Calling Patriotic Mahathir, Ibrahim Ali & Ridhuan Tee to teach the Indons a lesson ...
Fuming indignation
Behind The Headlines by BUNN NAGARA
Indonesian extremists need an injection of reason, but what chances are there of getting it?
ON Aug 13, some Indonesian maritime officers arrested seven Malaysian fishermen for alleged trespass in disputed waters off Kota Tinggi in Johor. One of the fishermen said the officers demanded a ransom.
Malaysia’s Marine Police then arrested three of the Indonesian officers also for alleged trespass, which seemed to even the score. Although Indonesia had started the arrests and detained more than twice as many Malaysians, people in Malaysia did not protest Jakarta’s action.
But things erupted in Indonesia: the Malaysian embassy in Jakarta and the Malaysian flag were defiled; Malaysians in Indonesia were threatened with assault and deportation; and Indonesia’s Maritime and Fisheries Minister demanded an apology from Malaysia.
The Indonesian extremists that Malaysia regards as a hired mob almost defy description. They have been described as ultra-nationalists, but the fact that their actions only hurt their nation’s interests underscores the need for reason.
They claim to resent the reported humiliation of the three Indonesian officers in Malaysian custody, but how were the Malaysian fishermen treated while in Indonesian custody? And how reliable were the reports of Malaysian mistreatment of the Indonesians?
The history of bilateral relations shows these periodic outbursts against Malaysia to go back further and deeper. The attacks on Malaysia’s embassy and the Jalur Gemilang are symptomatic of a deep-seated rejection of the Malaysian state itself among some quarters in Indonesia, which can be traced to its first president Sukarno.
Even before Malaysia was officially formed in 1963, Sukarno had moved to stop it under his slogan of “ganyang (crush) Malaysia” in his policy of konfrontasi (confrontation). That pushed back the date of Malaysia’s formation, originally scheduled for Aug 31 to coincide with Merdeka Day.
Sukarno’s contempt for the Malaysian state led to airborne and amphibious military assaults on Malaysian soil, producing a war that lasted for more than three years. Although limited in nature, this set back bilateral relations with wounds that fester until today.
Ordinary Malaysians on occasion find these rough sentiments brushing against them. In the 1967 Thomas Cup in Jakarta, for example, play had to be stopped because of rowdy home crowd behaviour when Malaysia was leading Indonesia four matches to three.
But 1967 was also the year of supposed change in Indonesia. Sukarno had been removed to make way for Gen Suharto’s Orde Baru (New Order) regime.
That was the year Asean was formed to keep a lid on things. Some visionary leaders in Malaysia and Indonesia came together quietly to seize a historic opportunity: to create a regional community, essentially a fraternity of neighbouring nation states, so that the bitterness of the past would not be repeated.
That, at least, had been the purpose and the hope. In practice much of the intention had been achieved, but Asean was not a foolproof cure for occasional friction.
In the 1990s, Malaysia’s RTM inadvertently showed television news clips of anti-government demonstrations in Indonesia. Jakarta immediately dispatched a group of generals to Kuala Lumpur to demand an apology.
More recently, Indonesian officials demanded that Malaysian news media stop using the word “Indons” in news headlines to mean Indonesians, owing to the negative connotations of Indonesian illegal workers and migrants in Malaysia. While Indonesians celebrate their newfound post-Suharto press freedom and regard their Asean colleagues condescendingly, they would set limits of media expression in other countries.
Occasional friction would still result over the perceived mistreatment of Indonesian nationals or alleged trespass on Indonesian territory by Malaysians. For the Indonesian extremists returning to the call of “ganyang Malaysia”, it did not matter that these were a minority of cases, or that Indonesian nationals also flouted Malaysian law while in Malaysia.
As an Indonesian colleague once told me, there are still some Sukarnoists with only contempt for the idea of Malaysia. Periodic spurts of outrage over one issue or another seem to have common, undeclared origins.
Malaysia has never denied that there have been cases of unlawful practices and foreign worker abuse or exploitation, sometimes with the collusion of Malaysian labour agencies.
Equally, Indonesia needs to acknowledge unlawful conduct on the part of many of their nationals, beginning with illegal entry into Malaysia.
For Malaysia, what is important is that reports of worker abuse are investigated and prosecuted through due process. At the same time, Malaysian NGOs covering labour rights continue to press for greater transparency and accountability on the part of the Malaysian authorities.
However, ordinary Malaysians and Indonesians may be baffled by frequent reference to “serumpun” (common heritage) between the two countries. If that were true, then why does such bitterness prevail?
As Asean co-founder and former Malaysian foreign minister Tan Sri Ghazali Shafie once observed, so much has officially been made of the common heritage between the two countries precisely because there is so little in common between them.
People in neighbouring countries often share family and cultural ties, but relations between states are something else. The Malaysia-bashers, both street mobs and their masterminds, are under no illusions about these distinctions.
If a small-state syndrome is marked by insensitivity to other states, a large-state syndrome seems to be characterised by hypersensitivity about others. Asean has since its formation been about the art of managing often prickly inter-state relations.
In recent years, some opinion leaders in Indonesia have suggested that their country has become too big and important to be in Asean. Yet it is precisely because of unhelpful attitudes that linger which make Asean even more important today.
If Indonesians still demand apologies for perceived slights from Malaysia, and further expect Malaysia to oblige, they have not moved on from Sukarno and Suharto. Malaysia itself has moved on.
Comments