Indonesia: Jakarta & Kissinger's mass Killings in 1965/6

[outsider]

The Jakarta Post Wednesday, July 08, 2009 Children To Starve As Funding For Food Runs Out Yemris Fointuna, The Jakarta Post, Kupang A center for the treatment of malnourished children in Timor Tengah Utara regency, East Nusa Tenggara, has ceased operation due to a lack of funding. Martha, the center's manager, said the organization ceased operation in May after promised government assistance of Rp 150 million (US$15,000) never materialized. "We have to turn away malnourished kids who are sent here. We suggest their parents take their kids to hospital," Martha said on Monday. She said 30 malnourished kids who are currently being treated in the center no longer get the milk and food once provided. "It's been almost three months since our employees received a salary." Meanwhile, head of the regency's health agency, Michael Suri, said the funds could not be disbursed as the purchasing of milk and other nutritious foods should be conducted through a tender process. "A project worth more than Rp 100 million should be conducted through a tender process. We will find other sources." East Nusa Tenggara councilor Adrianus Ndu Ufi said the province had allocated Rp 1.8 billion to help 55,500 malnourished children this year, enough for Rp 32,400 per child. He said this was not enough, as treating the malnourished children would take three to nine months. "The provincial budget, worth Rp 1 trillion, is mostly allocated for routine expenditures. About 40 percent of the budget is allotted for development spending," Adrianus explained. There are currently two international organizations helping malnourished children in the province: the United Nation's World Food Program (UNWFP) and UNICEF. The organizations help children in regencies of Sikka, Belu, Timor Tengah Utara, Timor Tengah Selatan and Kupang. "The WFP and UNICEF donated biscuits and other nutritious foods through schools and health posts," an employee of the nutrition rehabilitation division of the province health agency, Isbandrio, said. ------------------------------------------ Joyo Indonesia News Service

[outsider]

Not exactly 9/11, but Suharto took power after a masterful (not planned by him, I'm sure) 'False Flag' op in Indonesia, where 'Communists' kidnapped and killed five nationalistic generals. His General Murdani later went on to mastermind the Timor attack (once again, I'm sure planned from outside Indonesia).
I don't have a video link yet, but I'll post it when it comes up.

Balibo wins Brisbane film festival awards Aug. 9 2009 Australian film Balibo, about the murder of five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975, has won two of the five jury prizes at the 2009 Brisbane International Film Festival. Balibo took out both the Interfaith and FIPRESCI Jury Awards and is closing the festival tonight. Balibo was to have been screened in a single cinema but will be shown in two cinemas due to public demand. The screening is being attended by director Robert Connolly, actor/producer Anthony LaPaglia, actor Damon Gameau and Shooting Balibo author Tony Maniaty. Three other jury awards were also announced, including two for films for young people screened at the festival. It's Not Me, I Swear by Philippe Falardeau was singled out by the Junior Cine Sparks jury, while the Senior Cine Sparks jury named Ben X by Nic Balthazar as its award winner. The Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema jury named two titles for recognition, Agrarian Utopia by Uruphong Raksasad and About Elly by Asghar Farhadi. Seersucker, by Mairi Cameron, was awarded the critics' choice in the Queensland Short Film Competition awards while Behind Blue Eyes was named audience favourite. Writer, director and producer Jackie McKimmie received the Kinetone Award for outstanding contribution to the Queensland film industry.

[QuitTheirClogs]

WSWS: Review of Balibo

By Richard Phillips - 17 August 2009
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/aug2009/timo-a17.shtml

Performances by LaPaglia and Isaacs are generally strong and the movie’s three-strand narrative provides depth, helping to make the key events real, convincing and disturbing.

Connolly’s latest feature, however, is not without flaws...

The film’s references to the role of the Whitlam and US governments, which green-lighted the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, are effective although additional detail would have been helpful, especially for audiences—in Australia and internationally—that know little about what really happened.

Balibo concludes with Ramos-Horta returning to East Timor in 1999, following the UN-sponsored referendum that overwhelmingly rejected Indonesian rule. The ending tends to naively glorify the Fretilin leader and implies that the problems facing the East Timorese people have been resolved. In fact, Ramos-Horta, now the country’s president, presides over one of the poorest countries in the world, accommodating his regime to Australia’s continuing control of the lion’s share of East Timor’s oil and gas resources.

Director Robert Connolly, executive producer Anthony LaPaglia and the families of the Balibo Five have demanded war crimes investigations into those responsible for the murder of their husbands, brothers and sons. These calls have been studiously ignored by the Rudd Labor government, which has no intention of letting democratic rights issues get in the way of its economic and political relations with Indonesia’s ruling elite.

War crime investigations have also been ruled out by President Ramos-Horta. Speaking at a Q&A session following the movie’s premiere at the recent Melbourne Film Festival, he declared: “My answer has always been; let time deal with this. There have been dramatic changes in the last thirty years and Indonesian democracy today is one of the most inspiring in the south-east Asia region ... Those responsible for killing the Balibo Five will be brought to justice when the Indonesians are ready for it.”

An alternative ending to Balibo could have used extracts from Australian intelligence and diplomatic cables to the Whitlam government. This would have raised critical questions about the ongoing diplomatic manoeuvres and political dirty tricks being conducted by Australia’s ruling elite to ensure that political and economic decisions in East Timor conform to Australia’s regional aims.

As one October 16, 1975 de-classified cable from the Australian embassy in Jakarta to the Australian government—the day the Balibo Five were killed—noted: “On the operations which were launched yesterday, October 15, [Indonesian] General Murdani confirmed what [Harry] Tjan had already told us and which we reported previously. In these circumstances I can only repeat my earlier comments that, in the next few weeks, we are going to need steady nerves and to keep our assessment of our longer term interests in this region in front of us.”

Another possibility would have been to use some of Whitlam’s testimony to the 2007 NSW coroner’s inquiry into the deaths of the Balibo Five, which ruled that the reporters had been murdered. In his evidence Whitlam denied any responsibility for the five men’s deaths and attempted to blame them, and Greg Shackleton in particular, for going to East Timor in the first place.

Notwithstanding its limitations, Balibo is a serious work and a worthwhile step in the right direction. Hopefully it will encourage more filmmakers to explore other dark corners of Australian political history.

[outsider]

Re UK attitude to Indonesia's murderous invasion, here is what 'Our Man in Jakarta', British Ambassador Sir John Ford, said in a confidential letter to the Foreign Office: '....Certainly as seen from here, it is in Britain's interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible, and that if it should come to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations, we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides against the Indonesian Government' (leaked by Australian Intel, published by Munster and Walsh).

[TonyGosling]

East Timor, 1975. As Indonesia prepares to invade the tiny nation of East Timor, five Australian based journalists go missing. BALIBO is a political thriller that tells the true story of crimes that have been covered up for over thirty years.

Link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EApB2ndekZg

[outsider]

U.S. Release the Records, Acknowledge U.S. Role in the Crimes of 1965/66 Mass Violence in Indonesia:
https://www.change.org/p/sign-now-u-s-release-the-records-acknowledge- u-s-role-in-1965-66-mass-violence-in-indonesia?

'Although the massacre of between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people (possibly more) in Indonesia in 1965-1967 is a crucial event in modern Indonesian political history, it remains mostly a footnote in the United States and elsewhere. In 2012, the documentary The Act of Killing shocked audiences throughout the world as perpetrators of the mass murder reenacted their violence. The film has fueled a debate within Indonesia and drawn attention internationally to events long kept out of U.S. history books: Events that the U.S. government facilitated and celebrated.

A companion film, The Look of Silence, is currently showing at film festivals. It focuses on the victims by following the investigation of Adi Rukun into the murder of his older brother who was killed during the violence.

While these are powerful films, any discussion of the events of 1965-1967 must include a discussion of the role of Western powers in this violence, including that of the United States. In conjunction, with the release of the film The Look of Silence, the East Timor and Indonesia Action Network (ETAN) continues its call for accountability for those in the West who encouraged and assisted in the mass violence in Indonesia.

Join ETAN in urging the U.S. government to take two immediate steps: 1) Declassify and release all documents related to the U.S. role in the mass violence, including the CIA's so-called "job files." These detail its covert operations. 2) The U.S. should formally acknowledge its role in facilitating the 1965-66 violence and its subsequent support for the brutalities of the Suharto regime.

ETAN Backgrounder- Breaking the Silence: The U.S. and Indonesia's Mass Violence

[outsider]

Indonesia again:
October 2014: ‘Bloody Yotefa’: police turn a blind eye to violence against indigenous Papuans:
http://www.papuansbehindbars.org/?p=3252

'At the end of October 2014, there were at least 69 political prisoners in Papuan jails.

At least 46 members of the West Papua National Committee (Komite Nasional Papua Barat, KNPB) were arrested in Jayapura and Merauke this month for participating in peaceful demonstrations. The demonstrators were urging the Indonesian government to release two French journalists who faced trial for breaching immigration rules. In likely reference to the Social Organisations Law (RUU Organisasi Kemasyarakatan, RUU Ormas), police claimed during the mass arrests that the KNPB is an illegal organisation as it is not registered with the Department of National Unity and Politics (Kesatuan Bangsa dan Politik, Kesbangpol) and affiliated symbols or attributes are also therefore illegal. Last June, police conducted a mass arrest in Boven Digoel under the same auspices. Indonesian human rights group Imparsial challenged the shutting down of peaceful demonstrations in Jayapura and Merauke, stating that freedom of expression in Papua is the worst in Indonesia, particularly when it comes to the treatment of KNPB rallies. The criminalisation of peaceful demonstrations, often under the auspices of the Ormas Law, restricts democratic space and stigmatises Papuan civil society groups.

On 27 October, two French journalists, Thomas Dandois and Valentine Bourrat, were released after 11 weeks in detention. However, Lanny Jaya tribal leader Areki Wanimbo, who was arrested alongside the pair, still faces charges of conspiracy to commit treason. Lawyers from the Democracy Alliance for Papua (Aliansi Demokrasi untuk Papua, ALDP) have stated that the legal process for Wanimbo has been fraught with irregularities and that his case has been handled unprofessionally. Wanimbo faces charges different to those he was first accused of, and unsuitable evidence was used to build a case against him. The decision to impose a two-and-a-half-month prison sentence on the two journalists instead of acquitting them was a harsh blow for the campaign to open access to Papua. As noted by Human Rights Watch researcher Andreas Harsono, foreign journalists face a complex system of applying for visas to Papua, which requires the approval of 18 different government agencies – a process that severely restricts journalistic access. It remains to be seen whether Indonesian president Joko Widodo will make good on his promise of opening access to Papua.

In our July update we raised concerns regarding an incident which has come to be known as ‘Bloody Yotefa,’ that took place on 2 July at Yotefa market in Abepura. Early reports stated that three Papuan men were killed following a police raid on a gambling den at Yotefa market. At least four Papuan men from the Central Highlands were tortured and 40 people arrested according to a report from the Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Desk (Keadilan, Perdamaian dan Keutuhan Ciptaan, KPKC) of the Evangelical Christian Church (Gereja Kristen Injili, GKI). Following the raid on the market, police arrested and handed over two Papuans, including a 14-year-old boy, to a mob of non-indigenous Papuans who publicly tortured and beat them while police stood by, later continuing the job themselves at Bhayangkara Police Hospital. While police beatings, torture and killings of indigenous Papuans are not new phenomena, the public involvement of non-indigenous mobs to achieve this is a particular low point. Bloody Yotefa challenges the government perspective that torture and killings are carried out by a rogue police in isolated cells, showing instead that these arbitrary violations are becoming social events in which the non-indigenous community can participate. This dynamic perpetuates a culture of fear and domination in which indigenous Papuans are exposed to constant risk of public violence, even in traditionally ‘safe’ spaces such as hospitals and university campuses. Police discrimination and profiling of indigenous Papuans, especially those who come from the Central Highlands, makes them still more vulnerable to public torture, violence and arbitrary arrest...'

[TonyGosling]

Truth Jihad 1 hour interview with Andre on the topic. Enjoy if you have time:
http://noliesradio.org/archives/105213
psswrd: berlin
http://www.noliesradio.org/archives/KB-TJ_2015_1016_vltchek_web.mp3

Indonesia: 50 Years After the Coup and the CIA Sponsored Terrorist Massacre. The Ruin of Indonesian Society
By Andre Vltchek
Indonesia update: 50 Years After Kissinger's CIA Coup
Global Research, October 13, 2015
http://andrevltchek.weebly.com

Last year, I stopped travelling to Indonesia. I simply did… I just could not bear being there, anymore. It was making me unwell. I felt psychologically and physically sick.

Indonesia has matured into perhaps the most corrupt country on Earth, and possibly into the most indoctrinated and compassionless place anywhere under the sun. Here, even the victims were not aware of their own conditions anymore. The victims felt shame, while the mass murderers were proudly bragging about all those horrendous killings and rapes they had committed. Genocidal cadres are all over the government.

Don’t get me wrong: there is really nothing wrong with maturity. But instead of maturing elegantly into something noble, like a precious wine, Indonesia just decayed into disgusting vinegar, or spoiled milk, or most likely into something much, much more sinister – a monstrous decomposing carcass in the middle of a once socialist, progressive and anti-imperialist Asia.

After the 1965 coup backed by the US, Australia and Europe, some 2-3 million Indonesians died, in fact were slaughtered mercilessly in an unbridled orgy of terror: teachers, intellectuals, artists, unionists, and Communists vanished. The US Embassy in Jakarta provided a detailed list of those who were supposed to be liquidated. The army, which was generously paid by the West and backed by the countless brainwashed religious cadres of all faiths, showed unprecedented zeal, killing and imprisoning almost everyone capable of thinking. Books were burned and film studios and theatres closed down.

Women from the left-wing organizations, after being savagely raped, had their breasts amputated. They were labeled as witches, atheists, sexual maniacs and perverts.

Professional militant Christian cadres from Holland and other Western countries landed in Indonesia well before the coup. They were entrusted with the radicalization of Muslims, Hindus, Protestants, Catholics and the Indonesian military. They labeled Communists and other leftists as “dangerous atheists” and began an indoctrination and training campaign aimed to liquidate them.

The right-wing Chinese individuals, mostly traitors who just escaped from their Communist revolutionary homeland, happily joined the fascist putsch-nick clique and later the murderous, whoring and treasonous regime of General Suharto. They joined it as snitches and “preachers”. The Chinese minority in Indonesia, while undoubtedly suffering from certain discrimination, had joined the most oppressive domestic and foreign forces, shamelessly collaborating with military fascism, Western imperialism and the savage capitalist system, which it itself had helped to establish. Because of its control over the crucial part of the local “economy” (read: plunder of the natural resources) and its ownership of the countless brainwashing media outlets and private educational facilities, the Chinese minority in Indonesia has been playing a decisive and devastating role in the spectacular collapse of post-1965 Indonesia.

After the slaughters of 1965/66, everything resembling the Revolution and the People’s Republic of China was banned and obliterated in Indonesia, including red color, the Chinese language, and the word “Communism” itself. Some of it was “inconvenient”, but overall, the Chinese right-wing anti-Communist émigrés in Indonesia finally had it their way! Suharto’s fascism was definitely closer to their hearts than the anti-Western-imperialism and the power sharing between the progressive Muslim leader Sukarno and his “golden child”, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).

After the genocide, the great selling of Indonesia began. Corruption and privatization went hand in hand. Ideological and intellectual blindness were administered to the population.

The murder and rape of millions, theft of everything that used to belong to the nation…

Thus was committed the greatest treason of the 20th century.

Roughly 50 years after this disaster took place, I broke my self-imposed ban and visited Indonesia once again.

*

This time, I did not come to Indonesia for academic work. In fact, I have fully divorced myself from academia, now considering it as prostituted and defunct as journalism. Philosophy has to break itself free from academia and its institutions. Philosophy deals with life, while contemporary academia represents intellectual death.

My damning book, “Indonesia: Archipelago of Fear”, was published more than 3 years ago by Pluto in London, then translated and published by Badak Merah into the Indonesian language. Other translations followed. Enough of theory!

I came back once again to breathe polluted air and to see the ruins of Indonesian society – ruins visible all over the capital. I came to observe the uninspired expressions on people’s faces, to once again experience the totally collapsed infrastructure. I came to face the society that had liquidated almost all science, philosophy and arts, and where local workers are now unable to even put two simple tiles together in a matching manner, much less construct a spaceship or passenger jet.

I returned to shout and to curse, and to write this as a warning to those who still think that a savage capitalism could actually work, that a country that would allow its “elites” to turn it into a doormat (or worse) of the West, could simply survive, let alone thrive.

I came to say what is clear but “forbidden” to say: “Indonesia died! It is finished. It was murdered some time between 1965 and now. It will never get back to its feet. People living there do not really live in a country, but inside a horrific, decaying cadaver.”

The only way forward would be a revolution, as Pramoedya Ananta Toer used to say. A total revolution, a reset! Return to what was destroyed in 1965. Bury the corpse, put on trial all those who have been committing treason, and start from zero, from the beginning!

This is reality, and it does not require footnotes or quotations!

*

But back to the deal between Empire and local “elites”:

The deal was clear: the West allowed the putsch-nicks and their religious and “educationalist” lackeys to rob the nation, tolerating the lowest forms of corruption. But, in exchange, they had to guarantee that the Indonesian people would to be kept thoroughly brainwashed and uneducated, never demanding the return of the Communist Party, never striving for great patriotic ideals and never questioning market fundamentalism and the indiscriminate looting of Indonesia’s natural resources.

The Christians that were put “in charge” were those from the most deranged evangelical sects, braced by the imported army of North American and Australian intelligence/religious cadres. “Prosperity Gospel” and “Pentecostals” were the most successful implants. The preachers listening to Voice of America and reading Western economic journals were suddenly in control.

Saudi-style Wahhabi Western allies shamelessly sidelined almost all socialist brands of local Islam, and the most militant and intolerant varieties of otherwise progressive and socialist Muslim religion began their destructive, totalitarian and intellectually ruinous activities.

The West, its media and academia, started unashamedly backing all fascist cultural dogmas: including regressive religious and family structures.

Not only that – they kept spreading the most grotesque lies: about “how tolerant Indonesia became”, and “how moderate” it is. “Third largest democracy” was how the Western demagogues have constantly described the country without one single pro-people or anti-imperialist political party. Indonesia is called “the largest economy of Southeast Asia”, a totally misleading definition, considering that Indonesia has more than three times more people that any other nation in the region. And could it really be called an “economy”, something that produces hardly anything and lives predominately from the unbridled plunder of its natural resources, as well as from the resources of colonized Papua, where Indonesia has been committing horrific and silent genocide?

The local media has continuously quoted all this propaganda and disinformation, quite logically, considering that corrupt business interests own virtually all of it.

After the regime murdered around 40% of teachers in Java alone, the education system fell to the hands of totally ignorant but zealous morons: themselves collaborators with the West. These people were nothing more than cynical and money hungry businessmen and businesswomen, but definitely not educators. Spreading ignorance and stupidity was not only their mission; it was a natural way of expressing themselves, their method of interacting with the world.

After years of the horrid plunder of the resources, of incongruous religious gaga, of censuring of everything deep and creative, and after preventing Indonesian youth from getting real knowledge about the world, the country of Indonesia began eventually resembling what it is not: a nation of 300 million people (the government lies about the numbers, too, as I was told by several leading UN statisticians while I was working on my book) without one single thinker (now that people from the PKI and Sukarno era, like Pramoedya Ananta Toer, passed away), without one single internationally recognizable scientist or a musician or public intellectual…

Dirt everywhere, horrendous immoral social contrasts on every corner… Range Rovers and Gucci boutiques right next to open sewers and children showing clear signs of malnutrition. There are hardly any parks in Indonesia, no waste treatment plants, and hardly any sidewalks or public playgrounds for children. There are no public educational television channels, while public libraries are almost-not existent – a shocking contrast to Malaysia. Water is, of course, privatized.

The nation stopped reading. One bookstore after another is closing down. It only translates a few hundred titles each year, most of them commercial. Translations are of horrendous quality.

Nothing, almost nothing, works. There are constant blackouts, and the roads are uneven and narrow. Even trans-Java “highways” are two-lane, narrow potholed tracks, of a worse quality than some village roads in Thailand or Malaysia. Traffic jams are all over, in the cities and countryside, as even poor people have to rely on private vehicles and infrastructure that has already collapsed many years ago.

Internet and phone signals are so bad that when I was editing my films, I was forced to fly to Singapore in order to upload some larger files.

Old ferries are sinking, airplanes are falling from the sky, and trains keep derailing.

No forests are left intact. The entire nation is logged out, mined out – ruined, screwed!

And the West is dancing on that horrid Indonesian carcass, celebrating! Yes, celebrating! It loves, it adores this “democratic”, “tolerant” nation which is in ruins. Instead of thinking, Indonesia is listening to some repulsive pop, grinning idiotically, producing incomprehensible squeaks and giggles befitting a mental institution, sacrificing itself oh-so-generously to the wellbeing of Western corporations and governments!

*

And so I came again, for just a few days, to show my feature documentary film at a small, new film club at TIM in Jakarta… the only film club, with 45 seats for an entire nation of 300 million inhabitants. I came to show my film about the 1965 Coup, called “Terlena – Breaking of A Nation”, which I produced some 11 years ago. It was the first feature documentary film ever made about the 1965 “events”.

I watched my own film and suddenly felt devastated, because my old friends had “departed” several years ago, and I missed them… Abdurrahman Wahid, a former President of Indonesia, a progressive Muslim leader and a closet socialist, who was “discreetly” overthrown by the “elites”… Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the greatest Indonesian thinker and paramount Southeast Asian writer…

I looked as their faces on the screen, faces so dear to me, and I thought: “How alive you were! Even when you were old and ill, how strong and determined was your will. How alive was your generation that grew up on the socialist fervor of great President Sukarno, father of the non-aligned movement… how alive you were compared to this cynical, greedy, brainwashed “young generation” of the corporate whores, of covetous nitwits, of the pathetic, emotionless, selfish and empty moral and intellectual degenerates!”

After the screening, predictable questions came from the audience: “what is to be done?” and later: “what do you think about the young generation in Indonesia?”

I thought about some of those young social media damsels, who had come to me in the past, begging to be ‘educated’ and ‘brainwashed back into reality’… They ‘wanted to work for humanity’, they said. I thought about how they were faking and lying, and how they betrayed and ran away, always, at the slightest sign of danger… How they ran back to their fascist clans whenever they were whistled for, how they dove immediately and directly into the rectums of their corrupt and venomous parents and grandparents… I also thought about the students at the University of Indonesia – arrogant, disinterested, banging into their phones and eating * food during the lectures, even when presented with some tiny bits of essential information.

“Young generation?” I wondered. In Indonesia, they felt like some old nomenclature, even at the age of 15: endless idiotic Barbie dolls on thin legs… Those of the “elites”, I mean… the rest were just slaves, exploited, humiliated and fully conditioned not to ask and not to know. “Young elites” – embarrassing parodies of the movers and shakers from Wall Street. So pathetic! No individuality, dreams, talent, hard work; no revolutionary and rebellious spirit! The same crappy, sugary pop music and Hollywood films, the same Starbucks lattes… While outside, the nation was burning, choking on its own smoke and excrements, collapsing and murdering in some of the most horrendous genocides in the modern history – East Timor before, and Papua now.

Damned collaborators with the Western fascism! Bloody ass-lickers of the colonialists! And nobody thinks about shaving their head as punishment for selling themselves and the country to the Empire! That Indonesian boo-boo, coo-coo, absurd “young” (really, young?) generation!

I spoke. They listened. Then they went home. I think my shouting provided some entertainment. Nothing more. I was not shouting in Quito or Caracas. I was shouting in Jakarta. Most likely, nothing could be revolutionized here anymore.

*

The next day, I wanted to see a rhino at “Safari Park”, outside the city of Bogor, but police decided to torture people and it blocked, for no apparent reason, the highway exit. They did it for several hours, just to show that it could… This way the thugs were able to sell their junk, and ‘guides’ could take motorists through back roads. Booty was shared with the police, of course. Everything was corrupted: even a motorway could be blocked so police and gangs could make extra cash! I somehow managed to leave the highway, after my lungs began threatening to collapse from pollution.

I tried to make it to Bogor, to those old and famous Botanic Gardens, that were until recently one of the very few public places in Indonesia. But when I arrived, I saw devastation: the gardens were now systematically destroyed by some horrid construction project. Ancient trees have been cut down to give way to yet another revolting sprawl of parking lots. A historic bridge had been torn down and a new one was being built, obviously in order to change a predominately pedestrian area into a driveway. Instead of serenity, there was loud pop junk music, coming from all directions.

Then I was going on yet another stretch of clogged highway… and then I witnessed and smelled a mountain of garbage burning in the middle of Jakarta.

There were some deformed, gangrenous beggars in the middle of the highway and at several major intersections…

In Jakarta, a former bookstore that I used to frequent was now converted into a fruit shop. For dinner, I ate disgusting food at overpriced restaurants, where the waiters were clearly “somewhere else”, unable to even keep their eyes open, or to concentrate on what they were being told.

Several Ferraris were in between all this, and also a few Prada stores… and those enormous, monstrous advertisement billboards promoting cigarettes as something cool and hip.

There was no beauty in sight. No beauty at all. All gone.

While in the traffic jams, I tried to work. But how could I? The Internet was collapsing, and mobile phones hardly functioned. I’d written about it so many times, so why was I surprised?

*

50 years since the coup. A real anniversary – what many Indonesians are genuinely proud of! Their moment in the limelight! Their betrayal of all great ideals and their submission and surrender to the West.

Again, I wanted to run away. I felt physically sick here: a revolutionary, a rebel, and a philosopher in this land of obedience and intellectual collapse.

So, I ran. From canals clogged with unimaginable filth, garbage… from deformities of children and adults, but with Louis Vuitton boutiques in the background… from sickening betrayals, and from constant lies, from long uninterrupted silences, from the inability to rely on almost anyone, from the absolute and total lack of poetry, and from joylessness, from bleakness, from the absence of love. Yes, above all, from the absence of love.

During the 72 hours that I spent in the place that I consider to be the closest to hell (and I have seen more than 150 countries on this Earth), I suddenly recalled so many things that I tried to bury and forget: from the stench of the mutilated bodies of gang raped women in Ermera, East Timor, to those hundreds of poor animals slaughtered in the Surabaya zoo, so that some corrupt “international” project could go on.

I recalled how, after the tsunami in Aceh, the Indonesian soldiers and police, instead of helping traumatized victims, were blackmailing the volunteers, demanding money and threatening to cut with their knives those precious barrels of drinking water if the bribes were not forthcoming. I remembered bodies decomposing in the pits, because no government worker would lift his finger and operate heavy equipment without being “greased”.

Oh Indonesia, you are a true daughter of turbo-capitalism, of the lowest religious aspirations, of senseless obedience, notorious lack of education and knowledge, and unimaginable brutality and lack of compassion!

I saw so much * during the 20 years that I tried to document your downfall!

I saw deranged Christian preachers, their sadistic and fanatic eyes popping in ISIL-style zeal, locking up, for years, their adult daughters, simply because they wanted to marry non-Christian men.

I witnessed Christian religious services in Surabaya malls, where totally molded idiots preachers were declaring with absolute conviction: “God loves the rich, and that is why they are rich!” I observed some English-language church services performed by US and Australian intelligence apparatchiks… complete with bizarre and repulsive pop gospels, accompanied by ass wiggling of thrilled matrons and young girls. I saw racist, bigoted extremist Sunni Muslims, paid and conditioned by the Saudi Wahhabis, destroying Shi’a villages in the middle of backward and desperate island of Madura.

I saw a little girl running away from a burning mosque in Ambon, and a Christian boy trying to escape from a gang of Wahhabi youth. They cut him to pieces, at the end, with their machetes…

I saw so many fires and ashes, and so much intolerance, stupidity and hate! I saw what replaced a once great and proud nation governed by a progressive Muslim President who trusted and relied upon the great and democratic Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI).

I saw clearly what capitalism, what imperialism, ignorance and fascist indoctrination can do!

*

And deep inside I swore: “I will re-edit Terlena! I will re-edit that film of mine, damn it!”

I swore, and it made me feel much better.

Indonesia is the greatest untold story that I know – the story about what imperialism is capable of doing!

Entire islands deforested, robbed: enormous Borneo and Sumatra… Tortured elephants and great apes… Corruption and theft… Filth everywhere, on the surface of the earth, and inside people’s brains.

The collapse of humanism… the collapse of humanity. The persistent ruin of intellectualism, creativity, compassion and tenderness…

I ran, but as I did, I felt those millions and millions of hands trying to hold me, trying to slow me down. “We are alone, we are forgotten” I heard voices. “Stay little bit longer… Write a few more books, write a few more essays, and make films… Do not abandon us!”

I knew I would do what they were asking. I would leave and come back again. For those slaughtered and defenseless creatures, for the ruined rainforest, for the millions of interrupted lives…

I would come back out of spite for those who ruined Indonesia.

I would come back to warn the world.

I would come back, so I could call murderers by their real names, and give collaborators the titles that they deserve.

As I was leaving, I knew I would soon return and expose the full horrors of the Indonesian experiment that has been conducted on the local people by the sadistic Western regime, by its religions and its capitalist dogmas.

I knew that I would expose local collaborators. That is how revolutions begin!

I would give back, years and decades after they passed away, at least some dignity to those Indonesians who lived and fought and were killed. To those Indonesians who knew how to love passionately and desperately, fully and selfishly, each other and their Nation, and who were therefore eternally alive!

I knew one day soon I would return and re-make my film. For “them”! And my film would be, with some luck, damn good!

But as I was leaving, it was all smoke, stench and rubbish.

Indonesia died. Silently.

No more lies! Right now, the Indonesian people have no country. It was taken away from them by Western imperialists, by their own corrupt and treasonous “elites” and by the military. Only after they realize what has been done, they will be able to struggle and build their new motherland.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania - a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

[TonyGosling]

Reinhard Gehlen: Nazi head of post­war Ger­man intelligence
http://spitfirelist.com/news/gehlen-bnd-and-the-1965-indonesian-coup-o f-1965/

COMMENT: In our recent dis­cus­sions with Peter Lev­enda, we dis­cussed the pro­found Nazi pres­ence in Indone­sia, before, dur­ing and after World War II. The bloody 1965 coup against Sukarno is known to have been largely engi­neered by the CIA. By some accounts, the death toll reached 1,000, 000, with the vic­tims includ­ing many lib­er­als, jour­nal­ists, artists and writ­ers and oth­ers viewed with dis­taste by the army.

A recent issue of Ger­man For­eign Pol­icy (which feeds along the bot­tom of the front page of the web­site) dis­closes that the BND–the Ger­man for­eign intel­li­gence ser­vice and the final incar­na­tion of the Gehlen spy outfit–played a major role in the coup, as well.

The appar­ent BND point man for the Fed­eral Republic’s role in the coup was Rudolf Oebsger-Roder, like so many Gehlen org offi­cers, a vet­eran of the SS.

The slaugh­ter in Indone­sia proved alto­gether pleas­ing to Gehlen. ” . . . Reflect­ing back, BND founder Gehlen was prais­ing these crimes almost effu­sively. “The sig­nif­i­cance of the Indone­sian army’s suc­cess, which ... pur­sued the elim­i­na­tion of the entire Com­mu­nist Party with all con­se­quences and sever­ity, can­not ­ in my opin­ion ­ be appraised highly enough,” Gehlen wrote in his 1971 “Memoirs.” . . .”

“Bonn and the Putsch;” german-foreign-policy.com; 10/15/2015.

Germany’s Fed­eral Intel­li­gence Ser­vice (BND) has been heav­ily involved in the 1965 mur­der­ous putsch in Indone­sia ­ the guest nation of this year’s Frank­furt Book Fair. This was con­firmed in secret doc­u­ments from the Bun­destag, the Ger­man Par­lia­ment. Accord­ing to BND Pres­i­dent at the time, Ger­hard Wessel’s man­u­script for a talk he deliv­ered to a ses­sion of the Bundestag’s “Con­fi­den­tial Com­mit­tee” in June 1968, the BND did more than merely sup­port the Indone­sian mil­i­tary in their blood-soaked “liq­ui­da­tion of the CPI” (Com­mu­nist Party of Indone­sia) ­ result­ing in the mur­der of hun­dreds of thou­sands, pos­si­bly even mil­lions ­ with advi­sors, equip­ment and finances. Suharto, who sub­se­quently took power, had even attrib­uted a “large part ... of the suc­cess” of the oper­a­tion to the BND. Up to now, mainly the US-American assis­tance to the putsch has been known. The putsch, and the more than 30 year-long dic­ta­tor­ship that fol­lowed ­ which also had been reli­ably pro­moted by West Ger­many ­ are impor­tant themes being pre­sented by Indone­sian writ­ers at this year’s Frank­furt Book Fair. To this day, the Ger­man gov­ern­ment has refused to allow an inves­ti­ga­tion of the BND’s sup­port for the putsch and the Indone­sian military’s exces­sive brutality.

Hun­dreds of Thou­sands Dead

The Indone­sian putsch, bring­ing Maj. Gen. Haji Mohamed Suharto to power in Jakarta, began in Octo­ber 1965 as a reac­tion to an attempted coup d’état, killing sev­eral offi­cers on Sep­tem­ber 30. Suharto’s dic­ta­to­r­ial reign lasted until 1998. The attempted coup was falsely attrib­uted to the Com­mu­nist Party of Indone­sia (CPI). Sub­se­quently, the mil­i­tary launched exces­sively bru­tal oper­a­tions against all gen­uine and sus­pected mem­bers and sym­pa­thiz­ers of the com­mu­nist party. Hun­dreds of thou­sands, pos­si­bly even mil­lions, were mur­dered; mil­lions were impris­oned. The exact num­ber is still unknown. The crimes com­mit­ted at the time by the mil­i­tary have never really been brought to light.

50 to 100 Vic­tims Each Night

One of the things never brought to light is what sup­port west­ern pow­ers had given to the Suharto putsch. US com­plic­ity, hav­ing had the best rela­tions to the Indone­sian armed forces, has, to some extent, already been exposed. Accord­ing to experts, for exam­ple, by 1965, around 4,000 Indone­sian offi­cers had been trained in US mil­i­tary instal­la­tions as well as high-ranking offi­cers hav­ing been trained in counter-insurgency on the basis of US field man­u­als at Indonesia’s elite mil­i­tary institutes.[1] Decem­ber 2, 1965, the US ambas­sador gave his con­sent to pro­vid­ing finan­cial sup­port to the “Kap-Gestapu” move­ment, a move­ment ­ as he put it ­ “inspired by the army, even though com­prised of civil­ian action groups,” which “shoul­dered the task of the ongo­ing repres­sive mea­sures against Indonesia’s Com­mu­nist Party.“[2] The ambas­sador must have known what this would mean. Novem­ber 13, his employ­ees had passed on infor­ma­tion from the Indone­sian police indi­cat­ing, “between 50 and 100 mem­bers of the CPI in East­ern and Cen­tral Java were being killed each night.” April 15, the embassy had admit­ted, “it did not know if the actual num­ber” of mur­dered CPI activists “was not closer to 100,000 or 1,000,000.” In spite of the mass mur­der, the US ambas­sador in Jakarta reported back to Wash­ing­ton (August 10, 1966) that the author­i­ties in Jakarta had been pro­vided a list of the lead­ing CPI members.[3]

“Reli­able Friend of Germany”

Agen­cies of the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment had also been involved in the putsch. The BND had sup­ported “Indonesia’s mil­i­tary intel­li­gence service’s 1965 defeat of a left-wing putsch in Jakarta, with sub­ma­chine guns, short­wave radios and money (with a total value of 300,000 DM),” reported “Der Spiegel” in March 1971.[4] Twelve weeks later, the mag­a­zine added that “a com­mando of BND men” had “trained mil­i­tary intel­li­gence ser­vice oper­a­tives in Indone­sia” and “relieved their CIA col­leagues, who were under the heavy pres­sure of anti-American propaganda.“[5] By “sup­ply­ing Soviet rifles and Finnish ammu­ni­tion, the BND instruc­tors” were even actu­ally inter­ven­ing in that “civil war.” If one can believe the BND’s founder, Rein­hard Gehlen, Bonn, at the time, had the best con­tacts to lead­ing mil­i­tary offi­cers. In his “Mem­oirs,” pub­lished in 1971, Gehlen wrote, “two of Germany’s reli­able friends” were among the Indone­sian offi­cers, mur­dered Sep­tem­ber 30, includ­ing “the long­time and highly revered mil­i­tary attaché in Bonn, Brig. Gen. Pand­jai­tan.” Dur­ing the putsch, the BND was “in the for­tu­nate posi­tion of being able to pro­vide the West Ger­man gov­ern­ment with timely and detailed reports ­ from excel­lent sources ­ ... on the progress of those days, which had been so cru­cial for Indonesia.“[6]

An Excel­lent Resident

Other indi­ca­tions have emerged from the research pub­lished by the expert of intel­li­gence ser­vices, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom and the polit­i­cal sci­en­tist, Matthias Ritzi. Their find­ings con­firmed that there was close coor­di­na­tion between the BND and CIA. In April 1961, BND head­quar­ters in Pul­lach had informed the US Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency that it had “an excel­lent Chief of Sta­tion” in Jakarta, writes Schmidt-Eenboom. The CIA thought the BND was refer­ring to Rudolf Oebsger-Röder, a for­mer colonel of the SS work­ing in the Reich Secu­rity Cen­tral Office (Reichssicher­heit­shaup­tamt) in Nazi Ger­many, who joined West Germany’s Orga­ni­za­tion Gehlen in 1948 and was later on post in Indone­sia, as a cor­re­spon­dent for the Süd­deutsche Zeitung and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.[7] The BND had main­tained Oebsger-Röder on its staff until the mid-‘60s. In mid-January 1964, a high-ranking CIA rep­re­sen­ta­tive paid Gehlen a visit and asked him how the West Ger­mans were han­dling the devel­op­ments in Indone­sia, explain Schmidt-Eenboom and Ritzi. Gehlen told him that he is keep­ing Bonn up-to-date, but does not yet know how the chan­cellery intends to proceed.

“A Large Part BND”

The man­u­script for a talk BND Pres­i­dent Ger­hard Wes­sel pre­sented June 21 1968 to the Bundestag’s Con­fi­den­tial Com­mit­tee pro­vides more details. In the form of notes, Wes­sel gave “details of BND activ­i­ties” in sup­port of its Indone­sian part­ner ser­vice, explained Schmidt-Eenboom and Ritzi. Explic­itly the man­u­script explains that “the close ties already in place to the Indone­sian strate­gic ND (intel­li­gence ser­vice) by Octo­ber 1965, had facil­i­tated sup­port (advi­sors, equip­ment, money) to Indonesia’s ND and its spe­cial mil­i­tary organs dur­ing the elim­i­na­tion of the CPI (and Sukarno’s dis­em­pow­er­ment ­ con­trol and sup­port of demonstrations).“[8] The “CPI’s elim­i­na­tion” included the assas­si­na­tion of hun­dreds of thou­sands of gen­uine and sus­pected mem­bers and sym­pa­thiz­ers of the Indone­sian CP. Accord­ing to the man­u­script, BND Pres­i­dent Wes­sel con­tin­ued his speech to the Con­fi­den­tial Com­mit­tee, “in the opin­ion of Indone­sian politi­cians and mil­i­tary offi­cers ((Suharto, Nasu­tion, Sul­tan) a large part thanks to the BND.”

Praise from Pullach

Reflect­ing back, BND founder Gehlen was prais­ing these crimes almost effu­sively. “The sig­nif­i­cance of the Indone­sian army’s suc­cess, which ... pur­sued the elim­i­na­tion of the entire Com­mu­nist Party with all con­se­quences and sever­ity, can­not ­ in my opin­ion ­ be appraised highly enough,” Gehlen wrote in his 1971 “Memoirs.“[9]

Berlin’s Pri­or­i­ties

The Ger­man gov­ern­ment is still refus­ing to shed light on Germany’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in these crimes. In a par­lia­men­tary inter­pel­la­tion, the gov­ern­ment was asked if it has knowl­edge of “for­eign gov­ern­ments, intel­li­gence ser­vices or other orga­ni­za­tions’ direct or indi­rect sup­port of the mas­sacres.” In Mai 2014, it responded, “after a thor­ough assess­ment, the gov­ern­ment con­cludes that it can­not give an open answer.” It is “imper­a­tive” to keep the “requested infor­ma­tion” secret. The “pro­tec­tion of sources” is a “prin­ci­ple of pri­mary impor­tance to the work of intel­li­gence services.“[10] For the Ger­man gov­ern­ment, the Indone­sian civil society’s need to have infor­ma­tion on for­eign sup­port for the immense mass mur­der is of less impor­tance than its “pro­tec­tion of sources.”

[1] Rainer Wern­ing: Putsch nach “Pütschchen”. junge Welt 01.10.2015.
[2], [3] Rainer Wern­ing: Der Archipel Suharto. In: Kon­flikte auf Dauer? Osnabrücker Jahrbuch Frieden und Wis­senschaft, her­aus­gegeben vom Ober­bürg­er­meis­ter der Stadt Osnabrück und dem Präsi­den­ten der Uni­ver­sität Osnabrück. Osnabrück 2008, S. 183–199.
[4] Her­mann Zolling, Heinz Höhne: Pul­lach intern. Der Spiegel 11/1971.
[5] Her­mann Zolling, Heinz Höhne: Pul­lach intern. Der Spiegel 23/1971.
[6] Rein­hard Gehlen: Der Dienst. Erin­nerun­gen 1942–1971. Mainz/Wiesbaden 1971.
[7], [8] Matthias Ritzi, Erich Schmidt-Eenboom: Im Schat­ten des Drit­ten Reiches. Der BND und sein Agent Richard Christ­mann. Berlin 2011. See Review: Im Schat­ten des Drit­ten Reiches.
[9] Rein­hard Gehlen: Der Dienst. Erin­nerun­gen 1942–1971. Mainz/Wiesbaden 1971.
[10] Antwort der Bun­desregierung auf die Kleine Anfrage der Abge­ord­neten Andrej Hunko, Jan van Aken, Sevim Da de­len, weit­erer Abge­ord­neter und der Frak­tion DIE LINKE. Deutscher Bun­destag Druck­sache 18/1554, 27.05.2014.

[outsider]

Fire war criminal Wiranto. He's not fit to be Indonesia coordinating minister:
https://www.change.org/p/joko-widodo-wiranto-is-not-fit-to-be-indonesi a-coordinating-minister

'This is outrageous. On July 27, 2016, Indonesia's President Joko Widodo appointed indicted war criminal Gen. Wiranto Coordinating Minister for Politics, Law, and Security Affairs. A presidential spokesperson told the Jakarta Post that Wiranto "well-tested and was experienced in resolving various assignments, especially during the transition period from the New Order to the Reform era in the late 1990s." In 2003, he was indicted by a UN-backed court for his role in the security-force violence during Timor-Leste's independence referendum

Wiranto is responsible through acts of omission and commission for the gravest violations of human right in East Timor and Indonesia.

A retired General Wiranto had deep ties to the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s New Order regime. He served as Suharto’s Aide de Camp from 1989-1993. In February 1998, while Indonesia was in the throes of the financial and political crisis, Suharto named him commander of the Armed Forces of Indonesia and a month later he was given the portfolio of Minister of Defense and Security. Although viewed as a reformer for his outward support for reducing the military’s role in politics, he nonetheless bears responsibility as commander in the deaths of protesters at the hands of the military in Jakarta during the May 1998 tumult. Wiranto was implicated for rights violations in a 2003 Komnas HAM report on the anti-Chinese riots in 1998.

In February 2003, the UN-backed Serious Crimes Unit (SCU) indicted Wiranto for his role in the security force violence surrounding Timor-Leste's 1999 UN-organized referendum on independence. The SCU charged him “with Crimes Against Humanity for Murder, Deportation and Persecution in that these crimes were all undertaken as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against the civilian population of East Timor and specifically targeted those who were believed to be supporters of independence for East Timor.” As head of the military, there is no doubt that he was aware – if not involved in the planning – of the scorched earth campaign unleashed on the East Timorese following their vote for independence in 1999. For reasons of realpolitik the government of Timor-Leste has never followed up on the indictment.

In December 2013, Wiranto told Al Jazeera “that he followed state policies [in Timor-Leste] and that President Habibie was responsible for those. Habibie rubbishes his claims and says there are no facts to suggest he instructed Wiranto and his soldiers to kill.”

more at ETAN's website

see joint statement by Tapol, ETAN and Watch Indonesia! on Wiranto

ETAN needs your support - please donate today!
This petition will be delivered to:

Presiden Republik Indonesia
Joko Widodo

[TonyGosling]

INDONESIA: Capitalism has Reduced Cities to Dehumanized, Polluted Environments for Ordinary People
December 17, 2017 By 21wire 0 Comments
http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/12/17/indonesia-capitalism-reduced-cit ies-dehumanized-polluted-environments-ordinary-people/

Hungry and homeless in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

Andre Vltchek - 21st Century Wire

Several years ago, a prominent Indonesian businessman who now resides in Canada, insisted on meeting me in a back room of one of Jakarta’s posh restaurants. An avid reader of mine, he ‘had something urgent to tell me’, after finding out that our paths were going to be crossing in this destroyed and hopelessly polluted Indonesian capital.

What he had to say was actually straight to the point and definitely worth sitting two hours in an epic traffic jam:

“No one will be allowed to build comprehensive public transportation in Jakarta or in any other Indonesian city. If a mayor or a governor tries and defies the wishes of the ruthless business community which is in fact controlling most of the Indonesian government, he or she will be dethroned, or even totally destroyed.”

These ‘prophetic’ words are still ringing in my ears, several months after the complete destruction of the progressive Jakarta governor, known as Ahok (real name: Basuki Tjahaja Purnama), who tried very hard to improve the seemingly ungovernable and thoroughly destroyed city, constructing new mass transit lines (LRT), restoring old train stations, cleaning canals, attempting to build at least some basic net of sidewalks, as well as planting trees and creating parks.

After Ahok’s first and extremely successful term in office, the opposition consolidated its forces. It consisted mainly of the Islamists, big business tycoons, and the military as well as other revanchist cadres (almost exclusively pro-business and pro-Western individuals) that are still controlling Indonesia.

‘Ahok’, an outsider and an ethnic Chinese, patently lost.


A tiny minority can dine on caviar in Cafe Batavia in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

Instead of coming to his rescue, several ‘prominent’ but corrupt city planners and architects, most of them enjoying funding from abroad, shamelessly joined the bandwagon of ‘Ahok bashing’.

But even defeating Ahok was not enough. He had to be punished and humiliated, in order to discourage others from trying to replicate his socially-oriented example. Already during the election campaign, charges were brought against him, alleging that he had ‘insulted Islam’ during one of his public appearances. It was total nonsense, disputed by several leading Indonesian linguists, but in a thoroughly corrupt society (both legally and morally) it simply worked.

On May 9, 2017, ‘Ahok’ was sentenced to two years in prison, and unceremoniously thrown into the dungeon.


A normally polluted river in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

Since then, many of his projects have stopped totally, or at least were significantly slowed down. A disgusting filth has once again began covering Jakarta’s canals and rivers.

For those who still believed in miracles, all hopes died.

Those ‘city planners’ who still conveniently believe that one can ‘work with’ the present regime (they call it ‘government’) correctly assumed that it was once again ‘business as usual’.

As ‘Ahok’ was being thrown behind bars, huge sighs of relief were almost detectable all over this misfortunate archipelago! Everything has returned to ‘normal’, at least for those who have been benefiting from the collapse of Indonesia and its cities.

The clock of Indonesian history was turned back. It is now almost certain that at least for several upcoming decades, all Indonesian cities will remain what they are now – a living hell, the worst nightmare, and indisputably some of the most horrid urban areas found anywhere on Earth.

But readers abroad are not supposed to know all this. Indonesian people are not supposed to understand the situation. It is now all biasa – ‘just normal, just fine. Everything is fine. Read those ANU (Australian National University) papers and you will learn that ‘Indonesia is now a normal country, like Brazil or Mexico’. Nothing extraordinary is taking place.

In reality, everything has collapsed. The cities have.

Not metaphorically, not hyperbolically, but concretely, practically.

A renowned Australian artist, George Burchett, who now resides in Hanoi, Vietnam, once visited Jakarta. For several weeks we travelled together all around the Indonesian archipelago. He was shocked and depressed. Before departing, he declared:

“I saw many cities, all over the world. Cities are built for the people. For the first time in my life, in Indonesia, I saw the cities that are actually built not for the people, but against the people.”


Futuristic new Ciputra World Surabaya. (Photo: Andre Vtchek)

It is because Indonesian cities are fascist. They do not serve the needs of its citizens. On the contrary, they are designed to extract that little which is still left in the possession of the common Indonesian folks; extract and give it to the local rulers, as well as to the multi-national companies.

Excerpts of the most common definitions of ‘failed states’ are stated in the Encyclopedia Britannica, and can perfectly apply to both Indonesia in general, and to its cities in particular:

“The governing capacity of a failed state is attenuated such that it is unable to fulfill the administrative and organizational tasks required to control people and resources and can provide only minimal public services… A failed state suffers from crumbling infrastructures, faltering utility supplies and educational and health facilities, and deteriorating basic human-development indicators…”

Governor ‘Ahok’ tried to change the situation. Crowds cheered. Millions watched, in all the major cities of Indonesia. Hope was born, at first fragile but soon blossoming.

Then suddenly: a tremendous blast, full stop, and collapse! The man who dared to inject several socialist elements into the sclerotic, brutal system, ended up behind bars.

And it is now all back to the old ‘failed state’ scenario. Life is once again thoroughly empty and predictable.

There is hardly any difference between the Indonesian cities. If you put a person in the center or a suburb of Jakarta, Surabaya, Bandung, Semarang, Medan, Makassar or Pontianak, he or she would have no idea, which one is which.


Drivers of super rich under posh Ciputra Mall in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

All major streets are choked with traffic jams. There are no sidewalks, and even if there are some pathetic and narrow ones, they are overtaken by aggressive and smoke belching scooters, as well as by unregulated and unhygienic street vendor stalls. Thugs are everywhere, controlling the streets. Almost all side streets have open sewage system. When it rains, entire neighborhoods get submerged under filthy water. Tiny carts, pulled by unclean and underpaid men, collect garbage. All the cities face the same problems, and all the cities look precisely the same.

Sanitation, water quality and garbage recycling facilities are at similar levels to those of the poorest sub-Saharan African countries.

Slums are omnipresent – huge and brutal. In fact, most of the neighborhoods of the Indonesian cities, called kampungs (‘villages’), could easily fit the international definitions of slums.


Jakarta-under bridge dwelling. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

A few years ago I was invited to speak at the University of Indonesia (UI). Various students asked me: “Why? Why is all this is happening in our country? And is there any solution?”

I replied that of course there is a solution: “socialism and central planning. But it would also have to be determined and real, and it would have to include a full-hearted anti-corruption battle, as well as a decisive ban on selling all natural resources and utilities to foreigners.” I added: “And tell your professors to stop salivating over-funding from the West, and flying to Europe in order to learn about ‘administration’, ‘good governance’ and city planning from those who have been robbing your country for several centuries.”

I believe that students liked the sound of what I was saying (not sure they were still capable of understanding the meaning of my words). However, predictably, I was never invited to the UI again.

Indonesian cities are like open sores. Everything has been stolen from them and as a result, what makes life bearable is clearly missing. Only what the ‘elites’ do not want, is what has been left for the people.


Appartment under a bridge in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

There are hardly any public parks in Indonesia, at least no parks of any significance. Cities have no river or seafronts, in a striking contrast to South American, Middle Eastern and even African urban areas (not to speak of tremendous and beautiful public spaces, parks, promenades and exercise areas in China).

Dirty, clogged and polluted driveways are called ‘streets’ and ‘avenues’. There are no sidewalks, or if there are, they are just one meter wide, with broken tiles or deep potholes. Where sidewalks are not really needed, there may be actually some built – along one or two streets in the very center and in front of some government buildings, connecting basically nothing. This clearly shows that nothing is actually designed for the people.


One of the better public sidewalks in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

It is important to understand that the government of Indonesia, on all levels, is not actually an institution that consists of men and women who are determined to improve the country and to serve its people. On the contrary!

In Indonesia, a great number of politicians belong to or are somehow affiliated to the military, which has ruled the country brutally since the 1965 Western-backed military coup. That coup destroyed everything socialist and Communist, banned Communist ideas, and murdered between 1 and 3 million people, including almost all the progressive intellectuals. On top of it, most of the politicians are businesspeople, tycoons and oligarchs, and the great majority of them of unsavory reputations on top of it. They have been robbing the nation and its people for more than half of a century, and there is absolutely no reason why they should stop doing it now, or anytime soon. For these individuals, to grab the top political positions is nothing more than about maximizing the profits.

‘Indonesian democracy’ which the West loves to glorify (no wonder, as Indonesia de-facto functions as an obedient colony, plundering its own citizens and resources on behalf of the West), consists of countless political parties, of which not one of them is from the left, or defends the interests of common people. Moreover, a great majority of the ‘civil society’, of the NGO’s, are subservient to Western economical and political interests. Many if not all of these organizations are directly funded from Washington, Berlin, London or Canberra. (I described the situation in my latest novel “Aurora”).

Indonesian companies and its government are one single entity. And they are decisively and in unison plundering the entire archipelago of its natural resources. The 4th most populous country on Earth produces almost nothing. (Read my book Archipelago of Fear in English and in Bahasa Indonesia).

The ‘philosophy’ of this unbridled plunder is then applied to ‘urbanism’; to the way Indonesian cities are governed and basically abandoned to the markets. Not even in Africa where I lived and worked for several years, is there such absolute and shameless theft of urban land by the elites (of which members of government are part).

Once all this is determined, to understand the reality of Indonesia and its cities becomes much easier.

Once this is defined, Indonesian cities ‘begin to make sense’.

In reality, there is not much that could be called ‘urban’ in the Indonesian cities. Be it a city like Pontianak with 600,000 inhabitants, or Jakarta with 12 million (28 million including the surrounding cities and suburbs).

Wherever one goes, profit over people is taken to the extreme.


Streets of Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

Like those logged out, mined out and polluted islands of the archipelago, Indonesian cities are designed in a way that brings maximum income to the extremely small group of individuals and businesses. The price has to be paid by the impoverished, often ill, badly-educated, and literally choking majority.

The tremendously low level of media outlets, education, pop entertainment, as well as constant religious encroachment and feudal family structures, are purposefully spread and upheld, so the population does not think, does not doubt and does not rebel.

The results are shocking.

Indonesian cities are like palm oil plantations or open-pit mines, with some elements of military barrack colonies (of course there are some special quarters for the overseers, with large and kitschy houses, like those that dot South Jakarta).

Here, nothing is constructed to make life great, colorful, ecstatic, meaningful and happy. There are no permanent concert halls, no theatres, and no grand public museums (one that recently opened is private, and serves to further politically indoctrinate people, this time targeting the ‘urban middle class’). There are no pedestrian neighborhoods, and no free and public seafronts.

Not one architecturally valuable structure has been constructed in any Indonesian city after the 1965/66 military/religious coup.

In Indonesia, a ‘public area’ is synonymous with a mall, in fact with countless malls of various sizes and qualities. Inside the malls, there are chain eateries and chain shops, as well as cafes. There are also a few cinemas, showing mostly Hollywood junk or local horror films. On the weekends, there are bands playing old Western and Indonesian pop tunes, offering absolutely no variety. Some 50 songs are recycled again and again. The most favorite is, predictably: “I did it my way”.


Child labour is one of the results of high fuel and food prices in Indonesia. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

There is nothing ‘extra’ in the Indonesian cities. Here everything is stripped to absolute basics: you somehow survive on your meager salary (with prices, at least for the food and consumer goods being as high or higher than in Tokyo or Paris), you somehow move to your workplace and back, sitting for hours every day in horrific traffic jams as there is no public transportation even in such cities with 2-3 million inhabitants, like Surabaya or Bandung. You cook and wash your dishes and clothes in terribly polluted water, and try to save on outrageously high electricity bills. There is absolutely nothing to do in your neighborhood. There is of course always a mosque nearby or sometimes a church, if that’s what you fancy. There are no parks, no playgrounds for children. There is no sidewalk to walk to a cafe, and so, if you want to actually go to a cafe or to a bookstore (all the bookstores in Indonesia are increasingly poorly stocked and heavily censored), you have to jump onto your scooter or into your car again, if you have any strength left.


Garbage collection cart in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

The chances are – you have no time for anything, anyway. A 3-4 hours long daily commute, your exhausting work, and all you have time for is to collapse in front of the television set and get indoctrinated, neutralized and idiotized even further.

You learn to smile when you actually want to die, or at least to shout. You sense that nothing could ever change for better, and that your life is finished, perhaps at 25, or ever earlier.

Eventually, some people do it sooner than others: you become religious, and you become traditional, conservative and ‘family-oriented’. There is nothing else, really. The cities of Indonesia will make sure that there is nothing else. They are the perfect machines, manufacturing obedience, extracting everything from human beings, and giving nothing in return.

I often describe the coup of 1965 as a “Cultural Hiroshima”. While in Japan, the US openly experimented on the health of millions of human beings, in Indonesia the experiment was of a totally different nature. The area of interest to the Empire was: “What would happen with a progressive anti-imperialist nation that counts on a complex and diverse culture, if it is bathed in blood, if its theatres and film studios are shut down, 40% of teachers get murdered, women from left-wing organizations get their breasts amputated, writers are locked in Buru Island concentration camp, and urban planners are thought to design cities like Houston, Dallas or LA, but in a country with salaries that are 10% or less than those of the U.S.A.?”

The answer is simple: “It would turn into Indonesia. It would become Jakarta, as it is now”. For the Western demagogues and the imperialist planners, “Indonesia” and “Jakarta” are not only the names of the country and the city: they are names of the concept, of a model.

This model, forced on the colonies, is perfect for the West and its interests.

It is also perfect for the Indonesian ‘elites’, who are often getting dirty at home, plundering all they can, but do relax and play and often evacuate their entire families to Singapore, California, Australia, Hong Kong and many other ‘safe and clean’ places.

It is the cheapest; the most efficient of concepts designed to plunder, and to royally * a nation. Not surprisingly, the West has tried to replicate this ‘successful Indonesian model’ in many parts of the world.

It even tried to inject it into Russia, after the USSR was first mortally wounded and then destroyed. It tried to force it on Chile… My much older friends in Santiago told me that before the 9-11-1973 coup perpetrated by General Pinochet on behalf of the West and its companies, several people around President Allende were threatened by the right-wingers: “Watch out, Jakarta is coming!”

Jakarta came! It is here, all over Indonesia, in all of its cities, and to varying degrees in most of the countries that have fallen under the Western neo-colonialist boot.

But what does it really mean, ‘Jakarta’? Is it just a name or is it also a verb, an infinitive? “To Jakarta…”

It is ‘to take everything away from the people and to give nothing back’. ‘To Jakarta’ is to lie and to loot and to convince human beings, through long decades of indoctrination, that everything is just fine, and as should be. ‘To Jakartize’ the nation is to make almost the entire population irrelevant, to deliver the loot on the silver trays to both local and foreign rulers, leaving only dirty and polluted rivers and canals behind, as well as tremendous traffic jams, smog, bizarre overpasses with no escalators, and broken tiles along the driveways.

The ‘Jakartized population’ is obedient, explosively violent, edgy, but not towards the regime, turbo-capitalism, corrupt elites and their Western masters, but towards each other, as well as towards the minorities.

Jakarta gets very little criticism from the official mainstream Western and local media, and almost no genuine analysis from academia. No surprise: to attack the reality of the Indonesian cities is like attacking the entire Western neo-colonialist system imposed on various parts of the world. To tell the truth would destroy any journalistic career, as it would torpedo almost any chance for a well-remunerated university tenure!

Very often, all that one could expect in terms of a realistic description of the situation in Indonesia, are random exclamations overheard on board departing airplanes, or some ‘anecdotal evidence’ from the pages of travel magazines and blogs. It appears that what normal people see with their own eyes is in direct contradiction with what the mainstream media and academia presents as ‘facts’.

On 17 September 2017, a Malaysian newspaper The Star wrote:

“Based on a real-time air quality index uploaded to the Airvisual application at midday on Friday, Sept 15, Jakarta ranked third as the most polluted city in the world… In mid-August, the application showed that Jakarta was at the top of the list, followed by Ankara, Turkey and Lahore, Pakistan.”

“Escape Here” magazine ranked Jakarta as the No1 city in its report “The 10 Worst Traffic Cities in the World”:

“It happens to be the country’s capital and one of the most poorly designed cities in the World, a combination that makes getting around here a disaster. An ever-increasing number of car owners that come from the expansion of suburbia that surrounds this mega-city are to be blamed for the 400 hours a year that citizens spend in traffic. It is actually hailed as being the worst traffic in the world. It doesn’t seem like there is any solution for this mega-city as the infrastructure here falls into the hands of the local government and contracts are renegotiated annually; which means long-term projects are pretty much impossible. An average trip in this city takes about 2 hours…”

On 2 September 2015, even the official propaganda English language newspaper of Indonesia, the Jakarta Post, re-published the survey ranking the horrendous Indonesian capital as the 9th ‘un-friendliest city on Earth’:

“Jakarta, the Indonesian capital notorious for gridlocks and bad air pollution, ranks 9th among the world’s least friendly cities this year, a recent survey by an international travel magazine shows. Readers of the highly regarded luxury travel magazine Conde Nast Traveler included Jakarta for the first time on its ’10 unfriendliest cities in the world’ list this year. In the survey, one of the readers said Jakarta was ‘the scariest place I have ever been to ‘with its congestion and aggressive locals.”


You even have to pay to go on one of the polluted beaches in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

The ‘scariest place’: but of course! What could one expect from the capital city of the country that in the last half a century has committed 3 monstrous genocides (against its own population in 1965/66, against the people of East Timor and an on going genocide against the people Papua)?

What could one expect from cities that have been totally robbed of green spaces and in fact, of everything that could be called ‘public’, where the arts have disappeared and where absolutely everything has become commercialized; where everything and everybody is now expected to be the same – behave the same way, look the same way, sound the same way, taste the same way.


Tribute to Indonesian yuppies by Ciputra developer in Jakarta. (Photo: Andre Vltchek)

Try to look different, and if you are a Papuan, Chinese, African, or white, just try to walk on those broken tiny sidewalks of Surabaya, Jakarta, Pontianak, or Medan. You will be shouted at; you will immediately become the target of naked racism. People will stop and point fingers, or worse.

A few days ago I filmed from a boat sailing on a polluted river passing through Pontianak city, on an island in Borneo. Two children on the shore immediately raised their middle fingers and began yelling: “* you!” Just like that: with no warning and for no reason. And this is, of course, not the worst that could happen. If I was Chinese… were I an African… Everybody knows it. Nobody speaks about it, nobody writes…

According to Western ‘analysts’ and academics, Indonesia is a ‘democratic’ and ‘tolerant’ nation. The deeper it is sinking, the more oppressive and intolerant it becomes, the more devastated it gets, and the more it is glorified.

Lies are piled up on lies. “The Emperor has beautiful clothes’, everybody shouts, as in that old children’s tale. But in fact, he is naked!

It is clearly “political correctness” at work. One is supposed to be ‘sensitive’ to the local ‘culture’, religion, and way of life. The only defect of this approach is that in countries such as Indonesia, the local culture, its way of life and even the extremely aggressive religions, are all the direct result of the fascist regime that was directly imposed onto this nation by the West after the 1965/66 slaughter. had the socialist pre-1965 course be allowed to naturally flow, Indonesia would now be a truly normal, socially-balanced, secular and tolerant nation, and its cities would serve the people, instead of the other way around.

Here, the ‘political correctness’, is once again, protecting the crimes against humanity that have been committed by the West, by the local elites and the military, as well as by the religious leaders. The local ‘culture’ is not being protected at all, as it is actually dead, murdered.

The cities are dead as well. Their carcasses are stinking, horrifying, monstrous, stripped of all hope. People living in them are choking, humiliated, marginalized, unwell, and constantly robbed by the system.

Bizarrely, it takes an elitist magazine like Conde Nast to notice… It takes random travellers to speak out… One would never read such comments in the reports coming out of the Australian National University or on the pages of the New York Times.

Just outside the city of Surabaya, the second largest city in Indonesia, on the Island of Madura, several enormous ships are being manually cut into pieces and sold for scrap by destitute local people. Periodically things explode, collapse, and people lose their faces or limbs. It is a horrible sight: truly haunted, disturbing. Just like in Bangladesh, although here, it goes almost unnoticed.

In many ways, I believe that the Indonesian cities resemble those ships, and those polluted coastal areas where the ships are broken into thousands of parts and then sold. Once proud, they are now humiliated, in pain, being torn to pieces while still alive.

Only real fascism can treat its citizens this way; only a regime that has lost its marbles, and gone thoroughly insane.

Indonesia cities… What do they really consist of? Well, they are made of those tiny and crammed homes, filthy canals, potholed driveways, of indescribable pollution, of mosques and churches. Then there are a few office towers in their centers, countless shopping malls and several luxury hotels where the elites can escape and take some rest from the daily nightmare, which is ‘normal life’ here. Golf courses everywhere, but no decent public parks, as even those few green areas have been already thoroughly privatized.

Now the former governor of Jakarta, ‘Ahok’, is in jail for daring to change things; for building public transportation, cleaning the rivers and building a few tiny parks. He is in jail for relocating squatters to public housing, and for trying to serve the impoverished and humiliated majority.

His clearly socialist deeds were immediately smeared and discredited by the elites, by the Western-funded NGO’s and by corrupt city planners. Even when this could not stop his determination and zeal, religion was unleashed. Most of the religions are, after all, regressive, pro-business oriented, and ready to support any fascist regime.

How much deeper can Indonesian cities sink? When are they going to become uninhabitable?

People are already dying; thousands are, unnecessarily – from cancer, from stress, from respiratory diseases.

Millions of human beings are wasting their lives. They are alive, but it is only a bare existence, not really life: they are moving mechanically, cutting through the filthy air on their scooters, eating junk food, constantly surrounded by decay and ugliness.

Why?

For how much longer?

The forests of Borneo, Sumatra and Papua are burning. All over this archipelago, everything is logged out, consumed by mines, ruined by monstrous pollution. The extraction and looting of natural resources is the only real economic ‘engine’ of today’s Indonesia.

The cities are not faring much better. They are actually not faring any better at all.

It is time to wake up, or it could get too late. But the nation appears to be in a total slumber. It does not notice, anymore, that it is really in freefall. It was conditioned not to notice. It was made to accept, even to celebrate its own collapse.

Those who forced Indonesia into all this will not tell. As long as there is at least something left, something that can be extracted, utilized, looted, they will be cheering this great Indonesia’s ‘success’ and ‘progress’.

I encourage all those people from all over the world who would want to see the true face of neo-colonialism, of savage capitalism and right wing disaster, to come to the Indonesian cities! Come and see with your own eyes. Come and take a walk; don’t hide in your comfortable cities full of leafy parks, concert halls, art cinemas, public transportation and theatres.

This is real. This is a warning to the world!

Come and see how cities look like in a country where Communism and socialism are banned, where a colony does not even realize that it being colonized, and where everything is served on huge silver plates straight into the gullet of that monster called fascism.

14 December 2017

Ketapang, West Borneo, Indonesia

***

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are his tribute to “The Great October Socialist Revolution” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.