Indonesian Youth Movement Center and NGO

Sentra ITS, Wadah Para Aktivis

15 Maret 2005 12:45:10

Lembaga Swadaya Mahasiswa (LSM) Sentra ITS Jumat pagi (31/12), mendeklarasikan keberadaannya. LSM yang pada tahun 2000 sempat eksis ini ingin menjadi sebuah wadah berkumpulnya para aktivis mahasiswa se-ITS.

Perpustakaan ITS, ITS Online - Seperti yang dikatakan Tomy Nugrahanto Wisudawan dalam sambutannya selaku ketua umum LSM Sentra ITS, Jumat (31/12), "Berdirinya LSM ini bertujuan untuk mengumpulkan dan menghubungkan potensi-potensi mahasiswa, aktivis kampus agar selepas dari ITS dapat menjadi tokoh-tokoh bangsa yang baik."

Dikatakannya pula, bahwa semua permasalahan yang timbul di negeri ini seperti halnya bencana di Aceh, disebabkan pengelolaan negara oleh pemerintah yang kurang baik. Untuk itu, menurutnya mahasiswa harus mempersiapkan dirinya menjadi pemimpin-pemimpin bangsa dimasa depan. "Mahasiswa punya potensi menjadi pemimpin. Dan di sini (Sentra ITS, red) kita coba mewujudkannya dengan mengembangkan sisi politik dan sosial kemanusiaan dari mahasiswa," papar mahasiswa Teknik Elektro angkatan 2000 ini.

Mengenai nama lembaga, Tomy mengungkapkan, dipakainya Sentra ITS agar dapat benar-benar menjadi pusat (sentra) perkembangan di ITS. Ia juga menambahkan, sebenarnya Sentra ITS sempat muncul pada tahun 2000 yang dimotori oleh Mudzakir Uddin. "Tapi memang saat itu konstitusi di ITS belum ada legalitas untuk mendirikan LSM. Jadinya belum bisa maksimal," tambahnya.

Selain launching Sentra ITS, juga dilakukan penggalangan dana untuk korban Aceh dan diskusi dengan narasumber. Ada tiga narasumber yang hadir saat itu, antara lain, Mudzakir Uddin sebagai pendiri LSM Sentra ITS sekaligus mantan presiden BEM ITS pertama, Akhmad Nur Hidayat (Matnur) sebagai Aktivis LSM P3I, lalu dr Ahmad Fahmi dari Bulan Sabit Merah Indonesia (BSMI).

Sebelum sesi diskusi, masing-masing narasumber diberi kesempatan untuk memberikan paparan. Matnur misalnya, dalam kesempatannya, mantan presiden BEM Universitas Indonesia ini banyak mengkritisi mengenai bencana alam di Aceh. Matnur mengatakan, Aceh akan dapat terbantu apabila seluruh swadaya dari masyarakat Indonesia bersatu. "Kalau perlu kita sebagai mahasiswa siap untuk berangkat ke Aceh untuk berjibaku, berjihad membantu dengan segenap jiwa raga kita," Katanya.

Acara yang dihadiri oleh puluhan aktivis mahasiswa ITS ini diakhiri dengan pembacaan dan penandatanganan dokumen deklarasi oleh sembilan orang deklarator LSM Sentra ITS. Berdirinya Sentra ITS sendiri, diharapkan para deklarator, dapat menjadi wadah yang membangun mahasiswa ITS yang berkelanjutan dan mempertahankan independensi mahasiswa. Dengan motto "perubahan dimulai dari orang-orang yang terus bergerak, orang-orang ikhlas dan orang-orang yang berani" mereka mengajak mahasiswa ITS untuk bergabung bersama LSM Sentra ITS. (asa/tov)

RICHMAN FROM INDONESIA

daftar orang terkaya di Indonesia versi Majalah Globe Asia dan Forbes, adalah Sudono Salim dengan kekayaan US$2,8 miliar, Sukanto Tanoto (US$ 1,3 miliar), Hasjim Djojohadikusumo (US$ 595 juta), Sjamsul Nursalim (US$ 445 juta), Sudwikatmono (US$110 juta), Siti Hardijanti Rukmana (US$ 90 juta).

Interesting Archive : Indonesia had experiences in term of building diplomatic relationship with Israel

January 1994, Page 19

To Tell the Truth

China and Indonesia Warming Ties With Israel

By Leon T. Hadar

It was not a coincidence that the first official visits outside the Middle East that both Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat made, after returning from the Sept. 13 accord-signing ceremony in Washington, were to Beijing and Jakarta. As the world prepares for what most observers believe will be the Pacific Century, both Middle Eastern leaders recognize the growing significance of these two global players in Asia.

China is trying to increase its involvement in the Middle East. In particular, it is interested in playing a role in the Arab/Israeli peace process. This more assertive Chinese Middle East diplomacy is related to Beijing's new international strategy.

First, while during the Cold War the Middle East was dominated by the bipolar competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, the region today seems to revolve around the uni-polar position of the United States. However, the Chinese leaders, who see their country as a rising global superpower, would like to get a piece of the action in the region, even if it means challenging American supremacy.

Indeed, China expects growing political and military tensions with the United States in the coming years, and its strategy is based on developing itself as a diplomatic and military counterweight to the U.S. in the Middle East and in other parts of the Third World.

For their part, Middle Eastern leaders, including both the pro-U.S. Arabs and the Israelis, are concerned over their growing dependence on American power. They seek to diversify their global portfolio, and establishing ties with China is one way of doing that. Playing the "China card," they believe, could provide them with future leverage vis-a-vis Washington.

Secondly, the Chinese expect that the Israel-PLO agreement, followed by Israeli peace accords with Syria and other Arab countries, will produce an investment and trade boom in the region and hope to bid on a large share of the contracts. According to Chinese government figures, the country's trade with the Middle East has reached close to $2.3 billion–and Beijing wants to expand those ties.

Moreover, China's rapid industrialization and economic development is bound to increase its use of energy resources, especially petroleum. While the Chinese search for oil on their own territory, they expect that they will have to increase oil imports. Oil-producing Russia and Indonesia, notwithstanding their geographical proximity, are considered politically unreliable because of their longtime rivalry with China.

As part of its search for new sources of oil, Beijing also is developing a "blue water" navy that could be used to assert its claim to the disputed and potentially oil rich Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. In that context, Chinese leaders hope their expanding relationships in the Middle East will help secure access to Gulf petroleum.

Neutralizing Islamic Radicalism

Third, with the eroding power of communism and the rising influence of Islamic groups in Central Asia and the Middle East, China is concerned over the rise of Islamic political tendencies among its own more than 20 million Muslims. It hopes that its ties with the Muslim nations of the Middle East may help to neutralize moves toward Islamic radicalism and separatism in its provinces.

Asia Watch reports that China has suppressed an armed uprising and violent demonstrations in the Muslim Linxia area of Gansu province, and that there has been increasing violence between Muslims and Han Chinese in the southern part of Xinjiang, another area with a large Uighur Muslim population. Last summer, when Muslim groups apparently attacked a hotel in Kashgar, the Xinjiang capital, the Chinese authorities reacted by banning unauthorized religious tracts and tightening up firearms regulations. Kashgar was the location of a recent meeting of Islamist activists from Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir.

Beijing is worried, in particular, about secessionist tendencies among Xinjiang's Uighur Muslims. In 1964, thousands of them fled to the former Soviet Union after Chinese authorities suppressed an attempt to establish an independent state in the area and settled thousands of Han Chinese in the region. Many of the former Uighur Muslim residents now are returning to Xinjiang from Central Asia. Beijing is trying to restrict the flow of returnees into Xinjiang across the border from Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. Chinese authorities have asked Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to help it in those efforts, and have declared they will suppress any separatist activities.

China enjoys excellent ties with the Arab states as well as Israel and Iran. Over the past two years high-level Chinese officials have exchanged visits with leaders of most of these countries. China was one of the first governments to grant diplomatic recognition to the PLO, and it formally recognized Israel in 1992.

Indeed, Beijing's covert and overt ties with Israel are expanding. China has just granted Israel the right to open a consulate in Shanghai, in addition to its embassy in Beijing, and China has indicated its interest in opening a consulate of its own in Jerusalem, in addition to the Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv.

One key player behind the Sino-Israeli Detente is Shaul Eisenberg. This Israeli businessman with wide connections in China, Japan and other Asian countries has built his fortune in the region since World War II. A man of mystery, Eisenberg has helped establish links between Israeli and Chinese arms industries. The two countries have cooperated extensively on military projects and, according to U.S. government sources, Israel has provided sensitive U.S. military technology to the Chinese. At the same time, the Chinese have been accused of selling such military technology to Iran.

The Chinese, aware of the growing opposition on Capitol Hill to the renewal in June of their most-favored-nation (MFN) trading status, count on their connection with Israel to erode some of the criticism of their human rights policies among members of Congress.

Using the relationship with Israel to gain support in Washington also is a key consideration in the surprising decision by Indonesia to move toward establishing ties with Israel. As part of that effort, the Indonesian government hosted Prime Minister Rabin in Jakarta after his visit to China.

Establishing diplomatic ties with Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population in the world, would be a major political coup for Israel.

Indonesia's President Suharto is the current chairman of the Non-Aligned Movement and a major figure in the economically powerful Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN). Strengthening ties with these two organizations has been a long-term Israeli goal.

Israel has maintained covert ties for a long time with Indonesia. The Israeli Mossad, under the cover of a business office, maintains a large operation in Jakarta, Indonesian officers have been trained in Israel in anti-terrorist methods, and intelligence agencies of both countries have been exchanging information since the late 1960s.

Two Israeli companies, Alhit and BVR, are competing now for a contract to build a sophisticated training installation for Indonesia's air force on the Island of Sumatra, according to reports published six months ago in Military Technology. Other reports suggest that Israel sold Indonesia 28 U.S.-made Skyhawk fighter aircraft in the late 1980s.

Therefore, during the past year, and especially following the signing of the Sept. 13 Israel-PLO accord, Israel has been pressuring Jakarta to move in the direction of some level of formal diplomatic ties. The two countries have already established direct phone and mail service, Israeli businessmen and academics have visited Indonesia, and Indonesian journalists and students made trips to Israel.

A meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas last June, during the U.N. human rights conference in Vienna has been the highest level diplomatic exchange to date between the two countries.

Following that meeting, Israeli Ambassador to Singapore Dany Megido visited Jakarta and met with Indonesian Foreign Ministry officials. One idea raised in the talks was the opening of Protection of Interests offices in Tel Aviv and Jakarta that would operate under the flags of third countries that have diplomatic relations with both countries.

Rabin's somewhat low-key visit to Jakarta (Israeli journalists were not permitted to join the prime minister's entourage during the stop in the Indonesian capital) was preceded by an official visit by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. Suharto laid out a head-of-state red carpet for Arafat, and referred to him in a speech as "President of the State of Palestine."

Suharto and Indonesian officials have refrained from giving a full endorsement to the PLO-Israeli accord and are lowering expectations about any major breakthroughs as far as establishing diplomatic ties with Israel are concerned.

However, Indonesia hopes that the rapprochement with Israel will help it with the U.S. Congress, where Indonesia has been accused of human rights violations, especially in the former Portuguese colony of East Timor.

Leon T. Hadar, Washington correspondent of the Business Times of Singapore, writes on Middle Eastern and East Asian issues.

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Hidayat

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OUR MODEL DICTATOR

The Guardian
Monday, January 28, 2008

Our Model Dictator

The death of Suharto is a reminder of the west's ignoble role in propping up a murderous regime

By John Pilger

In my film Death of a Nation, there is a sequence filmed on board an Australian aircraft flying over the island of Timor. A party is in progress, and two men in suits are toasting each other in champagne. "This is an historically unique moment," says one of them, "that is truly uniquely historical."

This was Gareth Evans, Australia's then foreign minister. The other man was Ali Alatas, the principal mouthpiece of the Indonesian dictator General Suharto, who died yesterday. The year was 1989, and the two were making a grotesquely symbolic flight to celebrate the signing of a treaty that would allow Australia and the international oil and gas companies to exploit the seabed off East Timor, then illegally and viciously occupied by Suharto. The prize, according to Evans, was "zillions of dollars".

Beneath them lay a land of crosses: great black crosses etched against the sky, crosses on peaks, crosses in tiers on the hillsides. Filming clandestinely in East Timor, I would walk into the scrub, and there were the crosses. They littered the earth and crowded the eye. In 1993, the foreign affairs committee of Australia's parliament reported that "at least 200,000" had died under Indonesia's occupation: almost a third of the population. Yet East Timor's horror, foretold and nurtured by the US, Britain and Australia, was a sequel. "No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre." He was referring to Suharto's seizure of power in 1965-6, which caused the violent deaths of up to a million people.

To understand the significance of Suharto is to look beneath the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer - "our" is used here advisedly. "One of our very best and most valuable friends," Thatcher called him. For three decades the south-east Asian department of the Foreign Office worked tirelessly to minimise the crimes of Suharto's gestapo, known as Kopassus, who gunned down people with British-supplied Heckler & Koch machine guns from British-supplied Tactica "riot control" vehicles.

A Foreign Office speciality was smearing witnesses to the bombing of East Timorese villages by British-supplied Hawk aircraft --until Robin Cook was forced to admit it was true. Almost a billion pounds in export credit guarantees financed the sale of the Hawks, paid for by the British taxpayer while the arms industry reaped the profit.

Only the Australians were more obsequious. "We know your people love you," the prime minister Bob Hawke told the dictator to his face. His successor, Paul Keating, regarded the tyrant as a father figure. Paul Kelly, a prominent Murdoch retainer, led a group of major newspaper editors to Jakarta, to fawn before the mass murderer even though they all knew his grisly record.

Here lies a clue as to why Suharto, unlike Saddam Hussein, died not on the gallows but surrounded by the finest medical team his secret billions could buy. Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s, describes the terror of Suharto's takeover in 1965-6 as "the model operation" for the US-backed coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders," he wrote, "[just like] what happened in Indonesia in 1965." The US embassy in Jakarta supplied Suharto with a "zap list" of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed off the names when they were killed or captured. Roland Challis, BBC south-east Asia correspondent at the time, told me how the British government was secretly involved in this slaughter. "British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits so they could take part in the terrible holocaust," he said. "I and other correspondents were unaware of this at the time . . . There was a deal, you see."

The deal was that Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called "the richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia". In November 1967 the greatest prize was handed out at a remarkable three-day conference sponsored by the Time-Life Corporation in Geneva. Led by David Rockefeller, all the corporate giants were represented: the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British American Tobacco, Siemens, US Steel and many others. Across the table sat Suharto's US-trained economists who agreed to the corporate takeover of their country, sector by sector. The Freeport company got a mountain of copper in West Papua. A US/European consortium got the nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. America, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra. When the plunder was complete,President Lyndon Johnson sent his congratulations on "a magnificent story of opportunity seen and promise awakened". Thirty years later, with the genocide in East Timor also complete, the World Bank described the Suharto dictatorship as a "model pupil".

Shortly before the death of Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was the minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons, I interviewed him, and asked: "Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"

"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head."

"I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."

"Yeah?"

"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?"

"Curiously not."

www.johnpilger. com

Note:
Sekadar mengingatkan, John Pilger adalah wartawan investigasi asal Inggris. Salah satu bukunya adalah 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' yang antara lain mengungkapkan bagaimana kebijakan pemerintah Inggris turut ditentukan oleh para pelobi yang dibayar perusahaan-perusaha an besar ketimbang kepentingan publik.