[Final draft offered, sent 28 August 07, after drafts sent 17 July 07, 07 August 07, 10 August 07, 16 August 07, 20 August 07 - all refused]
----------------------------------------------------------Dear editors of Indonesia,
From Leena Avonius's review of my book Indonesia's War over Aceh (Indonesia 83: 165--168), I perceive several points of concern where the reviewer produces an overall effect of misrepresentation. My concerns cover apparent carelessness by the reviewer, including: errors of reading comprehension; major omissions of essential issues; mistaken and misleading comparisons with other studies; criticism based on considerations irrelevant to the book's context; unsubstantiated judgement; expressions of opinion posed as statements of simple fact; and apparent recourse to insult. These last two matters seem to contravene the journal's own policy.
The review starts with a simple claim citing Kirsten Schulze's chapter as "an earlier study", but I understand that claim to be incorrect. Submission or publication dates may yet prove my own study to pre-date Schulze's but, in the circumstances, it would be reasonable to regard both studies as contemporary. Moreover, Avonius's comments from "Schulze examined the war...based on the material and statements produced by the Indonesian military" may mislead by an impression that my study did not use such sources but rather examined some vague "spread" of official material.
Avonius's first major omission is in her summary of Chapter One, where she ignores entirely my study of GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Free Aceh Movement) structure, and GAM personnel and weapon strengths: some fourteen pages, two tables, and a map, all with basic even causal relevance to the book's subject. Given that Avonius was a diplomatic participant in Aceh's peace process with its crucial considerations for combatants' troop and weapon totals, we could expect her to confirm, counter, or at least mention my book's graphic illustration and chapter discussion of such details, especially where they contradict claims by the Aceh Monitoring Mission. Avonius's avoidance there also causes her omission of my timely warning (pp. 237--238) on the dangers to Aceh's peace process and tensions within the Acehnese resistance. Her silence on GAM is part of the review's larger gap for all thirty of my book's illustrations, which I believe have set new standards for the studies in levels of detail, source accuracy and quality.
On Chapter Two, Avonius conveys superficial understanding of my study into the relationship between Indonesian military (TNI) territorial commands and expanded civilian government apparatus. I describe (pp. 54, 58--61) how civil expansion long precedes most TNI territorial growth, with non-parallel civil--military hierarchies giving seniority preemptively to TNI (and to lesser extents Police/POLRI) commanders, as mapped overlaps ensure a 'security approach' and TNI--POLRI primacy in local government processes. Avonius ignores these processes' complexity, perpetuating instead a simplistic and superficial 'standard' view, i.e., "...the military's territorial structure grows with the civilian administration", a view my research qualifies by detailed reference to Aceh's case. The TNI territorial hierarchy rather overlaps and intersects civil administration at varying levels, which I emphasize by criticizing (p. 58) common, established views like Avonius's and other, slightly more sophisticated claims that such non-parallels are exceptions to a rule of simple civil--military parallel. Such of my book's explanations offer new understanding about these dynamics of military influence in Indonesian state processes.1
On Chapter Three, Avonius misses my explanations of TNI--POLRI force structure, organizational evolution, and operational tasking. Indeed, my efforts on definitions seem wholly lost on Avonius, who perpetuates common mistakes in this area by mistranslating KOPASSUS as "special operations military" and BRIMOB as "the special anti-riot police unit". As my graphics and Chapter Three text assert clearly (pp. xvii, 87, 93, 235), the Army's Special Forces Command (KOPASSUS) is but one of several TNI arms created for special operations; on page 93 I detail how Aceh saw deployments by special action forces from all three TNI services. Also, POLRI's Mobile Brigade (BRIMOB) is not the dedicated "anti-riot" unit she describes but, as I stress by my criticism of such common error (pp. 76, 99, 244--245n7), it is a basic infantry arm in POLRI's corps structure - anti-riot tasks (dakura / PHH in dalmas - 'crowd control') are allocated as functional capabilities among various POLRI (and still in some cases TNI) units. One of Avonius's complaints is that I "should have put more effort into opening up and explaining the specialist language". Indeed, I do provide a six-page list of acronyms and terms, while the text follows normal convention by expanding or translating less common terminology on its first appearance in the chapters. However, since Avonius's confusion after my unambiguous definitions for the commonly used "KOPASSUS" and "BRIMOB", it would seem futile to shift the book towards some dictionary-style reference that she may prefer.
Avonius further confuses on this subject by noting Henk Schulte Nordholt's chapter on genealogies of Indonesian violence: a broad, discursive piece with only fleeting and indirect relevance to my book's study of colonial precedents. In just one paragraph in his description of "a regime of fear", Schulte Nordholt mentions in passing the Korps Maréchaussee to trace colonial atrocity in Aceh. He adds a cursory, unsubstantiated and largely inaccurate comment on military genealogy: "the colonial army's Indonesian offspring, the Kopassus". By contrast, I plot traces of colonial, Japanese and Indonesian origins for most TNI--POLRI force types (including militia proxies), their counterinsurgency philosophy in concepts of command, control, and tactics, and the modern operational flexibility and standardization in the TNI's Satgas Rajawali system (pp. 70--79, 83, 167, 169). My research and analysis are not "elaborating upon a similar notion made by Henk Schulte-Nordholt" as Avonius claims; my book redefines post-colonial military history, thereby inadvertently correcting Schulte-Nordholt's very brief comments and their exaggeration of Dutch influence.2 My book makes other revisionist disturbance by investigating force structure, capabilities and institutional culture across all TNI--POLRI ranks from the mid-1990s; earlier, standard approaches to 'structure' often suggested a predominance of entrail readings from army academy and promotion lists, spawning much 'table talk' speculation about factionalism and networking, or which military executives will get the top jobs, and why.3
Avonius misunderstands parts of most chapters when she states that "the book does not offer new information on the legal and illegal business activities of the TNI in Aceh". Within most chapters I do offer such new information, because that of my book's reported detail is hitherto unseen in English and overwhelmingly not in the McCulloch--Kingsbury chapter Avonius notes. Chapter Eight (pp. 234--236), for example, exposes major TNI funding conduits via post-tsunami aid, while chapters four and six (especially) are peppered with local report detail of such TNI enterprise at lower levels. My book makes different discussions in this area, too, consistent with its war-fighting focus. It also considers TNI--POLRI business motives in: Chapter Two's look into anomalous internal statistics on population and expanded government apparatus; Chapter Three's view of TNI unit flexibility and logistics; and Chapter Five's investigation of underreported casualties. Such various considerations are largely absent in other studies, including the reference Avonius cites.
From her reading of Chapter Six, Avonius makes several suggestions and criticisms which miscontextualize her own review. She seems to read that chapter under the shadow of her own apparent preference for an altogether separate book with different approach, focus, and even title. Her first complaint here is that I did not make greater emphasis on what she believes to be an important factual point about popular pressure bringing late-1990s trials for military atrocity. Even if her point itself is factually true and valid, it is not mine or my book's to pursue. Besides, it is clear from my text (pp. 90, 98--99, 128, 164, 168, and, on the case to which Avonius refers, 96--97) that I am much less optimistic about military and other state publicity in such cases. Her point would therefore clash with my own expressed views, as if stamping an awkward, artificial postscript caveat to promote a rosily imagined 'success of local and international human rights advocacy against militarist brutality'.
On Aceh and syariah, Avonius strays farther from the subject's context of Indonesian counter-insurgency warfare, while claiming that it is my book that needs "further contextualization". Alleging my supposed neglect of "particularities" and exceptionalism in syariah, she loses all sight of my specialized book's clear and contextually focused particularity. Via severe quotation quarantined from my discussion's original context, she creates a critique of my chapter's quite unremarkable description of how syariah amounts to a strategic manipulation of religious difference between the uniform apparatus of the Indonesian state and its proxies on the one hand, and Aceh's local religious traditions on the other. Contrary to Avonius's liberal interpretation, my text (pp. 189--190) does not contrive some simplistic argumentative dichotomy of crude incompatibility between a state-driven Indonesian Islamic orthodoxy and some (imagined) Acehnese opposite of other uniformity.
About my main point on syariah Avonius is wrong i.e., claiming it is "that the military played an active role in imposing the religious law on Aceh". My actual main point is that TNI leadership on syariah steered Aceh into an extra venue of contest within Islam itself, as I assert in clear introductory and concluding text (pp. 189, 194). She also misrepresents my discussion as an "interpretation of Aceh's current syariah regulations", but that letter of the law is really incidental in my book's depictions of the subtler spirit and forms of syariah in publicity, planning, and organization. By missing such points, she drops syariah from my broader discussion of information war and its less tangible syariah-related pop-cultural and business aspects (pp. 126--128, 191--194). A case I explore at length is Sundanese entrepreneur Aa Gym, a syariah advocate in less formal though more widely Indonesian senses: Gymnastiar toured Aceh in high-profile TNI--POLRI perception management roles, preaching "repentance" to captured GAM members. I also identify the Indonesian Army's leading 'infowar' intellectual Syarifudin Tippe as a key architect of Aceh's syariah proselytization and implementation when a local territorial chief. For readers less familiar with Aceh-related sources, such of my book's contextualization may be clearer by drawing attention to obvious parallels with recent Western news publicity about military humanitarian activity in Afghanistan and Iraq. Alas, Avonius barely dips her toe in that entire discourse, despite its importance to (post-)modern warfare.
Another problem I noted was where Avonius seems to demonstrate other mistakes she claims to identify in my book. She upbraids me over my comparisons to East Timor and Northern Ireland, though I make such points in the book's consistent context of counterinsurgency (she does not seem to object to my mentions of Mindanao). But then for the non-military issue of syariah she sets such universal context herself as a compulsory dress code for all researchers thus: "any analysis of (syariah implementation, policing, and reception) in Aceh must take ... into account ... Aceh's (exceptional) situation in the wider Muslim world (sic)"! I know of no serious researcher who implies that Aceh's syariah is not unique, and my book, too, treats local source detail accordingly. Her other advice is a near-truism in the bizarre addendum: "TNI soldiers were excluded from syariah regulations". That the TNI has its own separate legal system will be apparent even to novice readers, as in page 91's table, for example; Avonius could have been advising me to make a separate point about TNI uniforms being generally green-colored. I was reminded here of her earlier tautology in: "This book does not cover the developments after the peace agreement..." (translating as Indonesia's War over Aceh ≠ peace"!)
The greatest problem I find in the review is its omission of my book's entire polemical approach, made explicit in the introductory chapter as an "agenda". My book makes critiques of much error and complacency in this area of study. Avonius complains that my chapters' conclusions tend to "jump from one argument to another", but the reason for that is that my book is a polemic, making its various corrective raids on established apparatus in the field after description and analysis. If Avonius had not made that great omission about my book's polemic and critiques, readers would more likely see that her complaint has no grounds. An unfortunate coincidence is that Kirsten Schulze and Damien Kingsbury together catch probably most of my book's critiques, so Avonius's major omission here combined with her prominent, complimentary, but tenuous referencing of those two writers may also give unsavory impressions of scholarly process abused for priorities of partisan, networked favoritism.
Avonius makes a restrained allegation that I use an internet-surfing writing style ("as if the author has followed numerous intriguing links"). I reject wholly that insinuation about my book and its potential implications that it lacks structural integrity and relies on others' research. Avonius states her opinion here as if it is no opinion but rather a matter of fact: she implies yet more certainty by associating the alleged shortcoming with a "strategy"! Despite her implicit pose of factual certainty, she offers nothing to substantiate her allegation; not a single quotation, endnote, source, or any analysis of compositional structure.
Avonius imagines me seeming "to drown in" what she asserts casually i.e., with no substantiation, as "the swamp of acronyms and details". On this point, I refer to my book's assertion on page three that it is essential for researchers of an army's war to immerse themselves in the specialized military areas of doctrine, sub-culture, terminology, and localized variations, in a self-evidently similar way to engineering's importance in studies of bridges and construction projects, for example. I think that her many problematical claims about my book and other sources should require her to devote much greater energy to such empathic immersion and other substantial matters of study than she seems to apply to her creative work in criticism (or insult barely concealed as ridicule). Perhaps Avonius' difficulties with specific but routine details of the war's terminology reflect a trend that saw many new scholars and others too hasty in joining Aceh's post-tsunami reconstruction and peace processes.
Given Avonius's several factual and analytical shortcomings identified above, it may be clearer just why she found my book "not easy reading" and "such a struggle": she may have found it hard to accept new information and analysis that contradicted her own ideas about the subject. Furthermore, not a few of her criticisms betray her own firmly held beliefs about warfare, diplomacy, human rights, and other studies, whereas my own research and arguments would pose a frontal challenge to certain articles of faith there. I am aware that my book's specialization, emphasis on local sources, relative complexity, and new, often revisionist approach may pose additional challenge for those used to studying the Indonesian military via non-Indonesian secondary sources and non-military perspectives. On reflection, although I believe that the journal has failed to provide readers a properly engaged, informed or otherwise competent review in this case, the vexed reaction apparent in Avonius' review would seem to vindicate my book's polemic.
Matthew N. Davies
Melbourne
1For more detailed description of such overlaps, though in contemporary West Papua, see: Matthew N. Davies, 'TNI & POLRI Forces in West Papua: Restructuring & Reasserting Sovereignty', 2006, pp. 15--17. Online: <http://members.optusnet.com.au/lismatt/papua_brief_davies_aug06_namemod2.pdf> (accessed August 2007).
2Henk Schulte Nordholt, 'A Genealogy of Violence', in Roots of Violence in Indonesia, ed. Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), pp. 36--37.
3See for example: The Editors, 'The Indonesian Military in the Mid-1990s: Political Maneuvering or Structural Change?' in Indonesia 63, April 1997, pp. 91--105.
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