Indonesia dangerously dull Michael Hegarty ;  A contributor to The Jakarta Post

JAKARTA POST,  08 Mei 2014

                                                

                                                                                         

                                                      

Did you see all the international coverage of the election in Indonesia recently? The reports on CNN and Al Jazeera about the shock result, the inexorable rise of the fundamentalists, the mass demonstrations on the streets, the mutterings of discontent among the military, the chaos at the polling stations, the whiff of tear gas hanging in the night air? No? Oddly enough me neither. In fact did you see any coverage of the election in the global media? Admittedly we in the world’s third-largest democracy were upstaged by our friends in the world’s biggest democracy, India. I did see one brief report on the Indonesian election on the BBC, but let’s face it when it comes to the BBC and India no other developing nation gets a look-in. But this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. We were warned by international pundits that instability in the “Fragile Five”; Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa and Turkey would be a major factor in world news in 2014, particularly with elections in three of them, Brazil, India and Indonesia. Well I don’t know how things will work out in Brazil or India, but for the “Breaking News” brigade of the 24-hour rolling coverage channels, Indonesia has been a bit of a damp squib, hasn’t it? It has been this way with Indonesia for a while now, the biggest news stories are to do with economic matters and most of them are of the decidedly yawneroo variety; the monthly percentage change in the current-account deficit, export policy and motor-cycle sales. Once the great menacing “Archipelago of Fear”, brooding with latent violence and danger, Indonesia’s problems seem to have become rather mundane. Dare we say it, Indonesia is getting a bit boring nowadays. Despite this, foreign correspondents still seem to have a lingering subconscious feeling that something must, de facto, be fundamentally wrong in Indonesia. As with the fatuous Fragile Five cited above, journalists love to lump nations, particularly emerging economies, into snappily named groups. The BBC website has a report on the “MINT” economies; Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey. The writer waxes lyrical about the prospects for three of these, the exception being Indonesia, which lacks a “wow factor” and faces infrastructural hurdles. Mexico is currently in the middle of an undeclared civil war between, and among, the government and the drugs cartels, which has left 70,000 dead, their disemboweled bodies left hanging from overpasses or dismembered and dumped at shopping malls. In the last two weeks Nigeria has made the headlines twice, take your pick between a bomb at a bus station in the capital that killed over 70 people or the abduction by Boko Haram of more than 230 schoolgirls. In Turkey, after weeks of violent street protests last year, the government has tried to ban YouTube and Twitter to prevent discussion of alleged corruption in the prime minister’s family. Yes, you can really see how when faced with wow factors like these in other nations international investors might be put off Indonesia because of outdated facilities at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. And how about that other famous group of emerging economic powers that Indonesians once looked so enviously at? How are things in the BRICS economies? Still looking to invest in China’s “economic miracle”? And Russia? No, let’s just pass swiftly over Russia. Even one of the most reported problems in Indonesia, the flooding that regularly blights several parts of Jakarta for hours, or sometimes days, during the peak of the rainy season doesn’t compare to the truly apocalyptic deluge that slowly engulfed Thailand in 2011. Come to that how does Indonesia’s political situation compare to that in Thailand, the one-time media darling of Southeast Asia? I await with bated breath the gushing report titled “Indonesia, the most stable and most liberal democracy in Southeast Asia” in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I’m sure it won’t be long now. Indonesia still has many problems, but most of these problems relate to its steady economic growth and development. The number of reforms the nation still needs to make could fill several volumes and every two steps forward seem to meet one step back. Nonetheless, despite the perennial naysayers, progress in Indonesia is obvious and tangible. The growth is not spectacular but frankly Indonesia doesn’t need another “tiger” boom, that didn’t work out so well the last time. The development is mostly below the radar and not especially exciting, the building of new roads, factories and port facilities are reported daily in The Jakarta Post, but rarely get much mention outside the business pages. Compared to riots, tsunamis, bombs and transportation disasters there is currently little to attract the attention of the world’s media to Indonesia. Back in the day Indonesians, with their customary self-deprecatory sense of humor, rebutted the absurd archipelago-of-fear image with the car sticker: “Travel warning, Indonesia dangerously beautiful”. For the world’s adrenaline-junkie foreign correspondents looking to do their reports to camera in that particular dodging-the-bullets crouch so beloved of a certain type of reporter today, the message is, “Warning, Indonesia dangerously dull”. ●