I will be in Yogyakarta next week to present at the 6th Annual International Indonesia Forum Conference, held this year at Universitas Islam Negeri Sunan Kalijaga. Here is the title and abstract of my presentation:

Title: “We Build Our Own Stories”: The 19th Century Figure and 21st Century Myth of Dôkarim, an Acehnese Poet

Abstract: Few primary sources other than Snouck Hurgronje’s tell us about the traveling bard Abdul Karim, popularly known as Dôkarim, who composed the Hikayat Prang Gompeuni, Song of the Dutch War. Composed orally in Acehnese verse, the Hikayat borrows generously from the themes and narratives of the famous epic poems that preceded it while also recounting specific details of warrior bravery, political negotiations, and community devastation brought by the war. The Hikayat Prang Gompeuni was not only a work in progress with Dôkarim adding new verses as the war unfolded, it was also a performance piece tailored to meet the expectations of every patron that commissioned Dôkarim’s recitals. Among Dôkarim’s patrons were Hurgronje himself who commissioned the only complete transcription of the Hikayat and the Acehnese war hero Teuku Umar, who later went on to execute Dôkarim before the war’s end for his supposed defection to the Dutch. But we must interpret both Hurgronje’s transcription and Umar’s accusations as only partial narratives. In this presentation, I show how the ambiguous figure of Dôkarim in Aceh’s 19th century serves as a productive metaphor and cautionary tale for Aceh’s culture producers in the 21st. The Tikar Pandan Community in particular has leveraged the figure of Dôkarim and elevated his partial legacy to the status of a myth, assuming his poetic license to claim a space for building new tales that espouse a critical wariness toward all figures of authority. I use Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic social structures to illustrate Tikar Pandan’s critical and evasive stance.

To be fair, I presented a version of this paper in Bahasa Indonesia at the 4th Biannual International Center for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) conference in Lhokseumawe two months ago.

]]> https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/we-build-our-own-stories/feed/ 0 1247 jgrayman Poster for 6th Annual International Indonesia Forum Conference https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/acwrimo-debriefing/ https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2012/12/11/acwrimo-debriefing/#respond Mon, 10 Dec 2012 22:31:10 +0000 http://jgrayman.wordpress.com/?p=1230 After the crushing sleep-deprived agony that preceded my defense, and the soaring high of the defense itself on 6 December and the celebrations afterward, I am back on an even keel and it’s time to debrief on the November Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo on Twitter) exercise that helped me make it to the end.  Here is another good article about the AcWriMo project, and here is the link to the goals I set for myself at the start of November.  In short, with the last goal excepted in which I hoped to write some blog posts (ha!), I met all these goals and then some!  In addition to the original goals I set, I also completed two totally unexpected job applications, and set aside time for some unexpected major revisions to my dissertation’s Introduction and Conclusion.  It boggles the mind how much I actually did last month, including the conference in San Francisco, and family time on Election Day and Thanksgiving, with lots of travel to and from different places.

I have always been a notorious procrastinator, but apart from the #AcWriMo support and camaraderie there were two factors that made last November extraordinarily unique in my career as an academic writer.  First, since the end of July, I have been on a productivity upswing unlike anything I’ve ever known before.  The looming deadline of my dissertation, knowing that it absolutely had to be finished before I return to Indonesia at the end of the year, was the motivator, and each week saw more productivity than the one before it.  So by the time #AcWriMo started, I was already in a concentrated writing mode.  The second factor follows the first.  Once my defense date was fixed on 6 December 2012, again there was just no way I was not going to complete all these tasks in time for it.  And so I did them.  Without these “pre-existing conditions,” I can’t really say whether I would have succeeded as well as I did with #AcWriMo, but knowing me and my habits, I’m guessing it wouldn’t have been as successful.

Having said that, #AcWriMo did offer a social community for what is essentially a very lonely pursuit.  On my breaks, I routinely checked in on the #AcWriMo crowd to see what people were talking about and how they were doing.  Most of my tweets received fun, constructive, or supportive comments.  And I especially appreciated @mystudiouslife‘s academic writing accountability spreadsheet, which I filled in assiduously until the last few days when it got super hairy and impossible to keep track during the final stretch of hypercaffeinated sleepless revisions.  I also learned the value of routine, daily writing, and hope it becomes easier to keep up this rare habit, having seen how well it works.

Now I am in a transitional post-defense phase, sorting out what needs to be done before I head back to Indonesia.  I still have writing tasks, but not like I had in November, so I am not sure how or if I will keep up with the accountability spreadsheet, but I will try to find a way.  For now, I’m still basking in the grateful glow of this moment, when the five members of my dissertation committee passed me at the end of my defense, opened up a bottle of champagne, and concluded the ritual with nothing but the kindest of words:

My dissertation committee prepares a toast at the end of a successful defense.

Awesome poster design by Karen Santospago.

If you are in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Thursday 6 December 2012, please join me from 9 until 11AM for the defense of my dissertation titled “Humanitarian Encounters in Post-Conflict Aceh, Indonesia.”  Here is a map that shows the location of Harvard’s Yenching Building.  More details on the poster image above.

The next day, at 10AM Friday 7 December 2012, the conversation continues with a talk that I will be giving at Harvard’s Medical Anthropology Friday Morning Seminar titled “Humanitarian Subjects in Post-Tsunami and Post-Conflict Aceh, Indonesia,” which will be a condensed version of one of my dissertation chapters.

So let me review what I’ve done the past few months, and then list my goals for #AcWriMo.  I’d say I got back on track with my work when I did a significant revision of my dissertation outline in July, so I’ll start from there:

1. Revised my dissertation outline.
2. Completed Chapter Four.
3. Completed Chapter Five.  This is the last substantive chapter for the dissertation.  I have complete drafts now for chapters one through five.
4. Applied for a job at the University of Sydney and got selected for an interview.
5. Prepared for the interview with a mini-lesson that I had to teach via Video Skype, and did my due diligence to prepare for the actual interview, also conducted via Video Skype.
6. Applied for a travel grant that would take me back to Jakarta, Aceh, and Bali in January 2013.

I’m pretty satisfied with all that I’ve completed during the past three months or so.  Feels good to be back into my writing, and even better to be graduating soon!  So here are my goals for #AcWriMo:

1. Complete Introduction and Conclusion.  (due date:  Election Day)
2. Prepare for my conference presentation at the AAA meetings in San Francisco. (due date:  Nov. 14^th)
3. Work on chapter revisions in most need of it. (at this point, this is Chapters Two and Three) (due date:  Thanksgiving)
4. Prepare for a Friday morning medical anthropology seminar talk at Harvard (which will be a short version of my dissertation’s Chapter Five), scheduled for 2 December.
5. Prepare the opening statement for my dissertation defense, scheduled for 6 December.  (due date for 4&5:  Nov. 30^th)
6. If I can make good progress on these tasks on schedule, then I’d like to also write a few blog posts this month, maybe about my upcoming presentations, or some of the ideas I’m working with in my dissertation, or about Daniel Ziv’s much-anticipated new documentary about street musicians in Jakarta.  Lots of ideas!

I will use Twitter to update my progress on these #AcWriMo goals throughout November.  Wish me luck, I’ve got a lot of work to do.

New ICG Report on Aceh Elections. These reports r now as ritualistic as the elections and violence that accompany them! http://t.co/eRFp453K

— Jesse H. Grayman (@kopyor) February 29, 2012

When International Crisis Group (ICG) released it’s latest Aceh report last week, Indonesia: Averting Election Violence in Aceh, I wrote the above tweet with tongue in cheek.  But the truth is that when I inevitably lose track of every twist and intrigue in Aceh’s electoral politics, I know that I can always count on ICG to efficiently summarize the events, players, and issues that keep this drama unfolding, without resorting to headline-grabbing hyperbole or convenient generalizations.  This latest report is the tenth that ICG has published about Aceh since a peace agreement in August 2005 brought an end to the Free Aceh Movement’s (GAM) separatist conflict against Indonesian security forces.  Taken together, the reports document the slow transformation of politics in Aceh from center-periphery conflict into internal conflict.  That’s not to say Jakarta isn’t still a major player in Aceh’s “transition to peace,” but rather the prevailing axis of conflict is now more localized and horizontal; it’s “GAM vs. GAM” as the last ICG report called it.  Power brokers in Jakarta are left figuring out how to take sides (or how to take advantage), but they’re not making their choices in unison.

ICG Report Header: “Indonesia: Averting Election Violence in Aceh”

Recent Attacks on Javanese Migrant Labor in Aceh

Last January, I happened to be visiting Aceh for the first time in 18 months when the last few in a series of shootings against poor Javanese migrant laborers unfolded one after another.  At the time everyone was talking about (or refusing to) the ongoing electoral paralysis, but the shootings added a new layer of violence and terror to the coffee-shop conversations.  Attacking Aceh’s most disenfranchised residents has no obvious connection to electoral politics, and yet everyone was absolutely sure there was a political motive behind the violence.  This new ICG report does a great job contextualizing these killings in the current political climate, but the evidence always remains reliably inconclusive.  Check out the investigative detail here that makes a valiant effort to trace a connection:

The first attack took place at a workers’ barracks of the PT Setya Agung plantation in Kreung Jawa, Uram Jalan, Geureudong Pase, North Aceh on 4 December. Setya Agung, a company based in Medan, North Sumatra, has usufruct rights (hak guna usaha) for planting cacao, palm oil and rubber over an area of some 8,000 hectares in North Aceh. Like most companies working in Aceh, it contracted with a GAM-owned company, CV Cimita Rata, which manages the rubber plantation.

PT Setya Agung merely collects a fee of Rp.1,250 (about $0.14) per kilo on the rubber, but CV Cimita Rata does all the work, including hiring the labour. Many of its workers are ex-combatants, but the company also brought in about 100 Javanese workers from Medan and housed them in a barracks owned by Setya Agung; these men were hired by a CV Cimita Rata official reportedly loyal to [Governor] Irwandi. (p.4)

ICG is quick to point out, however, that until now there is still no smoking gun and too much opacity in the investigation of the recent killings.  Instead, ICG’s careful chronology of events correlates the violence in Aceh with Partai Aceh’s extraordinary lobbying efforts with various power brokers in Jakarta to postpone the elections until after Governor Irwandi’s term ended on 8 February 2012, when he returned to private citizenship without the organs of state at his disposal to support his campaign.  Violence against Javanese labor gets Jakarta’s attention, ICG argues, and intimates similar or worse violence to come if Partai Aceh does not get its way.  When the ministries, the Constitutional Court, and probably the president himself in Jakarta finally coalesced upon a policy of appeasement to Partai Aceh’s implicit threats, the violence against Javanese in Aceh ended. Partai Aceh leaders have no shortage of plausible deniability, but the optics could not be more clear.

Questionable Alliances

Most people I spoke with in Banda Aceh in January were sick of Partai Aceh’s manipulative and hypocritical interpretations of the peace agreement, and in particular their antagonism toward the Constitutional Court.  These aspects of Partai Aceh’s horrible governance are well-documented in the ICG report, but it’s important to remember that they still have a loyal base of supporters in large swathes of the GAM heartland.  Many supporters and even some detractors aren’t convinced that Partai Aceh (or rogue elements therein) was behind the recent violence.  ICG reflects back some of the theories I heard as well, and it draws upon a long history of epistemic murk that has characterized Aceh’s conflict:

no one is sure who the perpetrators are, and even if some prove to have Partai Aceh connections, it will be hard to prove the party leadership knew of or condoned the attacks. With no information available on current police investigations, there are as many Acehnese willing to believe the attacks were part of a security operation as to believe the party was involved. (p.5)

Ensuring this lack of clarity persists until the election and beyond, Partai Aceh recently announced the endorsement of Aceh’s former military commander, Lt. General Sunarko, the extremely unpopular and belligerent voice of the TNI during the 2009 legislative elections.  This is the guy who tried to prevent election monitors from coming to Aceh in 2009; who tried to prevent Partai Aceh from using GAM symbols in their campaign; who vilified Aceh’s local political parties, one of the key achievements of the peace agreement; who routinely engaged in counter-productive public hissyfits with Governor Irwandi.  Some speculate that Sunarko’s awful relationship with Irwandi drove him into an alliance with Partai Aceh, while others suggest “Sunarko is collaborating on economic projects with former GAM commanders” (p.6), but most observers can hardly understand what benefit accrues to either Partai Aceh or Sunarko in their bizarre alliance (this Radio Rumoh PMI transcript published in Aceh Kita does a decent job of sorting out the pros and cons, pitting the words of erstwhile peace activist and now Partai Aceh spokesperson, Fachrul Razi, against a well-known military and defense analyst, Teuku Ardiansyah, on the subject of the Sunarko endorsement).

Elizabeth Drexler’s 2008 ethnography about the conflict in Aceh shows how both GAM and TNI each benefited from a polarizing conflict narrative while the messy realities on the ground reveal a range of questionable alliances that only in the post-conflict era have come out of the closet.  Profit flows up the chain of command on both sides, and civil society suffers excessively without any accountability.  The situation hasn’t changed much when the police stubbornly refuse to investigate and account for the murder of Javanese laborers, when Jakarta capitulates to Partai Aceh in order to “maintain peace” at all costs, when Partai Aceh forces its agenda with thug tactics and brazenly inconsistent governance, and when sworn enemies join forces to defeat a common foe.  As a result, ICG concedes, “time is now very much on Partai Aceh’s side, and it has three major advantages: a strong political machine, a capacity and willingness to use intimidation and the support of powerful figures in Jakarta” (p.6)…

…but it has cost them legitimacy and trust from Aceh’s civil society.  After the shootings, a number of friends urged me to cancel plans to visit Bireuen and Bener Meriah during my January visit, so I stayed in Banda Aceh (with just a short trip to Blang Pidie on the west coast).  Think of all the other canceled road trips and its economic impact on the east coast in the wake of the violence!  And there are other costs:  The Javanese migrant exodus back home has created a labor shortage for the grunt jobs where most Acehnese wouldn’t deign to work.  Some other friends of mine have lost their jobs while waiting for this electoral paralysis to end because investors are waiting to see how patronage networks will reconfigure before they resume operations in Aceh.  Business owners need to know who are the right politicians to bribe in order to secure a license renewal; their employees, in the meantime, have been waiting more than six months while the elections were postponed four times because of Partai Aceh’s strategy to delay until Irwandi was out of office.

ICG Recommendations

The ICG report concludes with four recommendations:

1. Deploy as many election monitors across Aceh as possible, immediately.
2. Investigate the shootings in December 2011 and January 2012 and bring the perpetrators to justice.
3. Empower the election oversight committee (panwas) to investigate electoral violations and take action.
4. Leading candidates must control their supporters in the field, particularly the committed loyalists to Partai Aceh and Irwandi, because they both have strong ties with former GAM commanders who tend to rely on intimidation and violence to get out the vote.

The presence of monitors (and routine press coverage of their work) dampens egregious acts of violence, intimidation, and fraud.

Based on my experience as an election monitor in Aceh in 2009, recommendations 2, 3, and 4 are completely unrealistic.  The police in Aceh rarely bring perpetrators of politically motivated violence to justice, especially if there is even a hint of TNI, and nowadays ex-GAM, involvement.  Panwas officials, if their impotence is not already bought and paid for by one candidate or another, have the most narrow criteria for pursuing electoral violations that relies upon an undue (and unethical) burden of proof upon witnesses, thus ensuring their powerlessness while facing even the most flagrant violations.  Finally, the candidates practically celebrate their unruly supporters because their uncontrollable behavior ensures plausible deniability when they attack supporters from opposition campaigns or engage in voter intimidation.  Party leaders and their candidates love talking about how they can’t possibly control the “excess euphoria” of their supporters!

“Peace Provocateurs”

To be fair, ICG places the most emphasis on their first recommendation to bring election monitors to Aceh as soon as possible.  Given the time constraints and certain pushback from local authorities to accommodate them, this recommendation too might be a challenge, but the very presence of monitors (and routine press coverage of their work) does dampen egregious acts of violence, intimidation, and fraud.  What excited me the most, however, was ICG’s suggestion to enhance the role of election monitors.  Citing a recent practice used to avert violence in Ambon by activists calling themselves “peace provocateurs,” ICG suggests that election monitors, and perhaps civil society in Aceh more broadly, can make use of text messages, Twitter, and facebook to counter provocative rumors:  “Election monitors in Aceh could usefully keep track of and work with journalists to counter ‘black campaigns’ via SMS that have the potential for sparking violence” (p.9).

One of the most impressive and elusive electoral intimidation techniques in Aceh back in 2008 and 2009 was the use of text messages.  Using resonant idioms such as Acehnese poetry or reliable bogeyman figures such as the PKI (Indonesia’s long-extinct Communist Party), these messages spread like wildfire across Aceh, with both veiled and explicit threats, from sources that were always impossible to trace.  Peace provocateur election monitors could work with local civil society activists and journalists throughout Aceh, using the same technology as conflict provocateurs to check rumors, collect proof with digital photos, and disseminate corrections.  This technological innovation would not have been possible even in 2009, as the data networks (or availability of wifi) and use of smartphones to quickly send images along with text were not quite so pervasive or affordable in Aceh at the time.  User saturation and a supportive technological infrastructure have skyrocketed since then.  With just a little bit of planning and ingenuity, I agree with ICG that supporting a network of peace provocateurs would be the smartest investment in peaceful elections.

For the last two elections since Aceh’s peace agreement, I was in Aceh.  This time around I’m sending high-fives to Aceh’s civil society and their peace provocateurs from Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I’ll be paying attention to the campaign and the electoral outcomes—and ICG’s next report—from a distance, but with no less interest.

**  Last year, I wrote two blog posts about the politics surrounding these elections, including notes on the previous ICG report:

13 February 2011:  The Aceh Governor’s Election Heats Up

19 June 2011:  Notes on ICG’s Latest Indonesia Report: “GAM vs GAM in the Aceh Elections”

For more coverage in English, Edward Aspinall wrote a terrific summary of Aceh’s electoral issues in Inside Indonesia up through December 2011, at a moment when it looked like Partai Aceh would boycott the elections altogether:

11 December 2011:  Aceh’s No-Win Election

The next day in Blang Pidie:

Each tweet has a complete back story of its own… but I’ll leave them as is for now and perhaps elaborate some details later on.

These Go To Eleven

I wrote this on 11-11-11 during a celebratory birthday moment:  I’m at this freakin’ amazing organic farm in Cicurug, a hillside town in West Java about two hours away from Jakarta, in the valley between Gunung Salak and Gunung Gede, a few kilometers up the Gunung Salak slopes off the main road to Sukabumi. It’s owned by this dude from Northern California (natch) who is a friend of my close friend Mercedes, so that’s how I got here, but Dezant and I are paying guests (they have three very different lodges for rent) for the long weekend. This is our (me and Dez together) birthday present to me! It would take a long time to describe just how awesome and weird this place is, but for now it’s worth it just to say that we made the right decision to do this for my birthday and I am so very happy to be here. I’ll try and do an actual photo-bloggish post about this place soon.

My birthday! This year! 11-11-11!!!!!!111111 How awesome is that? I’ve been anticipating it all year, and I’m not someone who cares that much about my birthday. Nor at my age now (say it softly now, in the interest of honest disclosure, 39. Can you imagine if today was my 11th birthday instead? *head explodes*) am I too interested in party planning or even social events. Ya, I’ve been kind of a recluse the past few years. And yet, for a birthday on 11-11-11, I had this nagging thought that I had to do something special. 11-11-11. It’s palindromic. It’s a bunch of ones. It’s a couple of elevens! Fucking Spinal Tap! It’s Nigel Tufnel Day! This date, this birthday, goes to eleven! It’s also Veteran’s Day, a national holiday where I come from. That’s important too. President Barack Obama is going to Arlington Cemetery to honor national heroes who have served in the military, the fallen and the living… ON MY BIRTHDAY!

So we had to do something special. This was our solution. Get out of Jakarta, go to the mountains, but also avoid the hotels with pools and “outbound” team building workshops for corporate Jakartans. I remembered Mercedes had a friend with a farm in Cicurug, and from there everything fell into place. I couldn’t deal with planning a special 11-11-11 themed birthday party (as cool and as fun as that would have been), but I can totally embrace what we’re doing here instead!

At the same time, this is supposed to be a writing retreat for me. My advisor imposed a deadline of November 15th to submit a draft chapter of my dissertation. This bloggy post about my birthday is a warmup exercise to get my writing juice on. What? Work on a dissertation for your birthday? I know right. But guess what this is totally going to work. I said everything fell (continues to fall?) into place for this long weekend, and that includes the writing part(y). I’m sitting on this here terrace on the second floor “library suite” at this farm, with a fabulous view of the valley and a gentle breeze coming at me from two directions. I’m also sorta inspired by this Academic Book Writing Month thing (#AcBoWriMo on Twitter), a new riff on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo, it’s every November). I’m not planning to write a book (LOL! as if!), but I am planning to write a draft chapter, and if I’m lucky I’ll get the outline ready for another one. For the current chapter I’m working on, all my ducks are in a row. I’ve done the reading, the data is mostly organized, and there is a satisfactory rough outline. This chapter is practically ready to write itself. I don’t know how much I will be sending to my advisor on November 15th, but I sure hope it’s about 7000 words of a semi-coherent chapter. I’ve got my Scrivener open, I’ve got the word count targets set, the outline is imported and ready to be filled in. If you haven’t figured it out, I’m trying to psyche myself out into actually writing something, but to be honest, this is the most ready I’ve been in about a year, and that’s pretty cool too.

I was pretending to be “off the grid,” but I’m not. There’s a cellphone tower within our line of sight. I can still check my email, my facebook, my Twitter. The stream of birthday greetings on facebook is always gratifying. So “off the grid” this long weekend has turned into “resist status updates, replies, link retweets, etc.” But I’m still checking them out. This has to stop. So I’m writing some warmup words instead to get my #AcBoWriMo groove on. Let’s do this!

How I Celebrated My Birthday & #AcBoWriMo

]]> https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/111111/feed/ 4 1034 -6.222341 106.786208 -6.222341 106.786208 jgrayman These Go To Eleven How I Celebrated My Birthday & #AcBoWriMo https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/icg-gam-vs-gam/ https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/icg-gam-vs-gam/#comments Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:22:31 +0000 http://jgrayman.wordpress.com/?p=749

ICG Report Header: "Indonesia: GAM vs GAM in the Aceh Elections"

A few days ago the International Crisis Group (ICG) issued their latest Asia Briefing titled “Indonesia: GAM vs GAM in the Aceh Elections.” ICG reports are always excellent and this one is no exception, featuring a clear review and honest assessment of the internal divisions within the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, GAM) since their peace agreement with Indonesia in 2005, and how those divisions are playing out leading up to the governor (provincial) and bupati (district) executive elections to be held on 14 November 2011. The report begins with the announcement in February—which I have written about HERE—that Partai Aceh (GAM’s local political party) would not nominate Aceh’s incumbent governor Irwandi Yusuf, also from GAM, for reelection. Instead they nominated Zaini Abdullah, a senior figure within GAM’s government in exile during the conflict, and Muzakir Manaf, former commander of GAM’s armed forces, as his running mate. They have since been cleverly dubbed the ZIKIR ticket. Irwandi, still a popular front-runner according to polls, intends to run for reelection anyway. The ICG report argues that if violent friction on the ground can be prevented, then GAM’s internal divisions may add healthy competition to the electoral process and “produce better policies and improved governance” for Aceh.

GAM vs GAM

But that’s not how Partai Aceh sees it. The party has autocratic tendencies, backed up with thug tactics on the ground by KPA (Komite Peralihan Aceh, the Aceh Transitional Committee, representing the interests of GAM ex-combatants), which they are using to steamroll toward one-party rule in Aceh. The political issue at stake to ensure their ZIKIR ticket wins is whether independent candidates (without party nomination) may contest executive elections. If Irwandi cannot run as an independent candidate as he intends, then he effectively loses the election as nomination from one of the national parties would compromise his credibility as a former GAM leader, and there are no other local parties that could (or would) capably back him. In order to ensure this outcome, Partai Aceh leaders are arguing that independent candidates are not allowed under the terms of the peace agreement even though Indonesia’s Constitutional Court has clearly established the legality of independent candidates running for executive office across the country and specifically found this particular provision of the Aceh peace agreement unconstitutional. The irony here is that it was precisely GAM’s peace agreement with Indonesia that allowed independent candidates to run for the first time anywhere in Indonesia (thus enabling Irwandi’s first term), at least until local parties were formed. GAM’s own precedent paved the way for the Constitutional Court to allow independent candidates all across Indonesia, widely seen as a crucial democratic reform for the country. Now that Partai Aceh has a near monopoly over Aceh’s government, GAM is backtracking on its pioneering step for the country from which they no longer seek independence.

That’s a quick summary of the ICG report, which has a lot more detail about political maneuvers in Aceh, violent incidents that may be related to GAM’s electoral competition, and a refreshingly honest assessment of the emerging candidates for governor. I found two particular points in the report worth discussing further:  one is symptomatic of Partai Aceh’s poor governance, and the other is an amusing linguistic footnote.

Partai Aceh’s Delay Tactics as a Mode of Governance

Perhaps as a kind of face-saving measure to cover up their all-out effort to consolidate power, Partai Aceh has turned the issue of independent candidates into an ideological battle between Aceh and Jakarta. They claim that when the Constitutional Court struck down the article of Aceh’s autonomy law that awkwardly allows for independent candidates until local parties have been established (i.e. effectively for the 2006 executive elections only), it violated the peace agreement by interfering with Aceh’s autonomy. This is classic GAM ideology based on decades of rapacious and brutal intervention from Jakarta that understandably validate Acehnese suspicions of central government motives. If Partai Aceh allows the court to chip away at the powers granted under the autonomy law, their argument goes, then it’s just a matter of time before other aspects of Aceh’s autonomy law are revised, presumably toward Jakarta’s advantage (ICG, p.4).

But since assuming legislative office in 2009, Partai Aceh’s inability to legislate or resolve pressing issues has in many ways invited Jakarta’s intervention. Take for example the two controversial “last minute” laws—the Qanun Jinayat and the Qanun Wali Nanggroe—that the outgoing politicians from national parties passed in 2009 just before Partai Aceh legislators assumed office, widely criticized as cynical legislative gamesmanship. Both laws pertain to Aceh’s special autonomy but outgoing legislators framed them quite differently than what GAM intended when negotiating their autonomy provisions during the peace process. Irwandi refused to sign both laws, but then the new Partai Aceh legislators failed to take up either law for revision, leaving the central government to respond to related pressing matters in its own fashion.

The Qanun Jinayat legislates some of the more barbaric aspects of Islamic law such as the stoning of adulterers to death (Aceh is the only province that may legislate Islamic laws), and triggered a wave of embarrassing bad press and international scorn for Aceh. When Partai Aceh refused to revise the law, perhaps wary of alienating their Islamist constituents in Aceh, the discourse shifted to leaders  in  Jakarta  such  as  the  Chief  Justice  of  the Constitutional Court, the President’s spokesperson, the head of the Department of Internal Affairs, and leading national human rights activists, who all publicly speculated upon the legality of the law’s harsh punishments for adultery and other crimes against Islamic law. The debate is no longer whether Jakarta should intervene to repeal Aceh’s religious laws if they violate human rights, but how.

The Qanun Wali Nanggroe establishes a royal leader for Aceh reminiscent of the Aceh sultanate prior to colonialism, and the outgoing legislators passed a version of the law that establishes merely a ceremonial figurehead, far from what GAM had in mind. While the Wali Nanggroe’s status remained ambiguous, in early 2010 the central government issued a routine government regulation that outlines the role and authority of governors across Indonesia and took the initiative to specifically include the Wali Nanggroe as a member of the Regional Leaders’ Forum (Musyawarah Pimpinan Daerah, MUSPIDA) for Aceh. The regulation states that the governor convenes and leads MUSPIDA, placing the Wali Nanggroe figure in a subordinate role, which accords with Jakarta’s understanding of the position. The regulation does not prevent Partai Aceh from enacting a revised law investing the Wali Nanggroe with more authority, but it does reinforce Jakarta’s normative understanding of the institution.*

When Aceh cannot get its legislative house in order, small discursive acts from Jakarta establish—in a piecemeal fashion and on an as-needed basis—precisely the kinds of regulatory precedents over Aceh’s autonomy provisions that Partai Aceh is worried about. The ICG report describes Partai Aceh’s second tactic to prevent Irwandi’s reelection bid (after disputing the Constitutional Court’s ruling), which is to delay issuing election regulations so that the clock will run out on Irwandi’s chances of mounting a campaign before his term ends (ICG, pp.4-5). This pattern of delay, whether strategic or merely incompetent, clearly invites intervention from Jakarta, most recently prompting the National Election Commission to instruct Aceh’s Independent Election Commission to follow the 2006 election law if the Partai Aceh led provincial assembly is unable to pass one for 2011. Partai Aceh only has itself to blame, and choosing now to pick an ideological battle with Jakarta reeks of hypocrisy given their inaction on other matters of importance to Aceh’s autonomy.

GAM & the Sacred Terms of Indonesian Statehood

I enjoyed a few LOLZ at Partai Aceh’s expense when the ICG report quotes senior party figure Adnan Beuransyah commenting on the Constitutional Court ruling. ICG correctly translates his statement as “rejection of the ruling is non-negotiable.” But in a footnote we learn that what he said in Bahasa Indonesia was “Menolak Mahkamah Konstitusi adalah harga mati,” where the phrase “harga mati” is translated as “non-negotiable.” For Bahasa Indonesia speakers, at least those who have spent a long time in Aceh, the kneejerk association with the rabidly nationalist and militaristic phrase “NKRI Harga Mati” is unavoidable. The acronym NKRI stands for Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia (The Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia), a state philosophy used as a bulwark against federalist frameworks (Republik Indonesia Serikat) that some argue would herald the disintegration of national unity. Pro-Indonesia groups in Aceh (especially national security forces) included this phrase in every statement and banner related to the conflict and subsequent peace process. While “non-negotiable” is a correct translation for “harga mati,” one may also infer more confrontational overtones because the phrase literally means “the price is death.” “Harga mati” conveys the sense of an aggressive line drawn in the sand.  (Meanwhile, Google Translate defines “harga mati” as “fixed price.” What.)

Perhaps Adnan was deploying some satire with this turn of phrase, but the two times I met him in 2009 he had the sense of humor of a lamp post, so I’m guessing he spoke without a trace of irony. GAM has a habit of defining their struggle against Indonesia with sacred, thoroughly Indonesian, nationalist terms. Merdeka (as in Gerakan Aceh Merdeka), meaning “freedom” or “independence,” is an attenuated allusion to Indonesia’s revolutionary war for independence from the Dutch. On every Indonesian independence day, the word merdeka echoes across every village and city of the archipelago. Now Adnan Beuransyah defines his non-negotiable opposition to a court decision issued by Indonesia’s highest constitutional authority with similarly sacred nationalist grandiloquence. The ease with which pro-Aceh activists slip into rhetoric that evokes Indonesian nationalism has led some observers to emphasize the point that Acehnese and Indonesian identities were never mutually exclusive.** At a more prosaic level, other observers note the ease with which former GAM activists have slipped into a thoroughly Indonesian style of governance through patronage.*** And that’s what seems to be at stake here: Irwandi has not patronized Partai Aceh enough to earn their nomination. In order to consolidate their fiefdom, Partai Aceh will shamelessly try to cut Irwandi out of the electoral process in order to get what they want, but there are few left who are fooled by their stall tactics and appeals to a hollow “non-negotiable” ideological opposition to Jakarta.

* This discussion of Qanun Jinayat and Qanun Wali Nanggroe is paraphrased generously from the Syiah Kuala University’s Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies publication titled “Aceh Peace Monitoring Update September – December 2009” 

** Siegel, James T. “Possessed.” In The Rope of God. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000.

*** Aspinall, Edward. “Combatants to Contractors: The Political Economy of Peace in Aceh.” Indonesia, no. 87 (2009): 1-34.

]]> https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/06/19/icg-gam-vs-gam/feed/ 6 749 -6.222341 106.786208 -6.222341 106.786208 jgrayman ICG Report Header: "Indonesia: GAM vs GAM in the Aceh Elections" GAM vs GAM "NKRI HARGA MATI" signs in Aceh (photo by Mercedes Chavez) "NKRI HARGA MATI" signs in Aceh "NKRI HARGA MATI" signs in Aceh "NKRI HARGA MATI" signs in Aceh https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/krakatau-day-trip/ https://jgrayman.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/krakatau-day-trip/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 06:29:21 +0000 http://jgrayman.wordpress.com/?p=678

Krakatau Islands (circa 2000)

This past weekend my friends Chloe, Simon, Rob and I learned that if you’re willing to hit the road at 5am then it is possible to have a complete, unhurried, outstanding day trip to the Kraktau volcano islands! I’ve been wanting to do this for years, especially after I read Simon Winchester’s history of the Krakatau explosion in 1883 and its aftermath (including the birth of Anak Krakatau island in 1927).

We took the toll road west all the way out to the Krakatau Steel Industrial Wastelands Park, and then caught a Banten provincial road along Java’s west coast, arriving in the sad beach resort town of Carita at 8:30AM. At a roadside warung beside a river, we drank a quick coffee and bought some durians, then hopped onto a speedboat that our guide chartered for us (more on our excellent guide below).

The boat trip to the Krakatau islands out in the middle of the Sunda Straits took another hour and a half.   The weather was just hazy enough that we couldn’t see Krakatau from Carita, and once the islands emerged on the horizon we could no longer see the mountains and shoreline of western Java.

Foolhardy Pine Trees

A small grove of pioneering tree species and other plants has grown on the black sand eastern shore of Anak Krakatau island. That’s where we landed and registered our visit with the park rangers posted there. Just a few meters down a leafy path, and the ascent quickly begins in earnest. The only growth on the slopes are the foolhardy pine trees, impressively sturdy, but there were probably more dead tree stands than living, as they die en masse with each major eruption that blows hot gas and lava their way. The hike up did not take more than 30 minutes, and we enjoyed stunning views that set the steep dark gray slopes against scorched trees, green lowlands, blue ocean, and the neighboring islands. In front of us, Anak Krakatau’s cone towered above like a pyramid.

Anak Krakatau's volcano cone

Anak Krakatau is currently active, so we were not allowed to climb up to the top, but there is an older caldera rim that our guide called “Level One,” and that was actually a perfect place to stop, rest, take pictures, and then explore.

In the gully between the older caldera rim and the huge cone there are sulfur deposits that look like light patches of snow. We walked down “Sulfur Avenue,” littered with steam vents and lava rocks that could only have been hurled out from the newer caldera way up above us during eruptions. Simon observed that many of the rocks were fresh arrivals because we could still see the crater-like dents where they landed or the tracks they left in the ash as they rolled to their current positions.

These pictures here are all from our walk down “Sulfur Avenue.” (Complete set of pictures, including some of Rob’s and Chloe’s pictures, are collected HERE at my flickr site.)

Burning Descent (Chloe's photo)

After exploring around for another half hour or so, we started back down the hot slope. My feet burned as the black sand sifted through my sandals; the faster I tried to slide down the slope the worse my feet were burning (ow! ouch! Oh no no OUCH! OMG OW ADUH GANTENGNYA PACARKU AUW!!!!11!), and for a few scary moments I thought I might get stuck until I realized that a slow step-by-step descent kept the sand *beneath* my sandals instead of in them.

Back on the boat, we circled around Anak Krakatau, and saw the barren landscape across the vast majority of the island. Rocky lava shores encircle nearly the entire island except where we first arrived.

After circling around, we took the boat over to Rakata Island, which was part of the original large Krakatau Island before it exploded out of existence in 1883. We parked on a small beach where some fishermen had made their camp and ate our boxed lunches. During lunch we had the unsettling experience of getting harassed by a monitor lizard (biawak). Every time we chased it away, it came back, and when we poked it with sticks and rocks it would thrash its huge tail as if trying to betch slap us. Another first in a long day of surprises… every other time I’ve seen monitor lizards they would scramble away from people, but this one must have been familiar with the tour lunch routine, regularly getting leftover scraps.

Biawak (monitor lizard) on Rakata Island

After lunch, we went snorkeling near where we ate, but I was actually more interested in the floating sheets of pumice rocks that surrounded us while we were swimming (another first!), and I collected some to bring home as my Krakatau volcano souvenir. Less appealing was the floating plastic trash, which even got caught in our boat engine on the ride home. Our guide said it comes from Lampung province at the southern tip of Sumatra.

Anak Krakatau Eruption (Chloe's photo)

On the boat ride home, we saw dolphins! And then, while I was jotting some notes from the day into my phone, Chloe grabbed me to point back at Anak Krakatau, fading away into the haze, and we saw a huge belch of volcanic ash shooting up into the sky. Eruption! We missed it by just an hour or so… good thing it didn’t happen while we were at the Level One caldera poking around the sulfur crystals, “moon rocks” and steam vents.

I think we all agreed that the whole day was a smashing success by any standard. I am grateful to Chloe who found our tour guide and planned the trip for the rest of us. The tour operator Chloe found is based at Jalan Jaksa in Central Jakarta, called Krakatau Holiday. The owner of the company, Thommy Samba, who grew up in the Carita area and speaks excellent English, was our capable guide. He packed our meals and lots of cold drinks, chartered our car and boat, handled the park visitation permit, and took us up to the volcano. Krakatau Holiday also organizes tours to Ujung Kulon National Park (and more!) just south of Krakatau, another big to-do on my Indonesia travel list. If you can get a group of friends together to share the cost of one of these all inclusive tours, Krakatau Holiday has my recommendation!

LINK TO FULL FLICKR PHOTO ALBUM: KRAKATAU ISLANDS TOUR

Southeast view of Anak Krakatau (as we headed toward Rakata for lunch)

Book cover for Valiant Budi's "Kedai 1001 Mimpi" (front and back)

my copy... signed, kissed, delivered!

Upon his return to Indonesia last year, Valiant wrote a travel memoir based in large part on the stories he already told on Twitter, his personal blog, or facebook. My signed (and kissed!) copy of Kedai 1001 Mimpi: Kisah Nyata Seorang Penulis yang Menjadi TKI arrived in the mail at the beginning of May. I haven’t settled on a fair translation of the title, but for now I’m going with the utilitarian but decidedly less catchy “Shop of 1001 Dreams: The True Story of an Indonesian Writer who Worked Abroad.” Each chapter recounts a series of short vignettes, partly reflecting its Twitter origins, making the book easy to pick up at a free moment and read quickly. I don’t think I could do Valiant any justice by recounting his experiences in detail, but there is plenty of shock and outrage, leavened with enough wordplay and humor to highlight Valiant’s absurd circumstances in the Saudi Kingdom

The parts of the book that I consistently enjoyed were Valiant’s “translation” moments. Throughout the book, Valiant interacts with Saudis (of course), Filipinos, Indians, Americans, and several fellow Indonesians. Among non-Indonesians, Valiant is probably speaking English as he mentions several times that he only learned how to say a few work-related coffeeshop words and curse words in Arabic. He must always translate these interactions for his Indonesian readers, or translate Indonesian for his foreign interlocutors in Dammam. Here is what Walter Benjamin says about how signifiers relate to the signified in translation:

“While content and language form a certain unity in the original, like a fruit and its skin, the language of the translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds. For it signifies a more exalted lan­guage than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien. This disjunction prevents translation and at the same time makes it superfluous.” [from “Task of the Translator.” Emphasis mine on those awesome metaphors.]

The “ample folds,” the yawning gaps between language and content, “overpowering and alien,” that prevent translation are the source of Valiant’s humor. He starts by noting the common challenge that speakers of Tagalog and Sundanese face when distinguishing between the consonants “p” “f” and “v,” further complicated by Arabic mispronunciation of the consonant “b.” For the rest of the book, the voice of Valiant’s Filipino supervisor Albert, who speaks to Valiant in English, is written in Indonesian, sometimes in English (as below), with this particular Tagalog speech impediment that Sundanese Indonesians from Valiant’s hometown of Bandung frequently experience themselves. Every speech act by Albert turns into sitcom-style slapstick:

* Albert is trying to say “finance” but says “binans” instead. Binan is Indonesian slang for “gay.”
** Valiant has slipped the speech impediment into his narrative voice.
*** Note that the first two lines combined, and the third line, are each less than 140 characters.

In another scene, Valiant awakes from a nightmare in which he explains it was the first dream he had in the Arabic language, but with English subtitles: “Yes, I saw English text on the screen of my dream!” (p.371, my translation) Valiant wrote all of the dialogue and description of the dream in Indonesian, so the reader is receiving the complete transcript of Valiant’s dream, translated twice (first into English then into Indonesian) from a language (Arabic) that Valiant himself does not understand!

In my favorite “translation” sequence on pages 307-309, a customer walks into the coffeeshop and asks Valiant to translate several text messages written in Indonesian. They were sent by an Indonesian woman working as a domestic laborer in Saudi Arabia, and apparently in a romantic relationship with the customer because Valiant realizes that she has been sending him lyrics from her favorite popular Indonesian dangdut love songs. The customer shows Valiant four different text messages, and with embarrassment and exasperation, Valiant provides the translations in awkward English:

Valiant lies when he is asked to translate an Indonesian text message for another customer:

I haven’t even touched the “overpowering and alien” scenes (from an Indonesian perspective) of Arabian sexuality, alternating between deep repression on the one hand and hyper-perversion on the other. Then there are scenes of conspicuous Arabian wealth wielded by people with unparalleled combinations of stupidity and arrogance. The realities of extreme discrimination faced by foreign labor in Saudi Arabia, particularly by women working as housemaids, are touched upon as well. Finally, there are many scenes of religious hypocrisy, the likes of which are sadly becoming more common here in Indonesia. Valiant recounts all of these scenes based on either his personal experience or the experiences of the Indonesian friends he met there. Apart from the hundreds of laugh-out-loud moments (the LOLZ or wkwkwkwkwkz depending on your slang preference), these stories reveal some of what lies beneath the Kingdom’s carefully managed public image as the Muslim world’s pious caretaker of Mecca and Medina and global supplier of oil. For Indonesians, Valiant’s book surely makes them proud and grateful of their home country and then think twice about the so-called “arabization” of Indonesian Islam. (Hundreds of appreciative Indonesian reader reactions can be found on Twitter by searching the hashtag #kedai1001mimpi)

My critique: Valiant’s book presents dozens of short vignettes, loosely tied together by the chronological arc (arrival, culture shock, acclimation, outrage, revenge, escape) of his time spent in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. I recognized quite a few of the stories from his Arabian Underkampret series on Twitter. Here is what I learned: it’s not easy to jump genre from serial tweets (or even blog posts) to long form narrative. Serial tweets impose a strict rhythm (140 characters or less) on internet communications. The #hashtag, which @vabyo uses as much more than just a topic or category marker in his tweets, is an important part of that rhythm. @Vabyo uses hashtags as a reflexive counterpoint to his stories, moments when the narrator comments upon his own storytelling, with brilliant comedic effect. Furthermore, each episode was an event with dozens if not hundreds of @vabyo’s followers reading along in real time, anticipating and savoring the arrival of the story’s next sentence every few minutes. Readers could reply in real time, sometimes asking for more details and receiving @vabyo’s answers. The temporal and prosodic qualities of Arabian Underkampret are not easily transposed into prose. First, the hashtag method of reflexive self-comment disappears, losing some of the delightful cognitive dissonance that they offer. Second, @vabyo’s efficiently descriptive, alliterative, rhyming tweets become oddly overwhelming after Valiant links and revises them as sentences on the page. Third, Valiant loses track here and there of certain promising narrative threads introduced in one or two vignettes, but without follow-up. For example, we never found out why coffeeshop customers from Riyadh are extra-arrogant compared to average-arrogant Saudi customers in Dammam. We also never find out if Valiant ever took up Eldo’s offer to try private pole dancing for paying Saudi customers. I wonder if @vabyo would answer that question if I asked him on Twitter?