Customer Reviews

Fragile Nation, A: The Indonesian Crisis

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Lee Khoon Choy was an ambassador to Indonesia during the early seventies, as noted in the introduction. He visited Indonesia before and after his tenure. Due to his special position, he enjoyed special experience travelling throughout Indonesia to compile materials for his book.

This book explains Indonesian sociopolitics condition in 1998, right after Suharto's fall. It's pretty accurate. It starts by explaining why Suharto fell. The reasons are rather subjective and he occasionally mentioned about "previleged secret information from anonymous trusted individuals". Next, it describes the nature of each tribe / culture in Indonesia. Certainly, the description here is very much generalized. For example: He mentioned how Minang people are apt to trading and good at money, or Madurese for being hot-headed people, and so forth. In each of the chapter he also mentioned about the problems of each tribe / culture and how he thinks those contributed to the Indonesian Crises.

The interesting part to me is its description about the Chinese minority, which is in Chapter 9. He eloquently argues why Chinese minority in Indonesia are, at the time of its writing, not being acknowledged, where he puts forth compelling arguments why they should be; like: Ming / Ching emperors considered overseas Chinese as traitor and massacre against them was considered as "fruit of bad karma", Chinese was among the first foreign visitors of Indonesia, Chinese was the one who introduce Indonesia to Islam (not Gujarat people, as previously thought), and so forth.

My major complaint of this book is that many of the compelling arguments do not have proper citation of their sources or are waved out as "personal talk from trusted individuals". In some, he does mention the source. However, literature / article citation is almost completely missing. Given the controversial nature of this book, I think that he should disclose from which book / article he got the arguments and put that in the footnotes, especially for historical citations. Although I don't question much about many of them, many people would easily diss this book as being provocative and baseless. The only "source" listed is in the bibliography, most of which, in my humble opinion, don't help much in tracking down the source.

Another issue is that there are few factual errors, such as the mention of "Gresik is in West Java" as opposed to the fact of "Gresik is in East Java". Things like these could throw much of the book's arguments: If the author can't cite simple facts correctly, how can we trust a much more provocative arguments he sets forth?

The next issue is typo. Around 5 per chapter. It can be quite annoying.

Too bad that flaws like above marred this otherwise very compelling book for Indonesian sociopolitics.