Feeling the World Bank’s pain: Policy advocacy and those PDFs

This post was first published on The Lowy Interpreter on 14 May 2014

The author, PDF at the ready, meeting  Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva in 2010  (Photo courtesy of the author).

In October 2007, my organisation (the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the SSRC) paid for two British consultants to go to Dili to help the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste (UNMIT) plan its security sector review. This was part of a project designed to help UN peacekeepers access ideas and people to produce better policy. In their first presentation, they put up an anonymous quote defining the desired end state for security:

A safer society where the citizens’ rights and public tranquillity are preserved constitutes the primacy of democratic life.

The assembled UN mission officials were asked: did anyone recognise it? No hands were raised. Another paragraph was projected and once again nobody could even guess its origin, though everyone agreed it was a good definition of what Timor-Leste should be doing. With one more click, the source was revealed: Government of Timor-Leste IV Constitutional Government Programme 2007-2012. No one had read it even though it was released in English and Portuguese months beforehand as the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction’s (CNRT’s) party manifesto.

It was available as a PDF, the ubiquitous format used for publishing documents online.

I recalled this workshop while reading coverage of Which World Bank Reports are Widely Read?, a study that found that nearly one-third of the PDFs on the Bank’s website were never accessed. (The Bank’s bestseller was Vietnam Development Report 2009: Capital Matters, with 2955 downloads). In era of overcrowded inboxes, getting busy people to do professional background reading is difficult. One of the two consultants mentioned earlier, Gordon Peake (a regular contributor to The Interpreter and author of Beloved Land) co-wrote an academic journal article called Their Reports are not Read and their Recommendations are Resisted: The Challenge for the Global Police Policy Community. (No need to pay US$39 for a PDF, it’s free if you Google the title.)

After five years with an organisation that has published hundreds of PDF policy reports, I know first-hand the challenge of getting decision-makers to read detailed research papers with complex arguments, often in a language that is not their native tongue.

Writing the report is only the first step. The second, in a long process of advocating policy change, is making the report available as an online PDF. At some point, armed with a PDF printout, an advocate will try to make a case face-to-face.

In July 2010, Crisis Group published a landmark report on the political crisis in Bangkok. Bridging Thailand’s Deep Divide was the first comprehensive international report on the violence of that year. When then Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva’s spin doctors traveled to Washington DC, they found the report had got there first, framing the understanding of this conflict in the US. This is when the PM’s office called and we were asked to come to the Purple Room in Bangkok’s Government House.

Arrayed against my Thai colleague and me that day was an intimidating debating team led by the Oxford-educated prime minister, supported by a cabinet minister, his spokesman, and a few director-generals — sixteen staff in all. The crowd put us on the defensive, until we realised that the criticisms the PM was making were not of our analysis but of foreign media dispatches. The prime minister’s points became easier to rebut as it became clear that he had not read our carefully edited PDF and neither, apparently, had the person who wrote his talking points.

In March 2012, I made the case on The Interpreter for a new role for Australia in Myanmar to incoming Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr. By that time, Crisis Group had been writing reports on the country for a decade, emailing them and posting them online. Aware that bureaucracy had long made the case for change, we thought we were adding weight to an existing argument; one Crisis Group had made around the world for some years. A few months later, Australia’s policy did change to one of engagement along the lines we had been urging.

Did we have influence or make a contribution? We had no idea and no way to evaluate our impact. If Bob Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister had a mention of Crisis Group’s work on Myanmar, which Australia now calls Burma again, I missed it. But last year I serendipitously sat down for lunch at a function in an Asian capital next to an Australian diplomat. We had not met previously, but this official knew our work on Myanmar. I was told that before making the decision to re-engage, front office staffers had been asked to download and print all the Crisis Group PDFs on Myanmar (among other documents) for the minister to read.

In almost five years overseeing the publication of more than seventy PDFs as well as dozens of opinion pieces and blog posts, this is the only proof I have that someone of ministerial rank might have ever read one. He was only one reader, but a high value one. Proof, perhaps, that a PDF in the right hands can make a difference.

REVIEW: The Violent Archipelago: Rethinking Its Place in History

Indonesia, Volume 82 (October 2006), 115–120

Original PDF of this review is available here.

Jemma Purdey. Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996–1999. Asian Studies Association of Australia, Southeast Asia Publication Series. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006. 300 pages.

Joseph Nevins. A Not-So-Distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. 273 pages.

Richard Tanter, Desmond Ball, and Gerry Van Klinken, eds. Masters of Terror: Indonesia’s Military and Violence in East Timor. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 218 pages.

Damien Kingsbury, ed. Violence in Between: Conflict and Security in Archipelagic Southeast Asia. Victoria, Australia: Monash University Press, 2005. 326 pages.

Jim Della-Giacoma

The violent past of archipelagic Southeast Asia during the past seventy years has been well documented. Neither the end of the Cold War nor any New World Order has changed the steady beat of nationalist, ethnic, religious, or state-based violence in this region, in particular in the nations we now call Indonesia and Timor-Leste. The horror of violence is a constant for those whose lives are involuntarily caught up in such brutal turmoil.

These four books, if read concurrently, track how the violence in the archipelago has evolved in the last decade. Removed from the ideological struggle against communism (which now seems like an ice-age ago), violence in the archipelago has in recent years moved through the four seasons of nationalist, ethnic, state-sanctioned, and religion-inspired inspired terrorism.

Each book has another common theme: revealing the impunity enjoyed by the state-sanctioned murderers, terrorists, and war criminals. The masterminds of this last decade of terror, its middle managers, and most of its perpetrators have never really been called to account, let alone punished for offenses that range from petty acts to crimes against humanity. Moreover, despite the magnitude of these crimes, the narratives in three of the four books show how the writing about the history of violence in the archipelago seems to have changed since September 11, 2001. The storytelling has moved from the post-colonial tale of David and Goliath after the Second World War through the narrative of the Cold War’s state terror of an authoritarian regime to the early twenty-first century framework of the US administration’s so-called “War on Terror.”

The near star of September 11 and its proximity to the nation that has the greatest influence over scholarship in the English-speaking world has obscured what the collective consciousness remembers about other relatively recent obscene crimes—such as the crimes against humanity in East Timor. No longer is violence alone sufficient to be explained as a crime against humanity in its own right. With globalization, it must now come with accompanying qualifications and be measured against the yardstick of September 11. However, as some of these authors reflect, the horror of the terror being inflicted on Indonesian Chinese and Timorese by their own neighbors and paternalistic government must surely outrank that inflicted by an outsider or anonymous “other.” This is even more true when those publicly deemed responsible remain untarnished enough to continue to live close by, stay in office, and be promoted or eligible to run for and hold some of the highest offices in the land. Yet this ever-present terror still competes with the memories and visually documented tragedy of September 11, 2001.

Historians are also weighed down by the depth of their knowledge and reliance on an “old” medium, academic texts. Today, regional specialists must compete with global political analysts when on-the-air and online international news media with narrow, preconceived storylines demand fast interpretations. In such a contest of ideas, the focus has shifted to the simplicity and global scope of post-9/11 terrorism, rather than on dissecting the complexity of underlying local historic and political tensions as the actual causes of much violence.

Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia

Jemma Purdy’s Anti-Chinese Violence in Indonesia, 1996–1999 captures the convulsions of the late New Order as violence was directed against the small ethnic Chinese minority in Indonesia. The second half of the 1990s was a chaotic period of great social, political, and economic change in the nation hit hardest by the Asian economic crisis of 1997–1998. Of the four books reviewed here, Purdy’s is the most thorough in its microscopic, detailed narrative that examines and analyzes even seemingly minor incidents. Purdy digs deep to seek the roots of conflict in obscure Indonesian towns where terrible violence was triggered by little more than minor acrimony between bosses and employers. Purdy also stands back to analyze the political environment that nurtured such violence.

Purdy’s is also the one book among the four that best lets the horror of the violence stand on its own testimony as an unspeakable crime without reference to September 11, 2001. The crimes against ethnic Chinese were brutal, state-supported, and left unpunished. What’s more, the sub-text of all four books is that part of the horror is that the violence may have been avoided had governments made different policy choices. This trail of evidence leads all the way to President Suharto through the Indonesian armed forces as the violence appears to be condoned by the government. Purdy’s study balances a critique of this government’s policies to tolerate anti-Chinese violence with individual descriptions of the trauma experienced by rape victims. Purdy’s study has depth as it climaxes with the May 1998 violence—not only that in Jakarta, which has already been well-reported, but also horrific events in the neglected regional centers of Medan, Solo, and Cilacap. While Purdy makes no attempt to include this kind of violence in the present-day definition of “terrorism,” she does conclude her study of the period with the rise of religion-inspired violence directed against Christian Indonesians. That phenomenon is explored in greater detail in Violence in Between.

There are common threads among all four works reviewed here. The first obvious link between Purdy’s research and the three other books is that the masterminds and perpetrators of the violence come from the Indonesian Armed Forces (then known by the acronym ABRI, but later as TNI).1 The fires of anti-Chinese violence were stoked by ABRI as part of broader political maneuvers against Suharto. The second common theme is impunity. Some of the key ABRI leaders who guided, instigated, and underwrote anti-Chinese violence in this period are the same individuals who later oversaw the political violence in East Timor. Purdy’s research points the finger at the same cast of characters in the ABRI leadership who are later listed in Masters of Terror as being responsible for using violent means to subvert the 1999 East Timor referendum for self-determination. Purdy speculates that had ABRI’s leaders been punished for playing with fire and politics in 1996–1998, they may have thought twice about using such tactics again to try to stop the 1999 East Timor vote for independence.

A Not-So-Distant Horror

At the core of A Not-So-Distant Horror is the case for international complicity in the crimes committed in East Timor, particularly that of the United States and Australia. It is the US-based Joseph Nevins who, in the very first chapter, most directly makes the link and addresses how the events of September 11 have changed the way that the “old” violence in Timor is now interpreted:

As in New York in September 2001, so in East Timor many hundreds perished in September 1999 due to acts of horrific terror. (5)

In the chapter “Double Standards or Justice at Ground Zero?,” Nevins concludes his book with a passionately argued thesis. He contrasts the resolve of Western governments to ensure accountability after September 11 with the complicity in the suffering and devastation of East Timor during twenty-four years of Indonesian occupation, which climaxed with the UN-sponsored ballot for independence in 1999.

Thus the violence of states is generally depicted as inherently more legitimate than that of non-state actors. Non-state actors who employ violence against civilians are, by definition, terrorists. State actors who employ violence against civilians, on the other hand, are just that: state actors, albeit ones guilty of brutality. (194)

At times, for a reader with first-hand experience in East Timor during this period, it seems a belabored point. However, for the September-11 generation of new students and scholars reading history for the first time, such an emphasis may indeed be necessary. It is reasonable to assume that most of the potential future readers of this book are unfamiliar with the actual horror of the violence in September 1999 that was inflicted by the Indonesian armed forces and its local militia proxies on Timorese civilians. It’s worth going the extra mile to make sure that the significance of the crimes committed in East Timor in 1999 by ABRI are put in perspective and not forgotten.

Masters of Terror

Masters of Terror also begins with a post-September 11 qualification. From the first sentence in their introductory chapter, Hamish McDonald and Richard Tanter feel compelled to justify the use of the word “terror” in the book’s title, now that the word has become “the touchstone of global politics at the start of the new millennium.” They seek to define the freedom from “state terror” (when governments turn on their own citizens) as the factor that differentiates “the West” from “the Rest.” Or, in other words, terror in the West comes from outsiders or outliers, whereas terror elsewhere comes from the government itself.

This book sets out to document the systematic strategy of crimes against humanity by the TNI and its militia allies against the people of the occupied territory of East Timor in 1999. It also reviews Indonesia’s judicial process that officials in Jakarta undertook in a feeble attempt to account for the 1999 violence in East Timor that one UN official described as “just one percent above a joke.” Most of those charged were acquitted or given light sentences that were in no way proportionate to their crimes. Those convictions were mostly later overturned on appeal. Ironically, McDonald and Tanter note that pursuit of accountability for those responsible for the “state terror” in East Timor in 1999 has been permanently pushed aside by the US -sponsored “war on terror.” Post-1999 prohibitions imposed by the US Congress that were intended to punish the TNI by limiting contact between Indonesian armed forces and the United States have all but been lifted. Indonesia, formerly a loyal US ally in the war against communism, recently had its military links with its US counterparts restored, establishing it as a partner in the US “war on terror.” Masters of Terror argues that, even if a crude comparison with September 11 is made in terms of numbers of lives lost, the terror perpetrated by the TNI in East Timor was so wide and deep as to be a much more significant crime. The 1999 violence in East Timor was more than just the sum of a series of massacres and murders in a remote half island involving perhaps 2,000 victims.

It involved the forced deportation and flight of three-quarters of East Timor’s 800,000 people by September 1999, and the organized destruction of the territory’s infrastructure and housing stock. It involved an attack on the territory’s religious institutions. It was a frontal attack on democracy and freedom, an attempt to dismantle an emerging nation. (11)

 Violence in Between

Damien Kingsbury and the contributors in Violence in Between take a longer and wider view of religion-inspired violence in Southeast Asia than is commonly taken bythose looking at the world through a post-September 11 lens. The Bali nightclub bombing in 2002 has led to an overemphasis on al-Qaeda-inspired violence in Indonesia in recent years. However, as Kingsbury writes, the region has always been relatively unstable, and has a long history of conflict and violence, “so it is only those with short memories who would be entirely surprised” by the region’s violent present. What the post-Bali-bombing shift in attention to Southeast Asia did, however, was awaken those ignorant of history or not following events closely who believed that the region was beginning to settle. This is sometimes portrayed as a shift from nationalist violence with a regional dimension to the less predictable wave of global terror. In the second chapter of Violence in Between, Carlyle Thayer identifies the terrorist attacks on a disco and pub in Kuta Beach, Bali, in October 2002 as the key event marking the transition from old to new terrorism for Southeast Asia.

New terrorism is a term used to describe high-profile mass-causality (or apocalyptic) attacks against civilians by internationally networked terrorist groups. “Old terrorism” focused on selective political violence committed by anti-government insurgents and ethno-nationalist separatists, usually acting in isolation, and was confined in geographic scope. (53)

Thayer also identifies the challenge of reporting facts, understanding events, and recording history when today’s mass media demand sound-bites and instantaneous commentary and analysis. Such media pressure often occurs on-the-air and on-the spot, before a thoughtful understanding can emerge, and often before facts on which to base a solid analysis have been revealed. When television hosts rely on “international terrorism” experts, thoughtful perspectives informed by country-specific expertise are overlooked. Premature analyses of events can lead to a temporary imbalance in the interpretation of a violent event by stressing the events’ “international” impact while overlooking regional and country-specific causes and effects.

Quite quickly the new discourse on new terrorism in Southeast Asia became dominated by what might be termed the Al Qaeda-centric paradigm. This provided the primary framework through which the activities of militant Islamic groups in Southeast Asia were viewed. An alternative, or “bottom up,” view was offered by country studies specialists that stressed the importance of local factors and the agency of local leaders. (53)

What’s Missing?

No four books can possibly cover all aspects of the violence in the archipelago in the last decade. Nor can a brief review essay such as this one do justice to all the arguments and evidence in each book. However, it is worth noting that some key recent developments are missing from these books, mostly as the events took place after copy deadlines. Purdy’s narrative ends in 1999, and she notes that there has been other anti-Chinese violence since then, particularly aimed at churches. This deserves greater analysis if we are to understand whether the post-1999 violence is truly anti-Chinese in nature, is characterized by post-Suharto politics, is part of in Indonesia’s rising religious tensions, or is an extension of a global Islamic terror agenda. Furthermore, while Purdy notes that the Indonesian elite no longer regard the May 1998 violence in Jakarta as “a national story of great consequence,” the relative lack of anti-Chinese violence post-New Order, which has allowed ethnic Chinese culture to grow in this time, also deserves greater consideration.

Both A Not-So-Distant Horror and Masters of Terror went to print before the publication of the final report of the Commission for Reception, Truth, and Reconciliation in East Timor (known by its Portuguese acronym CAVR). This lengthy document is worthy of an examination all its own, particularly to see whether it offers any insights or rebuttals into causes of the most recent “East versus West” violence that has ripped apart Timor’s social fabric and crippled its polity. In all the books covering East Timor, the role and responsibility of the current Timorese leadership in pragmatically supporting impunity for the Indonesian military and their Timorese cohorts needs greater examination. Nevins lets the Timorese leadership off lightly by noting their “inability” to “forcefully advocate” for “justice and accountability” for East Timor’s suffering. Van Klinken only comes to this issue in an afterword, where he identifies a “lack of spine by the East Timor Government” as one reason the abuses of 1999 remain unaccounted for. He further notes that the Catholic Church in Timor said the silence about prosecutions from the Truth and Friendship Commission jointly established by Indonesia and East Timor in July 2005 promoted “impunity” and that human-rights groups had rejected this bilateral body as a “whitewash.” These books cover the role of international culpability at length, but do not really examine the contribution that the East Timorese leadership played in undermining any international process by succumbing to real politik with its large neighbors.

Purdy observes that Indonesia seems reluctant to revisit the anti-Chinese violence of the 1990s, and many experts see that Indonesia has more “new terrorism” in its future. However, increasing political space in Indonesia has perhaps encouraged Indonesians to revisit some of the recent violent past, including the country’s role in East Timor. Former Indonesian foreign minister, Ali Alatas, recently published The Pebble in the Shoe: The Diplomatic Struggle for East Timor, saying he wanted to start a debate about Indonesia’s past occupation of East Timor. “I decided I would try to open up a debate and leave it to the reader to draw his conclusions,” Alatas was quoted as saying. 2

The reader of these four books, each volume its own act of witness, might conclude that there is no need for more debate about what happened in the violent decade they examine, particularly about East Timor. Instead, there is a need for victims to be recognized and perpetrators to be punished, lest the culture of impunity and the cycle of violence in the archipelago continue unchecked for another generation.

——-

1. ABRI is Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia, Armed Forces of the Republic of Indonesia; TNI is Tentara Nasional Indonesia, Indonesian National Army, including all the service branches.

2. Jane Perlez, “A Book about East Timor Jabs Indonesia’s Conscience,” New York Times, August 17, 2006, p. 3.