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.