Why the World Keeps Getting Indonesia Wrong
But we're okay with that.
Pope Francis visited Indonesia in early September, part of his tour of what’s not wrongly called “Australia’s backyard”—Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor, and finally, Singapore. Only East Timor is majority Catholic, and the tour significantly didn’t include the Philippines, the largest Catholic nation in the eastern hemisphere.
Going centre right introduces me to several Catholic Americans, who are not fans of Francis. The idea that he turned his back on Catholics to schmooze the Muslims was common. After all, Indonesia is the largest Islamic nation on Earth with more than 200, maybe 220 million Muslims. For Pete's sake, this sounded like the Pope going to Saudi Arabia.
And yet, it’s very easy to find Catholic Indonesians. Basic facts on the visit cite that Catholics constitute just 3% of the Indonesian population. That 3% translates to 8.5 million, bigger than the Catholic population in Australia, which declines steadily to five million in the 21st century.
The visit was a major event for Indonesia. Non-stop media coverage, from newspapers to social media. The Muslim population had many reasons to be impressed. His decision to take a chartered ITA Airways flight was positively compared to the president’s son who flew to Los Angeles on a private jet. Throughout the tour, besides the military-grade Popemobile, he rode shotgun in a basic Toyota minivan.
The friendly press and public nodded to his every word, on war and peace (he didn’t name names), the environment, and social justice. The keywords were simple, down-to-earth, and peaceful. My parents were among about 80,000 people who celebrated a stadium Mass and they had returned home before midnight, while most television channels broadcast the whole procession for the evening.
The only Indonesian detractors of the Pope were the Islamists, who believed that the media and the public gave him too much attention. Hence, I was surprised to find more criticism from Catholic Americans, and some other Indonesian Catholics also took notice.
As mentioned, these Americans thought he was a corrupt, and even illegitimate pope going on a very unnecessary tour. The 8.5 million Indonesian Catholics were nothing for them – he went to an Islamic nation to make nice with Muslims while ignoring the plight of Christians in the West. And yes, there were ladyboy jokes too, because Indonesia is in Southeast Asia.
Meanwhile, some other liberal Westerners also made a wrong impression about Indonesia (how do I know they were liberals? They hated Trump in other posts). It’s an illiberal place with sharia punishment so things were not alright in Indonesia – referring to the autonomous Aceh, held in union by this uneasy compromise. Christian migrants in the West would say that Christianity is persecuted in Indonesia, the reason they left.
Below I’ll examine the three causes of misconceptions of Indonesia.
1. Everyone gets the wrong idea about everywhere
Not just about Indonesia. Americans have wrong conceptions about each other. About the Midwest (Irredeemable racists or yearns to be freed from the GOP). About Florida and California (Hellholes). About New York (Weekly murders, just like on TV). And Americans are not the only people to have wrong perceptions about the world.
Indonesians naturally also have wrong perceptions about other islands, other provinces, other ethnicities, and religions. We often think that all Malaysians are Malays and all Singaporeans are Chinese. Even with that ladyboy slur directed at us, we still joke that Thai women could be ladyboys.
The Internet and international travel have helped us learn about the world and talk with the world. They are the same reasons we prefer to keep our priors, identifying different people (including fellow citizens) as friends or enemies, and increasing our dislike for new information and perspectives.
2. Indonesia is always under the radar
I often wonder about how non-Indonesian children look at the world map and notice the archipelago between Australia and the Pacific. Do they know what’s it called? How do they read it? What are they thinking about Indonesia?
Indonesians chuckle every time Indonesia is mentioned in American fiction, and we don’t even mind if it’s a passing or negative reference, like in the opening stage of The Last of Us series. Twitter followers might have seen my meme of the Indonesian Leonardo di Caprio, wearing a batik shirt and songkok cap, pointing at the TV while smoking and drinking iced tea. That’s how happy we are to be noticed.
Indonesia is unnoticed for different reasons. We were not colonised by the British. Most importantly, we export few migrants to America, compared to Vietnam, the Philippines, and Thailand. Chinese and Indian Malaysians, meanwhile, migrate to Australia and Canada and therefore represent Malaysia through their food and presence.
Indonesians are not even a significant minority in the Netherlands, numerically and culturally superseded by newer migrants from the Caribbean and Morocco. The Eurasian Indos have assimilated with interracial marriages, while there has never been any new wave of migration over the last fifty years.
It’s a mystery even for Indonesians why we don’t migrate, despite our overpopulation and living conditions. Even Chinese Indonesians don’t migrate permanently the way Chinese Malaysians or Thais do. Maybe the Indonesian economy and security are more stable than they are credited for.
3. Indonesia defies the expectations
In Indonesia Etc., Elizabeth Pisani defines Indonesia as the bad boy of Southeast Asia – a renegade, dangerous, irresponsible, and fun. Certainly, Filipinos and Thais would feel they are more fun and dangerous than Indonesia (while everybody agrees that Singapore is the stuck-up nerd), but Pisani has a point.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation. But it’s not any Arab state, it’s not Pakistan, it’s not even Malaysia. Many Muslim Indonesians have Christian and Hindu given names and it has been accepted for generations. Interreligious marriage isn’t out of the norm – at least Muslim families are free to celebrate Christmas with their relatives.
We are in the lower rung of Southeast Asian modernity. Jakarta is objectively dirtier, poorer, and less sophisticated than Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur, let alone Singapore. Bali is supposedly no more libertine and exotic than Phuket. And yet, Australians think Bali is more family-friendly for them than Thailand (a place with a worse reputation for Western women). I always find it hard to say something positive about Jakarta, but I can say the same for both Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. To put it another way, if I want to eat and shop in a capital city that’s not Singapore, I’ll just go to Jakarta because the other two cities cannot offer anything between Jakarta and Singapore.
I’m aware that the main reason that Indonesia is overlooked and underestimated is because it’s a Muslim republic that is not in the Commonwealth. As always, I wish I had been an Indonesian Australian instead of an Indonesian. But every night on Twitter I wonder – where are my Singaporean and Japanese counterparts? Where are my Asian Australian peers besides Adrian Nguyen? Am I unique because I am Indonesian?