John Monfries

John Monfries reviews ‘Indonesia’s Secret War in Aceh’ by John Martinkus

November 2004, no. 266 • 01 November 2004

Why is it that Indonesia’s northernmost province has received so much less Australian attention than East Timor? Aceh is of course further away, and no claims are made about local people supposedly helping our soldiers during World War II. Another reason is the uniquely emotive issue of the deaths of the five Australian journalists in Timor in 1975. A suspicion arises that the main reason is tha ... (read more)

John Monfries reviews ‘An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra’ By Anthony Reid

May 2005, no. 271 • 01 May 2005

Professor Anthony Reid has added this volume on Sumatra, with special attention to Aceh, to his already huge corpus of publications about Indonesia. The book reveals that he remains master of the telling phrase. In this case, the phrase emerges, almost casually, when he tells us that since 1998 the ‘Indonesia project’ has been increasingly challenged. Indonesians might be startled to learn tha ... (read more)

John Monfries reviews 'Suharto: A Political Biography' by R.E. Elson

March 2002, no. 239 • 01 March 2002

Repressive despot, or enlightened reformer? What are we to make of Suharto, four years after his fall? Was his prolonged rule an inevitable outcome of the Indonesian political process and of the mistakes and chaos of the Sukarno years? Or was it an illegitimate and corrupt militaristic venture, which has now been replaced by a genuine democratic political system, whatever its flaws and bloody diss ... (read more)

John Monfries reviews 'The Hot Seat: Reflections on diplomacy from Stalin’s death to the Bali bombings' by Richard Woolcott

April 2003, no. 250 • 18 October 2022

One of the puzzles of Australia’s diplomatic service is the comparative lack of informative memoirs by senior diplomats. Of the sixteen heads of Foreign Affairs mentioned in this book, only three apart from Richard Woolcott – Alan Watt, Alan Renouf, and Peter Henderson – have written memoirs (although John Burton wrote much about international conflict management, and Stuart Harris – more ... (read more)

John Monfries reviews three books on Indonesian politics

December 2002-January 2003, no. 247 • 01 December 2002

Have the Bali Bombings completely changed our view of Indonesia? Although obviously not designed to do so, these three books provide necessary background on how such an atrocity might be possible in the near-anarchic circumstances of that country. They also give a wide-ranging and informative picture of the present state of Indonesia in all its chaos and uncertainty. They make sobering reading, as ... (read more)