Indonesia

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 that their country was a project, but Reid presents plenty of evidence here for its incompleteness. Anyone tempted to superficial judgments about the Aceh problem and what it means for Indonesia and the region would do well to read this book.

Many who have followed Indonesian politics have become increasingly dismayed at the failure of the reform movement that followed the political demise of President Suharto in 1998. The glass is not so much half full or empty; rather, it is cracked and leaking. Indonesia now has a democracy, of sorts, after a constitutional coup against the first elected president, Aburrahman Wahid, and the non-presidency of Megawati Sukarnoputri. In many other respects, Indonesia has regressed. The military is again a power in the state, human rights abuses have increased and there are now more political prisoners than in 1998, if mostly from Aceh and Papua. Similarly, the poor remain very poor, the rich and powerful are again such, and corruption is worse than ever.

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 that the East Timorese are Catholics while the Acehnese are Muslims. Many Australians, especially church activists, could feel something in common with oppressed fellow-Christians in a nearby territory.

Indonesia is a difficult place to write about, because of its inherent complexity and the contested views that surround it. And then there is the sheer time that it takes to get to know the place, or at least to begin to know it, or parts of it. No one book can definitively come to terms with Indonesia’s scattered geography and dozens of cultures, its aliran (streams of influence), religious factions, social strata, degrees of development and competing interests. For these reasons, few authors or even edited collections try their hand at Indonesia as such, usually preferring to focus on an aspect of its vast and fragmentary complexity. This has been particularly so in the post-Suharto period, not least with the plethora of edited volumes that have sought to explain rapidly changing events there.

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 if Indonesian politics is a mixture of Shakespearean tragedy, Javanese shadow play and gangster drama: Hamlet, Semar and The Godfather.

Works of Indonesian fiction, whether set in Indonesia or written by Indonesians, are still comparatively rare in Australia, and can therefore be difficult to read sensitively. In her collection of three novellas set in New Caledonia, Adelaide/Bandung and Bali, Melbourne writer Dewi Anggraeni attempts to explore the ground between cultures and the way people straddle cultures and come to an accommodation and understanding of each other. She is not always successful.