Malaysia, Pakistan Keen to Enhance Trade in Commodities

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TSCFWA -- Malaysia and Pakistan are keen to further explore ways to enhance trade in commodities, as well as avenues to further expand Malaysian palm oil’s share in Pakistan.

A statement issued in conjunction with Primary Industries Minister Teresa Kok’s official visit to the country said the minister and Pakistan’s advisor for Commerce, Textile, Industry and Production and Investment Abdul Razak Dawood took the opportunity in a bilateral dialogue to explore various issues of common interest to both countries.

“For example, Pakistan is a net exporter of rice, fruits and other produce that are required by Malaysia, and Dawood encouraged Malaysia to consider instituting trading practices that could allow smoother passage of these products into Malaysia.

“On her part, Kok highlighted that medium density fibreboard (MDF) exporters from Sri Lanka enjoyed lower duties whereas Malaysia’s higher quality MDF was subjected to higher import tariffs,” she said.

Meanwhile, she said Pakistan is a key importer of Malaysian palm oil and products — in 2018, it imported 1.16 million metric tonnes of palm oil valued at RM2.97 billion.

She highlighted the importance of Pakistan as an end-user of Malaysian palm oil and facilitated by the joint-venture refinery between Malaysia and Pakistan in Port Qasim.

She said, while Pakistan is one of the most regular and dependable buyers of Malaysian palm oil and products, the commodity has the potential for a higher uptake in Pakistan, given that its local production of oils and fats meets only around 20% of its consumption needs.

“It, thus, depends heavily on imports to meet growing domestic demand and consumption. Demand has been increasing at a rate of 4.5% per year for the past seven years due to increasing population, income and consumer spending.

“Palm oil is widely used for the manufacture of vanaspati (ghee) and it is also the preferred raw material for the food industry in Pakistan, especially for frying and in confectionery items,” she added.

During her visit there, Kok was also invited to deliver the keynote address at the 5th Pakistan Edible Oil Conference on Jan 10.

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Fighting Spread of Hoax: Foreign Misunderstandings on Indonesia's Politic and Economic Data

TSCFWA -- The Presidential Palace responded to the criticism issued by a foreign economist regarding President Jokowi’s statement claiming that Indonesia has the third fastest economic growth in the world.

According to Chief of Presidential Staff Teten Masduki, Jokowi’s data was referred to other G20 countries and not the world's.

“President Jokowi wasn’t comparing it to the world, but among G20 countries instead. I don’t know whether there was a misquote by the foreign economist or not,” he said today, May 3.

Teten responded to an article issued by economist Jake van Der Kamp’s business column issued in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) who criticized President Jokowi’s data. Jake argues that Jokowi has been using the incorrect data because according to Jake, Indonesia's rank in the world’s economic growth is the 13th and not the third.

Teten considers that this is all a misunderstanding because President Jokowi used the G20 data when he was explaining about the subject. The presidential staff chief doubts that Jokowi misquoted the data since the data had been used by the president on numerous occasions.

Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati also gave her opinion on this matter. “We’re not claiming to have the highest economic growth in the world. The president said that he was comparing it among other G20 countries,” she said.

Formerly, the Indonesian military has filed a police report (update: cancelled.. ed) over a story originating at The Intercept, which claimed protests against the governor of Jakarta were actually part of a plot to overthrow President Joko Widodo.

The police complaint was actually filed against an Indonesian news site called Tirto, which translated The Intercept article with the blessing of its original author, Allan Nairn. The Indonesian military described the story as a “hoax.”

The Intercept article found objectionable by the Indonesian military was titled, “Trump’s Indonesian Allies in Bed with ISIS-Backed Militia Seeking to Oust Elected President.” The article charges that associates of the U.S. president – including the vice speaker of the Indonesian House of Representatives and billionaire Hary Tanoe, who is building Trump resorts in Bali and Jakarta – worked with several active and retired Indonesian generals on a plot to overthrow President Joko Widodo.

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A Kingdom of Riches: Saudi Arabia Looks to Strike It Rich with Mining Sector

TSCFWA -- Ma'aden

The history of mining in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia stretches back thousands of years. The first record of it has been dated to 2100 BC, while carbon dating has shown that operations at Madh Ad Dahab mine were underway at around 1000 BC. Archaelogists have claimed that a copper mine was generating revenue for King Solomon in the 10th century BC. But despite its early rising in the development of mineral extraction, resources in Saudi Arabia have remained relatively untapped.

Controlling around a quarter of the world's reported petroleum reserves, Saudi Arabia has been under little pressure to exploit other resources it may have access to, with the ever growing global demand for oil enabling the country to get richer and richer.

However, over the past decade the globalisation of oil exploration, an increase in climate change pressure and an influx of US shale gas and oil to the market have served to slightly ease the monopoly of Saudi Arabia and its fellow OPEC members. In response to recent reports that US exports would reduce demand for Saudi oil, the kingdom announced that it would be cutting production to 400,000 barrels per day, the lowest since 2011, in order to preserve the current price of $100 per barrel.

As pressure on its oil future, which will undeniably remain lucrative even if reduced, has increased, the country has started to once again turn its focus to the range of other resources that are in plentiful supply both underground and under the sea.

The revitalisation of mining started in 1997 when the government established the Saudi Arabian Mining Company (Ma'aden) to lead private investment in the sector and was followed in 2004 with the liberalisation of mining and mineral laws to make private exploitation more attractive.

Affirmation of these acts occurred earlier this year, when Ma'aden became the first mining company from the Middle East to enter the top 40 global firms. In a brochure to investors, half of the company is now listed on the Tadawul stock exchange while the government retains the other half.

"Diversifying the national economy is a strategic goal of the country. One way to expand those non-oil activities that offer considerable potential is to invest more into the mining and mineral processing opportunities that have already been identified," the company states.

While economic pressure to reduce its reliance on its oil reserves has provided the motivation to increase mining activity, geology, the deposition of sediments and the evaporation of seawater have revealed fresh resources for exploitation.

"The geological history of the most recent 500 million years has been marked by the gradual erosion of the continental area, and the deposition of carbonate and clastic sediments in a slowly declining trough extending towards the Arabian Gulf," said the statement from Ma'aden.

Gold mines fit for a Kingdom
The most mature and lucrative sector of the Saudi mining industry is gold. The Mahd Ad Dahab mine produces the lion's share. First mined over 3,000 years ago, the site, located near the centre of the Arabian Shield, is estimated to have already produced over one million ounces of gold and is currently producing 100,000oz a year. In addition to gold, Ma'aden extracts around 900 tons of copper 4,000 tons of zinc and 280,000oz of silver from the mine each year.

While operations at the mine were carried out in the middle of the last century, it was thought to have been exhausted after reaching depths of 200m. However, as the company explained, technology has enabled greater exploitation: "Today, these reserves are exploited by trackless methods. Recently an additional 1.4 million ton of reserves have been indicated."

The company expects the mine to continue operating for at least another seven years on current known resources, longer if further resources are identified.

The Sukhaybarat mine is located about 250km north-west of Mahd Ad Dahab and produces around 50,000oz of gold a year. It is mined to a depth of 130m through the conventional drill and blast technique. The company expects to get another four years of production at current levels by re-profiling the current open pit. While the current site has a limited lifetime, Ma'aden has identified a number of nearby locations. Bulgah, 65km to the south-west, has been identified as having 30 million tons and is delivering at a rate of one gram of gold per ton.

Industrial materials and joint ventures
In addition to gold, the kingdom is also extracting large amounts of industrial materials, with annual output of around 3,600 tons of zinc and 1,000 tons of copper. While the majority of the resources are extracted from the site at Mahd Ad Dahab, Ma'aden is also developing operations at its Al Amar mine where zinc and copper concentrate are extracted and sold to third parties for smelting.

To further develop copper mining in Saudi Arabia, Ma'aden recently formed a joint venture with Barrick Gold to operate the Jabal Sayid copper mine. Expected to become operational in early 2015, the mine is forecast to deliver 100-130 million ton of copper in each of its first five years of operation and continue for a further ten years with an overall expected output of 1.4 billion pounds.

Through a $10.8bn joint venture with Alcoa, the company has developed the world's largest vertically integrated aluminium complex. At Al Baitha in north-eastern Saudi Arabia the JV is extracting bauxite at an expected rate of 4 million tons per year. The refinery, smelter and rolling mill to process the material are located in Ras Al Khair and are expected to produce 1.8 million tons per year. Production at the plant started on 1 September this year.

A global force in the phosphate market
The most promising prospect for the future of Saud Arabia and Ma'aden is phosphate. Highlighting its potential, the Saudi Geological Survey said: "Our phosphate deposits have the potential to make Saudi Arabia one of the top five global producers of phosphate." Through its subsidiary Ma'aden Phosphate Company, it is extracting 11.6 million tons per year at the 50km Al Jalamid site, which is also producing an estimated 5 million tons a year of flotation concentrate.

To support the site, the company has invested significant amounts in infrastructure, including a power plant, water treatment facilities. The company has also invested in road and rail to enable transportation to the processing plant in Ras Al Khair that consist of a phosphoric acid, sulphuric acid and ammonia plant. At full capacity, the operation will produce around 3 million tons per year of granular Diammonium Phosphate and around 400,000 tons of excess ammonia.

To further develop its phosphate operations Ma'aden is in the process of developing seven large plants in Wa'ad Al Shammal. Once completed, the ambitious project is expected to produce around 16 million tons a year of product including phosphate concentrate, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid and sodium tripolyphosphate.

Saudi Arabia's history of mining may have started to bolster the coffers of King Solomon, but it has lain almost dormant for the thousands of years that have passed since. Granted a new lease of life from fears over the country's dominance of the oil market eroding and blessed by geological changes, Ma'aden, its investors and the established industry players it has partnered with look set to play a major role in the global mineral market.

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US, Saudi Arabia to Develop $200Bln Investment Program

TSCFWA -- US President Donald Trump agreed in a meeting with Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman Abdulaziz Al Saud to support a joint $200 billion, four-year investment program, the White House said in a statement on Wednesday.

During the meeting on Tuesday, Trump expressed support for US investments in Saudi Arabia and bilateral trade opportunities.

"President Trump provided his support for developing a new United States-Saudi program, undertaken by joint US-Saudi working groups, and its unique initiatives in energy, industry, infrastructure and technology worth potentially more than $200 billion in direct and indirect investments within the next four years," the statement said.

Furthermore, Trump and Salman agreed to continue bilateral energy consultations in a way that limits supply disruption and market volatility, the White House said.

According to the US Energy Information Administration the United States exported 4.7 million barrels of oil per day to 147 countries in 2015, mostly in the form of petroleum products.

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Article: Islamic Civilisation, Globalisation before its Time

TSCFWA -- Coverage of violence and Islam often go hand in hand. So it comes as a relief to be reminded that historically, culturally and intellectually, Islam is less a nihilistic creed than a global civilisation. A new book by Chase Robinson, which includes 30 pen-portraits of significant figures in Islamic history, is an elegant digest of the many colourful, creative and technologically innovative manifestations that the Prophet Muhammad inspired from his seventh-century oases in the Arabian peninsula.

The warriors and potentates are there, of course. Starting with Muhammad and ending with Shah Ismail 900 years later, they bookend the narrative. But in Robinson’s telling their martial arts are secondary to their aesthetic ones. Muhammad is celebrated not for his battlefield victories but his verse. Abd al-Malik, the caliph who took Cyprus, was better known to Islamic chroniclers for building Jerusalem’s majestic Dome of the Rock and, less appealingly, halitosis so severe it could kill a fly. Mahmoud of Ghazni, the jihadist who conquered the Hindu kingdoms of north-western India, was admired for decorating Islam’s eastern periphery with gardens. (“You have strung the wild rose with patterns of pearls,” oozed a court poet.) Timur, the Mongol “sheep-rustler and world-conqueror”, built towers of skulls but also the soaring, sublime mosques of Samarkand. Sultan Mehmed II, the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople, was “a renaissance man”.

As fascinating as the fighters are the characters in the courts they patronised. Robinson’s cast includes free-thinking physicians and biologists, calligraphers, cartographers (including Muhammad al-Idrisi, below), historians and poets. Though Muhammad himself was illiterate, his tradition was steeped in letters. One of his Suras, or Koranic chapters, was called “the Pen”. By tradition, the first man, Adam, fashioned the first pen, and Ali, the prophet’s son-in-law and successor, coined his own Arabic script.

Tycoons and businessmen are present, too: in the ninth century, as now, manufacturers were complaining of the Chinese dumping mass-produced kitchenware on their markets. Women also make an appearance, as mystics, courtesans and scholars. Beneath the arches of Mecca’s mosques, Karima al-Marwiziyya led Koranic study circles for both sexes. After all, she might have noted, many of the Prophet’s companions and preservers of Islamic traditions were themselves women.

What emerges is a civilisation that was a marketplace of ideas as well as goods. “Urbanisation and literacy was said to be a distinctly modern phenomenon,” says Robinson, “but that is wrong”. Rather the Islamic world, he says, epitomised “globalisation before its time”, “cultural cosmopolitanism”, “a world of cross-pollination” and capitalism. Rich from trade, its cities were the world’s finest. In the ninth century, Baghdad mushroomed as rapidly as Manhattan a millennium later, with intrigue, sex and irreverence no less a part of its makeup. Thirty thousand gondolas plied the Tigris. Another Islamic capital, Cordoba, was the greatest city in Europe and produced some of the greatest minds: without the 12th-century rationalist, Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose defence of Aristotelian philosophy against orthodox theologians influenced people like Thomas Aquinas, the Enlightenment might never have happened.

Through his portraits, Robinson debunks two modern myths about Islam. Salafists, the puritans who dominate 21st-century Islamic discourse, champion the Prophet Muhammad as the founder of a pristine, uniform faith which every Muslim should aspire to replicate. In Robinson’s rendition, the Islam the Prophet bequeathed was amorphous, inchoate and confused. Bereft of their founder, the Muslim community squabbled over not just the niceties of law, but who should rule and how. Muhammad’s favourite wife and his son-in-law fought pitched battles over his succession. The faith was also deeply syncretic: it expanded by absorbing the traditions of the peoples who fell under its rule. Its first rulers saw nothing incompatible between an upright Islamic existence and wine-drinking. Too often the source material was too skimpy to answer basic questions. The literalist Andalusian politician and scholar, Ibn Hazm, for instance, argued against the biblical death penalty for homosexuality, saying that nowhere was it prescribed in the Koran. (Ten lashes, he suggested, might be more fitting.) Only centuries later did the faith congeal into something akin to today’s orthodoxy.

The second myth Robinson punctures is one often propounded by orientalists: that the tightening grip of orthodoxy led to Islam’s supposed inexorable decline. In the tenth century, Abu Bakr al-Razi, a Persian alchemist and physician, wrote a tractate, “On the fraudulence of prophets”, asserting the primacy of reason over revelation and deriding the prophets as imposters and storytellers. Only his defence that reason was a gift of God spared him charges of blasphemy. The following century, Al-Biruni published perhaps the greatest classical account of comparative religion, citing Greek, Persian and Sanskrit aphorisms alongside the sayings of the Prophet. Five centuries before Daniel Defoe, Ibn Tufayl wrote a story about a boy who grew up on a desert island. Without revelation, his metaphor shows, humans develop as rational beings.

By the 14th century, Islam’s centre of gravity had shifted to Istanbul, but its courts continued to attract the world’s leading scientists and artists and remained at the cutting-edge of medical advances and military technology. After a familiar bout of devastation, Mongol rule ushered in fresh investments in science, particularly its 13th-century observatory at Maragheh, whose findings underpinned Copernicus’s models of the universe. Multiculturalism, perhaps even trans-confessionalism, remained a familiar trope of Islamic rule. Alternating between Sunni and Shiite rites, the Mongols’ faith felt remarkably fluid. Uljeitu’s vizier was Rashid al-Din, an Iranian-born Jewish convert to Islam, who assembled a warehouse of global researchers near Tabriz in the 14th century and set them to work on “an industrial-sized” history of the world, the “Compendium of Chronicles”. Its encyclopaedic breadth is a composite of texts drawn from Hebrew scholars (apparently translated by Rashid al-Din himself), Kashmiri monks, Chinese envoys and perhaps the most sympathetic account of Buddha in a non-Buddhist text. More than 2,000 miles away in Tunis, Ibn Khaldoun penned a social history which for the first time ditched the composition of court chronicles to examine the causes behind historical events.

There are, of course, characters closer to the caricatures of modern-day Muslim fundamentalists. Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyya, a 14th-century judge in Damascus and Alexandria, railed against the Mongols for favouring Shiism and applying their own yassa law, not Sharia – a sin which, he declared, rendered them apostates. When the Sunni Mamluk authorities he favoured overlooked a Christian’s insults against the Prophet, he agitated the mob to demand his beheading. A bit-player in his time, the Salafists have elevated him to centre-stage today, ranking his teachings alongside the Prophet’s in Saudi Arabia’s core curriculum. Islam’s most zealous detractors and practitioners alike could do worse than to recall Robinson’s other 29 characters too.

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Ten Years of Russian Cyber Attacks on Other Nations

TSCFWA -- In the past decade the Russian government has mounted more than a dozen significant cyber attacks against foreign countries, sometimes to help or harm a specific political candidate, sometimes to sow chaos, but always to project Russian power.

Starting in 2007, the Russians attacked former Soviet satellites like Estonia, Georgia, and Ukraine, and then branched out to Western nations like the U.S. and Germany. U.S. intelligence officials and cyber experts say a strategy that pairs cyber attacks with on-line propaganda was launched by Russian intelligence a decade ago and has been refined and expanded ever since, with Putin's blessing. Russia has shut down whole segments of cyber space to punish or threaten countries.

Related: FBI Agrees With CIA Assessment That Russia Wanted Trump to Win

Mike McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, says there is a bottom line to the pattern of hacking.

"For years now, the Kremlin has looked for ways to disrupt democracies, to help the people that they like to come to power and to undermine the credibility of the democratic process," said McFaul. Russia also seeks to weaken the European Union and NATO.

Stefan Meister, who has written extensively on Russian security strategies for the German Council of Foreign Relations, calls the attacks, which often include fake news, "a security strategy, not a media strategy."

"It is a growing policy that's strong and successful and they're getting bolder," Meister told NBC News. "They are risk takers. Putin is a risk taker, who thinks, 'If this doesn't work, we'll do something else.'"

A chronology developed by NBC News from U.S. intelligence sources shows Russia was involved in the following attacks:

April - May 2007: Estonia, a tiny Baltic nation that was occupied by the Soviet Union until 1991, angered Moscow by planning to move a Russian World War II memorial and Russian soldiers' graves. Russia retaliating by temporarily disabling Estonia's internet, an especially harsh blow in the world's most internet dependent economy. The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack focused on government offices and financial institutions, disrupting communications.
June 2008: In a similar attack, Russia punished another former possession in the Baltic. When the Lithuanian government outlawed the display of Soviet symbols, Russian hackers defaced government web pages with hammer-and-sickles and five-pointed stars.
August 2008: After Georgia's pro-Western government sent troops into a breakaway republic backed by Moscow, Russian land, sea and air units invaded the country - and Russian hackers attacked Georgia's internet, the first time Russia coordinated military and cyber action. Georgia's internal communications were effectively shut down.
January 2009: As part of an effort to persuade the president of Kyrgyzstan to evict an American military base, Russian hackers shut down two of the country's four internet service providers with a DDOS attack. It worked. Kyrgyzstan removed the military base. Subsequently, Kyrgyzstan received $2 billion in aid and loans from the Kremlin.
April 2009: After a media outlet in Kazakhstan published a statement by Kazakhstan's president that criticized Russia, a DDOS attack attributed to Russian elements shut down the outlet.
August 2009: Russian hackers shut down Twitter and Facebook in Georgia to commemorate the first anniversary of the Russian invasion.
May 2014: Three days before Ukraine's presidential election, a Russia-based hacking group, took down the country's election commission in an overnight attack. Even a back-up system was taken down, but Ukrainian computer experts were able to restore the system before election day. Ukrainian police say they arrested hackers who were trying to rig the results. The attack was aimed at creating chaos and hurting the nationalist candidate while helping the pro-Russian candidate. Russia's preferred candidate lost.
March 2014: For the second time, the Russian government allegedly coordinated military and cyber action. A DDOS attack 32 times larger than the largest known attack used during Russia's invasion of Georgia disrupted the internet in Ukraine while Russian-armed pro-Russian rebels were seizing control of the Crimea.
May 2015: German investigators discovered hackers had penetrated the computer network of the German Bundestag, the most significant hack in German history. The BfV, German's domestic intelligence service, later said Russia was behind the attack and that they were seeking information not just on the workings of the Bundestag, but German leaders and NATO, among others. Security experts said hackers were trying to penetrate the computers of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic party.
December 2015: Hackers believed to Russian took over the control center of a Ukrainian power station, locking controllers out of their own systems and eventually leaving 235,000 homes without power.
June 2015 - November 2016: In the U.S., Russian hackers penetrated Democratic party computers, and gained access to the personal emails of Democratic officials, which in turn were distributed to the global media by WikiLeaks. Both the CIA and the FBI now believe the intrusions were intended to undermine the election, hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump win.
October 2015: Security experts believe that the Russian government tried to hack into the Dutch government's computers to pull out a report about the shoot down of Flight MH17 over Ukraine. The Dutch Safety Board headed the investigation of the Malaysia Airlines downing, and concluded that the passenger plane was brought down by a Russian-made missile fired from an area held by pro-Russian rebels.
January 2016: A security firm announces that it believes Russian hackers were behind attacks on Finland's Foreign Ministry several years before.
December 2016: Earlier this month, BfV head Hans-Georg Maasen warned "There is growing evidence of attempts to influence the federal election next year," referring to German parliamentary elections likely to take place in September 2017. Maasen specifically cited Russia as the source of the attacks, adding, "We expect a further increase in cyber attacks in the run-up to the elections." Experts believe the Russians are trying to damage incumbent Chancellor Merkel, who supported sanctions against Putin's personal associates after Russia annexed Crimea.

Scott Borg, president of U.S. Consequences Unit, a cybersecurity firm that tracks Russian attacks, says that even as Russia's ambition grows it also acts on a much smaller scale. Said Borg, "They have tried to influence local elections in three or four eastern European countries as well as Germany."

The variety of the attacks does not surprise Meister of the German Council of Foreign Relations. He says the Russians tailor the attacks to the circumstances of each country.

"I think our politicians still underestimate the Russian activities," he added, saying protection against cyber attacks still doesn't have the priority it should.

Despite U.S. intelligence's belief that Russian hacks of the U.S. election were aimed at helping Trump or spreading doubt about the outcome, Meister thinks there is a simpler explanation: The Russians just revel in it.

"Their successful hacking and influencing -- we are frightened by that and that makes them happy," said Meister.

Meister and Borg also believe the rise in Russian cyber attacks has been encouraged by the most powerful men in Russia, pointing to 2012 papers by Vladimir Putin and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, the head of the military. Putin wrote an article in 2012 called "Russia in a Changing World" that advocated using a "complex of tools and methods for achieving foreign policy goals without deploying weapons." The piece called the internet and social media "effective tool[s]."

Around that same time, said Borg, Russia more effectively organized its cyber efforts, increasingly using its intelligence services to do the job rather than contracting with cyber gangs.

Both Meister and Borg believe Russia sees its cyber effort as a response to Western pressure and as an effective weapon for a nation that knows its conventional military arsenal of tanks, planes and ships is outmatched.

Related: Why Obama Didn't Do More About Russian Hack

As a senior U.S. intelligence official told NBC News, "Nukes may give them status but cyber gives them a usable strategic capacity, potential for active measures."

"It's pragmatic," said Borg. "If they can put in a good effort, even if they don't have a good shot at winning, they'll do it. The benefits are so great they are willing to take risks. If you can greatly diminish NATO or undermine U.S. relations with Europe, it's worth it to them."

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Indonesian President’s Visit To India: A Visit Of Strategic Significance – Analysis

TSCFWA -- By Gautam Mukhopadhaya*

Indonesian President, Joko “Jokowi” Widodo will be making an official visit to India in a couple of weeks. This will be the first bilateral bilateral visit at that level since Prime Minister Modi took charge in May 2014 and President Jokowi assumed office as President in October 2014 (after elections that brought the PDP-I headed by Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of the founding leader of Indonesia, Soekarno, to power), though both have traveled extensively during this period visiting key regional and world capitals. Former Indonesian President Susilo Bambamg Yudhoyono and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had earlier given a big boost to India-Indonesia relations with the signing of a strategic partnership agreement and reciprocal visits.

The visit should not be treated as a routine state visit with little long term outcomes. Indonesia with its size, population, strategic maritime location and natural resources, is a latent Asian power. Since the heydays of the struggle for independence against colonial rule when Nehru, Biju Patnaik, Soekarno and other Indonesian independence leaders like Mohammad Hatta and future PM Sutan Syahrir forged such close political bonds, as well as the 1955 Bandung Asia-Africa Conference that laid the foundations for the Non Aligned Movement, the India-Indonesian relationship, like the two countries themselves, has been one of more promise and potential than realisation. India and Indonesia should therefore consciously utilise this visit to turnaround this relationship which theoretically can be one of the defining relationships in Asia

Much of the excitement of that honeymoon period in our relationship has now faded with the ennui that followed the turbulent and dramatic early years of our modern relations. Those were the times when Biju Patnaik flew his Dakota to rescue the future Prime Minister of Indonesia, Sutan Syahrir, from a Dutch siege of Indonesian independence leaders in Surabaya; Nehru denied Dutch KLM airlines any stop, fuelling or over-flight facilities in or over India; PM Syahrir offered to send rice from Indonesia to help counter a rice shortage in India after independence (that Nehru discouraged but Syahrir insisted on sending) and Nehru reciprocated the gesture by sending Indian textiles to Indonesia; Nehru organised an International Conference on Indonesia in Delhi just before India’s independence in July 1947; and Soekarno became the first foreign Head of State to attend India’s first Republic Day celebration in January 1950.

There have been many earnest attempts, starting with Soekarno and Nehru, and later, post the Suharto years, with Abdul Rahman Wahid “Gus Dur’ and President Megawati up to President Yudhoyono who visited India three times, signing a Strategic Partnership Agreement in 2005 and attending Republic Day 2011 as Chief Guest, to bring a vitality to the relations. Yet, despite this, the relationship is yet to pick up traction.

Three seminal issues stand out amongst the many reasons for India and Indonesia to give this visit special importance. First, Indonesia’s geo-strategic significance, globally, and for India. Second, the role that Indonesia and India can play, separately, in providing alternative models of relations between religious majorities and minorities in South and South East Asia rooted in their own traditions of pluralism, syncretism and tolerance against a rising tide of religious fundamentalism in the region coming from the Gulf. And third, the concrete steps the two countries can take to augment their relationship and realise their potential for their mutual good.

Accustomed as we are to thinking of history and international relations in terms of empires, big powers and major trading nations, the strategic community in general has tended to think of Indonesia as a filling station between China, India, the Arab-Persian-Muslim world, and Europe. This is misleading and has blinded us from the economic and strategic potential of Indonesia.

Admittedly, there are good reasons for this. Until the establishment of a Republican government out of the Dutch East Indies under Indonesia’s first President Soekarno, there never really had been a unified Indonesia as we know it today, and even historically, none of the major ruling dynasties of Sumatra or Java exercised the kind of dominion over the whole archipelago that could have given them the kind of stature enjoyed by the imperial dynasties of China or India.

Post independence, apart from the period under Soekarno when he shepherded the Non Aligned Movement together with Nehru and other world leaders, Indonesia even now remains too preoccupied with building its nation, economy and democracy out of a very diverse nation to pursue a more assertive maritime or foreign policy that corresponds to its size, population, economic resources and potential, and geographical breadth.

Yet, it is not as if the potential and historical precedent for the strategic use of the seas of the Indo-Pacific by Indonesia does not exist. First, stretching over 5,200 kms from west to east, and 2,200 kms from north to south, Indonesia with its over 17,000 islands spread over 1.9 million sq kms, is the world’s largest archipelago, one that straddles both the Indian and the Pacific Oceans. It shares the choke point of the Straits of Malacca with Malaysia and Singapore, but also sits exclusively astride, and, therefore, can potentially control, virtually all the straits linking the southern Indian Ocean with the South China Sea.

There were periods in Indonesia’s history, such as during the Srivijaya-Sailendra dynasty (8-12th centuries), when their rulers used their location on both sides of the Malacca straits to tax and control the thriving trade in spices between the east and west of which it was the epicentre, so much so that at one point, the Chola king Rajendra Chola 1 launched a punitive naval expedition against them, triggering their decline.

Later, during the colonial period, so central were the East Indies to global trade, that the British and Dutch signed a Treaty in Banda Neira in 1667 under which the Dutch exchanged New Amsterdam, later New York, for the tiny nutmeg growing island of Pulau Run in the Banda islands of the Moluccas (Maluku) in what is now the eastern Indonesian province of Maluku.

While Indonesia does not yet seem to have developed or articulated a strategic vision of what to do with its extraordinary strategic location, the kernel of such a vision can be found in the words that Indonesians use to describe their homeland, ‘Nusantara’ (archipelago) and ‘tanah air’ or ‘land and water’, indicating that they see their seas as being as much a part of their national identity as land. But President Jokowi has drawn up a vision of Indonesia as the world’s ‘maritime axis’ requiring a strong naval force to protect its territorial integrity, fishing waters and energy interests, supported and funded by strong economic growth. India should welcome such a role for Indonesia around its territorial waters, Exclusive Economic Zone and beyond in the east Indian Ocean and adjacent areas of the Pacific.

Second, there is, presently, a battle for the soul of Indonesia being waged over the role of religion in forging Indonesia’s national identity around issues of ethnicity, religion and language that in some ways mirror our own.

Indonesia’s leaders have invested a great deal in the national motto of ‘unity in diversity’ (‘Bhinneka Tunggal Ika’) to hold this widely spread and diverse country together. One of the areas where Indonesia has been most successful in implementing this has been in adopting Bahasa Indonesia, a version of the Malay language used as a bazaar language in coastal areas for trade adapted to the Roman script, as a lingua franca across its length, breadth, and over 400 local languages and dialects, many with their own scripts and disparate origins, as a national language. It was able to do this at least partly because the culturally and politically dominant Javanese did not insist on Javanese as the foundation of their national language.

Today, Bahasa Indonesia is accepted as the language of administration, education and literature all over Indonesia including Java. Indonesia’s ‘experiment’ in nation-building through a common language could therefore have lessons for other multi-linguistic nations as well. Though conditions and solutions in India may not be the same, the Indonesian case may be worth examining in India too where the issue of a national language remains a live one.

Indonesia also prides itself on being the largest and most populous Muslim nation in the world, one that is both moderate, and now, a democracy. Indonesia’s syncretic traditions have bridged its indigenous, Indic, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, animist and latter day Christian traditions into a tolerant mix. The Javanese court chronicle, the Serat Centhini vividly portrays the extraordinary compromises Islamic ‘walis’ consciously made in Indonesia to accommodate, co-opt and assimilate existing composite indigenous and Indic festivities, beliefs and practices to make Islam more acceptable.

Post-independence, Indonesian leaders, thinkers and even Muslim religious organisations like the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Mohammadiyah have so far stuck to the idea of a distinctively Indonesian or ‘Pribumisasi’ Islam (articulated by Abdurrahman “Gus Dur” Wahid, later President of Indonesia after President Suharto, and others) characterised by respect for Indonesia’s syncretic and pluralist traditions that did not draw rigid lines between Muslims and non-Muslims and shariat and customary law, every bit as authentic as the ‘high’ Islam of the Hijaz.

In practical terms, this sustains a diversity of Islamic practices and a convivial framework of inter-religious relations and harmony in which Hindu epics, Sanskrit-origin words and names, Hindu and Buddhist temples, idols and images, an overwhelmingly Hindu majority Bali, and minority sects like the Ahmediyas, have historically coexisted without any problem.

Indonesia’s trajectory as a Muslim majority nation that is pluralist, democratic and still largely moderate and tolerant, finds a logical counterpoint in Islam’s trajectory in India. In India too, Islam struck roots at the popular and grassroots level by similarly fusing indigenous beliefs and practices to Islam to create a distinctive and more ‘Sufi’ brand of Indian Islam.

Amidst the tensions left by the legacy of the Partition of India, it is often forgotten that Indian Muslims too have made some remarkable adjustments in first accepting, at the height of Islamic rule in India under the Mughals that even with political power, they had to coexist with majority Hindus; then losing political power to the British; next, losing more than two-thirds of the Muslim population to Pakistan at partition; and finally having to live in a Hindu majority state under a secular Constitution accepting that they could practice their faith freely without the protective hand of an Islamic state. This is an act of faith in democracy and secularism, by an Islamic minority that once held imperial power, that has a doctrinal significance that does not seem to have been grasped even by its followers, possibly, because of an ideology that regards ‘true’ Islam as only the Islam of the Hijaz.

This pluralist, tolerant Indonesian social-religious philosophy has however come under serious pressure in recent years and months from a more literalist and Arabised version of Islam that looks at ethnic and religious identities in terms of binaries, and views Indonesia as a Sunni Islamic state where non-Muslims have to live by the rules of the majority Muslims and cannot aspire for political power or office. For a growing and vocal number of Indonesians, it is this homogenised version of Islam that is becoming the basis of Indonesian identity.

This trend has now come to a head with the controversy surrounding the candidature of Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama, an Indonesian Christian of Chinese ethnicity and formerly deputy governor of Jakarta under Jokowi, in elections in February next year for the post of Governor of Jakarta. ‘Ahok’ has drawn fire from more conservative Islamic organizations spearheaded by the Islamic Defenders Front (FDI) and including the Muslim Students Association (HMI) for alleged blasphemy in criticising those who are using a verse in the holy Qoran, the Meidah 51, to oppose his candidature for the elections because he is a non-Muslim.

Under pressure of street rallies organised on November 4, 2016, the police have decided to charge Ahok with blasphemy and hate speech under relevant laws much to the disappointment of the silent majority of liberal and tolerant Indonesians. This may be a tactical move to defuse the protest, but is nevertheless risky. President Jokowi has mounted a major political campaign to counter what many see as an existential threat to the idea of Indonesia and to his government by rallying around moderate Islamic organisations like the NU and Mohammadiayah and political parties, and the security forces, to the founding principles of ‘unity in diversity’ ‘pancsila’ and pluralism, with the words “…God created diversity and plurality, and our constitutional system recognises and protects such diversity and plurality…It is our responsibility to uphold it”. But the outcome is far from certain. Other examples of Islamic conservatism, militancy and extremism continue to manifest themselves.

India has a stake in the diversity of Islam found in Indonesia amongst other places in Asia against the exclusive and homogenising influences coming from the Arab world. Indonesia and India can also provide complementary models for coexistence of religious minorities with majoritarian communities in Asia and a globalised world (whether they are Islamic minorities in the West or India, or Hindu and other non-Muslim minorities in the Muslim world) based on their own authentic traditions of co-existence. This may seem a hopeless cause but is still worth championing in the face of what appears to be an inexorable rise of intolerance in many major religions.

Strategic Convergences

Against this background, there are some bold steps that Prime Minister Modi and President Jokowi could push over and above initiatives that are already in the pipeline to strengthen our relations at a strategic level agreed to more than 10 years back.

First, they could take a major initiative in the area of maritime security predicated on Indonesia’s ‘maritime axis’ vision and a more central future security role for Indonesia in the Indo-Pacific commensurate with its size and geographical location and spread.

So far, we have engaged with security issues with the ASEAN within the framework of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the ASEAN Defence Minister’s Meetings Plus (ADMM+) with limited but growing bilateral engagements with Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia and others. These mechanisms have also been the platform within which major players like the US and China, and individual countries within ASEAN that have disputes with China in the South China Sea (and little beyond the horizon, Japan and Australia), have tried to exert their influence in promoting their visions of territorial integrity, security, stability, consensus building and conflict prevention in the region.

But none of the ASEAN states have particularly robust navies; nor, given the power plays in the region, are they or the ARF likely to evolve into collective security mechanisms in themselves. One could argue that there is a bit of a security vacuum in the South Pacific as a whole that has so far been filled by the US, but which is increasingly being called into question by China. Political developments in the US too have introduced new uncertainties in the balance of power and stability in the Asia-Pacific.

In this context, a more robust maritime security capability for individual ASEAN countries (that could in future also provide the nucleus for an ASEAN maritime security force) could be in our interest. We have so far been a bit wary of the ‘Indo-Pacific’ concept promoted by Indonesia’s last Foreign Minister in the East Asia Summit forum fearing perhaps that it could introduce tensions in the South China Sea into the Indian Ocean or be used to enhance the presence extra-regional navies there, but the concept can also be used to develop a vision of shared security in which parties take responsibility for maritime security in their respective oceans and seas for the benefit of all. With Prime Minister Modi, this defensive mentality appears to have been shed and we may be ready to proceed with the idea.

Indonesia, with its geo-strategic location and reach, size, demography and economic potential, and balanced and nuanced relations with the US, China and Japan, would be the best placed to play a broader stabilising role in the region. Indonesia may be reticent about embracing such an idea openly as yet, and India may not be able to contribute much directly to enhancing Indonesia’s maritime capability presently, but at the least, it could recognise the latter’s centrality in the Indo-Pacific and initiate a strategic dialogue and defence partnership to the extent mutually convenient.

It could also be a hedge against dependence on big powers from outside the region whose commitment to regional security cannot be taken for granted and are subject to their own political predilections, and to rely more on neighbors and middle powers whose security concerns are far more anchored and predictable.

The political basis for such a relationship already exists in the Joint Declaration on the Establishment of a New Strategic Partnership agreed to during the visit of the President Yudhyono in 2005, and its subsequent elaboration into a five-pronged initiative that included a strategic engagement and defence and security cooperation amongst other areas adopted during Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s visit to Indonesia in October 2013. An Eminent Persons Group was also created during President Yudhyono’s state visit to India as Chief Guest on our Republic Day in 2011 and tasked to come up with a ‘Vision Statement 2025’ to enhance India-Indonesia bilateral relations.

These could now be used to initiate a strategic dialogue premised on realising Indonesia’s maritime axis vision and bolstering Indonesia as a maritime power through an appropriate level and forum that includes the armed forces and key Indonesian Ministries on the one hand, and the utilisation of space data under the India-Indonesia space cooperation programme to monitor and protect Indonesia’s natural resources, especially fishing in its territorial waters and EEZ, and greater Indian investment in other areas of strategic importance for Indonesia, on the other.

On defence and security, the New Strategic Partnership (NSP) could also be used to renew and upgrade our MoU on Defence Cooperation of 2001. This could cover cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, exports of equipment for defence and maritime and coastal surveillance, defence production, technical cooperation, more advanced service-to-service talks and exercises, cooperation on hydrographic surveys, HADR, and pollution control; and separate MoUs or mechanisms for sharing of maritime security information on non-traditional threats including environmental threats, counter-terrorism, and information on white shipping.

They could also take some imaginative steps in the areas of trade and investment and Culture and People-to-People Relations as part of the proposed Comprehensive Economic Partnership under the NSP. Chief among the former could be a thrust towards Indian investment in Indonesia taking advantage of the natural resource and industrial potential of the country, its large 250 million market, the 600 million ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) market and US$ 2.6 trillion economy, and ASEAN FTAs with India and major East Asian economies, to shape the Comprehensive Economic Partnership as part of our NSP. It is also well qualified to join and revitalize the now neglected India-Brazil-South Africa IBSA grouping.

India has been traditionally ambivalent about the idea of Indian investments abroad, focusing as it has, on first, domestic, and now also foreign investment into India for capital, technology, know-how and employment on the principle that capital invested abroad is capital lost to India. PM Modi’s ‘Make in India’ is no different in this regard. This is shortsighted. All major powers, be it the US, EU, Germany, Japan or China today look at foreign investment in economic and strategic terms. Investing in a foreign country is a stronger tool for influence than trade. Indian investment in strategically important countries, particularly in our neighbourhood and extended neighbourhood, should thus be seen as an arm of our foreign policy. We are not yet doing so.

People-centric growth is President Jokowi’s top priority, one that he would like to leave as his legacy, for which he has courted foreign investment particularly in the energy, infrastructure, manufacturing and tourism sectors. Indian investment in Indonesia is perhaps President Jokowi’s top most objective from this visit to India.

So far, the principal foreign investors in Indonesia are Singapore, Japan, China and South Korea. While there is already substantial Indian investment in areas like coal (Reliance, Adani, Aditya Birla), textiles (Aditya Birla), steel, automotive (Tata Motors, TVS) and banking sectors, much more can be done, There are huge new opportunities in the power sector where Indonesia faces a significant shortfall in funding to reach its target of 35,000 MW by 2019; roads, railways, ports and airports; industrial estates and Special Economic Zones; ICT; and tourism, where 10 destinations have been prioritised.

But apart from these, mostly lucrative, long gestation infrastructure projects that are attractive to major players. particular policy attention needs to be paid to increasing our presence in the manufacturing sector in areas of our strength like consumer goods, textiles, pharmaceuticals, automotive and auto parts, steel, agricultural machinery, engineering and industrial goods like boilers, pumps, valves, machine tools, plastics and chemicals, small & medium industries, etc. where medium and smaller industries can also play a part. Investing in these sectors will be a win-win for both Indonesia and India, contributing to local employment and the economy in general for the former, and to markets and brand visibility for India.

A number of well planned industrial estates with adequate infrastructure for power, transport, ports, bonded warehouses, training facilities, and residential and commercial areas have already come up in Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, Medan and Batam, and a new 2,700 hectare estate created in partnership with Singapore has just been inaugurated during Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien ‘s visit to Indonesia in mid-November in central Java. Of particular interest to us from a connectivity point of view should be the Medan industrial zone near the port at Belawan in north Sumatra that is physically the closest to the eastern seaboard of India and where we also have long had a Consulate General, to help our investors.

This could be combined with a shipping service from Chennai or Krishnapatnam to Medan via the Andaman islands that could be used to export Indian engineering, consumer goods, textiles, pharmaceuticals etc. to at least partly offset the large imbalance in our trade with Indonesia in which exports from India only account for US$ 2 bn out of a total trade of US$ 15.9 bn. The Prime Minister’s announcement of a US$ 1 bn credit line for connectivity projects in the ASEAN could be partially used to fund this shipping line. Air links from Medan to Chennai directly or via Singapore should also be explored.

Efforts should also be made to unlock the US$ 500 million LoC extended by India to Indonesia to promote Indian exports that has been stuck on the issue of sovereign guarantees. Our LoCs could also be better structured to cater to standard infrastructure to more innovative social development projects, and a better mix of Government-to-Government loans against sovereign guarantees and buyers and sellers credits with more commercial guarantees. India could also think of funding some quick impact small social development projects in the provinces executed by Indian or local companies or NGOs that could have direct impact at the grassroots level.

Finally, in the areas of education, culture, and people-to-people relations, bearing in mind, Indonesia’s youthful population, its Indic cultural foundations that are still living, and the generally good image of India, it would be in order to give a thrust to ICCR scholarships in Indian universities, increased slots for training under ITEC, closer university-to-university academic exchanges and ties at the student and faculty levels, and vocational training by Indian companies in Indonesia especially in areas like IT, business management, accounting, etc. to give a fillip to enduring people-to-people ties.

There is a lot that India could gain from Indonesia on Indian culture too. India ranks high in the list of nationalities visiting Bali, at least, in part, because of its Hindu population. There is a lot that we could learn from Bali on tourism promotion, but also about a more ‘simple’ Hinduism relatively free from caste and sectarian divisions. Apart from an absence of harsh and unequal caste practices, Hindu temples in Bali typically feature the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva and other gods like Ganesha, Saraswati etc. free from sectarian loyalties that are worthy of study and emulation in India.

Indonesian renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata too are living narratives and are being constantly reinterpreted, and Indonesian renderings occasionally give a prominence of characters who have been either forgotten or sidelined in renderings of the epics in India. A large sculpture of Ghatotkacha, a relatively minor figure in Indian renderings of the Mahabharata, graces the most prominent roundabout as you leave the international airport at Bali. There is much that both countries can learn from a study of the variations in the renditions of the two epics in India and Indonesia.

Likewise, despite the close ties of religious scholarship, both Hindu and Buddhist, the latter manifested by the visits of Chinese scholars to the Srivijayan capital of Palembang that was then famed for its Buddhist studies and the close ties between the latter and the Palas in connection with Nalanda and Bodh Gaya, and the prominence of Sanskrit origin names and words across religions in Indonesia, there is no professor or Sanskrit or Pali in Indonesian centres of learning mainly because of a lack of response from the Indonesian side. From a purely linguistic sense, this is a big lacuna. If nothing else, we should promote research into our historic and contemporary linguistic ties. The earliest writing preserved in the entire Indonesian archipelago are stone inscriptions in Sanskrit derived from the Pallava script in Kutei in Eastern Borneo dating back to the 5th century.

In general, there is a dearth of scholarship on both sides on the Indian roots of, and influences on Indonesian culture that is a bit puzzling for a country that prides itself on its cultural impact in South East Asia.

Lastly, if we were to invest more substantially on studying the foundations of our cultural relations through history, there could also be a case for joint Indian-Indonesian productions of our common cultural heritage that could be presented and promoted in other parts of Asia like Myanmar, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia where Indic influences still remain visible or strong, though increasingly driven down to the foundations.

The story of India-Indonesia relations in modern times thus presents a case of great depth and potential that have not yet been plumbed for their strategic value. Arguably, despite their many successes, both countries, in different ways, have also underperformed, nationally, regionally and internationally. It is hoped that President Jokowi’s state visit to India in December will provide the thrust to develop a truly strategic relationship that covers maritime security and defence of the Indo-Pacific, economic relations, both trade and investment, and cultural, training educational, and people-to-people interactions that can, together perhaps contribute to the realisation of the full potential of two major Asian powers in the 21st century.

Views expressed are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IDSA or of the Government of India.

Ambasassador Gautam Mukhopadhaya has served as Indian Ambassador to Syria, Afghanistan, and most recently, Myanmar. He has also worked in the UN Headquarters in New York as a Consultant on Social Development, and has been a Visiting Scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His range of interests include media, culture, human rights, social development, defence and security. He currently divides his time between Jakarta and Delhi.

Originally published by Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (www.idsa.in) at http://idsa.in/specialfeature/indonesian-president-visit-to-india_gmukhopadhaya_251116

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First Madagascar settlers may have been Indonesian

TSCFWA -- Madagascar is a country of paradoxes. It lies just 400 kilometres off the coast of Africa yet appears to have been colonised only within the last 1500 years. Stranger still, it now looks as if most of the women in that first population came from Indonesia rather than Africa.

We know from language and culture that modern Malagasy have African and Indonesian ties. To identify Madagascar’s “founding mothers”, Murray Cox of Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and colleagues analysed mitochondrial DNA from 266 Malagasy and 2745 Indonesians. This mtDNA is inherited from mothers.

Their results suggest Madagascar’s initial population contained around 30 women of reproductive age, with roughly 93 per cent of their genes indicating ties to Indonesia. Such a small population suggests they may have colonised Madagascar after crossing the ocean by accident.

Cox says that accidental crossings of the Indian Ocean are not without precedent. “In the second world war there was bombing around Java and a lot of that wreckage – including in one case a survivor in a life raft – actually washed up on Madagascar,” he says. “So you could imagine a boat being blown off course in Indonesia and making it to the island.”

Earlier theories had suggested that initial colonisation of Madagascar was planned, because the island made a convenient port of call on the silk road – an ancient trading route that ran across African and Eurasia. “We need to rethink a lot of our ideas about how Madagascar was settled,” says Cox.

Peter Forster at the University of Cambridge points out that the initial population was not pure Indonesian, suggesting the first people arrived in Madagascar via a generation of interbreeding with Africans. His earlier work suggests the DNA of the first population was just 60 per cent Indonesian. However, he studied fewer living Malagasy and analysed shorter sections of DNA – although his analysis included members of four Malagasy ethnic groups, while Cox studied just three.

Cox now wants to repeat his simulations with Y chromosome data to work out how many men were in the first population. “This isn’t just a story of the women.”

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North Korean Nukes... and Iran

TSCFWA -- Critics of the Iran nuclear deal often point to Bill Clinton’s nuclear accord with North Korea as a reference point for what we can expect next, and this week we were given a fresh lesson on that score. Satellite imagery shows Pyongyang is reactivating its plutonium reactor at Yongbyon, and now the regime has publicly threatened to produce more bombs and test another long-range ballistic missile.

That isn’t the nuclear-free future Mr. Clinton promised in 1994, when he claimed “the entire world will be safer” thanks to a deal that required Pyongyang to “freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.” Oh well. For now, the interesting question is why Pyongyang is again rattling its nuclear saber. There may be an Iran angle here, too.

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Indonesian Policies: An Overview

The internal dynamics of Indonesian politics in the last half of the twentieth century was linked to an external environment that both the Old Order and the New Order perceived as inherently dangerous. Foreign policy had as its most important goals security of the state and territorial integrity. The jurisdictional boundaries of the state were greatly expanded with the incorporation of the "archipelago principle" into the new international law of the sea regime. This new regime was codified as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1982. The "archipelago principle" effectively territorialized all ocean space inside straight baselines drawn from the farthest points of the most distant islands of Indonesia, thus giving new sanction to the Indonesian doctrine of the political and security unity of archipelagic land and sea space (wawasan nusantara), first promulgated in the 1950s. Sukarno's response to challenge was to attack the status quo--to "live dangerously," to cite his 1964 National Day address, "A Year of Living Dangerously." The Suharto government's approach, on the other hand, was one of cooperation and accommodation in order to gain international support for Indonesia's political stability and economic development while, at the same time, maintaining its freedom of action. Whereas Sukarno relished leading the New Emerging Forces against the Old Established Forces, the Suharto government turned to the Western developed economies for assistance. These countries were consortionally organized in the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), and along with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, gave massive economic assistance, amounting in the 1992 budget to more than US$4 billion a year. Although Suharto's pragmatic, low-profile style was a far cry from the radical internationalism and confrontational anti-imperialism of Sukarno's foreign policy, there was continuity in a nationalism that colored Indonesia's perceptions of its role in the region. The promotion of Islamic international political interests was not high on the Indonesian foreign policy agenda, despite Indonesia being the world's largest Muslim nation. Indonesia was a member of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) but as of 1992, unlike Malaysia, had not aspired to a major role in that organization.

Following two decades of post-Sukarno "low profile" foreign policy, by Suharto's fourth term (1983-88), a more assertive Indonesian foreign policy voice was heard as Jakarta began to reaffirm its claim to a leadership position, both regionally and worldwide, corresponding to its geographical vastness, resource endowment, population, and political stability. After an international rehabilitative period, Indonesia rejoined the community of nations, broke the Jakarta-Hanoi-Beijing-P'yngyang axis, ended the Indonesian-Malaysian Confrontation (Konfrontasi), worked to establish ASEAN, forged cooperative nonthreatening links with its neighbors, and became a moderating voice in Third World forums. By the early 1990s, Indonesia, which American scholar Donald K. Emmerson could still describe as "invisible" in 1987, had become more visible both as a regional power and a major Third World voice in the global political and economic arenas. In 1992 Indonesian foreign policy reflected a proud national identity and what British scholar Michael Leifer called its "sense of regional entitlement."

Indonesia's full reemergence on the world stage was signalled in April 1985 when it hosted a gathering of eighty nations to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Asian-African Conference in Bandung and to reaffirm the relevance of the Bandung principles. This conference projected Indonesia as a leading voice in the nonaligned world and provided it with an extra-regional platform from which to assert its new self-confidence and claim to proper international standing. Suharto, secure domestically in an environment of political stability and economic growth, and backed by his energetic and clever Minister of Foreign Affairs Mochtar Kusumaatmadja, prepared to assume the mantle of statesman.

In October 1985, Suharto represented the developing nations of the southern hemisphere (French president François Mitterrand spoke for the developed nations of the northern hemisphere) at a Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the UN meeting in Rome. This meeting recognized Indonesia's considerable accomplishment in achieving rice self-sufficiency. Suharto also undertook an East European tour to balance the close economic ties that had been established with the West and the general anticommunist orientation of Indonesia's foreign policy.

A major foreign policy initiative begun in 1985 sought for Indonesia the chairmanship of the Nonaligned Movement, a position that would acknowledge Indonesia's credentials to speak authoritatively in the Third World. Indonesia had been a founding member of the Nonaligned Movement and its adherence to and promotion of the ideals of nonalignment had been one of the few consistencies between the foreign policies of the Old Order and New Order governments. At the same time, Indonesia was the only founding member that had not hosted a Nonaligned Movement summit. At summits in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1986, and in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (later Serbia), in 1989, Indonesia lobbied hard but without success for the chair. A number of factors seemed to be working against it in an organization marked by geographic and ideological differences. Radical socialist regimes were not sympathetic to Indonesia's domestic anticommunism. African nationalist regimes mobilized in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa rejected Indonesia's incorporation of East Timor. Indonesia's solidarity with ASEAN on the Cambodian issue lost favor with friends of Vietnam. Finally, the absence of normal relations with the Nonaligned Movement's largest member, China, weakened Indonesia's position substantially. By the end of the 1980s, however, many of the objections no longer seemed as relevant in the changing global political economy as adroit Indonesian diplomats continued to pursue their country's goal.

At the Nonaligned Movement's thirtieth anniversary meeting in Accra, Ghana, in September 1991, Indonesia finally won its coveted role as chair of the movement and host of the September 1992 Jakarta summit. But as Indonesia grasped the prize, its political worth was questionable in a post-Cold War world without superpower rivalries. To set the scene for the Jakarta summit, as incoming chair, Suharto undertook the longest foreign tour of his career--a twenty-three-day trip to two Latin American and three African countries--in November and December 1991. At meetings of the Group of Fifteen in Caracas, Venezuela, and the OIC in Dakar, Senegal, as well as bilateral meetings in Latin America and Africa, he began the effort of shifting the Nonaligned Movement agenda from its traditional concerns to the economic and social issues confronting the developing world. This changed agenda was the focus of Suharto's address to the May 1992 Bali ministerial meeting of the Nonaligned Movement Coordinating Bureau, setting the agenda for the Nonaligned Movement summit. At the same time, however, Indonesia rejected suggestions that the Nonaligned Movement and the Group of Seventy-seven should be merged because the goals of the two groups differed. Whereas the Nonaligned Movement had a "special commitment" to the eradication of colonialism, racism, and apartheid as well as a duty to prevent the UN from being dominated by any one country, the Group of Seventy-seven fostered economic cooperation among its members.

The summit took place on schedule and without disruption the first week of September 1992. The Jakarta Message, the summit's final communiqué, reflected Suharto's call in his opening speech for a constructive dialogue between the developed and developing nations, warning that North-South polarization loomed as "the central unresolved issue of our time." In an expression of Indonesia's pride in its own development, Suharto offered Indonesian technical assistance to countries with food and population problems. As chairman of the Nonaligned Movement, Suharto brought the Jakarta Message to the 1992 session of the UN General Assembly.

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