Tom Pepinsky

Category: Indonesia

  • “No Hadiah, Boss”

    Immigration at Soekarno-Hatta International Airport is frustrating for anyone. Last night, though, my arrival process was as smooth as I’ve ever experienced. From plane to taxi in 20 minutes flat, which includes purchasing my visa on arrival, standing in line at immigration, getting my bag, and customs. That’s faster than most US airports! Part of it could be that I arrived on a flight that landed at 11:25 PM, so the airport wasn’t as busy as normal. But still, a pleasant surprise.

    Some of my fellow travelers did not have such an easy time. Standing in the line right next to mine at immigration—or, to be honest, holding up the line right next to mine—was a group of 10 Arab men, presumably just off the flight from Doha. None appeared to speak Indonesian or English, but it was evident that they were displeased about something that was holding up their visas. The immigration agent, in classic bureaucratic fashion, sat there looking bored as the designated spokesman of the group attempted to communicate with him. The other 9 travelers talked loudly, sucked in their teeth (“tsk!”), waved their passports around, and generally tried to make their frustration known to everyone.

    I don’t speak any Arabic, but I did catch one key interaction. As I was speaking to the immigration officer in my line, the men started saying “hadiah.” In Indonesian, this means gift, and it’s obviously an Arabic loanword. The travelers’ spokesman got right into their immigration officer’s face and started saying “hadiah. hadiah.” I can only interpret this to mean that he was offering a bribe.

    I caught my immigration officer’s eye and smiled, and she said to me something to me along the lines of “it’s always like this with the Arabs” (orang Arab selalu begitu). Her colleague looked disdainfully at the Arabs’ spokesman and said “no hadiah, boss.”

    There is a larger commentary here, on relations between the Arab world and Southeast Asia. Some of my very favorite recent work by historians has looked at movements of people and ideas around the Indian Ocean (Laffan and Tagliacozzo), and I myself am writing a bit on Arabs in Java. Most of the existing work, though, adopts the perspective of the Southeast Asian looking at the Middle East. I’ve always thought that it would be important to look in reverse, at how Arabs and Middle Easterners view their Southeast Asian co-religionists and whether or not their has been a circulation of ideas from Southeast Asia back to the Arab world that parallels the travel of ideas from the Arab world to Southeast Asia. It would take someone with good knowledge of Arabic and local Southeast Asian languages to do this, but it would make for a fascinating contribution.

  • Is There a Case for Prabowo? But Seriously Folks…

    My previous post on whether or not there is case for Prabowo Subianto for president (answer here) was obviously meant as a bit of a joke. Not entirely a joke, as this really is my position, yet as I wrote in a Facebook comment thread, there is something deeper that led me to that blogpost.

    there is an echo-chamber quality in my circle of colleagues and friends in Indonesia or who work on Indonesia. I wanted to write a post on that, but that got me thinking about whether I could develop an argument in favor of voting for Prabowo, and I actually thought about it for several hours yesterday.

    What I mean is that I just don’t know very many Prabowo supporters. By my informal and perhaps incomplete count, I have two not-very-close friends who are Prabowo supporters, and no close friends. I know a good deal of people who profess that they will not vote for anyone in the upcoming Indonesian elections (golput) but that’s far from the same. Among foreign analysts, I know some people who write things that aren’t as critical of Prabowo as I would like, or who try to think about what a Prabowo candidacy might mean, but I’ve yet to see a serious affirmative case written in English for Prabowo over Jokowi.

    The problem is that I have a biased sample of Indonesians and Indonesia-watchers. Prabowo is not doing nearly as poorly in the polls as my census of my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances would indicate. That means that I must be very careful in thinking carefully about Prabowo in this election. I suspect that many others are like me. So,

    I really hope that I have the chance to read a serious analysis of Prabowo voters that does not reduce them to chumps, vote-sellers, or ignoramuses, but actually takes seriously their support for Prabowo. Like, in the same way that many of us consider it to be self-evident that there are good reasons to vote for Jokowi.

    This means something more than correlations between what people think, or who they are, and their preferred candidates. A friend mentioned the issue of tegas (decisive or resolute) versus jujur (honest or upright), and that voters associate the former with Prabowo and the latter with Jokowi. This is indeed important, but here’s my response:

    I’m looking for something more than just what people associate with different candidates. I want the interior question of why someone would prefer tegas to jujur, or how people weigh tradeoffs and reason about alternatives. Something non tautological about what kinds of people make those sorts of decisions, pushing them on his negatives to see what they say.

    My own worry is that most scholars and observers are not equipped to produce that kind of analysis. If such analysis is required, the result will be impressionistic accounts that inevitably reflect the beliefs and perspectives of the analyst. I am the first to admit that I do not actually understand the level of popular support for Prabowo’s candidacy. My maintained hypothesis is that it is more than stupidity, corruption, or an inability to think critically (c.f. Vedi Hadiz’s comments on the stupidity of the middle class). That’s why—remembering that to understand support for Prabowo is not to condone or support his candidacy—I hope that there is serious effort out there to make sense of what makes Prabowo so popular.