DC Guy piece today was going to be a trashing of foreign journalists. Instead, upon thinking, DC Guy thought to ask a relevant question about hiring trends of expats across Asia.
Should foreign correspondents – and ex pats in general – speak the local language?
I’m asking because my original piece was going to be called, “Why Foreign Correspondents Suck and What they’re Not Telling You about Indonesia”.
In my wide-eyed thirties sometime last decade I rocked up to a cocktail-gathering of foreign correspondents in Indonesia, somewhere behind the Mandarin Hotel at the Hotel Indonesia Roundabout. I was all excited, imagining a smoky room full of spies and Year of Living Dangerously reporters. I mingled. I exchanged business cards. I chit-chatted about politics.
At first it seemed cool. One Bule reporter guy in his 60s ranted about Bangkok in the ’80s and how pathetic and lazy young journalists were. Cool. Another 40-something guy had just been laid off and was drinking away his severance package in bars in Asia. Cool. Some angry BBC chick was broadcasting her opinions (not so cool, but interesting). But then it struck me.
Most of them are tourists. Almost none of them spoke Indonesian.
“I’ve got a translator to do that”
said an Australian newspaperman.
“We’ve got fixers [slaves who set up appointments, get coffee, interns] for that”
said another Australian TV reporter. (A lot of Australians for some reason.) One English wire service reporter was even more blunt: they hire us [ex pats] for our skills – the locals do the language work. (In fairness, he was of Indian origin, not a bule.)
As the evening went on, I realized how little any of these supposed Guy Hamilton (Year of Living Dangerously) types actually cared about their stories. I paid attention and over the next few cocktail nights I realized that the Big Name correspondents rely on the Jakarta Post, Jakarta Globe and wire services to get their views. Maybe a few phone calls here and there to a diplomat, but in general they know much less than you, if you live in Indonesia, or me.
Let’s get this straight. They can’t understand the TV. They can’t understand the radio. They can’t read local blogs, websites, or newspapers. All they have is the English language sources. Granted, there’s a lot in English. Some email listserve called ‘Joyo’ apparently collates all the English language reporting and sends it out. One drunk American freelancer told me all he reads is Joyo and that’s enough.
Would you trust a White House reporter who didn’t speak English?
And why should I listen to a tourist? Why should the rest of the world? I don’t think they should. I think the foreign correspondents are generally a week or two behind the local press. I think they miss most of the most important stories. And I think the snootiness and arrogance hides an uncomfortable truth: they don’t know what they’re talking about.
That’s why the Aussie press writes about cheap drug dealers like Schapelle Corby getting busted. It’s why the Western wires were obsessed with Bird Flu whilst ignoring current epidemics such as Malaria or Dengue Fever. (Who cares, they’re just local brown people?) It’s why they sucked up to Indonesia’s lame duck President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono when everyone in Jakarta knew he was an armchair general. It’s also why they’re obsessed with terrorism when traffic jams and bad hospitals are more of a threat to most of the population.
The fixers’ version was even more telling. Some of them were kinda hot and came to the cocktail nights. They didn’t have much respect at all for their bosses. Sure, they kissed their asses, as we all do. But when it came down to it, it turns out the fixers do the work. They read the local newspapers, watch TV, make the phone calls, set up the appointments. And then bossman or woman walks off with all the credit. Why not just give the job to the local?
In fact companies across Asia are waking up to it. In an NYT piece For Westerners in Asia, the Job Market Grows Tougher, the writer talks about a tightening job market for ex pats; strangely, employers in Hong Kong wanted people who could speak Chinese.
I want more than anything to get back out there – preferably Jakarta so I can get up to my old tricks. But I know I’ve gotta pick up my game. I can’t just turn up like I did a decade ago, hang out a shingle and say
“unemployed white guy – hire me”
DC Guy’s message: the Western media is failing you. Ignore them. Read the Jakarta Post, the Jakarta Globe, get an RSS feed to blogs you’re interested in.
Mr. Arie,
A Q and A format, I think, would be best for this conversation, given the head start you have on me.
* What were you doing during the 1945-50 War of Independence?
* What’s your position on the moral and ethical strength of the Dutch Police Action?
* I’m still trying to gauge the tone of your (very thoughtful) answers here. Are you making an implicit case that, in fact, the late Dutch colonial government was actually more benign that the succeeding national Indonesian governments? Or are you just fighting for an accurate historical record?
As for the Indonesian side not wanting a joint research team. Don’t know what I think of it. We’d have to say exactly who said no and why. There seems to be a paranoia whenever I had anything to do with university research teams that the voice of foreigners would prevail due to superior funding. See episode on research around the ‘Hobbits’ in Flores.
Overall, though, I’m still interesting in that econometric or accounting exercise about exactly how much wealth was stripped out of the Dutch East Indies and to what extent that wealth contributed to Dutch economic growth back home. Who knows? Maybe that ‘ethical policy’ you mentioned ended up costing the taxpayer money back home, depending on the mood of politics. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to start squirrelling up the facts, and even if I did, you have a 20 year + head start, hence the Q and A format.
It’s all good as long as we get an enlightening thread out there. And hey, I ain’t my government.
Mr. Oigal.
Once again, I’d ask Mr. Arie:
* What he was doing during the Police Action
* Does he think Indonesians would have been better off continuing under a Dutch colonial government in the 1950s and 1960s?
See, we’re reliving, to a degree what early nationalist Indonesian leaders must have faced. We just don’t have the same facts to master as Mr. Arie. We could, if we wanted to, with the the internet, but we don’t have the time to dredge up all the details.
But I know from my few philosophy and history courses at college that no matter how learned someone is, someone else equally learned might and probably does disagree with them. Same set of facts can be interpreted *very* differently, depending on your politics or emotional state.
Mr. Arie was a colonial official. He’s got plenty of reasons to have an emotional state. But he knows more than us, hence the Q&A. In essence, let’s not get spun by the “trust me I’m a doctor,” argument.
I sense an overall tone of prettifying what the Dutch did and discrediting the Indonesian nationalists. I sense that he’s doing that whist hiding behind an edifice of facts we just don’t have the time to gather or get the frameworks to dispute.
Mr. Arie’s basically saying, “hey, it [Dutch colonialism] wasn’t that bad, they [Javanese/Indonesian elite is worse ie murderous bastards.”
I think he’s flirting with that line as well as the fighting-for-historical accuracy schtick. That’s why we need to know what he was doing back then.
After checking, turns out it was a Swedish guy, Thomas Lindblad and an Indonesian-Chinese historian Thee Kian Wie, don’t have time to check further, and I’m relaying their research second hand from a long time ago. Basically, I’ve got a Wikipedia level of understanding.
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thee_Kian_Wie
http://www.hum.leiden.edu/history/staff/lindblad.html
But we have your position right here:
“I believe that I can do both at one and the same time. I think that measured by most of the criteria for good government the late colonial administration was superior to the independent Indonesian governments that followed it. It was efficient, it was not plagued by corruption, it had a reliable administration of justiceand even in its dealings with political opponents it was considerably more “benign” (if that is the word) than the successor government.”
[WEB ADMIN — QUOTE FUNCTION ISN’T WORKING OVER HERE]
You think the colonial government was better, following logically, Indonesians would have been better off under it.
That’s a tough sell today, Big Guy.
Arie,
Well, so… if we’ve established that the late Dutch colonial government was better than the succeeding nationalist ones in the 1950s and 1960s, we can make some counterfactual observations and ask some questions.
These aren’t meant to be an interrogation, just a question to readers.
* If the Indonesians were better off under the Dutch colonial government, for how long? Indefinitely? Maybe Indonesia should still be a protectorate of the Netherlands.
* I have to wonder why Arie Brand thinks the nationalist governments were more corrupt. Is there something about Javanese culture which is inherently more corrupt or the natives are inherently less efficient? If so, what could it be?
* Logically speaking, if the late Dutch colonial regime was better than the nationalist ones, which were corrupt and murderous (allegedly), the Dutch police action might have been *the right thing to do*… as it was force deployed for a just cause under the auspicious of a recognized nation-state protecting its own territory (the Just War doctrine).
I think I have my next article.
You just have to read Twilight In Djakarta from Mochtar Lubis to know how bad corruption was in the early 60’s…..
Arie,
It’s ok, please do go into Dutch history. It’s hard to get elsewhere. But your position does raise some uncomfortable dilemmas: maybe the Indonesians would have been better off staying colonized. What about the rest of the world, I wonder.
Gents,
I think we should start a separate thread along the lines of, “Was Independence a Mistake? Some say the Dutch colonial government was better.” I can write the opening salvo and present Arie’s case. It’d stir some good debate. What do you think?
Thing is Arie, history’s full of facts. You watched and lived through this part of it, so it’s close to your heart. I’m interested in what history can teach us, the story it tells us about the future. An different people could look at the same set of facts and see different histories.
Truth be told, I don’t believe you yet. I suspect that out of nostalgia and guilt you’re selected a very pro Dutch version of events. It’s very interesting, I grant you, that the late Dutch colonial government may have got its shit together. It’s a bit like what I hear about Freeport – bad in the beginning, learned over time, now saddled with a dark history. But without having the time or archives to look up the facts, I can’t refute you yet. But this question’s big enough to start another thread.
But I do plan to continue writing about hookers and jerking off, but obviously not in the same thread. Fair warning ahead of time.
Arie,
Dude: you’re chickening out because you know if I post something as controversial as saying you think Indonesians would’ve been better off under the Dutch: Brown People can’t govern themselves, you’d get crucified, and attract historians from the other side.
A sophist you are, my fellow poster.
I might go ahead and do it anyway based on what you’ve written.
@ Blue Moejoe,
What do you think about Arie’s idea that Indonesians would have been better off under the Dutch? He seems to think Indonesians can’t govern themselves very well and would be better off having White men do it.
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DCGuy you wrote regarding self determination for Papua:
In one of your posts you referred your readers to the series about Papuan self determination that I placed in the now defunct webdiary (the link is http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=blog/417 ).
But have you read it yourself? If so you should have found the answer to your question there.
It was often contended by Indonesia that the Dutch dreamt up the concept of self determination of Papua late in the game to keep it, by hook and by crook, out of the hands of Indonesia. The facts are against this thesis. In 1947 the Dutch negotiators of the so-called “Commission General” met with representatives of the fledgling Republic (led by the Republic’s then Prime Minister Sutan Sjahrir) in Linggajati near Cirebon. The Dutch envisaged there a federal structure for Indonesia and believed that the various territories should have the right to join or not join this federal structure (external self-determination) or to join it as a separate state rather than as part of the ‘core’state that consisted of the greater part of Java and Sumatra (internal self-determination). This idea was embodied in the Accord of Linggajati both parties agreed to (most of it soon became a dead letter).
But a federal structure was agreed to in the agreement reached at the RTC. At the beginning of 1950, after the official transfer of sovereignty on 27th Dec. 1949, it looked as follows:
There were six federal states, and ten lower bodies: daerah or daerah istimewa.
But the revolutionary élan that prevailed in Java, especially among the “pemuda”, was looking for another target – that target was the federal structure. Allegedly the inhabitants of the various (semi) autonomous regions outside the “core” Republic (i.e. the greater part of Java and Sumatra) were themselves desirous to demolish this federal structure and join this “core” Republic. This was supposed to be clear from the various processions and demonstrations there (Jakarta has always been very good in engineering such things).
So the federal structure went down the tube. It did not go altogether smoothly. It is ironical, DCGuy, that you asked (why there was no self determination for the Moluccas. That is what quite a few inhabitants of this area wanted to know themselves, way back in 1950. When the federal state East Indonesia (comprising Sulawesi, Halmaheira, the Moluccas etc.) was demolished, Manuhutu, then chairman of the Council of the South Moluccas, declared the independence of the Republik Maluku Selatan (RMS) on the 25th of April 1950. In September of that year troops of the “core” Republic landed in Ambon and subdued it in heavy fighting that lasted almost two months. The struggle for the RMS then became a guerilla led by Dr.Soumokil who had been the recent president of the RMS. The main stage of the struggle then became Ceram that is considerably bigger than Ambon. It took the TNI thirteen years to capture Soumokil there. He was condemned to death by a military court in April 1964. After Suharto had come to power the sentence was executed in April 1966. There is still a government of the RMS in exile. It has its seat in the Netherlands ( president Bambang Yudoyhono was supposed to come on a state visit to the Netherlands at the end of 2010. This visit was postponed indefinitely because the RMS government in exile had started court action against him).
Now what about Papua. Around the time of the RTC the population of Papua was deemed unable as yet to exercise the right to self determination. So, ironically, when the federal structure was speedily demolished by Jakarta this territory was the only one to retain a concrete right to self-determination albeit a postponed right.
So the concern with self-determination for Papua was not a ploy dreamt up in the late fifties in order to protect Dutch interests and to keep Indonesia out of the region.To quote the internationally respected American-Dutch political scxientist Arend Lijphart:
.