Fellow Indonesians: no more xenophobic, it’s time to revive!

Asia and Southeast Asia have been developing quite rapidly and some nations are just unavoidably more advanced than the others. What do Indonesians have in mind when they look around at other countries in the region, in particular their two closest neighbors? Singapore, the region’s financial hub has managed to maintain its status as the wealthiest country in ASEAN. For the last 10 to 20 years, Malaysia has been basking economic growth resulting in much better quality of life including education system, leaving Indonesia far behind.

Admiration or envy?

These two countries are Indonesia’s closest neighbors, yet it seems to be having hot and delicate issues in its relations particularly with them in the past few years. Just to name some issues with Singapore: disagreement still looms on extradition treaty and defense agreement, and many feels the heat with the presence of Singapore’s Temasek in the country’s economy, while export of sea and land sand were suddenly banned in the name of environmental conservation. To Malaysia, anger was vented when it used a nusantara folksong for its tourism campaign, and accusation of stealing Indonesian old literature manuscripts was targeted with frustration, when Malaysia seems to care more about it than ever.

The list goes on and on, but as an Indonesian, I will not try to analyze why those episodes happened. It is how strong our reactions are to those issues that struck me. To my opinion, somehow we overreact to issues that touch nationalistic sentiment. Then we try to fight and act inappropriately. As an Indonesian, I am bewildered and worried how parliamentarians and even minister can sometimes be so emotional on certain issue. The fact that politicians play an issue that may affect relations with the neighbors for their political interest is simply irresponsible. This could be a reflection of inferior and insecure feeling over inability to compete. The country might have been infected by pandemic xenophobic sentiment.

From this point, I question the readiness of Indonesia for an ASEAN community and broader Asia. First, there is so little information about it, so most people are not aware. Second, amidst difficult life Indonesians have to face everyday, people might not care about ASEAN. They will contradictorily accuse globalization as the scapegoat for the rise of soybean price, for example. Third, many people do not benefit directly from globalization and internationalism. As an Indonesian who was fortunate to taste international education in Germany and experienced multicultural interaction during life in Singapore, I am lucky enough to benefit a lot from internationalism and enjoy learning other culture and languages. But other people may not get the same chance. Some people seem to be ‘allergic’ to whatever coming from outside (i.e. from the West), or even from Singapore. What would it be like if ASEAN community materializes? Are Indonesians ready to take the chance and win, or are we going to just sit still and blame others if we lose the competition?

With the benefit of being the fortunate few to bite into the fruit of globalization, I bear the burden to also reflect deeply on our nation’s mentality. Only condemning others –when in fact our own incapability plays a bigger role– would not help if we do not self reflect on our part of the blame. Retaliation is not beneficial, if we do not improve for the better life of our own people. We need to stop this and start doing something meaningful and revive! Perhaps in the future we do not ban the export of sand in the name of environmental protection, while we still fail to address the environmentally more destructive mud-flood caused by our own mistakes. And we would not need to wait until our neighbor complain for us to stop the export of haze, if we care enough about the life of our own people who are as badly –or even worse- affected by it. Sometimes, the best way to improve relation with others is to do the best to improve our own life.