• À Bali, bronca contre un gigantesque projet d’îles artificielles​
    https://reporterre.net/A-Bali-bronca-contre-un-gigantesque-projet-d-iles-artificielles%E2%80%8B

    On dénombre une quinzaine de temples disséminés dans la baie de #Benoa, d’envergure différente. Tous sont menacés par le projet d’#îles_artificielles #Nusa_Benoa, porté par la société #TWBI, propriété de l’homme d’affaires indonésien #Tomy_Winata. L’idée est de créer douze îlots d’une superficie totale de 700 hectares au milieu des eaux de la baie, qui pour l’instant sont essentiellement parcourus par les locaux. Un #complexe_touristique d’au moins 2.000 chambres réparties entre #hôtels de luxe et chalets au bord de la #mangrove, avec en prime #parc_d’attractions et #golf.

    #tourisme #Indonésie #Bali #résistance

  • Between throwing rocks and a hard place : FPI and the Jakarta riots
    https://www.cetri.be/Between-throwing-rocks-and-a-hard

    Many of the questions surrounding who was responsible for the violence that erupted in Jakarta on 21–22 May will likely never be answered. Prevailing theories suggest roles for a mix of interests and actors, involving paid thugs, religious extremists, opportunists and mysterious gunmen. But there is little clarity on which, if any, of the gaggle of contesting elites may have “masterminded” the unrest, or what precisely they sought to gain from it. In this respect there are strong resonances (...)

    #Southern_Social_Movements_Newswire

    / #Le_Sud_en_mouvement, #Indonésie, #Election, #Religion, #New_Mandala, Revendications (...)

    #Revendications_identitaires

  • Indonesia: Post-May Day Update and Call for International Solidarity
    https://mpalothia.net/indonesia-post-may-day-update-and-call-for-international-solidarity

    In Bandung, there was a peaceful action by a group of anarchists almost 1000 strong. It even consisted of mothers, children and teenage girls. Police attacked them and broke the bloc into two groups. They were then chased, beaten and arrested. The pretext for this was ‘vandalism’, some spray-painted graffiti. Many of those who were arrested were stripped and had their heads shaved. Some were spray-painted on their faces and bodies as well. Many were forced to crawl along the road in their underwear. In total 619 anarchists were arrested, of these, 3 still remain in custody for destruction of property.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKMaOpUxZEg

    https://youtu.be/jpEcZksGbgQ

    #indonésie #1er_mai #répression #solidarité_internationale

  • From Sri Lanka to Indonesia, more mothers are becoming suicide bombers – and killing their children too | South China Morning Post
    https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/society/article/3008808/sri-lanka-indonesia-more-mothers-are-becoming-suicide-bombers-and

    5 May, 2019 Amy Chew - The deadly new phenomenon sees women radicalised by IS ideology taking their children’s lives and their own in pursuit of martyrdom
    Experts say the rise in the radicalisation of married couples is endangering entire families

    IAs night fell on blood-soaked Sri Lanka following the carnage of Easter Sunday last month, police knocked on a door in an upscale neighbourhood – the home of two of the suicide bombers.
    They were greeted by Fatima Ibrahim, the pregnant wife of bomber Ilham Ibrahim
    . On seeing the police, she ran inside and detonated an explosive device, killing herself, her unborn child and her three sons aged five, four and nine months. Three police officers also died in the blast.
    In a similar case in March, anti-terror police arrested a suspected pro-Islamic State (IS)
    bomb-maker, Abu Hamzah, in Indonesia
    . When they went to his home to arrest his wife, Solimah, who had helped him make the bombs, she blew herself up, killing her two-year-old child.

    From Sri Lanka to Indonesia, a deadly new phenomenon is emerging – women, radicalised by IS ideology, are killing themselves and their children in their pursuit of martyrdom.

    Female suicide bombers have always featured in the annals of jihadism, going back to the Chechen Islamists in Russia known as Black Widows, but filicide by female radicals brings a dangerous new dimension to terrorism.

    “We did not have this in al-Qaeda,” said Sofyan Tsauri, former member of al-Qaeda Southeast Asia. “In Islam, jihad for a woman is to take care of the household, nurturing and educating the children, not taking up arms.”

    For these women, the maternal instinct to protect their children is supplanted by the quest for a “swift passage” into heaven, according to Nasir Abbas, a Malaysian former leader of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and once the most-wanted jihadist in Southeast Asia.

    He later switched sides and is now involved in deradicalisation efforts and other initiatives to counter violent extremism in Indonesia.

    “These [female suicide bombers] believe protecting their children means protecting them from turning into infidels when they are gone,” he told This Week in Asia .

    “In their twisted belief, they are convinced their children will also enter into heaven if they die with them [or] carry out the same act [of suicide bombing].”

    A significant development pointing to this new phenomenon took place when a family of six bombed three churches in Surabaya in May 2018. The perpetrators were a father, mother and four children aged between nine and 18, according to Nasir and the Indonesian police.

    The father, a wealthy businessman named Dita Oepriarto, strapped bombs on his wife and two daughters, who detonated them at a church. He made his two sons ride a motorbike laden with bombs into another church, where they blew themselves up.

    Dita then drove his car, filled with explosives, into a third church. In the space of 10 minutes, the entire family was dead. Dita’s younger son, 16-year-old Firman Halim, was seen crying inconsolably during dawn prayers at a mosque some two hours before the attack.

    “It is believed that the night before the bombings, the father told the children to prepare to die,” said Rizka Nurul, a researcher with the Institute for International Peace Building (IIPB), Indonesia’s first private deradicalisation organisation.

    The rise in the radicalisation of married couples is proving to be a danger to the lives of their children.

    “Children are in grave danger if both their parents are convinced that they must wage jihad … to atone for their sins in this lifetime by carrying out terror attacks,” said Nasir, the former JI leader. “The parents believe in bringing their children with them to heaven.”

    Women are capable of being more radical and militant than men, according to researchers in the field of countering violent extremism.

    “[This is] because women use their hearts. They can be more dangerous as they are more willing to sacrifice, compared with men who tend to be more rational as they consider costs and benefits,” said the IIPB’s Rizka.

    Such was the case with Solimah, who blew herself up in her home following the arrest of her husband, Abu Hamzah. During interrogation, he told investigators his wife was much more radical than him.

    The couple are believed to have been radicalised online by reading the teachings of Indonesia’s foremost IS ideologue, Aman Abdurrahman, who is currently on death row for inciting others to commit terror attacks in Indonesia.

    Many of these women are believed to be radicalised by their husbands and accede to their teachings as a mark of obedience to their spouse.

    “I am not surprised by [the suicide of the woman in the Sri Lanka blast] as she lives in a terrorist group’s environment,” said Ani Rufaida, lecturer in social psychology at Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama Islamic University.

    “In my prior research of wives of terrorists, most express obedience to their husbands. Only a small number of wives could reject the extreme ideology of their husbands, but they face consequences, for example, being separated from their husband,” she said. “Extremist groups require total obedience from the wife.”

    In a chilling development, some radicalised Indonesian women are requesting a suicide vest as dowry from their husbands-to-be, according to former JI leader Nasir. “These women plan to carry out suicide bombings after they are married. Several of them have been arrested,” he said.

    A counterterrorism official told This Week in Asia that a woman who requested such a vest was arrested in Klaten, Central Java, last March.

    Countering this phenomenon requires both a soft and hard approach, according to Nasir. “The deviant teaching of terror networks needs to be [made] public. We need to have continuous deradicalisation and counter violent extremism programmes,” he said, adding that this would help dismantle terror networks
    and detain their members before attacks were carried out.

    Indonesia through its National Counter-Terrorism Agency (BNPT) has established a deradicalisation programme for inmates, which works to rehabilitate their ideas about Islam through counter-narratives by religious leaders and psychologists, and equips them with skills they can use when they are eventually reintegrated into society. BNPT also focus on countering violent extremism on university campuses.

    Analysts say getting former militant leaders to work with universities and the police in deradicalisation makes these programmes more effective, as they have unparalleled insight into the minds of attackers.

    Another ex-JI member, Ali Fauzi, the younger brother of two executed Bali bombers, started his own NGO called the Circle of Peace, which is deeply involved in countering violent extremism and deradicalisation.

    Women must now be a specific focus of these programmes and other community efforts to prevent radicalisation, analysts say.

    A recent Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) report called for more women to be recruited by Indonesia’s counterterrorism police squad, Detachment 88, given the increasing number of female militants.

    “The percentage of women in the police generally remains woefully low, just over 8 per cent,” it said.

    Better programmes are also needed for pro-IS female detainees. There are currently 15 such women in detention, some of whom were involved in violence. According to IPAC, understanding the backgrounds and motivations of these women is essential for a more targeted rehabilitation programme.

    “IS may have reluctantly accepted women as combatants, but they are now encouraged to take part in operations,” the report said. “It is easy to dismiss the competence of Indonesian terrorists, but as long as they continue to subscribe to IS ideology, they remain a serious threat.”

    #Sri_Lanka #Indonésie #terrorisme #religion #islam #asie #daech

  • Indonesia: Polish Tourist Sentenced to 5 Years for Treason | News | teleSUR English
    https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Indonesia-Polish-Tourist-Sentenced-to-5-Years-for-Treason-20190503-0

    Published 3 May 2019 Authorities accused Skrzypski of collaborating with members of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), a separatist organization which advocates for a non-violent approach to gain independence.

    Polish tourist Jakub Skrzypski maintains his innocence as the first foreigner in Indonesia to be found guilty of treason and receive a sentence of five years in prison.

    Skrzypski was arrested in Papua, which is located on the far east of Indonesia, in August of last year. The 39-year-old plans to appeal the sentence, saying he was a victim of a politically motivated “show trial. I didn’t have the opportunity to speak in my defense or to present any favorable evidence. I reject the trial as well as the verdict,” he told reporters.

    Authorities accused Skrzypski of collaborating with members of the West Papua National Committee (KNPB), a separatist organization which advocates for a non-violent approach to gain independence. According to his lawyer, Latifah Anum Siregar, “he was a tourist and he was just visiting friends that he met over the internet and other people who he had been recommended to meet who turned out to be activists.”

    Along with Skrzypski, student Simon Magal, the nephew of a prominent West Papua activist Yosepha Alomang was also held. Magal had been jailed previously for a campaign against the Freeport McMoran goldmine in the province.

    While the organization is not outlawed in the country, public demonstrations in support of the movement are. It is also illegal to fly the Papua independence flag.

    Siregar pointed out at the trial that the grounds for accusing her client of treason are unfounded because the KNPB was not registered or classified as banned. The KNBP is one of four separatist campaigns in the region.

    Indonesian authorities also claim that Skrzypski attempted to arrange an arms deal for the group, but this accusation was not mentioned at the trial. According to Papua police spokesperson Suryadi Diaz, “he (Skrzypski) has been involved in buying ammunition for them.”

    Skrzypski denies all accusations, saying that he does not “even know [the conflict in Papua] very well” and reiterated that the “trip wasn’t a clandestine one. I was visiting friends.”

    The Indonesian military and police are documented as being suspicious of foreigners who communicate with Papuans. “The Skrzypski-Magal case is another example that the Indonesian government keeps blocking media access and deters independent reporting about Papua,” Indonesia’s representative for Human Rights Watch, Andreas Harsono, stated.

    Despite the country promising to allow access to the media, the territory has remained restricted to international journalists.

    #Indonésie #Pologne #tourisme #espionnage #trahison

  • Another fork in the road for democracy ?
    https://www.cetri.be/Another-fork-in-the-road-for

    Five years ago, many saw the electoral contest between Joko Widodo and Prabowo Subianto as a battle between good and evil. In April 2019, the two men face-off again for the presidency. This time it seems more like a case of the lesser of two evils. In 2014, Jokowi had campaigned on a promise to end the horse-trading that had slowed democratic reform to a virtual halt, pitching himself as a president who would represent the voice of the people. His candidacy spurred a new sense of hope, (...)

    #Southern_Social_Movements_Newswire

    / #Le_Sud_en_mouvement, #Indonésie, #Asie, #Election, #Inside_Indonesia

  • In Indonesia, a company intimidates, evicts and plants oil palm without permits
    https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/in-indonesia-a-company-intimidates-evicts-and-plants-oil-palm-without

    A state-owned plantation company, PTPN XIV, is evicting farmers to make room for an oil palm estate on the eastern Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
    In 1973, the company got a permit to raise cattle and farm tapioca on the now-disputed land, but it expired in 2003. After a long hiatus, the company has returned to claim the land. It says the government has promised to give it permits in the future, but has started operations anyway even as local communities resist.
    The case is one of thousands of land disputes simmering across Indonesia, as President Joko Widodo attempts to carry out an ambitious land reform program.
    The president has also ordered a freeze on the issuance of new oil palm plantation permits, but the level of enforcement remains to be seen.

    #Indonésie #industrie_palmiste #évictions_forcées #terres

  • Rampant deforestation in Leuser triggers floods, landslides - National - The Jakarta Post
    https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2019/01/30/rampant-deforestation-in-leuser-triggers-floods-landslides.html

    The rampant destruction of forests in the Leuser ecosystem, a major water source for Aceh, has led to frequent flooding in the province.

    A team from the Leuser Conservation Forum (FKL) performed a ground check on damaged areas in the ecosystem and found that, in 2018, about 5,685 hectares of the ecosystem were deforested, with the most serious damage found in Gayo Lues with 1,063 ha of deforested area.

    The ecosystem, located across several regencies in the province, also saw 889 ha damaged in Nagan Raya and another 863 ha in East Aceh. As of December 2018, 1.7 ha of forest remained in the Leuser ecosystem.

    The FKL and another conservation group, the Aceh Forest, Nature and Environment Foundation (Haka), concluded from their observations that the high rates of deforestation over many years caused flooding.

    Based on an observation of river basin areas, the highest rate of deforestation was found in the Singkil-Alas River Basin, which covers Gayo Lues, Southeast Aceh, Subulussalam, Aceh Singkil and the neighboring province of North Sumatra.

    #forêt #déforestation #plantations #Sumatra #Indonésie #inondation #écosystèmes #crétins_abyssaux

  • Jagal - The Act of Killing
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tILiqotj7Y


    v.o. sans sous-titres

    avec sous-titres
    https://amara.org/en/videos/lCHCQE8uqUJb/en/749348
    à 00:16:00 un gangster parle de sa passion pour le cinémà et comment c’était pratique d’avoir les locaux pour tuer et torturer en face de la salle de projection.

    C’est le film le moins apprécié par l’office de tourisme indonésien car il montre que le pays est gouverné aujourd’hui par les assassins de 1965/66 qui se font un plaisir de se vanter de leurs crimes devant la caméra.

    BACKGROUND | The Act of Killing
    http://theactofkilling.com/background

    CONTEXT, BACKGROUND AND METHOD
    First Encounter with the 1965-66 Massacres – The Globalization Tapes
    In 2001-2002, Christine Cynn and I went to Indonesia for the first time to produce The Globalization Tapes (2003), a participatory documentary project made in collaboration with the Independent Plantation Workers Union of Sumatra. Using their own forbidden history as a case study, these Indonesian filmmakers worked with us to trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present.

    The Globalization Tapes exposes the devastating role of militarism and repression in building the global economy, and explores the relationships between trade, third-world debt, and international institutions like the IMF and the World Trade Organization. Made by some of the poorest workers in the world, the film is a lyrical and incisive account of how our global financial institutions shape and enforce the corporate world order. The film uses chilling first-hand accounts, hilarious improvised interventions, collective debate and archival collage.

    Several scenes in The Globalization Tapes reveal the earliest traces of the methods we refined in the shooting of The Act of Killing: plantation workers stage a satirical commercial for the pesticide that poisons them; worker-filmmakers pose as World Bank agents who offer microfinance to ‘develop’ local businesses – offers that are both brutal and absurd, yet tempting nonetheless.

    While shooting and editing The Globalization Tapes, we discovered that the 1965-66 Indonesian massacres were the dark secret haunting Indonesia’s much-celebrated entrance into the global economy. One of the military’s main objectives in the killings was to destroy the anti-colonial labour movement that had existed until 1965, and to lure foreign investors with the promise of cheap, docile workers and abundant natural resources. The military succeeded (The Globalization Tapes is a testament to the extraordinary courage of the plantation worker-filmmakers as they challenge this decades-long legacy of terror and try to build a new union).

    The killings would come up in discussions, planning sessions, and film shoots nearly every day, but always in whispers. Indeed, many of the plantation workers were themselves survivors of the killings. They would discretely point out the houses of neighbors who had killed their parents, grandparents, aunts, or uncles. The perpetrators were still living in the same village and made up, along with their children and protégés, the local power structure. As outsiders, we could interview these perpetrators – something the plantation workers could not do without fear of violence.

    In conducting these first interviews, we encountered the pride with which perpetrators would boast about the most grisly details of the killings. The Act of Killing was born out of our curiosity about the nature of this pride – its clichéd grammar, its threatening performativity, its frightening banality.

    The Globalization Tapes was a film made collectively by the plantation workers themselves, with us as facilitators and collaborating directors. The Act of Killing was also made by working very closely with its subjects, while in solidarity and collaboration with the survivors’ families. However, unlike The Globalization Tapes, The Act of Killing is an authored work, an expression of my own vision and concerns regarding these issues.

    THE BEGINNING OF THE ACT OF KILLING

    By the time I first met the characters in The Act of Killing (in 2005), I had been making films in Indonesia for three years, and I spoke Indonesian with some degree of fluency. Since making The Globalization Tapes (2003), Christine Cynn, fellow film-maker and longtime collaborator Andrea Zimmerman and I had continued filming with perpetrators and survivors of the massacres in the plantation areas around the city of Medan. In 2003 and 2004, we filmed more interviews and simple re-enactments with Sharman Sinaga, the death squad leader who had appeared in The Globalization Tapes. We also filmed as he introduced us to other killers in the area. And we secretly interviewed survivors of the massacres they committed.

    Moving from perpetrator to perpetrator, and, unbeknownst to them, from one community of survivors to another, we began to map the relationships between different death squads throughout the region, and began to understand the process by which the massacres were perpetrated. In 2004, we began filming Amir Hasan, the death squad leader who had commanded the massacres at the plantation where we made The Globalization Tapes.

    In late 2004, Amir Hasan began to introduce me to killers up the chain of command in Medan. Independently in 2004, we began contacting ‘veterans’ organizations of death squad members and anti-leftist activists in Medan. These two approaches allowed us to piece together a chain of command, and to locate the surviving commanders of the North Sumatran death squads. In early interviews with the veterans of the killings (2004), I learned that the most notorious death squad in North Sumatra was Anwar Congo and Adi Zulkadry’s Frog Squad (Pasukan Kodok).

    During these first meetings with Medan perpetrators (2004 and 2005), I encountered the same disturbing boastfulness about the killings that we had been documenting on the plantations. The difference was that these men were the celebrated and powerful leaders not of a small rural village, but of the third largest city in Indonesia (Greater Medan has a population of over four million people).

    Our starting point for The Act of Killing was thus the question: how had this society developed to the point that its leaders could – and would – speak of their own crimes against humanity with a cheer that was at once celebratory but also intended as a threat?

    OVERVIEW AND CHRONOLOGY OF THE METHODS USED IN THE ACT OF KILLING

    Building on The Globalization Tapes and our film work outside Indonesia, we had developed a method in which we open a space for people to play with their image of themselves, re-creating and re-imagining it on camera, while we document this transformation as it unfolds. In particular, we had refined this method to explore the intersection between imagination and extreme violence.

    In the early days of research (2005), I discovered that the army recruited its killers in Medan from the ranks of movie theatre gangsters (or preman bioskop) who already hated the leftists for their boycott of American movies – the most profitable in the cinema. I was intrigued by this relationship between cinema and killings, although I had no idea it would be so deep. Not only did Anwar and his friends know and love the cinema, but they dreamed of being on the screen themselves, and styled themselves after their favorite characters. They even borrowed their methods of murder from the screen.

    Of course, I began by trying to understand in as much detail as possible Anwar and his friends’ roles in the killings and, afterwards, in the regime they helped to build. Among the first things I did was to bring them to the former newspaper office directly across the road from Anwar’s old cinema, the place where Anwar and his friends killed most of their victims. There, they demonstrated in detail what they had done. Although they were filming documentary re-enactment and interviews, during breaks I noticed that they would muse about how they looked like various movie stars – for instance, Anwar compared his protégé and sidekick, Herman to Fernando Sancho.

    To understand how they felt about the killings, and their unrepentant way of representing them on film, I screened back the unedited footage of these early re-enactments, and filmed their responses. At first, I thought that they would feel the re-enactments made them look bad, and that they might possibly come to a more complex place morally and emotionally.

    I was startled by what actually happened. On the surface at least, Anwar was mostly anxious that he should look young and fashionable. Instead of any explicit moral reflection, the screening led him and Herman spontaneously to suggest a better, and more elaborate, dramatization.

    To explore their love of movies, I screened for them scenes from their favorite films at the time of the killings – Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah and, ironically, The Ten Commandments topped the list – recording their commentary and the memories these films elicited. Through this process, I came to realize why Anwar was continually bringing up these old Hollywood films whenever I filmed re-enactments with them: he and his fellow movie theatre thugs were inspired by them at the time of the killings, and had even borrowed their methods of murder from the movies. This was such an outlandish and disturbing idea that I in fact had to hear it several times before I realized quite what Anwar and his friends were saying.

    He described how he got the idea of strangling people with wire from watching gangster movies. In a late-night interview in front of his former cinema, Anwar explained how different film genres would lead him to approach killing in different ways. The most disturbing example was how, after watching a “happy film like an Elvis Presley musical”, Anwar would “kill in a happy way”.

    In 2005, I also discovered that the other paramilitary leaders (not just the former movie theater gangsters) had other personal and deep-seated relationship to movies. Ibrahim Sinik, the newspaper boss who was secretary general of all the anti-communist organizations that participated in the killings, and who directly gave the orders to Anwar’s death squad, turned out to be a feature film producer, screenwriter, and former head of the Indonesian Film Festival.

    In addition to all this, Anwar and his friends’ impulse towards being in a film about the killings was essentially to act in dramatizations of their pasts – both as they remember them, and as they would like to be remembered (the most powerful insights in The Act of Killing probably come in those places where these two agendas radically diverge). As described, the idea of dramatizations came up quite spontaneously, in response to viewing the rushes from Anwar’s first re-enactments of the killings.

    But it would be disingenuous to claim that we facilitated the dramatizations only because that’s what Anwar and his friends wanted to do. Ever since we produced The Globalization Tapes, the thing that most fascinated us about the killings was the way the perpetrators we filmed would recount their stories of those atrocities. One had the feeling that we weren’t simply hearing memories, but something else besides – something intended for a spectator. More precisely, we felt we were receiving performances. And we instinctively understood, I think, that the purpose of these performances was somehow to assert a kind of impunity, to maintain a threatening image, to perpetuate the autocratic regime that had begun with the massacres themselves.

    We sensed that the methods we had developed for incorporating performance into documentary might, in this context, yield powerful insights into the mystery of the killers’ boastfulness, the nature of the regime of which they are a part, and, most importantly, the nature of human ‘evil’ itself.

    So, having learned that even their methods of murder were directly influenced by cinema, we challenged Anwar and his friends to make the sort of scenes they had in mind. We created a space in which they could devise and star in dramatisations based on the killings, using their favorite genres from the medium.

    We hoped to catalyze a process of collective remembrance and imagination. Fiction provided one or two degrees of separation from reality, a canvas on which they could paint their own portrait and stand back and look at it.

    We started to suspect that performance played a similar role during the killings themselves, making it possible for Anwar and his friends to absent themselves from the scene of their crimes, while they were committing them. Thus, performing dramatizations of the killings for our cameras was also a re-living of a mode of performance they had experienced in 1965, when they were killing. This obviously gave the experience of performing for our cameras a deeper resonance for Anwar and his friends than we had anticipated.

    And so, in The Act of Killing, we worked with Anwar and his friends to create such scenes for the insights they would offer, but also for the tensions and debates that arose during the process – including Anwar’s own devastating emotional unravelling.

    This created a safe space, in which all sorts of things could happen that would probably elude a more conventional documentary method. The protagonists could safely explore their deepest memories and feelings (as well as their blackest humor). I could safely challenge them about what they did, without fear of being arrested or beaten up. And they could challenge each other in ways that were otherwise unthinkable, given Sumatra’s political landscape.

    Anwar and his friends could direct their fellow gangsters to play victims, and even play the victims themselves, because the wounds are only make-up, the blood only red paint, applied only for a movie. Feelings far deeper than those that would come up in an interview would surface unexpectedly. One reason the emotional impact was so profound came from the fact that this production method required a lot of time – the filmmaking process came to define a significant period in the participants’ lives. This meant that they went on a deeper journey into their memories and feelings than they would in a film consisting largely of testimony and simple demonstration.

    Different scenes used different methods, but in all of them it was crucial that Anwar and his friends felt a sense of fundamental ownership over the fiction material. The crux of the method is to give performers the maximum amount of freedom to determine as many variables as possible in the production (storyline, casting, costumes, mise-en-scene, improvisation on set). Whenever possible, I let them direct each other, and used my cameras to document their process of creation. My role was primarily that of provocateur, challenging them to remember the events they were performing more deeply, encouraging them to intervene and direct each other when they felt a performance was superficial, and asking questions between takes – both about what actually happened, but also about how they felt at the time, and how they felt as they re-enacted it.

    We shot in long takes, so that situations could evolve organically, and with minimal intervention from ourselves. I felt the most significant event unfolding in front of the cameras was the act of transformation itself, particularly because this transformation was usually plagued by conflict, misgivings, and other imperfections that seemed to reveal more about the nature of power, violence, and fantasy than more conventional documentary or investigative methods. For this same reason, we also filmed the pre-production of fiction scenes, including castings, script meetings, and costume fittings. Make-up sessions too were important spaces of reflection and transformation, moments where the characters slip down the rabbit hole of self-invention.

    In addition, because we never knew when the characters would refuse to take the process further, or when we might get in trouble with the military, we filmed each scene as though it might be the last, and also everything leading up to them (not only for the reasons above), because often we didn’t know if the dramatization itself would actually happen. We also felt that the stories we were hearing – stories of crimes against humanity never before recorded – were of world historical importance. More than anything else, these are two reasons why this method generated so many hours of footage (indeed, we have created a vast audio-visual archive about the Indonesian massacres. This archive has been the basis of a four-year United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council project called Genocide and Genre).

    After almost every dramatization, we would screen the rushes back to them, and record their responses. We wanted to make sure they knew how they appeared on film, and to use the screening to trigger further reflection. Sometimes, screenings provoked feelings of remorse (as when Anwar watches himself play the victim during a film noir scene) but, at other times, as when we screened the re-enactment of the Kampung Kolam massacre to the entire cast, the images were met with terrifying peals of laughter.

    Most interestingly, Anwar and his friends discussed, often insightfully, how other people will view the film, both in Indonesia and internationally. For example, Anwar sometimes commented on how survivors might curse him, but that “luckily” the victims haven’t the power to do anything in today’s Indonesia.

    The gangster scenes were wholly improvised. The scenarios came from the stories Anwar and his friends had told each other during earlier interviews, and during visits to the office where they killed people. The set was modeled on this interior. For maximum flexibility, our cinematographer lit the space so that Anwar and his friends could move about freely, and we filmed them with two cameras so that they could fluidly move from directing each other to improvised re-enactments to quiet, often riveting reflection after the improvisation was finished.

    For instance, Anwar re-enacted how he killed people by placing them on a table and then pulling tight a wire, from underneath the table, to garrote them. The scene exhausted him, physically and emotionally, leaving him full of doubt about the morality of what he did. Immediately after this re-enactment, he launched into a cynical and resigned rant against the growing consensus around human rights violations. Here, reality and its refraction through fiction, Anwar’s memories and his anticipation of their impact internationally, are all overlaid.

    The noir scenes were shot over a week, and culminated in an extraordinary improvisation where Anwar played the victim. Anwar’s performance was effective and, transported by the performance, the viewer empathizes with the victim, only to do a double take as they remember that Anwar is not a victim, but the killer.

    The large-scale re-enactment of the Kampung Kolam massacre was made using a similar improvisational process, with Anwar and his friends undertaking the direction. What we didn’t expect was a scene of such violence and realism; so much so that it proved genuinely frightening to the participants, all of whom were Anwar’s friends from Pancasila Youth, or their wives and children. After the scene, we filmed participants talking amongst themselves about how the location of our re-enactment was just a few hundred meters from one of North Sumatra’s countless mass graves. The woman we see fainting after the scene felt she had been possessed by a victim’s ghost. The paramilitary members (including Anwar) thought so, too. The violence of the re-enactment conjured the spectres of a deeper violence, the terrifying history of which everybody in Indonesia is somehow aware, and upon which the perpetrators have built their rarefied bubble of air conditioned shopping malls, gated communities, and “very, very limited” crystal figurines.

    The process by which we made the musical scenes (the waterfall, the giant concrete goldfish) was slightly different again. But here too Anwar was very much in the driver’s seat: he chose the songs and, along with his friends, devised both scenes. Anwar and his cast were also free to make changes as we went.

    In the end, we worked very carefully with the giant goldfish, presenting motifs from a half-forgotten dream. Anwar’s beautiful nightmare? An allegory for his storytelling confection? For his blindness? For the willful blindness by which almost all history is written, and by which, consequently, we inevitably come to know (and fail to know) ourselves? The fish changes throughout the film, but it is always a world of “eye candy”, emptiness and ghosts. If it could be explained adequately in words, we would not need it in the film.

    For the scenes written by the newspaper boss Ibrahim Sinik and his staff, Sinik enlisted the help of his friends at state television, TVRI. He borrows the TVRI regional drama studios, and recruits a soap opera crew. In these scenes, our role was largely to document Anwar and his friends as they work with the TV crew, and to catalyze and document debates between fiction set-ups. In our edited scenes, we cut from the documentary cameras to TVRI’s fiction cameras, highlighting the gap between fiction and reality – often to comic effect. But above all, we focused our cameras on moments between takes where they debated the meaning of the scene.

    The Televisi Republik Indonesia “Special Dialogue” came into being when the show’s producers realised that feared and respected paramilitary leaders making a film about the genocide was a big story (they came to know about our work because we were using the TVRI studios.) After their grotesque chat show was broadcast, there was no critical response in North Sumatra whatsoever. This is not to say that the show will not be shocking to Indonesians. For reasons discussed in my director’s statement, North Sumatrans are more accustomed than Jakartans, for example, to the boasting of perpetrators (who in Sumatra were recruited from the ranks of gangsters – and the basis of gangsters’ power, after all, lies in being feared).

    Moreover, virtually nobody in Medan dares to criticise Pancasila Youth and men like Anwar Congo and Ibrahim Sinik. Ironically, the only significant reaction to the talk show’s broadcast came from the Indonesian Actors’ Union. According to Anwar, a representative of the union visiting family in Medan came to Anwar’s house to ask him if he would consider being president of the North Sumatra branch of the union. According to Anwar, the union was angry that such a large-scale production had occurred in North Sumatra without their knowing about it. Luckily, Anwar had the humility to tell them that he is not an actor, that he was playing himself in scenes made for a documentary, and therefore would decline the offer.

    Anwar and his friends knew that their fiction scenes were only being made for our documentary, and this will be clear to the audience, too. But at the same time, if these scenes were to offer genuine insights, it was vital that the filmmaking project was one in which they were deeply invested, and one over which they felt ownership.

    The Act of Killing : don’t give an Oscar to this snuff movie | Nick Fraser | Film | The Guardian
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/23/act-of-killing-dont-give-oscar-snuff-movie-indonesia

    It has won over critics but this tasteless film teaches us nothing and merely indulges the unrepentant butchers of Indonesia

    The Act of Killing won the documentary prize at the Baftas last week and is the favourite to win the much-coveted Oscar. I watch many documentaries on behalf of the BBC each year and I go to festivals. I’m a doc obsessive. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I’ve been asked by fans to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I’ve never encountered a film greeted by such extreme responses – both those who say it is among the best films and those who tell me how much they hate it. Much about the film puzzles me. I am still surprised by the fact that so many critics listed it among their favourite films of last year.

    For those who haven’t seen the film, it investigates the circumstances in which half-a-million Indonesian leftists were murdered in the 1960s, at the instigation of a government that is still in power. You might think this is a recondite subject, worthy of a late-night screening for insomniacs or atrocity buffs on BBC4, but, no, the film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer has made the subject viewable by enlisting the participation of some of the murderers. He spent some years hanging out with them, to his credit luring them into confessions. But he also, more dubiously, enlisted their help in restaging their killings. Although one of them, the grandfatherly Anwar, shows mild symptoms of distress towards the end of the film, they live in a state of impunity and it is thus, coddled and celebrated in their old age, that we revisit them.

    So let me be as upfront as I can. I dislike the aesthetic or moral premise of The Act of Killing. I find myself deeply opposed to the film. Getting killers to script and restage their murders for the benefit of a cinema or television audience seems a bad idea for a number of reasons. I find the scenes where the killers are encouraged to retell their exploits, often with lip-smacking expressions of satisfaction, upsetting not because they reveal so much, as many allege, but because they tell us so little of importance. Of course murderers, flattered in their impunity, will behave vilely. Of course they will reliably supply enlightened folk with a degraded vision of humanity. But, sorry, I don’t feel we want to be doing this. It feels wrong and it certainly looks wrong to me. Something has gone missing here. How badly do we want to hear from these people, after all? Wouldn’t it be better if we were told something about the individuals whose lives they took?

    I’d feel the same if film-makers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s, rounding up a bunch of ageing Nazis and getting them to make a film entitled “We Love Killing Jews”. Think of other half-covered-up atrocities – in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa, Israel, any place you like with secrets – and imagine similar films had been made. Consider your response – and now consider whether such goings-on in Indonesia are not acceptable merely because the place is so far away, and so little known or talked about that the cruelty of such an act can pass uncriticised.

    The film does not in any recognisable sense enhance our knowledge of the 1960s Indonesian killings, and its real merits – the curiosity when it comes to uncovering the Indonesian cult of anticommunism capable of masking atrocity, and the good and shocking scenes with characters from the Indonesian elite, still whitewashing the past – are obscured by tasteless devices. At the risk of being labelled a contemporary prude or dismissed as a stuffy upholder of middle-class taste, I feel that no one should be asked to sit through repeated demonstrations of the art of garrotting. Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we’ve ended somewhere else – in a high-minded snuff movie.

    What I like most about documentary film is that anything can be made to work, given a chance. You can mix up fact and fiction, past and present. You can add to cold objectivity a degree of empathy. You will, of course, lie to reluctant or recalcitrant participants, in particular when they wish not to divulge important pieces of information. And trickery has its place, too. But documentary films have emerged from the not inconsiderable belief that it’s good to be literal as well as truthful. In a makeshift, fallible way, they tell us what the world is really like. Documentaries are the art of the journeyman. They can be undone by too much ambition. Too much ingenious construction and they cease to represent the world, becoming reflected images of their own excessively stated pretensions.

    In his bizarrely eulogistic piece defending The Act of Killing (of which he is an executive producer), Errol Morris, the documentary maker, compares the film to Hamlet’s inspired use of theatre to reveal dirty deeds at the court of Denmark. But Hamlet doesn’t really believe that theatrical gestures can stand in for reality. Nor, we must assume, did his creator. A more apt analogy than Morris’s might come from Shakespeare’s darkest play, Macbeth. What would we think if Macbeth and his scheming wife were written out of the action, replaced by those low-level thugs paid to do bad business on their behalf? We might conclude that putting them centre stage, in the style of The Act of Killing, was indeed perverse and we’d be right.

    There are still half-forgotten, heavily whitewashed atrocities from the last century, such as the Bengali famine allowed to occur during the second world war through the culpably racist inattention of British officials; the never wholly cleared-up question of Franco’s mass killings; or the death of so many millions in the 1950s as a consequence of Mao’s catastrophic utopianism. Those wondering how to record such events will no doubt watch The Act of Killing, but I hope they will also look at less hyped, more modestly conceived depictions of mass murder. In Enemies of the People (2010), the Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath goes after the murderers of the Khmer Rouge. He finds Pol Pot’s sidekick, but it is the earnest, touching quest of Sambath himself that lingers in the mind, rather than the empty encounters with evil-doers. Atrocity is both banal and ultimately impossible to comprehend.

    Writing in 1944, Arthur Koestler was among the first to gain knowledge of the slaughter of eastern European Jews and he estimated that the effect of such revelations was strictly limited, lasting only minutes or days and swiftly overcome by indifference. Koestler suggested that there was only one way we could respond to the double atrocity of mass murder and contemporary indifference and that was by screaming.

    I’m grateful to The Act of Killing not because it’s a good film, or because it deserves to win its Oscar (I don’t think it does), but because it reminds me of the truth of Koestler’s observation. What’s not to scream about?

    Nick Fraser is editor of the BBC’s Storyville documentary series

    #film #documentaire #Indonésie #hécatombe

  • Are Indonesia and Malaysia Ready to Stand up for China’s Muslims ?
    https://www.cetri.be/Are-Indonesia-and-Malaysia-Ready

    The two Southeast Asian states might be the best hope for pressure from the Islamic world. By now, the scale of the crisis is clear. There are up to 3 million Turkic Muslims – primarily Uyghurs but also ethnic Kazakhs and Kyrgyz – in a vast network of concentration camps in China’s far western region of Xinjiang. The result is the 21st century’s greatest human rights crisis : Empty Uyghur neighborhoods. Students, musicians, athletes, and peaceful academics jailed. “Graduates” of these camps are (...)

    #Southern_Social_Movements_Newswire

    / #Le_Sud_en_mouvement, #Chine, #Indonésie, #Malaisie, #Répression, #Religion, The (...)

    #The_Diplomat

  • With Fatwas and Blasphemy Claims, Cleric Emerges as a Force in Indonesia - WSJ
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/conservative-muslim-cleric-emerges-as-a-force-in-indonesias-elections-115482448
    https://images.wsj.net/im-49236/social

    JAKARTA, Indonesia—The Muslim cleric poised to become vice president of the world’s third-largest democracy is known for curbing religious freedoms, opposing gay rights, and for his role in the prosecution of a Christian politician for blaspheming Islam.

    Ma’ruf Amin is the running mate of Indonesia’s more-moderate president, Joko Widodo, and polls indicate they should comfortably win April elections in the country of 250 million.

    #indonésie #islam #islam_radical

  • #Cinéma : «Marlina, la tueuse en quatre actes», un western féministe en Indonésie - Asialyst

    https://asialyst.com/fr/2018/11/15/cinema-marlina-la-tueuse-en-quatre-actes-western-feministe-indonesie

    Réalisé par la cinéaste indonésienne Mouly Surya, Marlina, la tueuse en quatre actes a surpris les spectateurs de la Quinzaine des Réalisateurs 2017 à Cannes. Ce western ultra-violent, qui emprunte à Quentin Tarantino et à Sergio Leone, met en scène la vengeance d’une femme sur l’île de Sumba.
    Attention, cet article dévoile des moments-clefs de l’intrigue, notamment la fin du film.

    Une femme seule, à cheval sur une route déserte, portant une tête humaine attachée à la selle. On pense à l’Ouest américain de Sergio Leone, mais c’est en Indonésie que se déroule Marlina, la tueuse en quatre actes, le dernier bijou de Mouly Surya. Sur l’île de Sumba, plus précisément. « Dans cette île à majorité animiste marapu, raconte la réalisatrice dans les médias, les habitants se baladent avec des sabres à la ceinture et la place de la femme est à la cuisine. »

    #cinéma_féministe #indonésie

  • L’art préhistorique est plus vieux qu’on ne le croit
    https://www.lemonde.fr/archeologie/article/2018/11/07/l-art-prehistorique-est-plus-vieux-qu-on-ne-le-croit_5380313_1650751.html

    La même équipe de chercheurs présente, dans Nature daté du 8 novembre, de nouvelles datations de gros mammifères dessinés cette fois dans une grotte de la partie indonésienne de l’île de #Bornéo : ces représentations remonteraient au minimum à 40 000 ans, ce qui en fait les plus anciens vestiges d’#art_rupestre figuratif connus à ce jour.

    La nouveauté ne tient pas à la découverte de nouvelles #peintures – elles avaient été décrites dans les années 1990 par des expéditions franco-indonésiennes, qui avaient notamment exploré la #grotte de Lubang Jeriji Saleh –, mais aux nouvelles datations à l’#uranium-thorium effectuées sur des échantillons de calcite. Ces coulées minérales recouvrent parfois les #dessins, ou les dessins les recouvrent, ce qui permet de déduire un âge respectivement minimal et maximal. « En vingt-cinq ans, la technologie a beaucoup changé et on peut travailler sur de plus petits échantillons », souligne Maxime Aubert (université Griffith, Australie), premier auteur de l’article publié dans Nature.

    #préhistoire #Indonésie

  • Community-Scale Water Sovereignty: Part II

    As part of a series examining best practices in water resilience at the home and community level, this post looks into what happens when water is no longer local — highlighting the challenges faced in Indonesia, and throughout the world, when water is privatized.

    The UN has declared the 10-year period beginning in 2018 as “The International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development.” [1] Construction, production of goods, and local livelihoods all ultimately depend on the quantity of available water; it is a major determinant of settlement patterns, and sets limits to growth. When communities manage their water supplies locally, collective awareness of water quality and availability leads to careful, deliberate, and sustainable use— with enough water available for all. [2]

    In the global growth economy, by contrast, it is assumed that development can go on endlessly, regardless of a community’s locally-available resources, including water. It is also assumed that centralization and privatization lead to greater ‘efficiency’ than when resources are controlled at the community level. But centralized water systems that empower multinational corporations can quickly tip the balance towards crisis, as revealed in the following examples from Indonesia, including the small island of Gili Meno. The question then is: What lessons can we learn from the experience of places like these, when it comes to managing water equitably and sustainably?

    One of a trio of small islands off the northwest coast of Lombok in Indonesia, Gili Meno has about 500 residents, and no fresh water source. For this reason, it was nearly uninhabited until the 1970s, when the government awarded land to privately held coconut plantations and supplied prison inmates as labor. Other residents from Lombok soon followed and settled on the island. [3] For a few decades, rooftop rainwater collection was the only source of drinking water on the island.

    Pak Udin moved to Gili Meno in the late 1980s, and now runs a shop and homestay on the island. He recalls that in his early days there, residents would fill up large containers from their household water tanks after each rainstorm. Stored in cool, dark rooms, the containers would keep water fresh and clean for up to a year, until the following rainy season. In his recollection, people rarely, if ever, got sick from the water.

    But in the following decades, tourism on the Gili islands experienced rapid growth, sparking a spate of new construction. The new buildings usually did not incorporate rainwater harvesting systems, and most homes quickly came to rely on government-built wells — which provided water that was often too salty to drink — and on 21-liter Aqua-brand bottled water. [4]

    Aqua, manufactured by the French company Danone, accounts for 60% of all bottled water sales in Indonesia. [5] At around US$1.50 per jug, it is affordable for the middle class and has caught on throughout the country — but a family with two minimum-wage earners purchasing three Aqua containers per week can find themselves spending nearly 10% of their income on drinking water.

    Absent an alternative, almost all visitors to Gili Meno buy even smaller bottles of water, at an even greater economic and ecological cost. Gili Meno has no recycling program — and no effective waste management program of any kind. [6] The piles of bottles in makeshift landfills on the island continue to grow, as do Danone’s profits. Efforts at building desalination plants or bringing water over in pipes from mainland Lombok, a few miles away, have encountered many setbacks. It is especially risky to depend on such infrastructure given the recent earthquakes that have shaken the region, which left neighboring islands Gili Trawangan and Gili Air without water for days. [7]

    The only residents for whom water is still free, says Pak Udin, are those few households that still maintain and use their rainwater collection systems.

    On mainland Lombok, some communities have no municipal water supply or traditional system, and rely entirely on the private sector for water. In Sekaroh in southwest Lombok, all water arrives on trucks, with residents paying as much as US$34 for 5,000 liters of non-potable water — on top of purchasing drinking water. Those who lack sufficient storage space and must therefore buy partial truckloads of water end up paying even more per liter: as in so many market-based systems, water in Lombok is more expensive for the poor. [8]

    In neighboring Bali, the government supplies water to much of the island via pipes from natural water sources in the central mountains. But in the dry season — the months of July and August — municipal water supplies sometimes shut off without warning for weeks at a time. In 2013, water ran out for two months in the arid region of the Bukit; supply-demand economics took over and truckloads of water soon cost more than US$100 each. Water-insecure Bukit residents are in good company: 2.7 billion people — more than 1/3 of the world’s population — lack reliable access to clean water for at least one month of the year. [9]

    When water is scarce in Bali, less affluent people and businesses are forced to go without. Commercial establishments including hotels, which consume many times more water per capita than Balinese households, are billed at a lower rate, and are given prolonged access to water during times of drought. [10] What’s more, groundwater is severely depleted in much of Bali due to heavy use from the tourism industry, dropping up to 50 meters (164 feet) in the past ten years. [11] Deep wells are often infeasible for local families due to high cost, site conditions, or concerns about further depleting water from neighbors’ shallow wells.

    As on Gili Meno, Aqua-brand bottles are the most common source of drinking water in Bali. Locals, noting that bottles sit in uncovered trucks for hours in the blazing equatorial sun on long journeys throughout the island, have expressed concerns that plastic may leach into the water. They have also noted that the Indonesian rupiah is a volatile currency, and that dependency on global private water suppliers and fossil fuels subjects their drinking water — their most vital resource — to the speculative whims of the global economy.

    So what makes household and drinking water sources truly sustainable? From these examples, it seems clear that sustainable systems are:

    Safe from natural disasters. When centralized systems with no backup storage are damaged, everyone is left without water. Because earthquakes, floods, and other natural disasters often affect homes in a community unevenly, having a large number of smaller systems in place increases the likelihood that at least some will still function after natural disasters, and can provide water to those who need it most in those critical times.

    Insulated from the global economy. Water prices that depend on currency fluctuations and the bottom lines of multi-national companies can devastate families living at the margins. In sustainable systems, safe water from local sources is available to every household, regardless of ability to pay.

    Equally accessible to everyone. Much of the UN rhetoric surrounding the “water for sustainable development” decade is focused on conflict resolution and on preventing the violence that inevitably results from unequal access to water. Large-scale market-based systems and handouts for water-heavy industries reward those with a higher ability to pay, creating and exacerbating class tensions. While some community-managed water systems can lead to biases against minority populations [12], conflict at the community level is often easier to address than structural inequalities built into centralized systems.

    Localized. Ultimately, the above characteristics are most likely to be found when water systems are localized, using technologies that can be managed and maintained locally, and with policies that are decided upon by communities themselves. Localization also encourages systems that are well-matched to the ability of the local environment to provide for its human inhabitants, with support from governments or non-governmental bodies as needed.

    In large-scale centralized systems, several factors lead to a loss of local control. Resource-intensive technologies are needed to access water from deep within the earth and transport it long distances, and non-local industry can become a region’s biggest water consumer. As a result, communities lose control over their most precious resource. Large-scale systems also make it difficult or impossible to know whether local ecosystems can support their human populations. In rapidly growing urban areas — especially in semi-arid regions — development is already so divorced from local water resources [13] that drastic strategies are needed — including a sharp reduction in water use for the highest consumers, and a shift back to a way of life that can support human populations. But for rural areas, the path to sustainable water management is relatively simple: reclaim control of water from the global economy, and protect it from unwelcome heavy industry and multinational corporations.

    Many organizations throughout the world are working on decentralized technology and product-service systems to empower local water management. Part 3 of this series will profile a few of these outstanding organizations in Indonesia and beyond.


    https://medium.com/planet-local/community-scale-water-sovereignty-part-ii-9d7378a9daff
    #privatisation #eau #souveraineté #Indonésie #eau_potable

  • #Rampokan

    Rampokan est une bande dessinée du dessinateur néerlandais #Peter_van_Dongen qui se compose de deux parties, #Rampokan_Java, publiée en 1998 et dans sa traduction française en 2003, et #Rampokan_Célèbes publiée en 2004 et dans sa traduction française en 2005.

    Le titre est tiré d’une #cérémonie_traditionnelle javanaise, le #rampokan_macan, sorte de #rituel destiné à exorciser les méfaits causés par une #panthère ou un #tigre. Le rampokan fut interdit par les autorités coloniales des Indes néerlandaises en 1905.

    Rampokan appartient au courant dit de la « ligne claire » (Klare lijn en néerlandais)


    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampokan
    #BD #bande_dessinée #Java #exorcisme #interdiction #colonialisme #Pays-Bas #colonisation #Indonésie
    cc @albertocampiphoto

  • Tsunami en Indonésie : « Les ONG étrangères peuvent être un fardeau » - Libération
    https://www.liberation.fr/planete/2018/10/11/tsunami-en-indonesie-les-ong-etrangeres-peuvent-etre-un-fardeau_1684725

    Rony Brauman, ancien président de Médecins sans frontières, justifie la décision de Jakarta de privilégier l’aide locale. Selon lui, l’arrivée de milliers de secouristes internationaux peut mener à une « catastrophe dans la catastrophe ».

    Dix jours après le tremblement de terre suivi d’un tsunami survenu sur l’île des Célèbes en #Indonésie, le bilan continue de s’alourdir, avec plus de 2 000 morts, 80 000 sans-abri et 5 000 disparus, nombre d’entre eux ayant été ensevelis par le phénomène de liquéfaction des sols qui a englouti un pan entier de la ville de #Palu. Après avoir déclaré la semaine dernière qu’elles acceptaient de l’aide venue de l’étranger, les autorités indonésiennes ont finalement annoncé jeudi compter 10 000 secouristes sur le terrain et ne pas avoir besoin d’assistance extérieure, à part pour les quatre priorités qu’elles ont identifiées, soit des tentes, des appareils de traitement d’eau, des générateurs et des véhicules. Depuis quelques jours, la presse se fait l’écho du désarroi des petites associations de pompiers ou de médecins qui avaient fait le voyage. Comme d’autres équipes venues d’Europe, elles se sont retrouvées bloquées par les autorités, leurs chiens de recherches mis en quarantaine, leurs dons de médicaments refusés, et ont dû revenir en France sans avoir pu accéder à la zone sinistrée. Seuls des Pompiers de l’urgence internationale, qui collaboraient depuis dix ans avec l’organisation locale Jakarta Rescue, semblent avoir pu travailler sur place, recherchant en vain des survivants dans les décombres de l’hôtel Mercure. Rony #Brauman, un des pionniers de l’humanitaire, président de Médecins sans frontières France de 1982 à 1994 et désormais directeur d’études à la fondation #MSF, défend la position de #Jakarta.

    Que pensez-vous du choix indonésien de limiter l’aide internationale ?

    Les autorités ont raison de filtrer l’arrivée des #ONG étrangères, qui peuvent être plus un fardeau qu’une aide. Lors du tsunami de 2004, le débarquement de milliers de secouristes inexpérimentés et désordonnés avait été une catastrophe dans la catastrophe. Les administrations locales ont déjà fort à faire, elles doivent s’occuper des routes encombrées, de la sécurité, du manque d’eau, d’essence, de logements. Il leur est impossible de gérer des centaines d’ONG qui vont peser sur les ressources locales et qui n’ont souvent pour elles que leur bonne volonté, le besoin de s’assurer un crédit en termes d’image ou, plus rarement, des motivations crapuleuses [se rendre sur les lieux d’une catastrophe permet de faire un appel aux dons, ndlr]. D’où l’importance d’une autorité locale qui organise, cadre, dirige. Ce n’est pas agréable de se faire imposer un lieu et une forme d’action, mais c’est indispensable.

    MSF n’a pas envoyé d’aide aux Célèbes, à part une mission d’évaluation des besoins. Est-ce par choix ou parce que l’Indonésie refuse ?

    Un peu des deux. Nous avons une très longue expérience des catastrophes naturelles et nous savons que, sauf exception notable, les premiers secours d’urgence sont assurés par les forces locales et par les structures politiques, religieuses ou militaires. La solidarité collective s’organise spontanément. Plus tard, les ONG peuvent prendre le relais, pallier la fatigue et l’épuisement. Mais la coordination avec le pouvoir local et les Nations unies est indispensable. Même si la société est bouleversée par un événement inattendu, on ne peut pas débarquer comme ça au bout du monde.

    Que pensez-vous des critiques émises contre le pouvoir indonésien, accusé à mots couverts de laisser mourir sa population ?

    Elles tiennent de l’arrogance et de la présomption, lesquelles peuvent prendre des proportions effarantes. Il y a dix ans, lors du cyclone en Birmanie, certaines ONG avaient publié des bilans cataclysmiques. Des éditos assassins accusaient le pouvoir birman de mettre en danger un million de personnes. Il y a même eu des menaces d’intervention par la force de la part des Etats-Unis, du Royaume-Uni ou de la France. Or le risque de famine et d’épidémie était nul, et la société et l’armée avaient pris en main la distribution d’eau potable et de nourriture. Même si les chiffres sont forcément très imprécis, c’est immoral d’exagérer sciemment les besoins pour mieux se mettre en valeur.

    Lors de ces catastrophes, a-t-on tendance à mettre en lumière l’aide occidentale ?

    L’aide locale ne se voit pas sur les images, les gens sont habillés comme les autres, ont la même allure. L’information est souvent centrée sur les équipes venues de l’étranger. En #Haïti, une seule personne désincarcérée par des pompiers occidentaux avait accaparé les médias, qui semblaient ignorer que 1 500 autres survivants avaient été sortis à mains nues par les habitants. Au Sri Lanka, en 2004, une bande de terre de 50 à 200 mètres avait été touchée par le tsunami. Dès les premières 24 heures, le pays avait mobilisé un millier de médecins et d’infirmiers qui connaissaient la langue, l’organisation de soins et la pharmacopée locales. Malgré cette réponse forte, on continuait d’envoyer depuis l’étranger des équipes médicales inutiles.

    Mais n’y avait-il pas urgence à soigner les blessés à Palu ?

    Contrairement à un mythe infondé, même si les besoins médicaux ont un aspect spectaculaire, ce n’est pas le problème fondamental. Haïti a été une exception en 2010, puisqu’il y a eu un très grand nombre de blessés en quelques minutes à Port-au-Prince à cause de l’habitat construit en dur avec de mauvais scellements. Les structures locales n’étaient pas capables de répondre à des attentes aussi spécifiques que des interventions chirurgicales orthopédiques. Nous avions donc effectué 15 000 procédures chirurgicales d’urgence pour environ 10 000 blessés [les patients peuvent avoir plusieurs blessures]. A Palu, la plupart des victimes sont mortes écrasées dans l’effondrement des immeubles ou noyées par le tsunami. Les autres ne sont en général que légèrement blessées ou ont perdu leur logement. La question des abris est un enjeu primordial. Le manque de sommeil est rarement évoqué, pourtant, si les gens ne peuvent pas dormir à cause de la pluie ou du vent, ils vont tomber malades, devenir agressifs…

    Sur place, des journalistes racontent que les habitants, affamés et assoiffés, espéraient pourtant de l’aide étrangère…

    A l’évidence, le gouvernement indonésien n’a pas mis en place un dispositif d’information à destination de la population de Palu. Les délais d’arrivée des vivres, de l’eau potable, des générateurs sont difficiles à juger faute de connaissance des réalités de terrain. La mobilisation et le transport de grandes quantités de matériels et de biens de survie prennent toujours du temps, en fonction de la localisation des dégâts, de l’état des ports et des aéroports, de l’isolement des villages gravement touchés… Et seules les armées disposent des moyens logistiques nécessaires.

    La menace du choléra est souvent agitée pour justifier une intervention extérieure. Est-ce un mythe ?

    En tant que médecin, j’ai été frappé de voir les Indonésiens regrouper les corps et les enterrer rapidement après les avoir recouverts de chaux, comme si on croyait encore à la génération spontanée de micro-organismes meurtriers. Les cadavres en grand nombre sont une source d’anxiété, dégagent une odeur intenable mais ils ne génèrent pas de risque épidémique. Certes, une canalisation peut se rompre, entrer en contact avec des corps en décomposition, ce qui créera des foyers de gastro-entérites très désagréables et des problèmes sérieux pour les bébés et les personnes fragiles. Et s’il y avait déjà du #choléra sur place, le séisme ne va pas arranger les choses. Mais c’est tout. Cette croyance qui date de l’Antiquité a des conséquences juridiques, financières et psychologiques importantes : sans les rites funéraires, la sublimation de la mort n’aura pas lieu ; si le décès de leurs proches n’est pas déclaré, les survivants vont se trouver face à des casse-tête juridiques, etc. On pourrait attendre des autorités sanitaires qu’elles rétablissent la vérité. Or les ONG et les agences des Nations unies contribuent à partager et diffuser un mythe potentiellement problématique.

    De crise en crise, le secteur de l’humanitaire apprend-il de ses erreurs ?

    Depuis une vingtaine d’années, les choses ont tendance à s’améliorer, grâce à des dispositifs d’information et aux critiques. Il ne faut pas tout jeter par-dessus bord. Comme les ressources locales ne sont pas inépuisables, une assistance internationale bien organisée peut se révéler extrêmement utile dans un deuxième temps, en amenant par exemple des moyens de télécommunication, du matériel de construction ou de l’aide alimentaire si les récoltes sont détruites. Je pense qu’il faudrait créer un système d’accréditation des organisations non gouvernementales pour les situations d’urgence, qui serait basée sur des critères d’expérience, de logistique et d’autonomie matérielle totale.
    Laurence Defranoux

    #humanitaire #rapport_colonial

  • #Indonésie : l’armée ne veut pas des équipes de secours étrangères
    https://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2018/10/09/les-equipes-de-secours-etrangeres-invitees-a-quitter-le-terrain_5366704_3244

    Dans un communiqué envoyé mardi 9 octobre au matin aux secouristes qui ont proposé leur #aide_humanitaire en #Indonésie, l’agence AHA, chargée de coordonner leur action, « conseille à toutes les #ONG étrangères ayant deployé des équipes sur le terrain de les rapatrier immédiatement ». La décision ne surprend pas de nombreux secouristes français, qui ont été ralentis dans leurs opérations par l’armée indonésienne, soucieuse d’éviter une ingérence étrangère après le séisme du 28 septembre.

  • Indonesia: The World Bank’s Failed East Asian Miracle | The Oakland Institute
    https://www.oaklandinstitute.org/indonesia-world-bank-failed-east-asian-miracle

    Indonesia, host of the 2018 annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), for years has been heralded as a major economic success by the Bank and rewarded for its pro-business policy changes through the World Bank’s Doing Business reports. Between 2016 and 2018 alone, Indonesia climbed an astounding 34 positions in the ranks. These reforms, however, have come at a massive cost for both people and the planet.

    Indonesia: The World Bank’s Failed East Asian Miracle details how Bank-backed policy reforms have led to the displacement, criminalization, and even murder of smallholder farmers and indigenous defenders to make way for mega-agricultural projects. While Indonesia’s rapidly expanding palm oil sector has been heralded as a boon for the economy, its price tag includes massive deforestation, widespread loss of indigenous land, rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and more.

    #Indonésie #Banque_mondiale #industrie_palmiste #terres #assassinats

  • À LA #DÉFENSE, UNE #EXPO #PHOTO BOULEVERSANTE SUR LES #MARIAGES_FORCÉS

    http://www.leparisien.fr/hauts-de-seine-92/a-la-defense-une-expo-photo-bouleversante-sur-les-mariages-forces-01-08-2
    publié le 01/08/2017
    consulté le 07/06/2018

    Nichée au sommet de la #Grande_Arche_de_La_Défense, à 110 m au dessus du sol, l’Arche du #Photojournalisme, inaugurée début juin, a reçu, ce mardi, la visite de Françoise Nyssen. L’occasion, pour la ministre de la Culture, de découvrir « #Too_young_to_wed » - « #mariées_trop_jeunes » - poignante exposition inaugurale signée par la photographe américaine #Stephanie_Sinclair.
    Sur un espace épuré de plus de 1 200 m² baigné d’une lumière douce et subtile, 175 clichés, dont 113 inédits, retracent le destin de centaines de jeunes filles forcées au mariage. Le fruit d’un minutieux travail d’enquête entamé en 2003 en #Irak et en #Afghanistan, deux pays où Stéphanie Sinclair découvre avec horreur que des fillettes s’immolent par le feu plutôt que d’être mariées de force.

    La photographe ne se limite pas au Moyen-orient : l’exposition illustre quinze ans de voyage à travers le monde, du #Yémen aux #États-Unis en passant par l’#Éthiopie, la #Sierra_Léone ou l’#Indonésie. Les clichés de Stéphanie Sinclair ont donc été pris dans le monde entier : on découvre par exemple les locaux d’un centre médical, en Indonésie, où 200 fillettes peuvent être excisées en une matinée, ou le parcours d’une gamine népalaise, Niruta, mariée à l’âge de 14 et photographiée à nouveaux dix ans plus tard, entourée de ses trois enfants... L’espace de l’exposition représente une surface de 1 200km2 et a accueilli depuis début juin environ 10 000 visiteurs.

    Mon commentaire sur cet article :
    À travers cette exposition, Stéphanie Sinclair cherche à nous faire prendre conscience, à nous qui vivons dans des sociétés privilégiées, des conditions atroces de certaines populations, dont on a tendance à penser qu’elles l’acceptent. « Des enfants sont mariées de force ? Leurs pratiques, leurs coutumes et leur culture sont différentes des nôtres, voilà tout. » Tel est parfois le discours de certains européens, et il peut être entendu. Mais voilà, « To young to wed » nous apprend que ces « coutumes » sont une violence envers les fillettes : elles n’acceptent pas toutes leur condition, la plupart en souffrent et certaines vont même jusqu’à se donner la mort en s’immolant par le feu pour y échapper ! Comment alors nier que la situation doit changer ? L’exposition adopte un point de vue aussi subjectif qu’engagé, qui cherche à mettre en valeur le malheur de ces enfants grâce au support artistique qu’est la photographie.

    • En effet, c’est une expo fascinante dans un lieu magnifique qui s’intéresse aussi aux Etats-Unis un des pays les plus riches de la planète mais au sein duquel certains groupes religieux pratiquent polygamie et mariages forcés comme le montraient bien plusieurs clichés. Je suis très heureuse de retrouver ce lieu grâce à vous. Y êtes-vous allée ?

    • De très belles photographies, très émouvantes et parfois insupportables ... Et qui incitent comme vous le dites à réfléchir sur le devenir des sociétés historiques, ou sur la nécessité d’une certaine forme d’acculturation pour parvenir au développement. Quand on pense au lien énorme qu’il existe entre le développement et l’éducation féminine, on pourrait se demander si les femmes ne doivent pas commencer par se défaire de leur culture traditionnelle ?

    • @dan_de
      Le cas des Etats-unis est en effet particulièrement intéressant dans cette exposition, il montre que ce genre de problèmes n’est pas réservé aux pays dits « en développement ».
      En effet, je connais cette exposition pour l’avoir visitée l’été dernier lors d’un voyage à Paris. Il est vrai que les images de Stéphanie Sinclair sont aussi bouleversantes que révoltantes...

    • @gimli122
      Je pense en effet que l’amélioration de la condition des femmes pourrait être un facteur important de développement, ne serait-ce que pour l’image du pays auprès des aides internationales ! Malheureusement, on observe trop souvent que l’histoire des pays prend le chemin inverse : c’est presque systématiquement après le développement du pays (ou peut-être grâce à lui ?) que les débats concernant la place des femmes dans la société commencent seulement à émerger...

  • Le fief de l’huile de palme - Nouvelles de l’environnement
    https://fr.mongabay.com/2018/03/fief-de-lhuile-de-palme

    Un politicien de #Bornéo a transformé son district en une mer de palmiers à huile. Cela a-t-il bénéficié à ses électeurs ou aux membres de sa famille ?

    Il s’agit du premier volet d’Indonésie à Vendre, une série décrivant de manière détaillée la #corruption qui se cache derrière la #déforestation et la crise du droit à la terre en #Indonésie.
    Indonésie en vente résulte d’une collaboration entre Mongabay et The Gecko Project, un projet de journalisme d’investigation créé par l’organisation britannique à but non lucratif Earthsight.
    La série est le fruit de neuf mois de reportage à travers ce pays d’Asie du Sud-est, passés à interviewer des fixeurs, des intermédiaires, des avocats et des entreprises impliqués dans les #transactions_foncières, ainsi que les personnes les plus affectées.

    #terres #industrie_palmiste #palmier_à_huile

  • كيف يمثل فوز تحالف « مهاتير محمد » خسارة للسعودية والإمارات؟ | الخليج الجديد
    http://thenewkhalij.news/ar/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%A9/%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81-%D9%8A%D9%85%D8%AB%D9%84-%D9%81%D9%88%D8%B2-%D8%AA

    La victoire en Malaisie de Mahathir Mohamad est aussi une méchante défaite pour l’Arabie saoudite et les Emirats qui ont dépensé beaucoup d’argent en faveur de son rival Najib Razak.

    #indonésie