Failing the people of Syria during Seven Years of Devastation and Dispossession
[Prefatory Note: What follows is a wide-ranging interview in November 2017 that that concentrates on the failure of the UN and the world to rescue the people of Syria by a timely and effective humanitarian intervention. The interview was conducted by a Turkish journalist, Salva Amor, and is to be published in a magazine, Causcasus International. The text of the interview has been slightly modified.]
A missed chance
- You previously referred to Syria as “an ideal case for humanitarian intervention” however, rather than becoming a prime example of positive humanitarian intervention it has turned into one of the greatest humanitarian crises with half of the country becoming refugees or internally displaced.
What turned such an Ideal case for humanitarian intervention into one of the worst humanitarian responses we have seen in recent times?
Answer: I do not recall this reference to Syria as ‘an ideal case,’ but I must have meant it in a hypothetical sense, that is, as if ‘humanitarian intervention’ was ever called for, it was in Syria, especially at the early stages of the conflict. And yet I am inclined to think that regime-changing intervention was at all stages a mission impossible. We should keep in mind that the record of actual successful instances of what is labeled as ‘humanitarian intervention’ has been dismal, and when successful the motivation was not predominantly humanitarian, but rather a confluence of strategic interests of one sort or another with a humanitarian challenge. In Syria the strategic interests were not sufficiently strong to justify the likely costs, especially in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sometimes, the intervention is a cover for non-humanitarian goals, as in Afghanistan (2002), Iraq (2003), and Libya (2011) and may be effective in attaining its immediate goals of regime change but is extremely costly from the perspective of humanitarianism if assessed from the perspective of prolonged violence, societal chaos, and human suffering.
And only marginally successful strategically given the resilience of territorial resistance and the pressure for long-term occupation if the original gains of intervention are to be preserved.
At other times, the humanitarian rationale is present, as in Syria, but there is no strategic justification of sufficient weight, and what is done by external actors or the UN is insufficient to control the outcome, and often ends up intensifying the scale of suffering endured by the population. In effect, humanitarian intervention rarely achieves a net benefit from the perspective of the population that is being supposedly rescued. Perhaps, Kosovo (1999) is the best recent case where an alleged humanitarian intervention enjoyed enough strategic value to be effective, and yet seems to have left the Kosovar population better off afterwards, although even Kosovo is not a clear case.
Failures & implications of inaction
- The humanitarian failures in Syria and for Syrian refugees in neighboring countries including Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and Iraq have had far-reaching implications for the EU with millions of refugees choosing to risk their lives in order to enter Europe causing the largest exodus since WWII.
Could the surge of refugees fleeing to Europe have been avoided had a more positive and organized humanitarian intervention taken place?
Answer: It is possible that had Syria possessed large oil reserves, the intervention against the Damascus regime would have been robust enough to topple the regime, and create stability before combat conditions prompted massive internal population displacements and gigantic refugee flows, including the European influx. In this sense, Libya with oil, did prompt such an intervention, although it was an easier undertaking, as the Qaddafi regime had much less popular support than did the Assad regime, and was less well equipped militarily and lacked regional allies. In Syria, because of regional and global geopolitical cleavages, the politics of intervention and counter-intervention was far more complicated, and inhibited potential anti-regime interveners from making large commitments. At the early stages of the conflict Turkey and the United States miscalculated the costs and scale of a successful intervention in Syria, supposing that an indirect and low level effort could be effective in achieving regime change, which misunderstood the conditions prevailing in Syria.
The best response
- In your experience, what would have been the ideal humanitarian response to the war in Syria? And who would have been best to implement it?
Answer: As my earlier responses hinted, there is no ideal response, and the current world order system is not reliably capable of handling humanitarian intervention in a situation such as existed in Syria. To have any chance of effectiveness would require entrusting the undertaking to one or more powerful states, but even then the situation that would follow, is highly uncertain. In a post-colonial setting, there is bound to be strong nationalist and territorial resistance to outside intervention and occupation, generally producing serious prolonged chaos. If the country is very small and can be overwhelmed (Granada, Panama) without counter-intervention the undertaking will sometimes work. Iraq serves as a clear example of an intervention that did rid the country of a brutal tyrant, but produced internal violence among competing regions, tribes, and generated extreme sectarian strife between Sunnis and Shiites, as well as a series of ethnic, tribal, and regional battles.
In a better governed world, which is far from existing, the UN would have acted robustly and with the support of the regional governments in the Middle East, the geopolitical actors (U.S. and Russia) would have not pursued their strategic agendas, and a politically neutral intervention would have created the conditions for a post-Assad democratic political transition, including imposing accountability for past crimes. Merely mentioning this desirable scenario is enough to reveal its utopian character. Especially in the Middle East, geopolitics of a regional and global scope badly distort all efforts to fashion a humanitarian response to repression and severe violations of human rights. In the background, but not far in the background, is the relevance of oil. The countries that have experienced massive interventions (Iraq, Libya) possessed abundant oil reserves, while those that have little or no oil have either been ignored or endured prolonged bloody conflict, of which Syria is the worst case, having become the scene of competing and offsetting interventions motivated by political and strategic ambitions with only a thin propaganda rationale associated with alleviating a humanitarian crisis, which at best, was a much subordinated goal of the interveners on both sides.
Lessons for Future
4a. How can the world learn from the humanitarian failures and inaction that occurred in Syria for the past 7 years? What opportunities to protect, defend or support the Syrian people have we missed?
Answer: In my view, it is a mistake to speak of ‘inaction’ in the Syrian context. There have been massive interventions of all sorts on both sides of the conflict by a variety of actors, but none decisive enough to end the conflict, and none primarily motivated by humanitarian concerns. Of course, here and there, lives could have been saved, especially if the balance of forces within Syria had been better understood at an early stage of the conflict in the West. What intervention achieved in Syria was largely a matter of magnifying the conflict, and attendant suffering. The conflict itself was surrounded by contradictory propaganda claims making the reality difficult to perceive by the public, and therefore there was political resistance to more explicit and possibly more effective regime changing intervention.
Indifference:
4b. Is there any correlation between the rise of Islamophobia and the world’s inaction towards Syrian people’s suffering? Has the ongoing drumming of hatred towards the Islamic religion created a generation of indifference towards those of them who are suffering? Or is such wide indifference a natural response to such overwhelming humanitarian crisis?
Answer: The indifference in relation to Syria is mainly a matter of public confusion and distrust. Confusion about the nature of the conflict and distrust as to the motives of political actors that have intervened on either side. The spike in Islamophobia is attributable to the interplay of the European refugee crisis and the occurrence of terrorist incidents that are perpetrated by ISIS and its supporters. Of course, the massive refugee flow was prompted by the violence in the Syrian combat zones, which has made Europe most interested in resolving the conflict even if meant allowing a criminal regime to remain in power.
I suppose that the indifference noted in your question is more evident in relation to the plight of the Rohingya people in Myanmar that in response to Syria where, as I have been suggesting, the political context dominates the human suffering, and the Islamic identity of the victimized people is secondary. Also, it is worth recalling the global indifference to genocide in Rwanda (1994) that could have prevented,
or at least minimized, by a timely, and relatively small scale intervention. And on occasion, if the strategic context is supportive, the West will intervene on the Islamic side as in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, and there in opposition to the Christian side.
- The UN has handed over a large portion of the $4bn of its aid effort in Syria to the Syrian regime or partners who have been approved by Bashar Al Assad. How does the UN justify providing tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid to one of the worst governments, that has besieged, starved, bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of its own people?
Answer: I suppose the basic justification for this behavior is that from the viewpoint of the UN the Damascus regime remains the legitimate government of Syria representing the country at the UN. This is of course a legalistic justification, and evades the real humanitarian crisis as well as the crimes of Assad’s regime. So far, because there is a geopolitical standoff, regionally (Iran v. Saudi Arabia) and globally (Russia v. the U.S. and Turkey), the UN has tried to remain aloof from the ambit of political controversy to the extent possible while doing what it can to alleviate human suffering. I am not knowledgeable about whether the UN aid is reaching the civilian population as claimed. The language of your question suggests that there should be some mechanism for disqualifying a government that commits repeated crimes against its own people from being treated by the UN as a normal member state, but this is not likely to happen anytime soon, and it is tricky as the UN System is built around state-centric ideas of world order.
The right to torture
- The world was shocked in 2015 when the Caesar files were releasedrevealing human stories behind 28,000 deaths in Syrian prisons, most, if not all were tortured prior to their death.Two years later no action has been taken in regards to detainees and torture in prisons. There has been no action or desire to send observers to Syrian Prisons nor to investigate those who were named in the Caesar files for war crimes.What must a dictator have to do for the international community to respond to his crimes? Comparing Libyan intervention with Syria
Answer: I took part recently in a ceremony in Nuremberg Germany that awarded a human rights prize to the photographer, whose identity is kept secret for his safety, responsible for the Caesar Report containing photographic images of Syrian prison torture of some 11,000 prisoners, most of whom are reportedly now dead. There is no question that these images are horrifying, but serious issues have been raised as to the authenticity of this photographic archive. It has been authenticated as genuine by Human Rights Watch, but has also been used by persons closely connected with the U.S. Government to build a case for war crimes prosecutions, particularly against Bashar al Assad. I am not in a position to assess the controversy, yet do not doubt that the Damascus regime has committed many atrocities and are responsible for the great majority of civilian deaths over the course of the last six years in Syria. At the same time the anti-regime forces, which are fragmented, have also committed many war crimes.
These issues of criminal accountability cannot be reliably answered from a distance, or merely on the basis of media reports. What is required is a credible international fact finding commission of inquiry with adequate access to whatever evidence and witnesses remain available.
- Human rights groups have estimated that no less than half a million people have died in the last 7 years in Syria. Although there are many violent factions in Syria, more than 94% of all deaths have been caused by Syrian Government or Russian strikes. In comparison Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi had killed an 257 people including combatants and injured 949 with less than 3% being women and children when UN security council intervened. On March 17, 2011, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing “regional organizations or arrangements…to take all necessary measures…to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack” in Libya. The resolution was adopted with ten votes for, none against, and five abstentions. In hindsight, many have now questioned whether that intervention was purely to “protect civilians”. Is the UN Security Council still a reliable body that can be relied upon to protect the civilian? The UN’s Responsibility Not – To Protect the Civilian Population
Answer: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P) UN norm is interpreted and practice is governed by the UN Security Council, and hence is completely subordinated to the manipulations of geopolitics. In this regard, the lesser humanitarian hazard in Libya led to a UN regime-changing mission because the Permanent Members opposed to intervention (China, Russia) were persuaded not to cast their veto for what was being proposed, which was a limited humanitarian mission to protect the then entrapped civilian population of Benghazi. In fact, the NATO undertaking expanded the mission far beyond the Security Council mandate from its inception, angering Russia and China that had abstained out of deference to pleas relating to the humanitarian claims put forward by the NATO members of the Security Council. They later justified their opposition to a more pro-active UN role in Syria by reference to this failure of trust, the unwillingness of the intervening states to respect the limits of the mandate.
What is important to appreciate is that R2P and other UN undertakings must adhere to the constraints of geopolitics. As disturbing as inaction with respect to Syria, is the UN silence with regard to the abuse of the civilian populations of Gaza and Rakhine (Myanmar). It is only when a geopolitical consensus exists, which is quite rare (e.g. failure with respect to Yemen) that it is possible for the UN to play an important humanitarian role in shaping behavior and protecting civilians.
- Why was The UN’s responsibility to protect (R2P ) invisible in the last 7 years in Syria? What must be done now, in order to implement an R2P operation in Syria to avoid further suffering? In past years vetoes have blocked humanitarian intervention.
Answer: Part of my response here has already been given in relation to the prior question. I would only add here that the abolition of the veto would be a crucial step, or even an agreement among permanent members of the Security Council to refrain from casting a veto in humanitarian contexts such as Syria. The problem is that the veto powers are extremely unlikely to give up their right of veto, partly because such states do not voluntarily give up power and partly because humanitarian issues are almost always inseparable from diverse and often antagonist geopolitical interests, and therefore the claims are not perceived as humanitarian. This is certainly the case with regard to Syria. The take away conclusion is that the international system as it now functions is rarely motivated by humanitarian considerations when they come into conflict with the strong political preferences and strategic priorities of principal states, and this is true even when the humanitarian crisis is as severe and prolonged as in Syria.
The most constructive response, in view of these realities, is to advocate global reform, but this will not happen without a major mobilization of people throughout the world or as a frantic response to some earth-shaking catastrophe.
- I understand that there was a veto by Russia and thus a solution was not passed, however, in such cases, when one of the countries that is involved in the atrocities is allowed to veto, does it not raise the alarm?Surely, this situation in Syria and the human cost provides enough of a precedent for (if not the UN, those who care about preventing further atrocities) a new chapter to be drafted and implemented into the UN. –Do you believe that it is time for the UN to adopt a new chapter into itsCharter that would prevent dictators or countries with vested interest in a war from overpowering UN Security Council votes? Normalizing atrocities at the global level.
Answer: Yes, there was much criticism of Russia for blocking action on Syria, but Russia was acting in accord with the constitutional structure of the UN. The U.S. uses its veto in a comparable way to protect Israel and other allies, and equally irresponsibly, from a moral or humanitarian point of view. It should be remembered that the League of Nations fell apart because major states would not participate, including the United States. The idea of the veto was designed to persuade all major states to participate, with the goal of universality of membership, but at the cost of engendering paralysis and irresponsible obstructions to action whenever veto powers disagree sharply. Your questions raise the crucial issue if this was too high a price to pay for the sake of maintaining universality of participation. One consequence of this tradeoff between geopolitics and effectiveness is to weaken public respect for the UN as an agency for the promotion of justice and decency in global affairs.
As specified in Article 108 of the UN Charter requires the approval of 2/3rds of the entire membership of the UN as well as all five Permanent Members of the Security Council, which means that it will not happen in the foreseeable future in relation to any politically sensitive issue. When World War II ended there was the hope and illusion that countries that cooperated against fascism would continue to cooperate to maintain the peace. As should have been anticipated, it was a forlorn hope.
- The White House accepts Assad’s continued rule in Syria as a “political reality” while European leaders have also taken a soft approach with French president declaring he no longer saw the removal of Assad as necessary. In your view, how do such civilized countries justify good relations with Assad? ISIS the monster that invites intervention: ISIS Affects the West, Assad does not.
Answer: Your comment on ISIS is a way of expressing my view that these issues are dominated by geopolitical calculations. ISIS as horrible as it is has not been nearly as responsible for the quality and quantity of suffering inflicted upon the Syrian people by the Damascus regime.
At this point, and given the unavailability of humanitarian intervention, the best Plan B for Syria is to seek a sustainable ceasefire, and this would undoubtedly require making some unpalatable compromises, including the possible retention of Assad as head of state. After all, there are many heads of state with much blood on their hands, and yet their legitimacy as rulers is essentially unchallenged. The way the world is organized makes it unable to impose criminal responsibility on the leaders of sovereign states except in special circumstances of total victory as in World War II, or more recently, in relation to the criminal prosecutions of Saddam Hussein and Milosevic, particular enemies of the West.
- Many Syrian groups have released statements to express their dismay at the international community for only intervening to strike ISIS. The Global Coalition’s planes hover over Deir Al Zour and Raqa to target ISIS (often causing civilian casualties) while in the same sky Assad Planes carrying deadly Barrel Bombs hover over nearby towns unperturbed. A) Is there balance in the international community’s actions in Syria? While Assad only kills or affects the lives of Syrians in Syria, ISIS became a threat to western countries. Terrorist attacks in the west killed and injured civilians in the west.
- B) Is there an underlying message that the West will “Fight against ISIS in Syria, because it affects people in our countries, but leave Assad because he has no impact on their own people?”
Answer: Yes, this is certainly a perceptive observation. When the issue is fairly large scale and internal, and where Muslims are the victims, any effort to intervene is bound to be feeble, at best, which it was in the early stages of 2011-2013 when Turkey and the U.S. cooperated in supporting Friends of Syria, which was mistakenly thought capable of shifting the balance sufficiently in Syria to produce the collapse of the Damascus regime. When that failed, it became obvious that the costs of an effective intervention were viewed in the West as too high and dangerous. Considering the Iranian and Russian alignments with the Syrian government doomed an anti-Damascus intervention.
And as you suggest, the West views ISIS as dangerous enemy, and is prepared to take bigger risks and bear higher costs because Western homeland security is at stake. ISIS is a proclaimed enemy of the West that is perceived as responsible for violent acts, Syria is not, being regarded, at most, as an unattractive regime, partly because in the past, hostile toward Israel. Taking account of these circumstances, the political realist seeks a ceasefire in Syria while going all out to achieve the destruction of ISIS.
- Please kindly note any comments, suggestions, opinions, thoughts you have on the Syrian conflict and in particular on the west’s reaction to it and the UN’s role. Also, on what you feel can and should be done from now on. Thanks so much.
Answer: From my earlier responses I am skeptical about what can be done beyond the obvious: give up any hope of securing support for an R2P mandate to protect the Syrian people, and pursue a ceasefire so as to end the suffering. This is not justice, but it may at least spare the Syrian people further trauma and bloodshed.
What the Syrian tragedy and ordeal reveals vividly is the inability of the international community, as now organized, to deal with a humanitarian crisis unless a geopolitical consensus is present in a relatively strong form, regionally and globally. Such a consensus is not even enough if the difficulties of intervention are seen as producing heavy casualties for the intervening side and would impose burdens of a prolonged occupation to achieve post-intervention political order and security.
Europe would benefit at this time from a Syrian ceasefire and the restoration of political normalcy. It would undoubtedly reduce the pressure on European countries created by the Syrian refugee flow, which has given right wing political parties their greatest strength and largest level of popular support since the end of World War II.
Global Justice in the 21st Century 
Indonesian Impressions
28 AprImpressions from a Third Visit to Indonesia
Indonesia Visits
This was my third visit to Indonesia. The first visit was very brief. It consisted of two stops on a Princeton allumni cruise to South Asia in 1992. I was invited to go along as ‘ a guest.’ In exchange, I was expected to give a few lectures on the political dimensions of our trip, especially pertaining to Indochina. Another academician, Ainslee Embree, an erudite comparative religion scholar, recently retired from Columbia, informed the 80 or so participants, mainly affluent Princeton alumni, about cultural and religious issues.
The notable highlights of the Indonesian phase of the trip included a stop at the world’s largest Buddhist temple at Borobudur in central Java. It is a spectacular structure, with nine levels, 504 Buddha statues, with 72 Buddha statues each encased in a stupa surrounding the central dome. Climbing around the pyramidal structure in Indonesian humidity was a struggle, but a memorable one. I can only wonder at the immense effort of many hundreds of anonymous workers who produced such a timeless monument to ‘detachment’! Our small ship also made a short stop at Bali, where several of the more luxury-addicted passengers, not content with the rather spacious staterooms on board, arranged to stay overnight at a splendidly expensive new hotel in the center of the island. They paid at least $1,000 per night; for the rest of us an elegant lunch on land more than sufficed as we happily retreated to the waiting ship.
Besides Indonesia, the cruise included on its itinerary several other countries. We started from Singapore, and made stops at Saigon and Pnom Penh on the Mekong, going inland to see magnificent Angkor Wat temple complex near Siem Reapin the dawn light, regarded as the largest religious monument in the world. It was surprising to learn that Angkor Wat was originally built as a Hindu place of worship, dedicated to Vishnu, and gradually became a Buddhist site in the 12thcentury. The more one is exposed to Asian culture and history, the more we come to realize that power shifts from one culture to another, but the symbols of cultural greatness and religious devotion are interchangeable. The countries of Asia are strikingly different from one another in almost all respects, and yet there is a civilizational commonality that makes it possible for the religious tradition to merge and overlap in ways inconceivable in the West where the dyadic logic of either/or continues to prevail, making it mandatory to distinguish ‘this’ from ‘that.’
The thrilling cultural experience at Angkor Wat was followed by a sobering visit to ‘the killing fields” of Cambodia. We were given a guided tour of the accompanying memorial museum that documented the decimation of the Cambodian population, portrayed in the Western Cold War media as genocide (Cambodian deaths estimated at between one point five and two million) in the period about between 1975 and 1979. The brutal Khmer Rouge policies of ‘re-education, forced communes, and anti-Westernism under the rigid Communist leadership of Pol Pot, so-called Brother #1, were blamed for the humanitarian catastrophe. What is held less remarked upon, if noticed at all, is the relevance of Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War to Cambodia to the genocide. This extension included saturated bombing of the Cambodian countryside forcing the peasant population to seek refuge in Phnom Penh where food shortages did much of the damage. Our cruise passengers, generally on the political right, seemed interested in my remarks on these contested events, becoming almost receptive and unexpectedly friendly. One rather opinionated Princeton middle-aged alumnus ‘confessed’ that before embarking he had ‘pictured me with horns’ and almost withdrew from the cruise for that reason alone. Despite such forebodings, he admitted to being pleasantly surprised by my demeanor and approach. I did not altogether reciprocate these heartwarming sentiments as such a cruise attracts wealthy and snobbish individuals who are often spoiled and greedy, never humble, and generally dogmatically reactionary when commenting on the issues of the day. In this vein, among our passengers were several leading ‘junk bond’ operatives who survived the scandal of the 1980s seemingly unscathed and a pre-Trump NYC real estate mogul who were forever complaining that the fringe luxuries didn’t meet their standards (while I must admit it was exceeding mine!) As with many ambivalent experiences, I was glad to have been part of this cruise, but would never do it again unless the itinerary was limited to Antarctica!
Second Indonesian Visit
My second visit to Indonesia was more personally satisfying. I came in 1998 as an invited guest of the newspaper Kompass, with lectures in several cities in Java preceded by a week of vacation in Bali where we stayed at an eco-tourist inn (Sua Bali) run by a German expatriate and his Indonesian partner, an anthropologist. Meals were eaten communally with the other guests and plumbing was pre-modern. Nearby Ubud was a culturally vibrant local community where expatriate writers and artists gathered to live a life away from the pressure of markets and critics. Bali exceeded even our highest expectations in all respects accept for the consistently high levels of humidity.
I came to Indonesia with Hilal. We were assisted and guided throughout by an extremely engaging and sensitive young former student activist leader, Taufik Rahzan, who greatly enriched our experience. During our three weeks in the country the Indonesian currency was hard hit by a volatile speculative market, which seemed inflamed by hedge fund traders in the West betting on the falling value of the Rupiah, and doing their best to make it happen! Mahathir Mohamed, then leader of Malaysia, made headlines by blaming the currency crisis in the region on George Soros, and lauding his own efforts to steer clear of neoliberal globalization, which he contended helped minimize the adverse impacts of the currency manipulations.
Recalling Indonesia means above all remembering my most cherished Australian friend, Herb Feith, who devoted his too short life to the study of Indonesia, and was probably responsible for my invitation to visit and speak. Herb was wonderfully strange in his intense innocence that led people to overlook his moral passion, exceptional intellectual capacity, and significant scholarly achievements. I will never forget his inexplicable practice of eating the meat on chicken bones left as garbage on their plates by others at several dinners we had together. Herb died far too soon while riding his bike in Yogyakarta where he also did some teaching. I first met Herb, and his advance student protégé, Richard Tanter, years earlier when they sought me out at Princeton in the 1970s, apparently looking for an anti-war activist hiding behind Ivy Walls. They were doing research at Cornell, which had a highly regarded academic program on Indonesia, and we instantly bonded for life.
Another human highlight for me was a long meeting with Indonesia’s extraordinary literary figure, Pramoedya Ananta Tuer, whose novels I had been reading with great admiration in preparation for the visit. I requested the meeting, and it was arranged for me to visit this left author/activist who had languished in terrible prisons for much of his life, having opposed and fought against Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and Suharto’s reactionary regime, and been imprisoned by each.
Perhaps, the most remarkable feature of Pramoedya’s life was the story behind his literary masterwork, the Buro Quartet, four novels strung together by way of the life story of Minke, an Indonesian journalist and activist who became a resistance fighter during the last phase of Dutch colonial rule. Adding to the literary quality of these novels is the amazing story of their composition. While in the miserable prison on the arid island of Buro for seven years Pramoedya was denied paper and pen, but refused to be silenced. Instead, each evening he would tell Minke’s story of hardship and struggle to his fellow prisoners. How this oral transmission was transcribed and converted into a gripping series of novels is not clearly established.
Politically, Pramoedya was on the left, paying a heavy price, being arrested and hustled off to prison in the aftermath of the anti-Communist massacre that led to the arrest of thousands more Indonesians. He supported Sukarno, who led the Indonesian independence struggle, and held General Suharto in contempt, and even after Suharto’s retirement, Pramoedya found no good things to say about the way the country was governed even though its democratically elected leader, Megawati Sukarnputri, was the daughter of his national hero, Sukarno. In his harsh words,”[a]fter Sukarno there have only been clowns who had no capability to run the country.”
When I visited Pramoedya he was frail (he died from health issues a few years later, in 2006), somewhat hesitant to talk much about his past, and seemingly worried about who was listening and watching. I had the sense of someone suffering from post-prison traumatic stress disorder or
PPTSD. I was glad I made this pilgrimage as it did give me the sense of someone brave and principled who lived his life and did his work in conformity with his beliefs, and yet despite enduring extreme deprivation and punishment managed 30 books, and created a legacy of distinguished achievement that has gavin the Indonesian people a national narrative detailing their struggles against the external and internal enemies of Indonesian self-determination and democratic legitimacy.
I cannot now remember even the themes of my talks to local groups of intellectuals. I also gave several lectures within university settings to students, stressing human rights. These activities provided stimulating contact with local personalities in three cities: Yogyakarta, Bandung, and Jakarta.
Unquestionably, for all of us, the enduring drama of this illuminating visit arose from a humbling incident occurring at the end of our last day in Indonesia. I had the temerity to disturb the local gods at dusk by losing my balance as I jumped from the pier to the ship moored below that was to take around the Jakarta harbor for a sunset tour. I fell rather deeply and uncontrollably into the scummy waters, prompting Taufik to dive in after me, losing his glasses in the process, and creating big fears of disease and infection for both of us as the water was extremely polluted. My fall was an event, attracting hundreds of local onlookers several of whom rushed me to a nearby shower, and while they were warmly empathetic they were also appropriately amused by my plight borne of awkwardness. The shower was on a moist stone floor in a broken down shack. It was as forbidding as the harbor water. With a genuine Good Samaritan spirit these local people who were obviously very poor provided me with a simple sarong to replace my infected clothes. Nothing happened to confirm these fears, but it has made me careful never again to anger the gods at dusk!
A Third Visit
My third trip to Indonesia was in early April of 2018. This time I was accompanying Hilal on a UN mission trip in her role as UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food, a position established some years ago by the Human Rights Council in Geneva. As I was not part of the mission team, I was able to pursue an independent line of activity, spending much time in our various hotels trying to write, but still managing to gather impressions that convinced me that Indonesia is not only an important and distinctive country, but an exciting place to be due to its deep, vibrant, and plural cultural identity and its warm traditions of hospitality.
Important because of a population of 260+ million, the largest Muslim country in the world, rich in a variety of resources, and exhibiting a strong record of economic growth and poverty reduction in recent years, as well as seeming to be evolving in democratizing and humanistic directions via elections, leadership, civil liberties, and social & economic rights. At the same time the country is beset by problems, old and new, arising from a variety of sources. A major problematic set of issues is connected with the rapidly expanding palm oil production causing harmful environmental and cultural side effects, some Islamic extremism, corruption, urban blight, weak infrastructure, and various dimensions of inequality, as well as some lingering dark shadows from past traumas whose memory has not yet faded away, and may never.
Indonesia is distinctive (with some comparison to the Philippines) as an island archipelago dominated by a single island, Java (comparable to Luzon’s dominance in the Philippines) spread over great distances. Within its many semi-autonomous communities there are numerous languages, separate ethnicities and traditions, a variety of ways of being Islamic, and overall, a bewildering complexity that make all generalizations suspect..
Remembering Sukarno, Forgetting Suharto
I made it point of asking a variety of persons I encountered during the ten days about their feelings toward the two dominant political personalities in Indonesian political history since it won political independence from The Netherlands in 1949 after four years of armed struggle. In short, those I spoke to remembered Sukarno favorably as the father of the country who was politically victimized by the malevolently tragic events of 1965, a massive anti-Communist national blood bath, abetted by the United States and reflecting the passions that overwhelmed morality during the height of the Cold War. For an understanding of how these past crimes haunt Indonesian political and moral consciousness I recommend highly the two documentary films of Joshua Oppenheimer: “The Act of Killing” (2013) and “The Look of Silence” (2014).
In contrast to the warmth toward Sukarno, there was disapproval, or at best, a stony silence when asked about their recollections of General Suharto who governed Indonesia with an iron fist in the period 1967-1998.
New Urbanism: Vitality and Blight
Clashing images struck me, especially in Jakarta: many striking examples of high rise contemporary architecture, much more so than in the typical American city, coupled with traffic gridlock. Hilal’s urban logistics would have been totally frustrating had not the government supplied a police motorcycle escort leading her cars from appointment to appointment, or making our way to and from the airports. The way Indonesian police found space to move our cars through the thickest concentration of vehicles was truly amazing, a kind of postmodern magic!
We were told that studies of urban life showed that an average Indonesian will spend ten years of his/her life behind the wheel. Such a situation gives rise to innovations. Many Indonesians cope with the traffic ordeal by relying on Go-Jek to get around cities by hired motorcycle, arranging rides by phone similar to Uber. There were abundant Go-Jek drivers all over Jakarta, recognizable by their Green jackets, many working for a company aptly named ‘Grab.’ Go-Jek service, like Uber or Lyft, also includes deliveries of takeout food and a courier service.
Jakarta, and its metropolitan surroundings, is estimated at over 20 million, making it the second largest urban center in the world, with ten million in the city, and the other ten million close by where rents are cheaper, and it is possible to have more space.
As incomes rise, and the car population grows quicker than the high birth rate what can only wonder whether Indonesian ingenuity can keep pace. Maybe the digitation of work will produce a deurbanizing trend in coming years to avoid having survey in the 2020s finding that an Indonesian spends 20 years getting to and fro work.
Archipelago Identities
Of course, every large country has regional differences, expressed by dialects, distinct language preferences, and food taste and local cuisine, but islands seem to accentuate their separate identities. Island pride often exceeds nationalist sentiments. This was clearly evident during our brief time in Indonesia.
There are also significant power/wealth differences within and among islands. For instance, other islands complain about Java’s dominance, which can be grasped through the geography of leadership, development assistances, and a variety of preferential investments, including centers of educational and cultural excellence. The remoteness and ethnic differences of Papua is cited as an example of how such prejudice operates on an inter-island, and in this case, an inter-civilizational basis. On Java there are complaints about inequalities between Jakarta and the rest of this main island, exhibited in the quality of the roads, employment opportunities, and cultural life. Of course, Bali is a world apart, maybe mostly because it is where the unconverted Hindus retreated (and Buddhists seemed to disappear) when Islam took over the rest of the archipelago starting as early as the 9thcentury, and spreading gradually (with no clear narrative) over the course of the next six centuries until 95% of Indonesia is regarded as Muslim..
We went for a few days to Ambon, a glimpse of paradise. The stillness of the place creates sea vistas with the vividness of fine Asian paintings, a sense of lost tradition and eternal ways of living, the marginality of the human presence in the Asian, the primacy of nature, experienced as ‘the exotic other,’ inscribing the depth of pre-modern authenticity. On the roads, motorcycles dominate the unlit roads, and driving at night feels hazardous as cars with impatient drivers move past slower vehicles on rather narrow roads, heedless of streams of approaching single headlights weaving in and out, without the slightest awareness of separate sides, much less lanes. Fortunately, the skill levels of drivers and bikers is high, the speeds are low; otherwise, fatal accidents would be sure abound.
Debating Flogging
On Java, in particular, devotion to Islam seems low keyed. I don’t recall hearing a call to prayer during our whole time in Indonesia or even seeing many mosques, unlike Turkey where the smallest village community will have a minaret defining its skyline, and city views will usually display several minarets wherever one is positioned. Also, again unlike Turkey, notable is the seeming non-issue arising from head scarves worn by many Indonesian women, worn with a strong sense of color and feminine grace, and freely mingling with girls and women who have their hair uncovered. This kind of pluralism, unselfconsciously a form of virtuous practice in our world troubled by secular and religious fundamentalisms. In Indonesia living together seemed to flow as naturally as the current in a lively river. Such a sense of harmony creates a calmness that is absent in the West where the atmosphere is stressed by encounters, explicit or not, between Islamophobes and humanists, as well as rigid secularists and their religious counterparts. To avoid being seen as a romantic, I would not that ethnicity can be an issue in
Indonesia as the Chinese minority, punching above their weight in the economy, know only too well.
But on the island of Ache things are different. Scarred by the 2004 tsunami disaster (more than 170,00 dead) and by a bloody independence struggle that seems paused if not ended by a peace agreement featuring autonomy in exchange for disarmarment, Ache exisst beneath the thralldom of far stricter Islamic law than elsewhere in Indonesia.
While we were in Jakarta, the daily papers were reporting on discussions in Ache about whether flogging of prisoners should be done in public to warn children to behave as they should in the future or behind the secrecy of prison walls so as to spare young Indonesians such gruesome spectacles. As near as I could tell, renouncing flogging as a punitive practice toward prisoners is not on the public agenda in Ache. It is not a question of whetherflogging, but howit is most constructively performed. What lies beneath such religiously vindicated cruelty is culturally specific, yet mysteriously disturbing.
Airport Security
With so much travel, we have become aware that airport security reflects the vagaries of national temperament, and sometimes reflects the personal style of the local administrative official. My bionic knees that set off the inspection alert in even the crudest of detector devices have given me much more extensive experience than I wish in the comparative practice of touch and feel. The Germans, as we might expect, are the most rigorous, with heavy hands leaving no body part untouched. The Indonesians are at the other extreme except when it comes to umbrellas. For Indonesian airports security personnel inspecting the body of strangers seems an embarrassment, even if gendered, and appears situated somewhere between the unpleasant and the unnecessary. But when it comes to umbrellas it is another story. As shown in crime films, umbrellas can be weaponized, and ours was viewed with suspicion, which was the case even though it was a humble umbrella with UN logos as its design motif. Finally, with pleading just short of tears we prevailed, and walked away hoping for rain!
The Lure of the Feminine
Our hotel in Jakarta, The Hermitage, was the embodiment of post-colonial tradition and elegance, with hostesses and staff selected for their charm and beauty, and undoubtedly trained to be conversational and friendly. These Indonesian smiles have a special radiance that is best understood (metaphorically) as the transparency of the soul. Another way of perceiving this lure of the feminine in this pure Indonesian form is as ‘gracious composure’ that is classless, purposeless, and without the taints of a colonial mentality left behind by the Dutch. These qualities also made Hilal’s female team of assistants and interpreters especially engaging, the Indonesian ways of being were contagious enough to reach an Indian regional coordinator and a Korean staff member from the Geneva Office of the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. It was my pleasure to experience this conviviality in a work-free atmosphere as my only obligation during the trip was to stay out of the way, and indulge my natural inclination for non-obtrusiveness, which happens to be the best way to observe the unfamiliar, whether it be persons or places.
A Concluding Word
Nothing better summarizes the experience of another culture or country than whether or not at the time of departure you leave with a strong desire to return as soon as possible. Certainly, despite age and geographic remoteness, I was unrealistic enough to hope that we would return soon to Indonesia, and especially experience that sense of Ambon bliss, perhaps on other islands as well. Indonesians told us that there many Ambons waiting to be visited, bearing a vivid witness to one version of what Derrida had in mind when he spoke so intriguingly of what it means to ‘live well together.’
Tags: BAli, Indonesia, Java, new urbanism, Pramoedya, Suharto, Sukarno