on Hillary, Al Gore, Poso, Gus Dur and other has beens. (Week #4 - 2007)

Media Indonesia today has Hillary and Barack Obama on the front page. This is one of Indonesia’s largest national daily. The Rolling Stones, on the other hand, is making a case for Al Gore. Apparently, his favourability rating is still higher than Hillary. Personally, I like Hillary, but that’s because I had a major crush on her a while ago.
I’d still do Hillary, and I know I’m not the only one. Steve Young from Huffingtonpost said the same thing so i know i'm not really that strange.

The news around here this week is plastered with the mess in Poso. The police finally had enough of it and raided the small militant village, killing 11 people or so. Most of the international media coverage are busy highlighting the sectarian aspect of the conflict. While valid, that’s not necessarily true. The area have been ripe with violence for a few years now. These days, they were carrying M16 and semiautomatics, supposedly coming from Southern Philippines and other foreign lands. The successive governments have been neglecting the conflict for many years and in occasions, it almost looks like they’re letting it happen: armed conflicts between the various security personnel are just as common as those among the sectarian gang. Soldiers regularly got involved in spats (with panzers and machine guns) against the police, anti terror squads against special forces and other strange stuff.
Hendropriyono – head of BIN, the Intelligence agency – said on Wimar show last week that the militant groups are getting support and protection from politicians and other powerful people. He should know, this man put out a similar sounding uprising in Lampung during his days in uniform. It was pretty clear, the entire village was wiped out and we never heard from them again. Blah.

The other big item of the week is the constitutional riff raff. Gus Dur and other notable has beens were busy campaigning against the constitutionality of the 1945 Constitution Amendments. From what I gather so far, their case is pretty meek: most of it are on technicalities like the fact that the amendments weren’t registered with the State Gazette back then. I’m not a legal scholar, so I am not sure if really a constitutional amendment could be rendered invalid just because it wasn’t registered, but on the surface of it, it sounds like a lot of rubbish.

Of course, the main issue here is the fact that the Amendments established a direct presidential election: if the Amendments were invalid, then – according to them – the elections were invalid (parliament, president, regionals, the whole thing). This opposition (old generals, old ladies, old presidents, etc) is getting louder and louder, especially since the palace is really being impressively stupid in the handling. They seriously need some spinning help.

On the other front, the Prez just declared we no longer need the CGI and people are busy getting pissed off at the IMF once again. I’m not sure why that is even interesting anymore.

That’s it for now, I need to get back to work.