Philippines Conference Room
TERNATE, North Maluku, Indonesia: Indonesia's first direct presidential election was held peacefully last Monday. That fact alone spelled success in a troubled country with an authoritarian past. As vote totals mounted at election headquarters in Jakarta, observers could project not only the outcome--they could also look forward with some confidence to a democratic future for the fourth most populous country and largest Muslim society on earth.
Seen from below, however, the world's biggest and most complex democratic experiment amounts to a set of promises still waiting to be fulfilled.
Half an hour by speedboat from Ternate and two more hours by jeep on damaged roads across the remote island of Halmera lie two adjacent villages, Sosol and Tahane. A clash between them on the night of August 18, 1999 had triggered near-anarchy here in the northern Maluku archipelago. Muslims fought Christians, then Muslims fought Muslims. More than a thousand died.
An Indonesian colleague and I went there on election day. We wanted to know whether the balloting would help heal or reopen North Maluku's wounds.
Sosol is a Christian village. In a near-whisper that reflected the sensitivity of the topic, the village secretary blamed the 1999 outbreak squarely on Muslim militants in Tahane. They had attacked Sosol en masse, he said. They had thrown rocks and torched homes while screaming "Allahu Akbar"--"God is great." Christian villages had counterattacked.
Interviewed in his home just down the road, the village chief of all-Muslim Tahane remembered differently: "They acted first," he said. People in Sosol had been drinking alcohol, forbidden to Muslims. From his side of the border he could hear the shouts of drunken Sosolans abusing Tahane; the Sosolans began seizing Tahanean houses, slashing the furniture, he said. He admitted that the first to die was killed by a Tahanean, "but they started it," he insisted. "They had weapons - arrows, bombs. What was I to do? Let them roll over us?"
Ever since the chief and his fellow villagers had arrived in Tahane in the 1970s, evacuees from a feared volcanic eruption on their home island in the south, the Sosolans had hated them and tried to get them to leave. Or so he said.
The roots of this conflict embrace many issues. They include religion, migration, ethnicity, customs, and access to land. But it was an action taken by the central government in far-off Jakarta that lit this volatile mix in 1999--a decree that transferred Sosol and several other largely Christian villages to the jurisdication of a new and mostly Muslim subdistrict, including Tahane. What looked in Jakarta like a purely administrative arrangement appeared to Sosolans to threaten their identity.
It has never been realistic here to expect the national government to understand what goes on in and between particular villages--not in a country this vast, diverse, and underdeveloped.
But democracy raises expectations. What happened on July 5 linked the electorate directly, almost personally, to individual candidates running for president and vice-president of the entire country.
Throughout our election-date tour of polling stations in northern Maluku we came across evidence of disappointment and hope in roughly equal measure.
Every villager we met either was or had been a refugee from the violence of the 1990s, and nearly every one had suffered. Yet when we asked who had supplied them with emergency food and housing materials to survive the crisis and rebuild, our informants rarely mentioned the Indonesian government.
We also found good news. Although Sosol and Tahane voted for opposing slates, old wounds stayed closed. The villagers were not about to let political rivalries between presidential candidates rekindle calamity. There was no violence on voting day, and turnouts were high in all the villages. If democracy requires civility and participation, the people of northern Maluku are ready and willing to do their part.
But will Indonesia's new president, when finally elected in a run-off this September, be willing and able to his or her part? Will campaign promises be kept?
Perhaps the most poignant hint of this country's fragility occurred when I asked the Sosol village secretary, "What is Indonesia?" For the first time in our conversation, he fell silent. Try as he might, he could not answer.
At the risk of wishful thinking, one can hope the election itself was a kind of answer.
A buffet lunch will be available to those who RSVP to Rakhi Patel at rpatel80@stanford.edu by Tuesday, May 5. Only recently have scholars begun to invest a substantial amount of effort in researching the history of the "forgotten" region of P'yóngan Province in Korean historiography. These works, which focus mostly on the period before the Hong Kyóngnae Rebellion of 1812, mainly investigate particular historical experiences of this region that culminated in the cross-class rebellion. These works are extremely valuable for a number of reasons. They represent the first comprehensive historical research on the northwestern region of the Korean peninsula, currently a part of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea (North Korea). Most of these studies start with the notion that there was no yangban aristocracy in P'yóngan Province -- a prevailing perception of late Chosón literati, and one that rationalized social and political discrimination against people from this region. One of the main goals of this study is to challenge this perspective through a close reading of the writings of Paek Kyónghae (1765-1842), a literatus from P'yóngan Province, to illuminate his perceptions and responses to regional discrimination and his cultural identity as a man from a politically and socially condemned region. This discussion offers a microscopic examination of the bilateral relations between the center and the periphery through Paek's life experiences. Particularly because Paek Kyónghae lived as a yangban official through the major social and political disruption posed by the Hong Kyóngnae Rebellion -- to which regional discrimination against the people of P'yóngan Province in terms of political advancement by the central court provided an ideological justification -- his views and personal choices partly explain how the existing regime survived the rebellion.
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall
Singapore has become widely known as a successful experiment in multiracialism and meritocracy. The apparently successful management of ethnic relations in Singapore has been attributed to the ostensibly race-blind vision of its leaders. In his talk, Eugene Tan will challenge this orthodox interpretation. He will argue instead that Singapore's rulers have not only been acutely aware of ethnicity and its importance. They have intentionally mobilized race, culture, and language as key political resources to ensure that Singapore remains a sophisticated, authoritarian, developmental state.
Eugene Tan has been researching multiracialism in Singapore at Stanford on a Fulbright fellowship while on study leave from the Singapore Management University, where he is a lecturer in law.
This seminar is co-hosted by the Southeast Asia Forum at Shorenstein APARC and the Stanford Program in International Legal Studies, Stanford Law School. This is the eleventh SEAF seminar of the 2003-2004 academic year.
Daniel and Nancy Okimoto Conference Room
Conflicting claims over Kashmir have been the main cause of hostility between India and Pakistan. The Kashmir dispute is complex. Although the area is predominantly Muslim, significant other religious minorities coexist in Indian Kashmir, while Pakistan Kashmir is linguistically divided from the rest of Kashmir. Nevertheless, both sides of the region are linked by common historical aspirations for a united Kashmir. India and Pakistan have fought several times over differences in their vision for Kashmir, which itself differs from the Kashmiri vision. During the late 1980s, an armed uprising in Indian Kashmir over independence resulted in the deaths of an estimated 60,000 people. A peaceable resolution should look at the region's history and culture even as it balances India and Pakistan's ambitions over Kashmir. It is not obvious, though, that such a resolution must be a "once-and-for-all-time" resolution or an agreed-to process without a committed timeline or, indeed, goals. The seminar will present and discuss these issues. Samina Ahmed is project director for South Asia at the International Crisis Group. She has worked previously as a research fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; the Institute of Regional Studies, Islamabad; and the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, Karachi. Dr. Ahmed has a masters degree in international relations and a Ph.D. in political science from the Australian National University, Canberra. Dr. Ahmed is the author of several book chapters and articles in academic journals and the print media. Her publications include ?The United States and Terrorism in Southwest Asia: September 11 and Beyond,? International Security, Vol. 26, (Winter 2001/2002); ?Pakistan: Professionalism of an Interventionist Military? in Muthiah Alagappa, ed., Military Professionalism in Asia: Conceptual and Empirical Perspectives (Honolulu: East-West Center, University of Hawaii, 2001), and a co-edited book.
Philippines Conference Room, Encina Hall
Daulah Islamiyya (Islamic sovereignty, or an Islamic state) is a declared objective of the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyya. In Malaysia, where parliamentary elections are expected to be held in April, both the Muslim-Malay party (UMNO) in the ruling coalition and the Islamist party (PAS) opposed to UMNO have offered rival visions of Malaysia as an Islamic state. Radical groups in Indonesia have proposed replacing the "Pancasila state" in their country with an Islamic state. So what exactly is an "Islamic state"? And why does it matter so much for politics -- radical or democratic -- in Muslim Southeast Asia? Dr. Martinez will review and explore the contexts, in theory and in practice, that can help us understand what this debate is about. Patricia Martinez, a Malaysian, is among the most highly regarded and widely published scholars working on Islam in Southeast Asia. She is based at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, where she is senior research fellow for Religion and Culture and Head of Intercultural Studies at the Asia-Europe Institute. Her writings relevant to her talk include "Islam, Constitutionalism and the Islamic State" (2004) and "The Islamic State or the State of Islam in Malaysia"(2001). A 2003 essay, "Deconstructing Jihad; Southeast Asian Contexts," is available at http://www.ntu.edu.sg/idss/new-publi.asp. Dr. Martinez has just returned to Stanford from speaking engagements in Australia.
Philippines Conference Room
Asia-Pacific Research Center
Encina Hall E301
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."
Philippines Conference Room
This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."
Philippines Conference Room
Born in Shanghai in 1970, Mian Mian first began writing at the age of sixteen. She dropped out secondary school in Shanghai in 1987 and two years later went on her own to Shenzhen, a boomtown in the southern province of Guangdong. She spent five years there delving into society's seedier side before returning to Shanghai, where she continues to reside.
After Mian Mian came home to Shanghai, she started writing again, and by 1997 her short stories and novellas were appearing in Xiaoshuo Jie (Fiction World) and several other widely circulated Chinese literary magazines. The milieu depicted in Mian Mian's work is drawn from her life experience, and many of her fictional characters are also inspired by the subculture she moved in, a subculture peopled by aspiring singers, drug addicts, prostitutes, homosexuals, gangsters, the mentally ill, slackers, and self-proclaimed artists. She became the first Chinese writer to describe drugs. Her style, characteristic of "cruel youth" and her simultaneously hip and introspective attitude toward self-reflection quickly attracted a large following of young readers. In July 1997, with the backing of the New Century Publishing House in Hong Kong, Mian Mian published her first collection of short stories, La La La. Mian Mian's first novel, Tang (Candy), was published simultaneously by Zhongguo Xiju Publishing House and the prestigious literary magazine Shouhuo (Harvest) in January 2000. This novel created a stir in China's literary world and quickly became a bestseller, with a large number of pirated copies produced and sold throughout the country. The publication of Candy was soon followed by the publication of two more collections of short stories, Every Good Child Deserves Candy (Huashan Publishers) and Acid Lover (Shanghai Sanlian Publishing House). In April 2000, the Chinese government banned Candy. Shortly thereafter, the rest of Mian Mian's books were also banned.
Candy has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese. La La La has been translated into German and Italian.
In addition to writing, Mian Mian is also a music promoter, and the only female dance party organizer in China. Following on her experience working as a DJ at Shanghai's Cotton Club in 1996, Mian Mian began bringing rock shows and DJs into clubs in a number of Chinese cities starting in 1997. She has planned numerous large-scale dance parties, where internationally renowned DJs have performed. Her most successful parties include two parties with Paul Oakenfold -- inShanghai in 1999 and at the Great Wall in 2003 -- as well as the Red Age Club party in Chengdu in 2002, a seven-day-long party where the biggest Chinese DJs performed.
In 2002, after the ban on her writing was removed, Mian Mian published Social Dance, a collection taken for the column she writes for the Hong Kong independent newspaper, Apple Daily. At that time, she also signed with the Modern Sky Record Company as her Chinese Agent. In 2003, Mian Mian started to write a column for several famous fashion magazines, marking a departure from her previous policy of shunning the mainstream media. The column focuses on personal issues, such as love relationships and ways of fighting depression. Mian Mian also wrote the screenplay and acted in the film Shanghai Panic which showed in a number of international film festivals.
This program is part of the Winter Colloquium Series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures."
Philippines Conference Room
A light reception will follow Mr. Garcia?s presentation. This is the first program in the winter colloquium series, "Globalizing Asian Cultures", which is hosted by the Asia-Pacific Research Center and Center for East Asian Studies.
Philippines Conference Room
