The good, the bad and the hopeful - reflecting on Indonesia

Talking with my friends still in the team, they listlessly complained that the program had lost its spark. “Before, it was exciting; we all shared a commitment to getting the pesantrens working well. We had hope and enthusiasm. We were treated like adults. Now the [new] manager’s nice, but she is like a robot. She has no commitment to Islam or to Indonesia. She could be managing a water supply project in Africa. We are all bored and we have lost enthusiasm.”

This is dangerous for Australia.

Islamic schools are free and are used increasingly by the poor in the wake of user-pays education cost rises. My granddaughter’s kindergarten costs US$400 a term, in a country where the minimum wage is less than US$1,000 a year.

Indonesian’s major complaint to me was that user-pays education excludes the poor who can then only send their children to village pesantrens (Islamic boarding schools) where academic standards are low and curricula restricted. Teachers are often poorly trained and resourced. Into this come the Muslim carpetbaggers from Malaysia and Saudi Arabia using Syhari’a principles to influence Indonesian children to take up the puritan form that they espouse.

I noticed a greater number of swathed heads and long gowns as well as an increase in the number of tragic threadbare beards. Ziuddin Sardar is fond of reminding fanatical Muslims that the prophet wore a beard as the Gillette had yet to be invented.

But the message is the Saudi influence is biting. The way to combat radical Islam is not by weapons, spies and training police, but by supporting the majority of moderate Muslims who want a good education for their children to open the doors of opportunity for which they don’t have the key.

The new Kevin Rudd-led government has many policy seismographs to check before it twiddles with the knobs of international assistance. Right now, and correctly, climate change has centre stage. But waiting in the wings for significant bit parts are the millions of extras who have been disenfranchised and whose lives have been made worse by development assistance to date.

The Howard government was actively disliked in Asia for its neo colonial, expedient foreign policies and paternalistic attitude.

Nehru once said that Indonesia was a nation of beggars. That is still true, but aid patronage does not help it move out of this mire. Puritan Islam’s biggest enemy is enlightenment, social and financial equity, not arrest or detention. We fail intellectually and tactically as a nation if we fail to see this.

Howard’s worst legacies, and the ones hardest to combat, are careless arrogance, infectious ignorance and the alarming and generalised parochialism he promoted. Indonesians. That the West, including Australia, continued to support Soeharto through the worst years of disappearances, torture and detention is a matter of shame. We supported the bed upon which the seeds of radical Islam were sewn. Engaging our largest neighbour with new and curious eyes will be a challenge.