“Taking Tea with the Dead” — the working title of the book I’m not quite getting around to writing — was taken from an experience over 20 years ago, when I was invited in to meet the grandmother of some random villager in Sumba. I was a little put out, on being introduced to Granny, to find that she had died the day before. I picked this piece of exotica as my working title because I was pretty sure that I would find, revisiting these parts two decades later, that such esoteric traditions would have disappeared. Tea with the Dead would surely have died, swept out of Indonesia on a homogenising wave of modernisation. The title would reflect the changes in the country, and perhaps, in a self-centred sort of way, my nostalgia for something that was no more.
Not at all. When I went to visit my friend Mama Bobo the other day to arrange our outing to the pasola jousting, she was in a tizz. Her sister-in-law had died the night before. Now she had to scrape together weavings, pigs, buffalo and endless supplies of betel nut to contribute to the week of feasting that precedes the funeral. Of course I must come along (this would entail some scraping together of my own, for every guest must pay tribute). And so, 22 years after I first took tea with a dead Granny, I repeated the ritual. Which rather calls in to question that homogenising wave of modernisation. Though Granny slept through it, the remainder of her terrestrial existence was quite bloody. For the less squeamish readers there will be more, much more, in the book. Whatever it is called.
"Stop violence": 10 years in jail for carrying a traditional weapon
“Like throwing salt into the sea” : an Indonesian expression for futile activity. Called to mind by this banner at the airport in West Sumba. “Stop Violence!” proclaims the banner. It reminds us that, under a 1951 law, we can be jailed for 10 years for carrying sharp weapons without a permit. On the right of the banner, an illustration of some of the sharp weapons in question.
Enforcement of this law would depopulate the island. No self-respecting man in West Sumba is without one of these parangs; they are a core element of ceremonial dress, and in the last week I’ve seen them used to slaughter pigs, skin a horse, clear land, prune trees, whittle musical instruments, even sharpen a pencil.
But they are also used to make trouble. The first time I arrived at this same airport, Tambolaka, a local doctor gleefully showed me a photo on his hand phone of a body hacked up in the market in Waikabubak, West Sumba’s main town. “Look, that’s his hand, lying over there…” Local ceremonies in which conflict is ritualised — the pajura group boxing contest, held on a beach by the light of the moon, the pasola jousting war, which sees youngsters on galloping horseback sling spears at one another — sometimes turn nasty. At both of these ceremonies last week, young men were barred from carrying their parangs. Just as well; the Wanokaka pasola degenerated into a glorious riot of chest-puffing and stone-throwing. A few people and a police car got badly bruised, nothing more, but had the young bloods had their parangs on them it might have been nastier. Their elders, including Bpk Petrus, pictured below, still get away with wearing their weapons whenever they please. But it does raise something of a problem in areas of Indonesia where the carrying and use of potentially dangerous weapons is common. The police can hardly enforce the law selectively, and if they try to enforce it universally, their efforts will be slashed down by the custodians of culture as well as by the farmers and labourers who rely on their parangs for tasks large and small.
A statue outside a health centre in Enarotali, in Indonesian Papua
Reading the newspapers in cities across Papua, I cannot help but notice the full-colour ads for penis extensions. In only half an hour, with no invasive anything, men can see their organs grow, thicken, harden, for ever. The ads are explicit about the results, down to the last half centimetre; clients can choose both the length and girth of their organ, up to 20 cm by 6 cm (the more modest promise diameters of just 5.5). All of this with just some magic oil and a few prayers, guaranteed free of side effects. The “Specialists in Vital Organs” promise services for women, too, tightening up our fannies “until you are like a maiden again”. And for both sexes, they will pray away our sexually transmitted infections.
Why the obsession with sex organs, and why especially in Papua? Are people encouraged by the blatantly erotic sculptures that are common in these parts? Do migrants from other parts of Indonesia feel inadequate on arrival in Papua, or do they feel the magic will be especially potent in the nether regions of the nation? And isn’t it mildly ironic that all of the people offering their dick-swelling charms claim to be from Banten in western Java, where mystics sometimes break their fasts by eating light-bulbs? They offer other mystical services too: tying down your spouse, implanting a protective aura, ensuring you get promoted or elected. But most of their force is expended on delivering: “What other people only promise, we prove with results that are Large and Long”.
It turns out that the penis obsession is not, in fact, confined to the tens of thousands of immigrants from the rest of Indonesia who have been sucked east by Papua’s booming economy. I learned this when I asked a Papuan nurse in one of the province’s largest hospitals what brought men to outpatient services. Three things, he said: injuries resulting from violent fights, injuries resulting from traffic accidents, and prison. Prison? Do people get sick in prison? “No, that’s the penis stuff.” Prisoners, Papuans and others, are operating on one another’s members — inserting ball bearings and biro parts, threading hair through the urethra. A doctor friend who ran an STI clinic in Papua for many years says he saw a lot of penises embellished with horse hair, but the nurse said since that’s in short supply in prison people weave ornaments from their own locks. Not surprisingly, many of these go septic, hence the hospital visits.
My doctor friend blames the porn industry for the penis-plumping craze. “People watch these porn films where everyone has a giant dick, and they begin to think that that’s the norm.” Certainly porn films are enough of a norm in Papua to have their own nickname: “film o-ya”. The name derives from the script, which in many films does not go much beyond the repetitive groaning of “Oh yah!, Oh yaaaaaah! Oh yaaaaaaaaah!
A more serious aside: data newly released by the Indonesian Ministry of Health show that one in four of the Papuan women who are selling sex to their men-folk on the streets of the Papuan highland town of Wamena are infected with HIV, while well over half have another STI. Perhaps because condoms don’t fit snugly over the horsehair, three in four of these infected highland women are not using protection with their partners.
When a senior Papuan politician said recently that Papua was not ready for democracy I was mildly shocked. “The people are not mature yet, neither are the political elite. They are not ready to accept defeat, which results in them resorting to violence. Organizers of elections in the regencies are terrorized and intimidated. People are prone anarchic acts,” Yop Kagoya, the deputy speaker of Papua legislative council,told the Jakarta Post.
There’s no shortage of vociferous calls for self-determination for Indonesia’s easternmost region. But the more one reads the papers here, the more one tends to agree that if Papuan politicians and voters really want to determine their own future, inside our outside of the embrace of Indonesia, they have a bit of growing up to do. In Tolikara district, elections that have already been postponed for two years were put off again this month as running battles broke out between supporters of different candidates. Today’s paper reported 46 people killed in the last couple of weeks; the death toll in Puncak in recent months has been even higher. When I heard that the Vice Bupati (Vice Regent, i.e. Number Two in government) in Wamena, the biggest city in the populous highlands of Papua had been wounded by an arrow and his adjutant killed, I assumed they were attacked by political opponents. (In fact, they were trying to put a stop to a brawl that began with an unpaid motorcycle taxi fare, and turned in to a riot several hundred strong.)
Looking for news about the Wamena incident, I came across the full-page ad pictured above. It was taken out by the Bupati of Teluk Wondama district, Albert Torey. He’s apologising to the graduates of a local institute of higher education for calling them all “gutter-snipes” (more specifically, he said they had crawled out of the Konto river, a stinking, garbage-strewn drainage canal in the West Papua provincial capital of Manokwari). His comment was apparently prompted by his disgust with his running-mate, the Vice Bupati, who is a graduate of the school. The Vice-Bupati ran the shop in Teluk Wondama for the eight months that the good Mr. Torey spent in rehab for drug use –he and his wife were caught taking meta-amphetamines last April. According to local journalists I happened to gossip with in a cafe in Manokwari, Mr Torey (now comfortably back in office) is snarky because his deputy did such a good job when he was away. Nothing like a bit of good governance to make your superiors uncomfortable.
The college was so upset by the gutter-snipe comment that it threatened to sue for defamation unless the Bupati printed an apology. This is a slightly more grown-up way of dealing with conflict than reaching for the bows and arrows, but it still smacks of kids fighting in the sand-pit. Needless to say, the constant squabbling and even outright violence that appear to be the hallmark of Papuan politics are a drag on development. As much out of habit as anything, Papuan voters still tend to blame development failures on the wicked government in Jakarta. But sooner or later they are going to have to take a closer look at their own leaders, and indeed their own behaviour, and ask themselves what role they play in holding back development in one of Asia’s richest territories.
West Papua will lead the fight against corruption, drugs, and HIV/AIDS
After another giant geographic leap (roughly the equivalent of London to Tehran) I find myself in Manokwari, West Papua. Tanah Papua, Indonesia’s eastern extremity, has the country’s highest rates of HIV, and also its highest levels of stigma. Which makes me wonder who came up with this commitment, made on an ageing poster that has pride of place outside the provincial Governor’s office. It declares:
The West Papua government will lead the fight against:
KKN (Corruption, Collusion and Nepotism)
Narcotics and illegal drugs
HIV/AIDS
Though hopeful donors have been pushing voluntary testing and counselling clinics on Papua for years, all the clinics I’ve visited in the last week report that the truly voluntary “I’ll just go along and see whether I’m infected” walk-in client is rare. Most are referred to the clinics by health staff who see signs and symptoms of AIDS — often, in other words, after people have been walking around with HIV for a decade or so. Why don’t more people want to get tested? Perhaps in part because we still tell people AIDS can’t be cured. But also because we are equating HIV with distinctly undesirable things like corruption and illegal drugs. It brings us back to the eternal prevention dilemma. We want people to think HIV is undesirable, because we want them to protect themselves from infection. But we also want to stop treating it like some horrid plague which deserves to be feared (and financed) more than any other inconvenient, chronic, treatable disease.
If you’ve been reading this blog much, you’ll have gathered that the parallel with corruption is not actually so far off for Indonesia, in that corruption is also an undesirable, inconvenient and chronic disease. At least HIV is treatable.
A new mosque being built in the centre of Ambon, a Christian-majority city that often sees outbreaks of religious violence
One of the mysteries of life in Indonesia is how the government and the security forces allow absolute chaos, sometimes even mass murder, to develop in totally predictable ways. As groups such as the Islamic Defenders Front (Front Pembela Islam or FPI in Indonesian) move around the country beating up hookers and inciting violence against non-Moslems, the President and his ministers play Three Monkeys — see no evil, hear no evil, and therefore never have to speak about any evil. Their dereliction of duty is such that the Dayak tribe in Kalimantan has finally taken matters into its own hands, taking over the airport’s runway to prevent FPI leaders getting off a plane to sow their poison. (As an aside, the manager of a large nightclub in north Jakarta told me a while ago that she pays the FPI substantial “protection” money.They’ve exchanged their leather jackets for white robes, she said, but it’s the same old thugs.)
Lest we forget: way back in 1999, thousands of frenzied young men from the overcrowded Islamic heartland of East Java shipped out to predominantly Christian Ambon to support their brothers in a largely trumped-up fight about supposed religious insults. This group, known as Laskar Jihad, something of a sister organisation to FPI, did not hide their intentions and they apparently didn’t need to; some of the boatloads of rabid jihadis were waved off by government ministers keen to boost their ratings with Moslem voters. The result was a three year pogrom which spread across the eastern province of Maluku, in which 9,000 people are thought to have died. Communities were torn apart, previously mixed areas were taken over by a single religious group, and the was a spate of symbolic dick-wagging, expressed mostly through religious architecture, that persists to this day. The photo above is of a gargantuan mosque being built in the very heart of formerly Christian Ambon; huge churches are springing too, though only in subsections of the city where Christians have kept their strongholds.
The conflict in Maluku was shut down after 9/11, as international tolerance for religious (and particularly Islamic) extremism fell well below zero. This rather suggests that if the security forces did want to prevent these conflicts, which tend to be massively lucrative for the police and the army, they could. And indeed there’s some evidence that their swift action when I was in the region in November/December pre-empted a potentially bloody Christmas. But the scars of the conflict in Maluku are still deeply felt. Kalimantan, too, has its scars; at about the time Laskar Jihad was wreaking havoc in Maluku, the Dyaks, a tribe known in part for their propensity to cut the heads off their enemies, were in bloody battle with settlers from Madura. Their refusal to host the bigwigs of FPI suggests they’d like to pre-empt more unnecessary conflict. FPI is not Laskar Jihad — the latter supposedly disbanded after the Bali bombings in 2002. But its leaders were inciting FPI members to violent action in Maluku as recently as last September. “We’ve issued an edict to all FPI members throughout the nation to get ready to leave for Ambon to defend Moslems” the FPI’s Secretary General Muhammad Shabri Lubishe told the Voice of al-Islam website. (The story rated 236 Facebook “Likes”.)
Some commentators see the Dayak’s action as a turning point in Indonesia’s tolerance for groups that provoke violence. I’m not so sure. When the middle class intellectuals of Jakarta drew strength from the Dayaks and staged a protest against FPI in central Jakarta, the police turned pussy. They asked protesters to disband because they had reports that FPI were on the way and they couldn’t guarantee the safety of protesters. The response of Indonesia’s spineless president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is even less encouraging. “Why should others be allowed to carry out their activities while our brothers in the FPI are forbidden?,” he asked journalists at a press conference. Because it’s a thuggish organisation which burns down buildings and injures and kills individuals to stop them doing completely legal things such as selling alcohol and running nightclubs, perhaps?
Stop Money Politic...! This poster from the elections commission in East Aceh, Indonesia, has the thought bubble: "Won't he have to use corruption to get back the money he's spent?"
It’s local election season in many areas of Indonesia. That means posters of well-fed used car salesmen promising vaguely to fight corruption and enrich the “rakyat”, the majority of Indonesians who live from day to day or month to month. It also means that towns and villages are filled with “Tim Sukses” — swarms of volunteers who try to get the vote out for their candidate, often with the help of envelopes of cash.
Here’s my question: why does money politics work? I put the question in a slightly more direct form to someone in Aceh who was cross because she’d been offered only 100,000 rupiah — less than US$ 11 — for her vote. “I got that in 2006, and there are more candidates this time, all of them making offers. Why would I give away my vote for just 100,000?” Why, I asked her, didn’t she just take 100,000 from all of the candidates, and then vote the way she would have voted anyway? She looked shocked. “If I’ve promised my vote, I have to deliver my vote!” In other words, money politics works because enough people are honest in their corruption.
As this poster from the election oversight commission in the East Aceh town of Langsa suggests, the vast spending on campaigns, including vote-buying, leads to a cycle of corruption. Elected leaders resort to graft just to get back the cash they’ve spent. Sometimes, the payback is in contracts, not cash. But every which way, it means public money is badly spent. This report from the World Bank gives a pretty clear picture of how it all works. It refers to the last round of elections in Aceh, the rich Westernmost province of Indonesia that teeters perpetually on the brink of independence, but — pace the separatists — there’s virtually nothing in it that is not just as true of the rest of Indonesia.
The exception is wrapped up in the final point about voter behaviour: intimidation. In Aceh, people are talking about “Terror Politics” as well as “Money Politics”. Last week I made a giant leap from the tuna fishing grounds by the Philippine border to the far West of Indonesia to witness the local election campaign in Aceh. I didn’t see it because the elections have been postponed for the third time, in part because the fractious former separatists, unhappy with the current governor who is also a former separatist, have been obliquely threatening unrest if Jakarta doesn’t roll over and do everything it can to undermine the incumbent. I can’t say that it is their camp, Partai Aceh, that was behind the drive-by shooting at the house of the Governor’s Tim Sukses head last week. But party activists in the local coffee shop were not denying it when I reflected that a postponed election increased their chances of getting “their man” — a crusty old soul who has spent much of his adult life in exile in Sweden — elected. If this all sounds complicated, it is (there’s a good run-down of the issues from the International Crisis Group and more in Inside Indonesia).
According to a former candidate for mayor in Langsa, home to the anti-money politics poster pictures above, terror Politics is the order of the day, at least in rural areas. “If you stay in a village for a week before the elections, I guarantee you’ll get a knock on the door in the middle of the night.” In an area where a knock on the door at night meant near certain death for over 15 years, either at the hands of a shadowy group of thugs and rebels who eventually gelled into Partai Aceh, or at the hands of the Indonesian army that fought to suppress them, it’s pretty persuasive. Even more persuasive, perhaps, than 100,000 rupiah.
Indonesia is mobile-phone mad. People who live in villages with no phone coverage and no electricity all have mobile phones “in case I go to town”. Motorbike taxis drivers, fishermen, primary school kids, trash-pickers — all have mobile phones. I regularly get e-mails from sex workers “sent from my Blackberry”. Indeed in the realm of smartphones, Blackberry is king, with 42% market share. In fact Blackberries are so popular that a couple of months ago a scrum for discounts on a new model left 90 people unconscious and a couple with broken legs. But, at around US$500, plenty of people can’t afford the real thing. And since trademark piracy is second only to tax evasion as a national sport both here and in China, where most cheap knock-offs are made, there are plenty of next-bests. Above, my favourite so far, spotted in Tahuna, in the Sangihe islands off northeast Sulawesi and available for around US$ 30.
A Chinese ship waits to carry raw nickel out of Weda Bay
Drifting out of the world of HIV, I’ve been able to get away from the knee-jerk demonisation of Big Pharma (often by people who are only too happy to extend their lives by taking their Truvada as long as someone else pays for it). But I’ve re-discovered another Public Enemy Number 1: Big Mining. Just to be clear, I’m under no illusion that Rio Tinto is all sweetness and light and contributing to human welfare, any more than Pfizer is. Both are out to rake in as much cash as they can for their shareholders by doing what they do best; in the case of Rio Tinto, sucking riches out of the earth and selling them to people who turn them into things that we all want and use daily. No amount of support for local communities, replanting of mined areas, investment in the workforce that we hear about from the Corporate Social Responsibility department can disguise the naked demands of the bottom line.
But that doesn’t mean that the corporate social responsibility stuff doesn’t exist. It may exist only to brush up the public image of Big Bad Mining. It may exist out of enlightened self-interest; corporations are increasingly aware that ignoring the needs of the local population (or even their demands, which is not always the same thing) can undermine their whole enterprise. We’ve seen a particularly vicious example in Indonesia this week; a gold mining licence has been retracted, but only after rioting locals burned the local Bupati’s office to the ground. Australian Arc Exploration, which began exploratory mining in Sumbawa in November, is not exactly at the forefront of Corporate Social Responsibility, judging from its website. But the very fact that corporate social responsibility exists among the larger corporates is something to celebrate as a step forward from the bad old days when mining companies working hand in hand with government officials didn’t even have to pretend to care for the environment, much less for humans.
I find it deeply ironic, however, that the companies that do the most to try and accommodate local needs and to mitigate the inevitable damage done by opening up the earth and digging out its contents are the very ones most often and most volubly targeted by the professional anti-mining protest groups (in Indonesia led by the respected environmental NGO Walhi). It seems that it is easiest to go after the large international corporations that do actually have a smattering of conscience about the consequences of mining, not least because those are the ones that are also making a long-term investment that is by definition tied to a specific location and community. The fly-by-night companies (these days often Chinese) referred to in Indonesia as “Scratch and Runs” are considered so beyond the pale that they get off virtually scott free.
I saw this recently in central Halmahera, a mineral-rich but little developed area of the eastern province of Maluku. The French firm Eramet, in partnership with Japan’s Mitsubishi, has a license to develop a vast nickel mine in Weda Bay. I really mean vast; the permit covers over 72,000 hectares of land, most of it forest. In compliance with the terms of their license, and also because they have asked for financial guarantees from the World Bank family MIGA facility, Weda Bay Nickel has commissioned passels of reports on environmental, social, health, cultural and other impacts, and has committed to measures to minimise the negative impacts in most of these areas. This has not stopped the mining protest groups from filing complaints and staging demos, one of which I witnessed while in the provincial capital, Ternate. The spontaneous demo by students and concerned citizens managed to find the cash to hire a large truck with a booming sound system, as well as to print up banners and posters. I have no doubt that the presence of these groups will keep Weda Bay Nickel on its toes, will make them pay more attention to the environment, will maybe even increase their investment in education and health facilities in the local communities. But these same protest groups have said next to nothing about Weda Bay Nickel’s neighbours, the Chinese owned Tekindo Energi. Unlike Weda Bay Nickel, which is building a port and investing in a processing plant which will create thousands of jobs locally, Tekindo is piling raw nickel on to boats and spiriting it off to China as fast as it possibly can, before a moratorium on exports of raw nickel comes into effect in 2014. Meanwhile, as far as anyone working locally can tell, it is doing virtually nothing to minimise the damage it is doing to the environment. Six villages downstream from the Tekindo site say they can no longer draw drinking water from the river because it is now yellow with sediment, the run-off from the mining process.
Perhaps NGOs ignore the likes of Tekindo because they will be gone soon, where as Weda Bay Nickel is here to stay. But the damage Tekindo is doing may well be permanent. Weda Bay has some of the finest, if least known, diving in Indonesia, perhaps anywhere in the world. One professional underwater photographer commented recently that five out of the 10 best dives of his life were during his four days in Weda Bay. The only dive resort for miles around is in regular contact with Weda Bay Nickel engineers about their plans for waste disposal, and has no concerns that the bay will be affected. But if nothing is done soon about Tekindo’s run-off, the sediment will settle on the bay’s glorious corals and kill them. That would also kill the prospect for eco-tourism, an obvious alternative to mining as a source of long-term employment for people in Halmahera. When I asked people locally why they weren’t protesting about Tekindo instead of (or as well as) Weda Bay Nickel, they got very shruggy. “Chinese companies, they are all shits, what’s the point?” It seems that no-one is tackling Tekindo precisely because they are so irresponsible.
The more extreme activists who are trying to oust Weda Bay Nickel and similar enterprises owned by large Western corporations (which, for all their faults, have fairly rigorous policies on environmental regeneration and community protection) should be careful what they wish for. The most likely consequence is not no mining, but more mining by small, completely irresponsible companies prepared to pay large bribes to local officials for licences over which there is no oversight.
It’s party season here in Weda, a newly-bustling town on the east coast of Halmahera island. There are parties and Parties, and the confusion of the two are a pretty good illustration of life in Indonesia’s districts, which are often run very much as personal fiefdoms of the Bupati, or regent.
The Bupati is the elected head of the local government. He (it usually is a he) runs an executive that is supposedly held to account by the local parliament, the DPRD. But the Bupati is usually also the local head of the strongest political Party, which means he controls the fortunes of many parliamentarians — that slightly cramps their syle in holding him to account, then. He’s also often the largest client for one of Indonesia’s most important local industries, the printers of giant banners. The Bupati planting trees, the Bupati eating local staple foods, the Bupati shaking hands with the President. And of course, the Bupati in the colours of his political Party.
Here in Halamahera Tenggah, that colour is red. The Bupati, now entering the fifth and final year of his first term, belongs to PDIP, the Party headed by former President Megawati Soekarnoputri. I happen to arrive on Sunday, PDIP’s birthday. The town is painted red, quite literally. And giant banners hang from every lamppost, flags flutter high above the mosque, the funfair, the marketplace, even the office of the rival Democrat Party. And by early afternoon, virtually all of Weda’s residents are also wearing red – mostly polo shirts declaring their fervent support for Al Yasin Ali, aka Aba Acim. They flood onto the streets, following a (surprisingly good) marching band twirling the red flags of the PDIP, ahead of a motorcade of honking, screeching, gyrating citizens. They shout for the re-election of the man who brought the seat of local government to this, his home town, four years ago. With his rule came paved roads, better transport to other areas of the province, better phone coverage, and some very flash new government buildings, all kept afloat on a sea of cash the like of which this former backwater has never seen. As they go past his house the local citizenry fight to shake his hand; he grins and grips, dispensing general bonhomie. Elsewhere in the district he is said to give out minimg contracts illegally, to violate the zoning regulations made by his own administration and to turn a blind eye to blatantly illegal logging. But let’s not ruin the mood.
This Party party is squeezed between three others. On Friday and Saturday, the Bupati spent “billions” of rupiah (according to the local papers) hosting some 7,000 guests at the back-to-back weddings of two of his daughters. I missed those parties, but what I saw of the left-overs alone would keep some of the islands I’ve visited fed for several weeks. Around the huge tented area where the ceremonies took place are more giant banners — very much larger than life sized photos of the happy couples, but also photos of the Bupati and his wife on holiday, the Bupati in his uniform of office, the Bupati with a list of the achievements of his first four years in office. All, needless to say, topped with huge PDIP Party banners hoisted in preparation for Sunday’s Party party. The fact that the wedding ceremonies revived some of the lost customs of the district surely justified subsidising them with public funds.
Monday, quite by chance (??), was the fourth birthday of the move of the local government to Weda. So another whole round of ceremonies, presided over by the Bupati. During which, along with traditional dances, a reading of Pancasila (the five principles upon which the Indonesian state is supposed to be based), a short history of the district and more marching bands, we heard at least four separate demands that we support the Bupati for a further 5 year term in elections due mid-year. Each in the local language, Indonesian and (GoogleTranslate) English (about which they might have learned their lesson from the recent Malaysia experience). But wait, this is a state occasion, funded out of the public purse, not a political rally. Or is it?
In this part of Indonesia, small Sultanates for centuries enjoyed large spheres of influence. The present system is an advance in that it allows people to choose their Sultans. But patterns of patronage, the confusion of government, Party and private interests and the very likely confusion of government, Party and private funds show that personal fiefdoms still dominate government in Indonesia.
