D.T. Hill

Wiring the Warung to global gateways: The Internet in Indonesia

The global enthusiasm about the Internet has infused the reception of this new communication technology in Indonesia. In much of this discourse—both in Indonesia and elsewhere—there is a tendency to invest the technology with a certain sociopolitical determinacy, that is, a belief that the technology will affect all societies in a particular way, regardless of its specificities. In our very preliminary survey here of the Internet in Indonesia, we want to test some of the Utopian projections about the Internets democratic potential in the context of Indonesian politics in the mid-1990s. While Indonesia remains one of the least networked countries in Southeast Asia,2 with an estimated forty thousand subscribers by the end of 1996, the Internet has been embraced by both the technophilic developmentalists (personified by Minister B. J. Habibie) within the New Order state and by the middle-class opposition to that coterie. Of course the Internet (or more correctly, CMCs, Computer Mediated Communications technology), like any other technology, lends itself to a limited, but varied, range of (occasionally contradictory) possibilities. We want to understand which of the technological options of the Net are political options in Indonesia.

East Timor and the Internet: Global Political Leverage in/on Indonesia

Student protestors inside the occupied national Parliament compound reporting online to the world from laptop computers epitomized the extent to which forces opposing President Suharto mobilized the internet in the dying phase of his rule. So too, under Suharto’s successors, is the Internet proving a new medium for separatist and minority ethnic groups within the archipelago seeking self-determination or international recognition for their aspirations. “The most important factor in gaining independence is communication with international powers,” claimed one Acehnese separatist leader, who added, “The internet is the only way we can achieve this.” They are staking their claim on the internet, with several sites like “Achehnese tears” providing “Information on breaches of human fights in Aceh,” complete with graphic photographs of military brutality. Moluccan groups, too, both in Indonesia and abroad, have taken to the internet to argue their position on the recent conflict there. This paper examines how one particular marginalized regional Independence movement has exploited the potential of the Internet in its struggle. East Timor provides a striking example of how a protracted Independence struggle adjusted to the new strategic possibilities of the internet, how these new technological possibilities could exert international political leverage, and how they can be applied by a nation on the path to Independence.

Plotting public participation on Indonesia's Internet

Focusing on public access rather than business or commercial applications, this article seeks to answer some fundamental questions about Internet use in Indonesia: How many people use the Net? Where and how do they gain access? Who facilitates this: government or private industry? What strategies are expanding public access? In answering such questions, the article examines Internet use as a social practice in Indonesia. It begins by plotting Internet growth. It then focuses on public access Internet facilities, discussing geographical diffusion, ownership trends and the potential for increasing user numbers. Finally, it teases out some user profiles and patterns of usage.

Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR

ABSTRACT This article examines political exile as a particular form of migration, with reference to Indonesians living in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) when the military regime came to power in their homeland. With the rise in Jakarta of the New Order under Major-General Suharto after 1 October 1965, thousands of Indonesians in socialist and communist states abroad were effectively isolated. Faced with detention or execution if they returned home, Indonesian leftists and other dissidents who were scattered across some dozen states spanning the Sino-Soviet divide became unwilling exiles. Several thousand Indonesians were then studying in the USSR, where they were one of the largest foreign nationalities in Soviet universities and military academies. Many spent nearly half a century as exiles, struggling to survive first the vicissitudes of the cold war and then the global transformations that came with the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. The most influential grouping of Indonesians who remained in the USSR after 1965 was known as the Overseas Committee of the Indonesian Communist Party. In China, a separate party leadership emerged, known as the Delegation of the Indonesian Communist Party. Mirroring Sino-Soviet rivalries, the Delegation urged Indonesian leftists in the USSR to join them in China. Hundreds did so. These rival factions were separated by mutual distrust until they each disbanded toward the close of the cold war. This article analyzes the changing fate of Indonesians caught in the contradictory relationship between New Order Indonesia and the USSR and in the tensions between the USSR and China as these unwilling exiles were buffeted by geopolitical transformations well beyond their influence.

Manoeuvres in Manado: Media and politics in regional Indonesia

One of the most visible changes to Indonesian public culture since the fall of President Suharto and his New Order in May 1998 has been the florescence of the nations media. This article is an initial attempt to examine these changes at the local level in the perimeter province of North Sulawesi, about 2,000 kilometres from the political epicentre of Jakarta. Prior to 1998, with only rare exceptions, studies of the Indonesian media - by both Indonesian and foreign scholars - concentrated on the national media. However, since the post-Suharto deregulation of the media and the dismantling of the repressive Department of Information, which had controlled the media centrally, the most dramatic transformation has been driven not from Jakarta but from local media enterprises. At its broadest, this current study of media in North Sulawesi questions whether the collapse of an authoritarian regime and abandonment of media controls axiomatically produce a pluralist democratic media; or whether, equally as likely, they involve the capture of the media by particular political interests, for whom media influence - if not control - is a valuable asset in influencing public opinion and electoral outcomes.

Ethics and Institutions in Biographical Writing on Indonesian Subjects

It has been argued that the social sciences in general are currently undergoing an ‘auto/biographical turn’. Internationally, the field remains largely Eurocentric and discussion of the particular problems presented by life writing in contexts such as Indonesia—in Asia more broadly—remains relatively rare. Nonetheless, within Indonesian studies, academic interest is increasing in the critical production, use, and interpretation of such materials, particularly in the context of the imagination and representation of an emerging ‘modern’ Indonesian identity. This paper examines ethical issues relating to such writing of Indonesian lives. It emerges from a concern over the ‘over-ethicizing’ and ‘over-institutionalising’ of non-medical life writing and examines the effects of prevailing regulations governing this activity in Australian universities. It then explores additional institutional constraints—sometimes directly contradicting Australias national code of ethics—that might apply in the Indonesian context. It concludes with a discussion of the consequent challenges of attempting to write a biography of Indonesian author and journalist, Mochtar Lubis.1

Biography within the Indonesian Context: An Introduction to Four Papers

Most writing about biography, at least in English, has related to Europe, North America, and the broader Anglophone world and its diaspora. Attention to even the major states of Asia*/China, India, Japan*/has been relatively rare. To a large degree this has been due to the linguistic constraints of Anglophone scholars of biography. It has been common for European scholars to have the language skills to work on European lives, but less likely that they would have the fluency in non-European languages required to probe lives in other terrains. Even within the field of area studies broadly defined, and Asian studies more specifically, discussions of biographical writing have only sporadically moved beyond scholars working exclusively on the countries concerned. Amongst Indonesianists, for example, in recent decades there has been mounting scholarly attention to the writing of biography and (though much less commonly) to the theoretical approaches taken in the writing of biography. Yet it remains uncommon for such discussion to spill beyond the confines of the Indonesianist community of scholars and into forums or journals principally focussed on life writing per se.

Beyond the Horizon: Short Stories from Contemporary Indonesia

This collection of stories takes the reader into a literary realm conjured up by a sample of Indonesias most creative contemporary authors. Like President Suhartos New Order itself, the anthology spans the past three decades, when the short story was the most popular literary genre in Indonesia. The tales give an impression of the changing styles and the enduring preoccupations of the countrys authors.

The Press in a Squeeze: Operating Hazards in the Indonesian Print Medial

Over the past two decades the press industry in Indonesia has been dramatically transformed...

The H.B. Jassin literary documentation centre

Few students of Indonesian literature do not known the name of H.B. Jassin. Ironically, while Jassin is one of Indonesia’s most influential and best known literary critics and its leading literary archivist, information about his extensive documentation collection is not readily available to students in Australia. This brief account introduces students and researchers in Indonesian literary and cultural studies to Jassin’s institutional legacy, one of the most valuable single research resources in this field.