A decade after the bombs, Bali remains vigilant

A decade after the 2002 bombing, Bali continues to be vigilant of terrorist threats as more tourists and migrants flock to the island of gods.

Bali governor Made Mangku Pastika on Wednesday told a reporter that despite Bali’s full economic and security recovery in the decade since the first bombing in 2002 and seven years since the second bombing in 2005, security, intelligence and the local community are continually on alert for possible terrorist threats.

“We have to be very, very cautious, all the time,” he said. Pastika said that the people of Bali realize that terrorists are “living around us” and that the Balinese have accepted this as something that the community has to deal with as part of their lives. The security [officers] and the people must carry out preventative and pre-emptive measures “to clean our society,”

“That’s the only thing we can do, you know? Bali is a destination for everybody. We cannot check everybody who wants to come to Bali. There are a lot of entry points into Bali. They can come and go anytime – this is the tourist area. That is the biggest problem,” Pastika said.

Bali tourism has continued to grow in the last years. More than 2.8 million visitors came to Bali last year an increase from around 2.5 million visitors in 2010. Economic development on the island has also attracted people outside Bali to live and work in the island. According to the 2010 census out every 1,000 people living in Bali, 28 of them are migrants.

“So I always say, ‘yes, now we are safe’ but I don’t know about tomorrow. Nobody can guarantee that, even the best security officers in the world,” he said.

In March, Indonesia’s anti-terrorist squad Detachment 88 received a tip off that a terrorist group planning to carry out a suicide mission had arrived in Bali. Police killed five suspected terrorist linked to Jamaah Ansharut Tauhid (JAT), founded by radical cleric Abu Bakar Baasyir, who were believed to be planning to launch an attack in Bali and other areas in the country. The suicide bomb groom reportedly escaped.

Indonesia’s top tourist destination is gearing up for the 10th commemoration of the first Bali bombing. On Oct. 12, 2002, terrorist attacked Sari Club in Jalan Legian, Kuta killing 202 people, 88 of them Australian. Terrorist launched a second attack three years after in Jimbaran and Kuta, which killed 20 people.

This year’s commemorations will be the biggest of all of the ceremonies staged in the last 10 years. The Bali administration also said that this would be the last. “It’s not easy to forget a tragedy so big, but I think we have to forgive and with this forgiving spirit we hold this commemoration,” Pastika, who led the investigation of the first Bali bombing, said.

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former Prime Minister John Howard is expected to attend the ceremony on Friday at Garuda Wisnu Kencana Cultural Park in Jimbaran. Around 4,000 people are expected to attend, including around 800 Australians who are families of the victims of the bombing.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | National | Wed, October 10 2012

Life, interrupted: When children face the law

Recent brawls among high school students left two dead in separate incidents in the city, leading to an outcry on how the chronic problem might be overcome.The Jakarta Post‘s Prodita Sabarini filed the following reports.

In a movie plot, a murder suspect on the run being caught would be the climax of a police chase scene. But rarely is it the end of the story.

Fitra Rahmadani, 19, who police suspect to be the culprit in the death of Alawy Yusianto Putra, 15, a first-year student caught up in the decades-old warring tradition between two elite South Jakarta state schools, SMA 70 and SMA 6, last month, was arrested last Thursday.

Police found him in a rented room in Sleman, Yogyakarta. Detectives allege that Fitra stabbed Alawy with a sickle during a brawl between students of the two high schools
on Sept. 24.

Two days after Alawy’s death, another teenager, Deni Yanuar lost his life in a brawl in Manggarai, Jakarta, between SMK Yayasan Karya 66 and SMK Kartika Zeni vocational school students. Police have also arrested suspects in Deni’s murder.

Alawy’s killing has become the country’s highest profile criminal case involving students. It has brought the old issue of violent high school rivalry to the fore once again.

But the deaths of Alawy and Deni and Fitra’s arrest not only raise the issue of unchecked school rivalries. The police investigations, which include minors being named as witnesses and subject to police interrogation, also raise the issue of the rights of children facing the law.

Juvenile delinquency in Indonesia has continued to rise each year. The government Commission on Child Protection (KPAI) has reported that each year around 7,000 children come before the law and that 80 percent end up convicted and sentenced to prison.

The National Commission on Child Protection (Komnas PA), a non-governmental organization focusing on child’s rights reported that in the first quarter of this year there were 2,008 cases of juvenile crimes. Komnas PA said that they found 2,508 cases last year, higher than the 2,413 cases in 2010.

The House of Representatives this year passed a law on juvenile justice, which aims to protect children’s rights during the criminal investigation process. The new law replaces the old 1997 Law on juvenile courts and promotes restorative justice for children facing the law. The new law also rules that only children above the age of 12 can be criminally processed; but only those 14 and over can be detained. Implementing regulations for the new law, however, have yet to be issued. Nevertheless, Indonesian children are protected by the 2002 Law on child protection. Indonesia has also ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Being 19, Fitra would not be eligible for the protections entailed in the child protection law.

Jakarta Police spokesperson Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said that anyone questioned by them had provided their own defense counsel, in line with the law that minors be accompanied by legal representatives when dealing with the authorities. The South Jakarta Police have so far questioned all of the 15 students of SMA 70 allegedly involved in the brawl.

In the absence of defense counsel during the legal processes any charges made against minors should be annulled, Komnas PA chairman Arist Merdeka Sirait said.

The high profile character of the SMA 70 — SMA 6 student brawl case will almost certainly ensure public scrutiny of the police investigation process. For instance, the Jakarta Working Group on Child Protection Seto Mulyadi reportedly plans to visit Fitra.

High-profile cases where the child has access to legal representation, such as the case of A, 14, who was charged with partaking in the murder of a father and son in Bojong Gede, Bogor, could see the possibility of the child actually undertaking restorative justice. Komnas PA provided legal assistance to A during his legal process. Arist said that in the end A was sent to a rehabilitation center for seven years.

“He did not end up in prison, he can still go to school,” he said. A’s school was also outside the rehabilitation center, so he was not confined to a cell, Arist said.

But in smaller and less publicized cases, children are at risk of being abused and even tortured during investigations. They also face the risk of being denied their rights to a legal defense and to a fair trial.

A damning report by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) on violations of children’s rights when facing the law showed that most juvenile offenders in Greater Jakarta experienced torture by the police. LBH Jakarta carried out a survey between January 2011 to 2012 on 100 children detained at the Tangerang correctional facility for male and female juvenile offenders as well as the Pondok Bambu prison in East Jakarta.

From the findings of the survey, the LBH concluded that “torture was institutionalized”, which meant that intentional acts of physical and psychological harm were carried out by state officials or under the orders of state officials, with the purpose of discrimination or extracting information or confessions.

Nearly all respondents said they experienced torture during arrest and police interrogations and more than 70 percent during incarceration.

Apart from being yelled at and being lied to, they had their hair pulled, had guns pointed at them, were burnt by cigarettes and stripped naked. One respondent said has was shot at, and six said they were electrocuted. Respondents also reported rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

“Our finding shows that the main perpetrators [of torture] are the police. The intensity of forms of torture are no different form those experienced by adults,” Restaria Hutabarat, LBH Jakarta’s head of research division said. LBH Jakarta has also released a report on police brutality. According to LBH data, the number of wrongful arrests and officers allegedly torturing people during questioning increased to 75 percent in 2011 from 66.7 percent in 2010.

Many of the juvenile offenders sentenced to prison come from low-income families whose parents work in the informal sector. The findings also shatter the myth that most juvenile crime is carried out by street children; Restaria said more than 90 percent of juvenile offenders were living with their parents and were still in school.

Syahri “Koko” Ramadhan, 19, was one such victim of police brutality. In 2009, when he was still 15, his neighborhood leader reported him to the police for allegedly stealing his laptop and handphone. Police arrested him and to make him confess, Koko said police beat him up. Koko only lasted three days of such interrogation. “I thought to myself, how can I make them stop? So, I made up a story and pretended that I stole the stuff,” he said. Syahri was released without charge as the real perpetrator was caught and confessed that he was the thief.

Syahri’s uncle Hermiansyah said that police told Koko’s mother that she should provide money if she wanted her son to be released. Koko is now suing the police for torture and wrongful arrest.

Rikwanto said the police followed the laws on child protection and on juvenile courts when dealing with juvenile offenders. Commenting on the LBH’s finding on police torture, he said that interrogations were standard procedures that the police carried out. He said that people might perceive the interrogation methods as harsh. “But police officers have a duty to produce dossiers,” he said.

Commenting on restorative justive, where children are placed under Social Affairs Ministry monitoring or returned to their parents, Rikwanto said that it all depended on the type of crime. “If the children commit a serious crime, then they have to be prosecuted,” he said.

Apong Herlina, deputy head of KPAI, however said that sending children to prison was not the answer to juvenile delinquency. She said that children’s prisons should be abolished altogether and that regional administrations should be responsible for the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders. “A lot of prisons in Indonesia are not child friendly. They are overcrowded, the children mix with adults, there’s not much rehabilitation,” said Apong, the former head of LBH Jakarta.

Arist also said imprisoning children should be the last resort. “Prisons are like a school for criminals, they learn more about crime and risk coming out of prison being proud of their status as ex-convicts”.

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 05 2012

Children risk unfair trial, torture

A 15-year-old boy returned home on the night of March 14 this year to find all the lights in his house in Depok, turned off. He had spent the day fishing with his friends and found the darkness of his house rather peculiar. He pushed open the creaking door and saw his mother with tears streaming down her cheek.

“Mother, what’s wrong?”

His mother’s reply was incomprehensible: “People looking for you,” “giving drugs to a girl”, “taking off with her”.

“What drugs? What are you talking about? I’ve been fishing all day”. His friends backed up his story.

Adi (not his real name) decided to go to the neighborhood leader’s house. They were expecting him and the father of a girl he was acquainted with was also waiting for him there.

In the two weeks preceding that night, a girl from a neighboring area had been hanging out with Adi
and his friends. As they were all mostly school dropouts the girl used to skip classes and spend time with them.

On March 14, Adi called her to ask if she would like to go fishing, she refused and stayed with a friend instead. When her father came looking for her, the girl told her father that Adi had given her drugs and had sexually assaulted her.

Adi did not know that when he went to face the accusations, it would be the last time he would see his home.

The house of the neighborhood leader was packed with neighbors, as well as the police. Adi came and introduced himself to the crowd and to the father of his friend.

He was met with a kick from the man and the police took him away for questioning.

The rest of the story brought Adi to where he is now. Adi is currently serving two years at Salemba prison in the children’s facility. His head is shaved extremely short and his eyes often glance straight ahead when recounting his experience, as if seeing the events unfold before his eyes.

According to Adi’s lawyers, from the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta), Adi has been a victim of an unfair trial. Under the 1997 Law on juvenile courts and 2002 Law on child protection, children’s trials should be closed to the public. Yet during Adi’s trial, the father of the girl, who works as a debt collector, brought dozens of thugs to the trial. According to Arif Maulana, Adi’s lawyer, the judge allowed the men to intimidate Adi and did not prevent the thugs from interrupting Adi’s lawyers during the cross examination of witnesses from the attorney’s side.

Further, Arif said, tests showed there to be no trace of drugs in the girl and the victim report did not provide any proof of the alleged assault.

Arif said the most disturbing part of the trial was that the judges rejected the request for witnesses to be called to support Adi’s innocence. Arif said they had witnesses who could testify that Adi was fishing at the time of the alleged assault and that the girl was not with him but was with another witness.

Arif said that Adi’s case was not only unfair but in addition, did not consider Adi’s young age. The judge has been reported to the Judicial Commission and Adi is now waiting for his appeal process to begin.

Children facing the law are vulnerable in terms of their legal rights and according to LBH Jakarta, violations occur across the whole process; arrest, interrogation, detainment and trial.

Syahri Ramadhan, 19, also endures the trauma of having to relive his own harrowing experience of being assaulted by the police as a 15-year-old boy. He is suing the police for false arrest and torture.

In 2009, he was accused of stealing his neighbor’s cellular phone and a laptop. While being questioned by the police, he said that the detectives used force to make him confess to the crime. On the first day, police officers told him “just confess that you’re the perpetrator.” “There is no use in you denying it, I’ll put you in prison,” Syahri cited the officers.

“[They] started beating me the next day. Perhaps they lost their patience,” Syahri said.

Syahri explains the abuse he suffered at the hands of the police, who beat him so much that the interrogation room was covered in his blood and hair. Police put a sandal inside his mouth when he cried, burnt his skin with cigarettes and pointed a gun at his stomach. Syahri lasted three days until he finally agreed to a confession. “You know, I was a kid. For a child, being beaten by his father is scary enough to make him run away, more over by [police] officers,” he said.

At his trial he withdrew his confession, saying that he was under duress. The judge released him from all charges as another suspect was caught who confessed to the crime and said that Syahri had nothing to do with it.

Syahri never continued onto junior high school. He said he was embarrassed and rather than dealing with the stigma of having once been accused as a thief, he’d rather just go straight to work.

He is now working as a mechanic.

Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said, commenting on police brutality against minors, the police follow both the child protection law and law on juvenile courts.

Maruli Rajagukguk, Syahri’s lawyer, said Syahri’s case was the first where the police were sued for brutality against a minor. “This could be a good precedent to show that the police can be held accountable. It will encourage police to carry out reform,” he said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Fri, October 05 2012

Youth stuck in violent cycle

Following the brawls that led to the deaths of two students last month, there is a sense that the jailing of juvenile delinquents and police brutality when dealing with minors facing the law is creating a cycle of violence.

Most of the children imprisoned in Greater Jakarta were tortured by the police during their arrest or interrogations, according to a study conducted by the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) that covered the 12-month period prior to January 2012.

Noted child advocate Arist Merdeka Sirait said that incarcerating youth offenders would not solve the problem of juvenile crime, as the nation’s prison system was an infamous “school” for criminals.

In the first case of its kind, the Cibinong District Court in Bogor, West Java, on Thursday heard testimony in the civil case filed against the police by Syahri Ramadhan, 19.

“The police should not get away with beating kids,” Syahri told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday at the garage in Tebet, South Jakarta, where he works as a mechanic.

Syahri, who alleged that he was tortured by officers who questioned him when he was a minor, has been challenging the “brown line” of the National Police. He has filed suit, claiming that he was falsely arrested by officers assigned to the Bojong Gede police precinct in Bogor.

Police detained Syahri in connection with a robbery when he was 15; during interrogations, investigators allegedly tortured him to make him confess, Syahri said.

Syahri was found innocent by the Cibinong District Court, but not before he spent two months in jail. He later dropped out of junior high school out of a sense of shame, Syahri said.

Syahri’s attorney, Maruli Rajagukguk from the LBH Jakarta, said that suing the police for false arrest or torture would challenge people’s complacency about the brutal and illegal treatment of minors at the hands of law enforcement officers.

Maruli said that the police needed to be “held accountable” to deter similar bad behavior from their peers.

Separately, police have made little progress in their investigation of the killing of SMA 6 high school student Alawy Yusianto Putra on Sept. 24.

Jakarta Police spokesman Sr. Comr. Rikwanto said on Thursday that detectives had finished questioning witnesses. The only suspect named in the homicide investigation remains SMA 70 student FR.

Rikwanto said that detectives had concluded that the students from both schools had asked nearby street vendors to store their machetes and other weapons used in the brawl.

Two days after Alawy’s death, Deni Yanuar, a first-year student in Manggarai, was killed in another high school brawl.

Three students of SMK Kartika Zeni vocational high school were arrested following his death.

The National Commission on Child Protection (Komnas PA), an NGO focusing on children’s rights, reported that in the first quarter of this year there were 2,008 cases of juvenile crimes.

The House of Representatives this year passed a law on juvenile justice, which aims to protect children’s rights during the criminal investigation process. The new law also rules that only children above the age of 12 can be criminally processed; and only those 14 and over can be detained.

Implementing regulations for the new law, however, have yet to be issued. Nevertheless, children are protected by the 2002 Law on Child Protection. Indonesia has also ratified the International Convention on the Rights of the Child. (aml)

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Headlines | Fri, October 05 2012

Property owners turn to Internet to advertise

Amin Cheng owned an apartment. He was looking for a tenant and needed to advertise. Putting a classified in a daily newspaper would mean paying an ad every day until he found the right person. So he set up his own advertising space on the Internet.

This was five years ago. Now, his apartment in Hamptons Park in South Jakarta has a long-term leaseholder who pays yearly rental fees. On top of that his website sewa-apartemen.net was now relatively popular with 300 new ads per month, he said. In the meantime, he has created three new websites for advertising boardinghouses and apartments.

The development of apartment complexes and boardinghouses in Jakarta has opened a new web-based business opportunity, websites for real-estate advertising. Typing search-terms such as “kost” on web search-engines like Google or Yahoo! will direct one to sites such as infokost.net or kosjakarta.com. “Rent apartment Jakarta” will give you apartmentsjakarta.com and sewa-apartemen.net among others.

Other real-estate websites are rumah.com, rumah123.com, Jakarta-apartment.net.

Amin is an IT programmer who has invested his money in property. At his home in Bintaro, South Jakarta, he said that more people were looking for cheap ways to advertise their properties. “If you put an ad in a daily newspaper, the information gets lost when the day is over and you have to place another ad. While on the Internet, it will stay there for a while,” he said.

Amin said that people could place an ad on his website for between Rp 50,000 (US$5.22) and Rp 80,000 for three months.

Two years after he created sewa-apartemen.net, he started kosjakarta.com. “A competitor, infokost.net, started to mess around with my market and also opened their site for advertisements for apartments, so I’ve tried to get their clients as well,” he said with a laugh.

Ads for boardinghouses were fewer compared to apartments, he said. He gets 50 ads per month for kosjakarta.com. One reason is that one boardinghouse can contain dozens of rooms, so it only needs one ad to get the attention of potential tenants. Meanwhile, apartments are more individual. He also said that kos owners could still place a sign in front of their boardinghouse, while apartment owners really needed to reach out to people.

The current trend for middle-range apartments is short-term leases on a per-day basis, instead of long term. “Owners really need to lease their apartments because even if there are no occupants, they still need to pay maintenance fees per square-meter,” he said.

Amin also speculated that kos owners were relatively older than apartment owners and thus less tech savvy.

“A lot of kos owners are old people. Some are not used to technology. They would have to ask their nephews to place an ad on the net,” he said.

— Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Wed, September 26 2012

For ‘kos’-owners: no pain no gain

With the high demand for inner-city housing from office workers, owning and running a kos (boardinghouse) might seem like a lucrative business.

But owning a kos is nothing like the traditional landowner who sits idly and has the rent money pour into his bank account. Maria M. Limaningsih, 56, a kos-owner in Jakarta, understands the difficulties. “People think that owning a kos is convenient and easy,” she said. “But it’s a difficult job,” she said.

Having successfully run two boardinghouses for students in Surabaya, the nation’s second largest city, with a total of 40 rooms, Maria saw the business potential of owning a kos in the capital. She bought an old house on a 300-square-meter site in Setiabudi, Jakarta and converted it into a three-story boardinghouse with 20 rooms, she has called it Griya Amartha.

Maria hired a contractor to design and construct her boardinghouse; a designer for the furnishing; a brand managing company to find a name and logo for her house. She spent a total of Rp 4.7 billion (US$492,000). She charges Rp 3 million a month for a nine-square-meter room with air-conditioner, WiFi, cable television and an ensuite bathroom with hot-water.

“But it’s very troublesome,” she said. She outsources a receptionist and security guards as well as a valet parking attendant. “The parking space is in the basement and it’s difficult to park, so I hired a valet”. She also hired four domestic workers to do the laundry and clean the rooms.

“I have to be on call, if the air-conditioner breaks down, or the water doesn’t run,” she said. She also has to pay for the electricity. “And you can’t tell people not to use too much electricity.”

But it pays, she said, taking home Rp 49 million every month after expenses.

Apartment owner Amin Cheng said he no longer had the patience to run a boardinghouse. He used to have a 17-room boardinghouse for students in Kemanggisan, West Jakarta. “There are always problems of leaks or the water pump not functioning. There are a lot of things to handle,” he said.

Moreover when the government progressively increased the price of electricity, Amin decided to sell his boardinghouse. He has chosen to invest in condominiums and rent them to high-earning families.

There is no exact data on the number of kos in Jakarta. Requests for an interview with the Jakarta deputy governor on housing affairs have not been answered. However, in 1987, the city passed a bylaw on boardinghouses. It obliges kos owners to register their boardinghouses and to report the identity of tenants for registry purposes. Compliance with this bylaw however is questionable at best.

Both Amin and Maria said they did not register their kos despite the bylaw.

Maria said that in her area, it was left up to the individual so she did not feel it was necessary to report even to the local neighborhood leader (RT). “But I do keep a log of the tenants’ identities,” she said.

— Prodita Sabarini

The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Wed, September 26 2012

Welcome to Jakarta’s shoe-box living

Communal living: The foyer of a boardinghouse in Kemanggisan, West Jakarta. Some owners are oblivious to the city rule requiring business registration. JP/ Ricky Yudhistira

The night sky in the capital was its usual reddish-magenta hue and Jakarta newbies Ele Williams and Philip Martin could see glimpses of it from their open-air dining area, beyond the walls of a three-story building containing 20 rented rooms. They sat facing each other at the dining table, a tiny space in the nook of a small garden. A gas stove and a kitchen sink were nearby, part of a communal kitchen for the building’s entire occupants.

Both Williams and Martin are UN volunteers, living in Jakarta on a budget. When Williams, 29, moved to Jakarta from Canberra, Australia, she knew what she was in for. Having lived in boardinghouses in Yogyakarta a few years back and having made short visits to Jakarta, she knew that the city placed demands on its residents. But after two months living in a nine square-meter room, though conveniently near her place of work, Jakarta is starting to get to her. Lacking space, her kos (boardinghouse) around Menteng did not feel like home. “I’m feeling very claustrophobic,” she said.

As the country’s economy soars — 6.4 percent growth in the second quarter, bucking the global trend of slow growth — and Jakarta becomes a busy business center, more and more people are coming to the city. Young expatriates such as Williams and Martin join the throngs of thousands of Indonesia’s young professionals searching for a living.

For many, it is not so much enjoying living in the capital as it is surviving the daily challenges that is poses, with infrastructure development lagging behind an increasing population. Jakarta’s population has exceeded 10.1 million and the sprawling Greater Jakarta (Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi) area is home to 27.9 million according to the 2010 census. Real estate consultancy firm Jones Lang LaSalle estimates demand for new residential units in Greater Jakarta to stand at 200,000 units per year.

Lang LaSalle reported the current supply by property developers and state housing projects could only supply a quarter of the demand, standing at 40,000 to 50,000 units per year. Most of this — 75 percent — is still landed housing in Jakarta’s outskirts and satellite cities. The rest are high-rise condominiums and low-cost apartments.

With high demand for housing, Jakarta, driven by the development of housing complexes, condominiums and offices, has been experiencing a property boom in the last two years. Indonesia Property Watch director Ali Tranghanda cited Bumi Serpong Damai, a residential area south of Jakarta, where prices have gone up by 60 to 70 percent since last year.

Yet the luxury of adequate personal living space in Jakarta is limited and expensive. For the moment, it is reserved for high-income earners.

In inner city Jakarta, developers are constructing 27,000 more condominium units to add to the city’s 77,000, with selling prices between Rp 12 million (US$1,250) to more than Rp 25 million per square meter.

City figures show Jakarta’s income per capita in 2011 was Rp 101.01 million per year, which means that to purchase a lower-middle-grade 31 square-meter condominium, an average Jakartan would have to spend nearly four years worth of their yearly income. The same amount of money can buy a 63 square-meter plot of land on the city’s outskirts. The trade-off for a home and a tiny garden for middle-class Indonesians means hours of commuting in Jakarta’s endless traffic or unreliable public transport.

Land owners and small individual investors riding the wave of a rising housing demand for Jakarta office workers saw this as a business opportunity and grabbed it. Boardinghouses have always been a part of Indonesia’s cities that have migrant populations. But in the last few years, “executive” boardinghouses targeting office workers mushroomed in residential areas near the capital’s business districts.

Ranging from Rp 2 million to Rp 5 million per month, these rooms are more expensive than your basic fan room but are relatively cheaper than renting an apartment. They provide meager personal living space but are equipped with facilities that help one wile away the time (WiFi, cable TV), sleep sweat-free in the heat of the city (air-conditioned rooms) and not have to walk to the nearest mini-market for a bottle of soda (refrigerator). These rooms are options for office workers who want to either save money or time.

Those who, like Williams, are scared of being caught up in Jakarta’s snarling traffic, have no choice but to live in fanned or air-conditioned “shoe boxes”.

Martin, 33, said that if only there was more sense of community in boardinghouses, the experience would not be too bad. His neighbors, he said, were “awkwardly unfriendly”.

“If people come down here and have a glass of wine or beer every so often it would be great. It could be really fun, but it’s not like that. Probably people are tired after work,” he said.

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Wed, September 26 2012

‘This is the Life We Live’: Seeing Papua through friendly eyes

Papua province, Indonesia’s easternmost territory, is so far from the country’s capital — geographically, culturally and historically — that many people in Jakarta have little understanding of what life is truly like on the faraway island.

Development worker Mitu M Prie has had the opportunity to live and work in both Jakarta and Papua during the last 10 years.

Working on public health campaigns, she travels to the highlands of Papua, crosses the deep and often choppy waters of Lake Sentani, plunges her feet onto the beaches in Beiji and looks out to the Pacific from Jayapura.

There, she meets Papuan people, learns their languages and falls in love.

Mitu travels with her several cameras. There are professional SLRs and small point-and-shoot pocket cameras. Everywhere she goes, whether to the markets, the soccer fields, the airports and seaports, the hills and the beaches, she captures the faces of contemporary Papua. Her pictures are rich in human emotions, against a backdrop of majestic Melanesian nature.

Neles Tebay, a Papuan human rights activist and rector of the Fajar Timur school of philosophy writes in an introduction to Mitu’s book of collected photos from Papua, that “[S]he looks at Papua through the eyes of love”.

“Viewing Papuans without love is to treat them like an enemy,” he writes.

And that was what Mitu aimed to break through with the photographs that she took, which are collected in the book, Ini Tong Pu Hidup (This is the Life We Live).

“I want people to support, to love and to know, so that the gap of [knowledge] will be narrowed. And the stories that come from there are not only from irresponsible parties,” she said at the Cemara Gallery in Central Jakarta, where her photos were being exhibited in early August.

“Many of us here have an unkind tendency [toward Papuans] because we don’t know them,” she said.

Papua continues to be the most impoverished province in Indonesia, despite being home to the world’s largest gold mine.

Years of conflict in the region from the military operation in the 1960s that officially placed Papua into the territory of Indonesia and decades of resource looting have left deep wounds.

Reports show that military operations hunting down so-called “separatists” have forced many Papuans to flee to the forests as their villages were razed to the ground.

“There is anger but, it’s not only political grief; simple cultural ignorance is also one of the factors,” Mitu said. She added that there was once a family planning campaign that utilized the same teaching materials aimed at Javanese culture, with Malay models on the posters, depicting life in urban Java. Unsurprisingly, the campaign failed and did not go down well with the locals, she said.

Her encounters with Papuans have often resulted in their becoming annoyed, as Muti hails from Java. “Sometimes, I’m like a representation from here [Java]. I’m ready to be scolded and I gladly take it,” she said.

Her book includes forewords from academics. Apart from Tebay’s essay, there is a detailed history of Papua by Agapitus E Durmatubun, a lecturer in the school of anthropology at Cendrawasih University in Jayapura.

Durmatubun provides an interesting read about Papua, from the geographical information of the island — “The island of Papua is shaped like a giant bird, of which 47 percent consisting of the bird’s head, nape, neck, back, breast and belly is the territory of Papua” — to the history of Papua’s name, which means “curly” from the Malay word, pua-pua.

But the pictures speak for themselves.

Local Papuans take three-wheeled Javanesse-style becak around Wamena in one of her pictures. In another, youths sporting rasta hairstyles smile into the camera. There are also little boys preparing for a soccer game in a field overlooking a great mountain range in the highlands.

Tak kenal maka tak sayang (if you don’t know it, you can’t love it); so goes an old proverb. Mitu has traveled to get to know Papuans and her love shows through the pictures that she takes.

Her book can be a tool for people to get to know the many faces of Papuan people and fall in love with them as Mitu did.

Ini Tong Pu Hidup
Mitu M. Prie
KPG (Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia), 2012
209 pages

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Feature | Sun, September 09 2012

Sampang villagers caught up in faith feud

On the morning of Sunday, Aug. 26, a crowd descended on Shia minority villages in Sampang, Madura in East Java. Two died in the attacks and dozens of homes were razed. Until today dozens of families remain in a make-shift shelter, while authorities have offered to “relocate” them elsewhere. The Jakarta Post’s Prodita Sabarini reports from Sidoarjo, Pamekasan and Sampang, where the Shiites were also attacked last December. The local ulema have demanded a ban on the teaching of Shia.

Rumsiah stood in a tobacco field next to her burning house. She held her 3-year-old daughter tight to her chest. In front of her, the orange flames crackled as they burned the woven bamboo walls and the fire quickly ate them up. But for Rumsiah, the voices from the mushola (small mosque) speakers drowned other sounds.

“Muslimin and Muslimat, come out all of you!”

“Don’t be afraid!”

“Be unified!”

“Let’s face them together!”

“We will burn them and turn them into satay!”

Rumsiah, 30, ran to the tobacco field with her children and husband as a mob of over a thousand people came to Blu’uran and Karang Gayam villages in Sampang.

On Aug. 26, the day of the Lebaran Ketupat, the local Madurese custom marking the end of Ramadhan, families of the Shiite Muslims in both villages were preparing to send their children back to the Shiite Islamic boarding school (YAPI) in Bangil, East Java.

But local Sunni leaders in Blu’uran stopped the rented minibus and denied them entry to the rocky roads of the village, Ummu Kulsum, wife of imprisoned Shiite leader Tajul Muluk said.

Tension between Sunnis and Shiites has been high since the ulema in Sampang declared the Shiites, led by Tajul in Sampang, a deviant Islamic sect.

Last December, a mob burnt down three houses, including Tajul’s. Not long after, Tajul was sentenced to two years in prison for blasphemy.

“Come if you dare!” shrieked an incensed Shiite at his neighbors who had advanced toward their house. As the mob approached, Molotov cocktails were thrown exploded. “They [the Shiites] were prepared to fight,” Noer Tjahja, the Sampang regent said.

Blu’uran and Karang Gayam now have patches of charred ruins where houses used to stand. Chickens peck aimlessly around what was once a rice mill, and rifle-slinging Brimob officers stand guard. Too little, too late.

The mob razed 37 houses of Shia followers. Mohammad Khosim, or Hamama, 50, died in a carok (duel); hacked to death by Husein, 48, from the Sunni crowd, who later died himself in hospital from machete wounds. Hamama’s brother, Thohir, 46, a Shiite, is still in a critical condition.

Some eight people were injured, including the Omben precinct police chief.

***

A woman in an ochre prayer dress sits alone on the carpet of the Sampang indoor tennis court. She faces Mecca.

Behind her, children chase a ball or dance to the blaring songs played by volunteers from Tagana (the Social Affairs Ministry’s Disaster Response Team). The tennis court has become a makeshift refugee camp.

On her right a large banner separates two sides of the court. Over the separator are rolled mattresses, pillows and the personal belongings of refugees.

The 37 burnt houses belong to 64 families according to Kontras (the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence); around 270 people are staying at the camp.

There is not much to do here. The children play with the volunteers, but the adults just sit around and wait. They would return home, if it were safe.

But Noer says they can only return with the approval of the community there, when they “repent”. Tajul Muluk’s wife, Ummu Kulsum and his brother Iklil have become leaders of the refugees.

Kulsum carries a calm maternal air with her, silently enraged by what she calls Sampang regency’s “incompetence”.

“If the regency could handle these differences properly, it would not be like this. They protect the guilty instead of the innocent. My husband is innocent and he is in prison,” she says flatly.

Most of the faces in the mob were strangers to Kulsum, but she could name her neighbors as leaders of the mob. Yet police have arrested only Tajul’s brother and arch-enemy Roisul Hukamah as the sole suspect. Kulsum said she did not see Rois, as he is popularly known, at the scene. But it was Rois, an official said, who summoned the people using text messages and phone calls.

Selected differences of Sunni and Shia

While both the Sunnis and the Shiites share most fundamental Islamic beliefs and theological laws, the distinctions between the two major denominations stem from historical political differences gradually transformed into a number of spiritual
dissimilarities.

• Successor
The Sunnis believed that the new leader of the Muslim nation after the death of the Prophet Muhammad was Muhammad’s close aide, Abu Bakr, who was appointed by the Prophet to become the first Caliph of the Islamic nation.

Meanwhile, the Shiites believe that the leadership remained within Muhammad’s family tree, which means that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abu Talib, should be the leader instead.

• Religious leadership
While the Sunnis accepted that the first four Caliphs, Abu Bakr, Uthman ibn Affan, Umar ibn Al Khattab and Ali, were the rightful followers of Muhammad, they are not considered infallible.

Shiites, meanwhile, believe that imams were the descendants of the Prophet. Shiites often worship the imams as saints and perform pilgrimages to their tombs and temples to seek blessings.

• Religious practices
Shiites allegedly resented some of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, such as Abu Bakr and Umar, who narrated the Prophet’s life and spiritual practices, and thus did not base religious practices on the testimony of those individuals.

• Marriage
The Shiites supposedly allow the nikah mut‘ah, or fixed-term temporary marriage, which is not tolerable within the Sunni community believing it as planned and agreed fornication.

• Rituals
When leveling their heads to the ground during prayers, Shiites place their forehead onto a piece of naturally occurring material, often a clay tablet said to be from Karbala, Iraq, the place where the son of Ali, Hussein ibn Ali (d. 680) was martyred, instead of directly onto a prayer rug.

In addition, some Shiites perform their prayers back to back, sometimes worshipping two times consecutively and thus praying five times a day but with a very small break in between the prayers.

From various sources (asa)

Prodita Sabarini, The Jakarta Post | Reportage | Tue, September 04 2012

In the land of ulema, the price of breaking with the past

The attacks and killings in Blu’uran and Karang Gayam villages did not only send tremors through Sampang, but have shaken Jakarta’s elites. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono held an impromptu meeting with aides and sent his top officials to Sampang. Jakarta blames poor intelligence for not detecting the seeds of conflict sooner.

In his office in Sampang, Rudy Setiadhi, the official in charge of local political security, showed rows of photographs, including those of meetings with the ulema in Madura, officials in Sampang and the cleric Tajul Muluk.

Rudy said Jakarta was mistaken. “I’ve been involved in mediation here since 2006,” he said. “This is proof that the Sampang government has tried its best to resolve the conflict.”

Rudy said that Tajul had offended the Madura ulema by bringing Shia teachings to Sampang. “Tajul is quite an arrogant person. He thinks that kampong clerics are nothing compared to him.”

Around March this year, Tajul’s brother and arch-enemy Roisul Hukamah, a convert to the Sunni denomination, distributed a recording of Tajul speaking to a follower on the phone to clerics in Madura.

In the transcript, shown to The Jakarta Post, Tajul blasts the Sampang regent for sucking up to the ulema for political gain.

He also said that in Sampang, uneducated clerics could become head of Islamic organizations. “Isn’t that showing disrespect to the ulema here?” Rudy asked.

Culture is important in Madura.There is a hierarchy of respect on the island. Both Rudy and Sampang regent Noer Tjahja say they adhere to this cultural convention: Buppa’ Babbu’ Guru Rato.

Buppa Babbu refers to parents, Guru to clerics and Rato to the government. Hence, the words of clerics hold higher value than those of the government.

A local cleric from Pamekasan says the informal education system of Islamic boarding schools is entrenched in Madura culture. Parents who can’t afford to send their children to public schools send them to Islamic boarding schools instead.

Alumni of Islamic boarding schools can be ulema in their villages, so each village has at least one ulema. Alumni continue their relationship with their teachers, their gurus, and make yearly visits to present donations to their them.

In 2004, Ali Kharrar, a revered local cleric, requested the help of the government to deal with the spread of Shia teachings by Tajul. The Sampang government, Rudy said, were more than happy to facilitate.

Tajul and Iklik meanwhile decried Kharrar’s sermonized warning about Shia as the beginning of their persecution.

Ulema rejection of Tajul was not merely a question of faith. Rudy said that Tajul disrupted the social order in Sampang with his ways.

Indeed, Tajul refused to accept envelopes filled with money from villagers. This was a break from the local customs, where people would give money to ulema for their preaching. A big name cleric can get a fee of Rp 2.5 million (US$262), while less prominent ulema can expect Rp 50,000 (US$5.24) to
Rp 100,000. Ulema also receive money from attendance at functions when villagers shake hands with them.

Tajul also said he stopped individual celebrations of the Prophet’s birth (Maulid), only holding a celebration at his home. In Madura, each house has a small prayer house, families hold feasts and invite a cleric to come and give a sermon.

“I changed the practice because I saw people there are under the poverty line … I gave them a solution so the cost of Maulid celebrations would not go through the roof.” Yet, this particular change reduces the popularity and, crucially, the income of local ulema.

***

A young cleric, Ahmad Muzakir quickly kisses the hand of Kyai Kharrar in front of his Islamic boarding house Daarut Tauhid in Proppo, Pamekasan, a neighboring town to Sampang. Wearing a white turban, Kharrar nods his head.

Kharrar wears his beard in a neat trim. A busy cleric, he excused himself to meet his wife in the female boarding house of his school. “Please excuse me, I will sin if I do not visit my wife. I have been out all day,” he said.

Kharrar had been out giving two sermons during the day and immediately led a sermon for his male students.

Kharrar is the brother-in-law of Tajul and Rois’ grandfather, Ahmad. Ahmad’s son, Makmun became a Shiite after reading books and bulletins about Shia after the Iranian revolution.

Ahmad cursed his son for converting to Shia to the day Makmun died, Kharrar said. Makmun, who was quite respected locally, did not teach Shia to other villagers. However, he sent his two teenage sons Tajul and Rois to YAPI.

“Kak [elder brother] Ahmad was against that and took them out from YAPI and sent the two to my boarding school,” Kharrar said.

“He [Tajul] bickered every day with the other santri because his thinking was already different”, Kharrar said. Tajul and Rois stayed at Daarut Tauhid for a mere three months and returned to YAPI.

Rudy said that in 1993, Tajul left for Saudi Arabia as a migrant worker. Kharrar however said that Tajul went to Iran and lied about Saudi Arabia. According to Kharrar, after his return to Sampang, Tajul started to teach Shiite beliefs to people in the village.

In 2005, Kharrar set up a meeting to convert Tajul back into Sunni teachings. He invited Sampang officials, police and clerics from the Sampang chapter of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) and ulema from five cities in Madura.

“I told him, ‘Child, I am here not to debate but to ask you to return to the road our ancestors took.’”

Kharrar’s proselytizing toward Tajul and his warnings toward other ulema about Shia continued.

In 2006, Tajul finally relented and signed a statement saying that he was returning to Sunni teachings.

“But he is always wishy-washy. In a meeting with us, he would comply, but once he is back, he would return to his ways,” Kharrar said.

In 2006, hundreds of people intimidated Tajul and his followers into returning to Sunni teachings.

Till 2009, Rois was with Tajul as a Shiite, until Rois’ desire for a young woman, called Halimah, was disrupted by Tajul.

Halimah, 19 has a long oval face and big eyes. Her house was one of those burnt on the Aug. 26 attack. At the refugee camp, she said that Rois confessed his love to her when she was 15. “But I did not want to
marry him.”

According to Tajul, Kulsum and Rudy, Rois has a womanizing streak. Marrying women just to divorce them in a couple of months.

One day, a close follower of Tajul, Dul Azid, came to Tajul to intercede for him and ask Halimah’s parents for her hand in marriage.

Tajul then proposed to Halimah for Dul Azid and the parents accepted. Rois became enraged, Halimah said. He summoned her parents and Dul Azid’s parents to meet him. Tajul told them not to come lest Rois would judge them and hit them.

Rois was furious with Tajul. “If that is the case, it is as if you have taken my wife. From now on, I will use my bajing power against you,” Tajul recounted what Rois said. Bajing power in Madurese means every dirty way there is, Tajul said. When Rois defected to the other side, pressure against Tajul increased and in 2011, the Sampang government asked him to relocate to Malang for a year until the situation cooled off.

Tajul accepted Rp 50 million from the government for relocation costs. But he continued to visit Sampang, Rudy said. And it infuriated the people there.

Despite mediation through the National Commission of Human Rights in October 2011, a month later, a Sunni mob attacked Tajul’s family, burning down three houses.

Rois then reported Tajul to the police for blasphemy. The Sampang chapters of the largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama, and Sampang’s chapter of MUI also released edicts that Tajul’s teachings were deviant. In July, Tajul was sentenced to two years in prison.

From prison, Tajul has said that he would like to return to Sampang after his release.

But Sampang regent Noer Tjahja, who will be running for reelection next year, ruled this out. “I am on the side of the ulema, that is clear. They are the ones who own Sampang. I don’t mind violating human rights, as long as I save the majority of my people”.