The little known prime minister

The Jakarta Post | Tue, 03/10/2009 12:26 PM | People

It’s official: Sjahrir (left) is shown signing Linggadjati Agreement documents in Jakarta on Nov. 15, 1946, while Dutch-appointed special commissioner general leading the negotiations, Willem Schermerhorn, looks on. Courtesy of Rushdy Hoesein

Surprisingly enough for a nation’s first prime minister, Sutan Sjahrir receives few mentions in Indonesia’s history book – even though his diplomatic skills were responsible for the nation being recognized by the international community.

“Sjahrir, who became prime minister at the age of 36, is little known by the public,” Sjahrir’s daughter Siti Rabyah Parvati Sjahrir said at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Sjahrir’s birth at Balai Agung in Jakarta on Thursday.

“Sometimes he has been misidentified as [literary critic] Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana or Sjahrir the [late] economist.”

Sjahrir was born in Padang Panjang, West Sumatra, on March 5, 1909, the son of an adviser to the Sultan of Deli. He studied in Medan and Bandung, before moving to Leiden in The Netherlands around 1929 to study law.

In Holland, he gained an appreciation for socialist principles, and joined several labor unions as he worked to support himself. He was briefly the secretary of the Indonesian Association (Perhimpunan Indonesia), an organization of Indonesian students in the Netherlands.

He returned to Indonesia in 1931 without completing his law degree, and helped set up the Indonesian National Party (PNI). Around this time, he became a close associate of future vice president Mohammad Hatta.

His nationalist activities saw him imprisoned by the Dutch in November 1934 for many years, first in Boven Digul, then on Banda. In 1941, just before the area fell to the Japanese, he was moved to Sukabumi.

At the time when Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta were compromising with the occupying Japanese forces, Sjahrir was involved in a clandestine movement that he believed would help prepare the nation for independence when the time was right.

In November 1945, then president Sukarno appointed him prime minister, a position he held until June 1947, during which time he worked on winning international recognition for the newly independent country.

Sjahrir is shown during the campaign for the 1955 general election.

Sjahrir founded the Indonesian Socialist Party in 1948, which, although small, proved to be influential in the early years after independence because of the expertise and high education levels of its leaders.

But after January 1950 Sjahrir no longer held any government positions, and his party performed poorly during the 1955 elections.

After a 1958 revolt known as PRRI or “Revolutionary Government of Indonesian Republic” in 1958, his relationship with Sukarno deteriorated, and the president banned his party two years later.

At 4 a.m. on Jan. 16, 1962, Sjahrir was arrested at his house in Jakarta. Three months later, he was sent with other political prisoners to Madiun, Central Java, before being moved back to Jakarta in 1965.

Despite his long and fervent political career, Sjahrir was always devoted to his family — he had two children, Kriya Arsyah and Parvati. He wrote in his prison diary on June 3, 1963, “My thoughts and my memories again and again turn to home, to my children. I want them to grow up to be happier and have a better life than me. … I want them to be honest, upright and loving, and not be obsessed with titles and stars.”

Sjahrir’s daughter, Parvati, was just two years old when her father was arrested. “I had to take a train back and forth from Solo to Madiun just to meet Papa,” she recalled. “When my father was moved to Jakarta, it was not easy for my mother to get a permit letter to visit Papa.”

The imprisonment, she said, was unjust. “Ironically, after Independence, he was detained without facing trial. He was accused without verification.”

As he was ill, Sjahrir was allowed to go to Zurich, Switzerland, for treatment. He died there on April 9, 1966, “far away from the country he co-founded, from the country he dearly loved, from family members and friends”, Parvati said. “Sjahrir went to Zurich as a political prisoner and returned to his homeland as a hero.”

He was a hero for his daughter as well.

“For me, Sjahrir, Papa, was a moral character who deserves to be emulated,” she said. “He was honest, brave and consistent with what he fought for. He did not fight for his own interest or for power or wealth. He fought for the freedom and the maturity of people to be free from oppression and the exploitation of others.”

—JP/Matheos V. Messakh

Sutan Sjahrir: Teacher of the nation

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Tue, 03/10/2009 12:09 PM | People

The leaders: Sjahrir (left) is pictured with Sukarno (center) and Mohammad Hatta.

It has been said that if Indonesia had paid greater attention to the wisdom and lessons of its first prime minister, it might have avoided decades of authoritarian rule and human rights abuses.

A closer look at Sutan Sjahrir’s life and thoughts, and at the testimonies of those around him, reveals that Sjahrir was more than the first prime minister of Indonesia — he was a defender of humanity and rationality.

Sjahrir is many things in this nation’s history — a national hero, founder of the Socialist Party of Indonesia, the first prime minister — but perhaps his greatest contribution to the nation lay not in the titles conferred or the positions held, but in his thinking about nationalism and humanism.

Only two months after Indonesia gained independence, Sjahrir felt the importance of emphasizing what freedom meant to the nation, Kamala Chandrakirana, chairwoman of the National Commission

on Violence against Women, said at the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Sjahrir’s birth on Thursday.

He did this in an article in October 1945 titled Perdjoeangan Kita (Our Struggle).

“Freedom does not only mean that Indonesia has become an independent state, but also is now free from tyranny, hunger and misery,” Kamala said, quoting Sjahrir’s article. “A national revolution is only the result of a democratic revolution, and nationalism should be second to democracy. The State of Indonesia is only a name we give to the essence we intend and aim for.”

Sjahrir’s article, said Kamala, was a response to the public’s desire at that time to take part in the building of the nation — a desire still evident 64 years after Independence.

Now, Kamala said, as the general elections approach, is the appropriate time to reflect on the nation’s “struggle”, as discussed by Sjahrir.

Sjahrir’s notion of struggle is not a narrow and specific construct, but a global and universalone; as he wrote, “only the nationalism carried by justice and humanity can lead us into world history”.

But evidence documented by several human rights bodies has demonstrated that, instead, it was the militaristic and narrow-minded notion of nationalism that Sjahrir so feared that took root in Indonesia for so many years.

Political oppression and political silencing of women during the New Order era and the mass rapes of Chinese women during the May 1998 riots, Kamala said, were evidence that the nation upheld what Sjahrir described as an “attitude of hatred toward alien groups in our population or foreigners and people of foreign descent”.

“Hatred for foreign groups and people,” Sjahrir warned, “is indeed something one finds voiced in every nationalist movement, especially among a movement that intoxicates itself with a passionate hatred … in order to gain power.”

Courtesy of Rushdy Hoesein

To Sjahrir’s list of “more or less alien groups in our population”, Kamala said we should add Papuans, the Ahmadiyah community and others in the nation whose right to equality has been neglected.

Rocky Gerung of the University of Indonesia also commented on how Sjahrir’s politics were directed more toward greater human freedoms than to mere national freedom.

“The evidence that this nation has never had human freedoms is that people first bring out their primordial identity when dealing with others,” said Gerung.

Sjahrir wrote in “Nationalism and internationalism” in 1953 that nationalism was a source of
new life and strength for less developed peoples. But, he warned,
as soon as a nation achieved freedom, it was confronted with the problem of adapting nationalism to the human needs for peace, progress and prosperity.

“If this fails,” he wrote, “this nationalism will become a negative factor, a factor of conservatism and reaction. Then it will become egocentric and degenerate into intolerance and self-glorification.”

The dangers that accompany the nationalism of a newly independent nation can still be tasted in the air in the current political situation, Gerung said, stating that the deficit in modern Indonesian politics is a deficit of rationality, whose dangers Sjahrir repeatedly noted.

“Democracy should be handled rationally, but we see now that the public is getting more and more irrational. Even a political analyst on the TV screen will say something just plain obvious or something that has already been analyzed by journalists.”

Gerung raised the concern the quality of Indonesia’s current political leaders has strayed from Sjahrir’s ideal of politics as having “complete and tidy ideology and theory”.

“What we have now are people with the tendency to solve problems using articles from sacred books rather than articles from the Constitution,” he said. “We should have political leaders in this country but instead we only have political dealers. Politics is full of advertising.”

As for the current 12,000-odd political candidates, Gerung compares them to the thousands of people seeking a miracle from child “healer” Ponari in Jombang.

“Both are expecting miracles to happen. People with a gamut of health problems are expecting
a miracle from Ponari, and the political candidates are expecting miracles from the next legislative election.”

Political activist Fadjroel Rachman, the editor of Guru Bangsa (Teacher of the Nation), a book dedicated to Sutan Sjahrir, said that if Sukarno were the father of independence and Mohammad Hatta the father of cooperation, then Sutan Sjahrir should be named the father of welfare.

“The program of his Cabinet was the program of a welfare state,” he said “One of his programs was progressive tax, which means that the higher the income, the higher the tax imposed.”

Unfortunately, Rachman said, Sjahrir had no time to implement his programs during his term as he was kept busy defending the nation’s independence and increasing its international legitimacy.

“If he were alive today and still in power, I’m sure he would create programs that directly addressed basic rights, combated poverty and narrowed the social gap — such as free education, providing employment and social security, and free housing and healthcare,” he said. “The money would definitely come from the progressive tax.”

Photo Courtesy of Rushdy Hoesein

Lola Amaria: The handmaid’s tale

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Sat, 02/21/2009 10:15 AM | People

Lola Amaria: JP/MATHEOS V. MESSAKH
Actress, director and producer Lola Amaria is happy to explore women’s issues in her films, but hates being called a feminist.
“I don’t like being put into a particular category,” Lola says. “What I did in my films just shows concern with the reality around us.”
Check out her filmography and you will see that all her films concern the struggle of women from a range of backgrounds, with each role – whether stripper, nurse, courtesan, rape victim, postgraduate student or mentally ill woman – demonstrating her genuine concern.
Her latest film The Detour to Paradise, in which she plays an Indonesian maid in Taiwan, opens in Taipei today. The film, produced in Taiwan by director Lee Tsi-Tai, has already been selected as the opening film for the Singapore International Film Festival in April.
“I’m so happy and proud because I’m the only Indonesian who took part in the film,” Lola says. “But at the same time I’m also anxious because none of the crew are Indonesian. I would be more proud if the whole team were Indonesian because the film is about an Indonesian maid.”
Lola says her experience with the film gave her the insight to produce another film with a similar theme – migrant domestic workers – but in a different setting, this time Hong Kong.
“I don’t take potshots at the government or anybody in the movie. It will be purely about the reality of life as a migrant worker in Hong Kong. It’s about the human side of migrant workers, which is totally different from what we usually believe,” she says.
Lola, who has been traveling to and from Hong Kong since early 2007 to conduct research, says strong laws ensured Hong Kong employers treated migrant workers relatively well.
“It would be impossible for us to make a film about migrant workers in Saudi Arabia or in Malaysia, for example, without bringing violence into it. But in Hong Kong you hardly find that,” she says.
Her team is currently working on the script. Lola will direct and star in the film, which is scheduled for release in August.
Lola was born in Jakarta on July 30, 1977. Although she once wanted to be a diplomat, she soon found a place in the entertainment world, as the 1997 winner of Wajah Femina, an annual model contest held by Women Magazine Femina.
Her acting career began in 1998 when she played Sila, a stripper, in Nan Triveni Achnas’ TV movie Penari (Dancer). After five television roles, including in the 1998 Indonesian Sinetron Festival award-nominated sinetron (soap opera) Arjuna Mencari Cinta, Lola turned to the big screen.
“I see a different spirit in big screen movies, in terms of working together with people, the quality requirement and the challenge of the work, which I would not have if I only worked in sinetron,” she says. “With movies I can explore my abilities as an actress, a director, producer or in learning another role. Film has its own challenges so I have to learn. I got nothing from soap opera except instant results and lots of money.”
Not that she doesn’t need money: “I just needed another way to earn money but one that also gave me some experience and knowledge.”
Her first movie role, in Tabir (Curtain) in 2000, was as a victim of the 1998 mass rape in Jakarta; after three years of production, the project was abandoned. In the same year, she starred in a Japanese film Dokuritsu as a nurse struggling between loyalty to her homeland and the Japanese colonial government.
A year later, she played a psychopathic girl, Beth, the title character in an art house movie that the censorship board banned from general cinema release.
Her biggest acclaim came for her performance as Tinung, the wife of a Chinese trader, in Nia Dinata’s award-winning 2002 film Ca Bau Kan, an adaptation of Remy Sylado’s best-selling novel. For Lola, it was a demanding role. “For Ca Bau Kan, I had to learn the Betawi language, which has at least four dialects. I also learned Chinese dance, I learned Chinese history and culture including fashion, furniture, even how people talked.”
Lola, who admires American independent filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and late director Teguh Karya and whose own favorite films are Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red by Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski, turned to producing and directing in 2004.
Her first effort as producer was for Novel Tanpa Huruf R (Novel Without the Letter R), in which she also played the lead role. In the same year, she directed Betina (Female), which won her a Netpac Award at the 2006 Jogja-Netpac Asian Film Festival.
Lola, who professes a love of dogs – she once had five sheepdogs – and ice cream, and a hatred of durian, says she wanted to try her hand at directing because it’s a “genius profession”.
“Being a director means you have to visualize all your ideas. All the components, such as sound, music, acting, photography and editing are put into one and the director is the captain.”
Although she has already performed in two foreign Asian movies, Lola is looking for any opportunity to venture outside Indonesian cinema again, although “if possible I would like it not to be an Asian movie”.
Another potential project would be a documentary on Indonesian women, should she find the opportunity to produce one – not that that would make her a “feminist”.

Maybe work is making you sick …

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Wed, 03/04/2009 9:58 AM | Health

Office illness: A study has found that 50 percent of people who work in office buildings in Jakarta suffer from what is known as “Sick Building Syndrome”, and that taking antioxidants can reduce symptoms. [JP]

After all those years of complaining that work makes you sick, it turns out you could be right. Don’t get too comfortable thinking your workplace is an airtight building, fully equipped with air conditioner, thick, regularly cleaned carpet and photocopier and fax. Things are not always what they seem.

A recent study by the University of Indonesia’s Mass Health Faculty, the Indonesian Mass Health Expert Association (IAKMI) and PT Bayer Indonesia revealed that 50 percent of people who work in office buildings in Jakarta suffer from what is known as “Sick Building Syndrome”.

Joko Prayitno Sutanto, a researcher with a government research agency, working out of a high-rise building in the Thamrin area, said he found he got a sore throat and cough every time he entered the building.

The 49-year-old researcher – who spent up to eight hours a day at his office – said he was not sure of the cause of the headache and cough, but felt uncomfortable with the air conditioner in the building.

“Apparently the air conditioner only runs from 8 a.m. so every time we enter the glass-walled building we already feel airless,” he said.

Joko is not the only one who finds it all too easy to believe there is a connection between the workplace and the state of his health.

Dian, 46, who works in the human resources department at a private company in a building in the Sudirman area, said she tended to feel nauseous and to tire easily, and she often had watering eyes and runny nose.

“It happens almost everyday and when I get home I feel like I can do nothing at all,” said Dian, who puts in more than eight hours a day at the office. “It’s not too bad but it’s annoying because it happens almost everyday.”

She also noticed that she felt better away from work. “It’s not drastically better but I feel it when I get out of the building.”

Joko and Dian are two of 350 employees from 18 companies and government institutions that took part in a three-month study conducted by the University of Indonesia from September to December 2008.

The 350 respondents were separated into two groups; members of one group were given antioxidant supplements while the members of the other group were not.

The study discovered that 50 percent of people who work in office buildings suffer from “Sick Building Syndrome”, and that members of the group that took the antioxidants experienced a significant reduction in their illness than the group with no intervention.

Taking antioxidants reduced the frequency of occurrence of four main symptoms of “Sick Building Syndrome” by up to 50 percent. Headaches were reduced by 48.9 percent, burning eyes were reduced by 45.5 percent, runny nose by 51.9 percent, bronchitis by 27.2 percent and exhaustion after normal activity by 40.8 percent.

“The risk of having Sick Building Syndrome is closely related to environmental factors which become the medium for physical, chemical and biological pollutants and radiation, especially when we face relatively constant exposure,” said research coordinator Budi Haryanto.

Haryanto said that Sick Building Syndrome became widely known in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1990s through research.

“Now they have become very advanced in managing the indoor air quality, but we have never before conducted this kind of study on indoor air quality,” he said.

A disease known is half cured, but the Manpower and Transmigration Ministry, which is responsible for evaluating indoor air quality, never tested it, said Haryanto.

“Sorry to say but the Health Ministry, which is responsible for monitoring the impact of indoor air pollution, also never did any monitoring,” said Haryanto.

For years, Jakarta has been included in the World Health Organization list of the world’s most polluted cities. World Bank data from 2004 ranked Jakarta as the third most polluted city in the world. A study by the University of Indonesia, USAID and Swisscontact revealed that city transportation contributed 70 percent of the total pollution in the city.

“If we look at the annual Health Profile of the Health Ministry, the top 10 diseases are related to air pollution and the total of these diseases accounted for 50 percent of diseases reported by the ministry,” said Haryanto, who is also chairman of the Environmental Health Department at the University of Indonesia’s School of Public Health.

However, said Haryanto, not many know that research has frequently found that the level of air pollution indoors could be worse than the level outdoors.

If building occupants complain of symptoms associated with acute discomfort, such as headaches; eye, nose or throat irritation; dry cough; dry or itchy skin; dizziness and nausea; difficulty in concentrating; fatigue; and sensitivity to odors – these might be symptoms of the syndrome.

Especially if the cause of the symptoms is not known and most of the complainants report relief soon after leaving the building, it is likely that they are in a “sick” building.

Causes of Sick Building Syndrome, said Haryanto, are inadequate ventilation, chemical contaminants from indoor sources, chemical contaminants from outdoor sources and biological contaminants.

Inadequate ventilation, which may also occur if heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems do not effectively distribute air to people in the building, is thought to be another important factor in Sick Building Syndrome.

Most indoor air pollution comes from sources inside the building, such as adhesives, carpeting, upholstery, manufactured wood products, photocopiers, air conditioners, pesticides and cleaning agents.

Environmental tobacco smoke also contributes high levels of toxins and particulate matter.

“Most of us spend more than eight hours a day in our office dealing with the copy machine, printer, air conditioner and carpet everyday,” Haryanto said. “Because we cannot smell the particles and dust we drag in everyday, we feel safe, but actually they cause lots of respiration problems.”

The outdoor air that enters a building can be a source of indoor air pollution, as pollutants can enter the building through poorly located air vents, windows and other openings.

Biological contaminants such as bacteria, mold, pollen and viruses can also be making buildings – and their occupants – sick. These can breed in any stagnant water that has collected in ducts or drains, or other places. Other sources of biological contaminants include insects or bird droppings – which can result in cough, chest tightness, fever, chills, muscle aches and allergic responses.

These elements, said Haryanto, may act in combination and may supplement other complaints such as inadequate temperature, humidity or lighting. Even after a building is investigated, the specific causes of the complaints may remain unknown.

Until the lack of knowledge about the syndrome among both the public and building developers and related government agencies is reversed, the first step for individuals is to reduce the impact of indoor air pollution by maintaining a healthy life – such as through antioxidant supplements, as found in the study.

“The need for vitamins and antioxidant supplements is parallel and important to people living in the middle of pollution,” Haryanto said. “Especially vitamin C and E are needed for stamina.”

At the moment, this may be workers’ only option. As Haryanto points out, “The key word for this syndrome is respiration. We can’t choose to breathe or not to breathe, can we?”

Sick Building Syndrome
symptoms:

Burning and watering eyes and nose
Burning in trachea
Chronic fatigue
Debilitating fibromyalgia (muscle cramps and joint pain)
Dizziness
Dry, itchy skin
Exhaustion after normal activity
Headaches
Heart palpitations
Hoarseness, cough, sore throat
Inability to concentrate
Itchy granulomous pimples
Nausea
Nosebleeds
Pregnancy problems
Sensitivity to odors
Serious edema (swelling of legs, trunk, ankles)
Shortness of breath upon mild exertion (e.g. walking)
Tremors
Wellness when away from building

Kamir Raziudin Brata: Finding a holistic solution

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Tue, 02/17/2009 11:52 AM | People

Kamir Raziudin Brata: JP/Matheos V. Messakh

When talking about how people treat the environment, Kamir Raizudin Brata can’t help but laugh.

The land ecology lecturer explained that he was at loss as to why many people claim to have found solutions to environmental problems when in reality they disregard environment principles in the process or simply shift the problem somewhere else.

He said it is simply not fair to blame upstream Puncak for “sending in” floods to Jakarta every year, or expect the hilly area to serve as the city’s water absorption area.

“We forget that Jakarta has its own rain and by saying ‘expect’, it means we put so much burden on a certain area, while leaving another with no burden at all,” the lecturer of the Bogor Agriculture Institute (IPB) said.

“We can’t solve enviromental problems by disregarding environmental principles. The best way to conserve the environment is to share the burden as equally as possible.”

He said that from generation to generation people only look for shortcuts to deal with environmental problems -- treating only the symptom and not the cause.

“I’m afraid we have started to believe that flooding is an oversupply of water, so that the best way to handle floods is to throw the water away somewhere else,” Kamir said.

“Flooding happens because the land has lost its capacity to absorb rainwater and we must do something to help the soil do its work better because it is human being who reduced the capacity of the soil.”

For more than 30 years Kamir has been defending his belief that the best way to conserve land and water is to let every component of the ecosystem do its part to equally share the burden of the environment.

Kamir is the inventor of the biophore absorption method, a technique which prevents flooding and conserves water by drilling holes in the ground.

The method, which he developed in 1976, his first year teaching at IPB, solves both water and waste management problems. By drilling holes no bigger than 30 centimeters wide and 100 centimeters deep, an organic waste bin is created which also increases the absorption of rainwater.

He said the method was so simple that nobody pays attention to it.

“Maybe it is because it’s so simple that people don’t believe it actually works,” Kamir said, laughing.

He said many have called his invention a simplification of water and waste problems, but nobody has successfully refuted its effectiveness.

“What I’m waiting for now is not testimony but to find the weaknesses of the method,” he said.
The man, who was born in West Java town of Cirebon on Dec. 12, 1948, said that with his invention he was trying to stick to the simple rules of soil and water conservation he learned from his former teachers.

But many people, including some of his former teachers, were upset with him for revealing that many efforts to conserve the environment have been conducted against environment principles.

“Shifting the quantity of material and energy into another part of the world will simply cut back the burden in that place but add the burden in another,” he said. “This is the environmental principle and everybody knows it.”

Just like global warming, he said, the problems can not be solved by merely depending on austerity, but have to utilize all components of the ecosystem.

“An ecosystem is a system formed with interdependency between its components. All components must be considered in any conservation effort to make sure nothing is wrong,” he said.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves for throwing our waste away to another place just because we want our place to be clean, but we just make another place dirty.

“It’s so easy to claim to be a friend of the enviroment. But throwing away waste to another place like developed countries do is no solution. What about the places that they throw their waste away to, are they not the part of environment?”

Kamir is willing to face anything to defend his ideas, including spending five and a half years to finish his master in Soil Physic at the University of Western Australia. “Although my thesis is against the mainstream, they were fair to me,” he recalled.

He also had to abandon his doctoral studies to uphold his ideas.

Being an inventor does not bring him riches and glory.

For his research, he even took up a bank loan which he still has to pay back. “My employee card is still with the bank. I still have four years to pay my debt,” he said.

Dig this: A hole solution

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Tue, 02/17/2009 1:08 PM | Environment

Simple way: Researcher Kamir Raziudin Brata shows his solution to deal with flooding and waste problem: by digging holes in the ground. JP/Matheos V. Messakh

For years flooding and waste management have been the two biggest problems for Jakarta. But researcher Kamir Raziudin Brata has a simple solution to both – dig holes in the ground.

The technique – so simple that it has been ignored since he first concieved it in 1976 – preserves water, naturally retains soil humidity, prevents flooding, stores carbon and can securely dispose of household waste.

The lecturer at the Bogor Agriculture Institute (IPB)’s Soil and Natural Resource Science Department based the technique on the hidrological cyclus principle.

He conceived absoption holes that give land the ability to absorb more water and procces organic waste into compost, while at the same time maintaining the soil’s role as a carbon sink.

The holes – called biophore absorbtion holes – are tunnel bored into the soil, enabling organisms to become more active and plants to take root easily.

The technique utilizes organic waste to allow organisms to actively create hollow spaces inside the soil, which then fill with air and serve as channels to absorb water more rapidly.

The more holes, the better the soil can absorb water, and this minimizes the possibility of flooding.

He said that human activities are unavoidable, but this method can increase the ability of the land to absorb water.

“Even land being used for farming or plantations has less ability to absorb water, even less is in a city with cemented ground everywhere,” Kamir said.

He said that even in a virgin forest rainwater does not directly reach the ground to be absorbed by land – most rainwater is caught or intercepted by plants and crops, which increase the rate of absorption.

Forest soil has more hollow spaces, created by the roots of the trees and other organism, which creates a channel for water.

“This is called biophore, but now that most land has been turned into farms, plantations, residential areas or public spaces, the biophore under the ground has been greatly reduced and has even dissapeared in some places,” he said.

Up close: An earth auger created by Kamir to facilitate the drilling. JP/Matheos V. Messakh

By drilling a hole no bigger than 10 centimeters wide and 100 centimeters deep in the ground, the space of absorbtion is vertically broadened to 3,140 centimeters squared.

The rainwater absorbtion does not only prevent flooding, but is also the best way to conserve water.

“The most healthy way to store rainwater is to let the ground absorb it and not catch it all in a container,” Kamir said. “Rainwater absorbed into the soil becomes
mineral water.”

All other methods to catch rainwater in man-made containers, such as infiltration wells, man-made lakes or large containers, can catch only a limited amount of lower quality water.

A hydrology cyclus, Kamir explains, is only good after rainwater has been mostly absorbed into the ground and after certain natural processes have occoured.

Besides broadening the space for water absorbtion, the biophores can also process organic waste.

He said that if each household in Jakarta put their organic waste in their biophore hole every day, 55 percent of the city’s waste problem would be solved.

The utilization of organic waste, Kamir said, activates the compostation process, which creates more hollows in the soil for water, but also reduces carbon emission.

“Human beings, as a component of the ecosystem, don’t have to work alone. Many people talk about biodiversity but they ussually forget about the biodiversity below ground.”

His idea is the result of trying to solve the problem of how to store water and at the same time reduce carbon emmissions.

“By this method, waste and water management is treated equally, it doesn’t have to compete with other land purposes.”

Composting underground also solves the world’s carbon and methane emission problem, as the gasses are captured by the soil.

“Never separate water management and carbon emissions. Many organic wastes are turned into
compost but if the composting process is made in the athmosphere, carbon emissions are still relatively high, though not as high as with burning waste.”

In order to facilitate the drilling of the biophore holes, Kamir has designed an ‘earth auger,’ made of a ¾ inch pipe, with several attachment sizes depending on the diameter of the hole needed.

Since no sophisticated equipment is needed, it can eaasily be done at home. “One doesn’t need to be rich to help others. We don’t need expensive or sophisticated things to help the environment,” he said.

After the city was heavily flooded in February 2007, the long forgoten and simple method is back in the spotlight.

The Jakarta administration has also started to recognized the technology and, with a 2008 gubernatorial instruction, aims to speed up of the drilling of biophore holes across Jakarta.

The regulation stipulates that a subdistrict should have had at least 100 augers by the end of 2008 in order to speed up drilling.

The Cipinang Elok subdistrict in East Jakarta has seen good results since drilling 2,000 holes in 2007.

“After drilling 2,000 holes, floods are no longer as high as they used to be,” Saksono Soehodo, head of a neighborhood unit in the subdistrict said.

The IPB’s biophore team, lead by Kamir, has calculated that, in order to reduce organic waste and flooding during the rainy season, Jakarta should have no less than 76,000 holes.

The State Ministry for Environment plans to issue a regulation requiring houses and commercial building owners across the country to build facilties to store rainwater or face punishment under the Environment Law of 1997.

However, with growing attention to technology, business speculation arises.

Kamir said the IPB’s biophor team calculated a price of no less than Rp 200,000 (US$17) for each auger to cover its production costs and tax.

In order to ensure quality, the team have appointed CV La Conserva as the single license holder for the mass priodcution of the auger. However, he said, many variations of the auger have been sold at lower prices.

Since he invented the technology in 1976, Kamir is reluctant to apply for patent rights. It was only a year ago that IPB applied to acquire the rights; the result is not yet known.

“I just want to prevent this [technology] being turned into a sort of project because it’s not expensive. It works even without making a project out of it.”

For more information on the technology see: www.biopori.com

Marwah Daud Ibrahim: Tipping the balance of power

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Wed, 02/11/2009 10:33 AM | People

Marwah Daud: Courtesy of Marwah Daud

Plenty of people, especially politicians, talk about inequality in Indonesian politics, but only a few can walk the walk.

Lawmaker Marwah Daud Ibrahim is not just walking it, but marching.

“My main concern as a politician is how to make people confident and believe that this nation is a big nation,” she says. “We are a great nation but we feel small; we are a rich country but we feel poor. It’s not enough to say that our inferiority comes from colonialism. As a nation we aren’t united in our dreams, ideals and aspirations.”

In 1994, after school dropout rates hit new highs, Marwah founded the Orbit Scholarship Foundation. In 1995, when people were rashly cutting down forests, she promoted the idea of establishing an “agropolitan” – an agriculture-based village of unemployed graduates – at the logging site in Bukit Sutra, South Sulawesi.

During the political upheaval of 1998, she was quietly visiting remote areas promoting the supply of energy and food based on local advantages.

Since 1996, she has been out and about in the country’s east, which tends to lag behind the west, visiting remote islands, and talking to people about how they can succeed. She also has traveled to educate women’s groups.

And in a political sphere dominated by men, Marwah is deeply involved in the fight for raising the number of women in parliament.

“We should be equal as a nation, regardless of our backgrounds. This is the first thing any leader must do.”

Marwah has always been positive about life and she wants to share that energy with others.
“God gives every one of us our potential and also provides all the chances. The success of this nation is the accumulation of the success of every single person in the country,” she says.

Thanks to her many contributions, Marwah was chosen on Nov. 5, 2008, by the Nation Integrity Council (DIB), a group of eight organizations, to run for president. Last year she was also chosen by the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) as one of the nation’s inspiring women.

She has since declared she will run for the presidency with or without the support of her party, Golkar. She has a dream for the country, which she hopes to share with all her fellow citizens: “Nusantara Jaya 2045” – a vision of Indonesia in 2045, leading not just Asia, but the world.

“A dream or vision is something between belief and hope,” she says. “You can get what you want if you have belief and hope as well as determination. God gives us the ability to dream and if you really do what you need to do, you can get what you want.”

Her own story demonstrates how she has lived this creed.

Marwah was born in Takkalala in South Sulawesi on Nov. 8, 1956, the second of eight children. From an early age, she demonstrated great academic prowess; while at school she dreamed of traveling the world, and developed an admiration for Benjamin Franklin because of his many contributions to history.

After graduating from high school with flying colors, Marwah decided to study communications at university, despite her family’s lack of money. She put herself through university thanks to a “Work Study Program” and then a scholarship.

When she later had the chance to go to the University of Pennsylvania to do a nondegree course, she decided not to return to Indonesia before finishing her doctorate, despite having funding for only one semester.

“When I first attended a class [in the United States], I knew this was the education system I needed. You already know that if you want achieve certain goals, you have to do certain things. We don’t have that in Indonesia.”

Through a combination of hard work, support from friends, scholarships and sheer determination, Marwah managed to get in the States both a master’s – after which she married Ibrahim Taju, her former colleague and activist – and a doctorate degree – the latter despite bearing two children and working two jobs at the same time.

The key to her success, she says, is not a brilliant mind but planning.

“I’m only being diligent and using my time systematically. Preparation makes perfect,” says Marwah. “My father said that if you want to wake up at a certain time just tell yourself and if necessary tell the pillow. Even now I always wake up early and never use an alarm clock.”

In 1989, several colleagues asked Marwah to become a candidate for the Golkar Party. Finally, she turned to politics in 1992 when she was elected as a lawmaker, a position she has held ever since.

Now, she wants to run for president to help advance the nation.

“It’s not about the position but about the authority to do more for the people. Many things I have done still have a limited impact. I imagine this can become a national program. Everybody is talking about poverty, but there are differences in how to go about it.”

Rihanna pulls yet another no-show for RI fans

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Wed, 02/11/2009 9:08 AM | Headlines

Rihanna: AP/KEVORK DJANSEZIAN

After two days of speculation, fans in Indonesia had to swallow the bitter truth that pop superstar Rihanna had cancelled her concert here for the second time, following reports that she had accused longtime boyfriend Chris Brown of assault.

Promoter ShowMaster told a press conference late Tuesday that it had held a teleconference with Rihanna’s management to confirm the cancellation.

“We spoke to Tony Goldring of the William Morris Agency [WMA] on Monday at 11:50 p.m. [Jakarta time],” said promoter Troy Reza Warokka.

“The main cause of the cancellation was related to Sunday night’s incident.

“What happened to Rihanna could happen to anybody else. The incident was unexpected.”

Brown had been slated to perform at the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday night, but was instead processed by the police on a charge connected to an alleged assault on a woman, reportedly identified as his girlfriend Rihanna, the 21-year-old pop princess.

Both Rihanna and Brown pulled out of the Grammys hours before Sunday’s telecast.
The Los Angeles Times, citing law enforcement officials close to the case and other sources it did not name, reported that Rihanna told police that Brown had hurt her the night before the Grammy Awards.

Rihanna, a Barbados-born singer, stormed the international music charts and radio playlists with her single “Umbrella”. Her other popular hits include “Take A Bow”, “S.O.S”, “Don’t Stop the Music” and “Disturbia”.

Troy said disappointed fans could reclaim their money at ticket boxes from Thursday.

“We are very disappointed [with the cancellation] but that’s a business consequence,” he said.
Troy said that Rihanna’s management, through WMA vice president of business affairs Ruth Estrada, had offered “to reschedule the performance for the future”.

“That’s their offer, but we must first evaluate it,” he said.

Cell phone operator AXIS, the main sponsor of the concert, said in a press statement, “Regretfully, AXIS has to announce that Rihanna Live in Concert, which was slated for Thursday, has to be postponed for the second time.”

Rihanna had been scheduled to perform in Jakarta on Nov. 14, 2008. But the Grammy-award winning singer called off the show over security fears after the Australian government issued a travel warning for Indonesia following the executions of the three Bali bombers.

Despite higher ticket prices, fans were still enthusiastic to grab them. The organizers had set the lowest ticket price, for Festival class, at Rp 1.25 million (US$ 112) each, higher than November’s Rp 750,000. The prices for the Tribune and VIP classes remained unchanged from last year’s Rp 2 million and Rp 2.5 million, respectively.

On Feb. 13, Rihanna also cancelled her concert in Kuala Lumpur.

Her planned concert there drew negative publicity after organizers said she would shun skimpy outfits to conform with the Muslim-majority country’s strict rules on performers’ dress.

Creativity can restore the lost soul in Indonesian journalism

Mon, 02/09/2009 5:12 PM | Headlines

Journalism today isn't what it used to be 50 or 60 years ago, and the one element that is sorely missing is its soul, says Rosihan Anwar, Indonesia's longest serving and living journalist. At 87, Rosihan was present and was reporting almost all the important turns in the modern history of Indonesia, going back as far as the independence struggle against Dutch colonialism in the late 1940s. During his career that spanned more than six decades, he has had several brushes with the law with different regimes and spent time behind bars because of his work. Still writing prolifically for several publications (I need the money, he says), Rosihan talked to The Jakarta Post's Sabam Siagian, Endy M. Bayuni and Matheos V. Messakh at his home in Menteng, Central Jakarta, in connection with National Press Day, which falls on Monday.

The Jakarta Post: How has journalism changed compared to when you started?

Rosihan Anwar: In those days, we saw ourselves as the fighting press. Now, we have a capitalist press, one dominated by big money. The family-owned newspapers that proliferated in the 1940s as part of the independence struggle are mostly gone. The few that are still around live a subsistence life, or have merged with big companies.

Can journalists do anything about it?

You can't fight the big money.

How would you characterize the fighting press?

In those days, there was solidarity among journalists, even when we competed against one another. Today, that element is missing. Journalists from the established media don't care about the fate of colleagues in other publications. Everyone is for himself. I am not being nostalgic, but in newspapers that I started, my salary as editor-in-chief was not that much more from my deputy. The spirit of socialism was there.

But didn't you have your differences with other prominent journalists then?

I was constantly fighting with B.M. Diah *founder of family-owned Merdeka daily*. I enjoyed fighting with him. But in spite of our differences, we remained true friends. We would use expletives to insult one another when we were angry, but never to the point of breaking up our friendship. The same with Mochtar Lubis. We had our political fights then, but we stayed friends to his death.

What else is missing in today's journalism?

Traditionally, the press sees itself as fighting for the interests of the oppressed, the marginalized, and in those days, we risked being sent into exile or jail. We tried to pay attention to the interests of the people.

You don't think that still exists today?

Sure, it's there. The press, for example, covered how the floods affected the people, and helped to raise the government's attention. But the press would drop the story after a few days before the problem is resolved and move on to the next story. It's the same with print and with broadcast media.

So the press has the responsibility to make sure that problems are resolved?

It's what I call the crusading press. The press has a duty to the public. You should go beyond the news.

Instead, we see a market press, one that caters to the market, and one that engages in sensationalism. Publications are more segmented into sections, one for fashion, one for sports and so on. That's tabloid journalism. When you cater to the market, you cater to the lowest taste.

So what can journalists really do?

Don't blame the journalists. They are products of the time. The key is in the hands of publishers and the editorial boards. But as long as journalism is concerned only with profit, it is losing its soul.

There are too many interest groups to cater to. That's what you get in a liberal capitalist system. The media is dictated by circulation and ratings.

How do journalists then stay relevant in this kind of environment?

Journalists must make sure they have bargaining power. At the French newspaper Le Monde, for instance, the editors could tell the publisher to stay away. "Don't touch the story," they would tell the publisher.

Journalists need to be creative and find opportunities to stay relevant.

I don't think you need to be too pessimistic about your job. But you need to be creative, and in crusading journalism, you need to be prepared to make sacrifices.

What about the environment, there is press freedom in Indonesia, right?

Our freedom is still being constrained, not so much by the government as in the past, but by pressure groups. Those thugs in white robes, for example. They are scandalous.

We need to have a free and independent press for our nation-building process. The Indian model of development, for instance, is based upon democracy, where a free press is essential. The Indian model is messy, chaotic and almost unplanned, but as the saying goes, the economy continues to grow while the government sleeps.

We must fight for the freedom of the press.

So it's not all a lost cause working as a journalist in Indonesia?

No. Realistically, profit is important. But surely as a human being, you still have your conscience, and that at times you feel the need to respond whenever you hear a cry of despair.

Rosihan Anwar: The last Mohican of Indonesian journalists

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Mon, 02/09/2009 10:08 AM | People

JP/Ricky Yudhistira

Sharp, bright and straightforward are three words that best describe legendary journalist Rosihan Anwar.

At 87, the man known as “the last of the Mohicans of Indonesian journalism” still regularly writes columns for several national media, such as the Cek&Ricek tabloid, the Waspada newspaper and the Business News newspaper or Jawa Pos.

“I will continue to write until I drop dead,” he told The Jakarta Post, laughing at his modest home in Menteng, Central Jakarta.

Citing his best friend Mochtar Lubis, who suffered from Alzheimers during his final years, Rosihan said the main reason he wanted to write was to prevent senility.

He also writes for his life.

“I have to write because there is no social welfare in this damned country. I have no pension so I have to write,” said the author of more than 40 books. The last book he authored was Petite Histoire Indonesia, on Indonesian history.

In his study room, he wrote all his articles using his 40-year-old Facit 1620 typewriter. A small bed is nearby, a place is where he would lay down when he tired.

Writing did make him sharp. Smoothly, he could rehearse the contents of a book he read during high school, such as Stefan Sweig’s Marie Antoinette, one of his favorites.

Rosihan was born on May 10, 1922 in Kubang Nan Dua, West Sumatra. His father, Anwar Maharaja Sutan, was a Demang, or a prominent local leader in Padang, West Sumatra.

He finished his studies at the Dutch elementary school for natives or Holland Inlandesche School (HIS) in 1935 and the Dutch colonial secondary school or Meer Uitgebreid Lager Onderwijs (MULO) in 1939, both in Padang.

He continued his education at the prestigious Dutch colonial high school or Algemeene Middelbare School (AMS) in 1942 in Yogyakarta.

Rosihan stayed at his teacher, Tjan Tjoe Siem’s, house where he had the opportunity to read Siem’s collection of books.

His style of writing, he admitted, was influenced by Austrian writer Stefan Sweig, which displays a broad knowledge of many historical figures and is very well-written.

Rosihan said he became a journalist by accident in April 1943 when he joined Asia Raya, the only newspaper allowed to be circulated by the Japanese military during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia.

At that time, he had passed a test to become a prosecutor, but he needed money as his parents did not provide him with financial assistance.

“It never crossed my mind to become a journalist. When I finished high school, I wanted to go to the Netherlands to study philology. However, fate brought me to journalism,” said the man who speaks many foreign languages.

On Oct. 1, 1945, Rosihan became an editor of the Merdeka daily newspaper, but because of a conflict with B.M. Diah, he quit the paper on Oct. 7, 1947. He later founded the Siasat magazine on Jan. 1, 1947 and became the chief editor until the magazine died in 1957.

In 1948 he also founded the Pedoman newspaper and became its chief editor until former president Sukarno forcibly closed the newspaper in 1961, and later president Soeharto did the same in 1974 for its criticism of the authoritarian regime.

Rosihan married Siti Zuraida Sanawi on April 25, 1947. He met Siti Zuraida at the Asia Raya newspaper and they have two daughters, one son, six grandchildren and two great grandchildren.

The man, who was regarded by former president Sukarno as “a good boy” in terms of his attitude toward women, said he never questioned the judgment of his wife.

“When former president Soeharto appointed me ambassador to Vietnam, she said there was no point going there while our children stayed in Indonesia. I refused the appointment, which made Soeharto angry.”

As a journalist who has lived through the Dutch colonial period, the Japanese occupation, and independence, Rosihan has had many experiences a journalist can be proud of.

He was there during the Nov. 10, 1945, battle in Surabaya and witnessed other battles during the revolution.

He covered numerous events such as parliamentary meetings during the revolution, negotiations between Indonesian delegations and the Netherlands, the early trips of former president Sukarno and vice president Mohammad Hatta as well as attending the Malino Conference in Malino, South Sulawesi.

“I thank God that I was present at every crisis in Indonesian history,” he said.

He also had experience as a correspondent for several foreign media publications, including Australia’s The Age, the Hindustan Times in New Delhi, London-based news agency World Forum Features, and the Asian weekly in Hong Kong (1967-1971).

From 1976 to 1985 he was a correspondent of Singapore’s The Straits, and the New Straits Times in Kuala Lumpur. The two newspapers only terminated his service because he was already 63 years old.

Old journalists never die; they only fade away. Rosihan Anwar is one of them.

Developing failure?

Sat, 02/07/2009 1:06 PM | Lifestyle

With apartments sprouting up across the city, Jakarta could soon be more crowded than ever.

Urban planner from Trisakti University, Yayat Supriatna, said the likelihood of problems represents a failure on the part of the government to provide better housing for people.
Living in the suburbs, he said, became very costly for many who work in the city, making people go back to the city.
For for those who are less fortunate, the only way to get around is to rely on public transportation, no matter the problems.
"In the 1970s and 1980s the Jakarta's middle class flocked to the suburbs like Pondok Indah, Bekasi and Depok, but now it's becoming so difficult to live in the suburbs. It creates many problems, especially with access to workplaces. So beginingg in the late 1990s there has been a trend of people moving back to the city," Yayat Supriatna said.
"People just don't need a neighborhood anymore, as long as they can pay for what they think is efficient in terms of distance, time, cost and choice fits what they need."
Developers saw the opportunity and have favored the 'superblock' approach. A superblock is a vertical complex complete with supporting facilities, including shops and offices.
Due to land speculation, which was not anticipated by the government, up to 60,000 hectare of land reserved for housing around the greater Jakarta has been bought by developers. This shows that the government has not done its job to provide affordable housing, Yayat said.
To build a house in Jakarta is nearly as expensive as to buy an apartment.
"How can we be able to buy a house at an affordable price if all the land is owned by developers, building materials cost are high and the tax burden falls on the buyer?"
All these problems, he said, have made housing not just a mere social matter but a capital or investment matter.
"Only if the government acts quite extremely and buys back land to provide houses for people we will be able to find affordable housing prices."
He said that, the government's low cost apartment projects (Rusunami), are build on state-owned land, meaning that the government has no ability to provide land for housing except from what they already own.
The choice to build many high rise and luxury apartments also makes many people worry that it is a heavy burden will be put on the environment and create social problems.
"The biggest question is where does the water supply come from? I doubt they will only rely on the water company PDAM. If they use ground water, how much will they use?"
Beside environmental damage, there are concerns about emergency preparedness incase of a disaster and social control among the occupants of apartments.
Supriatna said that the development of apartments and condominiums by big business has gotten out of control.
"What we really need is to provide the informal sector with a subsidy so that they can provide themselves with affordable housing.
"The government is not the developer. They are supposed to only provide an attractive climate for the property business. If they lose control over the property business, only a certain class of people can afford proper housing."--JP/Matheos V. Messakh

Changing skyline Time to get back to the city?

Matheos Viktor Messakh , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sat, 02/07/2009 1:06 PM | Lifestyle

In between: A man reads ads for apartments during a property expo in Jakarta. (JP/ Ricky Yudhistira)

Jakarta's skyline is changing. Many billboards advertise great apartments - smartly themed they sell ideas of romantic rhythms to tropical paradises. In five years time, will the skyline be full of glittering towers?

Probably. But many simply do not care about the affect this will have on the city's worsening traffic and environment.
Novita Imelda finds living in apartment suits her needs.
She actually bought a house in a township in Tangerang back in 1999 but when she got married six years later, they bought an apartment in Central Jakarta as it was closer to their places of work.
She said that before buying the apartment she and her husband used to spend two to three hours a day traveling back and forth between their working places in Sudirman in Central Jakarta and Slipi in West Jakarta.
"Now it only takes 15 minutes for me and five minutes for my husband to get to work," said the mother of one, brimming with joy.
The young family found living in apartment more practical, efficient and safe, although it costs them more than buying a house. They first bought a studio and when the baby came, they bought a three-bedroom apartment.
"Of course it's more expensive. with the same price, we could buy a good house," Novita said. "But an apartment is more practical and easier to maintain."
Home sweet home: Two women checkout the interior design of an upscale apartment in Sudirman area, Central Jakarta (JP/ P.J. Leo)
In the past, many people shied away from staying in high-rise buildings, preferring to live in houses.
But with bad traffic and the cost of building or buying a house continuing to escalate, people have started to change their minds and reconsider their options.
In the last few years, more and more people, mostly professionals and executives, cannot resist the temptation of living closer to their workplaces - enabling them to escape being trapped for hours in traffic, spend quality time with their loved ones or simply enjoy more "me time".
"People are willing to pay more as long as they get what they want, especially for those with a good career.," Evi Susanti, Associate Director of PT Procon Indah, a Jakarta-based property consultancy, said
Over the past three years, more apartments are being built for the middle- and lower-income segments with the price tags are between Rp 200 and Rp 400 million.
For those who prefer to rent, the prices range from Rp 2 million up to Rp 5 million per month.
The hassle of endless traffic jams has seen the construction of many apartment buildings close to prime business districts.
"They never build far away from Jl. Sudirman, Jl. Rasuna Said, Jl. Thamrin or Jl. Gatot Subroto. These are where the concentration of the projects have been within the last five years."
Data from Procon shows that from 2004 to mid 2007, the number of apartments has grown by 60.4 percent, as demand grew by 67.8 percent.
Procon's market review showed that in the fourth quarter of 2008, the cumulative supply for condominiums in Jakarta reached 65, 260 units, with an annual availability of 8,400.
Although analysts anticipate that, due to the current global financial crisis, the property business will be sluggish within the next two years, but insist that property is a safe investment, as there is stable demand from the upper-middle class for property in strategic locations.
Beside the distance to workplaces, Procon's latest research shows that the size and number of bedrooms, facilities offered, the architecture style and payment scheme on an apartment are also top considerations.
Almost 50 percent of residents own their apartment at use it as their first house, up to 20 percent use their apartment as their second house or a house for their extended family members and more than 30 percent rented them.
Despite the crisis, developers are still frantically trying to come up with seductive marketing strategies including offering flexibility of payment terms.
"Attractive payment schemes are one of the reasons why many executives and professionals are willing to buy an apartment rather than renting a room or a house.," Evi said.
Before interest rates increased in October last year, most buyers used bank loans to buy but the crisis has made many developers change their strategy, offering blunt payments to accommodate the demand of market.
"After October 2008, we advised our clients to reshape their payment schemes. Smart developers are usually responsive to market need or nobody will buy."
The relatively steady prospects for property investments attract the buyers who just want to use their apartment as a rental property.
"Buying a house outside the city will take a long time to sell back for profit. It might be sold at a loss if you're in hurry, but buying an apartment and selling it back in four or five years, you might gain more than 50 percent in profit."
With such a picture in mind, returning back to the city might seem like a good choice.

Peter Senge: Bridging the gap between business & civil society

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Tue, 02/03/2009 12:31 PM | People

Peter Senge: JP/J. Adiguna

Global warming has raised the emergency alarm with activist, governmental agencies and business organizations alike.

It is the most daunting environmental problem of our time, but not many grasp the bigger picture, says renowned business advisor Peter Senge.

Senge, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational learning (SoL), has called for collaboration among business and non-business organizations to solve the problem.

An engineer by training, Senge is perhaps best known for his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, which introduced the idea of the “learning organization” and has sold more than a million copies since its release. In 1997 Harvard Business Review identified the book as one of the seminal management books of the past 75 years. A new work released late last year promises to be just as influential.

In The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (2008), Peter and his co-authors grapple with the environmental problems we face, highlighting innovative steps taken by individuals and corporations toward a more sustainable world.

For Senge and his co-authors, there are no “good guys” or “bad guys”; everyone is equally responsible for the problems facing the world. It may seem anachronistic that an expert in management and organizational change is focusing on sustainability, but Senge sees a strong connection in his work.

He has written five books since The Fifth Discipline all of which, he says, are about increasing interdependence and diminishing capacity to understand interdependence.

“All my books are about systems thinking, we’ve always had them. How we started to see the interdependence. …We got two curves that are creating big problems. One is the growing interdependence of the world…and a diminishing capacity to understand interdependence,” Senge told The Jakarta Post during his trip to the capital last week.

“The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence.

So if you deal with tribal cultures, prior to the agricultural revolution, many of them don’t even have a sense of themselves as separate from nature. They usually don’t have even a word for nature. You don’t have a word from something that’s not separate from you.”

Agrarian societies, he says, developed a slightly different attitude, believing it was humans who initiate the “natural” systems, which were often highly religious, and that humans are separate and superior.

During the industrial revolution and the subsequent urbanization process, he says, human beings began to ignore nature. “There’s a lot of American kids think their food comes from the grocery store and the concept of seasonality has no meaning to them whatsoever.”

The further people are from nature, the more they lost the ability to understand interdependence. “Nature is our teacher to understanding interdependence,” he says.

In October 1999, The Journal of Business Strategy named Senge as one of the 24 most influential people on business strategy over the last 100 years. In 2000, The Financial Times named him one of the world’s “top management gurus” and a year later Business Week rated him one of the Top Ten Management Gurus.

But business has never been Senge’s passion. “I had no interest in business, because I grew up in era when business was generally seen as a kind of a bad guy and I personally just never have prereminiscent in commerce.”

But his career as a lecturer on the subject has meant that he has met a great deal of prominent business people.

“I meet extraordinary people and what really struck me is that all the people in business are really intelligent but they are a lot more practical. And they continually deal with thinking better and acting more effectively.”

Senge describes himself as an ‘idealistic pragmatist’, an orientation that allows him to explore and advocate some quite ‘utopian’ and abstract ideas, most notable in relation to systems theory and the necessity of bringing human values into the workplace. He believes that vision, purpose, reflectiveness and systems thinking are essential if organizations are to realize their
potential.

He advocates for managerial and institutional change to build more sustainable enterprises, to foster social, natural as well as economic well being. The idea that the purpose of a company is to maximize profit, he says, is a basic misconception that pervades the business world.

He cites Peter Drucker’s adage that, “profit for a company is like oxygen for a person; if you don’t have enough of it, you’re out of the game,” but adds that, “if you think your life is about breathing, you’re really missing something”, Senge says that, unfortunately, most businesses operate as if their purpose was breathing.

“No, ultimately, the real purpose for any organization is to serve in some fashion. Business has a way of talking about how to create value, which is in someway isn’t bad…We just need to start thinking about if the value we want to create is consistent with all social and environmental well being.”

Senge said his thoughts are more or less influenced by the Confucian theory of leadership, particularly the theory of “Great Learning”, which scholars believe was written by Confucius’ grandson.

“It talks about the seven meditative spaces for leadership development and it starts with learning how to stop. A lot of people lost touch with what that means,” Senge says of the theory he was introduced to while in college.

“You need to learn how to stop your mind, because while you mind is in its continual state of flow you can’t observe, you can’t see what’s going on, until you can start to learn how to pay attention before the thought. So you cannot confuse the flow of your thought with what’s in front of you. Only then you start have some awareness of the reality you face.”

It seems Senge believes a multifaceted approach is needed to tackling the problems of our time.

Love of Literature just doesn't pay

Matheos Viktor Messakh , THE JAKARTA POST , JAKARTA | Mon, 02/02/2009 12:59 PM | Lifestyle

Something for nearly everyone: Visitors to the Kompas Gramedia Fair 2009 pass by publishers’ stalls. Although many books written in other languages are available in Indonesia, few Indonesian books are translated into English or other languages. JP/J. Adiguna

Despite Indonesia’s rich literary tradition and vibrant local publishing scene, the work of only one Indonesian writer — Pramoedya Ananta Toer — has made its way onto the international stage.

Visit any Gramedia bookstore around the country, and you will see that fiction is the most visited section. Hundreds of novels, plays and anthologies are published here every year, but few get translated, keeping them inaccessible to the rest of the world.

The list of obstacles is a long one, according to John H. McGlynn, the director of publications at the Lontar Foundation.

“First and foremost is lack of support, whether from the private corporate or government sector. There has to be recognition — especially from the government — if you want to present yourself to the world as a civilized nation through literature and art.”

McGlynn, who has lived in Jakarta for 33 years, translated several works by Pramoedya and arranged his US tour. In 1987, he established the Lontar Foundation along with writers Goenawan Mohamad, Sa-pardi Djoko Damono, Umar Kayam and Subagio Sastrowardoyo as an initiative to foster greater appreciation of Indonesian culture, particularly through the translation and publication of Indonesian literature in English.

It is hardly a secret that few Asian governments and business have made the effort to have their local literature translated and promoted worldwide. Writers from India, Singapore and the Philippines who write in English gain some success, and a few Chinese and Japanese writers have managed to break through on the international market.

This lack of government support means publishers must rely on sales alone — an approach that doesn’t work for translations.

“Most countries around the world recognize that,” McGlynn said. “Throughout South America, Europe, other countries in Asia, there are institutions or the government itself provides subsidies to publishers who want to publish their literature.”

Book supporters: A group of cheerleaders choose books at the Kompas Gramedia Fair 2009 at Istora Senayan in Jakarta, on Jan. 29. JP/J. Adiguna

Low sales and high production costs mean that most of the revenue from a translated book — 80 or 90 percent — goes toward covering production, distribution, translation and writing, plus overheads, leaving the publisher with an unsustainable profit margin.

“If the maximum amount a publisher or a translator can get get from a Rp 100,000 book is maximally Rp 10,000, how many books do they have to sell to get a profit?” he said. “The publisher of a translation can’t survive using the commercial model.”

Even one of Indonesia’s biggest publishers, Kompas-Gramedia, finds it hard to sell translations or other books written in English.

Bagus Dharmawan, a chief editor of Penerbit Buku Kompas, a subsidiary of Kompas-Gramedia publisher, believes that the lack of a local market for English-language books means many publishers are not interested in having local works translated.

“We still have a problem with literacy even in Indonesian,” he said. “How can we expect people to read in English?”

One example, said Dharmawan, was an English version of Development Manifesto by the late economist Mubyarto, published in 2005. By October 2008, only five exemplars had been sold.

Yet Indonesian publishers have a high rate of translating books written in other languages into Indonesian. According to UNESCO, Indonesian is among the top target languages for translations. When it comes to works translated out of Indonesian, the language does not appear on the list. Countries that have published books translated from Indonesian include Japan, the Netherlands, Australia, Germany and theUnited States.

Even when works are translated and published, convincing international booksellers to distribute them is very difficult, especially in the United States, which is the world’s biggest market.

“Of the some 100,000 books published in the US last year, less than zero comma something percent were translations,” McGlynn said — a sign of the international lack of appreciation of foreign literature.

“There is not that much interest in the West in knowing about Indonesia, and it’s happening with almost all non-English languages.”

Only a few authors who write in languages other than English are well-known in the West. Many become known after winning prizes, especially the Nobel Prize.

“Of all the wonderful Spanish-language writers, a couple have gained fame, and Umberto Eco is the only well-known Italian writer,” McGlynn points out. “Indonesia has only Pramoedya and it’s very limited. … He was interviewed by almost all major televisions, radio and newspapers, but that didn’t help him increase sales at all.”

That there are no institutions representing writers compounds the problem.

“There is no such thing as literary agents in Indonesia, whereas Western publishers will only deal with an agent. They don’t deal with authors, they don’t deal with publishers. So for a writer from Indonesia who doesn’t have an agent, they won’t get to first base.”

And even then, it is a crowded literary scene.

“If we’re going to translate something from Bahasa Indonesia into English, it has to say something different or it has to say something so amazingly well, that they will take notice.”

The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy’s highly successful award-winning 1997 novel, was an example of a book that “broke out”, McGlynn said, because it is well written in English and also illuminates Indian society.

“That’s where Pramoedya had a gift. He was both a good writer and he said something about Indonesia.”

A contemporary Indonesian novel, such as crime or chick lit, will not appeal to Western readers who already have too much choice.

“Not that Indonesian writers should look toward the West and say ‘what’s going to make it there?’ That should not be their measure of success. Their measure of success should be how well it is received within their country. But if they do want to introduce Indonesia abroad through literature then they need to say something about Indonesia.”

The lack of such writing, McGlynn said, is one reason the Lontar Foundation has not been as productive as hoped. During its 20 years of existence, the foundation has published less than 100 books.

A further limitation is a shortage of translators, and the time and money required for the translation.

“It takes a year or more to get the translation of a novel right,” McGlynn said. “But no organization can afford to pay a good translator what they deserve.”

McGlynn could translate Pra-moedya’s works only because the publisher paid him in advance.

“Most of the good translators I know have a full-time job. They only translate for love of Indonesia and there is no appreciation of that love. And after a while it just gets burned out.”

Business is not a name game, says Olga

The Jakarta Post , JAKARTA | Mon, 02/02/2009 11:42 AM | People

JP/P.J.LEO

JAKARTA: Fame does not guarantee success in business, says actress and presenter Olga Lydia.

“I’m sure that the prominence of the owner of the business has some effect on the business but I don’t know how much,” Olga told The Jakarta Post on Saturday. “But the most important thing is not the fame but the quality of the service.”

The 32-year-old started her businesses four years ago — joint ventures with colleagues and friends — which include a pool and lounge at Setiabudi Building and a restaurant at the Crowne Plaza, both in Jakarta.

“So far, all of the businesses have quite a lot of regular visitors. This is what we want. We want to have a kind of circle of customers,” she said.

Olga, who started her career as a model, will soon open another business — a restaurant and pub in Kemang, South Jakarta. This is also a joint venture with her friend actress and presenter Anya Dwinov and some “expert” partners.

“I’m lucky to have friends who are experts in the business and that makes me confident to make the investment even though many people might be very careful about investing in this so-called ‘crisis’ year,” she said.

The new restaurant and pub have been under preparation since last October and are scheduled for completion in late February.

“I chose this business because I like to eat. Choosing a business close to our hobbies or interests can help,” she said.

The actress, who loudly rejected the controversial pornographic law, graduated with a degree in civil engineering study from Bandung’s Parahyangan University in 1994.

She has hosted dozens of TV shows including the News dot Com and Republic Mimpi on Metro TV and Beyond Marketing Today on JakTV. — J/Matheos V. Messakh