Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • Miss Indonesia Sports Hammer-and-Sickle T-Shirt

    …and it causes a minor scandal. Here is an article, in Indonesian. And here is the offending image.

    That’s right. Anindya Kusuma Putri, Miss Indonesia 2015, captioned her peasant-communist-chic Instagram photo as “I am so Vietnam today.” I got the image from a tweet by one @mas_prasetiyo, who suggests that the Army and Special Forces take action.*

    Now, this isn’t a giant scandal or anything. But reading the comments and tweets you can see how a segment of Indonesia’s population remains gripped by a Cold War-era mentality, one fostered under Indonesia’s New Order regime, of communism as an existential threat to the very idea of Indonesia. I have no systematic evidence to back this up, but my guess is that such sentiments are fairly widely shared. A follow-up tweet from another user mentioned in the article above says it all: Communist ideas are forbidden [= terlarang] in Indonesia.

    And in this tweet, yet another Twitterer mentioned in the article follows up by drawing on a common trope among anti-communist Indonesians, a memory of one’s family having been victimized by PKI, the Communist Party of Indonesia, over fifty years ago.

    What I find even more interesting, though, is the explicit analogy drawn between communism and ISIS as two common threats to the Indonesian state.

    The user mentions a widely known case of an ice cream vendor in the Jakarta exurb of Depok being detained simply for flying an ISIS flag. As if the more suggestion of ISIS and communism are enough to warrant an intervention by the state’s security apparatus.

    Such sentiments from a random Twitterer would not be so notable were it not for the fact that, indeed, particular arms of the Indonesian state security apparatus have explicitly likened the threat of ISIS to the threat of communism (here is an example from a regional military command).

    UPDATE

    Right on cue, an Indonesian Army general feels it necessary to weigh in—as a private citizen, of course—on the matter, asking Miss Indonesia to apologize.

    Note

    * To best of my knowledge, those are not the official twitter accounts of either the Army (TNI) or the Special Forces (KOPASSUS), although there’s probably an entire dissertation to be written on the GI Joe-themed KOPASSUS one.

  • Taiwanese Colonial Japanese Subjects in Java

    While reading on colonial-era ethnic Chinese businesses in Java, I came across a fascinating case study of one NV Handelmaatschappij Kwik Hoo Tong, founded by a family named Kwik who hailed originally from Taiwan.

    About the time when the Kwiks registered their trading society in Solo, Japan and China went to war, which resulted in Japan’s colonisation of Taiwan in 1895. This event would have a large impact on the brothers’ legal status in the Indies. After concluding a Treaty of Trade and Navigation in 1896, the Netherlands and Japan recognised each other as most favoured nations, and subsequently the Tokyo government pressed the Dutch to accord its migrants in their colonies the same legal status as Europeans. In 1899, Japanese citizens in the Indies acquired European status; this ruling applied not only to migrants from Japan proper, but also to inhabitants of its colonies. Although many Taiwanese Chinese in the Indies resented the Japanese takeover of their homeland, they were quick to recognise the advantages of registering as Japanese in the Dutch colony.

    That means that, under Dutch law, ethnic Chinese who happened to be born in what later became a colony of Japan were, legally, Europeans. Or at least, they could choose to be treated for legal and business purposes as Europeans. And at least one of the Kwik brothers did just this, which allowed him to have access to Dutch financial capital, something which would have been illegal for a non-European.

    This is a neat parallel for recent research being done here at Cornell about ethnic Chinese in Indonesia and post-independence citizenship. It turns out that after the 1955 citizenship treaty between China and Indonesia, a substantial number of Chinese families strategically chose to divide themselves by nationality: one child would choose Indonesian citizenship, another Chinese citizenship, as a way to hedge their bets.