Death of a Dictator

After a couple of weeks of anticipation, it happened: Soeharto died yesterday around noon and was brought back to the family house on the famous Cendana street in Jakarta. It’s been a very interesting couple of days here, although I'm mostly just watching, a bit confused and doubtful I'm really capable of understanding what's going on in people's minds.

Soeharto ruled Indonesia for 32 years, the better part of most people’s lives, and his death is all anyone talked about in the last 24 hours. I'm in Yogyakarta at the moment (getting permission to recruit students for my research), and everyone here is glued to TV sets with round-the-clock coverage of the funeral of “Pak Harto” (Mister/Father Harto) in Solo, the nearby traditional rival of Yogyakarta. Flags on official buildings are at half mast, of course, as in this Islamic school near my "homestay":

Soeharto was actually born near here to a poor peasant family and rose the ranks of the military (first the Dutch military, then the Japanese-sanctioned militia, then Independent Indonesian army). He was a classic military authoritarian and the fanfare today is both odd and fascinating to me. After such a long, often ruthless and ever-cleptocratic rule, Soeharto receives a lavish state funeral. All of officialdom was in Solo today and even dignitaries from nearby countries were invited (the president of East Timor included! Soeharto was the president who ordered the bloody invasion of East Timor. Perhaps not coincidently, he didn’t make it in time.)

Indonesians’ feelings seem decidedly mixed too. Most people I spoke to had very ambivalent responses. He did a lot of good for the country, some said, stabilizing it and orchestrating rapid growth that brought millions out of poverty and misery (and besides, things were just cheaper then.) But then they mention the large toll roads around Jakarta (a business venture his daughter, Tutut, is reportedly invested in) or other similar issues. “Maybe he was ok, but his family wasn’t” is one sentence I’ve heard more than once.

A local blog offered this epitaph (two weeks prematurely):

Here lies Soeharto’s mortal remains.
His loss is our eternal gain.
For while he exercised his powers,
Whatever he gained, the loss was ours.

Of course, for those who paid the personal price of “stability” – hundreds of thousands murdered and many others imprisoned - growth was no consolation to begin with.

But today everyone seems, mostly, fascinated. They’ve never experienced this before. The first president of Indonesia, Sukarno, was buried without any pomp or public mourning of any kind in his rather remote hometown in East Java (in accordance with his successor’s orders.) This is really the first presidential funeral Indonesia has known.

It's been an interesting couple of days.

Here's Inside Indonesia’s take on things

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Unrelated, but fascinating

Tereza

When I left for Indonesia, I knew I’d miss tap-water tooth-brushing, but it seemed like a fair trade for being rid of the perennial questions “so why Indonesia?”

My answers about it would go something like: “Well, it’s the fourth largest country in the world. No, really. Really! The U.S. is third, Indonesia is fourth. Honestly…”
Or: “It has the largest Muslim population in the world. Seriously. Yes, bigger than Pakistan; by far. Really; look it up.”

As my cousin puts it, Indonesia has one of the lowest I/P ratios in the world.
With I = subjective Importance (in the eyes of foreigners), and P = Population.
Bangladesh is on the short list as well and I know of a little country in the eastern Mediterranean that might be at the opposite end of the spectrum (at least in its own eyes, or if we count New York Times headlines per capita).

Turns out, however, I was wrong again. Giving up tap-water didn’t rid me of the questions; I get them here all the time. People actually seem puzzled by my interest in their mega-country. It’s not that Indonesians lack national pride or that they dream of leaving – actually, for its size and relative wealth, there are very few emigrants. But the country really is lacking in attention. For many people I meet here too, the idea that I’d leave the U.S. to study Indonesian politics seems odd (come to think of it, with this international consensus on the matter, should I be worried that it doesn’t seem odd to me?)

My last line of defense in these discussions usually comes down to: nicest people in the world (quite possibly true). But the problem with ending those discussions is that I know what’s going to follow. It’s the dreaded “And what exactly are studying?” question.

In the hatchet-job of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” also knows as the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, Tomas says to Sabina:

If I had two lives, in one life I could invite her to stay at my place, and in the second life I could kick her out. Then I could compare and see which had been the best thing to do. But we only live once. Life's so light. Like an outline we can't ever fill in or correct, make any better.
It's frightening.

It seems like much of empirical social science is really about answering that: what should Tomas have done with Tereza? Invited her to stay? Kicked her out? If only we could experiment with both.

Well, that’s sort of part of my plan here (minus Tereza.) I can’t actually create two Indonesias, trying some nationalism here, some Islamism there… but I can try and play with some methods and quite a few assumptions and pretend that I have done that. In these two Indonesias, where most people conceive of themselves as “Indonesians” or as “Muslims”, how would they interact with each other, economically and politically? How easily would they cooperate with those who are different than themselves, who speak different languages or belong to different ethnic groups or religions?

And after all, these two Indonesias exist – wrapped up in one. And so if one learns about them both, one might be able to say something meaningful about the real political competition between “Islamist” and nationalist parties and the kind of constituencies they turn to and political appeals they can use.

So there. Next time you feel the urge to write to me with “How/when did this happen? What are you doing there? Why?” remember that I/P ratios like Indonesia’s can’t last.

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I’m off tomorrow, finally, to Yogya. Will be nice to get out of Jakarta after quite a while.

In the meantime, in turns out that R.O.U.Ss are real (via this)

Jakarta "Barry" Obama

One thing is certain, if “Barry Obama” wins the presidency, the U.S. image over here will change overnight. It’ll probably change everywhere, including in America itself, but more than one person here has commented about his Indonesian connection, and what an Obama victory would mean to people. Obama spent four years as a child here, with his mother and stepfather (an Indonesian). It really is pretty hard to believe that a kid who roamed the streets of Jakarta nicknamed “Barry” (everyone has a nickname here) and attended local schools (very rare for expat kids), could be the next U.S. president.

There’s little I hate more than bandwagoning, and I was thinking Clinton is the best available choice, experience-wise, but it’s hard not to be moved by Obama’s oratory. His Iowa victory is really exciting. It would be nice to have a president who not only can speak English, but can do it so well (if only he had some executive experience). It’s also moving to see the reactions to Iowa; here are some from abroad, and this is from Harlem:

Another woman who remembers America 50 years ago watches Obama's victory and tells me she's never seen anything like this in her entire life. Someone says, "Doesn't he look like a president?"
(Via this, it turns out Andrew Sullivan is a big Obama fan).

What’s really great is that Obama didn’t win this round because of Harlem (or Jakarta). It was Iowa after all. But Jakarta and Harlem could still hurt him, of course. Daniel Pipes, who’s had his share of cynical jingoism (I can remember some from when I heard him speak in D.C. a few times), outdoes himself here, writing “Was Barack Obama a Muslim?” (via this).

As you can see, I’ve had too much unproductive time on my hands this week, mostly because I got the official Jakarta “welcome”: I was sick as a dog. After spending a few days working up in the mountains above Jakarta, I came back and spent the next few days holed up in my room (haven’t really emerged yet). The mountains, besides being a quiet place to read and write, also taught me where Jakarta floods originate (it never stopped raining for more than an hour) and reminded me what “cold” feels like (aside from A/C that is).

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Here’s a Makassarese (South Sulawesi) restaurant. The picture hanging on the top left is of the Ka’bah in Mecca, flooded in the 1941.