Daniel Lev helps to bring some imagination
By Ati Nurbaiti
JAKARTA (JP): In the three weeks that Daniel Lev was in Jakarta, he said he was in confusion. The city was so big, and while people asked to talk to him in the hope of gaining some clarity over the turmoil, "I myself was dragged into the muddle; Jakarta is so full of gossip, everyone wants to know how to get out of the crisis."
Given time, he would have loved to have visited old friends and "families" in other cities such as Surabaya, Medan and Yogygakarta. But he was scheduled to leave Indonesia on Friday, to return to his family in Seattle, the United States.
Lev was among the long-time observers of Indonesia invited to an international conference here last month, organized by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences. Inevitably it turned out to be a reunion of local experts and "Indonesianists" like Lev and R. William Liddle, who have been studying the country for more than 40 years.
Lev, 65, first came here with his wife Arlene when he was 23, in 1959 and they have returned several times since. Among their very old friends are writer Umar Kayam and his family. Arlene studied painting here with the late Zaini.
Lev is best remembered for his study on the parliamentary period: The Transition to Guided Democracy in Indonesia and to audiences here in the past weeks, he has suggested that it is this parliamentary system which should be applied again. To the young and old Lev has shared recollections of how knowledgeable politicians debated hard but remained good friends; of how corruption was rare despite the hard times; and how there were no deaths because of government decisions.
He encourages people to have some imagination, however hard or utopic it may seem these days with the trouble in acquiring basic needs and dismissal looming over people's heads.
While people may only remember the parliamentary period as bringing little more than bitter political divisions among ordinary people, Lev says, drawing from history, it would be the only way to prevent a repetition of a strong executive -- "which for over 40 years (since the parliamentary system was abandoned in 1959) has done so much damage."
Being a little too fluent in improper, colloquial Indonesian, like several other Indonesianists, Lev always uses the term ngerusakin (destroy).
Strength
The strongest impression made on him during his stay, he said on Tuesday, was the public's deep cynicism and pessimism, and their distrust of government. There's a deep wish for change, he notes, but at the same, a "lack of political imagination" in which many can only associate his suggested improvements, either a "multiparty system" or a possible change in the 1945 Constitution, with chaos.
In these times of despair, the aftermath of riots, and new- found freedom, Lev points to what he sees as the strength in Indonesian society.
"It has never been a society filled with hatred."
The strength is in society itself, he says, a complex and fundamentally healthy mixture of cultures in which "by and large, people have become used to living with differences."
He adds, "but I'm impressed that (conflicts) have always been engineered from above." He is convinced that none of the riots of the past were spontaneous, citing for instance anti-Chinese riots in the late 1950s. Hence his conclusion that "the problem has always been with the government," that there has always been scores of "courageous" people willing to stand up to the authorities with the risk of, at the least, being jailed.
So he refutes the tendency "to blame the victim," the view that perhaps society was partly to blame for allowing such a strong government to develop. "People couldn't stop it; a government based on an army is very dangerous."
Lev says he was "not even surprised" by the Trisakti shootings and riots, which he monitored from Seattle. He added that he had been "very much influenced" by a 1992 paper by former student activist Marsilam Simanjuntak.
"Marsilam wrote that the end of regimes in Indonesia always happens with violence," and that it would be the only way that the New Order could end.
He sees the necessary role of professionals if a fresh beginning is to be chartered, and this is the subject of his ongoing research.
Lev notes that while professionals have been involved in the "moral" movement, they have yet to show eagerness to be active in political organizations, as politics has been labeled dirty. "But then they let the people who have already been labeled as dirty into these organizations," said Lev.
This is a comparative study; he is also studying professionals in Malaysia and has so far got a clear picture of the differences between the two countries.
Given the constant political intervention here, he notes how weak professionals' organizations here have become, compared to those in Malaysia.
Then there is his almost completed biography of the late noted Indonesian lawyer Yap Thiam Hien. The lawyer was "an extraordinary man," said Lev, who taped hours of interviews with him before Yap died in 1989. Yap is best known as an advocate of human rights, long before it became part of official jargon.
There are more studies on Lev's list: he says he still wants to understand more about Islam in Indonesia and Malaysia, including developing his interest in Islamic courts.
Another wish is to conduct research on women's organizations here and their changing position in society. The change, he said, was "quite confusing" to men, both in Indonesia and America.
Theater
In his tiring time here, with several appointments every day, Lev mostly stayed at the home of his friend, the noted lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution. No time to watch his favorite funny Javanese ludruk theater comedies or tour the sites. Besides, "I've never thought of myself as a tourist here."
The ludruk brings home Lev's "disappointment" of not fully understanding the language, as there was never time to study it.
It sounds that he is closer to Indonesia than to Russia, whence his parents hail, even though he is only of the second generation of immigrants. His father Louis, a carpenter, and his mother Bessie, a full-time homemaker and mother of five, arrived in the States in 1930. Lev was the youngest. "I never knew her full name, she only began to learn to sign her name after my father died."
As of Tuesday Lev had not decided what to take home as souvenirs. An exception was his daughter Claire, who only asked for sarongs "because she had ripped her old ones." His son Louis plays the violin in the orchestra in Pittsburgh, "and he's got so many violins already." Meanwhile his wife Arlene, he says, is busy preparing a painting exhibition.
During his stay Lev says he most enjoyed meeting old friends and eating. All kinds of foods, he said, including rendang which he's not supposed to consume a lot of given his lingering cholesterol problem, "But I do."
Back home, Lev will resume teaching at Seattle's University of Washington. And he won't be far from Indonesian food. "When we sit down to something comfortable it's likely to be Indonesian." Lev does a lot of the cooking and spices are easy to find now, he says; bubur ayam or chicken porridge often appears at breakfast while his desire for durian can be satiated somewhat with that from Thailand.
That, said Lev, is an example of "globalization" which he clearly benefits from. But he's old-fashioned when it comes to television, from which millions globally have benefited.
"It's hard for me to believe something (reported) on TV until I've read about it." Lev would be most disliked as a parent these days; when Claire and Louis were young, they were only allowed to watch television for an hour a week!
"Students read less now," and this, he insists, is partly because of too much TV. Maybe he has a point. A bit more reading, particularly of past mistakes and less "potato couching," perhaps, would help to inspire the imagination we seem to need more of now.