Indonesia Boleh, Why Not Us?

My ayah chuckled when our first subs arrived in Pulau Indah in early September because Indonesia had their first in 1962. Once an intelligence officer involved with Konfrontasi back in sixties, he knows what Indonesia is capable of doing – using both physical and spiritual armaments by their military men and ordinary men.

Well, I am not trying to scare you out there, especially with recent outbreaks of support for “Ganyang Malaysia”. All I intend to do is for us to respect our neighbouring country, Indonesia and its people.

We Malaysians have been taking our neighbour for granted. We mistreat them to a point of abuse (or murder). We disregard them to a point of ‘robbing’ their cultural and heritage ‘heirlooms’ as ours. We disrespect our Indonesian maids simply because they are dirt poor. Even I heard from our cleaning ladies what the Men in Blue would ask for some ‘duit kopi’ whenever these men meet them along our roadside (even worse than Ah Longs, kan?). Wow, truly Islam Had-hari.

For all those ‘shortcomings’, we ought to be scared of the rise of this ‘sleeping beauty’. Someone told me that apart from Brazil, Russia, India and China (“BRIC”), Indonesia is steadily progressing into this group of New Economy.

During last month’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh, through Bapak SBY’s speech, Indonesia has emerged as the true hero there, when he presented a case study to his counterparts on Indonesia’s innovative strategy to wean this nation off addictive fuel subsidies. Even my Mr Obama shares his concern – a complete digression from worn-out rhetoric about the need to fortify the world’s financial systems. This article mentions that Bapak SBY should be applauded for his international leadership for he has shown his mettle as a true crisis manager. In our Ibu Pertiwi, looking at the kind of leaders we have, they just couldn’t stop creating more crises!

“Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind” ~ Sir Francis Bacon

Just yesterday, in his second term as the President to circa 240 Million Indonesians, he has vowed to make the eradication of so-called ‘legal mafia’ – whom he said can be found in the police force, the judiciary, the Attorney-General’s Office, the KPK, customs and excise department and other government departments - a priority in the first 100 days of his new administration. I admire him even more when he urged his people, “who feel like they have become victims of this mafia in the past, or perhaps even now have become victims, to report to us” in his first public statement acknowledging the presence of such a mafia in key law enforcement agencies. In our Ibu Pertiwi, we cannot even trust those people who walk along the corridor of power, let alone the enforcement agencies.

"Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army" ~ Edward Everett

I still remember reading Dr. Farish A. Noor’s article where he compares the level of intellectual maturity between Indonesian and our undergraduates. Again, we fail to produce the right kind of thinking mentality required to propel our Ibu Pertiwi forward. Despite their prowess in memorising facts and figures in the books, they forget to look around and realise what went so wrong with this Ibu Pertiwi. Sometimes, I think that by creating more jobless graduates, we actually creating more citizens that ‘kowtow’ to the ‘master’, blindly. Yes, in our Ibu Pertiwi, a failure to education system is in fact a boon to some you-know-what!

Anyway, these are only a few examples to civil liberty taking place in this beautiful country.

Indeed, if Indonesia Boleh, Malaysia, of 27 Million surely can too! Right?