Nation Building?

Ini Lukisan Orang, Lupa Siapa Yang Punya

How do you perceive Indonesia? What’s on your mind when you’re thinking of Indonesia? What defines Indonesia? What makes Indonesia Indonesia? Is there anything worth being called ‘uniquely Indonesian’? What is Indonesia? What’s so Indonesian about Indonesia? Who made Indonesia? Who named Indonesia? Why Indonesia? Why not Indoplanet? Or Nusantarasia? Javanesia? Indonesia is just a name. The rest is dirty politics.

Temanggung Siege

Yeah, yeah, we all have seen it on TV. It was like watching the SWAT team trapped in the land of Si Buta Dari Goa Hantu; only this is neither a TV series nor a low-budget silat film of the 1980s; it’s a real ‘live’ footage of extremely rare police actions broadcast by our ‘respected’ TV news networks under the “Breaking News” label. That day, Saturday, August 8, the police stormed a little house in a village called Beji (what a bad name for a village!) where the most feared guy in Southeast Asia, after Soeharto and LKY, allegedly hid, probably with bombs nicely installed on his belly. That guy was killed after a siege of 18 hours. It was indeed a thrilling spectacle; the thing is: the police could not identify the man they just brutally killed.

Keren juga yak

The identity of the presumed terrorist remains a mystery to many of us. This is in my view a serious issue; how could they display such a brutality in front of millions of people across the country, while they were in fact unsure if the man they wanted was inside the house? The excessive siege in Beji answered my question in my previous post; we have set democracy and human rights aside when hunting terrorists; that man is dead. He was probably responsible for a string of terror attacks but he was also probably innocent. He could be one of those people deceived and manipulated by JI militants. What if he was never involved in any terror attacks? What if he was the wrong man in the wrong place? What if he did not deserve to die? What if the attack was intolerably excessive? What if the police committed rights violation? These questions would not have mattered if the police had not let — or invited? — TVOne air the siege, and told those two journalists the presumed terrorist was Noordin. This should have been a secret operation. The police actually had very little information about the people inside that tiny house. They were probably deceived by the two terror suspects they arrested earlier. But those two TV journalists thought they knew everything about what the police were doing; and what we got then was nothing but bad journalism. Four thumbs down for Densus and TVOne!

Was It Noordin?

We do not need terrorism experts from Singapore and Australia to presume that the man killed in Beji was not Noordin.  Even my dentist knows he was probably somebody else, not Noordin. She said: “Why would he confess he was Noordin when asked by the police who he was?”