Comments

  1. Chris says:

    The degree to which he may or may not turn out to be a ‘dictator’ is irrelevant. A hunger for power is also not a positive quality for a candidate who has blood on his hands. Prabowo should never have been allowed to run for the presidency in the first place.

  2. Bayu says:

    Pernyataan kembali ke UUD 1945 versi 18 Agustus 1945 disampaikan Prabowo pada saat debat capres yang pertama.

  3. Bayu says:

    KPU tidak punya pilihan selain meloloskan Prabowo. Prabowo lolos pada Pilpres 2009 sebagai calon wakil presiden. UU Pilpres 2009 dan Pilpres 2014 tidak berubah. Apa alasan tidak meloloskan Prabowo yang pada 2009 lolos tetapi tidak gagal pada 2014 ketika aturannya sama?

  4. Monique says:

    Nappies ? Ken’s riposte is amusing, as it is anachronistic and facetious. If it is not facetious, it well should be. There were already thousands and thousands and thousands of Nanyang Chinese, Mainland Chinese, Vietnamese, Thais, and 200,000 Filipinos in the United States, long long long before the Vietnam War. NO American believed that ANY Asian person lived in trees, on trees, or under trees (unless they were monks who lived in Buddhist temples under large Banyan trees). Ken’s humorous riposte is, in fact, as incorrect as it is malodorous. The common false belief, often held by our dear cousins in the UK and Oz, being that only elite WASPS
    from Cambridge, Massachusetts, knew anything
    about Asia. Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia and Edwin Reischauer was born in Tokyo. Clifford Geertz served in the U.S. Navy, well before his ethnographic work in Java. I imagine English and Australian stereotypes would be equally odious as the ones that Ken makes reference to. Yet on the other hand, I distinctly remember, one day in Adelaide at a local arts festival, a heckler asking David Gulpilil in 2003, whether he lived in trees, and whether the Moore River Native Settlement was populated by Aboriginal tree dwellers (in the 21st Century). I assume the heckler meant native Australians, and not Caucasian hippies trying to max out on native herbs and enter the “Last Wave”. Perhaps it is to Oz, that Ken should look for such anthropological anomalies, and not in the United States. Finally, no Americans believe that Southeast Asian adults wear nappies, 100 years ago or today.

  5. Danau Tanu says:

    Actually, students of Indonesian politics should be grateful to Dominic Berger from ANU/ New Mandala for showing me the interview and encouraging me to write the article after I commented on the interview.

  6. tocharian says:

    It seems like there can be no “anti-Chinese future” (only anti-Chinese past might be tolerated perhaps) in Southeast Asia. It’s mostly owned and controlled by the Chinese and their proxies nowadays, no?

  7. Pinter mend says:

    Kita tidak perlu berdebat apalagi bermusuhan!!! Cuma agar dapat kita fahami ,didunia ini banyak pemimpin yg gaya kepemimpinannya otoriter dan emosional, tapi pada akhirnya jatuh juga.kita harus sadar bahwa sekuat-kuatnya kita ,tapi masih ada lagi yg lebih kuat di atas kita.karnanya bila pemimpin kita kedepan berjiwa emosional, dan bergaya keras,maka banyak musuh dari dalam maupun luar yg bisa mendikte kita dan salah sedikit saja kita melangkah maka mereka ramai-ramai menjatuhkan kita.sementara disisi lain masyarakat Indonesia ,masih banyak yg kurang berpedidikan dan berekonomi lemah sehingga kalau di ajak berlari kencang seperti MACAN maka mereka tak sanggup dan pada akhirnya mereka jatuh pingsan.

  8. Nyonyo says:

    Well one thing for sure, when we heard the word ‘macan’ or tiger, you’d run away for your life. You don’t to be eaten by tiger. No not me… scary bro

  9. […] the election, these two essays: Indonesia on the knife’s edge by Edward Aspinall and Sukarno’s two bodies by John Roosa are worth reading to get a sense on how the outside world views this election […]

  10. Jaidee says:

    If Thaksin is indeed guilty of widespread extra judicial killings then a strong case with solid evidence should be mounted against him through the medium of an impartial judiciary.

    Of course its common knowledge that no such court currently exists in Thailand, In which case I suggest a court where the judiciary has no vested interests such as the Hague.

    Likewise, if the generals and their network monarchy puppet masters are guilty of committing treason by using the tax payers tanks and M16’s to repeatedly topple democratically elected governments, they should also have their day in an impartial court.

    It is clear to anyone with a genuine sense of fairness and justice that both Thaksin and the coup makers are equally obligated to defend all serious charges made against them.

    With this concept of equality in the face of the law in mind, we watch Thaksin and his team routinely get dragged through the rubber stamp judiciary (albeit often in absentia)for anything and everything their opponents think will stick.

    Meanwhile, the coup makers routinely commit immense crimes against the country, such as treason and illegally toppling democratically elected governments by force, and then proceed to write their own full amnesty, along with an extended list of other politically useful perks (Such as inventing a hand picked Constitution court and installing hand picked senators etc) into a sparkling new custom made constitution designed specifically to cement their teams long term hold on power.

    The concept that network monarchists
    completely fail to comprehend is that people accused of serious crimes on all sides must have their day in court and be treated equally if their cause is to ever attain credibility in the eyes of the world.

    There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the current possey of dictators intend to let themselves be tried in impartial courts for their ongoing foray with treason and other crimes, so they deserve nothing but condemnation as the oppresive dictators they are.

  11. Sceptic says:

    I have made clear that I don’t believe the methods used in the drug war were right even though they were clearly well understood and endorsed, indeed urged, by opinion at all levels of society starting at the very top.

    I fail to see how you can draw any valid comparison between the situation then and now, but I have no doubt that, in the months before the latest coup “intervention”, most of the disturbance – and hence the more than 20 deaths and multiple injuries which resulted – would have been prevented if the military had been prepared to make clear its intention to support the King’s appointed government. It really required no more than that. Indeed, since Gen. Prayuth ultimately used his personal view that law and order had irretrievably broken down as the pretext to oust the elected government, it surely follows that he could and should have preempted that situation by taking a committed and responsible attitude on behalf of HMK’s government before the situation had begun to deteriorate. That, in my view, is how the military should behave under a democratic constitutional monarchy.

  12. Mariner says:

    Well, if you really take it that “according to NMites…massive public opinion extra-judicial murder of innocents is alright” then you must be rather silly, mustn’t you. No where does an NM responder say this is ‘alright’ or even imply as much.
    Nor has any contributor said or implied that killings and maiming is acceptable.
    Honestly, people here are just going to carry on tearing you apart if you can’t argue on the basis of facts. An unsubstantiated rant just doesn’t cut it over here (Thai Visa, perhaps?).

  13. Sven says:

    It’s called plagiarism and not “unproper cut and paste” and regarding the differences between the 1st and the 2nd edition we probably could get some facts from Chris Baker without the need of you dwelling into your conspiracy theories.

  14. Vichai N says:

    Both Indonesia and Malaysia were scarred by its murderous anti-chinese riots past. The Philippines too, I suspect, had similar murderous anti-chinese tendencies but I am not certain whether there had been past racist riots.

    In fact Sinophobia is a very strong lingering sentiment nearly all over asia, primarily because of long-past China empire invasions of Korea, Vietnam, etc.

    But NOT Thailand. Thailand’s Sinophillic, not, Sinophobic. That’s good yes?

    But modern China is over-reaching and over-arming and Sinophobia will probably more feverish, if modern China keeps this up. Modern China is hacking at western technological and defense secrets and that’s hostile and that’s dangerous.

  15. Vichai N says:

    Both Indonesia and Malaysia were carred by its murderous anti-chinese riots past. The Philippines too, I suspect, had similar murderous anti-chinese tendencies but I am not certain whether there had been past racist riots.

    In fact Sinophobia is a very strong lingering sentiment nearly all over asia, primarily because of long-past China empire invasions of Korea, Vietnam, etc.

    But NOT Thailand. Thailand’s Sinophillic, not, Sinophobic. That’s good yes?

    But modern China is over-reaching and over-arming and Sinophobia will probably more feverish, if modern China keeps this up. Modern China is hacking at western technological and defense secrets and that’s hostile and that’s dangerous.

  16. notdisappointed says:

    So I take it that according to NMites, that with “massive public opinion” extra-judicial murder of innocents is alright.

    But living and working in Thailand and having gone out to the provinces; there appears to be massive pubilc opinion to the army taking control to cool down and stop the killing and maiming of anti-government demonstrators. Those killings and maiming are also acceptable to NMites because Suthep is also a crooked politician who used his demongoguery to incite the population againgst legal graft and corruption which came from elections giving the thaksin and his surrogates a ‘winner take all’ attitude.

  17. Ken Ward says:

    Students of Indonesian politics should be grateful to Danau Tanu for the reference to the interview with Prabowo, if for little else. This interview is well worth watching, as it is full of interesting information. Ms Danau quotes the multi-schooled Prabowo as saying that Americans at his Swiss school had asked him if his people lived in trees. Ms Danau assumes that this implausible story is true. In the interview, Prabowo says that he was fourteen when this conversation took place. So it was probably in 1965 or 1966.

    Prabowo also says that he was born into a ‘republican’ family. Given that Prabowo was born in 1951,by the time his brain began recording experiences that his memory could divulge in an interview fifty-odd years later,’republican’ families were the only ones around. So why bother saying that his family was republican? Had he been born ten years earlier, he would have been onto something. But Federal Indonesia, or pro-Dutch Indonesia, had vanished long before Prabowo was out of nappies.

    The interview that Danau Tanu links to is interesting because Prabowo clearly prefers to talk about his grandfather, Margono, rather than his father, Sumitro. Sumitro had obtained a doctorate in economics from Rotterdam more than twenty years earlier. Sumitro’s professors probably didn’t ask him before granting him his doctorate whether ‘inlanders’ still lived in trees, but American teenagers resident a thousand kilometres or less away in Switzerland as late as 1965, when America began deploying large numbers of troops to Vietnam, still believed that Southeast Asians lived in trees. I began studying Indonesian at Sydney University in 1965 and I remember that no Australians in that year believed that Indonesians lived in trees. Indonesia was then ‘confronting’ Malaysia, and Australian soldiers were shooting at Indonesian soldiers in Sarawak. They didn’t have to aim at tree-level. I must confess that I don’t know what American teenagers in Australia then believed about Indonesian tree-dwelling customs, but their future president was about to head off to Indonesia for three or four years’ education. Obama at least had got the message about Indonesians living in houses and attending schools, even if Prabowo’s school-mates in Switzerland hadn’t.

  18. notdisappointed says:

    Apologies for the unproper cut and paste of the above taken from the 1st Edition of Thaksin: The Business of Politics by Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker. A well written account of Thaksin, the 2nd Edition was updated but some paragraphs were deleted and taken out apparently to appease certain readers.

  19. notdisappointed says:

    Apparently NMites love to skirt around the truth; in the past month, numerous caches of war weapons were found in the hands of thaksin loyalists.

    Oh! Is that a truth that’s not supposed to be accepted by this forum, by poeple so used to unsubstantiated alleagtions and accussations and outright dissemination?

  20. Ghost of Jit Phoomisak says:

    I am skeptical about both suggestions: Guys like Thaksin are copiers – they don’t have the mentality to invent or innovate. However the successful ones do tend to be good at marketing and ‘money-politics’.