I am about as far away from New York as I can be, in a remote rural location, the site of the world’s largest shrimp farm on Sumatra, one of the Indonesian islands. The story here is still unfolding, an uphill battle in the economic war for economic recovery in a country that was devastated by a financial crisis engineered in part by agencies like the IMF. This is one of those fronts in the Globalization conflict that I am here to make a film about, to chronicle how a local entrepreneur is engaging the world markets and creating jobs while trying to overcome corrupt government practices and pressures from workers and farmers for a bigger slice of the pie.

Most of the economic news we see is not about people creating value, about work and enterprise,, but about market fluctuations, stocks rising and falling, indices that give little insight into the human drama on the ground in the poorer nations where most of humanity ekes out a living on a dollar or two a day.

THE AL QAEDA CONNECTION

The problems that obsess America and the west are not far away because the US is convinced that the base of the militant Muslim fundamentalist resistance, al Qaeda, is alive and well here and cite a number of incidents, plots and threats as evidence.

A grenade went off by mistake near the US embassy in Jakarta, and security there has been strengthened with local police armed with automatic weapons. I saw them at the Embassy yesterday, although most were hanging out in a park across the street.

Elements of the local media are not buying all the alarmism, as Ray Bonner reported in the New York Times, noting that local papers have carried front page headlines that say: BEWARE OF US PROPAGANDA.” Sometimes, I wish our press would do so as well.

Bonner reports that various leaders here “heaped scorn” on reports that one Omar Farug had told the CIA he was working for Osama. (Bonner adds a bit of history usually missing from media reports: “Considering the CIA’s history here, the fears (of CIA info management are not totally irrational”) He says local press accounts directly attribute stories leaked by the CIA to the CIA. So the story says straight out: “CIA: AL Qaeda tried twice to assassinate Megawatti ” (Indonesia’s President.)

In other words, instead of attributing the report to Newsweek, they attribute it directly and overtly to CIA’s source.

GUESS WORK

As it turns out, yesterday I spoke with the leader of Indonesia’s largest Mulsim organization, a moderate group representing 40 million Muslims. He told me that the US Ambassador acknowledged to him that the evidence about al Qaeda was based on “guess work.” And yet by the time that “guess work” (i.e., unsubstantiated information) gets to us, it triggers heightened alerts and all kinds of alarmist reporting here.)

The attitude in Indonesia towards these “threats” seem more relaxed than they are in Washington. This is not to say that small militant groups don’t exist.

As everyone who studies campaigns like our terror war knows, a good continuing threat is what political partisans in government need to justify their budgets and Presidents need to keep the paranoia and fear going. That way they can question the patriotism of their political opponents.

BALLAST FROM BUSH

I have been following the recent squabble between an aggressive and increasingly demagogic Bush and the timid Democrats who took the partisan bait after daring to raise an occasional question on CNN and the BBC.

It all seems increasingly bizarre. A half dozen incredulous Indonesians have asked me if the US is “really” going to war with Iraq, as in “WHY !? What are they thinking !?” We seem crazed to many. The Indonesian President’s sister–a political critic–says straight out “THE US CONTROLS INDONESIA.”

PRO-TOLERANCE MEDIA

On the media front, one interesting story in the Far East Economic Review notes that Indonesian TV has lately aired two soap operas that try to encourage more tolerance towards the ethnic Chinese community. They are prominent in Indonesian business life, but this monority is resented and scapegoated by those who unfairly blame the country’s problems on them. Some Indonesians have even labeled these Chinese as “The Jews Of Indonesia” because of parallels between the centuries old pogroms against Jews in Europe and the attacks that devastated Jakarta’s Chinese community after the fall of Suharto.

That’s all from me right now, as I try to squeeze a few minutes out to give you the view from another corner of the world. I am sorry I have nothing to report on the ABC-CNN merger to be or the latest on Iraq. Check out the expanded media news on the home page of Mediachannel.org for more. I can still access email, so share your comments with me at dissector@mediachannel.org