Due to retire, with heart still in RI

Due to retire, with heart still in RI

M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

During a 10-year stint in Indonesia, United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
director for Asia-Pacific Stephen Hill has traveled to the
country's most exotic corners and accumulated enough experience
to make even Robinson Crusoe green with envy.

In that time, Hill got involved in some of the most
breathtaking moments in his life, from negotiating with Free
Papua Movement (OPM) rebels who held UNESCO staff hostage to
seeing Komodo dragons in their natural habitat.

In 1996, barely a year after he assumed his new post in
Jakarta, Hill was faced with a hostage crisis that took place in
Mapenduma, Jayawijaya regency, Papua.

Two of his staff, who were taking part in the Lorentz
(scientific) Expedition, were held captive by the OPM in
Mapenduma village before being taken to virgin forest in Papua.

One of them, Martha Klein of the Netherlands, was pregnant at
the time.

After lengthy negotiations that involved the International
Committee of the Red Cross, the United Nations Security Council
and the Indonesian Army's elite Special Forces Command, all the
hostages were released. Two Indonesian hostages, however,
perished in the incident.

The episode, however, foretold of good things to come.

Following the violent hostage-taking incident, Hill learned
that most native peoples of Mapenduma village, who were from the
Dani tribe, had lost their most precious property -- their pigs.

To replace the lost pigs, Hill assembled a team to purchase
pigs from villages around Mependuma and flew them on a helicopter
to the waiting villagers.

Recalling the famous Operation Dumbo Drop, a military
operation to airlift an elephant and return it to its sacred
location (which took place during the Vietnam War in 1968) Hill
called it the Flying Pig Operation.

The Dani people were so grateful that they honored him in a
tribal ceremony at which they gave him many presents --
traditional war paraphernalia, from spears and daggers to arrows.

The Dani were not the only group with whom Hill has built a
good rapport.

He became close to the Batak people of North Sumatra -- via a
project organized by UNESCO -- enough to earn him a Batak family
name.

"My Batak name is Purba and that of my wife Damanik," Hill
told The Jakarta Post during an interview at his spacious office
in the leafy district of Kebayoran Baru, South Jakarta.

Hill is due to retire this week and will soon leave for his
home country, Australia.

Such experiences will be firmly registered in Hill's personal
recollections, together with a variety of projects that UNESCO
has implemented under his leadership.

Another string to his bow

Staying true to its name, UNESCO has carried out numerous
projects that cover science, culture, education and
communications, from preserving the country's cultural heritage,
mobilizing resources for basic education and empowering street
children to defending press freedom and the free flow of
information.

The UN agency has helped the government to manage conservation
regions in Lorentz National Park, Papua; Leuser National Park,
Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam; and a biosphere reserve in Siberut
Island, West Sumatra.

In recent years, UNESCO has built an initiative with the
United Nations Children's Emergency Fund (Unicef) and the
Ministry of Education on the setting up of community-based
education.

Currently, UNESCO is working on a project in Aceh focusing on
the role of the traditional arts in helping children cope with
post-tsunami conditions.

This is not the first time UNESCO has made use of the arts as
a powerful vehicle to empower people.

In Jakarta, for instance, UNESCO has used visual arts to build
reconciliation between conflicting street gangs.

Hill seems well aware of the immense power of the arts, given
that he was a professional musician in the early 1980s.

Playing music from a genre he deemed a cross between rock,
blues, punk and country, Hill was in a band until he called it
quits in 1981, realizing that it would not hit the big time.

"My night job was as a musician and my day job a university
professor," said Hill, an avowed fan of Joe Cocker, the British
blues singer.

As if being a sociology professor and playing music were not
enough, Hill was also an industrial chemist who holds a PhD in
business administration.

He has written 16 books and 380 scientific articles across 12
disciplines. Some of his works have been translated into nine
languages, including Uzbek.

A key policy adviser to the Australian government, Hill is the
foundation director of the Center for Research Policy at the
University of Wollongong.

He once worked for Unilever and as a consultant to UNESCO and
other international agencies in many Asian countries before he
assumed leadership of the UNESCO office for Asia and the Pacific.

"It was a suitable background for work at UNESCO because,
basically, we confront issues that concern people and their
knowledge," he said.

Now that retirement beckons, Hill would likely have more time
for two activities that have long been overdue.

"I shall write books and compose new music. Several tunes are
already in my head," he said.