Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

Burning Bright

Four of us were driving on Sunday from Banda Aceh on the northern tip of Sumatra, to the town of Calang on Aceh’s western coast. It was a seven hour drive; we were five hours in. The road ran along the coast past wide empty beaches of pale sand, and then over high cliffs where gibbons dangled from the trees. It had been almost three years since I was last in Aceh, in the weeks immediately after the tsunami. At that time the destruction of the towns and villages here was complete; even now, there were stretches of the coast which looked as if a disaster had just struck them, with the tall skinny stumps of palm trees jutting up out of inundated marshy swamp.

One hundred and seventy thousand people – the number is no exaggeration – died along this coast in the space of a few minutes on Boxing Day morning. It was the largest single tragedy any human being alive has ever seen. Emotionally, it’s an experience that I hardly began to digest.

But three years later, what had been destroyed was being restored. Houses had been rebuilt, and rice fields had been cleansed and replanted. It was stirring and touching to see it all around. I met a woman whom I had last seen in a refugee camp, stunned with grief after the loss of her three children; now she had a new home and new 16 month old daughter. I saw the mosque which had been the only thing left standing in her village. The community had left a corner of it broken and unrestored, in case people should ever forget about the tsunami.

It had been a long, exhausting journey and the four of us in the jeep were quiet as the sun set and darkness came down. But I was filled with thoughts of how lucky I was to be here, how thrilling it was to be driving along this bumpy road through the bush – here, now, alive, with friends, surrounded by the timeless sea and trees. The road turned away from the coast and up through the forest, with a steep cliff above to the right and a thicketed plunge below to the left. The lamps of the jeep cast a wide oval on the road ahead. I was daydreaming (I really was) about travellers of long ago, who spent days and weeks rather than mere hours making journeys like this, and of the dangers and monsters which threatened their imaginations.

To the right of the road, a dim shape became suddenly visible. At first I took it to be a dog – but it was much too big to be a dog. Quickly it moved across the road and its shape and colour flared up in the illumination of the headlamps. At the same moment, everyone in the car exclaimed.

Dreams in Bali

[Hello again. Here's a post I wrote for another Times blog, 'Across the Pond', about US poltiics and the presidential elections.]

On the face of it, Asia is an unlikely place from which to pontificate on the US presidential election, and I am an unlikely pontificator. Drastic barriers of culture and language, the world’s largest ocean, and hours of time difference and separate Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok from Washington, New York and LA. Compared to Europe, the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia. Personally, I have set foot in America three times in my life, and never for more than a few days.

But the lives of people in Asia have been profoundly affected by political decisions made in the United States. To a greater extent than Europeans, American actions over the past sixty years have been a marked blight, as well as a blessing. Twice in living memory, in Vietnam and in Korea, American troops have fought disastrous wars on Asian soil. Large concentrations of US troops remain in South Korea and Japan, arousing mixed feelings, at best. Of course, the brightest Asian students still compete to win places at US universities, American ideals of self-betterment and democracy inspire Asian politicians, and people of all backgrounds are avid consumers of American popular culture. In Europe, sentiments towards the US tend to veer between extremes of admiration and contempt; in Asia, the polarisation is less extreme, but there is an general and often unstated ambivalence about the vastness of American US power, and a scepticism about how much the American public and American their politicians understand or even care about the world’s largest continent.

The interaction between US politicians and Asia has been one of the most interesting things about a frequently boring and frustrating event – the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where I write this. Here representatives of the negative American stereotype – arrogant, indifferent and patronising – have intersected with other Americans making an effort to putting over a very different image of responsiveness and responsibility.

I touched on some of this in my piece in this morning’s newspaper. To oversimplify: 190 governments have gathered in Bali to plan the next stage in the struggle against global warming. The European Union favours the kind of approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases on which the European Union has been created – rules and targets and commitments, agreed in detail, and legally binding on everyone. The US, at least the Bush administration, prefers a situation in which countries come up with their own targets, if any – if there are to be binding goals, it certainly doesn’t want any of them agreed this week.

The final document is being negotiated as I write. I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the two arguments (although the alert among you may be able to work out where my sympathies lie). The Bali International Convention Centre is full of environmentalists heaping contumely on the US; it is important to filter most of this out. But, honestly, in its press conferences at least, the US delegation has failed to impress.

It is led by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs at the State Department. The expansive vagueness of this job description leads me to suspect that she is valued for her PR and presentational skills – and Ms D does have a certain auntyish charm. Attending one of her press conference is like standing as a five year old in front of your primary schoolteacher as she tells you it doesn’t matter that you have wet your knickers, but that you should try to make sure that it never happens again.

The real star is a bloke called James Connaughton, who opens new universes of meaning in the world oily.

Nakasone: Board Games, not Rape

[Here's a piece that got bumped from Saturday's piece, about Nakasone and his wartime relationship, or lack ofn one. with the "Comfort Women'. There's a lot more to say on this subject, and I hope I'll be able to add to this soon.]

Saturday 26th March 2007

Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo

Japan’s most respected elder statesmen was forced yesterday [Friday] to contradict an autobiographical account suggesting that as a young officer during the second world war he forced women to serve as military sex slaves.

Yasuhiro Nakasone, one of Japan’s most distinguished former prime ministers, is the latest politician to be drawn into a bitter controversy about the so-called “comfort women”, which boiled over this month after years of simmering resentment.

At a press conference in Tokyo yesterday [Friday], he admitted that Japanese forces did force women to serve on “comfort stations”, the euphemism for military brothels where many Koreans and Chinese claim to have been enslaved and raped. But he denied allegations, based on an account he himself wrote 29 years ago, that he organised brothels as a military logistics officer in the Imperial Navy in the island of Borneo.

“They were civilian engineers, not military people, and they just wanted a place for rest or entertainment,” he told a press conference in Tokyo. “They wanted entertainment such as [the board game] go or Japanese chess. We simply established facilities where such [diversions] could be offered.”

But this account of innocent games centres seems to contradict a written memoir by Mr Nakasone published in 1978, before the existence of the “comfort women” had become controversial.

Death and life in Yogya

News of a plane crash sends a shiver down the spine of any air traveller, but anyone who has flown on Indonesia’s domestic air lines will experience a chill of awful recognition at the news of yesterday’s crash in Yogyakarta in the island of Java.

Unpredictability, improvisation and casualness can be charming when you are travelling on a flexible schedule by boat or bus and train. But when it comes to aeroplanes, what you want most of all is for everything to be done by the book. In Indonesia, you sometimes get the impression that the book has been mislaid.

Running an airline is a demanding and competitive business at the best of times, all the more so in a massive, sprawling country of 17,000 islands, subject to frequent tropical storms and even volcanic eruptions. One of the most remarkable airline incidents of all time was in 1982, when all four engines of a British Airways 747 failed during a flight to Australia. They had become choked with ash from Mt Galunggung in Java which happened to be erupting 37,000 feet below. When the plane passed out of the dust cloud, the silent engines hummed backed into life.

After the Asian economic crisis of 1997, Indonesian airlines were hurt as hard as anyone by the collapse of the currency, the rupiah. The soaring cost of aviation fuel had driven the price of tickets beyond the reach of anyone but foreigners, or the rich. More alarmingly spare parts had become unaffordable. I remember sitting on quarter full flight for Surabaya which was an hour late in taking off, as the ground engineers delved in the engine, making do with what they had.

There are plenty of alarms and bumpy landings, and occasionally an awful tragedy like yesterday’s, with all the grief that it brings. But for all this, Indonesia is one of the most alluring and enjoyable countries on earth, a place almost literally magical. Travelling there is worth the small risk; most people come home uninjured and alive.

Podded

In February, I spent a happy few days as a guest of 'Words and Ideas', the writers' and readers' segment of the Perth International Arts Festival, sponsored by Curtin University. One of my contributions, a conversation with the journalist, David Cohen, followed by questions and answers, can be downloaded as a Podcast here. (I hope that this link works - if not download it from this page.)

It last about an hour and consists mostly of a discussion of my book, In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos (click on the image above for enlargement), although at one point, for no very good reason, I also start talking about my career as a teenage UFOlogist. A bit cringe-making in parts, but it could be worse. Interestingly, my voice becomes lower in pitch towards the end of the hour than it is in the beginning. Not smooth and cholcolatey exactly but less ... piping.

Ten minutes from the end, it goes completely silent for a while but that's because some damn fool member of the audience failed to speak into the microphone. The other effect of this is that the reaction of the audience is almost inaudible. You'll just have to take it from me that they were almost constantly applauding or issuing forth chortles of appreciation.

US Amazon link for the book is here, Japanese Amazon (for the English language edition) here. It's also been translated into Dutch as Indonesia: Tijden van waanzin.

Here's a smattering of reviews from The Times, TIME magazine, The Observer, San Francisco Chronicle, The Guardian and a long and well informed one from the Columbia Journalism Review.

Your Christmas present problems, solved at a stroke! Buy, buy, buy . . .

The King of Mt Merapi and the Queen of the Southern Seas

It's less than a fortnight since the Java earthquake, but two or three generations of news have already been and gone - the "terror" arrests in Canada, death of al-Zarqawi in Iraq, and soon the maelstrom of the World Cup. I arrived there late on the day after the Saturday quake, and left the following Thursday.For the purposes of a daily newspaper, there wasn't anything very new left to say.

Day One: describe the immediate impact of the disaster, and recount the stories of survivors. Day Two: the terrible scramble for those trapped beneath the rubble. Then on Days Three and Four you concentrate on the aid effort, inevitably rather shambolic at first, but increasing in efficiency and effectiveness. On Day Five you might write a more general story about the region. But after that competition from more rapidly changing situations in other parts of the world edges the story out of the news pages. It makes me a little sad, and causes me to wonder whether I have become cynical. At this stage after the disaster, of course, the vastly more catastrophic Indian Ocean tsunami was still ain important headline. But, given its smaller scale and the relative competence of the aid effort, it's not surprising that attention should have turned elsewhere.

And now, of course, Mt Merapi, the turbulent volcano which overlooks the earthquake zone, looks as if it is brewing a major eruption.

Foreign Service

One of the few sources of light relief during foreign disasters is the opportunity they provide for sniping, sniggering and sneering at British diplomats. Bomb, earthquake or revolution - almost inevitably stories will emerge of Brits on the ground let down by the flakiness and arrogance of their local embassy. Ah, how we journalists love to smirk at those complacent envoys, with their diplomatic bags and wine cellars and their general chinless air of inheriting the earth!

So it is with pain and reluctance that I report an oustanding case of diplomatic assiduousness.

After the earth moves

Yogyakarta, Tuesday, 12.45pm

It's late, and I'm a bit knackered, but here are some sketchy observations on the Javanese earthquake.

Lessons learned the hard way

Compared to the aftermath of the tsunami in Aceh, the whole aid effort - Indonesian and foreign - is very much more controlled and impressive. Of course, the tsunami was exponentially worse, in so many ways - the death toll (170,000 vs 5,000), the area affected (the coast of Aceh, rather than just a 15 mile strip south of Yogya), the isolation of the disaster zone, the wretched communications, and above all the deadly combination of earthquake and wave. Even so, the workers on the ground today have a confidence and authority which is impressive this early on in the aid effort. I suppose that's no surprise - no one has better, recent experience of dealing with large scale destruction and loss of life than Indonesians.