My non-personal essays about Indonesia
are crowding the book Planet Loco,
available online at the official pages of
Badd Painting Publishing House.

HISTORY OF INDONESIA

Hypocrisy of
the Mooi Indie

Email, reply to Gordon Stanton, 1999.

'Mooi Indie' (Dutch): 'The Beautiful Indionesia' - a term used to dub the early period in the Indonesian fine art history, characterized by 'touristic point of view' - pastoral scenes, ancient monuments, folk legends, mythical spheres, etcetera.

• Click here for 'Mooi Indies' pictures.
• Click here for the Javanese frame of mind.

Indonesians are hypocrites?

I have heard the same from every direction, even when it is not in vogue anymore, being hypocritical. Now I'm not going to get defensive, but I'll try to give you a sketch of the way it is (or so I think), that when you finally come to know us in the flesh you'd not be too clueless. (Pocketing the "Warning: Indonesians Are Hypocrites" isn't identical with having equipped with Guide to Encounter Indonesians.)

Hypocritical attitude is learnt; it comes from socialization and destined by circumstances. So no one is born to be a hypocrite - according to this theory.

Among Indonesians, the Javanese are the most often said to be hypocritical. It is their worldview that causes it; the constant need of being at peace with everyone and everything, the determination to avoid conflicts.(See the old tomes such as Clifford Geertz' books on this.) Under the New Order, what was merely Javanese was made Indonesian - or, they Javanized Indonesia (whichever you please).

To hide the real feelings, intentions, and thoughts is considered good manners. That's why we really are horrified to behold tourists' eagerness to smooch, to cry, to hug, in short to display emotions in public (a third person is a 'public' already). The so-called 'cosmopolitant' people in Jakarta have been starting to do the same. While these are only done in private by non-barbarians, we believe.

That is one piece of the stack of 'evidence' often produced to sustain the notion that we are hypocrites. Because we don't bawl like a baby in the airport upon departure of ones we love. We don't fly into their arms upon arrival from faraway lands over many years. We save emotional displays for the private sphere, giving some concession for funerals.

We could say "yes" when we mean "no" for some reasons, oftentimes to pacify the other person(s) so peace will not be disturbed. This acquired the decidedly hypocritical sense when the other(s) is the boss, the colonists, the kings and presidents and the like.

If you come to our house and are offered some lunch, you upon observing good manners would say "No, thanks, I have eaten" even if you are starving to death. As good hosts we would force you to accept this offer even if you can barely stand on your own feet, being already full of McDonald's and other such junk. This got a hypocritical splash since it wastes so much time.

But time is relative. We don't hurry like Londonese. Our 'on time' means no Switzerland or Japanese time. So we say "Yes, I'll be there at 10 o'clock" and arrive at 10.30 - this isn't a misdemeanor and you should have foreseen it and don't get ready to play host before the appointed time has passed. Especially in parties; to arrive on time in parties is bad manners - denoting starvation, for one thing, if it is a dinner invite.

To talk straight to the point is barbaric. We will proceed from inquiring about your health, your parents' rheumatism, how your kids are doing at school, how is your wife's pregnancy going, do the roses come from this or that district, and so on, before arriving at the reason why we pay you a visit - namely to borrow some money.

If it is your turn to come to us for something, you are expected to act civilized, like us as I just elaborated in the previous paragraph.

Selling yourself is horrendous. You don't say "I am a good writer." You expect others to say so about you. Otherwise it is vanity, and displayed vanity is a social sin. This of course extends to even applications for jobs.

Those examples are no longer very valid. We have changed out of necessity and fashion.

But some stays the way they've always been, without making them hypocritical.

What about me, personally?

I'm never a 'cosmopolitan' thing - I'm not even sure what that word means.

I'm an inland small old town's inhabitant and so are the people around me. If you are among us, I, too, will expect you to respect our cultural norms that have been ours for hundreds of years.

That you love your wife so much is your own business, so don't kiss her anywhere around us, and most of all don't kiss us in public. Keep in mind that many of the local women seen together with caucasian males are professional escorts specializing in sex.

The heat might be understandably oppressive to you, but I, too, will hope that you'd wear something more than shortpants and sleeveless shirts, unless you only stay in your own room or house. You can roam around the Mall thus dressed, of course. But, if so, don't ask me to come along, unless you really want to crush my social dignity to confetti.

I will expect you to suspend the will to appear friendly to anybody (i.e. smiling and talking a lot at once upon encounter) until after you know for certain who the people you meet are. Or else they'd leave you thinking that you are "One of those stupid tourists". Remember that most people appearing to be amiable to you around the Mall are salespersons and tourist guides and pimps.

Well, I don't have to say those to you, I know; but I can't resist pasting what I had already said to other foreigners upon their uncomfortable flight to this country. Those could give you some real-life clues of how to be.

Back to the subject - Am I a hypocrite when I don't want to be mistaken as a local whore upon going out with a caucasian male?

Is saying anything that's on your mind at any given time to anyone is universally agreed as sane?

And I believe, unlike the theory that started these lines, there are people who were born to be hypocrites no matter what is the race and how they are socialized.

The Culture of Cannibals

Email, reply to Patrick Matthews, 2000.

• Click here for the horror of getting online in Indonesia

No offense, but you really deserve some flogging.

Why not? If only you aren't so cultured in the Western European customs, just seeing some Easterners (Eastern European!) committed cannibalism wouldn't get you all bewildered like that!

I have no idea how the Czechs got along with this age's economy, but if they did what you said they always did but hitherto behind your back, it looks to me their purses aren't so good.

Isn't it five years ago that I told you - in detailed accounts - that Indonesians have their own way in dealing with this techo stuff? (Examples: buying pirate's stuff for programs, using lesser sort of hardware, because of the inexistence -- either really caused by under-financed situation or by corruption -- of fund to sustain the work.)

Cannibalism is unavoidable here, and not just in computer hardware. The fire-fighter brigade of the Jakarta Metro has been doing the same - they buy two sets of everything every time, so when one part is broken they can yank it off the other's. Imagine how vast the spread of junk there, of hoses and cars and all.

So what your inferior colleagues have done there in Prague is something computer-related workers like M have been doing here in Yogya (and Jakarta and other cities). I sympathize with your disgust, but to me it is nothing new. It insults your British nerves (Really? Nobody in England ever done that?), but it is logical, it is reasonable, in the like circumstance of hazards of computer maintenance.

M, for instance, he is in charge of the whole online version of his office (a governmental agency) and the offline computerized business, over five districts of branches and one headquarter. He's not only playing the programmer, traffic controller, and so on, but also flooded by manual repair and such, because there is no other worker assigned under him. The officials clearly believe that they have given M much by installing one whole sort of private room just for himself and a lot of machines no one else knows what for nor how they operate.

So M keeps filing requests that the government gives him at least one computer mechanic, to constant rejection until this day (see, I told you he shares your fate), meanwhile he got to tackle the issue of scarcity of spareparts - some of the computers and related equipments were, to supress the matter of finance, the cheapest made-in Korea and China. He found no sparepart in the market when the first broke for the first time. From then on he has been purchasing two for every one machine needed.

Cannibalism doesn't sound good, I agree. But what else can they (my Indonesian friends and your local colleagues) do?

Squadrons of Woe

Email, reply to Ryan Kane, 2001.

• Click here for the history of Indonesian military.

It happened in my front porch, 1987. A gang of lower-middle class boys, my High School friends, exchanged blade cuts with only a couple of other kids. Local boys around my house were gathering, alert. Somehow the two kids could get out of there without further physical harm. But in the morning everybody got the news of a major brawl somewhere in the center of the town - two weeks the one who had injured the couple of other boys couldn't get out of a hospital bed. Apparently later the previous night they combed the town for revenge, having with them a bunch of the kids of their own compound.

This story is typical. It sounds icky now, but I was not the only one getting the honor to 'host' such a brutality's preliminary session. But you know what? If the two boys were not two but a whole gang; if my other guests were not six but one; or if they were still six but defeated by the two; the local thuggy boys around my house would get into the fight on the behalf of the six - why, because the two boys were sons of Major X and Captain Y - the six were purely civilians.

Being female was a bliss in that sort of situation - but the point is, even the civilian progeny of someone from the Armed Forces were 'the military' to us - to the rest of the country. They didn't hide their disdain towards us the helpless civilians, and we, by acknowledging their superiority, came to hate them much.

There was nobody filing suits against them no matter how many ribs were broken. No one opposed them bluntly. That's how bribery got rampant. 'Security fee' was paid by shop-owners to cops and/or soldiers besides to the usual extortionists. To drive squatters away, landlords employ them, too. Even traffic cops are cops, so rather than eliciting further trouble we quickly produced bank notes upon any incident. In my life I had done this several times - the most expensive were when I got caught riding without a driver's license (I wasn't eligible to get one, I was only 14) and the other when someone else took my bike while forgetting to take the proper papers and running over another bike. Lucky kids could get their driver's licenses as early as they wanted, without even endured the traffic tests ad health exams; buying them from officers was a usual practice for the moneyed parents. The minorest offense related to the traffic today is the inexistence of helmets for motorbike riders - the minimum 'fine' so cops will let you go unfined is two and a half dollars (still a large sum for us - gas is only 20 cents a liter).

Events like the one happened in and after my front porch were why mobs sought and beat policemen and soldiers in the 1998 riots. They burned all the military and police vehicles they could find - those used to be taking their friends, acquaintances, family members and civilians in general to some investigation rooms which they couldn't leave without medical aids afterwards.

I don't keep an eye on the military. I know this is a grave defect; no country in the world could be discussed leaving out the persons of arms -- and in Indonesia (1967-1998) the Armed Forces had been all-powerful, not in battles but in (yeech!) politics. Lately President Megawati looks like courting them alarmingly, while it has only been a short time our freedom of such an unholy alliance.

But I think I can talk about the military a little bit from this chair I sit in - enough to say that yes, they were monsters to us civilians, they were our nightmares, and whether we were interested in politics or not the men with the killing devices were terror in broad daylight. Until the end of the nineties the Police Force was a part of the Armed Forces - pretty unusual this arrangement was, but it had been enforced for long without any substantial challenger (well, who dared to!).

As a result, though civilians knew - via rumors - about the rift between one Force and another, rivalries and enmities among them, and so on, the fact remained that if you messed up with Corporal X around the neighborhood you have automatically challenged the whole Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia for a duel.

There. That's the overview.

Fat businesses were under the controls of people like Army Generals (Suharto was one, remember?), their offspring broadened the area of wealth-gulping. One of the youth organizations at the time, the most powerful ones in real life, was the association of veterans' kids. Imagine that. Their old men were not even active soldiers anymore! These kids (age didn't matter, even though they were 45 year-old they're kids of the retired Majors and such, that's all they needed) overtook lucrative projects, the worst example is perhaps General Sutowo's son and grandson. the seventies' oil boom had taken the General to business. The national petroleum company, Pertamina, is still in some legal labyrinth because of the chronic mismanagement all of its life; that it had meant a wow sum of money had attracted all sorts of criminal actions.

But for my social stratum it is enough if you are Sergeant X's son. Often it is more than enough that you are somewhat related by DNA to Private X of the Army. Teenage brawls could leave you defeated, but wait until you get home - whoever was the champ that sent you off black-eyed, he's going to be dead meat when your father has taken this matter into his gun.

Not every soldier-father would, as a matter of course; most of them I believe knew nothing whatever of their sons' indecent acts out there dragging in their names upon every challenge. But enough fathers had done what was expected of them by the sons to establish civilian kids' conviction that all of them were the same. So unless desperation or uncontrollable hatred was there, civilian adrenaline stopped broiling upon the sight of soldiers' or cops' kids. In my teenage world this was how it had been.

At the same time, if you leave the realm of intellectual discussions which give you scary pictures, and enter the ordinary people's lives, it might look not so bad. We were never a military country with military rule like in some second-rate scifi movie - Indonesia is so laid-back and can move its body to whichever direction gracefully (just see the Javanese dancers and compare them with the ones in Las Vegas); it wouldn't make it possible to have anything rigid and as stiff as even your ballet dancers' muscles are according to the Javanese standard.

Suharto always smiled, at least, at civilians like us. If life went well, we didn't have to deal with the military; if we did, then life was definitely unkind to us. This made civilians guard themselves with heaps of cautions lest Sergeant X would get some ideas and detain them on whatever excuse.

Unbearability is sure to come from the fact of your submission out of the lack of choice to others whom you despise and of which you think are beneath you.

That's the case with us and the military. Though this is inaccurate, it still can represent the big part of the make-up of the Army; if you can't go to college because your parents are poor landless farmers, and you have to help them feeding your seven younger siblings, as long as you are rather physically healthy and more than 5' 6", you can consider the career in the Army. If you're good they'd even send you to some university. Such a thing happened a lot in the seventies and eighties. Via snobbery, then, civilians stopped by a traffic cop in the street, arrested for political protests, etcetera, got the view of themselves as victims of barbary ignoramuses who were barely literate and only knew how to inflict physical or financial pain to others.

But intellectual superiority didn't mean a thing in Suharto's Indonesia. Only after the Reform you (with horror) found out that we have so many Professor Doctors on every subject of study, who came in hordes to take public offices, in or out of their claimed specialization. These people were the ones to strip the military, albeit haltingly, peacemealy, even some say half-heartedly and intimidatedly, off the previous power. You'd hear Indonesians considering it a failure by the fact that the Armed Forces still got chairs for free within the parliament. The argument of others stresses the fact that it is unrealistic to deny their involvement, since they still are a major threat to democracy if we are to lock them out completely now.

About the whole thing I suggest that you browse the likes of Harold Crouch; The Army and Politics in Indonesia (Cornell University Press, 1978), Patrimonialism and Military Rule in Indonesia (World Politics Journal 31), Generals and Business in Indonesia (Pacific Affairs Journal, Winter 1975-76); the Indonesia part in Harold Schiffrin (ed.), Military State in Modern Asia (Jerusalem Academy, 1976); etcetera - dozens of such literature is available in English - this subject was highly un-kosher for us to talk about in Suharto's era, so virtually all the writers were foreigners. You'd better start from the oldest bibliography because how the military came to be what they were in the New Order would elude anyone if not beholding the very beginning. I think the year to take as the start line is 1971 after Suharto's first general election.

I have mentioned General Abdul Haris Nasution, former Chief of Staff under Sukarno and former superior officer of Suharto, later was taken as his dangerous rival and denied any public role when Suharto had established his regime. While, ironic as everything tends to be in authoritarian states, Nasution was the man who thought up the role of the military in civilian politics. A strategician and a thinker with guns, Nasution wrote quite a lot for a soldier; see for instance The Army as a Functional Group, in Herbert Feith and Lance Castles (eds.), Indonesian Political Thinking 1945-1965 (Cornell University Press, 1970), and his book about guerrilla warfare. It was under General Nasution that the Army got solidly on, that to be in or out of their favor for the civilian politicians was a matter of life or death.

My Generation

Email, reply to Thomas Erskine, 2001

• Click here for history of Indonesia around the 1998 Reform.

I don't know if I am supposed to explain the personal tone, if not remarks, smuggled into the Indonesian history expected to strip itself disinfected.

First of all (of which you have known) the story of this republic means much to me in a rather weird affectionate sort of attachment. (I'm sorry but) I think you have no idea how it rings in the ears of my peers and the generation after us.

It doesn't.

Independence is done, left behind, dusted every August 17th. And the last part is exclusively saved for the wacky old survivors of the actual event - while the Class of '66 still got some more vivid stuff related to 1945, anyone born around my day of birth had been cut off both the turbulence of Revolution and the stormy 1966; we have never experienced both upheavals.

How about the university students who moved the country to another direction in 1998? If they were already swarming and stinging in the crucial hours of the begetting of Reform, they must have been born between 1973 (common age for graduating) and 1980 (usual age to enter as freshman). Until this self-made deconstruction, they had never been close to the event of reshaping Indonesia - not the Independence and not the birth of the New Order either. You can imagine how even farther these are from a High School kid of today who was born in 1985!

So you got it right in asking "Where is your place?".

I and my peers were not even born yet when Suharto started to control the country (1967 when he got the mandate from President Sukarno), we were hapless babies when he started to build his regime (1971 when he had undergone his first general election). When he was toppled, we were (I was) 28 or so; we have left the colleges behind and nearly settled down in whatever field we tractored. Among us are - I hope you have gotten enough reading around this - creatures decidedly political; those who were activists in campus and who kept being so until at least their second kid demands attention. Some others were simply workers.

I have to correct the info you got about FT here - he was no longer a student in 1996 when the armed, organised thugs (could be the Army, the cops, or the regime's unacknowledged paramilitary) kidnapped him and his gang of socialists. He was my age, and he graduated a year after I did. That he had chosen being an activist as his career, that's none of anyone else's business - that he was factually dubbed a student hero, it's the students' business -- but you'd better distrust the British media when it comes to things like this - just like Time and Newsweek and occasionally the Far Eastern Economic Review. FT was a legitimate Bachelor of Government Administration Science the day he was abducted for anti-Suharto activism (so said Time and Newsweek) or alternately nothing but his adrenaline (my private circle's opinion).

I said you were right in asking me that question. So you were. The average alumnaes like me were thinking about a lot of things except politics after graduation. Some immediately got married, some re-enrolled for further formal ed, some chased shadows of lucrative multinational corporatism, some did nothing whatever and added to the official number of 'intellectual unemployment' - these are the normal courses of life after 25.

Upon the 1998 Reform, these mostly sedentary mammals of my generation were parts of some establishments. FT's best buddy in college, SY, was a professor (got his tenure in 1997), the rest were journalists (IW, GH, KT), others worked for the government (M, RD), and so on. Among the regular participants in our discussions during the university years, I guess only I didn't have such a security in the line of professional careering and financial stability. FT didn't have them either, of course, but he was a public figure (at least for his circle before the abduction and nationwide after abduction). If we are to talk about 'my generation', I suggest that you leave FT out of the conversation - because he was not 'one of us' in the sense that I just tried to describe. Comparing the rest of us with him is justifiable to see where the river splits itself, but you'd weave yourself an unnecessary complication if you reap all of us together as one.

In our 28th (or more or less) year on this planet, naturally we craved normalcy - if ever there be a wish for changes, it got to be to a certain betterment, and we no longer gave in to the nag to initiate anything nor to endorse such a pathfinding - most of all whose harvest was unpredictable. Activism became mere romanticism, to be deplored at length upon dinner tables or to be recalled vividly in misty nostalgic tone upon other people's weddings.

Then the students and non-student activists got down to the streets, marching to meet their deaths, in the eve of the Reform. I was in constant contacts with at least ten people around my age at the time; in this limited discussion I guess the number is enough to represent most of us the rather impolitical members of the generation - our instant reaction was like the rest of the country's ignoramuses'; we were scared of what would lay ahead and we were mad at this interruption or possibly even undoing of what we had secured so far.

You should have listened to GH's curses when he was detained by the media tycoon to barricade the office 48 hours straight while his wife and baby were crying in turns, miles away at home. GH was a street-marcher in college, he spent his years there protesting against everything from the Gulf War to the forced migration of the people of Kedungombo when their land was seized by the government to build a dam. He used to curse everyone like that, from his district's Regent to George Bush Senior. But he was a stable breadmaker in 1998; he clawed his way to the higher and higher level of the management of his magazine. It was a great business. Thus it was among the possible targets of the year's looting and burning activities by the mobs.

You should have heard what RD said; he was another former streettreader who was in 1998 a government official - be what he kept opposing in college. Those days a sight of such a person was a death sentence for the latter; the mobs burned cars sporting the red license-plates (i.e. being governmental vehicles), they beat officials senseless.

And you should, above all else, eavesdrop what I said, I and all the rest whose businesses didn't come to be the targets of arson, who didn't bear the possibility of getting sent to the E.R. after the mobs' attack, who in short weren't anything but peaceful citizens away from the center of upheaval.

We were sad and scared and mad at everything and everyone in general - since they all have trespassed our former quietude.

But the whitewashing notion that all of the above were glad to see Suharto out of office was largely correct. Directly inside the movement, indirectly at the roadsides shouting support and giving away plastic glasses of mineral water, or silently watching TV in private houses, we were all hoping for the end of the New Order and Suharto's downfall. The impolitical wanted him dead just like everyone else. This compound only didn't want to pay the cost - didn't want to witness the students' deaths, didn't want to see the supermarkets turned into rubbles, didn't want to befriend any member of the violent mobs, and (at least one of us) didn't want to invite migraines walking miles under the broiling sun demanding Suharto's resignation.

In the aftermath for a brief time the political elements of my generation had their day - although limited to being sought and featured in newspapers, most of which didn't come with pay. Then the inevitable came as usual. Their younger brothers and sisters were marching back to campuses. The regime had (arguably) died. The media shifted the center of attention.

And the new faces of power were people 40 years of age and up.

Amien Rais was upon a noisy ceremony conferred the title 'Reform Hero'; he was way above 50 that year. Megawati who didn't say a word and was virtually invisible during all the brouhaha re-appeared to lead her new party of millions of supporters; she was around the same age. So was the diehard Group of Functionaries' leader Akbar Tandjung, so was Hamzah Haz of the United Development Party, and even more senior was Abdurrahman Wahid - some others were only a bit younger, newer, like the Bulan Bintang (Islamic) Party's Yusril Ihza Mahendra. Some were newly well-known but senior in age, such as Matori Abdul Djalil of the National Awakening Party. Celebrated names who had been around for long but were muzzled by the New Order for example by incarceration were there, too, like A.M. Fatwa of the National Mandate Party. There were also the likes of Sri Bintang Pamungkas who was jailed by Suharto out of political dissent but utterly failed to get a place at all in the new era; he was over 40.

In 2001, just for an example, Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti became the minister for economic and financial matters for Megawati's Cabinet; he was a student activist - of 1966.

So you see the awkward dance upon this precipice, my generation's. Whether they initiated the Reform or not, they didn't get the strategic posts for determining which way this republic is to go to.

In 1966 after the students retreated to resume their formal schooling and the Army took over everything and Suharto was erecting his dinasty a lot of the former streetmarchers were subjects of the same fate. But it was a bit kinder, destiny that year; a few got some power. Former student activist Cosmas Batubara, for instance, was to remain near Suharto for years to come. But not 1998. Not immediately such gains were gotten by the people of their late twenties or early thirties.

Suharto had been President for an unbelievably long time; he had along the way collected personal and political foes. These enemies grew older with Suharto and his regime, never got any chance to take over the reign from him; now after the Reform it looks like some of them were quick enough to get prioritized.

But people like FT, in my opinion, would scarcely get elevated to power any given time. These radical and revolutionary activists are, in all human history, to be the pioneers to open frontiers, never tenants of the settlement. His peak of achievement is to stay mythical for generations to come.

I can't talk about the agrarian of my generation,. My location is for one thing urban, access to mass-media is a part of daily life, minimum formal education is High School, jobs tend to sway towards the non-manual for the ones with higher diplomas and both white-collar and manual labor for the rest. So here are artists, teachers, managers, bus and taxi drivers, salespersons, homemakers, officials, enterpreneurs, programmers, car dealers, and so on. No landlord, farmer, fisher, and such.

Now from this devotion to the non-heroic enclave we can't give you anything from the storm's eye. We were silent partners (to some we were even the objects which the Reform was to inflict improvement of and for); we were outsiders in a strict sense (nobody was an outsider in the Reform, I believe; everyone takes sides). Yet from here we had the bird's eye view of the twister and the trails it left behind.

Politics based on the actors' age is stupid; but if we are to see it from this perspective then I'd say at least my generation doesn't get to be responsible for the mess we are living in today after the Reform. The fault always belongs to the people who are old enough to know worst. :-P

The Indonesian
(Un)Armed Forces

Email, reply to Ryan Kane, 2002

"Habibie's naval junk": See my Planet Loco, Indonesian history, p. xxxii. In 1994 Habibie was only the Minister of Technology in Suharto's Cabinet, and this purchase which was beyond his job-description caused a violent storm. The Navy only clenched its teeth in disgust but said nothing; yet the Minister of Finance refused to pay for the rickety ships nobody else but Habibie would ever have thought to equip a Navy with. They were sold very expensively by the Germans, too, which initially only would send them to the junkyard (sic.) The thing had killed three prestigious Indonesian newsbearers, closed down by Suharto in his effort to defend Habibie. In 1998 this favorite Golden Boy of his became President.

George Aditjondro: Indonesian scholar, got to live and work in 'exile' (starting with Australia) during the late years of the New Order in the nineties because of his continuous production of such things as the statistics of deaths in East Timor which he believably said was the Army's doing.

Xanana Gusmao: Commander of the Timorese guerrillas, now the first President of the Republic of Timor Leste c. 2002.

"Civilian Ministers of Defense": President Wahid's Prof.Dr. Juwono Sudarsono is an expert in foreign affairs, a (of course) university professor and author. President Megawati's Matori Abdul Djalil is a pure politician coming from a party's chunk of officials.

IMET: International Military Education Training, conducted by the U.S. Armed Forces, admitting military officers worldwide.

• Click here for the history of Indonesian military.

For decades the list of the Indonesian citizens' enemies was like this:

#1: The Police Force
#2: The Army
#3: Probable alliance of all the Armed Forces.

A cruel irony that the bullets were gotten by students and all rather than for instance Australia. The war all these years was between the civilians and the licensed to kill. That's why the issue is significant here in this republic, whether the President comes from the flock that knows how to install a machine-gun or not.

Of all the Armed Forces, I think the Marine gets the respect and awe just it deserves, from the civilians. The men with the violet berets were the only ones the politicians could resort to get help from during the scariest days of Reform when cops and soldiers were beaten senseless by the civilian urban mobs. They didn't do so to the Mariners. Instead they heeded their pleas to disband and go home. When donning the Police and Army uniforms or even looking like one belonged to those twin bodies of the armed was a dangerous thing those days, only the Marine could patrol the streets.

But even they are not decently impressive in terms of combat. The Indonesian Navy is even worse. Anyone could scarcely patronize the territorial sovereignty on 113 battleships which are deemed 'functionable' only in the terms of 'able to get away from the dock without immediately sinking'! Even when we are slimmer and shorter than ever with the loss of East Timor and probably also West Papua and Aceh, the previously 13,677 islands-long area of maritime patrol to circle is still way too wide for the poor Navy. Admiral Bernard Kent Sondakh grimly said to the congregation of parliamentarian sedentary mammals that he is profesionally grieving. As much as he is with the Armed Forces' determination to stay as far away from big budgets as possible in this crisis, his Navy can't get busy being professional with this sort of lack of everything - what do you call a Navy which doesn't have ships?

You remember 1994 when B.J. Habibie bought Admiral Sondakh's Navy some East German junk. Now among the 113 ships including the ones Habibie forced on them only eight are under 10 year-old, said the Admiral; a great chunk of them are older than I am and as 'young' as F's wife who has started to reap cellulites even before your first sexual initiation. Among the detailed report Sondakh delivered was the factual condition of a couple of German U-209 submarines which sounded like somebody's grandpa; a 1967 Dutch Van Speijk ship which reminded me of Ethiopian famine; Harpoon missiles which would make Osama bin Laden die laughing. This armada is obviously to defend our waters - 80% of the whole thing called 'Indonesia', mind you - on virtually nothing but museum items.

Now the Air Force.....What Air Force?

This particular branch of the armed is hardly seen except in the celebration of the Armed Forces Day (October 5th). That day, some F-16 are heard as flying across the clear blue sky - so fast that no one can actually testify of having seen them. Then a number of nondescript flying objects probably made in the likes of the late Czechoslovakia appear, emitting colorful smoke to entertain the Generals and the civilian officials below. The Air Force Chief, Admiral Chappy Hakim, told the parliament that his personnels' readiness to defend this country from Osama bin Laden and George Bush Junior alike is "Under 50%" - he has around 89 combat planes in seven squadrons, among which only 30 could take off like normal war planes. He's in charge of 16 units of defense radars, only 11 are operable. He has absolutely no early warning radars and ground control interception - C-130 Hercules carriers can only take care of the dropping off soldiers into one trouble spot at a time. All in all, aircrafts under the Admiral are 222 planes for all purposes, only 93 can fly.

This is horror even for the adamant military-haters. We are virtually naked above the ground and around the waters!

It was none other than Billy Jefferson Clinton who stopped selling killing devices to the Indonesian Armed Forces in 1993, after Al Gore got really perplexed witnessing the Army killing East Timorese civilians in the end of 1991.

The Timorese had never wanted to be Indonesians to begin with, after the area was dragged into the realm as the 27th province in the second half of 1970's. We, though, couldn't understand why and didn't want to know, only Jakarta kept sending arsenal to the worn-out soldiers who were ordered to enforce what was thought of as law and order at whatever cost.

Even the most patriotic of Indonesians, and the most zealous missionary of the universal Human Rights, ought not whitewash the Indonesian Army stationed in East Timor - it is largely valid, to say that mysteriously the population of East Timor had declined so sharply since they were made Indonesian - George Aditjondro's statistics really freaked me (and everyone else) out; in twenty years virtually half of Timorese had met their violent end and the remaining civilians lived in fear and hatred and misery in general. But 'the Army' is a mechanical killing machine and 'the Army' is individual soldiers who for some reasons had chosen or made to choose this hazardous profession (traditionally Indonesian rural youth who didn't have the means to acquire higher education and wasn't equipped with luck and such to enter other businesses went to join the military for the household kitchen's sake). I am not friends with, but in passing know, one of such soldiers previously put on duty in East Timor. He's the husband of X, who is M's colleague at work. He's a loud Javanese, a devout Muslim, a keeper of several dozens of parakeets.

He cursed every day of his Timorese assignment, away from the family and everything he's familiar with, and the most ridiculous of all according to him was that he got to go on patrol fully armed as if Indonesia was at war - while these Timorese were Indonesians, right? Or were they? Of course the Xanana Gusmao guerrilla fighters fired at his hummer - but this soldier thought if he were them then he would have done the same thing.

"I don't understand it," he said; "They are different from us in every way. They are Catholics. They speak Portuguese. They have Portuguese names. They have darker skin, their houses are not like ours, they have their own tradition and all. They want independence - why couldn't we let them have it?"

A very simplistic mode of reasoning - but devastatingly sounds so commonsensical.

I admit that it's so easy for a Javanese to fall down on the slippery road of being a democrat by an everpresent, latent tendency to see other ethnicities as beneath his or hers. But in this social blemish that we will need a very long time to completely vanguish there is the habit of quickly spotting irreconcilable differences. The Timorese clearly felt closer, and painfully to us warmer, to the former colonists of their region, the Portuguese, than to the Indonesians. From Jakarta this must have been dimly perceived but instantly dismissed - pride and some murky vested interests would have given it no way to get through to the conscience. From just a few gunshots away, the soldiers in the area saw the thing as it was.

"If they have oil," he said, "It's their oil, right?"

Wrong. Jakarta felt that for the sake of justice Aceh shouldn't be alone in being exploited by the Exxon Mobil.

Chronic discontentment like the soldier's was a part of the reasons why some of them became monsters; they turned their personal wrath towards the Timorese, Acehnese, and so on, who populated the land they didn't want to go to in the first place. Some others really shared the Jakartanese politicians' view of the matter. Some were more or less unthinking robots who only knew to pull the trigger upon the sergeant's order. Some were probably simply bad; bloodthirst and so on. The composition is as old as time. Among the fascist people of the Naziland, for instance, they were like these, too.

But as much as I fear and loathe the Army like most Indonesians do, I refuse to see them always as a huge organisation and nothing else - even though their own nature strongly inspired us to do so.

They are, above all, people.

People can be good or bad or in-between and shift poles according to the circumstance.

Corporal X is in-between with a tendency to sway to the good. I won't condemn him. He is, and so many soldiers sent to the areas of local unrest, a victim of the stupid expansionist policy bred in some Jakartanese air-conditioned disinfected rooms away and aloof from the actual combats out there conducted on its name.

In 1999, Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat) had turned the U.S. Congress against military aid in any sort to Indonesia - the Leahy Amendment add more weight of pressure on the Indonesian government to make the military to behave. In the same year President B.J. Habibie gave the Timorese a referendum. In 2000 Indonesia lost East Timor for good. In 2002 it is an independent nation on its way towards a separate future from ours.

Now Bush Junior is reportedly trying to talk the Congress into revising the non-aid policy a little bit; at least to give the Indonesian Armed Forces some fund to finance what they cryptically call 'command and control' activities - such as buying newer computers. The Indonesian Intelligence Agency had detained a Kuwaiti named Omar al-Faruq, suspected to be one of the al-Qaeda military trainers, and deported him not to his own country but to the USA - I guess it's plain to see that we are trying to mend the image in accordance to Bush's anti-terrorism fanfare. Our last two Ministers of Defense are civilians. The Armed Forces looks better to me now than ever. The spokesperson for them, Major-General Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, admitted that the Armed Forces doesn't have what it takes yet to handle terrorism, and meekly applied to the USA. All these might have hurt the hardliners within - but maybe we really have no choice. Bush would, so the rumor goes, let the Indonesian officers fly westward again to attend the IMET. He loves to envision an Indonesian Armed Forces which business is non-combatant.

Despite the lack of backup, I really hope it is possible to see soldiers as human beings - one day perhaps Indonesia will recover from this life-long disgust of the military-persons and get some better peace.

Our Parliament, meanwhile, doesn't care about any such a thing; they just want the military to stay away from politics and they have gotten that; now all that occupies their minds is just the 2004 election and how to secure the chair that has been supporting their butts.