OzIndo puts politics aside to help RI's impoverished

OzIndo puts politics aside to help RI's impoverished

Claire Harvey, Contributor, Jakarta

In the heart of Australia's dusty outback, where rednecks are
as common as kangaroos, hundreds of hearts have been touched by
the struggles of ordinary Indonesians.

Sheep farmers, schoolchildren, shopkeepers and tradesmen in
the remotest parts of Australia flocked to donate aid money to
Indonesia during 1999, even while official tensions were flaring
between Jakarta and Canberra over East Timorese independence.

While the politicians traded insults, two remarkable
Australian women - activist Fiona Collins and academic Jan
Lingard - embarked on a 16,455-kilometer bicycle journey around
Australia to raise A$65,000 (Rp 326 million) for impoverished
Indonesian families.

"We wanted to explain to ordinary people that Australia's
nearest neighbor was suffering a terrible economic crisis," said
Collins, founder of the OzIndo Project.

"In some of the towns we went to, people knew absolutely
nothing about Krismon (the monetary crisis) and some people even
thought Australia was at war with Indonesia over East Timor. But
when we explained how ordinary Indonesians were suffering, we
found the most amazing compassion."

This week Collins and Lingard are in Indonesia to receive the
official thanks of the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The ministry has honored Collins and Lingard for their work with
an official award for promoting "people-to-people harmony".

Makarim Wibisono, the ministry's director general for Asia-
Pacific and Africa, presented Collins and Lingard with a special
award for promoting "people-to-people harmony" at a ceremony in
Jakarta on Friday. This week they will travel to Yogyakarta and
Bali at Deplu's invitation.

Lingard, a retired lecturer in Indonesian and Malay studies
from the University of Sydney, is presently writing a book on her
discovery in rural Australia of 13 World War II graves of
Indonesian political prisoners.

While researching contact between Australia and Indonesia
during World War II, Lingard uncovered evidence that 1,200
Indonesians had been imprisoned at an Australian prisoner-of-war
camp at Cowra, 450 kilometers southwest of Sydney.

More than 500 of these prisoners were the founding fathers of
the anti-colonial resistance movement, who had been arrested by
the Dutch and exiled to the prison camp of Boven Digul in Irian
Jaya.

When Japan invaded the area in 1943, the Dutch colonists sent
the prisoners and their families to Cowra to be imprisoned
alongside captured Japanese soldiers, under an agreement between
the Netherlands and Australia.

Thirteen of these prisoners died at Cowra, after which the
Australian government allowed the remaining detainees partial
freedom - they were sent to work in employment brigades for the
remainder of the war.

Another 700 prisoners were Indonesian merchant seamen,
arrested as illegal immigrants after they mounted an anti-
colonial strike in the early years of the war.

After Lingard discovered the graves in 1997, the Indonesian
government paid for their restoration and a Muslim burial
ceremony.

Perhaps the saddest grave belonged to Soelistimah, the two-
year-old daughter of one of the freedom fighters, who died in
Cowra.

Lingard is the author of a history of Indonesian-Australian
relations in the 1940s and has translated several books by
Indonesian authors.

She had lectured Collins at Sydney University and when the
young student returned from a year's studies in Yogyakarta with a
passion for the people of Indonesia, she was glad to help.

"I drove the caravan with our Indonesian colleague, Timur
Nugroho, while Fiona did all the cycling," Lingard said.

When the fundraisers arrived in the hard-luck township of
Camooweal, in the northern state of Queensland, they were hot,
sweaty and despondent.

Only days earlier, bloody conflict had exploded in East Timor,
attracting great publicity across Australia. "I was so down,"
Collins said. "We had already come 10,000 km and I thought we'd
never be able to convince anyone in a place like this to be
sympathetic to Indonesia now. When we got to the camp ground the
first person who approached us was a typical Aussie bloke wearing
shorts and thongs and holding a beer in his hand. He said "What's
this all about love?"

"Jan explained the whole story to him - about Krismon and
about how ordinary Indonesian people were not responsible for
what was happening in East Timor," Collins said.

"He listened to it all and then he pulled a $50 note (Rp
250,000) out of his pocket. He said 'You use that to buy some
tucker for the poor buggers.' It was absolutely wonderful."

The money was used to subsidize food packages for needy
families in Java, to assist refugees from East Timor and Maluku
and to aid street children in East Java. The OzIndo project, with
Collins as director, will next month launch a website,ozindo.org,
focusing on relations between the two countries.

-- Claire Harvey is an Australian journalist working at The
Jakarta Post as part of the Medialink fellowship, sponsored by
the Australia-Indonesia Institute.