Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Bela Negara and the Re-Militarization of Indonesia

    Indonesia has a long history of military involvement in politics. Indonesia fought a bloody war of independence against the Dutch after WWII, and after independence the army—one of the few institutions that could claim to be truly national—remained a key political force. And of course, the events of 1965-66 brought to power General Soeharto, who would rule Indonesia as president until 1998. Under Soeharto, the Indonesian armed forces (ABRI) developed an ideology of dwifungsi [= dual function], which held that the military was both a military and a sociopolitical force. This did not merely justify, it actually required active involvement of the Indonesian military in political and social life. During the New Order, the prominent journal Indonesia frequently published articles that simply summarized what was going on in the Indonesian military. That is how important developments in the military were understanding Indonesian politics. (For academic treatments, see Crouch and Sundhaussen, among others.)

    Democratization in 1999 set in motion substantial reforms to the Indonesian military which made significant progress towards converting the military to a civilian role. These included separating the military from the police force, removing reserved seats for the military from the People’s Representative Council, and other changes. It is very clear that Indonesia’s military never “got out of politics” or “went back to the barracks,” if for no other reason than the fact that significant portions of the military’s budget still do not come from the official state budget. Instead, funding is generated by the military itself. But Indonesia’s military reforms did make substantial progress on a number of fronts. The best work on the nuances of this period is by Mietzner.

    In recent years, however, progress has stalled, and it is evident that Indonesia’s military—either as a corporate body, or among important leaders—does continue to insist that its interests extend far beyond a traditional “Western” notion of defense. The new program Bela Negara, launched last week by Defense Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu, marks the most visible sign yet of the re-militarization of Indonesian politics and society.

    By re-militarization I do not mean that the Indonesian military is entering domains in which it had left; as observed above, in most domains, it never left in the first place. Rather, I mean two things. One, a visible reassertion of military prerogative in domains in which the military has been relatively inactive, or in which activities have remained out of the public eye. And two, a revival of a New Order-era language of defense against imagined threats, one that implicates all Indonesians in a common project of maintenance of the state and nation.

    What I find particularly meaningful is the effort to deny that a program called “Defend the State,” and proposed by the Department of Defense, amounts of militarization. This effort, to non-Indonesians, is simply bizarre. Here is a press release.

    jelas bahwa bela negara bukanlah wajib militer, bukan militerisme, bukan militerisasi dan bukan pula sebuah usaha pembelaan atau pertahanan negara secara fisik dalam menghadapi ancaman militer.

    Akan tetapi, sebuah upaya membangun karakter bangsa yang menyadari hak dan kewajibannya untuk berbuat yang terbaik bagi bangsa dan negara, guna menjamin kelangsungan hidup bangsa dan negara dalam menghadapi multidimensionalitas ancaman yang membahayakan kedaulatan negara, keutuhan wilayah dan keselamatan bangsa.

    it is clear that “defend the state” is not a military service requirement, nor militarism, not militarization, not even an exercise to defend the state physically against a military threat.

    Rather, it is a way to develop national character that recognizes the rights and responsibilities to do good for the nation and the state, to assure the continuity of the nation and the state in confronting the multidimensional threats that endanger state sovereignty, territorial integrity, and the well-being of the nation.

    There is something so very New Order about this insistence that using the military to inculcate military values does not amount to militarization. Look at the picture that accompanies the above press release.
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    One might be forgiven for thinking that this is just a touch militaristic.

    Still, Bela Negara draws on some common themes that aren’t just about the Indonesian military. One is a conception that pervades Indonesian political life about national character as an ideological project. One sees this in Prabowo Subianto’s campaign, in aspirations for a political culture that is adab [= civilized], and also in Jokowi’s “Mental Revolution.” Mass political culture in all of these different examples is something that must be cultivated (perhaps by politicians), and that is somehow currently deficient.

    A second theme is one of total people’s defense, or pertahanan rakyat semesta. A former Cornell master’s student, John Lee, wrote a compelling thesis on the origins of the institutional culture of the Indonesian armed forces, arguing that its norms, values, and self-understandings emerged under the PETA [Pembela Tanah Air, = defenders of the homeland] units established by the Japanese under the Second World War, but that the model for PETA was in fact the Imperial Japanese Army, in particular the experiences of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. Here is how he described the Imperial Japanese Army’s relationship to Japanese society in the late 1800s:

    As Japanese society quickly became more educated, industrialized, and thus increasingly diverse and socially mobile, military leaders developed an obsessive fear of national disunity…

    Military leaders also exploited the natural tendency toward cohesion and cooperation in rural village life. The funding for the militarized local organizations came from the community, not the national government, reinforcing each village’s financial and psychological sense of investment in the military. Responsibilities for civic services such as fire departments were given to local military reserve units, so that the line between civil and military functions often disappeared.

    You can easily see the parallels with Indonesia under the New Order. Total people’s defense emerges in the 1950s as a central principle in Indonesian military doctrine, and today shows up as the term hankamrata (pertahanan keamanan rakyat semesta), which adds a concept of security or safety [= keamanan] but does not change the meaning.

    Re-militarization as described above is a qualitatively different thing than the persistence of odious paramilitaries like Pemuda Pancasila, the military protecting private mining activities, forbidding public discussion of the killings of 1965-66 at a writer’s workshop, or the invocation of vague ill-defined threats to explain restrictions on movement and speech. Re-militarization is a mobilizational project predicated on, first, legitimating the rejection of a boundary between military and national interests, and second, mass participation in an undefined threat to both state and nation. Both legitimation and participation elements of that project became contested in ways never before possible after 1999.

    And that is important. One thing that does distinguish contemporary Indonesia from the New Order period is the possibility of discussion and criticism. Critics of this new and still fuzzy Bela Negara program do exist and are vocal: see here and here. (On the other hand, Prabowo likes it.) So it is not right to say that re-militarization has happened, or is complete, or is inevitable; it is none of those things. I am sure that those analysts of military and politics in Indonesia can tell us a lot more about the deep politics of re-militarization, and the extent to which programs like Bela Negara are more of the same, something new, or simply huff and bluster.

  • Why Hasn’t Indonesian Food Caught On in the US?

    A post at Food Republic asks why Indonesian food hasn’t caught on in the U.S. The proposed answer is a tautology.

    It’s going to take a little exposure and popularity. It’s going to take perspective from chefs and restaurants to draw that mass appeal…someone is going to figure out that these things are tasty as fuck and make a killing slinging it. They just need the audience for it.

    Not much of an answer to explain the lack of interest with reference to the lack of an audience.

    I’ve thought a lot about why Indonesian food is so unpopular in the US, and I have two actual answers. The first is obvious to anyone who thinks about food culture: there are not very many Indonesian Americans. You can see the numbers here. The big players in the Asian American food universe are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Vietnamese. There are lots of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Vietnamese Americans.

    Numbers like this are obviously part of any explanation. If there were hundreds of Indonesian restaurants catering to Indonesian Americans hungry for a taste of home, you’d see the emergence of an Americanized version of Indonesian food. It would probably look a lot like rijsttaffel, the Dutch equivalent which remains popular there.

    But this explanation on its own has two problems. One is Filipino food, which has nowhere near the pull in the Asian American food scene that Chinese or Indian food does even though the numbers for Filipino Americans bury every group but Chinese Americans. The other is Thai food, which is immensely popular with relatively small numbers.

    So what else might be going on? I reluctantly submit that a broader problem is that many Indonesian dishes are not that tasty, and few of the tasty ones are truly novel to the American palate.

    Focus on the second part of that sentence first. Many Indonesian dishes involve flavors that U.S. consumers already associate with another Southeast Asian cuisine. Primarily Thai (for coconut-based curries) and Indian cuisines (for grilled and spiced things). Yes, opor ayam is not massaman curry, but to a first approximation…not that different, especially if it were cooked in an Americanized version using common American ingredients. Lumpia? Egg rolls. Bakso? Pho bo vien. Sate? Satay. Sad thing is, some of these non-Indonesian approximations are generally better than the Indonesian ones. I’d choose a bowl of pho bo vien over bakso any day of the week, and I am an inveterate bakso hound (my insults of Bakmi GM notwithstanding).

    This leads me to a second point, which is that a good number of Indonesian dishes that haven’t been borrowed aren’t really that tasty. Classic dishes like gudeg come to mind. Or you can think of the unsalted steamed papaya leaves or oily-fish-simmered-in-oily-sauce from Padang-style food. These are foods that would be relatively inexpensive to prepare en masse, but aren’t attractive to the Western palate. One bit of evidence that would be consistent with my argument is the observation that Indonesian and Filipino cuisines share the same general flavors and ingredients, and Filipino food has never really taken off in the US. either. JMP, who grew up in LA with a Filipina American best friend, remembers nothing aside from a pig roast at a birthday party.

    We can turn to the Netherlands to probe my claim further—this is where you’d look to find delicious Indonesian food for the Western market. If you google “indonesian restaurant amsterdam” here is the top-rated result: Restaurant Blauw, with a homepage that makes the colonial encounter very obvious. Here’s the dinner menu (PDF). Looks fine, yes, but nothing jumps out at me as sounding delectable or even that interesting. Sure, I’d definitely try one of the rijsttaffels. But with mains in the €20+ range, they better be delicious.

    If I’m right, then no matter how much I love Indonesian food, it’s a non-starter in the US without a much larger Indonesian American population and some distinctly different flavors and dishes that appeal to the US palate. Remember that the dishes that imported Chinese food to the US mass market were made by immigrants living in the US cooking for the US palate. Chop suey and General Tso’s chicken, not stinky tofu or hundred pepper chicken, brought Chinese flavors to the US. Teriyaki and tempura, not sushi, were the first Japanese flavors to make it in the US. Chicken tikka masala is yet another example.

    So, let’s say you want to be the chef who brings Indonesian food to the US mass market. What should you do? The answer is to find those unique dishes that do appeal to the US market, and focus on those. Here is my list.

    • Rendang. The Food Republic article is right about that. But real rendang is not the same as cooking lamb in coconut milk. You’ve got to get your kitchen dirty to make it special.
    • Coto makassar. Sufficiently different from pho that no one will get confused. Can be tamed for Western palates by omitting lungs and kidneys and by pureeing the liver.
    • Tempe mendoan. Tempe is challenging for some Westerners, but fortunately, you can fry the heck out of it.
    • Dendeng. The market for this is limitless.
    • Gado-gado. But it has to be made street-food style, not civilized-restaurant style as in that picture.

    I’m sure I’m forgetting some.

    But that’s probably enough. What an aspiring restauranteur needs is a signature Indonesian American dish that looks familiar to a Westerner but is clearly Indonesian, something like banh mi or Korean tacos. Something that sells well out of a food truck. I’ve devoted way too much time to thinking about this, and here is my idea.

    The Indonesian Sandwich
    Start with sweet and fluffy Indonesian-style bread. A Portuguese sweet roll will do nicely here. Open it up and hollow out the middle. Into the middle dump a big scoop of rendang, cooked long enough that the meat is basically shredded. Add to that two slices of Edam (yes really), a handful of deep fried shallots, and some fresh scallions. Add a dollop of pecel sauce and top with lettuce, tomato, a squirt of Sriracha to make it taste legible.

    You’d eat that, and you’d know instantly that it’s not Thai or Indian or anything else familiar. You can mix it up—switch out ayam kluwak for the rendang, Gouda for the Edam, some slices of tempe mendoan for the vegans. This is how you can make Indonesian food popular, by taking Indonesian flavors and showing how they work with the American palate.

    UPDATE

    Some additions of classic and distinctive Indonesian dishes that I neglected above.

    I will say that only the first one, rawon, is a strong argument in favor of Indonesian food. I love oseng-oseng, perkedel, sayur asem, and other dishes like these, but they are not particularly compelling dishes. The world’s best sayur asem is not that great; tasty yes, but you’d never build a restaurant around it.