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