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Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News Volume XXIII Number 8, August 2015

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Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News Volume XXIII Number 8, August 2015 Amnesty International Group 22 Pasadena/Caltech News Volume XXIII Number 8, August 2015 UPCOMING EVENTS Next Rights Readers PLEASE NOTE: WE ARE NOT HAVING meeting: THURSDAY MONTHLY MEETINGS FOR JULY AND AUGUST. Meetings will resume Sunday, Sept. 20, on September 24. 6:30 PM Tuesday, September 8, 7:30 PM. Letter Vroman’s Bookstore writing meeting at Caltech Athenaeum, corner 695 E. Colorado, of Hill and California in Pasadena. In the Pasadena summer we meet outdoors at the “Rath al Fresco,” on the lawn behind the building. This Indonesia Etc.: informal gathering is a great way for Exploring the newcomers to get acquainted with Amnesty. Improbable Nation Sunday, September 20, 6:30 PM. Rights By Elizabeth Pisani Readers Human Rights Book Discussion group. This month we read “Indonesia Etc.: BOOK REVIEW Exploring the Improbable Nation” by [The New York Times Sunday Book Review] Elizabeth Pisani. By JOSHUA KURLANTZICK AUG. 1, 2014 COORDINATOR’S CORNER This year, three of the world’s largest Hi everyone democracies are holding national elections -- vast polls spread over several days and School started last week (the early start thousands of miles of territory, involving more calendar) and we are up and running with Tdap than a billion voters. Two of these elections have (vaccine required for 7th grade entry)! So far our attracted intense media coverage, or will. India’s region is in the lead with 96% of 7th graders in national elections, which took place in May, compliance! swept out of office the long-ruling Congress Party and handed government of a rising Hope you all had a nice summer. I didn't work economic and political power to the Hindu this year and it was nice to relax and have the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Brazil’s time off. elections, which will be held in October, are coming on the heels of the World Cup, one of AIUSA has closed the case for Gao Zhisheng so several high-profile events that have marked the we are in the process of obtaining another country’s emergence as the second giant of the prisoner of conscience. Alexi is looking into Americas. cases in Cuba and Iran. The third election, Indonesia’s presidential vote Kathy on July 9, has been mostly ignored by the international media, even though Indonesia, [Breaking News. Group 22 just received a case with a population of about 250 million, ranks as dossier on Iranian prisoner of conscience Narges the fourth- largest country in the world, as well Mohammadi. Here’s a link to the Wikipedia as the biggest economy in Southeast Asia. article about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narges_Mohammadi ] In “Indonesia Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation,” Elizabeth Pisani, a journalist, epidemiologist and on-and-off resident of Indonesia, readily acknowledges the RIGHTS READERS archipelago’s feeble presence on the global Human Rights Book Discussion Group stage; her friends back in London look at her quizzically when she mentions the country. Keep up with Rights Readers at Though she had flirted with Indonesia for http://rightsreaders.blogspot.com decades, she finally tires of the world’s ignorance and chooses to take a break from 1 work to travel the islands, offering a primer and mystic, who will kill it, read its entrails and tell a quick history lesson on this awakening her fortune; later, she joins a massive animal powerhouse. sacrifice on Sumba in honor of a recent death. Her book is loaded with such anecdotes in Through her journey, too, she hopes to places that seem the opposite of cookie-cutter understand not only how a country as Southeast Asian megacities. She watches diverse and far-flung as Indonesia — at least supposedly forbidden whale hunts on the island 13,000 islands, many with their own unique of Lembata, near East Timor. She is suddenly cultures — has stayed together but also why, swept into the wedding of a friend’s brother. despite having had an average income similar to She stumbles into a revivalist Christian Malaysia’s and Singapore’s 60 years ago, it now congregation in Ambon, amid the fabled Spice lags badly behind. Today, some 105 million Islands, a congregation that seems to have been Indonesians live on less than $2 per day, though airlifted from a Texas megachurch. much of the country is blessed with fertile volcanic soil, rich fishing grounds, abundant For someone who focuses on Indonesia, like natural resources and a demographic dividend, myself, these anecdotes are tasty morsels, and in which the country has a high ratio of rare. I had heard almost nothing, for example, working-age people to elderly. And in an era about the sparsely populated Sangihe islands, when authoritarian China is poised to become between Sulawesi and the southern Philippines, the world’s largest economy and democracy is where tuna fishing is the only industry. Here, floundering throughout the developing world, Pisani says no to an offer for once, with good perhaps Pisani’s study of Indonesia can help reason -- it’s a chance to join a four-day fishing answer the question of whether democracy is trip on the open Pacific in a rickety outrigger even compatible with the high growth needed to with only a shoddy tarpaulin for cover. foster development in these emerging giants. Unfortunately, these anecdotes rarely cohere Pisani knows that the only mental images into more than collected stories about outsiders may have of Indonesia hail from Java, Indonesia’s outer provinces. Pisani introduces the island containing nearly 60 percent of the some broad themes that could help explain the country’s population: Wayang shadow puppets country’s simultaneous survival and failure, but moving behind a translucent screen, luminous she doesn’t expand on them effectively. batik cloths and the grim-faced former dictator Indonesia, she suggests, has “welded so much Suharto, who ruled between 1967 and 1998. difference together” through collectivism in From the time of independence in 1949, Javanese villages and clans -- collectivism that makes elites have monopolized politics, the military people more secure in their daily lives. Its and other major institutions. citizens have generally fostered a level of cultural tolerance rare in such large nations. Yet, Pisani’s strategy for countering Java’s she suggests, it has failed to change the dominance is to explore the other Indonesia — byzantine bureaucracy, feudal political the forgotten parts of a forgotten country. Her hierarchies and entrenched corruption left by journey spans a year and 26,000 miles, and she the Dutch colonizers and then the Suharto rarely takes comfortable vehicles. She jumps regime. five-daylong ferries to the most obscure islands and cadges journeys along rutted roads on the At times, she also tries to introduce the backs of motorbikes, which leave one’s bottom nonexpert to the country’s myriad cultures but bruised. Her rule for the trip, she declares, is stumbles with strange analogies, calling “just say yes” to any invitation. Indonesia a “Bad Boyfriend” -- it excites your senses but then angers you with its flaws. For She not only visits Indonesia’s forgotten areas; the most part, she remains content to drift back she clearly identifies with their residents, into anecdotes rather than pull them together. writing with passion and telling detail. On the island of Sumba, near northern Australia, she is Worse, though Indonesia certainly is more than adopted by the matriarch of one village, and just Java, the book does not really grapple with moves in with the woman’s family for a time. Java or several of the other populous Indonesian Eventually, Pisani becomes so involved in the islands. Mostly ignoring the bigger islands rituals of this Sumba village that she finds means that Pisani’s picture of Indonesia, though herself carrying a squawking chicken to a local different from those of many Indonesia 2 specialists, is badly skewed in another way. She Organisation, the World Bank, US Centres for basically leaves out any discussion of about Disease Control and many others. She is three-quarters of the country’s population, and especially interested in trying to ensure that HIV makes only passing mention of Jakarta’s prevention programmes are guided by sensible governor, Joko Widodo, the winner of the July analysis of high quality information. In 2010, she presidential elections and the first post-Suharto founded the public health consultancy Ternyata. era politician to run Indonesia. It’s as if someone For more information about her life as a nerd, tried to write a book about America but ignored please go to her professional site: Ternyata – 40 of the states. Public Health Consultancy Javanese elitism or not, it is simply impossible to understand the staggering changes Indonesia has undergone since the end of the 1990s, including decentralization, a rapid transition to democracy and growing relationships with both China and the United States, without truly considering how decisions are made in Jakarta and other major urban centers. Instead, Pisani falls back on easy clichés about Jakarta, reform and the population itself. She deplores the rapid change and construction in the seemingly soulless capital, without seriously examining the positive aspects of all this growth, a strange omission for a public health specialist. She In a previous existence, Elizabeth was a foreign disdains the pork-barrel politics that come with correspondent for Reuters, The Economist and greater direct democracy, as politicians jostle to the Bangkok-based Asia Times, posted in Hong deliver projects to their districts and sometimes Kong, New Delhi, Jakarta, Hanoi and Brussels. skim a percentage for themselves. But this kind She covered everything from conflicts of patronage is necessarily curtailed by the (Tiananmen Square, the Aceh civil war) to transparency of democracy, and in the long run markets (Asian stocks, currencies and far healthier than the opaque and commodities, EU trade policy).
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