the office and another at home, or one face at the golf course" and another at a party, says Kirkpatrick. Maybe everyone should know us as the same person, whomever we decide that is online.

Maybe we are afraid of our own unified identities? Maybe the thing that is unsettling about the site is that it is the relentless online version of running into your cool soccer friends when you're hanging out at Five Guys with your church group? Multiple competing variations on yourself, and all of them true.

* * *

Facebook: Is still as bright and shiny as it ever was! How else to explain books like "Facebook Fairytales," which recount how people have found love, found long-lost relatives, found organ donation matches. There is so much redemption on the site, so many chances to see how the mean girls turned nice and the nice girls stayed that way.

Facebook: There are still people who are not on it. I don't gettttt it, they say. What does it dooooo?

Facebook: The lazy weekend afternoons bleed into evenings. The eyestrain headaches, the cramped fingers. We think about getting out of the house, calling up a friend. But then again, we already know what they're up to. They are "watching 'Coraline' with Isabelle and waiting for the laundry to dry."

Is this site enriching our relationships, or is it making us too lazy to check in with people in person anymore? Have we sustained ourselves on a friend diet of bread crumbs for so long that we no longer want sandwiches?

Facebook True Story No. 3: "I really value thoughtfulness and rigorous" dialogue, says Amy Alexander, a writer in Washington. But on Facebook, "I find myself chiming in with glib asides," for the amusement of her network. "I feel like I'm getting ADHD. I feel like it's inhibiting my ability for thoughtfulness." She joined the site in the middle of 2009 and is now considering a moratorium, to get her brain back.

Alexander, like so many others, is still negotiating boundaries. When you're still relatively new to Facebook, it seems like, if you just try hard enough, you can keep up with each and every Facebook friend.

But here's a secret early adopters know: You can't. It is impossible to water everyone's Farmville, coo over everyone's puppy pictures or get annoyed by every inane status update.

Eventually, Facebook will fade into the background of your life, no longer new and perhaps actually boring -- about as remarkable as a ringing telephone.