Border Town

2008/06/13
JOHN TEO: Is Malaysia ready for 'new' Indonesia?


PRIME Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took time this week from what must be an extremely punishing work schedule these days to call at Bandar Mutiara, a new township that is just a stone's throw from Tebedu, the only major land border crossing between Malaysia and the entire Indonesian archipelago.
Bandar Mutiara should thus be Malaysia's main gateway into our giant neighbour and vice-versa. Yet it is merely a few rows of under-utilised shophouses that is far from fulfilling the government's ambitious game plan for a show-piece of cross-border industrialisation that takes full advantage of our infrastructural superiority and Indonesia's abundance of labour.The state government must be hoping that a dose of prime-ministerial attention will do wonders for the border-town-to-be, especially given the prime minister's close working relations with his Indonesian counterpart, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who incidentally also made the even more arduous trek to Entikong on the Indonesian side of the border recently.The state government cannot be more wrong -- but it is not alone here. The whole of Malaysia has not quite come to grips with the decade-old "new" Indonesia. It is an Indonesia where the diktats of distant Jakarta are increasingly of little material significance in the far-flung reaches of the archipelago.This new Indonesia calls for engagement on an entirely new, multi-sectoral plane. But if the regular meetings between Putrajaya and Jakarta and Kuching and Pontianak, the West Kalimantan provincial capital, are any indication, we have been slow to wise up to the new ways of doing things across the border.
A whole new layer of government at the greatly empowered regency level now holds sway, but it is largely ignored by our government officials. In towns across Kalimantan and Indonesia, sprawling new complexes housing new regency governments and parliaments have sprung up and bear testimony to their growing influence in the lives of ordinary Indonesians.A trip across the border now presents any visitor with a bewildering sense of a land under a perpetual cycle of electioneering, all made the more confusing by the apparent fact that the elections -- at regency, city or provincial levels and in different regencies, cities and provinces -- are not synchronised or coordinated in any way.Democracy can be and is often messy and unwieldy, but one cannot help wondering if it has to be so much more seemingly chaotic as in Indonesia. But I am digressing. The inescapable fact is that Indonesia has changed within the last decade, and we need to seek ways to deal with it beyond the traditional mode of cosying up to key leaders at national or provincial levels.Those Malaysians with business dealings in Indonesia are probably quicker in adapting to the need to cultivate and engage with all the new power brokers in all the local areas in which they operate.At the government-to-government level, is anything being done by Wisma Putra to address the need for our diplomats to reach out to such local decision-makers whose decisions may critically impact upon our business people operating in the country? As things stand, one gets the impression our nation's interests in Indonesia are hardly adequately served by a single full-fledged consulate in Pontianak and honorary ones in Makassar and Bali to cover the entire expanse of eastern Indonesia.Back to Bandar Mutiara. Planners at our side have this idea that Indonesian factory workers can come over to work during the day and return home across the border by night. But sparsely populated areas on the Indonesian side are not exactly teeming with potential workers. They still need to be bussed in from the towns and cities further from the border and may still require in-factory housing.I recently took the bus from Kuching to Pontianak. The winding road on the Indonesian side is a far cry from the four-lane expressway from Kuching to Serian from where the road to the border branches out. The bone-jarring Indonesian stretch of the journey took more than half a day. It will be in both countries' interests if at their next summit meeting, Abdullah and Susilo undertake to make upgrading the road a priority, possibly a joint project.