Haggled and Bedraggled with Motorcycle Cartels

Posted by John
Mornings in Medan often begin with a motorcycle taxi ride. But the trip doesn’t start without a little haggling, a ritual with maneuvers that rival Japanese kabuki for intricacy and inscrutability. Bargaining pervades Indonesian culture, whether you’re buying mangoes at the traditional fruit market or boarding the carriage attached to a motorcycle taxi.

Whenever feasible, Danielle and I avoid situations where haggling plays a major role. Parties on both sides of the transaction often make unflattering snap judgments about each other. Language and cultural differences create confusion, and the tone can descend into hectoring. The whole exchange takes on the feeling of combat, where the stakes become less about fair prices and more about conquest for either a smug merchant or a self-satisfied customer. It’s even worse when both parties seem to be airing grievances across socioeconomic and historic lines, and a basic need like traveling across town becomes a commentary on neocolonialism. Opting out of the bargaining process by shopping at more expensive stores comes at a premium, but piece of mind is often worth what turns out to be equivalent of a few extra few cents.

Cross-town transportation in Medan, however, is not a market with many options. Without easy access to public transportation or a car of our own, we are at the mercy of the becak (motorcyle taxi drivers) that convey people across town. When we were staying in Surabaya and Yogyakarta, we primarily took non-motorized bicycle becak between well-traveled destinations near the center of town. When we didn’t like the price, we could almost always walk away and find another driver. Now that we’re living on the outskirts of Medan, however, there are far fewer drivers, the distances are greater, and the drivers who are in our neighborhood seem to be in cahoots. Any attempt to walk away to find a better deal will turn into a fool’s errand, a fool’s errand on uneven sidewalks and in 95-degree heat.

When we want a ride to the college where Danielle meets her research team, we approach the gaggle of drivers gathered at the end of our street. These three or four drivers are independent operators, but lately they’ve been demonstrating the iron discipline of a cartel. After cornering the market in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Medan, they zealously protect their turf. One becak driver that brought me back to the neighborhood tried to pick up another passenger, only to be shouted down by the assembled members of the neighborhood racket.

The haggling begins when a passenger explains the route and makes an offer. For Danielle and me, this offer comes after a bit of well-intentioned market research. We want the driver to be well-compensated, but not to make out like a bandit. We’ll be facing these drivers every day for the next few weeks, so it’s in our interest to avoid the reputation as the foolish foreigners who don’t know the value of the rupiah.

Our neighborhood research informs us the going rate for the 2.5 mile-ride to campus is 12,000 rupiah ($1.20). That doesn’t sound like much, but government subsidies bring the cost of gas down to $0.90 per gallon. A motorcycle gets more than 40 miles per gallon, so drivers taking us are easily covering the cost of a nickel worth of gas. Under these conditions, becak make a decent profit for ten minutes of work in a country where most people subside on less than $2 a day.

When Danielle presents an initial offer for 12,000 rupiah, the becak often recoils as though presented with spoiled fruit. He can’t possibly drive all the way to that part of campus for less than 20,000 rupiah (about $2).

Danielle’s face registers shock and horror in return. She retorts, “That’s way too expensive. The normal price is 12,000. How about 15,000?”

The becak engaged in negotiations will often turn to his comrades in search of affirmation. In that moment, the cartel does play a certain enforcement role. Overly ambitious demands from an individual driver are nixed.

“20,000? No, 15,000 rupiah is the right price,” the crowd will affirm.

At the same time, the curbside cabal also establishes certain baselines that no amount of customer bargaining, however well-reasoned, will budge.

“15,000? But I can travel twice as far for 20,000 rupiah when I’m coming from the other direction.”

“No, 15,000 rupiah is the right price.”

One solution would be to pay the premium willingly, acknowledging a sort of transportation noblesse oblige. But if two or three dollars extra in daily transportation sounds trifling, it adds up over the balance of a few weeks. Plus it’s not clear that agreeing to a higher rate ensures an end to the haggling. The sliding scale may just keep sliding. A few days ago when Danielle immediately volunteered the higher 15,000 rupiah price for her standard commute, the driver mischievously suggested, “Unless you want to pay more...”

At moments like these, I try to dismiss haggling for taxis as a trivial nuisance, maybe even embrace it as a modestly entertaining form of sport. Yet years of reading The Economist have instilled in me the unfortunate instinct of trying to understand the pricing mechanism involved, and that’s when the strange calculus of determining taxi rates confounds me. An outbound trip to one destination costs 12,000, but then the return trip costs 15,000. Today’s trip, easily twice as long as yesterday’s trip, ends up costing the exact same amount.

We’re getting better at discerning the subtle market mechanisms that cause rates to fluctuate. Trips to and from tonier parts of town cost more than equivalent trips in other parts of the city. Also, since Danielle is going to and from a university, there seems to be an assumption that she’s a professor who can afford higher prices. Fares are easier to pick up in some parts of town, so when you go to those busier destinations you seem to get a discount. Regardless, no matter how much better I am at deciphering the logic involved, I remain mystified. The Indonesian becak awaits the economic game theorist that can crack his code.

Since Danielle’s research involves immersion into Indonesian society, she wants to develop a fluency in the language of haggling. When she fails to avoid what she calls the “bule markup”—the extra premium attached to the price for white foreigners—she feels relegated to the periphery of Indonesian society. After fielding a particularly unfair offer the other day, she broke into her best Indonesian and said, “I may be a white foreigner, but I’m not stupid.”

It sounds wittier and less offensive in the original Indonesian, as the howls of laughter from the crowd of other becak drivers will attest.

Sumatran Awakenings

This Friday, members of a wedding party moved into our small guesthouse in Medan. When we heard voices across the hall at 4:30 the next morning, both Danielle and I gravitated to the standard explanation of prenuptial cacophony: a tipsy groom staggering in after a last late night on the town, calming nerves with a bit of liquid courage.

That was before we shook off the early morning cobwebs and realized we were still in teetotaling Indonesia. The vast majority of people here don’t drink, even for a bachelor party. The early morning disruption turned out to be servants telling each other loud jokes as they prepared a fried-food feast just inches behind our window.

It was at that ungodly hour that I pondered the question of when it is that Indonesians actually sleep.

The equatorial climate and mosques’ amplified dawn call to prayer mean Indonesians tend to start their days on the early side. (It wasn’t a huge surprise to hear people at 4:30 a.m. on the wedding day, but the volume created an unwelcome intrusion.) Yet it’s not as though Indonesians follow the early to bed, early to rise proverb. People may not be drinking, but there’s quite a bit of activity in neighborhood cafes well past 10 p.m. And neighborhoods where houses sit on top of each other mean that chatting pedicab drivers or pushcart vendors have a greater chance of disrupting your slumber. Indonesians can seem like a nation of insomniacs.

It’s no wonder coffee plays such a central role in life here in the land of Java. And with more than three-fifths of Indonesia’s population, Java dominates much of the nation’s politics and culture. All of Indonesia’s presidents have been Javanese except one—B.J. Habibe, who briefly held the job when Suharto was ousted from power. Ancient court traditions from Javanese cities like Solo and Yogyakarta—gamelan music, wayang puppets (above), and a Hindu-influenced form of Islam—are among Indonesia’s most recognizable cultural features. After our two and a half months in Java, it was beginning to feel like Indonesia and Java were synonymous.

Our last two weeks in Medan on the island of Sumatra have helped correct that impression. In this province, the Javanese are just one of many ethnic groups, comprising about a third of the population of 12 million. Most Javanese in Sumatra came to the island to work on coffee and tobacco plantations, and many remain in lower-wage sectors of the economy.

The Batak are the province’s largest ethnic group, forming about 40 percent of the population. A warrior spirit is part of the national identity, and Sumatra was one of the last Indonesian islands to come under Dutch colonial rule. Batak are closely related to the Malay, and North Sumatra is closer to Kuala Lumpur than Jakarta.

In contrast to the Javanese, most of whom are Muslim, the overwhelming majority of Batak are Christians. The Batak’s own Lutheran-oriented Huria Kristen Batak Protestan (HKBP) church claims more than 3 million members, but Dutch and German missionaries from a variety of sects won converts here in the 19th and 20th centuries. And the Catholic Church where we attended Mass this morning featured pews full of parishioners offering full-throated renditions of hymns.

Muslims are still the largest religious group in North Sumatra, but the province is characterized by much more religious pluralism than Java. Muslims and Christians Danielle has interviewed for her research have mostly testified to positive relations between religious groups here, but tensions crop up from time to time. One source of friction comes from the government’s increasing involvement in decisions regarding how and when religious groups can build new places of worship. Several Christians have told Danielle and me that they believe it’s harder to gain approval for a new church than a new mosque.

Muslims and Christians in Indonesia respect each other’s beliefs, but view proselytization as a threat. One survey from the Indonesian research institute LP3ES shows Muslims and Christians express acceptance of conversion, but are less keen when it involves a member of their own family.

I’m fine with Muslims marrying Christians, Muslims marrying Muslims, or Christians marrying Christians. My one request is that they wait until after 4:30 a.m. before making a lot of noise about it.

Democracy in Action

Posted by John
Iranian clerics horrified the world last month by stealing a presidential election through back-room maneuvers and state-sponsored violence in the streets. Today, Indonesian presidential election officials were in the streets of our neighborhood, but for a completely different reason. They were counting votes right in front of us.

Indonesia and Iran, two Muslim-majority countries on opposite sides of Asia, have had remarkably different experiences with democracy over the last decade. Iran’s theocratic regime disqualifies reform candidates from running before elections even start, while Indonesians voted for more than 40 parties during the legislative election last April. Iran’s rulers shut down reformist newspapers by the dozen, yet Indonesia’s press is free to investigate and criticize the government. And while Iranian officials implausibly awarded an election for an unpopular president a few hours after it ended, Indonesian officials remain circumspect about declaring the wildly popular incumbent a winner until all the votes are counted.

Watching that count begin at outdoor polling stations in our neighborhood this afternoon had a reassuring civic effect. Half an hour after the polls closed in our Setiabudi neighborhood of Medan, four election officials were sifting through ballots in plain view (see above). One worker opened them and searched for the tell-tale checkmark before announcing “satu,” “dua,” or “tiga”—numbers corresponding to the three presidential candidates. Another sorted the counted ballots into piles—with incumbent president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s stack quickly towering over piles for the other two candidates. A third worker marked the vote tally on a posterboard, with Yudhoyono’s tick marks wrapping into a second row while his rivals managed a few lonely scratches. A fourth kept track of the total number of ballots to ensure everything added up properly. Neighborhood residents, pinkies inked purple after voting earlier in the day, gathered around the table to watch the count unfold.

At first, Danielle and I kept our distance. We were curious about the vote count, but did not want to disrupt the process. Before long, some of the polling station volunteers invited us over, pointing to open chairs and offering us glasses of water. One official paused briefly from his count to smile playfully into the camera as Danielle prepared to take a photo. Compare this to Iran, were foreign journalists were beaten, deported and accused of inciting rebellion. Here in Indonesia, two uninvited election tourists were welcomed with open arms.

By the end of the hour, the count showed 206 votes for Yudhoyono, 51 for Jusuf Kalla and 25 for Megawati Sukarnoputri. At least in our well-to-do neighborhood, a natural Yudhoyono stronghold, it was a runaway win for the incumbent. More importantly, representatives from the three candidates’ parties had watched poll workers conduct the count in real time. For an emerging democracy, this kind of transparency can build meaningful trust in the electoral process.

Unlike the outright fraud and intimidation in Iran, the main concern about Indonesia’s elections involved bringing some semblance of order to a potentially chaotic process. Today, Indonesia’s 175 million eligible voters had all of six hours, 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., to mark their preference for president at hundreds of thousands of polling stations on thousands of islands. As many as a quarter of these voters were disenfranchised amid procedural confusions during a national legislative election three months ago. These hardly sound like conditions to inspire confidence.

Yet voting appeared to proceed smoothly today in Medan. Indonesia declares Election Day a national holiday, meaning the streets were actually quieter than usual. Each polling station serves fewer than 600 voters, cutting down on potential wait times. These booths were well-staffed, with four to five election officials and a local police officer at each. So rather than seeing long lines in the world’s third-largest democracy, only a handful of people were voting in the ten or so stations we visited. In addition, voting took a few seconds since the ballot only contained the vote for president. The Indonesian government certainly set up adequate election supply to meet voter demand.

Problems with voting lists, which may have kept as many as 48 million Indonesians from voting in the April legislative election, almost threatened the presidential vote as well. Voting lists that are supposed to contain all eligible voters were not updated, leaving off names of people who had moved or married. Fortunately, all three presidential candidates agreed yesterday to a Constitutional Court ruling that allowed Indonesians to cast a provisional ballot as long as they show their national ID card. It’s far from a perfect solution, but it promises a far more inclusive election.

Of course, the candidates’ agreement about the voter list issue hasn’t stopped some of them from complaining. Megawati’s enigmatic running mate, former general Prabowo Subianto, made a statement this evening criticizing the voter list compromise and the media’s early vote counts showing Yudhoyono in the lead. He made the statement in English, presumably for the benefit of the international media that he hopes to set on edge. Prabowo also claims he and Mega are in the lead, even though most exit polls show them at less than 30 percent. No one shows signs of taking him seriously.

The Election Commission promises to certify the results by July 25, but we should know the final outcome much sooner. President Yudhoyono has close to 60 percent of the vote in initial national returns—less than the 73 percent he won in our neighborhood, but still enough to avoid a September runoff if it holds through the night. If they have to recount 175 million ballots, Jakarta’s central square would the perfect spot. We’ll be there with our cameras.

48 Hours before the Vote

Posted by John
As Americans celebrated independence on Saturday, Indonesians were treated to another familiar civic ritual — the barrage of last-minute election advertisements. Streets were plastered with signs and flags proclaiming the virtues of the three candidates: incumbent President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY); vice president Jusuf Kalla, running against his boss; and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri, who wants her old job back.

During the Saturday evening news broadcast, more than 80 percent of the ads were campaign commercials. By now, Danielle sings along with refrains she knows by heart, and Indonesians who’ve been subjected to a month of campaign mottos can probably tell you in their sleep that Kalla stands for “better and faster” government, Megawati is “for the people,” and SBY intends to lead the people “Forward!”

The most frequently aired advertisement features hundreds of SBY supporters in color-coordinated outfits carrying similarly color-coordinated flags to the top of a verdant mountain where a huge red-and-white Indonesian flag sways majestically in the wind. There’s nothing about SBY’s agenda, just a dose of stirring nationalism, impressive choreography and reminder that SBY is number two on the ballot. You can probably afford this kind of celebratory strategy when you have a 40-point lead in the polls. (I’ve searched for this and other ads on YouTube, but no luck so far.)

Meanwhile, in a country where close to 90 percent of the voters are Muslims, the Kalla campaign has sought to capitalize on the fact that neither SBY’s wife nor the wife of his running-mate wear jilbabs (head scarves). Both Kalla’s wife and his running mate’s wife wear them. Kalla draws attention to this bit of symbolic politics because the major Islamic parties are supporting SBY’s coalition, and this jilbab issue might lure some voters away from the president.

Kalla billboard ads regarding headscarves (see sample above, from the New York Times) are the first ads I’ve seen where candidates’ wives are featured more prominently than the candidates themselves. We saw one ad bearing the words “Insya Allah” (Allah willing) above the wives’ heads, further driving home the point. Another Kalla ad stresses his outsider status—from Sulawesi, he would be the first non-Javanese Indonesian elected to the presidency. None of these ads appear to be gaining traction, as Kalla is mired in third place in most polls.

Megawati seems the most willing to engage in critical campaigning. In a more combative style most Americans would recognize, her ads outline promises that SBY made but did not fulfill during his five-year term. One ad features some wretchedly melodramatic acting, where a boy celebrates after hearing a radio broadcast promising free elementary school education. His parents embrace him and regretfully inform him he can’t believe everything politicians say. It turns out they won’t be able to send him to school because they would still have to pay hidden school fees. Of course, voters’ disappointment with Megawati’s own inability to deliver on her promises as president from 2001 to 2004 hurts her credibility on this front.

The preponderance of political ads in the streets and on the airwaves reached a saturation point all last week. Come Sunday morning, however, all the flags and signs came down. TV broadcasts returned to normal, punctuated by commercials for coffee and cell phones rather than 60-second candidate biographies. In turns out that Indonesia has campaign rules that strictly prohibit political messages in the final three days before the polls open. Accustomed to American campaigns where supporters wave signs on street corners until the polls close on Election Night, it will be strange to travel down the home stretch in relative silence.

It’s not clear these ads were having an impact, anyway. SBY, the wildly popular incumbent, has consistently polled well above 50 percent, in some cases as high as 70 percent. There remains a slim chance that Kalla and Megawati will earn enough votes to force SBY below the 50 percent mark and into a September runoff. But all signs point to SBY winning in a landslide, as his re-election campaign takes on more of the feel of a coronation.

Even though the election will not be competitive, Indonesians will vote at a very high rate. The turnout in three national elections from 1999 to 2004 was over 75 percent of eligible voters in each instance, including 93 percent in the first post-Suharto election of 1999. Compare that to the United States, where about 60 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in last year’s closely contested presidential election. Social pressures to vote were very strong in Indonesia during the authoritarian Suharto era, even though election results were essentially meaningless since Suharto controlled who could run. Still, Indonesians developed the voting habit, and will go to the polls in droves on Wednesday.

Yet Indonesian voters’ motivations can prove elusive. More than a third of Danielle’s interview subjects said they did not know what “democracy” meant, only knowing it as a word in the name of SBY’s political party (“Partai Demokrat”). Voters identify much more closely with political personalities than parties, and parties do little to distinguish themselves ideologically through platforms or policies. In addition, the presence of patronage and “money politics” persists, factoring in voters’ decisions to an unverifiable extent. Everyone acknowledges that parties still buy votes with food and gifts in the post-Suharto era, but of course no one owns up to doing it themselves.

Even with Indonesians’ high rates of political participation, new forms of disenfranchisement have crept into the political process this year. Shockingly, an estimated 40 million voters were unable to vote April’s parliamentary election, mostly because the Central Election Commission (KPU) had not properly updated its electoral rolls. Indonesians don’t have to register, but the KPU was more lax about updating its lists this year than in previous elections. The commission has since run numerous advertisements exhorting Indonesians to check with local KPU offices to ensure that they haven’t been left off the list. It’s unlikely, however, that the voting rolls will be completely fixed before this week’s presidential vote.

In addition, the KPU has introduced some confusing procedural changes in 2009. For the first time in more than 50 years, Indonesians are supposed to mark their intent to vote by putting a check next to their candidate of choice rather than using a punch card ballot. Much confusion ensued in the April parliamentary election, with the KPU invalidating 14 percent of votes because of improper marks or other irregularities. (The average ballot invalidation rate in most elections is about 3 percent internationally.) With more than 1 in 10 voters disqualified on these kinds of technicalities, Florida’s butterfly ballot seems like the model of rectitude in comparison.

International election organizations like IFES have worked with the Indonesian officials to address this issue, encouraging the KPU to take a broader approach in honoring voters’ intent. They’ve gotten the KPU to accept X marks as well as the officially preferred check marks, for instance, but there’s still some disagreement about what counts as a vote. There are no signs that these invalidations have benefited one party or candidate, but they don’t inspire trust among Indonesians learning to live in a 10-year old democracy.

Still, Indonesia will have a proud moment on the international stage on Thursday morning, as wire services run stories confirming SBY’s victory in “Indonesia, a democracy with 240 million people and the world’s largest Muslim-majority country.” Then the world will mostly go on forgetting about Indonesia until something drastic happens.

With his broad mandate, SBY may be able to continue his progress toward making free public education available to all students, combating corruption at the heart of Indonesian politics and business, and spreading the benefits of economic growth to the broader Indonesian population. That is, of course, he stays true to his campaign motto of “Forward!”

Disrupting Corruption

Posted by John
North Sumatra’s Medan Airport provides the perfect view of the consequences of corruption among Indonesia’s political elite. Jockeying for position among hundreds of passengers around two antiquated baggage claim carousels, you’re left with the impression that Indonesia’s third-largest city of 2 million people deserves better.

For the past 10 years, North Sumatran political leaders have promised better. Money is budgeted for a new airport, but construction has stalled. Each year, local politicians dip into the funds in order to cover other costs, such as financing their own increasingly expensive campaigns. Meanwhile, over at the airport, cranes idle and planes squeeze into crowded terminals.

The story of Medan’s airport — false starts, good intentions and incomplete implementation — is repeated in other public works projects across the country. Part of the explanation lies in Indonesia’s public finances. Almost all Indonesians work in the informal economy and make very little money, which means they don’t pay taxes. Not paying taxes may sound appealing to Americans who grumble about the IRS each year as April 15 approaches, but it also severs citizens from their government.

With little understanding or stake in how the government funds its programs, most Indonesians have low expectations for what their government should provide. The government manages to meet those low expectations, especially since there is genuine ambiguity about who is responsible for basic services — schools, roads and trash pick-up — that Americans take for granted.

Meanwhile, businesses and wealthier citizens tapped to fund the Indonesian government’s coffers move their money offshore whenever they can. It’s often a matter of finding the right government official and meeting his price. Corruption has been a consistent feature of Indonesian politics in the country’s 64-year postcolonial history. Transparency International, an agency that tracks political corruption, placed Indonesia 126th in its 2008 Corruption Perception Index of 180 countries. That’s slightly behind Honduras and just ahead of Libya.

Two new features of Indonesian politics promise meaningful change, however. First, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (“SBY”) has had a far less accommodating attitude toward political corruption during his five years in office. The government’s anticorruption commission even prosecuted a member of SBY’s extended family accused of wrongdoing. Here in Medan, both the mayor and vice-mayor recently landed in jail for embezzlement.

SBY’s anticorruption consistently comes up in Danielle’s interviews with Indonesians and accounts for much of the president’s popularity. If he wins next week’s presidential election by as large a margin as projected, his meaningful accomplishments in anticorruption will be a major reason why. For some sense of the change that has occurred in the SBY era, Transparency International’s Corruption Index as recently as 2001 placed Indonesia ahead only of Nigeria, Uganda and Bangladesh.

The second change on corruption comes from the Islamic-inspired Justice and Welfare Party (PKS), which has served as a gadfly on this issue during the last decade. While I bemoaned the political confusion that has emerged with the proliferation of political parties in Indonesia, one real advantage has been that success by new parties like PKS shows that people are willing to listen to parties that take corruption seriously.

PKS has garnered Western press attention because of its links to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and its professed intention to implement sharia (Islamic law) in Indonesia. Less noticed, however, has been PKS’ fight against corruption, which accounts for much of its popularity. The party has become so successful at making corruption its signature issue that one sex worker Danielle interviewed as part of her research said she would vote for PKS — even though the party’s insistence on sharia means it would hardly look kindly on this woman’s profession.

In most Indonesian towns and villages, political parties still offer money, rice or other goods on the eve of an election in exchange for votes. Rather than receiving sustained public services from the government over time, this one-time bribe from political parties is often the extent of constituents’ interaction with the political system.

PKS’ influence is challenging this arrangement, however. During the April parliamentary election in Medan, several mosques gathered up religious clothes and prayer rugs that political parties had donated. They told parties to come retrieve these items — no one would be allowed to bribe their way into office using the mosques. Partly because of the attention PKS has brought to corruption, religious figures are unwilling to passively accept it.

PKS earned 7 percent of the vote in Indonesia’s parliamentary elections in April — not enough to allow them to run a presidential candidate, but enough to make them a potential kingmaker in Indonesia’s coalition politics. For this election, they’ve cast their lot with SBY’s Democratic Party. While the parties disagree about social issues and the role of Islam in Indonesian politics, they can find common ground on anti-corruption initiatives. SBY will probably have to find important places for PKS leaders in a second-term presidential cabinet.

It remains to be seen whether SBY’s Democratic Party and PKS — both relatively new creations — will have staying power in the Indonesian political landscape. PKS’ successes in fighting corruption mean they will remain relevant, if not a major party. And if the president’s party consolidates its legacy of anti-corruption, it will go a long way in helping it establish institutional permanence after SBY.

For all these successes in challenging the culture of corruption in Indonesia, however, nostalgia persists for Suharto, the president who set up one of the world’s most corrupt governments during his 33 years of rule. Suharto’s crony kingdom began to unravel when disgust with members of Suharto’s family and inner circle lining their pockets reached a breaking point during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1998.

Still, historical memory has been kind to Suharto. The poorest Indonesians have not all seen consistent gains during the SBY era. Several SBY supporters told Danielle in interviews that while they are happy with the current president, particularly his anti-corruption efforts, they would definitely vote for Suharto if the former president were on the ballot.

“Suharto may have been corrupt, but he left something for the rakyat kecil (little people),” one said.

Those “little people” still vote in large numbers in Indonesia. Absent meaningful changes in Indonesians’ economic circumstances, a populist who can convincingly pose as the people’s champion — regardless of his or her political platform — may galvanize a new political movement in the post-SBY era.

Legal Roulette in Surabaya

Posted by John
First impressions count for so much when you travel. In Indonesia, our most dramatic introduction occurred in Surabaya on May 10.

As we pulled into our hotel near Surabaya’s Kali River, we were stunned by what looked like the immediate aftermath of a hurricane or flood. Block after block, houses were reduced to rubble, destroyed down to their foundations. Men, women and children were still piecing through the wreckage, salvaging toys, photographs and other mementos.

After the initial shock of the first few blocks, however, we realized that the damage had all occurred on one side of the street — the side closest to the river. Houses on the other side appeared unaffected. Small shops had their doors open for business and people milled around as dusk approached. Yet how could one side of a street be completely destroyed, apparently by a violent act of nature, and the other remain virtually untouched?

The next morning, Danielle’s Indonesian research associate dispelled the mystery of this street with a split personality. The destruction was no act of nature, it was the act of a man — the mayor of Surabaya, who five days earlier had ordered the destruction of 385 houses on a 500-meter stretch along the river. The city displaced more than 1,000 people — all lost their homes and many lost jobs or small businesses in the process.

Details about this event slowly emerged in our conversations with Surabayans during our five weeks in the city. It turns out that Indonesian law stipulates that buildings need to be a certain number of meters away from the river for reasons of flood control. Still, Indonesian authorities have a history of applying laws selectively, and the middle of an election year seemed like an inopportune moment to forcibly remove people from their homes.

We received some answers when we spoke with individuals from the Wonocolo neighborhood directly affected by the Surabaya government’s forced relocation plan. Through Danielle’s contacts, we arranged a meeting with members of the Stren Kali association from the neighborhood on June 9. None of the people we met lost their houses in the May evictions, but their neighbors were forced out. Their own homes on adjacent streets remain at risk. When they walked us through what happened, the tale that emerged was one of individuals with little money or influence caught between overlapping layers of bureaucracy.

The Surabaya government had uprooted river communities before, forcing residents from 250 houses near the river in east Surabaya to move in 2002. The Stren Kali group knew their Wonocolo neighborhood was at risk and told us about repeated efforts they made during the last seven years to come to a negotiated settlement with the government. They enlisted the help of experts, including an architecture professor from Indonesia’s leading university. He testified to the Surabaya regional government that this group should not have to move since they were composting and engaging in sustainable sanitation practices. Several neighborhood residents paid to have their houses moved three to five meters back from the river in order to comply with Indonesian law. Others were raising money to do the same.

The Stren Kali group appeared to be making some headway, finding a sympathetic audience when they testified at the regional legislature in 2007. Regional legislators signed an agreement giving residents of the Wonocolo neighborhood five years to complete renovations designed to allow them to stay in their houses. Yet 2007 was also around the time the national government passed regional autonomy reforms handing more responsibilities to city governments. The Stren Kali group was caught in administrative limbo — they had an agreement with the regional government, but the city government could choose to assert its authority at any time.

The city began to do precisely that on April 23 of this year, when residents of the Woncolo neighborhood received letters from the mayor’s office saying that they would be evicted on May 5. The Stren Kali group sprung into action, contacting the regional legislature to inform them of this development. Regional legislators, mindful of the agreement they had made allowing for renovations, signed an order on April 29 overturning the mayor’s eviction plan.

The mayor’s office moved forward anyway, sending thousands of police officers to the river at 3 a.m. on May 4, telling residents to gather their belongings. Members of the regional legislature also arrived at the scene, calling for a halt to the eviction. By May 5, however, the evictions began as advertised. Ten to 15 police officers went to each house to remove residents.

We arrived on the scene in Surabaya five days later. By then, hundreds of the dislocated citizens were living in city apartments with no electricity or water. Others were staying in tents or in churches. Lawsuits on their behalf are moving forward, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs may also take up the issue.

Some critics have pointed out that river residents had no legal right to the land where they had set up their houses. Perhaps, but that doesn’t justify the heavy-handed way the city handled the situation before all questions of jurisdiction were resolved. Many of the river residents are economically marginalized people from ethnic minority groups who don’t have a lot of sympathy from the wider population.

I try to imagine an equivalent situation in the United States, where the mayor of San Francisco would evict more than a thousand residents who were in negotiations with the California Senate that would allow them to stay put. If nothing else, it seems like a legal appeals process would be allowed to move forward before evictions took place. Yet residents of Indonesia seem to have few enumerated rights and little recourse when they believe their rights have been infringed. Members of the Stren Kali group we met remain concerned with the fate of their displaced neighbors, and worry it’s a fate they could share unless the city government changes its policies.

Yesterday, our arrival in the North Sumatran capital of Medan turned out a much tamer affair than our first day in Surabaya back in May. Medan feels much cooler and calmer than the hurly-burly of Surabaya’s motorcycle-strewn streets. And unlike Surabaya, we didn’t encounter any destroyed city blocks. Yet Medan has a river of its own, with some residents living near the water. They’ll be watching the situation in Surabaya closely.

Our Jakarta Anniversary with Michael Jackson and Obama

Posted by Danielle

June 25, 2009 will be remembered the world over as the day that Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, passed away. We learned about Jackson’s death on Friday morning Jakarta time, when we tuned into BBC headline news while eating our breakfast. It was the only story that the BBC covered for over two hours.

Given the 14-hour time difference between California and Jakarta, the June 25 that we experienced actually preceded the sad news about Michael Jackson. Rather, we spent the day marking our fourth wedding anniversary. This week also happens to be the 482nd anniversary of Jakarta’s founding, so the city itself is in a celebratory mood. I managed to finish my research in the 95-degree archives on Wednesday, so I took the day off work so that we could spend some time exploring Jakarta.

Not that we had a particularly long list of places we wanted to see. In contrast to most world capitals, Jakarta does not have much to attract tourists other than its vast shopping malls. We had already managed to take in most of the prominent historical sites when we visited the city in April, and the heat, pollution, and lack of pedestrian-friendly sidewalks does not make Jakarta a particularly pleasant place for strolling.

So we went on a mission searching for a site associated with one of Jakarta’s most famous residents…Barack Obama’s elementary school. I’d learned from a friend that the school had actually posted a plaque on its front gate. We spent some time searching for an address, and we found it (see photo to the right). Most schools are on their two-week summer vacation before starting the next school year in July (Indonesian children go to school six days a week year round with vacations each season), so there was not much activity at the school. (It certainly was not the “madrassa” that people spoke about during the presidential campaign.) One teacher walking in asked us (in English) what are names were and where we were from. When we answered that we were from the United States, she smiled and said, “Just like Barry,” pointing to the Obama plaque. My friend Herlily—who had told me about the plaque—joked that Indonesians like to take credit for Obama’s victory—that something about his four years in Jakarta as a child gave him that extra edge to become the US president.

After photographing the school, we continued our walk through the neighborhood and found that we were in a rather different Jakarta—lush green trees offered shade and fresher air than we’ve found elsewhere in the city. The sidewalks were clear of vendors and motorcycles. We were in the diplomatic district, passing embassies left and right. Clearly this is the best place to take a walk in the Indonesian capital. John described it as the “Georgetown of Jakarta.”

We ultimately made our way to an impressive monument on Proclamation Street that marks the spot where Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declared Indonesian independence on August 17, 1945. The monument (see photo) is in a quiet shaded park on territory that had once been Sukarno’s home. After such a pleasant walk to a nice, quiet spot, we might have forgotten we were in Jakarta if it weren’t for the man urinating on a tree next to the monument.

In a last attempt at escapism, in the evening we headed to an upscale restaurant specializing in traditional Javanese cuisine where we gorged ourselves on tempeh sate, tofu stuffed with bean sprouts and mushrooms, coconut rice, and numerous other vegetarian delights that have eluded me on our trips to Indonesian-fast food outlets. We could not get over the irony that the two glasses of wine we ordered—at $9 a glass—covered half the cost of our bill. Although the excellent food was very affordable, the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu was $50. The California Mondavi wine we buy in our Berkeley grocery store for about $12 a bottle was priced at over $60. Clearly this is an economy-of-scale issue in a Muslim-majority country where alcohol consumption is avoided by about 90 percent of the population.

While the ambience of the restaurant was delightful, our own mood was lowered by the presence of a rat that scurried across our field of vision at least four times over the course of the meal, including one close call behind my chair. No matter how hard we may try to escape the less pleasant aspects of Indonesian city life, they seem to find us.

Tomorrow we leave Java for Sumatra, Indonesia’s second-largest island. We will be in Medan, capital of North Sumatra and Indonesia’s third-largest city, for the next five weeks. The region has a reputation for being more rough-and-tumble than Java, so maybe the visit from a little furry friend during our anniversary dinner was just a warning of more to come.