Posting may be light to non-existent over the next few days as I'm off on a short break to Bali, sans laptop.
Feel free to opine, rant or advertise your penis enlargement solution in the comments.
There's an interesting in-depth report on Indonesia's emerging refugee crisis in today's edition of the Jakarta Globe (only a short version appears to be online).
The story, by Putri Prameshwari, reveals that the number of illegal immigrants seeking sanctuary in Indonesia surged last year to 2,504, up from 369 in the previous year. These official figures from the immigration department probably include only a fraction of the thousands of boat people and other refugees who arrive in Indonesia each year.
Most of the refugees come from Afghanistan, Burma, Iran, Iraq and Sri Lanka. As one of the region's few genuine democracies, and with vast, porous sea-borders, Indonesia is a relatively attractive destination. As a majority Muslim nation, it also has a particular pull for Muslim refugees.
Indonesia has in the past extended the hand of friendship to some of those fleeing conflicts and political repression. When a group of Burmese permanent residents were booted out of Singapore after protesting outside the Myanmar embassy during the Saffron uprising in 2007, Indonesia took some of them in rather than allow them to be deported to Burma, where they would have faced likely imprisonment.
But, according to officials who have spoken to the Globe, Indonesia, with its limited resources and plentiful social existing problems, is struggling to deal with the rising tide of refugees.
All of this begs the question of what responsibilities developing countries have to look after refugees.
Most Southeast Asian nations insist that they cannot afford to take in refugees - even wealthy Singapore. Only Cambodia, the Philippines and Timor-Leste have signed the UN's refugee conventions.
That's understandable. But, if large developing countries such as Indonesia want to have a greater say on the world stage, they will increasingly have to accept that if they want more global rights and a bigger voice, then they must take on more responsibilities.
Disclosure: I'm currently working as an editor at the Globe.
"Can I fuck you today?"
Malaysian opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's supposed "Mrs Robinson" moment, according to Saiful, the young former aide to Anwar who is now his chief accuser in a politically-charged sodomy trial that has gripped Malaysia.
It is upon the judges' interpretation of these words and other lurid details that Malaysia's political future depends. The trial, which is the second time that Anwar has been charged with having anal sex (a criminal offence in Malaysia), has been dubbed Sodomy II by Malaysia's dutiful state-owned press and Fitnah 2 - or "Defamation 2" - by Anwar's opposition allies.
The over-arching narrative of the coverage of the trial in the international media has been that these charges are either trumped up or politically-motivated or both.
Government politicians such as Khairy Jamaluddin, who heads the youth wing of the ruling UMNO party, have urged people not to pre-judge the outcome of the trial. But, given that the independence of the Malaysian police and judiciary was dismantled by former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, it is hard to believe that Anwar's predicament is not driven by political imperatives.
Anwar insists that the charges are trumped up and that he is the victim of a political conspiracy by UMNO to destory Malaysia's resurgent opposition movement.
Even the idle utterances of great men can carry considerable force, particularly among their closest confidants.
Hence, when, according to British folklore, Henry II wondered aloud "who will rid me of this turbulent priest?", four royal knights interpreted his comments as a subtle instruction to strike down Thomas Beckett and dutiful obliged their king.
840 years later and 7000 miles away, when Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, president of Indonesia, complained about a group of protesters who had brought a buffalo to a demonstration and suggested that the beast symbolised the president as being "big, stupid and lazy", SBY's advisers sprung into action.
On Wednesday, the police stopped a truck carrying the infamous beast - called "Si Lebay" - from coming into Jakarta. On Thursday, State Secretary Sudi Silalhi claimed there was an existing law preventing people from bringing animals to demonstrations and that they should refrain from doing so in future.
And then on Friday, the President's faithful spokesman, Julian Aldrin Pasha, called for a new law to ban the "humiliation" of "state symbols" (i.e. his boss).
Indonesia abolished the Suharto-era laws that made mocking the president a criminal offence in 2006.
That SBY apparently wants to bring them back is just the latest in a number of growing encroachments into free speech since he was re-elected with a large personal mandate in July. For a good review of the book and film bans and other restrictions, check out this piece in The Economist.
Is it just me, or does SBY need to grow a thicker skin?
Watch out Lee Kuan Yew, one of Barack Obama's soldiers of freedom is out to get you. After decades of silence on the ingrained human rights abuses and lack of genuine democracy in the Lion City, the nominee to be the next US ambassador to Singapore seems ready to shake things up.
During pre-appointment questioning by senator Jim Webb, the key advocate of rapprochement with Burma, David Adelman said that while he wanted to build on America's strong partnership with Singapore, he would push the government to open up and allow greater democratic freedom.
"Make no mistake, currently Singapore is not a multi-party democracy," he said, according to AFP.
"I intend, if confirmed, to use public diplomacy to work towards greater press freedoms, greater freedom of assembly and ultimately more political space for opposition parties in Singapore."
That's not the kind of sentiment the ruling People's Action Party wants to hear with an election due by early 2012.
Whether Adelman (if confirmed) will have the cojones to share these sentiments with Lee Kuan Yew or his son, the Prime Minister, when he gets to meet them is another issue altogether. Most members of the Singapore diplomatic community steer clear of such sensitive political issues for fear of jeopardising their countries' often-lucrative business interests in the city-state.
In the meantime, the PAP apparatchiks and their civil service allies will once again be preparing to deploy their stock line about "Western-style liberal democracy" not being appropriate for a society governed by "Asian values". I suspect they are even firing up their current attack dog of choice, law minister K. Shanmugam, as I write this.
I've got nothing per se against people hiring willing foreign employees to work in their house on a full-time basis, cooking, cleaning and perhaps looking after the kids.
But, as Jolene Tan, a Singaporean writer at the f word, a feminist online magazine, argues, the manner in which many maids are treated in Singapore is often deliberately abusive and/or degrading with the intention of dehumanising the women who take on this job.
Maids are usually put up in tiny windowless cubby holes without fans or air-conditioning, forced to surrender their passport, given one day off a month (if they are lucky) and scolded over minor complaints (leaving a crease in a shirt, buying the wrong flavour of Ben and Jerry's ice cream for little Johnny, etc).
More importantly, despite the fact that she may often be the driving force behind the household and perhaps have a closer relationship with the children than the parents, the maid is not allowed to behave like a person.
As Jolene puts it:
One sought-after trait, which sadly cannot yet be reliably gauged by even the most competent businesses, is quiescence. The maid mustn’t get ideas above her station, like thinking she is entitled to one day off a month, or considering changing employer if her current post isn’t working out, or - worst of all - eating biscuits, thus forcing you to beat her. Savvy employers sometimes pick Indonesian workers because FDWs from the Philippines are reputed to be more knowledgeable and assertive about their rights, as well as being likely to speak English, the local lingua franca.
There is a strong sexual element here. Singapore, as Jolene mentions and writer Catherine Lim has argued, is a fiercely patriarchal society, headed by the patriarch-in-chief Lee Kuan Yew. Jolene continues:
I suspect that for many Singaporean women, abusiveness towards FDWs is also connected to fear and anxiety about our own place in society. Patriarchal attitudes simultaneously devaluing and gendering care work and domestic work are well-ensconced in Singapore, but the prevalence of foreign domestic workers staves off, to some degree, arguments about the role of Singaporean women in private and public spheres, by replacing the grossly undervalued labour Singaporean women would have been expected to do with grossly undervalued labour that foreign women are made to do. The hierarchy and unfairness remain in place; we’ve just changed the demographic on whom the worst burdens fall. Which is, of course, from a humanitarian perspective, little change at all.
Singapore is still governed by a colonial mentality and, like in every good colonial society, upstanding women are scandalised by the possibility (real or imagined) that dark-skinned domestics will seduce their men.
Thus maid agencies in Singapore ensure that their workers are de-sexualised, using the classic tool for the ritual humiliation of women: forced hair cutting. Maids are obliged to cut their hair short and wear boyish shorts and t-shirts to reduce the likelihood that they will tempt their male bosses into indiscretion.
To reiterate what I said at the start of this post, there's nothing wrong with people hiring maids or with women from poorer countries who are willing to do this sort of work. But it seems bizarre in the extreme that so many Singaporeans are happy to let someone who they distrust so much look after their kids and effectively run their household. It is a classic colonial paradox, where the imperial masters are totally reliant on the native population yet deeply suspicious of them, partly because they know how badly they are treated.
The only difference is that Singapore has had to import its colonial work gangs from the Philippines or Indonesia and, in the strikingly similar case of the construction industry, from Bangladesh and China.
According to Wikitravel, a reasonably reliable user-generated travel site, I was taking my life in my own hands.
"It is not advisable to watch any live football match in Jakarta," the website warns, "because the Jakmania, Persija Jakarta's ultras, often turn into rioters."
But buoyed by journalistic bravado, the knowledge that I had survived visits to equally scary places (Millwall, Grimsby, etc) and the sound advice of Jakarta Casual, one of the most knowledgeable voices on Indonesian football, I headed down to the Lebak Bulus stadium, wearing my brown trousers as an extra precaution.
Jakarta Casual informed me that while fans of the visiting team, Persijap, had had their coach stoned in Semarang on the way to Jakarta, the Persija fans would extend a somewhat warmer welcome.
And he was right. Before the game, die-hard fans from both clubs exchanged scarfs in a gesture of goodwill.
Contrary to warnings, I didn't see any violence at the game, though it's worth noting that Persija have no keen rivalry with Persijap. Just thousands of young Jakartans - the not so fearsome Jakmania - enjoying their day out.
While the quality of the football was pretty poor, the atmosphere was great. On the way to and from the stadium, fans crammed into and onto buses, minibuses and cars, beating drums, chanting and dancing on the vehicle roofs in precarious fashion.
Inside the stadium, where around 15,000 people were crammed into a 12,000 capacity venue (just one of many health and safety issues), the chanting continued in regimented fashion, with "conductors" climbing up the security fences (the kind that were banned in the UK after the Hillsborough disaster) and leading their fellow fans in song.
Suffice to say, no one paid too much attention to the game. The fireworks kicked off toward the end of the match and I'm not talking about on-the-pitch brawls. The Jakmania obviously had no other way to express their delight at their imminent 0-0 draw with Persijap than to set off rockets from the stand.
In a creaking, overcrowded stadium with no stewards to speak of and only a handful of disinterested police, it was not the sort of thing to fill you with much confidence. In the event of a fire breaking out, this would be stampede central.
Rather unhelpfully, the stadium was also located down a single access so getting in and out was a complete nightmare - little surprise in a city not exactly known for its intelligent urban planning.
After the game, as I waited for a taxi outside a nearby Carrefour supermarket, the Persija fans streamed past on the motorbikes, honking and shouting, much to the dismay of the middle-class Jakartans who were waiting for their drivers to pick them up.
It was all, however, in good humour. I'll have to return to watch a game against one of Persija's real rivals to see if that's still the case.
"The automation process has changed the rules of the game and politicians who fear they can no longer manipulate poll results are more tempted to eliminate one another."
Benito Lim, a political scientist at Ateneo de Manila University, on why the addition of a more trustworthy, electronic voting system may lead to more political violence in this year's polls.
Even though the UK has banned the export of the ADE-651 bomb-detection device and arrested the director of the company selling it after a BBC inquiry found that it was about as useful as a diving rod, Iraqi officials are insisting that they still work.
At the same time, Thai officials are insisting that an equally questionable bomb-detection product, the GT200, is still a useful tool in the struggle against insurgents in southern Thailand.
This apparent state of denial is not surprising in as much as officials in both countries allegedly fell for the charms of snake-oil salesmen. Not only are they keen to wipe the egg off their face but they are also eager to waft away the whiff of corruption - a number of commentators have been quick to claim that the purchase of these devices may be more related to kickbacks than their efficacy.
But it's not just in these countries that the bomb detection process seems based more on faith than on good sense.
In Jakarta, every office-block, hotel and mall worth its salt is surrounded by a cordon of security guards and barriers. But these measures are more Maginot Line than ring of steel.
At one entrance to Plaza Semanggi, a popular mall in Southern Jakarta, security guards vigorously search every bag for bombs and weapons. But if you go through another door 20 metres further down, they don't even pull over those with large backpacks.
During the day at my apartment block, the security regime is kind of rigorous. Before any car can pass through the barrier, one guard looks in the boot with a handheld bomb-detector while another half-heartedly examines the underside of the vehicle with a mirror on a rod. Watching them in action, I'm not sure that they know what they are looking for let alone what what they would do if they ever found it.
That's during the day. At night, they don't bother with any of these checks, waving every car through. I'm no counter-terrorim expert but I think I can spot the hole in that system.
The lockdowns are pretty solid at a few key locations, such as the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott hotels, which were attacked by suicide bombers in July - a classic case of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted.
However, I find it hard to believe that the security measures in place in the rest of Jakarta are truly designed to stop terrorists or even to scare them off.
It's just a way of trying to reassure people and create a bit of employment.
When foreign embassy officials break the law in their host country, diplomatic immunity ensures that they hardly ever face charges for their crimes. This protection is an essential one for the conduct of diplomacy.
But it invariably irks the local population, especially if the crime in question is particularly egregious.
So it is little wonder that many Singaporeans are angry that the police allowed Silviu Ionescu, the Romanian charge d'affaires, to leave Singapore after a fatal hit-and-run incident involving his official car.
Ionescu claimed that his car had been stolen when the incident took place, at 3.10am on December 15.
However the Singapore police have concluded that he was in fact behind the wheel when his Audi A6 hit two men who were crossing the road, one of whom later died of his injuries. Rather than stop to help, Singapore prosecutors allege that Ionescu then sped off, hitting another man, before reporting his car stolen 30 minutes later.
Three days after the incident, Ionescu left Singapore, claiming that he was seeking medical treatment abroad. Some Singaporeans are unhappy with the police and foreign ministry for failing to stop him leaving. But, diplomatic conventions mean there was little they could do without the express permission of the Romanian government.
Most Singaporeans understand the concept of diplomatic immunity but the Ionescu case has tapped into a deeper bed of resentment about the way justice is meted out in Singapore.
There is a widespread perception that the authorities are soft on well-off Western expats who break the law while cracking the whip when it comes to your average Singaporean.
As I've mentioned before, there are few countries in the world where the scales of justice are not, for one reason or another, loaded in favour of the rich.
But in Singapore, there is a feeling that the government panders to Western expats in particular (even when they're not that wealthy) because of some sort of inferiority complex.
Singaporeans are routinely jailed for petty thefts or camping without a permit. Meanwhile, the likes of Alexander Montefiore, a 28-year-old British stockbroker who admitted to two counts of stealing S$2,000 and forging an employment letter, escape with just a fine.
One evening last year, I was waiting at the station in Solo, central Java, for a train back to Yogyakarta. Although the train was over an hour late, my natural irascibility was tempered by the beauty of the setting sun casting a red hue over the silhouette of a smouldering volcano in the distance.
As I sat on the platform admiring the view, the tranquility was broken by a deep murmuring noise some way off. At first I thought it could be the sound of some ageing locomotive struggling up the tracks.
But, as the noise got louder, it became clear that it was some form of chanting. I wondered if this was a special prayer train. But, as it came into full view, I discovered that it was nothing of the sort.
Hundreds of people were crammed into the train, sitting on the roof and hanging out of the windows. They were not reciting benedictions but football chants. For these, I was informed by another passenger, were the much-feared Bonek - short for bondo nekat, Javanese for "reckless mob" - the hardcore fans of Persebaya, the Surabaya football team.
As the train passed through the station at an alarmingly slow rate, I was reminded of why British police decided to ban "football special" trains. The Bonek banged out a beat on the walls of the train while shouting something that could be loosely translated as "fuck you Solo". The people around me looked just a bit concerned but luckily no stones were thrown at the platform.
That fate was reserved for the oncoming train to Yogyakarta which, by the time it pulled into the station, had had many of its windows smashed in.
I recount this tale because the Bonek are in hot water again after another similar incident at the weekend, also at Solo station. This time, the citizens of Solo (who are known for their fiery disposition) fought back, pummeling the train with rocks on its return to Surabaya after an away game at Bandung.
The Jakarta Casual blogger, who is by far and away the best source of information and insight on Southeast Asian football, reckons that the Jakarta English-language press is blowing the latest violence out of all proportion.
He seems to think there is a class issue here: "At work today the great and the good of middle class society gnarled their teeth and puffed their chests out with self righteous indignation at these Dickensian scamps having the temerity to crawl out from under their stones and blight their precious consciousness for a few hours."
While there is clearly a large class/wealth divide in Indonesia, I'm not sure he's right about this one. By trying to defend poor football fans, he seems to be condemning them. Does he really believe that the only release that Indonesia's downtrodden can obtain is by going on the rampage before and after football matches?
Nevertheless, I'm still keen to check out a local match and see how the Indonesian Super League compares to Singapore's S-League and Vietnam's V-League. If I've managed to survive trips to Grimsby and Bournemouth, I'm sure I'll be OK.
There's an interesting Banyan column in this week's edition of The Economist (to which I contribute) about the recent banning of a number of books and a DVD by the Indonesian government.
The Economist argues that the decision to ban the works - which mostly deal with the dark events during and after Suharto's rise to power - stems less from a desire for censorship in general than from a distinct lack of willingness to face up to history.
One of the major stumbling blocks, according to The Economist, is the massacre of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists and leftists as Suharto consolidated his power in 1965-66.
Most of the books in question are histories; guidebooks to parts of that foreign country which the government still wants to keep out of bounds. One tackles the mysterious atrocities that still haunt Indonesia: the massacre of hundreds of thousands of alleged communists and others as Suharto consolidated his power in 1965-66. Few horrors have been so unexamined. In Cambodia a flawed judicial process is at last asking questions about the Khmer Rouge terror from 1975-78. Even in China the show-trial of the Gang of Four served to hold a few responsible for the crimes of the many in the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). But in the villages of Java and Bali people still live side-by-side with their parents’ murderers or their families. And the torrent of bloodshed in which they were bereaved has never been officially acknowledged, let alone subjected to a truth-and-reconciliation commission.
Part of the reason that Indonesia is yet to confront the murky realities of this period is because many members of today's political establishment - including President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono - were part of the Suharto regime.
But, as Cambridge historian Rachel Leow (who I met on a recent trip to my alma mater) mentions on her blog, this paranoia about recent history is common to many regimes in Southeast Asia.
On a basic level, this can be explained by the fact that the majority of governments in the region practice or have until recently practiced some form of authoritarian control.
But, more importantly, most of the ruling politicians and parties in Southeast Asia claim political legitimacy on historical grounds, often because of direct links to the anti-colonial movement.
So history is less an academic pursuit than a potential political battleground, which governments with authoritarian instincts want to control.
Incidentally, for those interested in the 1965-1966 political massacres in Indonesia, there is a great collection of essays on the subject in the latest edition of Inside Indonesia, an Australian online magazine.
The conviction and sentencing of four democracy activists in Vietnam last week attracted some attention from the Western media as well as condemnations from the US Embassy and the British Foreign Office.
Most reports, probably correctly, place the trial in the context of a wider crackdown on free speech that has seemingly gathered pace over the last year, ahead of the Communist Party congress in 2011.
While the jailing of men like Le Cong Dinh, a prominent human rights lawyer, tends to attract publicity, it is important to point out that people like him are true outliers in Vietnam.
Most Vietnamese have probably never heard of him and the influence of men like Dinh and other democracy activists is probably limited to a few hundred other marginalised campaigners.
Given that the Vietnamese government has never shown any hesitation in rounding up vocal democracy campaigners, the jailing of Dinh is not a surprising development.
What is more worrying for Vietnam's development is the wider crackdown of the last year or two on free speech in a more mainstream context and on Vietnam's emerging civil society. To cite a few examples:
It is widespread restrictions such as these on mainstream Vietnamese, rather than the jailing of a few outspoken dissidents, that could threaten Vietnam's (up to now) very successful transition from a poverty-stricken nation with a backward, state-controlled economy to a thriving middle-income country.
Over the last few years, Vietnam had made some very positive if humble steps in terms of increasing transparency and fighting corruption. The ongoing crackdown appears to show that the more conservative elements within the Communist Party feel threatened by some of these developments and want to roll back this progress.
However, without promoting a stronger civil society and more openness, it will be harder for Vietnam to maintain its impressive record of economic growth.
In Indonesia, as elsewhere, politicians are often accused of failing to listen to the people. That is not a charge that can be leveled against Endang Rahayu Sedyaningsih, Indonesia's recently-appointed Health Minister.
While audience participation is normally reserved for pantomimes or bad comedy acts, Endang managed to successfully integrate it into a press conference last week.
Addressing Jakarta's cohort of foreign correspondents and assorted hangers-on on Friday, Endang began by outlining her five key priorities for her department in the year ahead:
She had no trouble recalling the first four - responsive, inclusive, effective and clean - but was completely stumped when it came the all-important final priority.
Turning to her gaggle of advisers, she asked them in Indonesian if they knew. But her hapless bag-carriers were equally clueless.
As the pause in proceedings mutated into a slightly uncomfortable silence, Endang tried to salvage the situation with a smooth one-liner.
"How could I forget?," she said in English as she looked at her assistants. "You cannot forget because you are my staff."
Thankfully, a member of Jakarta's diplomatic community who was obviously better briefed than the Health Minister finally stepped in to save the day. "The last priority is pro-poor," she said, to mirth all round.
It's not like an Indonesian politician to forget the poor, of course.
In fairness to the minister, her distinct lack of fluency appeared to be more related to English language difficulties rather than anything else.
Toward the end of her hour-long Q&A session, which had, of course, started an hour late, Endang made one particularly incisive point about the challenge of providing even the most minimal level of healthcare for a population of 240 million spread over 6,000 inhabited islands.
It is often said that politics is the art of the possible. But, in Indonesia, politics is more usually the art of the impossible.
"Everything is very bad in Indonesia," Endang said, when asked how feasible her healthcare goals were. "If you think how realistic something is, nothing will be done."
P.S. If you want a more serious take on what Endang had to say, check out my news story in the British Medical Journal.
The government and the government-linked mainstream media in Singapore promote a false dichotomy between "trouble-making, "Western-style investigative journalism" and "positive nation-building journalism".
This is utter nonsense on many levels and it would take far too long to expose all the hypocrisies inherent in this concept.
But I do want to pay tribute to The Online Citizen, one of Singapore's most popular citizen journalism websites, for demonstrating both the importance of investigative journalism and its positive benefits for society.
For Singapore's population of overwhelmingly craven local and foreign journalists, investigative journalism is a no-go area. But, with few resources and no professional journalists, TOC has slowly moved from being a comment blog to an outlet for increasingly more ambitious (at least in Singaporean terms) reporting.
Last week, TOC published a story on the plight of homeless Singaporeans camping out in Sembawang Park, on the northern coast of the island state. It was well known among a number of social workers that there were Singaporeans living under canvas on a semi-permanent basis (I mentioned the issue in a story about loan sharks I wrote for Asia Sentinel in August).
But TOC went down to Sembawang and told the story of these people, whose predicament gives the lie to the government's (at best ) arrogant and (at worst) dishonest insistence that there are no homeless in Singapore.
Although these people had been camping at Sembawang and other parks for months and had been seeking help from various agencies, the government had done nothing. That was until TOC covered the story, after which the Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports, Vivian Balakrishnan, apparently visited the campsite, on Thursday.
While you may have presumed that he was on a fact-finding mission to find out how the government could help these poor people, events seem to suggest otherwise. On Saturday night, at 10.30pm, officials from his ministry, the parks authority and 10 police officers raided the campsite and forced some of the campers to leave.
TOC kept with the story, revealing that the government had tried to have some of the families put under something approaching house-arrest, in a half-way house for former drug abusers, and had issued others with court summonses for over-staying their permits at the park.
Now TOC tells us, all the families will be offered proper accommodation and the park campsite has been closed "for maintenance".
While the government may find it inconvenient in a possible election year for pesky citizen journalists to reveal the real nature of poverty and the limits of social welfare in Singapore, how can you argue that TOC's unpaid reporters have not provided a valuable service to their nation?
One of the societal benfits of citizen journalists is that they are more likely to follow a story through from beginning to end rather than abandon it after the first big exclusive. If TOC hadn't followed up on its first story, the campers would probably have been forced out by the police, arrested or made to move elsewhere and the matter would have dropped off the public radar.
Kudos to TOC, whose website has incidentally been plagued by hackers over the last few weeks, hence the lack of links in this blog post.
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