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the waters are rising and the beaches are drowning......

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a flooding: With apologies to T. S. Eliot

Every year the UN runs a Climate Change Conference – the next is scheduled for November in Brazil. High on the agenda will be the plight of Pacific Islanders seeing their homes drown. There’s an equally pressing need close by, but the solutions seem doomed.

 

Duncan Graham

Not waving, drowning - Indonesia may lose warming battle

 

Indonesian authorities provide useful information for travellers checking if they’ve got to the right place: alongside the destination name is its height above sea level.

Surabaya, the capital of East Java, advertises it’s just two metres higher than the nearby waves. The Republic’s second-biggest city is a vital transport hub, a humid home to ten million and a trading and naval centre for more than a thousand years.

How many more is the figure to fear.

For the waters are rising and the beaches are drowning, most strikingly in the capital Jakarta 780km west along the coast of the Java Sea. It’s disappearing faster than any other city in the world, according to a BBC report:

“North Jakarta has sunk 2.5 metres in 10 years and is continuing to sink by as much as 25 centimetres a year in some parts, which is more than double the global average for coastal megacities.”

Global warming is a factor but the other culprits are illegal drilling for groundwater and excavating foundations for high-rise towers and a web of toll roads. Despite the predictions the rattle of pneumatic drills, the slurp of concrete pours and the nodding of dinosaur construction cranes continues day and night.

The BBC’s depressing information was broadcast seven years ago; horizontal lines drawn by shack owners on their timber walls to measure the rise are now invisible under the brown soup of plastics, nappies, cans and other trash that passes for water.

Lab-coated scientists taking samples to prove the pollutants are extreme would need extra protection because corrosives rot clothing.

So, what to do?

The last president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo decided the solution was to move. He reckoned the right place to raise a memorial to his foresight was 1200 km north-east of the descending capital. The first building rising above the greenery has been the palace.

This is East Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo, the biggest in the sprawling 17,000-island archipelago where orangutans once outnumbered their human relatives. That was before the timber cutters and palm-oil planters arrived to turn the pristine into profit.

Java is five times smaller than Borneo but immeasurably more important – the political, administrative and cultural centre of the Republic and home to more than 158 million. It’s the world’s most densely populated island and super-fertile, though much of the landscape is mountainous.

The proverb rindu kampung halaman means more than just a longing for home. It embraces family, community, culture, local language and history. For the Javanese, these magnets of birthplace exercise a powerful pull.

So the four million bureaucrats and their families who call Jakarta their place are not dashing to shift to East Kalimantan with its different climate and culture – now grandly titled Ibu Kota Nusantara, the Mother City of the Outer Islands.

Despite their city’s mess, many workers will need more than subsidies and promises of promotion to get them to move, particularly if they have partners and kids embedded in schools, sports and friendships.

All this along with a disinterest in tipping more money into the Jokowi ego monument is why his successor, President Prabowo Subianto, is pondering other ways to keep Jakarta residents above water.

The current favourite is the Great Wall of Java, already on the list of strategic projects in the 2025-2029 National Medium-Term Development Plan, though there are still no blueprints.

As a former military man before being cashiered in 1998, Prabowo sees rising seas as an invasion, so the best defence is fortification.

There are lessons from military history he needs to heed. The collapse of the French Maginot Line in 1940 showed that barricades are only as strong as their weak spots and there’ll be many as seas surge and waves undermine the president’s bulwark.

Like Canute, he can shout orders. But king tides only obey the pull of the moon.

So far, estimates of Great Wall measurements and costs are still being splashed around conference tables, but the best published stab is 500km and A$122 billion over two decades. That’s twice the current estimated cost of Jokowi’s IKN.

The figures are certain to rise faster than sea levels. The money will have to be drained from state budgets as the project is unlikely to attract even Chinese investors reportedly propping up IKN. How do you earn money from a venture trying to tame nature?

One idea is to build “a livable seawall that has residential and commercial zones, essentially turning the whole structure into a kind of floating city”. Swimming would be a required skill for buyers.

The omens aren’t good. Earlier attempts to build Jakarta dykes failed. One collapsed in 2007, five years after construction – no defence against a storm that took 80 lives.

_The Jakarta Post_ is not a cheerleader for the Prabowo plan: “Simply put, we don’t have enough money or possess the knowledge or experience to build the Java seawall… We could end up with another unfinished massive construction by the end of the current presidential term, only this time at sea.”

Maybe delegates to the UN Climate Change Conference will offer fresh solutions. Otherwise like Shelley’s Ozymandias, Prabowo’s mighty works will remind future generations how we lost the battle against global warming.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/07/not-waving-drowning-indonesia-may-lose-warming-battle/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

sejarah masa depan....

 

Duncan Graham

Scrubbing away the bloodstains, tipping out the truth

 

Lit lovers argue who first said “History is written by the victors”. It’s sharp enough to belong to Churchill, though earlier and longer versions come from politicians in the US and Germany – including fascist Hermann Göring.

The dictum is favoured by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. The disgraced former general has hired 113 wordsmiths and 20 editors to keyboard his Rp 9 billion ($850,000) version of the past, all within two months.

August 17 is always a big day for Indonesia’s 285 million citizens; this year, the show will be prodigious, marking the 80th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The Brits do coronations – Indonesia goes brasher with fireworks, bunting, robot soldiers, clichéd speeches and enough flags to clothe the triumphs and mask the tragedies of a nation that calls itself a 25-year-old democracy, though foreign autonomies reckon it’s flawed.

The Republic is slipping back to the 55 preceding years of autocracy because democracy is “tiring, very costly and very messy”, according to Prabowo.

The heaviest splash on 17 August will come with the publication of Indonesia Dalam Arus Sejarah (Indonesia in the flow of history), a revision in 10 volumes – each of 500 pages.

There’s plenty to write about; the stories of the archipelago before the arrival of people are gripping enough for little is certain and much is contested. The first humans probably came from the Arabian Peninsula heading towards India:

“The descendants of this first wave arrived in what is now the Indonesian archipelago around 50,000 years ago. At the time, the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and Java were still connected as one landmass called Sundaland. Descendants of this group continued to wander to Australia.” Other experts give earlier dates and different routes.

Molecular biologist Dr Herawati Sudoyo said modern Indonesians like to label people as pribumi (native) or pendatang(foreigners): “This dichotomy often creates racism and tension between groups in society.”

Indeed – and this is where the new versions collide with the survivors of the harrowing wrongs.

The books will adopt “a more positive tone towards each president, highlighting milestones such as Indonesia’s economic development under Soeharto and infrastructure expansion during the administration of Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo”.

In brief, a story stitched to squeeze a political agenda into the combat boots of those in power.

That’s the aim of Dr Fadli Zon, the Minister for Culture who is driving the project.

Unlike many other department heads, he’s not from the military – though he’s doing its bidding. He was educated in the US through an American Field Service Scholarship, and in Britain at the London School of Economics and Political Science, an institution famous for producing left-wing thinkers.

Fadli is not one.

A former activist-journalist turned politician and one-time critic of Jokowi, he swapped horses when he foresaw a changing political landscape. In 2015, he met Donald Trump, and in 2018 he allegedly tweeted:

“If you want us to rise and be victorious, Indonesia needs a leader like Vladimir Putin: brave, visionary, intelligent, wise, not too many debts, not clueless.”

Climbing the ladder also meant trampling those below – in this case the 11 million ethnic Chinese minority, always an easy mark for populists; few are Muslim in a nation where 87% follow Islam. The Chinese are smart in business; they stick together and work hard, so they’re often tagged as cheats and exploiters.

Indonesia’s long history of racism boiled over in May 1998 when its second president, Soeharto, quit after 32 years of autocracy; there was chaos in Jakarta and elsewhere with Chinese shops trashed, people killed and women sexually assaulted and mass raped.

In a TV interview, Fadli denied the events happened because no-one was brought to trial. Like Trump, he uses outrageous statements to grab attention.

The Jakarta Post opined “that the mass rapes that … ultimately led to the fall of then-authoritarian president Soeharto, are thoroughly documented and must not be removed from history for whatever reason".

“At that time, amid a series of demonstrations demanding reform, violence and civil unrest escalated … This period tragically resulted in over 1200 deaths, and at least 52 people, predominantly Chinese Indonesians, were victims of rape.”

Later Fadli tangled reason trying to explain that his comment “specifically highlighted the need for precision and an academic framework of caution in the use of the term ‘mass rape’, which can have serious implications for the collective character of the nation and requires strong fact-based verification”.

Requests to interview Fadli for this story have been ignored.

Queensland Uni doctoral candidate Muhammad Ammar Hidayahtulloh said denial of the mass rapes added to “ways in which Prabowo’s government continues to erode the democratic political system… rewriting history without a transparent and participatory mechanism, for example through public consultation, especially with victims.”

If the mass rapes can be deleted from Fadli’s revisions, what else can be trashed?

The 1965-66 killing of maybe half a million or more real or imagined communists in a Soeharto-orchestrated genocide was exposed by Australian academic Dr Jess Melvin as (according to the CIA) “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century”.

There have been 67 other outrages since then — like the 1984 _petrus_ extrajudicial public executions of crims and dissidents, through the East Timor Referendum of 1999, religious conflict like the co-ordinated 2000 Christmas Eve bombings, the Bali bombings of 2002, the assault on the Australian Embassy in 2004 — and many more.

Are these bloodstains to be fully recorded in Fadli’s histories – or will they be footnoted as aberrations in the Republic’s growth? And where will Australia fit in – a supporter of decolonisation through the unions’ Black Armada campaign?

Unless there are leaks, we won’t know till the books are published; debate about content will be academic.

The national literacy rate is above 98% but Central Connecticut State University research ranked Indonesia 60th out of 61 countries for interest in reading. About 70% of students have low literacy skills.

During the 32 years of Soeharto, writers were regarded with suspicion. Their books, signed off by censors, were locked behind counters, like the way smokes are sold in Australia today.

Fadli’s legacy will be thousands of unopened copies of Indonesia Dalam Arus Sejarah moulding on the shelves of government offices to help talking heads look learned.

They’d get more viewings on TikTok.

 

https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/06/scrubbing-away-the-bloodstains-tipping-out-the-truth/

 

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The Indonesian government has officially launched the construction of an integrated facility for the production of electric vehicles batteries in the Karawang area of West Java, the project is being developed jointly with China and is estimated at $5.9 billion, the Jakarta Globe reported.

The project is expected to be one of the key steps towards turning Indonesia into a leading hub for the electric vehicle industry in Southeast Asia.

The construction is being carried out as part of a joint venture between state-owned mining company Aneka Tambang (Antam), the Indonesia Battery Corporation (IBC), and a Chinese consortium led by Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), Brunp Recycling and Lygend Resources.

The ceremony to launch the construction was led by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.

The production cluster will be located on an area of 3,000 hectares and will create up to 8,000 jobs. The project also plans to implement 18 related infrastructure facilities, including the construction of a universal seaport.

Commercial operation of the battery plant is scheduled to be launched in late 2026.

https://sputnikglobe.com/20250630/indonesia-china-launch-construction-of-59bln-battery-production-project-1122365334.html

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.