Bandung of today

Bandung of today

After reading the editorial of The Jakarta Post on Oct. 14,
1995, I pondered for a while the Post's motive for such profound
concern about the grievous fate of Bandung, since the editorial
dubbed the city as No longer (the) Paris of Java. I surmised that
the nostalgia of seeing Bandung preserved as a worthy tourist
resort in Jakarta's hinterland must be one apt reason.

In Dutch times, the inhabitants of Bandung were called
Bandunger and I happened to be one of them. During both the Dutch
period and the Japanese occupation, Bandung was a marvel. I
remember that the streets were always clean, since the workers
swept them every morning and water wagons sprayed away the dust.
My Dutch schoolmates, like Dunki Jacobs and Sven van Rijswijk,
are surely witnesses to Bandung's beauty of the time, if they are
still alive somewhere in Holland. To me, Baraga street at that
time looked just like a street in a Dutch town and definitely
looked more radiant than the Ginza street of wartime Tokyo, where
I first set foot in 1943.

Marshall Von Blomberg, ranking fifth in the hierarchy of the
Hitler regime in pre-war Germany, visited Bandung in 1937 on his
honeymoon. The local Dutch travel agency Bandung Vooruit (Bandung
Forward) interviewed him at the glamorous clubhouse Concordia
(the auditorium of which hosted the famous Afro-Asian Conference
of 1955). In response to the question as to how Von Blomberg
liked Bandung, his historic answer was: Es ist ein Paradies auf
Erden (It is a paradise on earth). As Bandung youngsters, we were
proud of the town being liked by foreign dignitaries.

The King of Siam (now Thailand) in the 1930s used to visit as
far as Pengalengan in Southern Bandung.

Then, in April 1955, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, a Democrat U.S.
Congressman, who confessed of being of Negro descent but looked
more like a Latin American Don Juan, visited Bandung as an
observer of the Bandung Asian-African Conference. Upon returning
to Washington, D.C., before a black congregation in a suburban
church, to which I was invited, the congressman in his sermon was
full of praise for Bandung. Naturally I felt my heart filled with
pride as I listened to his address.

Now the city's fate reveals the conditions tersely illustrated
in the Post's editorial. To me, the striking passage was the
observation touching on the people's mentality and perception,
which seems incompatible with the rapid trend of growth in the
city. Such an appraisal hits the point squarely.

The general opinion is that the responsibility for the present
unruly situation and land use lies with the municipality and
prefecture bureaucracy.

Never is too late. We will never budge in our keen hope that
Bandung's bureaucracy will become aware of the need to save the
traditional charm of the city and its environment, with a view to
the next century, tourism and public welfare.

It is tragically ironic for Bandung to pride itself with
housing ITB (Bandung Institute of Technology) which generates
city planning graduates. No sign is visible that such planning is
workable under the present bureaucracy. The epithet "City of
Chaos" given by the Post hurts the heart and mind of Bandunger of
bygone days.

SAM SUHAEDI

Jakarta