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Jan 31, 2002. Caroline, Jakarta (komentar/tanggapan ini panjang, saya ambil yang relevan untuk di tampilkan di sini)

Apa definisi kemiskinan? Siapa yang membuat definisi itu? atas dasar apa? Apakah orang yang makan satu kali sehari= miskin, atau tdk makan daging satu bulan, apakah yang makan singkong dan ubi, apakah yang pendapatannya dibawah 500.000, 100.000. Dari GDP? Yang tidak bisa beli komputer? Di desa, di kota? Kita "diarahkan" using their standart! Dan mereka (The World Bank, ET) menyeragamkannya di semua negara dengan penanganan/solusi yang sama pula. Sorry..dalam hal ini mungkin saya lebih banyak datanya dari kamu.Tidak hanya Web tapi bukunya juga (sekarang di tangan saya berwarna hijau). That's their new strategy to control the world, what else? El nino?, rawan pangan?. Etc. what next? setelah itu mereka melegitimasi bantuan-bantuan yang diberikan atas nama penghapusan kemiskinan?
ORNOP (Non-governmental organization, ET) secara rutin mengajukan permohonan info terbaru yang kita tentukan sendiri dan mereka harus menyediakannya karena ada dalam kesepakatan akan keterbukaan informasi. Kita punya no loan, pinjaman siapa (data curian dr bappenas), jumlah proyek dan bentuk samaran nama proyek, lokasi, kita melacaknya sampai ke tingkat lokal. Give a dammed to WB! Dan orang-orang yang mensupportnya. Kita perlu orang cerdas yg punya hati u/ melobby para petinggi mereka supaya pemerintah nggak menelan bulat-bulat program mereka yang ujung-ujungnya bertujuan supaya kita jadi bangsa yang terus ngutang dan bergantung.
Dan jangan kira WB stupid. WB juga merangkul banyak ornop plat merah demi melancarkanprogram mereka. Dari Integrated Conservation yang gagal di beberapa taman nasional sampai pembangunan waduk. Dan siapa yang membayar kegagalan pembangunan dan hutang yang dikorupsi? Rakyat!yang tidak pernah menikmati
pembangunan itu, nggak pernah diajak berunding perlu atau enggak bikin waduk,
apalagi ikut tanda tangan. Dan kemana larinya aset sumberdaya hayati kita? Di
museum mereka untuk dimanipulasi jadi bahan obat paten, yang pada akhirnya kita beli dengan harga mahal tanpa kompensasi yang layak untuk masyarakat lokal( Intelectual Property Rights). Dammed LIPI dan penelitinya yang nggak jujur, juga manusia yang cari untung dengan menyelundupkan sumberdaya hayati demi kepentingan bisnis.kita dipaksa beli barang jadi mereka menurut aturan mereka.sementara IMF menekan untuk mengurangi subsidi kesehatan. Dan mereka akan berkata, this is fair, We have money, technology and Acsess. Forget about your people! We control the world.
Dan Semua orang pinter yg sekolah akan mengangguk setuju, yang kuat akan menguasai yang lemah. Masuk akal. Itulah ukum alam.
Jadi bayangkan betapa dahsyatnya "perang dalam negeri sendiri" Musuhnya bahkan teman sendiri, para pakar yang tidak punya keberpihakan, peneliti LIPI, Dosen, mentri, presiden LSM, Departemen, media, bahkan masyarakat dampingan/lokal yang udah dipecah dll (SOAL inI MEREKA AHLINYA)



Hi Caroline, 
Silahkan baca komentar saya di Should we believe in the World Bank and the IMF
Tentang kemiskinan, mungkin perlu di check komentar saya di How poor are we?

Feb 01, 2002.  Ipien Purba, Jogyakarta

Hidup bang Elwin! Kalau semua orang kita berpikiran gitu, sudah maju tanah air kita ini. Selama ini yang aku dengar orang2 kita yang di Amrik pada sombong-sombong. Kalau begini kan mantaf!!!

IpiEN

Feb 1, 2002. Brigita Juwita, Seattle, WA

Hi,.. aku lihat web kamu... bagus juga aku setuju banget sama isi dari this week's view.. bagus dan emang bener banget kok...

gita

Feb 1. 2002. Linda Sari, Jakarta

Thank you for giving me further explanation which indeed gives me more background about how you arrived at your decision to pursue this initiative. Now it could also satisfy my lingering question on the underlying assumption that you used in your articles, because before they seemed to give me impressions that you supposed the people/actors in your pieces were essentially good-natured or at least have good intentions.

But your explanation above vindicated that you also agreed that it is the low degree of morality that is the essence of all these issue. That is why I think I agree with a notion which said that we’re called to this world not to stop only at analyzing the problems - because they are mostly already given and they have been exhausted extensively by many parties. But to also provide real solutions, especially the breakthrough ones.With regards to the choice of target audience, correct me if I’m wrong though, you hinted that it is those people who are now residing abroad that present the real challenge because they are assumed to be more equipped. Even assuming this is true, intuition (in addition to personal experience/observations:-) tells me that only those who either 1) have the ‘incentives to care’ or 2) are visionaries who embarked abroad driven by solid motivation to go back and/or do something about Indonesia (like yourself), who could be enticed to support this kind of campaign. And from that group, perhaps only some portion of it can be categorized as supportive and cooperative. I have met/seen quite many even government-sponsored scholars, either when I was in the US or here, who either refuse to go back or came back but just do nothing to improve the situation.With regards to the party who lack the necessary information, have you made any kind of small study on which party is actually more in need of it, those people abroad or those in Indonesia?

Again, experience tells me (although this is becoming a tenuous argument when it’s used too often, I know, but I hope it still appropriate:-) that much more ground-breaking news and important data have come not from the local mass-media/sources but the foreign ones. That’s why I think the reason why there are so many people joining those first two groups (the unconcerned and the ignorant), perhaps because they are being bombarded with more (instead of lacking) comprehensive information, but choose to do nothing about it because there is no incentive or personal commitment. And can you rely on others’ attachment with their pasts on this?  On the contrary people in Indonesia constantly receive one-sided data and lack the broad perspective to see the existing problems. However, this later group, especially the educated ones, I think have the inherent element to become the ones which can make real changes in Indonesia. The reason, once again because they have a personal interest/incentive to make it better, because it involves their own future & personal well-beings.
Perhaps, one way for you to reconcile these and to shoot two birds with one stone is by aiming at equipping people in Indonesia with unbiased yet enlightening information with the help of joint effort from concerned people from both local and overseas. I might have gone too far while perhaps using inaccurate assumptions in daring myself to giving you these opinions & idea. So, please do not get weary to correct and further enlighten me, O.K?

linda

Hi Linda,
Thanks again for such great questions and concerns. I will try to answer them as much as I could.

analyzing the problems - because they are mostly already given and they have been exhausted extensively by many parties

There are two kinds of main analysis you found there, either partisan or garbage. It’s garbage because they pay to do that and we knew the results even before they do it. This is usually done by professionals or semi-profs. Secondly, there is another one that always sees bad things in the government. This usually is done by the NGOs. Of course not all of them are bad because you can find a very limited numbers of which are good. Pertaining to our goal in TII, we really have to be careful to interpret it, although it’s actually easy to understand. For example, we said that one of our goals, besides presenting the cases, is also to provide solutions to the cases. 

As you might have read from some of the articles here, we try to do that, offer ideas or policy implications, although some of them are familiar to many. But there are also new proposals such as the idea of incorporating entrepreneurship materials into our high school and university curriculum, establishing national recovery agency which would produce a blue-print for the nation in the next 20 years and that would come up with a plan similar to Soeharto’s Repelita, and so on. We certainly can’t go into detail here about the idea, presenting cases one by one and proposing the solutions step by step. That’s not possible as it will be useless at all. Idea is much more important. Again although some of them are already well-known, presenting them in a new perspective would make it easy to be understood and accepted.

And from that group, perhaps only some portion of it can be categorized as supportive and cooperative. I have met/seen quite many even government-sponsored scholars, either when I was in the US or here, who either refuse to go back or came back but just do nothing to improve the situation.

The real problem is actually those who are supported by the government. Majority of them act like innocent and independent people. What I mean as innocent is they ‘deny’ that most of the grants they receive are actually public debts or government debts. This attitude of course does not encourage them to study hard, work hard and improve their way of thinking here or in the country they are studying. Instead, to our unfortunate, their way of thinking is still traditional in a sense that they still practice non-democratic values, behave in a less tolerance manner, and even amplify their primordialism. 

When some of them return home, they develop those unconstructive values even more serious. No wonder if we see that a large percentage of the corrupt bureaucrats are those who have studied abroad. What I mean as independent is their attitude that there is no responsibility attached to their duty as recipients of government’s support. Otherwise, we should have seen long time ago a strong network of government’s scholars (if you can call them as scholars) that focus on the development of the country. Instead, they go back to their habitat and become a part of the problems. Of course there are some who still walk along the line of idealism, but they will get discouraged if they see the reality. There is another serious problem regarding this matter. The recipients of the government’s fund are not necessary the best and the good guys. It is no secret that nepotism plays no less important role in deciding who will be funded. Also the worst situation is when the government funds some people (not all) much more than enough for students. A reliable information I heard that some PhD students ( I don’t know about the lower degree) funded by the government receive stipend from $2500 to $3500 per month, excluding their tuitions and books, plus they still receive their basic salaries as government officials. Compared with a standard amount for a student under the same program in any institution in the US which is around $1500, that amount of course is outrageous. The amount could in fact funds two people. And a more horrendous story is, that amount is the final amount sent to the recipients and the one reported to the treasury or HRD office (of the department where the recipients work) is much higher. Again, it is no secret that this business is also a lucrative area for corruption. So, what can we expect from such circumstances?

My conclusion is nothing but expecting a good gesture and cooperation from people who are more independent and free from nepotism.

With regards to the party who lack the necessary information, have you made any kind of small study on which party is actually more in need of it, those people abroad or those in Indonesia?

I haven’t made any study on this question. It would be interesting to know the result. But presumably, the both are still in need of information.

Again, experience tells me that much more ground-breaking news and important data have come not from the local mass-media/sources but the foreign ones.

That’s true. A huge of amount of research about Indonesia has been done by foreign scholars. Also, foreign media have skills and technology to present the case much better than their counter part in Indonesia. And of course, the Internet world provide them all to us. But scholars’ research is mainly for certain class of people. Breaking news is still news, you can tell many different stories from any events and make your case. If our case is to promote democracy, unity and prosperity, we can use the news to support them. Again, the young fellows in Indonesia are sensitive to any twisted story/news. So, we can hope by providing them a more sensible meaning to a story/news, then they will be more rational. For your last question, I certainly offer hands and invitation to any people to join this effort. As much I could, I will contact those categories you mentioned, but I do have limited time. If people are more interested in something else which perhaps closely related to their skills and knowledge, I encourage them to do that. The more important is, the more people realize the need of doing something for the people in the country, the better. We may live and dwell in any part of the world, but seeing the country ruined like a sinking boat, it just no good.

Regards,

Elwin

Feb 3, 2002. Halil Kurt, Iowa, US

Man...a well prepared mission. It takes a lot of efforts. Congrats and good luck.

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Last updated 2/26/02