Response to accusations relating to the East Timor Killings

On December 20, 2013, a noted Indonesian journalist, Mr. Aboeprijadi Santoso, wrote an article in The Jakarta Post titled: "What ever happened in Kraras,Timor Leste, ‘Pak’ Prabowo?" [http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/12/20/what-ever-happened-kraras-timor-leste-pak-prabowo.html].

The article draws a strong response from Mr. Prabowo Subianto, a frontrunner in Indonesia presidential race. His response was published in The Jakarta Post on Decmber 27, 2013 [http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/12/27/letter-editor-prabowo-clarifies.html]. Mr. Prabowo vehemently denied his involvement in a massacre in Kraras, Timor Leste. He charges that the article is a 'personal attack on my military career and personal reputation, based on unproven allegations, innuendos and third-hand reports — none substantiated, by either the United Nations or current Timor Leste authorities.'

Mr. Aboeprijadi Santoso tries to clarify the matters. He sent a response to The Jakarta Post editors who, unfortunately, refused to publish it because they do not want 'to prolong the controversy.'

Since JoyoNews had published both Mr. Santoso's article and the response from Mr. Prabowo, we feel we are obliged to post Mr. Santoso's response too.

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Aboeprijadi Santoso: A Reply to Mr. Prabowo

I should thank Mr. Prabowo Subianto for his response (The Jakarta Post Dec. 27) on my article titled “What ever happened in Kraras, Timor Leste, ‘Pak’ Prabowo?” (The Jakarta Post Dec. 20). His response, however, is deeply disappointing - a baseless denial.

First, he insists that he “was nowhere near the site of the “Kraras Massacre” that occurred in Viqueque district on Aug. 8, 1983”. That was the day when a number of hansips (local civil defense) deserted form the Indonesian army’s units stationed in Viqueque, attacked and killed 16 Indonesian soldiers.

Almost a month later, around Sept. 17, a number of massacres occured as reprisals killing about 300 unarmed locals (including those executed near the Luca, not Wituku, river). There is no doubt Prabowo was in East Timor in April and had covertly gone in and out of the country until at least August, perhaps even September.

Much throughout this period it was not clear his whereabout and what he was doing – much to the anger and worry of Col. Gatot Purwanto who was the then local commander, as he reported it to Governor Mario Carrascalao. (See Timor Archives, http://timorarchives.wordpress.com/2013/01/17/revisiting-1983/

and interview by Benedict Anderson etc with Mario Carrascalao in ‘Indonesia 76’, Cornell University, Oct. 2003. There should be more on this at the CAVR archives in Dili).

Second, he said he had never been near the site of the massacre, yet there was a report (in sources mentioned above) saying, I quote, “Prabowo went to Bibileo”. Perhaps it will be helpful to refresh his memory: do you remember the field in Bibileo with a building and a stone with this written on it: “Sekolah Dasar Negeri 08. Riun Yudha. Bibileo, Viqueque, Tut Wuri Handayani” (at the unit’s symbol)”. It’s still there.

The villagers I met were much younger in 1980s and naturally could not remember all details i.e. whether they had seen Prabowo on the days when the attacks and killings occurred in such a big field and when those events probably occurred in the afternoon or night. But why on earth could they three decades later have heard of and remember Prabowo’s name, mention it as an important name, and put a poster with his photograph in their house? I could go on with more details should Mr. Prabowo pretend to forget.

Third, Mr. Prabowo appears to be naive or pretends to be so when he said “Would Xanana and other Timorese freedom fighters, our nation’s former enemies, have befriended an Indonesian officer truly guilty of such despicable crimes..”

In doing so, he actually mistakenly transfers the issue to a political and diplomatic realm since this event, the so-called ‘friendship’, occurred – indeed could only occur - after the independence of Timor Leste. In other words, the geopolitics has dictated both sides, now those East Timorese are state officials representing their state, to act as politicians and diplomats. I happen to know and met with some of those freedom fighters when they were abroad during their struggle in the 1990's. They certainly took a very different attitude when they mentioned Mr. Prabowo’s name. It is interesting that Mr. Prabowo now mentions them as “Timorese freedom fighters”. Had he recognized this three decades ago, the massacres might not have happened.

It should also be stressed that having fought for decades and achieved freedom, the East Timorese resistance had also learned, not only from Indonesian struggle against Dutch colonialism, but in particular from Africa i.e. the Mozambique’s and Nelson Mandela’s struggle. At this point I fully agree with Mr Abdul Khalid response to Mr. Prabowo that “The East Timorese authorities are far more tolerant to you than a number of countries in the world”.

Fourth, to conclude, the only way to resolve the controversy would be for Mr. Prabowo to honestly provide details of his assignments, his posting dates and the operations under his command in East Timor at least during the period of April to Sept. 1983.

Only then it would be fair for the Indonesian electorate, including the supporters of his political party, whether or not it is politically and morally responsible to vote for his party and his president candidacy.

@ Aboeprijadi Santoso, journalist and Indonesian national residing in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Australia issues Indonesia travel warning, citing terrorist threat

The Department of Foreign Affairs has issued a travel warning to Indonesia, including tourist hotspot Bali, because of the high threat of a terrorist attack

The department's latest travel advice contains a warning that terrorists remain active in the country despite police efforts to stop them.

"Indonesian authorities have warned that extremists may be planning to attack churches in Jakarta, and elsewhere in Indonesia, during the 2014 new year period," the travel advice said.
Earlier this month national police chief Sutarman said there were indications that militants may be assembling bombs to target areas of worship.

"The terrorists have cells everywhere and they are active. We are continuing to pursue them," he told reporters, without giving details of specific targets.

DFAT warns the threat to Australians in Indonesia may reach beyond churches.

"Terrorists have previously attacked or planned to attack places where Westerners gather, including nightclubs, bars, restaurants, international hotels, airports and places of worship in Bali, Jakarta and elsewhere in Indonesia," it said.

"These types of venues could be targeted again."

There have been several attacks on Western targets in the past decade, including the 2002 Bali bombings which killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

DFAT also notes that travellers to Indonesia could experience natural disasters like tsunamis, or be the victims of petty crime, drink-spiking and scams.

The advice does not recommend Australians stay away from Indonesia, but it does urge travellers to exercise a high degree of caution in the country.

However, Australians are urged to reconsider the need to travel to some areas including the provinces of Central Sulawesi, Maluku and Papua.

What Snowden Has Shown the World

The Year 2014 Equals 1 P.S.

Historians can be expected to mark June 9, 2013 as a significant date in the evolution of the surveillance and monitoring of mankind and peg 2013 alongside George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, making 2014 officially 1PS – one year Post Snowden.

There is justification for this chronological divide. The world will be working its way out of the events of last June for years and decades to come, trying to come to grips with the astonishing ability of electronic snoopers to surreptitiously monitor the details of millions of lives.

It appears that they will continue to be able to do so despite growing knowledge of the pervasive level of this surveillance. For instance, US federal judge William Pauley ruled last Friday that the National Security Agency’s massive collection of telephone records is lawful and, citing the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a valuable tool in the country’s arsenal to fight terrorism that “only works because it collects everything.”

In other words, the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution – which protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure and requires a warrant for the search of their homes, appears no longer to be valid.

Whether you like it or not, care or care less, the Snowden saga that began last June not only stole global headlines unlike other recent historic events but hits at the very core of our modern social fabric, revealing a glaring divide.

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all,” said the former NSA contractor turned “indoor cat” Edward Snowden in his “Alternative Christmas Message” broadcast by British network Channel 4 last week, where he stressed that “asking is always cheaper than spying”.

"For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission's already accomplished," he said. "I already won."

He also pointed out that the Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four had already warned us of mass surveillance.

“The types of collection in the book – microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us - are nothing compared to what we have available today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go. Think about what this means for the privacy of the average person.”

But does the world really care about privacy – much less the invasion of it?

One need not look further than the tens of thousands of readers’ comments in those online news articles on the Snowden Christmas message. They are far more entertaining and insightful of the state of the world today, amplifying the clear line between the two extremes – the oblivious and the paranoic, the indifferent and the concerned.

It seems fitting to list some of these comments as food for thought:

“Technology, of course, has enabled a great deal of consumer surveillance by private companies, as well. The difference with the NSA’s possession of the data, Snowden said, is that government has the power to take away life or freedom. At the NSA, he said, “there are people in the office who joke about, ‘We put warheads on foreheads.’ Twitter doesn’t put warheads on foreheads.”
“I wish he would start telling us something we didn't already know. A 90 year old person has no conception of privacy, at this point.”

“I find it somewhat funny that the American public is so concerned about their privacy and states that nobody has a right to look into their personal information. This is the same society where so many people are hooked on Facebook that posts people's most idiotic, embarrassing pictures, statements and posts that no normal people should be viewing.”

“The key difference: All those posts on Facebook? All voluntary. People want it there. They chose to put it there. I and many others however did not flail about and say, "NSA please spy on us." Nope. That is the difference.”

“You have nothing to hide? Why don't you post your full name, street address, and date of birth? Who did you vote for in the last few elections? Who are you texting right now and about what?”
“Note to the Judge: It may "work" - that doesn't make it Constitutional.”

“I'm not willing to surrender my freedom so that those who need the fake sense of security provided by mass surveillance can feel safe.”

“Everyone knows countries spy on each other. No one actually believed the US would carry it out to such great extent and also spy on its own citizens to no limits.” 

“Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and every department store you have a credit card for has far more of your personal information than the government. They can sell it to whomever they please and pocket the money at your expense. They can read your email, scan for certain key words, and sell or give your information to the highest bidder. And they are taking note of YOU PERSONALLY. Unlike the NSA, to who you are just one of a billion phone calls which, while they have the data, or uninterested in. And they will never sell your stuff to a third party.”

“The NSA is mad at Snowden. They didn't like it when he violated their privacy.”

“The problem most Americans have is the same as Snowden. In spite of his time at the NSA he fails to see the necessity of intelligence. If he and his supporters have their way there would be no intelligence service, the NSA and the CIA would cease to exist. And that is MUCH more dangerous to the American way of life than what he has exposed.” 

(Vanson Soo runs an independent business intelligence and commercial investigations practice specialized in the Greater China region. Blog: http://vansonsoo.com Another version of this appeared in The Standard of Hong Kong.)

The Flood to India’s Cities

All aboard for the bright lights

India, China take radically different approaches to urbanization, to India’s sorrow

Fed up with isolation, deprivation and hardship, Chandra Ballabh Bhatt, 30, a few years ago picked up his family – a wife and two children aged 2 and 6 – and emigrated from Okhalkhandam, his 350-person village in northern Uttaranchal, to Noida, a new industrial planned city southeast of New Delhi.

Life in Okhalkhandam, he said, “was full of struggle. For months, we didn’t have electricity in our village. Water wasn’t available either (due to an erratic irrigation system) to till my small farm where I grew vegetables and wheat. There was barely enough food to keep the wolf from the door.”

An undeveloped rural economy meant that jobs were scarce. The schools were lousy, the ill-equipped hospital a daunting 100 km-trek from the village. The only toilet was half a kilometer away, Bhatt said. In fact, 59.4 percent of rural households have no toilets, according to India’s National Sample Survey Office, meaning nearly 60 percent the rural poor defecate in the open, a significant health hazard. 

“It was common for pregnant women to die en route to the hospital without proper medical care,” Bhatt said “My wife too, had pregnancy-related complications. She nearly died when my younger child was born. What kind of a future could I have given to my children by staying on in the village?”

Fed up with his destitution, Bhatt took the plunge to relocate to a city. Many of his relatives had already done so – migrated to Delhi and Noida. Bhatt too, bundled up all his life savings – crumpled notes amounting to the equivalent of US$80 – and boarded a tempo to the nearest town. From there, he changed to an overnight bus to reach Noida.

Bhatt thus joined India’s vast numbers of rural dwellers who head for cities that are totally unequipped to handle them. According to a study by K. Laxmi Narayan, a Social Demographer at the University of Hyderabad, almost 50 percent of Mumbai’s population are living in slums, as are 32 percent of Kolkata’s. According to the 2001 census, the total slum population in urban India was 42.6 million, 15 percent of urban India’s population.

Bhatt’s wife and kids didn’t accompany him at first. “I thought I’d bring them in only after I’d settled down in the city,” he recalls. At first the farmer had to shack up with another villager in the city in a 7X7- sq. m tenement. After three weeks, Bhatt managed to land a job as a security guard at a local apartment block, which paid him US$ 20 per month.

The money was a pittance. But the farmer says it saw him through tough times as local residents pitched in with meals when he did odd jobs for them like cleaning cars or fetching groceries. To improve his earnings, he learned tailoring after winding up his guard’s shift. Equipped with better job skills, he soon began knocking on the doors of local garment factories.

A month later, he got lucky. He bagged a job at a factory that currently pays him the equivalent of US$200 a month. With two hours of overtime twice weekly, Bhatt was able to add another US$60 to his salary. He then brought his family down from Okhalkhanda.

“It’s still a hand-to-mouth existence,” he concedes. “But at least we have a roof over our heads, access to good doctors, water and electricity and a decent school for my kids. Plus my wife works as a maid in a nearby house bringing in another $50.”

For millions of villagers like Bhatt, distress migration is proving to be the only panacea for impoverished lives, but creating a pressing need to rejuvenate and revitalize India’s existing towns and cities to create new greenfield cities. The failure to do this will seriously retard India’s growth process leading to disastrous consequences. As India grapples with urbanization, it will encounter severe challenges. But it needs to leverage these as huge opportunities for sustainable growth. Recent studies project that India will face an unprecedented scale of urbanization when 350 million will move to cities by 2030.

That number is likely to double to 700 million by 2050, 2.5 times the size of the United States’ present population and rivalling China for the largest urban movement in the world. In other words, every minute over the next 20 years, 30 Indians like Bhatt will leave rural areas for the cities.

It was basically a misguided attempt to decelerate this rural-urban exodus, through provision of locally available work, that the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government launched the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), its flagship welfare program and the largest of its kind in the world in 2006.

But the impact has been limited. Recent independent studies argue that NREGA’s failure stems partly from a flawed premise, that labor migration is a poverty problem and merely a product of ‘push-and-pull’ economic factors. This view wrongfully assumes that farming is what the poor really want, and that poverty is chiefly a rural problem to be tackled by rural development. 
“As a concept, NREGA is great,” said urban planner Shashi Bhagwat. “But it doesn’t delve deep into reasons why villagers are still migrating eight years after its launch. This is largely due to social factors.”

It’s a myth that rural poor only dream of the swaying verdant fields shown in Bollywood movies as the key to their happiness, Bhagwat explained. “They’re increasingly having higher aspirations – of better housing, English-medium schools, access to good hospitals in their villages. They’re not just thinking merely in terms of survival,” she argues.

At the other end of the spectrum, the only major urban scheme India has launched in its entire planning process to tackle rural-urban migration is the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM), and analysts have reservations about the plan’s capacity to cope with the country’s rural-urban demographic shift. They emphasize the imperative need for India to create 500 new cities to accommodate and provide a better quality of life to its migrating people. Otherwise, they warn, every existing city will become a slum when India turns 75 in 2022.

A recent ministry report has highlighted that by 2020 India will be facing a housing shortage of 30 million dwelling units, 200 million water connections, 350 million people will have to be given access to sewage, 160 GW of power- generating capacity will have to be added and the number of vehicles on roads will increase fivefold.

At the beginning of the Eleventh Five Year Plan (2007-2012), the urban housing shortage reached 24.7 million. Of that shortfall, 99 percent pertained to the economically weaker sections and lower income groups in which migrants typically fall.

Following Independence in 1947, the broad view among utopian Indian politicians – still under the heavy influence of Gandhian philosophy – was that India would be able to get by on its agri-economic model.

“But no country in the world has grown on a sustained basis for long periods purely on the back of its agricultural sector,” said economist Sanjeev Mistry, previously with the ministry of urban affairs. “It is inevitable that people will migrate from rural India to towns and cities.”

Farming accounts for nearly 60 percent of India’s workforce, but accounts for only 14.2 percent of GDP, Mistry added. Agriculture can sustain a growth rate of 3 percent while the Indian economy must grow at 9-10 percent to lift vast segments of its population above the poverty line.
Amitabh Kant, CEO & MD of the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor Development Corporation, says India can learn a valuable lesson from China.

“For China, economic development was, in essence, about shifting people from sustenance farming to manufacturing, and urbanization was the spatial manifestation of this shift. As a policy, it adopted rapid planned urbanization with manufacturing as the key locomotive. The development of new cities and expansion of existing ones has been a dominant feature of China’s growth in the last three decades.”

The government in Beijing is actively planning to rebuild and refurbish 20 inland cities whose satellite areas will serve the upgraded and expanded needs of 800 million people. That is expected to kick off an unprecedented building boom that is intended to carry with it a whole parade of ancillary industries including durable goods, automobiles, etc. Just a week ago, China opened an additional 2,000 km of high speed rail links designed to move up to 700 million people around the country. Another 12,000 km of new high speed rail is under construction.

There are concerns whether China can pull it off, and some of the enormous housing estates already built suffer from substandard construction and the residents that have been moved into them suffer a range of social problems from joblessness to feelings of dislocation.

But whatever the problems, China is facing up to the need to urbanize and making it a positive goal to drive economic growth. There is little indication that India’s government leaders are doing more than throwing up their hands in alarm.

Certainly, India’s problems are every bit as big as China’s if not more so
Kant also quotes the example of Kitakyushu in Japan which, post- World War II, was the most polluted city of the world. But today, he says, it is a unique example of green technology and clean environment. Singapore is another example of innovative integrated water management approaches — using reclaimed water, recycling and desalination.

Migration – and its corollary burden on cities – some historians argue, is only part of India’s woes.
Preeti Mann, a social anthropologist, writes in an essay, “India in transition: Urban migration and exclusion” that the success of the Indian urbanization agenda will be hugely dependent on the poor migrants’ integration as urban citizens. She also points to the growing hostility of urban governments, as well as middle-class citizens, towards the urban poor, especially migrants to the cities.

Currently, the anthropologist argues, the urban development is a story of sharp contrasts. “Urbanization in India subscribes to forces of the neo-liberal economy, Mann writes, “where citizens are expected to become self-reliant and not be an economic liability for the State.”

Mann theorizes that urban spaces are generating newer forms of inequalities and exclusions that go beyond caste. “In urban India, one’s social and economic class has become the new caste. The caste anonymity of migrants is not enough to allow access to all urban spaces, as their social profiling restricts entry to most of these enclaves.”

She predicts that acceptance of the permanence of the poor migrant population is critical to better planning, provisioning, and integration into India’s urban development.

“If schisms are left unaddressed, it will not be long before the inequality in India’s urban centers, like the rural hinterlands, becomes engulfed by civil strife,” Mann predicts.
(Neeta Lal is a senior journalist living in New Delhi and a regular contributor to Asia Sentinel)