Indonesians, Invidiousness & Idiots

My matey Dean Johns reminded me of Indonesians’ dislike (or even hatred) of Malaysians in his Malaysiakini’s column which features Idiocy still rules, ok when he wrote:

Deputy Sports Minister Razali Ibrahim in his statement last week that the hostile reception given by Indonesian fans to Malaysian teams at the SEA Games in Jakarta was because “opposition leaders have been making a beeline for Indonesia to bad mouth our country”.

Of course, Razali Ibrahim's statement would be believable to only, in line with Dean’s theme for this week, his 'idiot' supporters.

Anyway, leaving the home ‘idiots’ aside, Indonesians’ (rather than Indonesia’s) dislike of and for Malaysians has been a long standing state of envy, with that feeling boiling at times over into sheer hatred. But in the final analysis it’s just plain envy of Malaysians’ more fortunate circumstances and affluent lifestyle, sometimes deteriorating into the more emotional ‘jealousy’ against anyone who’s Malaysian.

To put it in the pithy words of Pak Pandai ;-) it’s "Taikoh with a wee weenie being green-eyed about Adik with the humongous ‘adik’" wakakaka.

By population size, Indonesia is the world’s 5th biggest country after China, India, USA and Russia. It’s natural resources - oil, timber, minerals, agricultural land, fishery, its land and sea mass - and its human resource would make even the richest nation in the world easily envious of Indonesia, ...

... but – and as a salutary lesson to Malaysia – Indonesia has been buggered by corrupt leaders for 60 over years, since 1945, to such an extent that today its most notable (and probably, like the Philippines, biggest) export to the Gulf countries and, malulah, Adik Malaysia has been its women, to serve as maids to foreigners.

Malaysia is just a dozen years behind Indonesia in being her own master of affairs, though thanks to leaders like Tunku and the earlier PMs, may be said to be racked by corruption for a far shorter period than that suffered by our neighbour (even with the difference of 12 years taken into account).

Very much to Indonesians’ chagrin, Adik Malaysia, apart from emerging even stronger from the trials, tribulations and trauma of Konfrontasi, has been doing very much better. Thus, when Malaysia’s relative superiority in economy, affluence and lifestyle is realized by Indonesians, the fact becomes unbelievable, unbearable, unacceptable and, in moments of stress and national hurt (like when losing islands and badminton & soccer matches), would easily provoke them into hatred for those (in their troubled minds) adiks, the lil’ buggers living just north of equally puny lil’ Tionghua Singapore.

Years ago, when I was working in Java, Indonesia, I went to a ramshackle gymnasium for a workout, but wakakaka, mainly to ogle at the nona sweeties (nyonya in Indonesia means a married lady whilst nona is a maiden, thus fair game for blokes like kaytee, unless boyfriend is a silat harimau expert wakakaka).

An Indonesia colleague who had never been north of Java’s shoreline, asked me whether Malaysia possessed facilities like the ramshackle gym, in a condescending tone that left me in no doubt as to his believed superiority I came from a truly ulu (backward) country called Malaysia. The other Indon colleagues who had been to Malaysia were so embarrassed that they walked away immediately, but subsequently apologized to me for their mate’s ‘katak dibawah tempurung’ (frog beneath a coconut shell) mentality.

Just imagine how that tempurung-ed Indon would have felt if the facts about Malaysian-Indonesian relative lifestyle and affluence were made known to him? First, he would probably have rejected them in disbelief, then he would be enviously horrified, and finally he would be a green-eyed monster, perhaps even hating those bloody adik Malaysians.

Our Deputy Sports Minister Razali Ibrahim was thus not only peddling unscrupulous opportunistic political lies to his ‘idiot’ supporters but has been a far more ignorant idiot himself, not unlike that tempurung-ed Indon of my Java experience wakakaka.

Perhaps now would be a timely reminder of where we are going, by recalling that at a time when the only petroleum Malayans (and subsequently Malaysians) knew about was from the gas nozzles of Shell and Mobil petrol stations, Indonesia already had its monopolistic powerful Pertamina, headed by Army General Ibnu Sutowo.

Read this Wikipedia statement about Pertamina’s early history:

For President Suharto and other members of the ruling elite, revenue from Pertamina was "an ongoing source of funding" without accountability: "they ran this cash-cow into the ground, using it for both military and personal ends."

Historian Adrian Vickers describes the endemic corruption at Pertamina: At each stage of the transaction chain somebody was getting a percentage ...

In 1973, the government's ability to borrow money from overseas was constrained, and Pertamina was no longer providing revenues to the state. Instead, the massive enterprise turned out not to be making money, but compiling exponentially large losses. In February 1975, Pertamina could no longer pay its American and Canadian creditors.

Sounds familiar? … unless of course you want to be like what Dean Johns described so succinctly, an 'idiot'.