i know i'm not required to do this anymore, but...

A resilient Indonesia moves beyond Suharto

As Indonesia's former strongman, Suharto, lay on his sickbed this week, the country that rejected him 10 years ago was in the early stages of a democratic election campaign.

Though the nation's leaders spoke with respect of the man who had been their master and mentor for three decades, they were by their actions repudiating him, moving forward with a new Indonesia that contrasts in almost every way with one he bequeathed to them.

From one of the most centralized and controlled countries in the region, it has transformed itself into one of the most decentralized, free, open and self-regulating.

From a brutal and corrupt regime under the heel of the military, it has become the standard bearer of democracy in Southeast Asia. It stands out for its political liberalism at a time when coups and coup attempts have discredited the region's two exemplars of democracy, Thailand and the Philippines.

"Indonesia represents a good-news story in the region and in the world," said Ralph Boyce, a former United States ambassador to Indonesia during the post-Suharto period.

It did not disintegrate as a nation or fragment into a tumult of mini-wars, as many people feared when the dictator suddenly released his grip. It was not engulfed in Islamic radicalism, although that struggle is still playing itself out. It did not fall back into the grip of the military or collapse in economic ruin.

"They're well on their way to establishing a more democratic and modern Indonesia," Boyce said, "which is quite a challenge when you are dealing with one of the world's largest and most disparate societies."

A vast archipelago with a population of 240 million, Indonesia is the world's fourth most-populous nation, whose people are 90 percent Muslim. As the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, it is demonstrating that Islam can be compatible with democracy.

Since Suharto was ousted as president in May 1998, Indonesia has had four presidents, all of whom have worked, unlike him, within the democratic system. The next election is a year away but already three of them the four have declared that they want the job again.

In the past decade, Indonesia has held three national elections and more than 300 elections for provincial and district officials in votes that have been judged to be relatively clean and in which the results have mostly been accepted by the losers.

In the marketplace of elections, political Islam has failed to win support, and Indonesians have mostly rejected the radicalism and violence of Islamist groups. In general, the country has become more devoutly religious but has not embraced extremism.

"I think the more hard-line Islamists discredited themselves in the early post-Suharto period" when they attempted to bully the nation into Islamic conservatism, said Greg Fealy, a specialist on Indonesia at the Australian National University. "They added to the wariness that the general public had toward strong Islamism."

After three decades in power during which he bent Indonesia to his will, Suharto disappeared almost completely from public life, puttering quietly in his modest home in central Jakarta as his health grew steadily worse.

"What we learned," said Boyce, "is that at least in Indonesia, when you lose absolute power, you lose it absolutely."

In today's Indonesia, Suharto is not even a reference point against which policies and reforms are measured.

His legacy is a mixture of economic growth, a culture of corruption and a stunted political system.

A nation that was written off as an economic failure when he took power in 1965 became one of Asia's tigers. Roads, schools, clinics and electricity raised living standards, and economic liberalism tied the economy to the outside world.

When the economy collapsed during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, Suharto lost the basis of his legitimacy, and growing discontent burst into the open.

In the decade since then, Indonesia has climbed back toward prosperity. A growth rate that fell to a negative 13 percent has risen to more than 6 percent.

But although the nation embraced democracy with starved enthusiasm, it found that Suharto had eviscerated its institutions, weakened its political parties and blocked the rise of potential leaders, setting back its political development.

There are no fresh faces in the presidential field for 2009. Political analysts say they are waiting until the next vote, in 2014, to see a new generation emerge.

One of the most profound changes has been the decentralization that dispersed power and political accountability from the all-powerful executive in Jakarta to local governments around the country.

The country's bank deposits fell from 70 percent in the capital, Jakarta, to 35 percent, said Craig Charney, a political scientist and pollster based in New York — "a redistribution of wealth rare in countries outside of revolution or war."

This has increased the political accountability of local leaders, potentially improving the delivery of government services, and it has increased stability by defusing separatist demands.

But it has also run the risk of creating what people here call hundreds of corrupt and autocratic mini-Suhartos. And it has weakened the hand of the central government in putting its policies into effect.

This accomplishment is Indonesia's main task today, said Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono, a cabinet minister under every president since the time of Suharto.

"Before we claim to be the third largest democracy we have to overcome what I call the delivery deficit," he said. "For democracy to take root here it must prove that it can improve the lives of the people."

Forty-nine million people live on less than $2 a day, he said. Ten million are unemployed. Large numbers have no access to health care, primary education or clean water. The infant mortality rate is one of the highest in the region.

"We call it procedural democracy," said Bonar Tigor, who heads a pro-democracy group called Solidarity Without Borders. "We have freedom of political expression. We have good freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. We no longer have political prisoners." But he said, "Democracy has been kidnapped by the elites who have gotten all the benefits. The hard daily life of the people on the bottom is still the same."

For many of these people, the controls of the Suharto regime offered a marginally better life. Commodities like gasoline, rice, sugar and cooking oil were subsidized by the government. Now the poor are at the mercy of the market.

Problems like these are challenges for the country's democratic government, the hard work of everyday governance. Indonesia's success now depends on small and incremental changes rather than on the heart-stopping historical turning points of a decade ago.

"The biggest news here is that there is no crisis," said Douglas Ramage, the country representative for the Asia Foundation.

"What strikes me is the sheer normality of the country. Indonesia is now a normal nation."

the standard bearer of democracy in Southeast Asia?!?!??!!!

I know it's the holidays and i don't have to post, but....

Article

Judge who sued over pants loses job

Wed Nov 14, 12:29 AM ET

WASHINGTON - A judge who lost a $54 million lawsuit against his dry cleaner over a pair of missing pants has lost his job, District of Columbia officials said.

Roy Pearson's term as an administrative law judge expired May 2 and the D.C. Commission on Selection and Tenure of Administrative Law Judges has voted not to reappoint him, Lisa Coleman, the city's general counsel, wrote Nov. 8 in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Associated Press.

Pearson was one of about 30 judges who worked in the Office of Administrative Hearings, which handles disputes involving city agencies. He had held his position for two years.

The Washington Post and The (Washington) Examiner, citing sources familiar with the case, reported the commission's decision last month.

Pearson's lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court claimed Custom Cleaners, owned by South Korean immigrants, did not live up to Pearson's expectations of "Satisfaction Guaranteed," as advertised in store windows.

Pearson demanded repayment for the lost pants, as well as damages for inconvenience, mental anguish and attorney's fees for representing himself. He calculated his losses initially at $67 million but lowered his request to $54 million.

Pearson did not immediately respond to an e-mail from The Associated Press requesting comment.

REFLECTIONS

What can i say? Karma ftw!

please don't grade this Ms Kuang.

The people fiddle while the government is being grilled

The police fiddle while children are killed
Minette Marrin August 26, 2007

It is no exaggeration to say that today’s children have been betrayed by today’s adults. The killing of 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool is a direct consequence of a mass abdication of responsibility by the generations that should have been protecting him – and his murderer, too.

I am not talking about Rhys’s grieving mother and father, who are loving parents of the sort every child should have. I mean the agencies of state, from police officers and local authorities to those in Whitehall and Westminster who have turned their backs on adult obligations and discouraged the rest of us from taking them on.

Although we are the most spied-upon nation in Europe and although we have spent billions on social renewal schemes, we have reached a state in which children and teenagers in big cities live in terror of other children and teenagers and in despair of protection from adults. They carry knives because they are afraid.

They are afraid on their way to and from school and they learn almost nothing when they get there, partly because adults don’t protect them from bullying, thieving and disruption. Teachers have either lost or relinquished their authority and children can expect little or no guidance and protection from them, or from their parents, or from council care, or from the police.

Children know the police cannot protect them from gang leaders and that they would be daft to cooperate as witnesses. I know of two boys who were tortured by a young teenager to stop them giving evidence against him. For many young people in inner cities, there is no alternative to the comparative safety of gang life.

Since January eight young people have died in shootings – six in London, one in Manchester and now one in Liverpool. According to Home Office figures, the total number of young people aged between five and 16 who were murdered, one way or another, has gone down from 44 in 1995 to 20 in 2005-6 (and 40% of these were killed by a parent). However, overall gun killings went up from 49 in 2005-6 to 58 in 2006-7, which is a big leap.

Knife crime has gone up and knife owning is becoming common: 12 teenagers have been stabbed to death since the beginning of this year. The Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London found that between 22,000 and 57,000 young people could have been the victims of knife crime in 2004; without better official data it is impossible to know.

It is clear that violent crime among those under 18 has risen for four consecutive years. And it is increasingly clear that, like mass illiteracy and innumeracy, this is at root due to an adult flight from responsibility – a loss of a sense of proper authority, replaced by a misguided pursuit of improper authority.

Take policing, the first, thin line of protection. I find it incredible to learn that there are known gangs in Croxteth, where Rhys was shot (as in Peckham, where Damilola Taylor was stabbed). If the police know of these gangs, why don’t they control them with all possible severity? Why don’t they watch them ceaselessly and remove the ringleaders with Asbos? Why don’t they have police on the beat, as politicians keep promising?

Of course they know of these gangs. Recognising the gravity of gang gun crime, Merseyside police set up a special unit called Matrix two years ago with 200 officers. Why aren’t they patrolling the danger spots aggressively? If 200 officers are not enough, why aren’t there more?

According to locals, the car park where Rhys died had become a meeting place for gangs, yet plans to have police there between 8pm and midnight were withdrawn last May. A camera was proposed for this coming October. It is depressing by comparison that a camera was already in place on a beach in Sussex to catch two girls exposing their breasts, and police were available to arrest and charge them, and accompany them to court last week (though the case was later dropped), while nobody from our busybody state was watching the known troublespot where Rhys died.

There was also police time and presence enough in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, this month to arrest a boy who threw a sausage at a man in the street and to charge him with assault, for which he could stand trial at vast expense. A police culture that permits this is the culture of Nero – fiddling with cocktail sausages while the inner cities burn.

The police are not entirely to blame, however. It is not their fault that under politically correct micromanagement from Whitehall, policing has become pen pushing, forcing them off the beat. Alistair McWhirter, a former chief constable of Suffolk, recently made the well-known point that officers spend much of their time doing preposterous amounts of paperwork.

A file for a simple assault case contained 128 pieces of paper and had been handled by more than 50 people before it got to court. Recording an arrest will take up at least a morning of an officer’s time in paperwork. It was irresponsible enough to dream up such a time-wasting procedure; it has been almost criminally irresponsible, after several years of complaint, to continue with it. This is the betrayal of the Whitehall mandarins, who have insisted on this nonsense, in all public services, backed by government.

The failures of the police are only one part of a complex collection of social problems and if society is broken, the police can hardly be expected to fix it. What’s needed is a passionate backlash against irresponsibility and irresponsible, misguided waste and the terrible state sector mentality that promotes both.

It’s this mentality that has produced teachers who can’t or won’t teach, school leavers who are unemployable, students who can’t study, feckless parents, broken homes, police who are obsessed with things that don’t matter, neighbours who dare not stand up to other people’s children, jails overcrowded with the wrong people, idiotic state sector make-work, intrusive quangos imposing idiotic make-work and the divisive follies of multiculturalism and uncontrolled immigration.

Until we begin to stand up against all these things, we can probably expect more senseless killings of children.

Reflection

After yet another untimely passing it is inevitable that an article like this one should be written. As the columnist has mentioned, it is society’s neglect of obligations that has resulted in Britain’s current state of affairs, of which Rhys’ incident was but a small part. The columnist, however, also expressed the view that it is the administration that has promoted such neglect, which I do not agree with. I believe it is the general public that has perpetuated it.

In this age of democracy, the ones with the most power are the voters, not the voted. While this encourages the government to perform in the interests of the people, it also means the government is at the mercy of said people’s whims. As such, the government’s policies are sometimes formed not in the interests of the people, but according to the interests, which as will be illustrated can have dire consequences.

I am no expert on police dealings, but I am sure that they were originally meant to deal with real criminals such as the ones who were (directly or indirectly) responsible for the death of Rhys. They were definitely not meant to go after sausage-throwing adolescents. The reason Whitehall assigns police to such trivial incidents in the community is the public forces them to. Evident here is the public’s ‘abdication of responsibility’; problems that were once solved by one’s self, such as restraint of children, now require police intervention. The people’s uncaring attitude towards their obligations results in them forcing the authorities to cover for their shortcomings.

The police force being swamped with paperwork is another indication of the public’s manipulation. It is Whitehall that implements the system, but it is the public forcing the agency’s hand. The reason so much paperwork has to be done is so that there are no loopholes to exploit. Granted, even without public pressure this should be done, but the public presses for even more detail, even more exact recounting; should a felon escape on a legal technicality, there would be many condemning the current administration and calling for change. To prevent such events, there is no other choice but to increase the amount of paperwork done by the police.

One might argue that the public is also calling for more policemen to be patrolling the streets. Given the resources the authorities would probably implement that too, but as it is they seem to be working at full capacity. I know not why the authorities have chosen paperwork over patrols – I did say I was no expert – but either way they still leave one of the people’s wishes unfulfilled.

This columnist has highlighted a major problem, but has erred in her focus. It is the people who have neglected their obligations, and they have tried to get the state to fulfil them, causing the state to neglect its original tasks, so until the British stop blaming their government and start changing themselves, they indeed can expect more killings like Rhys’.

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Harder to find than a star in Singapore's night sky

At Iraq's front line, U.S. puts ex-foes on payroll
Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:37pm ET

JURF AS-SAKHR, Iraq (Reuters) - Under a tree by a battlefield road in Iraq's "Triangle of Death," Lieutenant- Colonel Robert Balcavage meets his new recruits.

The men are Iraqi Sunni Arabs who are about to join the U.S. military's payroll as a local militia. They want guns.

"I am not giving out guns and ammo," the U.S. commander says. The men listen carefully as the interpreter translates.

"I've been shot at up here enough times to know that there's plenty of guns and ammo. Me personally. Some of you guys have probably taken some pretty good shots at me."

Slowly but deliberately, U.S. forces are enlisting groups of armed men -- many probably former insurgents -- and paying cash, a strategy they say has dramatically reduced violence in some of Iraq's most dangerous areas in just weeks.

It is a rare piece of good news in four years of war, and successes like this are likely to play a prominent part when U.S. commander General David Petraeus makes an eagerly anticipated report to congress in mid-September.

"People say: 'But you're paying the enemy'. I say: 'You got a better idea?'," says Balcavage. "It's a lot easier to recruit them than to detain or kill them."

But U.S. forces also say the militia -- dubbed the Concerned Citizens Programme, or CCP, -- is only a temporary measure. If the comparative peace is to hold, the mainly Shi'ite government must offer the fighters real jobs in its army and police force.

TRIANGLE OF DEATH

U.S. forces have launched an offensive against Sunni Arab militants and Shi'ite militias following a build-up of U.S. troops to 160,000 aimed at quelling sectarian violence.

They have partially succeeded, although hundreds of people are still being killed every month.

Balcavage's territory in the Euphrates River valley south of Baghdad covers the sectarian fault line dividing Sunni Arab western Iraq from the Shi'ite south.

The lush date-palm groves in the irrigated river valley were a heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, while the steaming towns of Iskandariya and Musayyib became a cauldron of sectarian violence and power base of Shi'ite militia.

Since last October, 23 members of Balcavage's battalion of 800 paratroopers have been killed in the area U.S. troops call the "Triangle of Death."

But the unit's charts show sudden, unexpected improvements in security in the past few weeks. At one point the battalion was hitting 16 roadside bombs a day but that fell to four last week. Mortar barrages, once constant, have almost ceased.

The CCP effort is focused on the road leading from the town centre north. A potentially strategic artery linking the region to Baghdad and to the Euphrates valley of Anbar province to the west, it has been sealed off for nearly a year.

The last time Balcavage's troops went up this road in January, they hit six roadside bombs, had three armored Humvees destroyed and had to fight their way out.

But as they started moving up the road this week, they were met by a local chieftain, Sheikh Sabah al-Janabi, in white robes with a shiny, chrome-plated pistol holstered at his waist.

"We are glad to see you," the sheikh told the U.S. colonel, greeting him warmly with a broad smile. "Our men will guard the road. If we receive any shots, please let us answer, not you. We give you our word as we promised."

ROOTS OF INSURGENCY

The valley's inhabitants are from the Janabi tribe, a Sunni Arab group once favored by Saddam Hussein, who recruited and stationed his feared Medina Division of shock troops here to protect the capital from restive Shi'ites to the south.

When U.S. occupation authorities dissolved the Iraqi army in 2003, many Janabi returned home -- armed, jobless, angry and fearful, and joined the insurgency.

But in recent weeks, Janabi leaders have approached the Americans offering to make peace. Balcavage's troops took fingerprint and retina data of nearly 1,000 men in the area.

Each militia member will earn $370 a month, about 70 percent of the salary of an Iraqi policeman or soldier. Contracts are signed with sheikhs in villages, and each is given authority to hire 150-200 men.

A chart Balcavage first drew on a napkin and then added to his regular briefing shows the scheme ending by early 2008 with militiamen being incorporated into the Iraqi army and police.

He stopped to talk to some of the militia as his column of U.S. infantry and mainly Shi'ite Iraqi soldiers made their way into what had been enemy territory. He took the names of two Janabi men who had been officers before the U.S. invasion and promised to try to secure them jobs in the army or police.

"You should have done this a long time ago," said Abdul Razzaq Homayid, in a frayed robe and sandals, with a beat-up AK-47 on a knotted cord over his shoulder.

"Your invasion of Iraq brought hardship. Everything was destroyed and we had no salaries. All of these men are unemployed."

He asks about opening the town centre, rebuilding the health clinic, fixing schools.

The colonel nods: "We'll get it done. We've got to keep talking and not fighting."

Reflections

Compared to the last article on Iraq that I did, this one is significantly more heartening. It is the sole piece of good news concerning the protracted conflict which I have heard in recent times. This new CCP initiative works on so many levels, it seems like a godsend.

First off of course would be the most obvious benefit stated in the article: violence against the occupying US forces has notably decreased. This benefit on its own, though, is not enough, as it would mean the US having to continually, in the words of one Internet detractor, ‘buy off the resistance’. In the short term it is invaluable, but in the long term there are other merits that are more important to both Iraq and the US.

The CCP has laid the groundwork for what would please the Democrats greatly, although strictly speaking it’s good news for all. In my opinion the programme, although as stated in the article is temporary, will ultimately make it easier for the floating fighters to tie down jobs in the still-young military and police forces. This would facilitate a faster transfer of power from US to Iraqi forces, meaning a swifter withdrawal of US troops. Iraq also stands to reap the benefits of reduced unemployment. Not only would potential insurgents not have to join guerrilla gangs, they would be helping restore order.

The other benefit of this initiative seems more diplomatic than military, but nevertheless contributes greatly to diffusing the current situation. The entrusting of security to local sheiks and the Iraqi people in general seems to me a gesture that at least the occupying forces, if not their commander i.e. President Bush, have enough faith in their capability to run their own country. This is to say that the Iraqi people are being told they need not be babysitted, and they are powerful enough to take care of their own security. If this initiative is not a gesture of goodwill and way to sweeten relations, I don’t know what is.

This is, of course, a very optimistic take on things. The road to success for this initiative has more obstacles than every road in Iraq put together. Even after the implementation there have been killings and bombings (although I am not whether these occurred in the places where the CCP is in effect; nevertheless they demonstrate how fragile peace is). However, the ongoing success Balcavage has enjoyed bodes well, and I’m always one to hope for the best.

I’ll be listening out for those fixed clinics and schools.

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