Posts by Simon Grigg
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or do they largely let you just go about your business?
Mostly, unless you're in position of weakness, in which case the rules change.
We don't live in Indonesia anymore, partially because of what I've written. The dark side of the nation just wasn't something I was easy about being so close to, as even if you don't have to actually deal with it, it's in your face if you have your eyes even partially open.
On a business level we've done business with the many businesses who do interact on a financial level with the military, but no, not directly ourselves.
However, everything you land at the airport in Bali you enter a business which notoriously is owned by the navy (!) under a front. That costs most tourists at least something extra whether they know it or not.
The police, well mostly it's just the small instant fines which most visitors encounter. My friends who own businesses in Bali's tourist areas all pay some sort of protection money to the cops, and there was a levy added to that in parts of the lower triangle after the last local elections, when the successful candidate for governor asked local business to cover his (anti-corruption) campaign costs.
But I'm not being unreasonable in saying that when Ms. Corby was caught a few years back, $30k and a muzzle on both the Australian media and her family would've likely eased the way home rather quickly.
And this sort of thing is not uncommon. Horrifying reports of police gang rapes of female drug users, who were kept in cells for weeks for the purpose, were all over the Indonesian media last year. Nothing was done about it.
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I got to reading about the Indonesian military after your last post on the topic, correct me if I'm wrong but the day to day military mandate of the TNI is also primarily maintaining internal security?
Not any more, that role was stripped away from them after 1998 when the Police, and more importantly, the formerly very nasty Brimob were devolved away from the military to civilian government. The police still, however, do exist pretty much as a body who can do what they want despite the current governments ongoing attempts to reign them in, and remain simply corrupt to the core, and pretty bloody nasty at every level, running a raft of illicit businesses. But there seems to be a growing mass had-enough movement and it's going to be interesting in years to come.
The Army (and the very, very powerful airforce, despite the fact that their air fleet is best described as barely in the air) are on another level altogether. They're tasked with just external security now and there was a national uproar last year when the President suggested they be bought into the anti-terror campaign.
They operate literally thousands of legit and semi-legit businesses, often behind fronts, including many monopolies (the ones that are not controlled by Suharto family or cronies) despite a change in law a few years back which said they had to divest themselves of these by the end of 2009, and, like the police, those they don't own, they often 'protect'.
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Having said that, I'd rather be in an American prison than a Chinese one.
The irony being that in China last year I saw a documentary on the state of prisons in California. It was a reverse sort of thing from the sort we get from the American networks or The BBC. I don't think either nation's incarceration systems are much to get excited about. It's degrees but historically the US has had a legally sanctioned hellhole or two, and likely still does.
The point I was making is that in the US dissent, debate and the mocking of the powers that be are the norm. In China? Not so much.
The norm seems to be that we simply don't hear about these.
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Mick Hucknall: I really don't like Simply Red and Hucknall comes across as a prize tosser / pratt in every conversation I've seen, but for all that it's a mixed prattishness as the dude actually has quite respectably good taste. I'm sure The Valentine Brothers and others were not unhappy with the large cheques Mick sent their way, and he funded and co-owned Blood & Fire, one of the truly great reggae reissue labels, which, once again, sent a few cheques in the right direction.
In the mid 1990s he was in Auckland for a tour or something and he approached us to DJ for a night in the Box. We agreed, not expecting too much, and yes he was very much the prize tosser / pratt, and totally full of his own self importance, but, using two DAT players, he played a stonking set of soul, funk, reggae and Rnb that completely bought the, queues down High Street, house down, without the whiff of an overplayed classic anywhere. And refused to take any payment aside from a lager or two, asking that we donate his fee to charity, which we did.
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@Chris. The PLA's relationship to the state is not dissimilar to quite a few other Asian militaries' relationships to their respective governments...it's almost identical to the way the Indonesian TNI operates..a state within a state and largely autonomous, despite promises by successive civilian leaders to change the structure, which they, the army leadership, dealt with as the PLA did..exactly.
The same could more or less be said today of Pakistan, Vietnam, The Philippines and Thailand.
We think of it as unusual but historically Asian militaries have often worked as largely self sufficient businesses. As were most Western armies before the mid 19th Century, of course.
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A moment for the great Teddy P:
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One does wonder how a nation like, say, Thailand, with its lushness and direct easy routes to the sea and to SEA's rubber, tin and oil would have done over the centuries if placed next to, say California. As it stands, aside from a brief period in the 1940s when it was a Japanese client, the only real military threat to it has come from the west.
There is a huge difference in the mindset between the Chinese and the US that the argument that China is an expansionist military threat completely ignores. War is bad for business. It's something you hear and read a lot in this part of the world, from Singapore to Shanghai.
After all, the only times the US and China have come to blows was when the US directly violated what China sees as it sovereignty (North Korea and Taiwan).
The Chinese were non-committal to the fact that 500,000 US troops were next door from 1965-72, as long as it kept the feisty Vietnamese occupied, and didn't cross borders north.
China's blue water fleet has been a fairly direct response to the continual pushing at it's boundaries by the US military and one should never ignore how much the horrendous history of western intervention in China in the 19th through to the mid 20th (1997, if we're being exact) affects the way China does business with the west.
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It helps to have 'unspecified' threats. That way you can spend billions and billions on hardware without having to justify who you would ever have to use it against.
And yet in the 1970s Australia was quite open about the threat from Indonesia (on one hand, and on the other handing them Timor Timur), using the threat as the lever to open the door to the massive funding needed for that string of mostly useless bases across the north.
The fact that Indonesia then, as now, can't find it in themselves to get the traffic lights working, let alone drag a million men and women, plus equipment across thousands of miles of desert seems to have eluded the planners.
I have no idea what the point of such machines is, but that's their problem...
They have some history of buying utterly pointless military toys, but I guess it's their money.
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This discussion is taking place because the Chinese government (allegedly) hacked the gmail accounts of political activists yet you think they'd be better overlords than the US?
Because the FBI would never do such a thing, right?
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since he totally missed the East Village and Dupont Circle
In 1837 when Yellow Fever ravaged NYC, which largely finished around 14th Street then, most of those who could afford to escaped to the country villages north. The Pat's evangelical forbears in the city urged their not inconsiderable flocks to stay put as the fever was simply allah punishing the sinners, and would pass over them.
They too were ravaged and died in their thousands.