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Sunday October 18, 2009

Who’s fanning the flames?

STRAY THOUGHTS
By A. ASOHAN


Why aren’t the authorities, on either side of the Malaccan Strait, doing anything about soured Indonesia-Malaysia ties?

LET’S start with some shock therapy: We Malaysians are just not as loved as we think we are.

We have no idea of how much our South-East Asian neighbours dislike us, even if it is only small pockets of a larger population.

We may not be seen as arrogant bullies who are apt to dispense advice to “lesser” countries while failing to clean up our own backyards, but we are certainly seen as suffering some sort of superiority complex. We just think, some of our neighbours believe, that we’re better than them, rather than just better off than some of them.

For people who think of themselves as warm and friendly, the Indonesian anger against us must be inexplicable. We think we share commonalities in culture, language and religion; they think we’re stealing their rich heritage without so much as a by-your-leave.

This is just the latest in a series of disagreements between our peoples.

There was the 2007 dispute over the use of Rasa Sayang in a Malaysian tourism commercial, a folk song they said originated in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands.

There were the claims that our national anthem, Negara Ku, plagiarised another Indonesian song (claims that were quashed by musicologists who pointed out, according to an AFP report, that both borrowed heavily from a 19th-century French tune).

Then there are the myriad cases of the physical abuse of Indonesian domestic maids and the basic rights denied to their workers in other sectors.

Add to this already volatile mix, the Ambalat territorial dispute.

Still, given all this, the recent wave of anti-Malaysian sentiment in Indonesia cannot be attributed to long-simmering resentment alone.

“There must be something or someone with vested interests behind this,” we hear some people say, and yet nothing has been done to determine the identity of this “something” or “someone”.

Not that our Indonesian neighbours can claim to be the only victims here either.

Burning our national flag, holding demonstrations and throwing rotten eggs at our embassy in Jakarta may be acceptable expressions of public anger when all other platforms fail, but the line has to be drawn when some people – even if they are, as claimed by the Indonesian authorities, a small and marginal group – threaten to sweep the streets clean of Malaysians.

Or when a group like Benteng Demokrasi Rakyat (Bendera) threatens to invade the country, digging up the old Sukarno-era “Ganyang Malaysia” (Crush Malaysia) slogan.

The invasion was supposed to have taken place on Oct 8, but was postponed a day. As I write this, we haven’t been conquered yet.

Yeah, sure, they were sharpening bamboo and gathering samurai swords, which led to much hilarity on both sides of the Straits of Malacca.

Malaysians on Twitter had much fun putting up “invasion alerts” (“3.40pm, no sign of invasion in Miri, area secured. Over.”), but if you type in #defendMsia or #Bendera in the search box of Twitter.com, you’ll find a few “tweets” that are as racist as a Ku Klux Klan gathering.

Yes, let’s face it: We are racists. We are always ready to blame the high crime rate on illegal (and legal) Indonesian immigrants, even if the actual statistics do not bear this out.

When Indonesians commit crimes, their nationality is always cited as some kind of explanation.

The Indonesian Government’s move to cut off the supply of domestic maids unless a better deal could be had led to many racist statements here about how they don’t deserve higher pay because their maids are “lazy and stupid”, or that giving them a day off would have disastrous consequences because, dammit, they’re Indonesians and therefore cannot be trusted to be on their own.

I don’t doubt there are individual Indonesians who are stupid, lazy or untrustworthy – just as I don’t doubt that there are such individuals within any race or nationality, including our own.

We are, both Indonesians and Malaysians, too ready to blame each other using stereotypes and our own blinkered views.

And as long as the authorities and governments of both countries continue to tackle such crises with platitudes, smiles and reassurances that all’s well between us, nothing will change.

Yes, the authorities. When Malaysians are threatened, our government should not be too hesitant to issue travel advisories to caution its citizens, while requesting their counterparts across the straits to take some action.

The Indonesian authorities should not say they cannot take action because no crime has been reported yet. While I’m no expert on Indonesian laws, I’m pretty sure that if they check their statute books they will find that merely issuing a threat is a crime, as it is in most developed and developing countries in the world.

The Indonesian media first covered the “pendet” issue with stories screaming that Malaysia was stealing Indonesian culture again by using the Balinese dance in a Tourism Malaysia advertisement.

That was bad journalism because it was not a Tourism Malaysia advertisement but a promo for a Discovery Channel programme.

When Discovery Channel pointed out that Malaysia had nothing to do with it, the same media organisations did very little to communicate this to their consumers.

Indeed, some of them ignored the explanation and continued to fan the flames.

And while I recognise the irony of someone from our government-controlled media regime pointing this out, this is no longer merely bad journalism but is unethical journalism.

So who is behind it? Do the owners of these media organisations have ties to Indonesian politicians with a bone to pick with the current administration? Why aren’t the Indonesian and Malaysian authorities investigating this?

Perhaps we should look into how illegal Indonesian immigrants slip through the net so easily, and somehow still manage to maintain connections with their people back home. Perhaps we should examine the possibility that there are well-placed people in both countries who are either incompetent or who turn a blind eye to this phenomenon, which has played a terrible role in bringing out the worst of both our peoples.

Who are these “somethings” or “someones”? It’s time we found out.

A. Asohan, Digital News Editor at The Star, is proud of the Malaysian medical students who declined to be evacuated so that they could stay back and help with rescue efforts in the aftermath of the recent earthquake in Padang, Indonesia.

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