Puppet No Longer

If you don’t speak Indonesian, you wouldn’t have been astonished by what Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono said at a recent press conference as he stood next to his visiting American counterpart Donald Rumsfeld. Or how he said it. If you do speak Indonesian, you know that something extraordinary happened: a profound, public insult. Almost a slap in the face, in fact, to a Bush administration out to bolster anti-terrorism efforts by deigning to resume military cooperation with an Indonesia it had been punishing for human rights violations in now independent East Timur.

The tone and content of Sudarsono’s remarks are a clear indication of how low the US has fallen in the eyes of the world. The Bush administration needs the world’s largest Muslim country, it seems, but Indonesia is not so sure it needs the US. At least not on US terms.

Modern American prose style goes back to Hemingway: short sentences with active verbs. Bang. Bang. Bang. Like rounds of ammunition being squeezed off with a hunting rifle.

This is not the normal Indonesian style. I remember when, fresh out of Indonesian training, I first got to Jakarta. I found some of my colleagues in the press section of USIS complaining that the editorials they were forced to read and report on were badly written and hard to follow. “Why don’t they just get to the point?” was the complaint. “Why do they beat around the bush?”

There were, in fact, two very good reasons for the convoluted style.

For one thing, people who disagreed too openly and strongly with the Suharto regime were likely to be disappeared. Hard to identify corpses turned up in gutters and backwaters with frightening frequency.

More enduringly, bluntness wasn’t (and isn’t) the Indonesian style, especially among the Javanese. Bahasa Indonesia, the Malay-based national language of the multi-linguistic Indonesian archipelago, has two forms of the passive, one more delicate than the other. Polite discourse relies on the passive. Circumlocution is another Indonesian way of getting to the point. It has an exquisite effectiveness, as connoisseurs of Henry James know, though it’s often an acquired taste for Americans. Both Sudarsono and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono are Javanese.

Indonesia’s current leadership operates in a context of open political competition. Elegance isn’t dictated by fear these days. But cultural change doesn’t take place at the same rate as regime change, so my eyes popped when I read that Sudarsono had declared, on the record, before a clutch of international reporters, “It’s best that they [the Americans] leave the main responsibility of antiterrorist measures to the local government in question, and not be too overly insistent about immediate results arising from your perception about terrorists.” And further, “...we are very aware of the perception, or misperception, that the United States is overbearing and over-present and overwhelming in every sector of life in many nations and cultures.....” And finally: “So I was telling the Secretary just recently, just two minutes ago, that your powerful economy and your powerful military does lend to misperception and a sense of threat by many groups right across the world, not just in Indonesia....”

This is very strong stuff. Poor Rummy was so taken aback that he blundered out with a pathetic and totally unconvincing “I” statement: “I have never indicated to any country that they should do something that they were uncomfortable doing.”

This from the man who once bestrode the globe telling everyone what to do! And “once upon a time” is the key concept here. That’s precisely what the Jakarta Post stresses in an editorial that appeared just before the US Secretary of Defense arrived in Jakarta.

Rumsfeld is perceived here as a lame duck Cabinet member who is now preoccupied defending himself against critics in the United States....Bush has had to repeatedly defend one of his most trusted aides. As far as we can follow from reports in the Western media, trust in Rumsfeld is very much eroded among members of the American military.

Nevertheless, advised the Post editorialist, Indonesian courtesy and national interest dictate that “a legitimate American defense secretary” be properly received.

Our leaders must avoid getting caught up in the controversy and making incorrect judgements about Rumsfeld, which could harm our national interests....One of these goals for Indonesia is building a capable and professional military. The country’s armed forces suffered much during the 15-year arms embargo.

The countries share “common goals, such as fighting terrorism,” noted the Post. But the US has lost the moral high ground and is no longer “in a position to preach about how we should conduct our war on terror.”

While the United States has in the past frequently criticized Indonesia’s human rights record, it might not be too strong to say that Indonesia now treats terrorist suspects more humanely and more fairly than the US. Indonesia, for example, takes suspected terrorists to court, a step very often ignored by Washington.

After reading the Post editorial, I was no longer surprised that Sudarsono gave such tepid support to the proposal for formal military cooperation with the US: “Perhaps we can agree on a limited framework of cooperation on an ad hoc basis.”

The editorial also gave me welcome context for a little notice I have found only on the website of the Bahrain News Agency:

Indonesian Minister of Defense, Juwono Sudarsono, said today that his country will not abandon the intended purchase of Russian fighter planes. In a statement to [the] Russian News Agency, he said that purchasing fighter planes is important for the country, especially as there is a possibility that the US Congress might ban sale of military technologies to Indonesia.

So Indonesia has no intention of becoming a client state of the US, but will find areas of mutual interest on which to cooperate, if only to obtain spare parts for its US-made F-16s, which have been grounded since the US embargoed exports over human rights abuses. The next time America decides to punish Indonesia, however, Indonesia’s air force won’t be so badly crippled. The US will have to rely on persuasion, even on diplomacy, to get its way.

Indonesia is the paradigmatic moderate Muslim nation that the administration thinks it is going to create elsewhere as a way of keeping America safe, but this is how the Post editorial concludes:

Indonesia is a friend of the United States but not an ally. We assert our right to differ from the U.S. on issues of policy and even to maintain friendly ties with countries the U.S. does not necessarily approve of.

Indonesia is huge country. Only China, India and the US are more populous. It was just a matter of time before Indonesia, like India and China, began to demand a proportionate place in the eyes of the world, an emergence which must come as a further shock to the hegemonic aspirations of the Bush administration, so bogged down in Iraq it must even speak with Iran. Indonesia--especially Java--is known for wayang, its traditional puppet dramas. Sudarsono was clearly playing the role of puppeteer, not puppet, during the press conference with Donald Rumsfeld.

However, there’s another reason for an elected government in Jakarta to catch attention by talking tough in public. A report by the Congressional Research Service says that the percentage of Indonesians with a favorable image of the US was only 15% in 2003, a drop from 79% in 1999. I don’t need a new survey to know that we’re even less loved in 2006.