A member of the Free Syrian Army holds his weapon as he sits on a sofa in the middle of a street in Deir al-Zor, April 2. The United States believes with varying degrees of confidence that Syria's regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale, the White House said on Thursday. But it added that President Barack Obama needed "credible and corroborated" facts before acting on that assessment. (Khalil Ashawi/Reuters)
Should use of chemical weapons in Syria be a 'game changer?'
The Obama administration said in a letter to senators today that it has seen evidence that the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may have used chemical weapons against its opponents "on a small scale."
The letter drew howls from predictable quarters that the US must now do more to arm rebels or perhaps even go directly to war with Syria; cautions from Obama administration officials like Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel that evidence isn't firm enough yet to be the "game changer" President Barack Obama had promised in March; and a reiteration from the administration itself that proven use of chemical weapons by Assad would draw a sharp response from the US.
"The President has made it clear," Miguel E. Rodriquez, Obama's director of legislative affairs wrote to Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin today, "that the use of chemical weapons – or the transfer of chemical weapons to terrorist groups – is a red line for the United States of America."
But why should the US commit itself to war with Syria on the basis of whether it used chemical weapons? There's an unspoken assumption that chemical weapons are a special horror that requires special responses, but the underpinnings for this are rarely explored.
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The catalog of likely war crimes by the Assad regime has steadily expanded since anti-government protests first broke out in early 2011. Thousands have been killed by cluster bombs, mortars, and scud missiles that have rained down on Syrian cities, with no discrimination between rebel fighters and civilians. Rebels, too, have been implicated in war crimes: executing prisoners, carrying out indiscriminate bombings in civilian areas, and participating in sectarian massacres.
At least 70,000 Syrians have died in the conflict and 1.4 million have fled the country, mostly to neighboring Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon, where they're straining the budgets of the local governments and the United Nations agencies tasked with providing humanitarian assistance. Aside from death tolls and home losses, millions of Syrians are being plunged into poverty.
So, the human need is great, regional strategic fears are mounting, and from the outside, the whole thing looks like a bloody stalemate. But the US has been reluctant to couple its insistence that Mr. Assad "must go" with the sort of military assistance that could prove decisive.
That's because Obama and many of his advisers are worried about the substantial presence amid the rebel fighters of the same brand of jihadis the US spent a fortune fighting in neighboring Iraq and the prospects for a major sectarian bloodletting in the country in the wake of a defeat for Assad. The US has also been reluctant to act without UN Security Council backing, something Russia has steadfastly opposed, at least until now.
But if all of these things have stayed Obama's hand, why would the "small" use of a chemical weapon, presumably some of the sarin nerve gas that has long been in the Syrian government's arsenal, change his strategic calculation?
Yes, there's a UN convention against chemical weapons (as there are against a great many things), but the world is filled with horrible crimes, and it seems to me the best way to measure them is by the number of their victims rather than the means of assault.
For instance, Saddam Hussein's famous chemical assault on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 claimed about 5,000 lives. But in the overall context of the punitive Anfal Campaign that he pursued in the late 1980s against Iraq's Kurdish population, the use of chemical weapons was small potatoes. Human Rights Watch estimated a minimum of 50,000 Kurds were killed during one six-month period in 1988 and perhaps as many as 100,000, almost all of them non-combatants.
Yet internationally, Halabja is spoken of again and again as evidence of Hussein's particular evil; the vastly greater number of people killed with conventional weapons is rarely mentioned at all.
But both Obama's people and his more hawkish critics in congress appear to be in agreement that greater US action will be mandated by the use of chemical weapons in Syria. So what's the quality of evidence?
So far, evidence is sketchy and it appears to come entirely via Syrian opposition sources, who have a clear incentive to exaggerate or fabricate Syrian government crimes as they pursue international support for their cause. The administration's letter said, rather awkwardly, that the US intelligence community "does assess with varying degrees of confidence that the Syrian regime has used chemical weapons on a small scale."
Varying degrees of confidence? Does that mean that one intelligence agency says "highly unlikely, but maybe" and in the analysis of another the situation is "highly likely, but not 100 percent for certain?" Given the poor intelligence analysis and the misuse of raw intelligence in the rush to war with Iraq in 2003, caution is clearly required.
The letter also says the "chain of custody" on "physiological samples" provided by opposition groups to the US claiming they prove chemical weapons use is unclear – by which the administration means it can't guarantee precisely when the samples, which Wired indicates were blood samples containing evidence of sarin gas exposure, were drawn, where they were drawn, or under what circumstances.
In other words, they could have been tampered with, or the evidence of sarin in them could have come from some other cause (rebel fighters handling captured chemical weapons?). Or maybe rebels used sarin they captured from Assad. Or, well, something else.
The good news for those worried about a rush to war is that Obama's people went to enormous pains today to insist that much harder evidence will be needed before the matter is considered settled. It was hard to read their comments as anything but a rebuke about the way things were done ahead of the Iraq war.
Obama's legislative affairs director Mr. Rodriquez wrote to Sens. McCain and Levin today: "Intelligence assessments alone are not sufficient - only credible and corroborated facts that provide us with some degree of certainty will guide our decision-making, and strengthen our leadership of the international community."
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As Indonesia gears up for election, fears of corruption soar
From a distance, Indonesia over the past decade looks like an unalloyed success story.
But the country's gains remain fragile as the country prepares for a pivotal election next year, the outcome of which will either ratify both the democratic and economic gains of the past decade, or signal a return to money politics at its worst.
This week, Indonesians – and foreign investors – are most concerned about the appointment of a new finance minister without a background in finance, who also happens to be the father of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's daughter-in-law. They speculate the appointment has more to do with freeing up funds for next year's elections than it does with the nation's financial management.
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First, the good news
Fifteen years ago, longstanding dictator Soeharto was forced out of power by an economic crisis that galvanized student protesters and millions of workers who had lost their jobs in the monetary crisis. In May 1998, a combination of democratic opposition and bloody rioting, some of it encouraged by ambitious generals eager to grab a greater share of power for themselves, opened the door to fundamental political change in the world's fourth largest nation, and most populous Muslim one.
The early years after Soeharto were rough. The country's small cadre of militant Islamists, forced into the shadows by Soeharto's police state, emerged from hiding at home and exile abroad, helping to fuel religious conflicts on Sulawesi and the Maluku islands, while their allies in big cities like Jakarta carried out vigilante raids on nightclubs and bars. Churches, hotels, and nightclubs were also bombed by a terrorist group inspired by Al Qaeda, most famously the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people.
Democratization also brought a mad rush of decentralization without sufficient legal reform, which saw local leaders and their business partners across this nation of 240 million people try to set up their own smaller version of the corrupt system that served Soeharto so well.
In essence, Soeharto had gathered all the strings of power and influence in Indonesia to his hand, which enabled vast fortunes to be amassed by a small number of people around him, but also left Indonesia's corruption somewhat controlled and understandable for foreign and local investors alike. When his hand was symbolically cut off by the 1998 uprising, those strings snapped and twanged out in different directions, toward new potential seats of power. At the time, restoring order appeared to be such a formidable task that many wondered if Indonesia might have to survive a break up into a set of new states drawn along ethnic or regional lines.
But then in 2004, the retired general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president, ending a period of bumbling national leadership. While not without his flaws, SBY (as he's universally called here) helped bring the country under control, didn't have much of a reputation for corruption himself, and set Indonesia on a path for renewed prosperity. In 2009, he won 60 percent of the vote in a three-way election, a stunning mandate that showed Indonesians were well pleased with what he'd done in his first five years.
Now, the bad news
But today, if you talk to Indonesians about SBY, you are far more likely to get an earful about the rampant corruption that many long-time businessmen and bankers here insist is worse than ever.
"Under Soeharto, they'd come to you and ask you to put some money on the table for them, and they'd take the money, says the owner of a furniture factory in the Central Java city of Surakarta. “Now, they ask the same but then they take the money, the table, and everything else they can find in the room," he says.
Another factory owner in Tangerang, an industrial town on the outskirts of Jakarta, has a similar view. He makes clothes, mostly for export, and is grumbling about a 45 percent increase in the minimum wage in the province this year, from 1.5 million rupiah a month ($154) to 2.2 million ($226). His principal complaint is that the surge in labor costs year-to-year made managing his cash flow and margins almost impossible. He's in the process of cutting 2,000 of the 6,000 jobs at his factory (with plans to open up a new factory in a province with lower wage costs). But he finishes his complaint by saying the following: "Of course, I'd be happy to pay 2.2 million a month if all the bribes I have to pay were ended – my margins would go up. But the bribes, I have no control over."
A foreign visitor expecting high praise for SBY now has to look hard to find it. Bankers, street peddlers, businessmen, and shopkeepers have soured on the president, who is term-limited out next year and appears to be spending as much of his time managing the affairs of his scandal plagued Democratic Party as he does the affairs of state.
Anas Urbaningrum, the chair of SBY's party, was forced to quit earlier this year after he was named a suspect in a kickback scheme involving the construction of a sports complex in the city of Bogor, West Java.
In 2011, party treasurer Muhammad Nazarrudin fled the country ahead of a corruption indictment, but was ultimately extradited from Colombia to face trial. Party member and Sports Minister Andi Mallarangeng, a former democracy activist, was forced to quit over corruption charges in late 2012 and in January of this year, Democratic Party MP Angelina Sondakh was given a four year jail sentence for demanding kickbacks in exchange for awarding government education grants.
And it isn't just SBY's party, it's almost everyone.
If you look at the constellation of Indonesia's political parties, it's hard to find strong ideological differences. There's a group of vaguely Islamist parties and a group of vaguely nationalist ones, but almost all of them are indistinguishable when it comes to performance in parliament – which often seems largely about looking for ways to collect rent and strengthen the positions of the individuals at the top of the party.
Juwono Sudarsono, an urbane defense scholar who has served in the cabinets of four different Indonesian presidents, including SBY, says that while democracy in Indonesia is working in a formal sense, with regularly scheduled, mostly-fair elections, the practical outcomes are frequently disastrous. The national political parties appear to represent business oligarchs (many of whom lead the parties) rather than national interests, and Indonesia's legal institutions are fairly powerless to reign in their behavior, he says.
He recalls 2007, when he was serving as defense minister in SBY's first cabinet. He was trying to get a defense budget passed, which included measures to improve the pay and conditions of low-ranking soldiers. Separately, representatives of the eight largest parties in parliament all approached him, and said that he would have to find a way for some of the contracting and procurement for the military to flow through the hands of businessmen they would appoint before they'd vote in favor. Essentially, they wanted a promise of payment in exchange for doing the nation's business.
With his hands tied and worried about at least controlling the graft, he worked for weeks on a deal in which 10 percent of the defense budget could be skimmed, but not more, and quietly sold the idea to Indonesia's international lenders. "I didn't like it, but I had to protect against it becoming 60 percent or something like that," he says. Juwono left government service after the 2009 elections.
Stories like his are common here, and it’s part of the reason the appointment of Hatta Rajasa as finance minister this week has prompted so many skeptical responses.
Indonesia's key economic ministries, particularly the Finance Ministry and the Central Bank, have almost always been reserved for so-called technocrats since the Soeharto years. While many ministries were said to be "wet" in the local parlance (that is, providing ample opportunity for graft), the government has always worked hard to keep the more technical financial ministries "dry" as a way to ease international concerns about the stability of the currency and the chances of a ballooning budget deficit.
Hatta, who was already serving as coordinating economic minister, heads the National Mandate Party (PAN) a vaguely Islamist party that also has close ties to SBY. Hatta's daughter Siti Ruby Aliya Rajasa married SBY's son Edhie "Ibas" Baskoro Yudhoyono in 2011.
Indonesian bankers and politicians say Hatta had repeatedly clashed with outgoing finance minister Agus Martowardojo over the latter's reluctance to bump up government spending until better corruption and accountability measures were put in place.
Martowardojo's predecessor, the highly regarded Sri Mulyani Indrawati, was pushed out in 2010 after repeatedly clashing with powerful business and political interests over reform measures, perhaps chief among them Aburizal Bakrie, the Indonesian billionaire who also heads the Golkar Party, which is the second largest party in parliament and has named Mr. Bakrie its candidate for president next year. Sri Mulyani was immediately named the director of the World Bank Group.
"The consensus among everyone I talk to is this is about shaking loose money for the elections," says a long-time Jakarta banker who asked not to be named.
It's not just in that area.
A researcher into Indonesia's booming forestry industry says in the past few months he's seen a large uptick in clear-cutting of natural forest that the government long-ago licensed for "conversion" into acacia or eucalyptus plantations. His read on the situation was that forest that have been left alone for years are being mulched for cash now because of the electoral needs of various political parties.
Running campaigns in a country like Indonesia – with hundreds of inhabited islands, stretching a distance equivalent to that between London and Baghdad – is always an expensive business, and money tells.
Juwono, the former defense minister, and many others here worry that Indonesia's dominant political parties effectively control the money game, and are in turn controlled by entrenched business interests who see no value in the kind of economic competition that could help bring the tens of millions of Indonesians still living on less than $2 a day out of poverty.
In other words, fair elections by themselves don't make fair societies.
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From Bali to Boston, terrorists chase the same goal: infamy
About a month ago I was sitting at my home in Inman Square, Cambridge, sipping coffee, grumbling about the late arrival of spring, completely unaware that two young men just a few blocks from me were probably planning Boston's worst bomb attack since 1976, when 22 people were injured in a bombing of the Suffolk County Courthouse by an obscure Marxist group.
On April 16, I awoke in the Hotel Ibis in Surakarta, Central Java (also called Solo) to news reports that two brothers had carried out a planned attack, killing three people and injuring more than 200 at the finish line of the Boston Marathon.
At the time, I was sitting a few miles from the Ngruki Islamic boarding school, where some of the most devastating terrorist attacks in Indonesian history were inspired. Among them was the 2002 terrorist attack on Bali's Kuta tourist resort that left more than 202 people dead and the country's tourism industry devastated.
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The terror and violence that spread from the militant Islamists associated with the school – founded by the since-jailed cleric Abu Bakar Bashir – puts recent events in Boston in the shade, involved as they were in the deaths of hundreds and the displacement of tens of thousands from Indonesian religious conflicts they helped feed.
On the morning after the Boston bombing, the Indonesians in the hotel coffee shop were barely glancing at the news out of Boston. Children were chirping away with their parents as they slurped down bubur, a type of rice porridge, and the general air of unconcern was contagious. Why?
Well, the terrorists just up the road have been relentlessly pursued by the Indonesian state, their networks disrupted, and scores of their operatives either killed in shootouts with police or jailed (Mr. Bashir was given a 15-year jail sentence in 2011 for financing the creation of a terrorist training camp in Aceh, in northern Sumatra).
Is the threat to Indonesia over? No.
Indonesia is the most populous Muslim majority nation, and is also a democracy, albiet one with serious flaws. The open nature of society and the fact that there's always going to be some small subset of young men susceptible to violent whisperings in their ears (or via social media) means that the problem of Islamist militancy is hard to completely vanquish.
But Indonesians are getting on with their lives. Militant Islamists had nearly no chance of taking over the country a decade ago, and they have even less of one now. This is a country that has shown that the problem can be managed, even in an overwhelmingly Muslim nation.
Which takes us back to Boston.
The elder Tsarnaev brother accused of pulling off the attack, Tamerlan, was killed during a police shootout. He appears to have been a fringe member of America's small Muslim minority. At a mosque on Prospect Street in Cambridge, he was expelled for disrupting a sermon on Jan. 18, after the prayer leader referred to Martin Luther King as a great man and Tamerlan leapt up, denouncing praise for an "non-believer."
An enormous amount of speculation is currently going on in the US about what "radicalized" the accused young men, the role of religion in the motivations, and whether their background as ethnic Chechen immigrants to the US led to their attack. But while it's much more rare for a US resident to carry out an attack like this than in, say, Indonesia, there shouldn't be any great mystery as to the likeliest motivations.
Like the most nihilistic of Islamist militants in Indonesia or the Middle East (and really, who thinks randomly killing 8-year-olds cheering at the end of a marathon is going to draw much support for any cause?), they came to share a set of views that are wildly at variance with most teachings of Muslim movements. Instead, they latched on to a set of radical, modern beliefs that started being propagated in small prayer groups away from large mosques and now is largely spun out in online discussion forums. (The view that the Internet is a university for global jihad has been around for several years.)
The men could have easily learned how to build their crude bombs from websites like Al Qaeda's English-language "Inspire" magazine, and gotten their fill of bloodthirsty rhetoric about the need to strike out violently against the "infidel."
Olivier Roy, a leading scholar of modern Islamist movements, was recently interviewed by The New Republic about the Boston Marathon attack, and thinks that the brothers' links to Chechnya or Dagestan are secondary to their alleged decision to set off the two bombs at the Boston Marathon.
Many of the security people are convinced there should be a thread, but it doesn’t seem to be the important thing. They may find a connection here and there, of course. The decision to become radical, the decision to become a terrorist, and the planning of the coup is their own. They didn’t get instruction, do this and that at this time....
No, they want to make headlines. That’s the point. They want to become a hero. It’s why I compare them with many of the guys who did the Columbine sort of terrorist attacks against a school. They were very young guys, probably loners and slightly suicidal. They want to end in beauty, they want to do something extraordinary.
Another, more prosaic argument in favor of a lack of outside direction is the fact that the two boys came off as the gang that couldn't shoot straight (although they did shoot with devastating effects). They hung around the Boston area for days after the attack, and appeared to have set no money aside to flee.
If there was extensive communication with an organized jihadi movement, their chances of being uncovered would have been very high. Monitoring those kinds of communications is something both the US and other countries have gotten very good at. Did the older brother, who visited Dagestan not so long ago, according to reports, get "radicalized" on that trip? He certainly may have spent time at salafy mosques (the brand of Islam favored by and propagated by Saudi Arabia), but that's usually not enough to breed a terrorist.
Mr. Roy's comments are worth reflecting on, because they espouse an idea that is rarely seen in the US press – that such killers frequently see themselves as vigilantes for good, or at least as seeking to carve a name for themselves in history (like the two students who murdered 13 at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999). It often boils down to a twisted attempt to overcome one's own creeping feelings of insignificance.
That was much the case with the Islamist militants in Indonesia, some of whom I met back in the late 1990s and the early years of the last decade. They were transforming themselves into cartoon super-heroes and escaping their own drab lives.
Indonesia, by and large, eventually brought them to heel. The local terrorists accomplished nothing beyond ruining the lives of others, and their own. The destruction allegedly caused by the Tsarnaev brothers is far smaller. Hopefully they will not be given the prominence they must have craved.
For the past few weeks I've traveled through Indonesian communities that were heavily marked by terrorism. There are few signs of people living in fear. There's little reason for the people of Boston to live in fear either, and I doubt they will.
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European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, right, and President of Myanmar Thein Sein, address the media after they met at the European Commission headquarters in Brussels, in March. (Yves Logghe/AP)
Myanmar's ruler to get peace prize, despite 'ethnic cleansing' charge
Are parts of the international community rushing too fast to reward Myanmar's regime for its promises of fast democratization and an end to military-backed rule?
If the confluence between the International Crisis Group's plan to give its "In Pursuit of Peace" award to Myanmar President U Thein Sein later today and a new Human Rights Watch report on ethnic cleansing against ethnic Rohingya are anything to go by, then the answer is yes.
The contrast is so striking, that one has to wonder if Human Rights Watch timed the report to coincide with the gala party that the International Crisis Group (ICG) is planning to host for President Thein Sein later today at the swanky Pierre Hotel in New York City, and with a scheduled lifting of all but arms sanctions against Myanmar (also known as Burma) from the European Union.
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The ICG party is to be hosted by ICG President Louise Arbour, a former United Nations high commissioner for human rights and a past lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, and is scheduled to praise the Myanmar president as a far-thinking humanitarian.
"Since taking office in March 2011, President U Thein Sein of Myanmar has pioneered a historic transformation of his country with bold reform initiatives," the ICG said on its website. "His leadership has seen decisive action towards improving Myanmar’s relations with the political opposition and liberalising past repressive laws."
While there have been some reforms in the past year, Human Rights Watch probably doesn't agree with the honor for Thein Sein. Their report, which came out today, blames elements in his government and Bhuddist monks for carrying out a systematic campaign to cleanse Rohingya Muslims from the country's Rakhine State last year.
"The October attacks were against Rohingya and Kaman Muslim communities and were organized, incited, and committed by local Arakanese political party operatives, the Buddhist monkhood, and ordinary Arakanese, at times directly supported by state security forces," Human Rights Watch wrote. "Rohingya men, women, and children were killed, some were buried in mass graves, and their villages and neighborhoods were razed."
Where was the Myanmar central government in all this? According to Human Rights Watch:
"While the state security forces in some instances intervened to prevent violence and protect fleeing Muslims, more frequently they stood aside during attacks or directly supported the assailants, committing killings and other abuses. In the months since the violence, the Burmese government of President Thein Sein has taken no serious steps to hold accountable those responsible or to prevent future outbreaks of violence."
The attacks displaced about 125,000 Rohingya and other Myanmar Muslims from their homes and have been part of an effort to have the Rohingya, the descendants of laborers who arrived in the country from what is now Bangladesh, removed from the country. Hostility toward the Rohingya is common within Myanmar's Burman and Buddhist majority. In July of 2012, Thein Sein called expelling "illegal" Rohingya from Myanmar was the "only solution" to ethnic tensions in Rakhine state.
That is not reassuring. Meanwhile, normalization with Myanmar continues apace, with a growing community of foreign governments and nongovernmental organizations like the International Crisis Group with a stake in proclaiming success. I wrote in November about the Obama administration's fast embrace of Thein Sein:
Has there ever been faster restoration of US relations with a country it had once worked so hard to isolate, in the absence of either a US invasion or a revolution? I can't think of one.
The once-maligned leaders are being brought in from the cold. The US even indicated in October that Burmese officers would be invited to the annual Cobra Gold military exercise between the US and Thailand as official observers.
The Obama administration's motivations are clear: Demonstrate the benefits of the generals’ political opening and turn toward democracy.
But with the breathless rush to friendship comes a country where ethnic tensions still dominate, and ethnic violence, specifically against ethnic Rohingya Muslims, that the generals have been either unwilling or unable to stop.
Concerns about that remain.
Many ethnic Burmans view the Rohingya as interlopers who have recently arrived and whose competition for jobs and economic opportunities are unwelcome. But many if not most Rohingya, whose families have lived in the country for generations, have nevertheless not been able to obtain citizenship and are basically stateless. By some estimates 800,000 people in this community are in this predicament, and regional governments in Southeast Asia are bracing for an onslaught of refugee boat people if the situation continues.
In Indonesia, there have already been signs of trouble.
Human Rights Watch key, and most troubling, charge is the level of local government collusion in the recent violence there in October 2012. While the first outbreak of attacks against Rohingya in July seemed spontaneous, the organization says the October attacks seemed planned by local political groups, and abetted by government forces.
In October, "Instead of preventing the attack by the Arakanese mob or escorting the villagers to safety, (Myanmar police and soldiers) assisted the killings by disarming the Rohingya of their sticks and other rudimentary weapons they carried to defend themselves," Human Rights Watch wrote. "“First the soldiers told us, ‘Do not do anything, we will protect you, we will save you,’ so we trusted them,” a 25-year- old survivor told Human Rights Watch. “But later they broke that promise. The Arakanese beat and killed us very easily. The security did not protect us from them."
Heavy metal, Islamist politics, and democracy in Indonesia
When I moved to Indonesia in 1993, the Indonesian media and political spheres were closed shops. There were only three legal political parties and the media, particularly broadcast media, were tightly controlled. The scenes around me now, in this corner of the archipelago, reveal just how much the nation has transformed itself.
Twenty years ago, nightly news reports largely consisted of long, loving accounts of the latest factory opening by President Soeharto, the self-styled "father of Indonesian development" (the old 50,000 rupiah note carried a beaming Soeharto with this title beneath), followed by an account of the latest foreign dignitary he received and then, perhaps, sports.
There were red lines everywhere for reporters and film and television producers. Most important was to never, ever discuss in a critical tone the 1965 coup that brought him to power and the anti-Communist purge that followed, leaving an estimated 500,000 dead. There was an official narrative that everyone had to adhere to: Evil communists tried to take over and brave young Soeharto saved the day, pushing the first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, from power for having unsavory friends. End of story. Or else.
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It wasn't until 2000, two years after Soeharto was pushed from power, that the mawkish 1983 romance "The Year of Living Dangerously," set amid Indonesia's 1965 turmoil, was allowed to be shown here, with Indonesians in the audience twittering at the accents of the Filipino actors when they spoke Indonesian.
Even almost 30 years later, Soeharto's regime still played masterfully with the fear and paranoia generated by the national tragedy of 1965. In that time, he built an order (which he called the "New Order") based on rigid political control. In the years after taking power he forced Indonesia's existing political parties into two super-parties that, for decades, represented the loyal (very, very, very loyal) opposition: the United Development Party (PPP) for Islamist political groups and the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) for more secular nationalist ones.
And then there was the new party to rule them all: His Golkar, an acronym that means "Functional Groups."
In the early 1990s, the protest movement that would help galvanize opinion against Soeharto in 1998 was being born, though no one really understood it back then. It was much like Egypt when I arrived there a decade ago: activists hounded by the state, organizing, seeking to make links to labor unions, often getting their heads kicked in by the police or the military in what seemed like a hopeless cause.
In 1993, Soeharto made one of his great miscalculations. Though he had show-elections every five years, which his government called "festivals of democracy," both PDI and PPP were allowed some scraps of parliamentary representation as rewards for good behavior. At the time, some members of the PDI, however, were pushing to engage politics in a real way, and Soeharto's government sought to directly control the election of a new party leader. However, the PDI succeeded in naming Megawati Sukarnoputri, Sukarno's daughter, as the head of the party.
While she had neither political skills nor governing ability of her own, a group of bright political operators seeking political change gathered around her, and were important players when the curtain came down on Soeharto's 32-year reign. Megawati ended up Indonesia's first post-Soeharto vice president and its second president, in a political era in which the country exploded from just three parties to over 100.
Today, Indonesia's raucous political environment is a stunning change from a decade ago. South Maluku, of which Ambon is the capital, is gearing up for gubernatorial elections (under Soeharto, all local politicians down to the district level were appointed by Jakarta) and the island is awash in political posters and canvassers. Judging from a few days traveling in the province, there are at least five candidates with some money behind them, and the bottoms of their billboards show the support they've aligned in each case from dozens of national parties.
Speaking to an old friend from Indonesia recently, who describes himself as a "glass half-empty guy," he nevertheless said direct local elections and a commitment to the political process has been one of the great successes of Indonesia since Soeharto. Sure, crooks often get into office, "but they end up getting voted out."
Indonesia's next big "festival of democracy" (this time, a real one) is scheduled for next year. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is being term-limited from office, and the jockeying to replace him has already begun.
The old three parties have had mixed fortunes in the years since democracy came to Indonesia. The PDI (which came to be known as the PDI-P, or "Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle") leads the opposition in parliament, with about 17 percent of the seats. Golkar, which has parlayed backing from big businesses and years of organization into ongoing support, is the junior partner in the governing coalition with about 19 percent of the seats. And the PPP? A shadow of their former selves, with 7 percent of the seats in parliament.
But I switched on the TV here two nights ago before going to bed, and came across the PPP's 40th anniversary rally in Surabaya, East Java. Having spent much of the past decade in the Middle East, and having covered the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Indonesia, I was transfixed. A crowd of thousands of enthusiastic young Indonesians, the girls in headscarves, were head-banging to the heavy metal band Jamrud, which was headlining a party for an avowedly Islamist political group.
With apologies to Mark Levine, who wrote an excellent book on the alternative music scene in the Arab world called "Heavy Metal Islam," this was the real thing. I wish I could find an online video of the show. But though its absent the PPP's green flag, with the Kabbah in Mecca in the middle waving above the music, this is what Jamrud sounds like:
And it reminded me that a unique political culture is evolving here that can consistently confound expectations and preconceptions.
Is Indonesia finally going after its feared special forces unit?
Indonesia has been giving off signals that it may clean up its Special Forces unit (Kopassus) after some of its members raided a prison in Central Java last month to murder four inmates.
The victims were implicated in the murder of Sgt. Heru Santoso from the unit, which was synonymous with wet work and torture during the Soeharto dictatorship. The fact that the four slain prisoners were held under Indonesian civilian law and subject to a judicial process didn't sit well with the men whose unit has for decades seen itself as divorced from the constraints of civilian oversight.
At first there were denials that it was the military that had raided a prison and executed four prisoners (the suggestion that there might be such well-trained and armed militias on the Indonesian street, not from the military, drawing justifiable howls of derision). Then there were suggestions that it might have been the military.
Then, a few days ago, came a clear admission. Deputy military police chief Brig. Gen. Unggul K. Yudhoyono said that nine Kopassus members had confessed to the murders, and promised a trial. On April 6, Kopassus head Maj. Gen. Agus Sutomo promised a public trial for 11 members of his unit accused of the murders.
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The Indonesian press played a decisive role in leading to the swift admission of what almost every knowledgeable observer in Indonesia suspected to be the truth. And the role of public opinion in this case is a clear sign of how much has changed in Indonesia since the fall of Soeharto, whose 32-year dictatorship, backed by the US and others, had turned the military's domestic interventions into a black box that few dared to examine.
But, case closed? Not exactly. When Unggul announced the confessions, he had the following to say: "The perpetrators bravely admitted to committing the crime on the first day of our investigation on March 29 ... the attack was based on esprit de corps after discovering that a group of thugs had sadistically and brutally murdered First. Sgt. Heru Santoso, the assailant’s superior, who once saved his life in an operation."
The "assailant" in the above refers to a Kopassus member so far only identified as "U." But the tone of the general's comments is far short of what one would hope for when a group of soldiers murders a group of civilians.
Indonesian human rights activists allege that the head of the regional military command Maj. Gen. Hardiono Saroso and Yogyakarta police chief Brig. Gen. Sabar Rahardjo discussed the killing of Kopassus Sergeant Heru before the assault on the prison, and say it appears that a green light for the attack was given at senior levels of both the military and the national police.
The two men were both relieved of their jobs over the weekend, certainly a sign of greater accountability for military abuses in Indonesia. But is it symbolic? It might be.
In the decade or so of democratic development since the fall of Soeharto and the difficult years that followed, the military has maintained a privileged position in domestic politics. While a British grandmother can be sentenced to death for smuggling cocaine, as happened today, soldiers enjoy much lighter sentences. After Kopassus murdered Papuan independence activist Theys Eluay in 2001, seven members of the unit were given jail sentences: The longest sentence was three-and-a-half years. All seven were promoted as well.
That was the old pattern. I covered the independence effort in East Timor in the late 1990s. Before the territory voted for independence, Kopassus was the most feared unit when it came to quashing independence efforts, and was in the lead of the government's scorched earth policy to punish Timor's vote for independence afterward. A few years later, six members of a pro-Indonesia militia were given maximum sentences of 20 months for murdering three United Nations workers – one an American – and multiple officers associated with the creation of the militias were promoted.
So, are we seeing a PR effort to manage a problem? Or real change?
Time will tell.
Migrants look out from bars at a cell of an immigration detention center in Belawan, North Sumatra, Indonesia, Friday. Sectarian and ethnic tensions running high in Myanmar boiled over far outside the country's borders Friday, when Buddhist fishermen and Muslim asylum seekers from the country brawled with knives and rocks at an Indonesian immigration detention center, leaving eight dead. (Binsar Bakkara/AP)
How Myanmar's Buddhist-Muslim conflict has reached into Indonesia
In a severely overcrowded Indonesian detention center, a brawl broke out today between Muslims and Buddhists that left eight of the latter group dead.
Indonesia, an archipelago that straddles the equator, has long been a way-station for people fleeing troubles in their homelands. For decades, boats with Afghans or Iraqis hoping to make it to Australia have washed up on its shores and their occupants have ended up spending months, and sometimes years, in detention here.
In this case, there's trouble much closer to home. In Myanmar (Burma), months of mostly Buddhist-instigated violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority have left tens of thousands homeless and hundreds dead. The country is in the middle of a transition process from a long military dictatorship to something resembling civilian rule, but that has meant more trouble, not less, for the Rohingyas. Ethnic-Burmese champions of the long struggle against military rule there, chief among them Aung San Suu Kyi, have largely avoided speaking out over the targeting of the Muslim minority, creating fears that recent spasms are just the beginning.
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Thousands of Rohingyas have fled to neighboring Thailand, and hundreds at least have floated on down to Muslim-majority Indonesia in makeshift boats, setting the stage for today's violence.
The Associated Press reports from Belawan, the town in North Sumatra that houses the migrant detention camp, that the brawl erupted after an argument between a Rohingya Muslim preacher and a Buddhist fisherman at the camp about the recent attacks on Muslims in Myanmar.
The violence spiraled almost immediately, and the group of 11 Buddhists there were badly outnumbered by the roughly 100 Rohingyas who’ve arrived there in recent months.
Recent events in Myanmar have been a reminder that, while Buddhism has a peaceful glow around it in the minds of many people in the West, its adherents are capable of horrific violence, given the right conditions, as is just about any other group on the planet.
Events in Indonesia today, meanwhile, are a reminder that the world is not one of confessional divides alone. I expect that some Indonesian incompetence was in play in this case, but they're certainly not guilty of picking sides with their fellow “Muslims.” The three Buddhist survivors were quickly given medical care and segregated in new accommodations.
The deaths are of course the most tragic part of the story. But the AP report also mentions that the fishermen, poor as church mice, have been detained in Indonesia for nine months for illegally fishing in Indonesian territorial waters. That’s a long time in detention for the crime of trying to make a living.
The Rohingyas in that camp, meanwhile, have lost their homes and aren’t getting the welcome mat rolled out to them here in Indonesia. The country has a long track record of trying to avoid resettlement of refugees, whatever their religious beliefs, and that’s unlikely to change soon.
Both sides in this brawl are trapped in a painful cycle of events, with few good options – beyond peace and a little more prosperity coming to their homeland.
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Halim and other miners stand on the stones containing gold materials at the site of Poboya gold mining area in Indonesia's Central Sulawesi province April 2012. (Yusuf Ahmad/Reuters/File)
A gold rush in Indonesia you've never heard of
I first became aware of the trouble on Bald Mountain a few days ago.
Sitting with a friend here in Ambon and talking about this region's vicious little sectarian conflict a decade ago and the largely successful efforts of Christian and Muslim leaders to heal a fractured community, I asked him about the central government's role in supporting that effort. He gave a slightly grim chuckle. "They'd rather pretend it never happened, and not think about taking steps to make sure it never happens again."
Then he asked me, with a mixture of amusement and frustration, if I'd heard of the Bandera RMS on Buru Island.
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First some background. Ambon is the part of the Indonesia with the oldest, deepest Dutch footprint. The Dutch arrived here at the start of the 17th century with the intent to control the production of cloves and nutmeg, which led to this eastern Indonesian archipelago being called the Spice Islands for centuries. Among the legacies is that the native people of Maluku (as the region is now known, or in English, the Moluccas) are split between Christianity and Islam.
In the centuries of Dutch control, local Christians generally had more access to economic opportunities and education than local Muslims (a purely relative advantage of course; the average Ambonese Christian is about as poor as the average Ambonese Muslim today). Though there was plenty of Dutch brutality targeted at local Christians as there was toward local Muslims, by the time of World War II, many Ambonese Christians served in the Dutch colonial army. With the defeat of the Japanese (who had occupied Ambon and the surrounding islands) and the Dutch decolonization process, they were nervous about being integrated into the new nation of Indonesia, overwhelmingly Muslim and dominated by the Javanese.
Independence sentiment was strong in Ambon, particularly among former Dutch soldiers, and in 1950, a group of local notables declared independence as Republik Maluku Selatan (South Maluku Republic, RMS), expecting the Dutch to support their efforts. The Dutch did not, and the RMS was quickly crushed by the new state of Indonesia (though a few holdouts lingered in the wild interior of Ceram island until 1963). More than 10,000 Ambonese members of the Dutch army and their families were forced into exile in Holland (where they were held in squalid internment camps for about 20 years before the Dutch finally admitted they were never going home) by the politics of the time, and those men and their families came to harbor a dream of returning some day to their own independent state from a Holland that didn't want them.
There are still pockets of RMS sentiment among the former exiles in Holland, and here and there in Ambon. But the vast majority of Ambonese long ago accepted an Indonesian national identity, and the RMS exists pretty much as a bogeyman for the Indonesian military and central state, ever vigilant against independence sentiment. During the sectarian war here in 1999 and 2000, rumors stormed through the local Muslim community and among the soldiers and police stationed here from other parts of Indonesia that heavily armed separatist militias were being stood up with Dutch help, a false absurdity that helped add fuel to the conflict.
Which brings us back to the Bandera RMS. "Bandera" means flag in Indonesia, and 17 people were severely beaten and arrested by Indonesian soldiers on the island of Buru, a few hours by ferry from Ambon, for raising the RMS flag this week. It was a strange story. Buru wasn't even a hotbed of RMS activity in its heyday in the 1950s. It is best known for the political prison camp where the Soeharto regime housed many alleged communists and other political prisoners after the 1965 coup that brought him to power, most famously the chronicler of the Indonesian colonial experience Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who wrote some of his best-known works there while serving a decade in detention.
What's more, the detained men were poor wildcat gold miners from Java and South Sulawesi, overwhelmingly Muslim and with no ties to this region's history. It turns out they were fans of the French national soccer team, and had raised a French flag ahead of the World Cup qualifier between France and Spain, which they'd hoped to watch as a respite from their back-breaking toil.
My friend shared the story as example of the paranoia and lack of thought that are so often exhibited by central government authorities and that often end up creating conflicts. The story was apparently picked up in the national press, with speculation that a new separatist push was in the offing, before the sad reality of what happened came to light.
But I'd never heard of gold mining on Buru, and started to ask around. In late 2011, a local man on the island found a large gold nugget on Gunun Botak, or Bald Mountain, so named because of its lack of tall vegetation (such vegetative anomalies are sometimes a sign of mineral deposits). By the middle of last year, the island was seized with gold fever, with scenes reminiscent of the gold rush in the Sierra Nevadas in 1849 or around Bathurst, Australia, in 1851, when men abandoned jobs and farms to head into the bush to start digging their fortunes.
Within months, Buru's population had swollen from 90,000 to an estimated 130,000, with poor Indonesians arriving from all corners. Local residents have abandoned their gardens and rice fields. The mining operations are illegal and unregulated, though locals say the Indonesian military has been taking a cut of the profits in exchange for turning a blind eye (standard practice in my decade in Indonesia between 1993-2003).
They are also very dangerous. Clashes over gold claims left around a dozen people there dead last year, and locals say that hundreds more have died when their rudimentary digs have collapsed.
There is little to no sanitation in the area, and local health authorities are worried about a cholera outbreak. Worst, from a long-term perspective, is the large amounts of mercury being used to extract gold from crushed rocks. Suara Maluku, one of the main daily newspapers here, carries a story today about concerns that mercury is leaching into the islands water supply.
Well, there ain't separatists in them there hills. And there is gold. But there are also the seeds of real trouble.
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In this 2012 file photo, Jon Stewart speaks during a taping of "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart", in New York. (Carolyn Kaster/AP/File)
Diplomatic fail whale? US embassy, Muslim Brotherhood clash over @TheDailyShow (+video)
The situation Bassem Youssef finds himself in is no laughing matter.
The Egyptian satirist, who has been targeted by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood-led government for prosecution for the crime of “insulting religion” and the president, is facing years in prison for his irreverent approach to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, the Brotherhood stalwart who was catapulted into the presidency thanks to the powerful political organization he hails from last year.
Over the weekend, Youssef was arrested and taken in for questioning, during which he was forced to defend his jokes. He has since been released on bail.
Jon Stewart, the American comedian, inspired Youssef (a cardiologist with a sense of humor when I knew him socially in the mid-2000s) to grab the opportunities of post-Mubarak Egypt and launch his show, which is unabashedly based off of Mr. Stewart’s The Daily Show (although it involves far more broad comedy). The show, Al Bernameg, has become wildly popular. When Youssef was invited onto The Daily Show a few months ago, he was equal parts a ham and honest when he played up his delight at tossing jokes back and forth with his former idol, now a peer.
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Two nights ago, at the start of his show, Stewart delivered a funny and pointed defense of the fellow satirist. He rightly pointed out that making fun of the president’s choice in hats (as Bassem did in one famous clip) shouldn’t be treated as a threat to social order in any modern society, and that leaders who fear being skewered by comedians are invariably either despots, or on the road to becoming one.
As for the charge of insulting religion? Stewart dredged up clips of Morsi describing Jews as the descendants of apes and pigs from as recently as 2010, as well as other clips from Morsi insisting that the new Egypt would protect the right to speak one's mind.
Defamation of religion charges filed against Morsi so far? None.
Yesterday the US Embassy in Cairo’s Twitter feed shared a link to the video of Stewart’s monologue, which prompted a furious reaction from the Brotherhood.
The official Twitter feed for Morsi’s office criticized the US for disseminating “negative political propaganda” and the Muslim Brotherhood’s official English-language account wrote “Another undiplomatic & unwise move by @USEmbassyCairo, taking sides in an ongoing investigation & disregarding Egyptian law & culture.”
The US standing up, tall, for a specific free speech case in Egypt (rather than general platitudes) is indeed noteworthy. And the growing use of vague “defamation” of religion laws or “insulting the president” laws since Morsi took power is worrying, given that many had hoped that the fall of Mubarak would bring a new dawn to the Arab world’s largest country.
It might not be “diplomatic,” but what the State Department employee who wrote the post had to say was hardly inflammatory. “Video @TheDailyShow with Jon Stewart on @DrBassemYoussef.”
That’s as neutral an intro to an interesting link on Egypt as one could find. But the Brothers were highly – no, highly! – outraged, as their response shows.
So US Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson stepped in. Her decision? To shut down the embassy Twitter feed for a while and delete the offending tweet.
That, of course, was the worst of both worlds. It gave the Egyptian government a reason to make a show of taking offense and then caved fast to their complaints. It doesn’t help that many of the democracy activists who complain that Morsi’s government is chipping away at the democracy that brought it to power also charge that the US has been too friendly to the Brotherhood.
Tarek Radwan, a researcher at The Atlantic Council, has the best take on the embassy’s social media faux pas that I’ve seen:
More importantly, however, Ambassador Patterson’s decision to pull the plug reflects an uncoordinated and ill-planned approach to the relatively minor diplomatic fallout. If anything, the backlash from the Morsi government and the Muslim Brotherhood adds credibility to the position against legal harassment of political activists (and comedians). Deleting tweets and closing accounts not only shows ignorance of the dynamics of social media (and the capacity to “Storify” or take screenshots) but also implies that critics can strong-arm the US online presence if it takes an unpopular stance. The ambassador, the face of US diplomacy in Egypt, already suffers from the stigma of stronger relations with the Muslim Brotherhood that taints her relations with opposition or nonprofit organizations that more closely share US values. Try not to make it worse.
Today the Brothers doubled down. While Jon Stewart may have used satire to criticize Morsi and the government for silencing a comedian and a critic, and the US embassy may have shared it, the eagle-eyed Max Fisher of the Washington Post noticed that the Brotherhood’s English language Twitter feed shared a video, saying: “@AJArabic feature on West's double standards regarding freedom of speech, or lack of, and anti-Semitism.”
The linked video? A 2010 Al Jazeera Arabic report on the firing of former CNN host Rick Sanchez for suggesting Jews control the US media and that Stewart, who is Jewish, “does not belong to an authentic minority group.” That Al Jazeera report asserts that there is a double standard in the US in which Jews are treated with kid gloves and all else are fair game, due to Jewish media control.
The US Embassy in Cairo twitter feed is open again for business. Its last two tweets at the time of writing?
“President #Obama has informed the Israelis that the Palestinians deserve a state” (in Arabic), from March 26, and ” MT @kjdenhert: An exciting adventure begins. Here's a promo video with all of the bands participating!” from March 24 (with a link to the Cairo Jazz Festival).
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A sacred eel in Ambon, Indonesia. (Youtube video screen capture)
Sacred eels and peace in an occasionally troubled corner of Indonesia
I'm going to keep this short.
I recently returned to Indonesia and drove along the coast outside Ambon City that was the heart of a raging religious and communal conflict more than a decade ago, and while the scars of that violence (and more recent outbreaks) were still visible if you knew where to look, the main picture was of a peace that has mostly held and of a people that have mostly gotten on with their lives.
In 1999 and 2000, this Indonesian island and many of its neighbors were boiling with a Christian-Muslim religious conflict that erupted after the fall of long-standing Indonesian dictator Soeharto. The violence in the religiously mixed Maluku provinces (which include Ambon) had drawn in Islamist militias from the broader, majority Muslim, Indonesian society. Domestic groups with ambitions to bring Islamic law to the country, some with links to outside actors like Al Qaeda, were buzzing around the fighting, seeking to use it as a spark for a vast, national revolution.
That ambition fell flat, though not without enormous costs for people here, Christian and Muslim alike.
All those years ago, Ambon was at the heart of what the West knew as the Spice Islands, the home of cloves and nutmeg that were worth a fortune in an unrefrigerated world. The tiny island of Run, now a rarely visited backwater, was formally traded by the British to Holland in the 1660s in exchange for Manhattan.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the area was of great-power interest again, with notions about history ending and clashing civilizations filling the air. The Ambon conflict fit that narrative and so was of interest for a time. That's what brought me to Ambon and the village of Waai in 2000.
Waai is a Christian village on a picturesque coast dotted with papaya and sago palm groves, with Muslim villages on either side. When I traveled there, the village had been attacked, its church and dozens of its homes razed, its people driven into refuge camps on the coast. One detail that came up again and again when talking to survivors of the attack, was the significance of the fate of their sacred eels in a fresh water spring a short distance from the ocean. Even the spring had been bombed, closing off its access to the sea (where eels, rare among freshwater fish, go to spawn).
The story of the eels has always fascinated me. It's rarely been written about, and I've yet to find anything that's specific and detailed on the local beliefs about these fish. I finally returned to Waai today and found a thriving, happy community. Homes have been rebuilt and the people have almost all returned. As have the eels. I started some conversations on their traditions and beliefs, but a shortage of time and energy (a sleepless night getting here) prevented me from gathering all the information I wanted. I think that Waai will be part of a story I'm working on about the healing process after horrific violence, and will go back for some longer talks tomorrow.
For now, a little video of one of the freshwater eels of Waai, and two of his guardians.
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