[Kabar-indonesia] Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono's Blog: Military Businesses and Reform

[Joyo at aol.com]

also: Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono's blog:
Military Businesses and the Reform Process

The Jakarta Post 
July 3, 2006

Opinion and Editorial 

Blogs level field for corporations and governments

Ong Hock Chuan, Jakarta

Corporate communicators, journalists and PR hacks take
note: Your defense minister has just started blogging.
What are you going to do about it?

If conversations with professional communicators in
Indonesia are anything to go by, the answer is
probably nothing. The typical attitude, especially for
those over 40, is that blogs are for angst-filled
teenagers writing syrupy prose and bad poetry on the
Net.

They couldn't be more wrong. Blogs are very likely to
change the way businesses and organizations
communicate, especially when it comes to crisis and
issues management. The rise of the blogging phenomenon
as a force in society is well documented in
publications such as Fortune, Thomas L. Friedman's The
World is Flat, and Naked Conversations, a book
co-authored by Robert Scoble, best known as
Microsoft's appointed blogger, and Shiel Israel.

Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has apparently taken
all this seriously and started blogging
(www.juwonosudarsono.com) in April. So far he's made
five posts. The first was personal, having to do with
the arrival of his grandson. The next were about the
U.S. Secretary of Defense, development planning and
the debate on Pancasila.

His last post, however, is particularly interesting
from an issues management point of view and may
foreshadow how businesses, organiza-tions and
personalities try to engage their detractors in the
future.

In a post titled Military Businesses and the Reform
Process, Juwono rebuts the Human Rights Watch report
of June 2006 calledHigh a Price: The Human Rights
Costs of the Indonesian Military's Economic
Activities."

So what does he achieve?

Potentially, a lot. By even going into the so-called
blogosphere, Juwono is sending a strong signal that he
is willing to discuss his views on matters that he
cares about. He is also sending a message that he is
willing to have a conversa-tion with these
stakeholders, whether they are supporters or
detractors, through his blog.

By doing this he is presenting himself as an open
person, and by blogging about his grandson, he also
presents the human side of Juwono, the defense
minister.

Through his blog he is able to engage critics like
Human Rights Watch and respond blow by blow if
necessary. This is something that is very difficult
for an attacked party to do in the traditional media.

That is because in the traditional media, the
advantage goes to the party that strikes first. A
typical example would be an NGO calling a press
conference to accuse, say, a mining company of
pollution. It makes the front page if the accusations
are sensational enough.

By the time the mining company calls a press
conference to rebut the allegations, the story is
downgraded to an inside page because a defense is
usually not asas an accusation. By then, the damage is
done, and there is little the company can do to
mitigate it.

In the blogosphere, however, companies and NGOs enjoy
a level playing field. An NGO can make an accusation
and the company can rebut it almost in real time, as
well as bringing other stakeholders into the ensuing
conversation. Since most Indonesian NGOs and activists
are plugged into the Net anyway,an even better medium
to engage them.

There is also increasing evidence that many issues now
begin in the blogosphere and only jump to the
traditional media when they reach the critical point.
The woes of bicycle-lock company Kryptonite,problems
involving a flawed chip and other business crises were
apparently caught early in the blogosphere.

So this is the best place for businesses and
organizations to intercept issues before they become
crises.

But for all their potential, blogs are still a
relatively new phenomenon, and not a few people will
be questioning whether Juwono can influence anyone at
all.

Time will tell, but in the meantime, here are some
figures to help you decide whether Juwono's blog will
amount to anything.

Nobody knows the total number of blogs in the world,
although some experts place it at 100 million.
Juwono's blog is now ranked at 122,749 by Technorati,
a web service that searches and ranks blogs by order
of influence.

Technorati also says Juwono has 44 links to his blog
from 26 other sites. Among those links are Komunitas
Blogger Muslim, Global Voices Online and an
influential Indonesian blog, Blogger Indonesia, whose
author, A. Fatih Syuhud, has named Juwono the Blogger
of the Week. And this is a blog that is less than
three months old with only five posts (most
influential bloggers post at least once a day).

Juwono is certainly creating a buzz among bloggers,
many of whom would now like to see Human Rights Watch
engage the minister on his criticisms of their report.

If Human Rights Watch engages Juwono then a
conversation may happen, leading to, in the best
circumstances, respect for each other's views. If the
former keeps mum then it would not look too good in
the blogosphere as it would mean they are either so
backward they do not know that the minister is
creating waves on the Net, or they are too cowardly to
take him on point for point.

Either way the lesson is there for companies and
organizations that are frequently on the receiving end
of NGO criticisms: you can potentially level the
playing field with a blog.

Ong Hock Chuan is a PR consultant specializing in
crisis and issues management. He can be reached via
ong at maverick.co.id. His blog address is
unspun.wordpress.com 

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Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono's blog
Friday 23 June

Military Businesses and the Reform Process

No defense ministry and defense force in all of South
East Asia has been subjected to more international
scrutiny about its role in the life of the country
than the Indonesian Defence Force (Tentara Nasional
Indonesia). Since President Soeharto, a retired
general, stepped down in May, 1998, the TNI reform
process has been periodically in the forefront of news
coverage by national and international media, none
more so than the of the "military businesses" owned,
operated by or linked to any one of the tri-services,
Army, Navy and Air Force.

Most domestic and foreign analysts, particularly NGOs,
incessantly find fault with almost anything and
everything the TNI (especially the army) did, is doing
and will do in the future. The anti-military tone is
partly in the nature of most NGOs anywhere, and is
deeply rooted in the liberal western lexicon of
"civilian supremacy" or "civilian control" and the
predictable language of "transparency and
accountability. Much of the reporting of the TNI__most
recently revealed in the June 2006 Human Rights Watch
Report entitled "Too High a Price: The Human rights
Costs of the Indonesian Military's Economic
Activities" is coloured in the HRW report, the
phraseology of which draws upon events that took place
in Indonesia before May 1998.

As expected, HRW's report starts with the predictable
"front-loading" of its title report, as if all of
Indonesia's military businesses were always
systematically linked to human rights abuses. Words
such as "mafia-like behaviour" are laced through the
report's pages with nary a single reference to the
realities that in most instances throughout
Indonesia's earlier history in the mid-1950s down
through mid 2006, many of the cooperatives and
foundations (not all of them outright businesses such
as the title of the report ominously insinuates)
helped support TNI tactical units in providing in-kind
support to low-income soldiers, help provide education
to poor families and, in many instances outside of
Java, provide soldiers as teachers of Bahasa Indonesia
and arithmetic, the building of irrigation and water
supply, bridges and schools.

>From the outset the Indonesian Defense Force has never
had a decent budget to provide a security and defence
service as part of the provision of a public good to
enable an environment wherein development, stability
and civil liberties can flourish. Since the mid-1950s,
no Indonesian government has been able to provide the
police and the defence force with an adequate budget
to provide that public service.

The HRW June 2006 report is understandably
unsympathetic to such realities, given that its
framework and paradigm rests on the assumption of
standards of "professionalism and transparency" taken
for granted in developed countries. HRW Asia was also
mindful that in the wake of the TNI's exemplary role
in the rescue and rehabilitation efforts of the post
Tsunami in Aceh in 2004-2005 and the recent earthquake
in Central Java, the TNI's image at home and abroad
had soared. The lifting of the US restriction of spare
parts to the TNI also took the wind of the
anti-Indonesian lobby in the US and Western Europe.

All in all, the content and tenor of the HRW 2006
report is both predictable and disappointing. When I
served in London as ambassador, I had many meetings
with NGOs and human rights activists (including HRW
Asia) about the TNI, its role in the reform of
political life in Indonesia. Including the divestment
of the TNI's businesses. The language and lexicon of
most of the groups I met came right through a time
warp of 1990-1998. They simply could not and would not
accept the notion that the TNI was the pioneer of
political reform, and none more so when under
Lieut.General S.B. Yudhoyono during his tenure as TNI
chief of territorial affairs in 1997-1998. Human
rights groups also would not acknowledge the UN Human
Rights Summit formulation in June 1993 that human
rights constituted "civil, political, economic, social
cultural rights in an integrated, inseparable and
balanced manner". 

But then HRW thrives on focusing civil and political
rights infringements because their bread and butter
heavily relies on emphasising those infringements that
are much more appealing, dramatic and headline
grabbing. Besides, who would want to read about the
TNI's successes in separating sectarian groups from
killing one another in Sulawesi or Ambon. What
Congressman in the US or parliamentarian in Europe
would care about a TNI soldiers toils in helping
villagers build irrigation, shelters and wooden
bridges in the boondocks of Borneo. No editor in the
newsrooms of satellite TV or print media in the
liberal press would dream of providing a favourable
paragraph or two about the TNI. The TNI will remain
whipping boy for many NGOs and western media for a
long time to come.

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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