Egyptian Christian activist in Virginia promoted video that sparked furor

Egyptian Christian activist in Virginia promoted video that sparked furor:
The crudely made anti-Muslim video that has sparked violent outrage in Egypt and Libya this week was posted prominently Monday on the Web site of a Coptic Christian group headed by a Morris Sadek, an Egyptian American activist and lawyer who lives in Northern Virginia.
Read full article >>

Mitt Romney lags in swing states, polls show

Mitt Romney lags in swing states, polls show:
A slew of new polls suggests that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is lagging behind President Obama in several crucial swing states.
The polls comes as the Romney campaign has shrugged off Obama’s post-convention bounce as a “sugar high” and as Republicans have urged Romney to get more specific about his agenda.
Read full article >>

Philippines Draws Inspiration From Singapore - Southeast Asia Real Time - WSJ

Philippines Draws Inspiration From Singapore - Southeast Asia Real Time - WSJ

SYDNEY–The Philippine’s government is drawing inspiration from Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore as it seeks a path to prosperity and a developed economy, Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said Thursday.

South Sudan Shakes Up Oil Sector

South Sudan Shakes Up Oil Sector: South Sudan issued the biggest revision of its oil-exploration rights yet, seizing a giant license area long held by Total SA and slicing it into three.

ICG Report - Divided We Stand: Libya’s Enduring Conflicts

Divided We Stand: Libya’s Enduring Conflicts: The violent death of the U.S. ambassador and three of his colleagues is a stark reminder of the challenges Libya still faces and should serve as a wake-up call for the authorities to urgently fill the security vacuum.

Includes link to full ICG report. - John

Hanoi Web Crackdown Hits Blogs; Foreign Firms Fret - WSJ.com

Hanoi Web Crackdown Hits Blogs; Foreign Firms Fret - WSJ.com

HANOI—Vietnam's leaders are stepping up their campaign against critical blogs, ordering government investigators to arrest the operators of three websites at a time when global Internet companies are growing more worried about doing business in the tightly policed country.

Morsi Appeals for Calm as Protests Continue

Morsi Appeals for Calm as Protests Continue: Egyptian riot police clashed with protesters angry over an anti-Islam film close to the U.S. Embassy in Cairo as the country's president, Mohammed Morsi, went on state television and called on Muslims to protect embassies.

Democrats Pull Even With Republicans as Better on Terrorism

Democrats Pull Even With Republicans as Better on Terrorism: The Democratic Party now ties the Republican Party in Americans' perceptions of which would better safeguard the U.S. against terrorism, erasing a GOP advantage. Americans also see Democrats as better at keeping the country prosperous.

Chris Baker on Thailand’s Political Peasants

Chris Baker on Thailand’s Political Peasants:

Chris Baker has reviewed my new book, Thailand’s Political Peasants, for the Bangkok Post. Here are some extracts. The full review is available here.

[Ban Tiam], the subject of Thailand’s Political Peasants, is a community of 130 households in the west of Chiang Mai province. It is not a village in the old sense. The families grow rice, maize, and garlic, but they make most of their livelihood elsewhere. About a quarter have a business. Two-fifths do some work for government. A third have a family member working in Bangkok or farther afield. …
These …. changes have converted villagers into what Walker terms “political peasants”. Prosperity has endowed them with new needs and aspirations.
Dealing with the power and patronage of the state is key to fulfilling those needs and aspirations. While Thai villagers were once believed to be remote from politics, and some imagine that still to be true, Walker is bent on exploding that notion for ever.
But the new rural politics has its own unique character. Walker suggests that a good way to understand this character is to appreciate how villagers deal with the gods and spirits that determine good and bad fortune in everything from health to harvest. These spirits must be seduced by offerings and flattered with rituals so that their considerable powers are tamed and directed to benign ends.
Bureaucrats, politicians and big agribusiness groups are much the same. They have powers that can either bring good or do harm. They must be seduced by offerings and flattered with rituals too. This means courting the locally powerful, but also becoming involved in electoral politics in the locality, province and nation.
“The central element in the political strategy of this middle-income peasantry is to weave the power and resources of the state into the economic and social fabric of village society.”
Walker borrows the term “political society” to describe the result. In contrast to “civil society” which is full of rules and institutions, political society is all about connections, manipulation, bargaining, deals, expediency – a kind of free-for-all, more like all-in wrestling than rule-bound Olympic boxing. …
Possibly the story would look a little different if told from the perspective of the northeast or the migrant communities of the capital or even Chiang Mai city. Possibly the term “peasant” is misleading. Possibly Walker focuses too much on economic variables to the almost complete exclusion of the cultural dramas of politics. But there is no doubt this book is a landmark that will be required reading for anyone trying to understand Thailand’s new politics, and a stimulus for debate and controversy for some time to come.

Interview with director of Enemies of the People

Interview with director of Enemies of the People:

One of the most striking recent examinations of the Pol Pot period was the groundbreaking documentary film Enemies of the People. Widely acclaimed and recipient of over 30 international awards and an Oscar nomination, the film highlighted a growing desire to grapple with the legacy of Cambodia’s traumatic past. Following its special edition DVD release, I caught up with the film’s British co-producer and director Rob Lemkin, to discuss his views on the film and its contribution to history, dialogue, and reconciliation in Cambodia. Having produced over 50 documentaries for several major TV networks and won numerous awards and accolades himself, Lemkin is a veteran of investigative journalism and an erudite researcher of high repute.
I began by asking his opinion on why the film was so well received. “I think what we had was pretty unprecedented, in terms of going into the topic with such a level of frankness. We wanted to try to find new ways of looking at the Khmer Rouge. To try to get out of the unhelpful paradigm that tells you the same thing again and again, about the extremity of the violence and the unpleasantness of it all, and to try to take you to another dimension. We were able to make human connections with people in the Khmer Rouge, to put a human face on perpetrators and let people say maybe there is a possibility of a positive dialogue rather than a punishment or prosecution based dialogue.”
“That is the point where film does work properly, because it enables the audience to see inside of this thing. Was this really going on because there’s one or two people in an office saying ‘yes purge, go now?’ No it wasn’t. It was a much more amorphous, on-the-ground contest for power that was going on, which of course had large interests behind it as well.
“In Enemies these people weren’t just being squeezed in order to make self-incriminating confessions about crimes, they were actually being encouraged to enter a truth telling process, in which the process of telling is perhaps even more important than the truth that’s told. That’s something that has resonated with people in a way that I think few other works on the subject have really done. Previously I think people have either not really made many of these types of connections, or they have made very specific, evidential types of connections instead.”
Such comments seem apt at a time when fear of retributive justice persists. The ECCC has recently tried to reassure witnesses that they will be protected from prosecution if they testify in the court. Such reassurances have not always been entirely convincing, however, since they rely on limiting the jurisdiction of future courts, a constitutionally dubious proposition.
In a country where the past is never far from the surface, many Cambodians wish to move on from such a dark episode, and this may be as much a product of trauma and weariness as it is of vested interests. Yet for that to be achieved, only full and thorough disclosure may put to bed decades of intrigue, misinformation and the legacy of mass murder. Despite this, debate continues over the ECCC’s ability to foster any meaningful reconciliation of the type so badly needed in modern Cambodia.
“The question mark that I think there is over organisations in Cambodia is to what extent are they truly interested in reconciliation? Many of them are more interested in justice and effectively therefore with a prosecution aspect to their work, which means of course that you can’t talk to people like Khoun and Suon [two of the film’s most honest confessors], because there’s nothing in it for them.”
By contrast, some of the most powerful footage on the special edition DVD comes from a videoconference that the filmmakers set up, in which a group of Khmer Rouge victims confront perpetrators from the film face to face. Their exchanges are extremely frank, and what develops is an appreciation that the line between victims and perpetrators may not be as clearly defined as those terms may suggest. Lemkin has previously spoken about his desire to “hear the roar that lies on the other side of silence” in post-conflict societies, and this videoconference provides a fascinating model for reconciliation based on facilitating this sort of open dialogue.
“I don’t think the tribunal has too much chance of reconciliation,” he continues. “If the three who are on trial there now end up getting sentenced to life I’m not quite sure what reconciliation will follow after that, because there are thousands of Khmer Rouge people who were in various positions of responsibility from 75-79, some of them in government now and some of them not in government. They are not really integrated into that situation, and so that means the whole history of why all this violence happened, trying to understand it and analyse the causes of it remain as obscure as ever.”
The search for a fuller understanding of what really happened in the killing fields pervades Enemies of the People, and is central to the aims of the film. “It’s a current and problematic political issue in Cambodia still now, because there is a very direct connection between the current government and that history, between the organisations and individuals. In Cambodia I think its decided by the authorities that those investigations should not be done. That then means that any blurring that there might be over the origins of the Cambodian People’s Party and the regime that took over from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 can all be forgotten about.
“In a country or a society where something very extreme and horrible has happened there is a big interest to be able to block that out and package that period off, to bracket it out of the rest of history. But if you start seeing it as part of a much more connected bit of history which has links with what went before and what went after then that involves asking some quite searching questions of yourselves as a society.
“When people, particularly Cambodians who are already of a certain amount of knowledge about the killing fields, watch Enemies of the People they’re still left with the question of what was it that caused all of this violence? Why did it become as intense as it did? I think also there is a feeling that after 30 years, after a generation has passed that it is more possible to glean some insight, but it needs to be answered during the course of the next few decades, and historians and researchers will have to try to find out.”
Lemkin has a keen appreciation of the central role historical study has to play in memorialising tragedy, as well as in nurturing a nation’s shaken conscience after the events. Whilst wanting to avoid spurious comparisons, the spectre of Nazi Germany is also not lost on him. “I think Cambodia has not been well served by research, which has always tended to slightly dwell on the Khmer Rouge as a pathological regime that can only be interpreted as various degrees of evil. The written documentation upon which so much information has relied and the interviews upon which so much of the interpretative analysis has relied have always been from one particular source.
“By and large it has come from what the Vietnamese government provided, and historians who have been able to go in and ask have only been able to speak to people through permissions given by the Vietnamese. When they’ve spoken to Khmer Rouge people it has been usually in the context of rather confrontational interviews. As a result much of history ends up not really emerging, because people are not around to tell the story.
“By contrast there has been much, very substantial pieces of work done on the history of the Nazis by people like Ian Kershaw and Christopher Browning that have been able to be much more creative analytically. In other words, rather than going in with your mind made up, actually try to get yourself back into that time. It’s fascinating because it was so scary and so violent it’s almost impossible to imagine what it was like to live under that.
“I think for people who live in Cambodia, many of their memories are informed by the stories that get told, rather than going back to what it was really like. The reasons for going back and finding out what it was really like is not necessarily to forgive or forget what happened, so much as to understand what happened in the context of the history of the country and the experience of people, so that these things can be harnessed towards positive energies in the future.
“It’s always pretty bad when people on a personal level, let alone on a whole societal level spend so much time thinking about the terrible past they had. It’s better if you’re free and able to embrace the future. That’s one of the things that the 2 disc DVD is trying to do is to put a whole load more material out there within the confines of a small commercial release, to get a lot more of it in the public domain than there was previously, and to facilitate this truth telling process. Hopefully we’ve forged a path there that people will want to follow.”
The special edition of Enemies of the People is available now.
Fionn Travers-Smith is a history postgraduate student at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Singapore’s national conversation

Singapore’s national conversation:

On 26 August 2012, during his annual National Day Rally speech, Singapore’s Prime Minister announced that he wanted to have a “national conversation” about the three themes that he mentioned in his speech – Heart, Hope and Home. Most recently, it was announced that Education Minister Heng Swee Keat would be the chairperson for the committee facilitating this “national conversation”, which is expected to involve thousands of members of the public. Various observers have commented that such an attempt at engaging the public amounts to no less than a massive effort for Singaporeans to do some serious “soul-searching”, to ask themselves what they want for their country now that the days of obsession with economic growth and development is a thing of the past.

While proponents have lauded the government’s endeavour to engage the hitherto politically apathetic Singaporean public, there have been no shortage of critics of the regime who are all eager to point out the flaws in such committee-driven forms of engagement.

First, prominent Singaporean blogger and civil society activist Alex Au argues that there would be little changes in processes and outcomes from similar past committee-driven public engagement. He suggests that “the process is flawed because it is hierarchical, insider-driven, like-minded selective, with no way to create public buy-in of its findings, simply because of its closed-door process.” Past committees generated rubber-stamped proposals that did little to tweak the existing status quo.
Second, even the prominent pro-establishment Chua Mui Hoong, Opinion Editor of the government-controlled Straits Times newspapers, expressed her disappointment at the makeup of the 23-member “national conversation” committee in a recent op-ed. Including the chairperson Mr Heng, there are eight People’s Action Party (PAP) ministers and MPs. No civil society activists and members of the opposition party are included. When quizzed on why no such personalities were present, Mr Heng replied that “This is not a partisan exercise.” One wonders if Mr Heng realized the irony in his reply that by excluding them he was exactly engaging in a “partisan” exercise?
Ironies aside, how this “national conversation” will pan out is anybody’s guess. Will the final recommendations in its report lead to any significant changes in the substance of governance, political institutions and the political process? Will any sacred cows in public policy be slayed? Will it serve to win back the trust of voters for the PAP after its historically low vote-share and loss of the Aljunied group representative constituency in last year’s general election?
One thing is clear – the establishment will have a very difficult time trying to silence its critics no matter how genuine and sincere they may be about this “national conversation.”
Elvin Ong from Singapore has studied at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford.

Review of The Fate of Rural Hell

Review of The Fate of Rural Hell:

Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand
Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2012.  Pp. viii, 99; photographs.
Reviewed by Erick White.
This slender volume, full of many provocative assertions and interpretations, actually constitutes something more like an extended essay than a full-fledged monograph. Its fifty-six pages of thought-provoking text are supplemented by thirty-eight eye-catching photographs which document a cross-section of the statuary that populates the book’s central focus – the “Hell Garden” of Wat Phai Rong Wua, a temple located in a hard to access rural corner of Suphanburi province. These dramatic, grotesque and eroticized three-dimensional representations of the classic Thai Buddhist vision of hell, designed to educate and warn the general public about the future costs of current moral transgressions, serve as a primary empirical foundation for Benedict Anderson’s more general musings about history, religiosity, aesthetics, desire and subjectivity in rural Thailand, past and present. The seed for these extended reflections was planted more than thirty-five years ago in 1975, when Anderson fist visited the Suphanburi temple. Since then he has returned on three occasions, each time collecting additional information about the temple and its phantasmagoric visual spectacle. He has also consulted two Thai master’s theses on the temple. Anderson’s continuing fascination with the temple’s arresting visual extravagance eventually grew into this exercise in “investigating this rural hell within its local and wider contexts” (p. 11).
The Fate of Rural Hell is concerned primarily with three issues: the history and context of the temple and its hell garden, the psychic and motivational undercurrents at play in the creation of the hell garden, and the implications of the hell garden’s seemingly inevitable eclipse as a pedagogical project of piety. In exploring the history and context of the temple and its hell garden, Anderson initially reflects on the statuary itself, and on its anarchic, even sadistic, glorification of the sufferings of impalement, mutilation and torture that await the morally disreputable in their future hellish rebirths. Anderson is especially interested in the explanatory captions painted directly on the statues, cataloguing and categorizing them according to the types of transgressions described, who committed them and against whom they were committed. He notes that the sins depicted are conventional and even generically stereotypic within the Buddhist ethical imaginaire – murder, lying, stealing, adultery, slander, etc. – rather than particularly Thai or contemporary. There are no corrupt politicians, committers of lèse majesté, communists, professional hit men, or selfish capitalists represented in the Hell Garden, for instance. He is also fascinated by the nakedness of the sufferers and the eroticized masculinity of the servants of Yama, the mythological judge of the recently deceased, who are torturing them.
Anderson also reflects on the intertwined history of the temple and the biography of the temple’s late abbot, Luang Phor Khom, both as contextualized within Thailand’s twentieth-century political and religious history. He focuses especially on the history of building projects pursued by the abbot, of which the Hell Garden is just one example. What emerges is a developmental tale of growth, expansion and subsequent decline within an expanding, internationalizing capitalist economy. In the twenty years prior to 1957, Luang Phor Khom established the architectural foundations of a generic rural temple at Wat Phai Rong Wua by building several sermon halls and sleeping quarters, as well as an ubosot (ordination hall), a school house, and a connecting road. But, spurred on by the national and international celebrations of the 2500-year anniversary of the Buddha in 1957, the abbot began to pursue more monumental if conventional devotional building projects, such as a giant seated Buddha and replicas of Indian Buddhist religious sites. These resulted, in turn, in increasing recognition from Bangkok elites and even from the Thai king himself in 1969.  This recognition subsequently fueled an expansion in visitors and donations in the early 1970s. This attention and support led to a rapid, but relatively brief, burst of more topically eclectic projects – the Hell Garden included – which were then followed by a winding down of construction over the subsequent fifteen years. By the time of the abbot’s death in 1990, an air of desolation and decay had set in, and the temple carried the burden of enormous, hidden, and mounting debts.
Having examined the historical and social context within which the Hell Garden is embedded, Anderson explores the otherwise unspoken motivational undercurrents at play in the creation and uses of the Hell Garden’s extended visual diorama. Two psychological dimensions are of particular interest to Anderson – the motivations of the abbot and the psychic price of the patronage developed between the abbot and his craftsmen. From Anderson’s perspective, the Hell Garden of Wat Phai Rong Wua is a historically innovative form of visual representation for its time, leaving behind the more muted, conventional interactive medium of murals that preceded it. In particular, Anderson is intrigued by the “anarchic, semi-sadistic eroticism” (p. 60) that he sees as animating the statuary, whose aesthetics was consciously and explicitly specified in the abbot’s detailed instructions to his craftsmen. Ultimately, Anderson argues that the logic underlying the Hell Garden’s dramatic aesthetic vision lies in the abbot’s repressed and sublimated sexual desire and its fantasized phantasmagoric objectification via a “theology of abjection” (p. 90). He even goes so far as to refer to the abbot as “gay” and describes him as “a religious figure struggling in unusual ways to deal with his unorthodox sexuality on the eve of the triumph of a consumerist culture” (p. 93). At the same time, Anderson highlights the erotics of devotional intercession and pleasurable transgressions which are also sometimes at play in the Hell Garden. Individuals seeking improved health at two statues deemed by locals to be endowed with magical power are known to touch their clothed genitals in pursuit of blessing, and some have even danced naked before the statues in petition. Similarly, local boys have been known secretly to masturbate at night before the naked female statues. The Hell Garden, then, is apparently a magnet for provoking and channeling subversive, unspoken, furtive eroticism.
Just as intriguing for Anderson are the complicated social relations between the abbot and the folk artisans who actually built the statuary of the Hell Garden. The craftsmen, Anderson concludes, worked as unpaid or minimally paid modern versions of what an earlier era called “temple slaves”. Under the umbrella of the abbot’s patronage, they were easily exploited, as well as easily disposed of when the building projects wound down. Nonetheless, Anderson identifies an enduring, collusive social indebtedness within the intimate bonds of mutual dependency fashioned under rural patronage. The last surviving sculptor, Suchart, harbors resentment at being trapped in a dead-end and impoverishing occupation and yet acknowledges that, out of deference to Luang Phor Khom, he chose not to carve statues of the hellish fate of corrupt local officials, dishonest monks and crooked temple committee members. In turn, despite Suchart’s fall into alcoholism and drug addiction, the abbot cared for him.  After the abbot’s death, his nephew and successor also rescued Suchart from abject poverty by allowing him to ordain despite his un-exemplary behavior. Anderson highlights the intimacy and hierarchy of this social dynamic, the celebration and abjection underlying rural patron-client relations as they play out in complicated ways across an environment of mutually unspoken, frustrated and rejected desire. “It is not hard to conclude that Suchart, who is no one’s fool, understood what drove Luang Phor Khom, maybe even sympathized with it, but he needed the abbot’s authority and patronage. Conversely, his patron was grateful for this tact and for his spectacular statuary and so kept him under his wing” (p. 86).
Anderson concludes his analysis of the Hell Garden at Wat Phai Rong Wua by reflecting briefly on the declining cultural and social salience of the religious aesthetics, pious instruction and devotional inspiration as exemplified within and through the temple’s built environment. The genitalia of some statues are found to have been covered up during Anderson’s most recent visit, while other statues have disappeared, presumably in response to public rebuke. (Even before his death the abbot displayed an ambivalent defiance and shame in the face of public criticisms of the Hell Garden as “pornography”.) The visual message of the park seems out-of-date and rather sedate in the eyes of a contemporary urban youth more familiar with a heady diet of horror films, violent video games and Internet pornography. Physically deteriorating and spatially marginal, the Hell Garden comes across as increasingly irrelevant and backwards in relation to other tourist venues, even as its sacral aura fades. Its particular fusion of kitsch, languor and piety, Anderson suggests, marks it more as an historical museum, as a cultural world out of joint with the wider cultural and aesthetic sensibilities at play in Thailand’s dominant digitized, high-speed mass culture. In short, the models of eroticism and faith at work in the Hell Garden have been left behind to a considerable degree by the robust urban bourgeois consumerist culture increasingly prominent across contemporary Thai society and public life.
This review is available in its entirety here.
Erick White is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Cornell University. He has carried out research on the subculture of professional spirit mediums in Bangkok. More recently, he served for several years as an instructor in the Antioch Buddhist Studies in India program. 

POPULATION PANGS : How to make more Singaporean babies

POPULATION PANGS : How to make more Singaporean babies: Concerns that dipping birth rates in Singapore spell demographic doom for the city-state have seen the government invite ideas from the public about how to encourage people to have children. While some critics say healthy economic growth has led people to put off parenthood to focus on their careers, others blame the high-pressure education system. - Kalinga Seneviratne (Sep 6, '12)

KPK arrests business tycoon Hartati Murdaya

KPK arrests business tycoon Hartati Murdaya: Business tycoon and former member of the Democratic Party's board of patrons Siti Hartati Murdaya appears on Wednesday morning at the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) for a questioning ...

Indonesian Train E-Tickets

Indonesian Train E-Tickets:
Finally! Indonesians trains have e-tickets.

In a long overdue but still unexpected move, railway operator Kereta Api Indonesia has introduced online booking and e-ticketing on its website.

This is another sign of KAI management's greater focus in recent times on customer service, comfort and convenience. As well as increasing the maximum advance booking period from 40 days to 90 earlier this year, KAI has stopped selling standing room tickets and banned smoking on all trains and station platforms.
As recently as a few years ago, customers could only buy tickets a maximum of 7 days in advance, and only from the station where the train departed from. Customers had to fill in a form to buy tickets, payment was cash-only, tickets were paper tickets, and this inefficient system resulted in long queues. Now, passengers can book tickets for any train on the website, pay by ATM/credit card and receive the tickets by email as a pdf/Acrobat Reader file.
However, foreign visitors to Indonesia wanting to book train tickets will still have a problem: the KAI website does not accept foreign credit cards.
Fortunately, Mau Ke Mana can assist people in this situation.
If you are interested in booking a train ticket, please fill in an enquiry form here.

Indonesian Train E-Tickets is brought to you by Indonesia Matters, where you can book flights in Indonesia, and features listings of Indonesian hotels, like Kuta hotels, Sanur hotels, hotels in Jakarta and near Jakarta airport, and more.

Airport Tax Guide

Airport Tax Guide:
A guide to Indonesia's infamous and confusing passenger service charge.


Indonesia is one of the few countries where airport fees are NOT included in the price of the ticket. Visitors to Indonesia often call it "departure tax", but that is not correct because domestic passengers also pay it. Its official name is PJP2U (Indonesian for passenger service charge), but its working title is airport tax.
How Much Is Airport Tax?

Airport tax is up to Rp40 000 ($4.50 €3,50 £3) per person for domestic flights, and up to Rp150 000 ($16 €13 £11) per person for international flights. As a general guide, smaller and more remote airports have cheaper airport tax.
Want to know how much airport tax you will pay?

View Indonesian Airport Tax in a larger map

Please click on the link below the Google Map to zoom in, then select your city from the menu on the left; they are listed in alphabetical order.
When/Where/How to Pay Airport Tax?

At most airports, passengers at a special booth after checking in, on the way to the departure gate (right). At a few airports - e.g. Surabaya - passengers can pay at the check-in desk.
Passengers then receive a sticker on their boarding pass as a receipt/proof of payment, which is scanned at the security checkpoint near the departure gate. Some airports try harder than others with the presentation of the airport tax sticker:

Airport Tax Across Indonesia
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Airport tax must be paid in Rupiah cash. It is recommended that visitors prepare the required amount of money in advance, and save it for later. If you are arriving in Indonesia and then transiting/connecting to a domestic flight, you will need to get some Rupiah from an ATM or moneychanger before checking in for the second flight.
What Happens If I'm Transiting?

Transiting passengers on domestic flights do not have to pay airport tax twice. If you are flying from e.g. Medan to Denpasar (Bali) via Jakarta using the one airline and the one ticket/booking code, you only pay airport tax in Medan. The exception is budget airlines (e.g. AirAsia) that do not allow passengers to transit and do not check bags through to their final destination. If you are flying e.g. AirAsia from Medan to Denpasar (Bali) via Bandung, you will pay airport tax twice.
Similarly, passengers taking a domestic flight then an international flight do pay airport tax twice; 1 x domestic airport tax, 1 x international airport tax. For example, if you are flying from Surabaya to Perth via Denpasar on Garuda Indonesia, you will pay domestic airport tax in Surabaya, then international airport tax in Denpasar (even though your bags are checked through to Perth).
Airport Tax To "Disappear"?

According to reports, the Indonesian airport operator is going to commence incorporating airport tax into the price of domestic flights. The schedule is:

• September 2012: Garuda Indonesia domestic flights from Jakarta
• End 2013: All domestic flights from Jakarta
• 2014: Domestic flights at other airports

It seems international airport tax will remain a cash payment.
Questions about airport tax or updates for a specific airport are welcome; please write it below in a comment.
Airport Tax Guide is brought to you by Indonesia Matters, where you can book flights in Indonesia, and features listings of Indonesian hotels, like Kuta hotels, Sanur hotels, hotels in Jakarta and near Jakarta airport, and more.

Embattled Indonesian Church Must Relocate Despite Supreme Court Support - ChristianityToday.com (blog)

Embattled Indonesian Church Must Relocate Despite Supreme Court Support - ChristianityToday.com (blog):

Jakarta Post

Embattled Indonesian Church Must Relocate Despite Supreme Court Support ChristianityToday.com (blog) A West Java church which has become emblematic of record-breaking religious intolerance in Indonesia will now be relocated by the Indonesian government. Taman Yasmin Indonesian Christian Church (GKI Yasmin) legally acquired permission to build a ... Indonesia Asks Yasmin Church to RelocateTempo Interaktif Issues of the day: Govt backs suggestion to relocate GKI YasminJakarta Post INDONESIA: Religious minorities' relocation is not a solutionAsian Human Rights Commission News (press release) all 5 news articles »

Malaysia and Indonesia to Unite To Combat Drug Trafficking - Jakarta Globe

Malaysia and Indonesia to Unite To Combat Drug Trafficking - Jakarta Globe:

Jakarta Globe

Malaysia and Indonesia to Unite To Combat Drug Trafficking Jakarta Globe Moving up to hard drugs? They have not eradicated even cigarette smuggling from Indonesia by migrant workers and factories in Batam - see http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2012/6/26/sarawak/11548263 - up to 78% of the total cigarettes sold in ... Malaysia and Indonesia to battle drug trafficking togetherBikya Masr all 2 news articles »

Indonesia's Backsliding - Wall Street Journal

Indonesia's Backsliding - Wall Street Journal:

Wall Street Journal

Indonesia's Backsliding Wall Street Journal Jakarta's protectionist measures have turned investors and its trading partners wary, so you might think President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would at least issue some soothing statements about reforms being on track. Instead, according to local media, ...

Catalans rally for independence from Spain

Catalans rally for independence from Spain: More than a million people gather in Barcelona, accusing Madrid government of dragging them into economic trouble.

Russia and China to back Iran resolution

Russia and China to back Iran resolution: With Israel threatening to use military force, agreement is seen as progress after months of diplomatic deadlock.

Obama vows to bring Libya killers to justice

Obama vows to bring Libya killers to justice: US president says killing of ambassador and staff in Benghazi will not break the bonds between the two countries.

ASIA: Too much water lost to urban leaks

ASIA: Too much water lost to urban leaks:

BANGKOK, 12 September 2012 (IRIN) - South and Southeast Asia are home to 60 percent of the world's population but have only 36 percent of its water resources - a situation likely to be exacerbated by population growth, rapid urbanization, industrialization, environmental degradation, groundwater overuse and climate change unless urgent remedial action is taken, say experts.

SOMALIA: Mammoth task ahead for new president

SOMALIA: Mammoth task ahead for new president:

MOGADISHU, 12 September 2012 (IRIN) - Hassan Sheikh Mohamud's election as president of Somalia has been heralded as the start of a new era for the troubled Horn of Africa state, which has been mired in conflict for over two decades. Residents of the capital, Mogadishu, say the new president has his work cut out for him.

LEBANON: Refugee hosts feeling the pinch

LEBANON: Refugee hosts feeling the pinch:

BEIRUT, 12 September 2012 (IRIN) - Fewer tourists, lower levels of investment by Gulf states and reduced opportunities for cross-border trade with Syria are adversely affecting Lebanon's most vulnerable people, including the hosts of many of the tens of thousands of Syrian refugees.

Program Offering Immigrants Reprieve Is Off to Quick Start

Program Offering Immigrants Reprieve Is Off to Quick Start: More than 72,000 young immigrants who are in the United States illegally have applied for two-year deportation deferrals, and this week the first approvals have been granted.