Asia Exile - Times Online - WBLG

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 . . .

Next Papua?

East Timor has been independent and at peace since 1999. The rebellious province of Aceh has been calm since an unexpectedly successful ceasefire agreement last year. But after decades on the simmer, the third and last of the breakaway regions of Indonesia, is beginning to bubble and steam.

Blogs of Innocence and Experience

I was a hesitant recruit to blogging, but after a week and a half I am enjoying this. It is one more demand on time, of which there is never enough in the day anyway. I like to polish and worry over what I write, whereas a blog is, or should be, fifty per cent spontaneous. But perhaps it will suit me, for I am a show off, if a shy one. And then there is the novelty of working in this unfamiliar, marginal writing space, unconstrained by word count, time and the wisdom or folly of editors.

A newspaper article is an artefact, fixed and finished as soon as it is printed, but a weblog is provisional, a work-in-progress; almost alive. It can be constantly refined and updated. Errors of fact and lapses of style can be corrected at a stroke. And then there are images and moving pictures, and sound files, and links... It feels like the birth of a new literary medium, which doesn’t happen many times in a lifetime, and it’s exciting to get stuck in before the conventions become fixed and the hierarchies established.

Thomas Nashe would have had a weblog, if he’d been born 400 years later, and so would Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. William Blake would have had an extravagant multi-media website, complete with audio files recording his conversations with angels, and George Orwell would have been a furious blogger, although clueless about the technical aspects. Who else?

Some of what I will write about here will fall under the category of ‘Current Affairs’, but not all. Much of it will be about Japan, where I live, but also about Korea and south-east Asia, the other places I am paid to worry about, as well as the conflicts I am sent to cover from time to time, such as Iraq. Perhaps I’ll also write about this strange, untethered life I lead: in Asia, but not of it, looking out at the world from inside a soap bubble floating one floor up above west-central Tokyo.

I’ll try to post something most days. Comments, criticism, ideas and links are welcome.

The Dangerous Decency of President X

It is a law of guerrilla wars that they are morally murky affairs, in which it is impossible to separate right from wrong or to sympathise unconditionally with either side. The British Army and the IRA in Northern Ireland; the Serbian state and the Kosovo Liberation Army; the US-Iraqi government against the Sunni insurgency – wherever your sympathies lie, only a partisan or propagandist could fail to see cruelty and stupidity on both sides. I know of only one exception to this rule in my own experience: the 24-year struggle between the East Timorese guerrillas and the occupying army of Indonesia.

East Timor was that rare thing: a morally black-and-white conflict. Partly, this was because of the circumstances – the Indonesian invasion of 1975, after the abandonment of the territory by colonial Portugal, was a straightforward case of international thuggery. Partly, it was because of the winking collusion of governments which should, and did, know better, including Britain, the United States, and Australia.

But it was also because of the discipline and restraint of the East Timorese resistance, the guerrilla army called Falintil. Before their skulking withdrawal in 1999, the Indonesians employed the nastiest tricks in the counter-insurgency manual: napalm, hamletting, the bombardment of civilians, mass deportation, torture, rape, and extra-judicial execution. Two hundred thousand people, by the commonest estimate, died of violence, disease and starvation. But, with the rarest of exceptions, the guerrillas met Indonesian brutality with outstanding decency and restraint.

Falintil was overwhelmed. It had a few old Portuguese rifles and no heavy weaponry. But it never resorted to the terror tactics of guerrillas elsewhere in the world. The victimisation of civilians, the lynching and knee-capping of informers, the bombing of Indonesian cities – none of these were ever a feature of the war in East Timor. Even after the violence of September 1999, when the Indonesian army burned the country in retaliation for the country's vote for independence, there were no serious reprisals. Much of the credit for this lies with Xanana Gusmao, the guerrilla leader and former political prisoner, who is now the first president of his independent country.

But now I wonder whether Xanana’s restraint is going too far.