Profile: Osama bin Laden
From Amy Zalman, Ph.D.,
Name:
Osama bin Laden, also spelled Usama bin Ladin.
His full name is Osama bin Muhammad bin Awad bin Laden. ("bin" means "son" in Arabic, so his name also tells his genealogy. Osama is the son of Muhammad, who was the son of Awad, and so forth).
Family Background:
Bin Laden was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capitol. He was the 17th of over 50 children born to his Yemeni father, Muhammad, a self-created billionaire whose fortune came from building contracting. He died in a helicopter accident when Osama was 11 years old.
Osama's Syrian born mother, born Alia Ghanem, married Muhammad when she was twenty-two. She remarried following divorce from Muhammad, and Osama grew up with his mother and stepfather, and their three other children.
Childhood:
Bin Laden was schooled in the Saudi port city, Jedda. His family's wealth gave him access to the elite Al Thagher Model School, which he attended from 1968-1976. The school combined British style secular education with daily Islamic worship.
Bin Laden's introduction to Islam as the basis for political, and potentially violent—activism, was throughinformal sessions run by the Al Thagher's teachers, as New Yorker writer Steve Coll has reported.
Early Adulthood:
In the mid-1970s, bin Laden was married to his first cousin (a normal convention among traditional Muslims), a Syrian woman from his mother's family. He later married three other women, as permitted by Islamic law. It has been reported that he has from 12-24 children.
He attended King Abd Al Aziz University, where he studied civil engineering, business administration, economics and public administration. He is remembered as enthusiastic about religious debates and activities while there.
Key Influences:
Bin Laden's first influences were the Al Thagher teachers who offered extra-curricular Islam lessons. They were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political group begun in Egypt which, at that time, promoted violent means to achieve Islamic governance.
Another key influence was Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born professor at King Abd Al Aziz University, and a founder of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Azzam solicited bin Laden to raise money and recruit Arabs to help the Muslims repel the Soviets, and he played an instrumental role in the early establishment of al-Qaeda.
Later, Ayman Al Zawahiri, the leader of Islamic Jihad in the 1980s, would play a significant part in the development of bin Laden's organization, Al Qaeda.
Organizational Affiliations:
In the early 1980s, bin Laden worked with the mujahideen, guerrillas fighting a self-proclaimed holy war to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. From 1986-1988, he himself fought.
In 1988, bin Laden formed Al Qaeda (the Base), a militant transnational network whose original backbone was Arab Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Ten years later, bin Laden forged the Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders, a coalition of terrorist groups intending to wage war against Americans and battle their Middle Eastern military presence.
Objectives:
Bin Laden has expressed his ideological goals in both action and words, with his periodically videotaped public statements.
Since founding Al Qaeda, his objectives have always been the related goals of eliminating the Western presence in the Islamic/Arab Middle East, which includes battling American ally, Israel, and overthrowing local allies of the Americans (such as the Saudis), and establishing Islamic regimes.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
'Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?' - An Excerpt
'Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?'
Interview with Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
From Fred Topel
April 17, 2008 - Morgan Spurlock follows up his critically acclaimed documentary Super Size Me with something completely different – the search for Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock began the documentary process believing he could actually find the terrorist and personally visited some of the most dangerous places in the world. “That was the plan in the beginning,” explained Spurlock. “The plan was, ‘Come on, we've got as good a shot as anybody else. Why not?’” Of course, Bin Laden hasn’t been found which means that as of now Spurlock’s question has yet to be answered.
Morgan Spurlock Interview
Where did the idea come from?
“It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Supersize Me did something that none of us anticipated, which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It kind of went so beyond our borders. It was something I didn't anticipate, and the way that it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with something that was much more of a global issue, on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, of which this was.
I live in New York City so this question is constantly out there. I was there on 9/11 so this is something that's brought up consistently. Bush had just been elected to his second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere. It was on every news channel, every radio station, people were talking about him again. He was completely ubiquitous. Newscasters were like, ‘Where is Osama? Where is he? Why haven't we found him? Why haven't we brought this man to justice? Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?’ And I said, ‘That's a great question. I'd like to know that as well.’
We started just formulating how would we even make a movie like this. How would we start going about trying to find those answers or tackle this topic? We raised a little bit of money to do some preproduction on the movie from a guy named Adam Dell. I was out one night and he said, ‘I just met with your lawyer about a movie that I'd like to make. I'd like to try and go find Osama Bin Laden.’ I said, ‘You and I should sit down and talk immediately.’ So he helped us raise the first bit of seed money, just to even formulate an idea around this film. About two months into that process was when we found out [my wife] Alex was pregnant. At that point, the film took a real shift for me personally. It really went away from just being where in the world is Osama Bin Laden and what kind of world creates an Osama Bin Laden, to also, what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it much more personal for me. And I think ultimately made the journey that we went on and the people that we went to talk to in addition to politicians and people in the military, ultimately made the film better.”
How much of an eye opener was it to see how America is perceived?
“I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be better. That's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think that a lot of that has been shattered over the course of, for some people it's been five years, some it's been 10-15 years, but as you heard consistently and we spoke to people consistently, it was, ‘We don't hate the American people but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's transpired.’
I think we're still taught that people hate us and it's this they hate us, them, those people and everybody's grouped into this one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. Those people are a monolithic thing and that's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package and I think it's much more broad than that. I think over the course of the film, even when I go in my travels, you see that from different places where we go, from all the countries we go to, there's a much more diverse, even brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced.
For me, I personally also thought that I was going to be met with a lot more hostility, a lot more resentment, that people weren't going to want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People really were eager to sit down and share their feelings and share their outlooks and share their opinions. These are people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries. These people live in countries where if you speak out, you'll go to jail. That's terrible, so I think for them to be able to sit down with somebody from what they see as the Western media and actually being able to express their thoughts, knowing it could potentially reach people back in America, is very brave.”
So where is Osama Bin Laden?
“He's up in my hotel room. He's just hanging out getting room service. I think he's still in the mountains of Waziristan or somewhere in that area. When we got to the end of our trip, when we were in Pakistan, people were pointing to a direction up in those mountains that I think, by the time we got to the border, was probably about 50-75 miles away - guestimating. Whether he's still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he's mobile within that area personally, who knows? I think he's still there, somewhere.”
Did you have an ending for the film if you'd caught him?
“Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, [cinematographer] Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, ‘How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?’ And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.”
Were you worried he'd be found before you finished postproduction?
“They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans, but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States.
I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bites that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.”
Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?
“Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.”
Interview with Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock
From Fred Topel
April 17, 2008 - Morgan Spurlock follows up his critically acclaimed documentary Super Size Me with something completely different – the search for Osama Bin Laden. Spurlock began the documentary process believing he could actually find the terrorist and personally visited some of the most dangerous places in the world. “That was the plan in the beginning,” explained Spurlock. “The plan was, ‘Come on, we've got as good a shot as anybody else. Why not?’” Of course, Bin Laden hasn’t been found which means that as of now Spurlock’s question has yet to be answered.
Morgan Spurlock Interview
Where did the idea come from?
“It was 2005 when we first started talking about what my next movie would be. We'd just finished shooting the first season of 30 Days. Supersize Me did something that none of us anticipated, which was play in about 75 countries around the world. It kind of went so beyond our borders. It was something I didn't anticipate, and the way that it did that made me realize that my next movie I wanted to be something that dealt with something that was much more of a global issue, on a global scale and wasn't just an American issue, of which this was.
I live in New York City so this question is constantly out there. I was there on 9/11 so this is something that's brought up consistently. Bush had just been elected to his second term and Osama had released a tape and suddenly the tape was everywhere. It was on every news channel, every radio station, people were talking about him again. He was completely ubiquitous. Newscasters were like, ‘Where is Osama? Where is he? Why haven't we found him? Why haven't we brought this man to justice? Where in the world is Osama Bin Laden?’ And I said, ‘That's a great question. I'd like to know that as well.’
We started just formulating how would we even make a movie like this. How would we start going about trying to find those answers or tackle this topic? We raised a little bit of money to do some preproduction on the movie from a guy named Adam Dell. I was out one night and he said, ‘I just met with your lawyer about a movie that I'd like to make. I'd like to try and go find Osama Bin Laden.’ I said, ‘You and I should sit down and talk immediately.’ So he helped us raise the first bit of seed money, just to even formulate an idea around this film. About two months into that process was when we found out [my wife] Alex was pregnant. At that point, the film took a real shift for me personally. It really went away from just being where in the world is Osama Bin Laden and what kind of world creates an Osama Bin Laden, to also, what kind of world am I about to bring a kid into? I think that kind of shift made it much more personal for me. And I think ultimately made the journey that we went on and the people that we went to talk to in addition to politicians and people in the military, ultimately made the film better.”
How much of an eye opener was it to see how America is perceived?
“I think they don't like America's foreign policy as much as they used to. I think people still have a tremendous amount of hope in what America means and what America is. America is a dream and an ideology and a hope that things can always be better. That's how a lot of people see the United States still. I think that a lot of that has been shattered over the course of, for some people it's been five years, some it's been 10-15 years, but as you heard consistently and we spoke to people consistently, it was, ‘We don't hate the American people but we hate what's happened to the American government and what's transpired.’
I think we're still taught that people hate us and it's this they hate us, them, those people and everybody's grouped into this one thing. Islam is a monolithic thing. Those people are a monolithic thing and that's just not the case. We like things to be very simple and in a little package and I think it's much more broad than that. I think over the course of the film, even when I go in my travels, you see that from different places where we go, from all the countries we go to, there's a much more diverse, even brand of Islam in all of these countries and how it's practiced.
For me, I personally also thought that I was going to be met with a lot more hostility, a lot more resentment, that people weren't going to want to talk to me because I was an American. They weren't going to want to sit down and open up. It was completely the opposite. People really were eager to sit down and share their feelings and share their outlooks and share their opinions. These are people who don't get to speak in a lot of these countries. These people live in countries where if you speak out, you'll go to jail. That's terrible, so I think for them to be able to sit down with somebody from what they see as the Western media and actually being able to express their thoughts, knowing it could potentially reach people back in America, is very brave.”
So where is Osama Bin Laden?
“He's up in my hotel room. He's just hanging out getting room service. I think he's still in the mountains of Waziristan or somewhere in that area. When we got to the end of our trip, when we were in Pakistan, people were pointing to a direction up in those mountains that I think, by the time we got to the border, was probably about 50-75 miles away - guestimating. Whether he's still there or has moved on to somewhere else, because I think he's mobile within that area personally, who knows? I think he's still there, somewhere.”
Did you have an ending for the film if you'd caught him?
“Where if we caught him, we had a big party and I get a big $25 million Tiger Woods golf check? We talked about it, [cinematographer] Danny Marracino and myself, what would happen if we actually would get to find him or get to speak to him. A lot of people have asked what would you have said to him or what would you have asked him. I think the biggest thing for me would have been, I would have liked to have heard from him, ‘How does it end? How does this stop? How can the killing of innocent people end? How can all the hatred end? How can it just get to the point where there's peace and security for everybody?’ And maybe gotten a real answer. Maybe something real would have come out of that, with actual steps. Or, we might have just gotten a whole lot of crazy. Who knows? We would have gotten an answer. That would have been interesting.”
Were you worried he'd be found before you finished postproduction?
“They Found Osama Bin Laden. We Found Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden. No, that was a concern while we were making the film was would this guy be caught. And great. If he was caught, fantastic. That’s an awesome, wonderful thing. You can't be upset about that. Would it have completely ruined the film that we were making at the time? Possibly. It would have thrown a gigantic wrench into the plans, but we would have figured that out somehow. Even if they would have found him, I think a lot of the things people talk about over the course of the movie would remain the same because what you start to see over the course of the movie is, as much as Osama Bin Laden isn't in Egypt or Morocco or Saudi Arabia or the Palestinian territories or Afghanistan or Pakistan, he is in all of those places. The spirit of Osama Bin Laden, his ideology, the way that he thinks has infiltrated these countries, especially people who are in that minority of people that get all the airtime here in the United States.
I think what the film does a really good job of doing is starting to give a voice to that silent majority, the people that I think we don't give enough airtime to in America. I think the film does a great job of getting out of the two minute sound bites that we get on the news and painting a much different portrait of what life is like in the Middle East for a lot of these people on a daily basis.”
Was there a point that you knew nobody was close to finding Osama, you didn't have to worry?
“Yeah, personally I figured it had been so long and they hadn't found him and hadn't caught him that the chances of them finding him before we finished the film, odds were in our favor. It was the calculated risk that we took. As I said, had they found him, it would have been fantastic, but they didn't and hopefully they do.”
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Being a Chinese-Indonesian - An Excerpt
Being a Chinese-Indonesia
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 06/13/2006 1:42 PM
Wijanto Hadipuro, Jakarta
Once I happened to meet a Chinese-American lawyer. When she found out I had married a ""native"" Javanese woman, she asked me, ""Has that made your life easier?"" Her question really made me realize some things about my position.
I remember what happened when I went to get my marriage certificate. I went to the office alone, without my wife. The woman who waited on me picked up a big book and tried to find my name. She looked two or three times but could not find it.
She looked at me several times before asking me whether my wife was a ""native"". When I nodded, she was angry and asked me why I didn't tell her in the first place. She then picked up another book.
I do not care what kind of book they use to register my marriage. What I care about is her expression when she found out my wife was ""native"".
Marrying a woman from another ethnicity and religion has not actually made my life easier. I have to think things over for a long time before I bring my wife and my daughter to visit my family, because most of my relatives cannot accept my wife's background.
My wife has also had bitter experiences. We got married according to my religion. We both believed in Jesus Christ, but we had different religions. She was told by her religious leader that she did not belong to the faithful anymore because she got married outside her religion.
I have a Chinese-Indonesian friend who is Muslim. He married a ""native"" woman. During the riots of in May 1998, I told him he was lucky that he could go anywhere safely, because he had successfully assimilated with the Indonesian majority. His answer surprised me: ""Nobody will ask about my religion or my wife,"" he said. ""People will look at my face and because I look like a Chinese, my religion and my wife will not save me from harm.""
When I visited Atlanta, I was accompanied by a black officer from the Public Works Office.
""Charles,"" I said, ""there are so many black people living in Atlanta, and you can work at government offices. I think it is good that there is not any discrimination against black people here.""
His answer, too, was a surprise. ""Government rules can't make discrimination disappear from my social life."" he said. ""Not all white people want to interact socially with black people like me.""
A place without social discrimination would be utopia. Charles' remark reveals another fact we must accept: that government regulations can't abolish social discrimination.
My wife was discriminated against in terms of her salary. She earned less than her Chinese-Indonesian friend, just because they worked at a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian businessman. My wife with more than five years' experience at the company got only half the salary of her Chinese-Indonesian friend, who had worked for just a month at the same managerial level.
Once I read an article about indicators of social tolerance. According to the article, there are three degrees of social tolerance. The worst is when somebody does not tolerate the existence of anyone from outside his group. Such a person will try to banish ""different"" people if it's not possible to make them the same as him- or herself.
In the case of religion, for example, somebody from a certain religion might say someone from another belief system will go to hell. Another, less extreme example is when somebody does not tolerate other people's religious activities.
A better level of social tolerance is when someone accepts the existence of ""different"" people. He or she may work together and cooperate with them, but cannot accept the ""different"" person becoming a family member, for example, through marriage.
The most tolerant people are those who not only accept ""different"" people, but can welcome them as family members. This group of people is the smallest. There are only a few people who can do that, and my experience shows that people like this are marginalized both by their own groups and their spouse's groups. If you belong to this group, believe me, your life is more complicated than the lives of the other two groups.
We are born with differences. That is true. But some differences are significant for certain people, and some are not. We have to accept that. It is no use to claim equality among all those inherited differences, even by way of the law.
My experience proves that if you are not strong enough, you should keep your group identity as strong as possible. Assimilation and regulations cannot remove social discrimination from every corner of the world.
I have never regretted my decision to marry a Javanese woman, and I will not claim equal rights to citizenship. I am happy with that as long as everybody can accept my existence. If you are Chinese-Indonesian you will be better off going to a school where there are a lot of Chinese-Indonesians and working for a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian. It will help you avoid a lot of discrimination.
The writer is a Chinese-Indonesian who married a pribumi (native) woman.
__________________________________________________
I am a Chinese-Indonesian
Aimee Dawis, Jakarta | Wed, 02/06/2008 2:16 PMIn December last year, I attended a seminar in Singapore. I was welcomed by the seminar representative at the Changi Airport.
After shaking hand, he asked me, "Are you ethnic Chinese? Your name is not Chinese, but you look Chinese." I told him that I am Chinese and he was taken aback. "I couldn't tell from your name that you're Chinese," he said.
The puzzlement around my name and my identity as an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia continued throughout the one-day seminar.
As a writer and researcher on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I was invited to present my paper on China and the Cultural Identity of the Chinese in Indonesia.
Hoping to dispel the confusion arising from my name, I decided to begin my presentation by explaining my name and the historical implications and significance of naming among the Chinese in Indonesia.
In 1966, the Indonesian government issued a policy which strongly recommended Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent change their names into Indonesian ones to prove their loyalty to Indonesia.
This policy was released in the wake of the Soeharto regime's closures of Chinese schools, bans on public expressions of Chinese culture and language and widespread government suspicion regarding the Chinese community's role in the PKI's (The Indonesian Communist Party's) uprising in 1965.
Being a heterogeneous and diverse community, the Chinese in Indonesia responded to the name-changing policy in distinct ways. My father chose to change his name to Didi Dawis from Djie Ie Ling.
His other six siblings chose different names for themselves. One of his siblings who chose to keep his Chinese name.
While the names chosen by my father's family (except for his youngest brother) have been Indonesianized to the extent most people cannot tell that they are Chinese, there are other Indonesian names chosen by the Chinese in Indonesia that implicitly indicate that they are still Chinese.
For example, those with the Chinese surnames of Tan, Ong and Wee chose Indonesianized surnames such as Tanuwijaya, Ongggara and Wijaya.
These names show a desire to retain a sense of Chineseness while at the same time complying with the government's policy.
When Abdurrahman Wahid served as the President of Indonesia between November 1999 and August 2001, he abolished the Presidential Instruction Number 14, signed in 1967 by Soeharto, which restricted the practice of Chinese customs and religions to private domain.
Following this abolition, he signed the Presidential Instruction Number 6, stipulated in the year 2000, which allows the public celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Megawati took a step further by declaring Chinese New Year has been a national holiday in 2003.
Other than the official celebration of Chinese New Year, the revival of Chinese culture may be seen in the establishment of schools offering Mandarin as a mode of instruction and a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers in Indonesia.
In 1999, a television channel that broadcasts news in Chinese (Metro TV) and a radio station (Cakrawala) have joined the growing number of Chinese-language newspapers to form a media climate that is more open to Chinese language and culture.
The dazzling array of choices and opportunities arising from the acceptance and embrace of Chinese language and culture in today's Indonesia does not mean the process of identity process and maintenance among the Indonesian Chinese is less complex than in the Soeharto era by any means.
The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug-of-war between self-positioning and being positioned by others.
With the available options, the Indonesian Chinese are now presented with various means to (re)negotiate their own sense of Chineseness. From the moment their babies are born, Indonesian Chinese parents are no longer pressured to name their offspring with Indonesian names. In my observations, some parents have chosen to meld not two, but three cultures together by giving their newborns names such as Adrian Wijaya Ng, Louisa Kartadinata Liu; the first names being Western (because the parents have been educated overseas), the middle names being Indonesian, while the last names are Chinese. Yet there are many other parents who still prefer to name their babies with Indonesian names such as Hendra Suryajaya or Dewi Kurniadi.
The differences in attitudes and expectations in the Indonesian Chinese community with regards to naming reveal the polyphonic nature of identity issues. As Indonesia erases the discriminatory regulations against the Indonesian Chinese, members of this community are presented with different sources of Chinese cultural expressions that begin with their names and formal Chinese language education and continue with Chinese media, Chinese organizations and cultural performances.
Depending on their distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and the choices they make, the next generation of Indonesian Chinese and their parents may uncover new channels and avenues in their continuing process of being Chinese in Indonesia.
The writer teaches in the graduate programs of the University of Indonesia School of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communications, and the Letters Department at the School of Humanities. She can be reached at canting@hotmail.com.
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Tue, 06/13/2006 1:42 PM
Wijanto Hadipuro, Jakarta
Once I happened to meet a Chinese-American lawyer. When she found out I had married a ""native"" Javanese woman, she asked me, ""Has that made your life easier?"" Her question really made me realize some things about my position.
I remember what happened when I went to get my marriage certificate. I went to the office alone, without my wife. The woman who waited on me picked up a big book and tried to find my name. She looked two or three times but could not find it.
She looked at me several times before asking me whether my wife was a ""native"". When I nodded, she was angry and asked me why I didn't tell her in the first place. She then picked up another book.
I do not care what kind of book they use to register my marriage. What I care about is her expression when she found out my wife was ""native"".
Marrying a woman from another ethnicity and religion has not actually made my life easier. I have to think things over for a long time before I bring my wife and my daughter to visit my family, because most of my relatives cannot accept my wife's background.
My wife has also had bitter experiences. We got married according to my religion. We both believed in Jesus Christ, but we had different religions. She was told by her religious leader that she did not belong to the faithful anymore because she got married outside her religion.
I have a Chinese-Indonesian friend who is Muslim. He married a ""native"" woman. During the riots of in May 1998, I told him he was lucky that he could go anywhere safely, because he had successfully assimilated with the Indonesian majority. His answer surprised me: ""Nobody will ask about my religion or my wife,"" he said. ""People will look at my face and because I look like a Chinese, my religion and my wife will not save me from harm.""
When I visited Atlanta, I was accompanied by a black officer from the Public Works Office.
""Charles,"" I said, ""there are so many black people living in Atlanta, and you can work at government offices. I think it is good that there is not any discrimination against black people here.""
His answer, too, was a surprise. ""Government rules can't make discrimination disappear from my social life."" he said. ""Not all white people want to interact socially with black people like me.""
A place without social discrimination would be utopia. Charles' remark reveals another fact we must accept: that government regulations can't abolish social discrimination.
My wife was discriminated against in terms of her salary. She earned less than her Chinese-Indonesian friend, just because they worked at a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian businessman. My wife with more than five years' experience at the company got only half the salary of her Chinese-Indonesian friend, who had worked for just a month at the same managerial level.
Once I read an article about indicators of social tolerance. According to the article, there are three degrees of social tolerance. The worst is when somebody does not tolerate the existence of anyone from outside his group. Such a person will try to banish ""different"" people if it's not possible to make them the same as him- or herself.
In the case of religion, for example, somebody from a certain religion might say someone from another belief system will go to hell. Another, less extreme example is when somebody does not tolerate other people's religious activities.
A better level of social tolerance is when someone accepts the existence of ""different"" people. He or she may work together and cooperate with them, but cannot accept the ""different"" person becoming a family member, for example, through marriage.
The most tolerant people are those who not only accept ""different"" people, but can welcome them as family members. This group of people is the smallest. There are only a few people who can do that, and my experience shows that people like this are marginalized both by their own groups and their spouse's groups. If you belong to this group, believe me, your life is more complicated than the lives of the other two groups.
We are born with differences. That is true. But some differences are significant for certain people, and some are not. We have to accept that. It is no use to claim equality among all those inherited differences, even by way of the law.
My experience proves that if you are not strong enough, you should keep your group identity as strong as possible. Assimilation and regulations cannot remove social discrimination from every corner of the world.
I have never regretted my decision to marry a Javanese woman, and I will not claim equal rights to citizenship. I am happy with that as long as everybody can accept my existence. If you are Chinese-Indonesian you will be better off going to a school where there are a lot of Chinese-Indonesians and working for a company owned by a Chinese-Indonesian. It will help you avoid a lot of discrimination.
The writer is a Chinese-Indonesian who married a pribumi (native) woman.
__________________________________________________
I am a Chinese-Indonesian
Aimee Dawis, Jakarta | Wed, 02/06/2008 2:16 PMIn December last year, I attended a seminar in Singapore. I was welcomed by the seminar representative at the Changi Airport.
After shaking hand, he asked me, "Are you ethnic Chinese? Your name is not Chinese, but you look Chinese." I told him that I am Chinese and he was taken aback. "I couldn't tell from your name that you're Chinese," he said.
The puzzlement around my name and my identity as an ethnic Chinese from Indonesia continued throughout the one-day seminar.
As a writer and researcher on the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, I was invited to present my paper on China and the Cultural Identity of the Chinese in Indonesia.
Hoping to dispel the confusion arising from my name, I decided to begin my presentation by explaining my name and the historical implications and significance of naming among the Chinese in Indonesia.
In 1966, the Indonesian government issued a policy which strongly recommended Indonesian citizens of Chinese descent change their names into Indonesian ones to prove their loyalty to Indonesia.
This policy was released in the wake of the Soeharto regime's closures of Chinese schools, bans on public expressions of Chinese culture and language and widespread government suspicion regarding the Chinese community's role in the PKI's (The Indonesian Communist Party's) uprising in 1965.
Being a heterogeneous and diverse community, the Chinese in Indonesia responded to the name-changing policy in distinct ways. My father chose to change his name to Didi Dawis from Djie Ie Ling.
His other six siblings chose different names for themselves. One of his siblings who chose to keep his Chinese name.
While the names chosen by my father's family (except for his youngest brother) have been Indonesianized to the extent most people cannot tell that they are Chinese, there are other Indonesian names chosen by the Chinese in Indonesia that implicitly indicate that they are still Chinese.
For example, those with the Chinese surnames of Tan, Ong and Wee chose Indonesianized surnames such as Tanuwijaya, Ongggara and Wijaya.
These names show a desire to retain a sense of Chineseness while at the same time complying with the government's policy.
When Abdurrahman Wahid served as the President of Indonesia between November 1999 and August 2001, he abolished the Presidential Instruction Number 14, signed in 1967 by Soeharto, which restricted the practice of Chinese customs and religions to private domain.
Following this abolition, he signed the Presidential Instruction Number 6, stipulated in the year 2000, which allows the public celebration of the Chinese New Year.
Megawati took a step further by declaring Chinese New Year has been a national holiday in 2003.
Other than the official celebration of Chinese New Year, the revival of Chinese culture may be seen in the establishment of schools offering Mandarin as a mode of instruction and a proliferation of Chinese-language newspapers in Indonesia.
In 1999, a television channel that broadcasts news in Chinese (Metro TV) and a radio station (Cakrawala) have joined the growing number of Chinese-language newspapers to form a media climate that is more open to Chinese language and culture.
The dazzling array of choices and opportunities arising from the acceptance and embrace of Chinese language and culture in today's Indonesia does not mean the process of identity process and maintenance among the Indonesian Chinese is less complex than in the Soeharto era by any means.
The meaning of Chineseness is always shifting through time and place, and is dependent on the discursive tug-of-war between self-positioning and being positioned by others.
With the available options, the Indonesian Chinese are now presented with various means to (re)negotiate their own sense of Chineseness. From the moment their babies are born, Indonesian Chinese parents are no longer pressured to name their offspring with Indonesian names. In my observations, some parents have chosen to meld not two, but three cultures together by giving their newborns names such as Adrian Wijaya Ng, Louisa Kartadinata Liu; the first names being Western (because the parents have been educated overseas), the middle names being Indonesian, while the last names are Chinese. Yet there are many other parents who still prefer to name their babies with Indonesian names such as Hendra Suryajaya or Dewi Kurniadi.
The differences in attitudes and expectations in the Indonesian Chinese community with regards to naming reveal the polyphonic nature of identity issues. As Indonesia erases the discriminatory regulations against the Indonesian Chinese, members of this community are presented with different sources of Chinese cultural expressions that begin with their names and formal Chinese language education and continue with Chinese media, Chinese organizations and cultural performances.
Depending on their distinct socio-cultural backgrounds and the choices they make, the next generation of Indonesian Chinese and their parents may uncover new channels and avenues in their continuing process of being Chinese in Indonesia.
The writer teaches in the graduate programs of the University of Indonesia School of Social and Political Sciences, Department of Communications, and the Letters Department at the School of Humanities. She can be reached at canting@hotmail.com.
Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World - An Excerpt
Fri, Oct. 22 2010 06:26 AM EDT
Missionaries: Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World
By Michelle A. Vu
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – More than 25 percent of the ethnic groups (unreached people groups) in the world, or about two billion people, are not represented at the Lausanne Conference.
An unreached people group means that cross-cultural mission is necessary for a person in the group to hear the Gospel because they cannot find people within their ethnic group to share with them the good news.
Mission leaders on Wednesday said the hardest obstacle to overcome in reaching unreached people groups is the obedience of the church. They spoke at the Lausanne multiplex session titled “M*ss*ng People: The Unserved One-Fourth World.”
A video shown at the beginning of the session highlighted that despite the fact that 86 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists do not personally know a Christ follower, 90 percent of missionaries go to “Christianized” regions, according to the World Christian Database.
“In my 14 years working with Muslims, mobilizing churches in Korea, I came to realized that Muslims haven’t been missing people to God, but to God’s people,” said Henry Lee, a mission leader based in Seoul, South Korea, and part of Ethne to Ethne (Greek for people to people), a global mission network focused on getting the gospel to unreached people groups.
Kent Park, president of U.S.-based Mission to Unreached Peoples, explained why churches do not share the Gospel with people groups that need to hear it.
“The Indonesian church, by its own confession, said we have ignored them (difficult unreached people groups in Indonesia) because we didn’t want to pay the price, we were afraid, we didn’t think it would work, we didn’t think they would change. That’s what it means to be unreached.”
Arychiluhm Beyene, who has worked in the mission field for the last 15 years, including six years with the most difficult people in Somalia, told a touching story of a “scary” looking Somali man who converted to Christianity from Islam.
After the Somali man converted, he told Beyene, “When you look at us from outside with the long beard, with the cap, and jalabiya (traditional loose fitting clothes worn by some Somali men), we look scary. But I just want to give you assurance, don’t stop telling the good news. Although we look scary from the outside, our inside is looking for the truth.”
During the missing people session, an African mission leader also spoke to the disconnect he sees between what African Christians are taught and how they live their lives.
Although Africa currently has the highest Christian growth rate in the world, it also has the highest levels of HIV, conflict, poverty, and corruption, said Peter Tarantal, the South Africa regional director of Ethne to Ethne.
In 1900, there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Today, there are 500 million Christians in Africa and in some countries 90 percent or more of the population is Christian.
“The challenge before us is despite as a church having grown so much, we need to teach people what it means to live as people of God,” said Tarantal.
The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, also known as Cape Town2010, has drawn more than 4,000 Christian leaders representing over 190 nations to Cape Town, South Africa.The conference was founded by American evangelist Billy Graham in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland,to bring together the global body of Christ for world evangelization.
Missionaries: Church Failing to Reach One-Fourth of the World
By Michelle A. Vu
CAPE TOWN, South Africa – More than 25 percent of the ethnic groups (unreached people groups) in the world, or about two billion people, are not represented at the Lausanne Conference.
An unreached people group means that cross-cultural mission is necessary for a person in the group to hear the Gospel because they cannot find people within their ethnic group to share with them the good news.
Mission leaders on Wednesday said the hardest obstacle to overcome in reaching unreached people groups is the obedience of the church. They spoke at the Lausanne multiplex session titled “M*ss*ng People: The Unserved One-Fourth World.”
A video shown at the beginning of the session highlighted that despite the fact that 86 percent of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists do not personally know a Christ follower, 90 percent of missionaries go to “Christianized” regions, according to the World Christian Database.
“In my 14 years working with Muslims, mobilizing churches in Korea, I came to realized that Muslims haven’t been missing people to God, but to God’s people,” said Henry Lee, a mission leader based in Seoul, South Korea, and part of Ethne to Ethne (Greek for people to people), a global mission network focused on getting the gospel to unreached people groups.
Kent Park, president of U.S.-based Mission to Unreached Peoples, explained why churches do not share the Gospel with people groups that need to hear it.
“The Indonesian church, by its own confession, said we have ignored them (difficult unreached people groups in Indonesia) because we didn’t want to pay the price, we were afraid, we didn’t think it would work, we didn’t think they would change. That’s what it means to be unreached.”
Arychiluhm Beyene, who has worked in the mission field for the last 15 years, including six years with the most difficult people in Somalia, told a touching story of a “scary” looking Somali man who converted to Christianity from Islam.
After the Somali man converted, he told Beyene, “When you look at us from outside with the long beard, with the cap, and jalabiya (traditional loose fitting clothes worn by some Somali men), we look scary. But I just want to give you assurance, don’t stop telling the good news. Although we look scary from the outside, our inside is looking for the truth.”
During the missing people session, an African mission leader also spoke to the disconnect he sees between what African Christians are taught and how they live their lives.
Although Africa currently has the highest Christian growth rate in the world, it also has the highest levels of HIV, conflict, poverty, and corruption, said Peter Tarantal, the South Africa regional director of Ethne to Ethne.
In 1900, there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Today, there are 500 million Christians in Africa and in some countries 90 percent or more of the population is Christian.
“The challenge before us is despite as a church having grown so much, we need to teach people what it means to live as people of God,” said Tarantal.
The Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, also known as Cape Town2010, has drawn more than 4,000 Christian leaders representing over 190 nations to Cape Town, South Africa.The conference was founded by American evangelist Billy Graham in 1974 in Lausanne, Switzerland,to bring together the global body of Christ for world evangelization.
Civilian Deaths in Iraq - An Excerpt
A Grim Portrait of Civilian Deaths in Iraq
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010
The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.
The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.
But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.
The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.
The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »
In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »
The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.
The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.
The archive does not put that argument to rest by giving a precise count. As a 2008 report to Congress on the topic makes clear, the figures serve as “guideposts,’ not hard totals. But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.
Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why. Read the Document »
According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. Read the Document »
The archive’s data is incomplete. The documents were compiled with an emphasis on speed rather than accuracy; the goal was to spread information as quickly as possible among units. American soldiers did not respond to every incident.
And even when Americans were at the center of the action, as in the western city of Falluja in 2004, none of the Iraqis they killed were categorized as civilians. In the early years of the war, the Pentagon maintained that it did not track Iraqi civilian deaths, but it began releasing rough counts in 2005, after members of Congress demanded a more detailed accounting on the state of the war. In one instance in 2008, the Pentagon used reports similar to the newly released documents to tabulate the war dead.
This month, The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.
The archive does not have a category for the main causes of Iraqi deaths inflicted by Americans. Compared with the situation in Afghanistan, in Iraq aerial bombings seemed to be less frequently a cause of civilian deaths, after the initial invasion. The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ANDREW W. LEHREN
Published: October 22, 2010
The reports in the archive disclosed by WikiLeaks offer an incomplete, yet startlingly graphic portrait of one of the most contentious issues in the Iraq war — how many Iraqi civilians have been killed and by whom.
The reports make it clear that most civilians, by far, were killed by other Iraqis. Two of the worst days of the war came on Aug. 31, 2005, when a stampede on a bridge in Baghdad killed more than 950 people after several earlier attacks panicked a huge crowd, and on Aug. 14, 2007, when truck bombs killed more than 500 people in a rural area near the border with Syria.
But it was systematic sectarian cleansing that drove the killing to its most frenzied point, making December 2006 the worst month of the war, according to the reports, with about 3,800 civilians killed, roughly equal to the past seven years of murders in New York City. A total of about 1,300 police officers, insurgents and coalition soldiers were also killed in that month.
The documents also reveal many previously unreported instances in which American soldiers killed civilians — at checkpoints, from helicopters, in operations. Such killings are a central reason Iraqis turned against the American presence in their country, a situation that is now being repeated in Afghanistan.
The archive contains reports on at least four cases of lethal shootings from helicopters. In the bloodiest, on July 16, 2007, as many as 26 Iraqis were killed, about half of them civilians. However, the tally was called in by two different people, and it is possible that the deaths were counted twice. Read the Document »
In another case, in February 2007, an Apache helicopter shot and killed two Iraqi men believed to have been firing mortars, even though they made surrendering motions, because, according to a military lawyer cited in the report, “they cannot surrender to aircraft, and are still valid targets.” Read the Document »
The shooting was unusual. In at least three other instances reported in the archive, Iraqis surrendered to helicopter crews without being shot. The Pentagon did not respond to questions from The Times about the rules of engagement for the helicopter strike.
The pace of civilian deaths served as a kind of pulse, whose steady beat told of the success, or failure, of America’s war effort. Americans on both sides of the war debate argued bitterly over facts that grew hazier as the war deepened.
The archive does not put that argument to rest by giving a precise count. As a 2008 report to Congress on the topic makes clear, the figures serve as “guideposts,’ not hard totals. But it does seem to suggest numbers that are roughly in line with those compiled by several sources, including Iraq Body Count, an organization that tracked civilian deaths using press reports, a method the Bush administration repeatedly derided as unreliable and producing inflated numbers. In all, the five-year archive lists more than 100,000 dead from 2004 to 2009, though some deaths are reported more than once, and some reports have inconsistent casualty figures. A 2008 Congressional report warned that record keeping in the war had been so problematic that such statistics should be looked at only as “guideposts.”
In a statement on Friday, Iraq Body Count, which did a preliminary analysis of the archive, estimated that it listed 15,000 deaths that had not been previously disclosed anywhere.
The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.
Misunderstandings at checkpoints were often lethal. At one Marine checkpoint, sunlight glinting off a windshield of a car that did not slow down led to the shooting death of a mother and the wounding of three of her daughters and her husband. Hand signals flashed to stop vehicles were often not understood, and soldiers and Marines, who without interpreters were unable to speak to the survivors, were left to wonder why. Read the Document »
According to one particularly painful entry from 2006, an Iraqi wearing a tracksuit was killed by an American sniper who later discovered that the victim was the platoon’s interpreter. Read the Document »
The archive’s data is incomplete. The documents were compiled with an emphasis on speed rather than accuracy; the goal was to spread information as quickly as possible among units. American soldiers did not respond to every incident.
And even when Americans were at the center of the action, as in the western city of Falluja in 2004, none of the Iraqis they killed were categorized as civilians. In the early years of the war, the Pentagon maintained that it did not track Iraqi civilian deaths, but it began releasing rough counts in 2005, after members of Congress demanded a more detailed accounting on the state of the war. In one instance in 2008, the Pentagon used reports similar to the newly released documents to tabulate the war dead.
This month, The Associated Press reported that the Pentagon in July had quietly posted its fullest tally of the death toll of Iraqi civilians and security forces ever, numbers that were first requested in 2005 through the Freedom of Information Act. It was not clear why the total — 76,939 Iraqi civilians and members of the security forces killed between January 2004 and August 2008 — was significantly less than the sum of the archive’s death count.
The archive does not have a category for the main causes of Iraqi deaths inflicted by Americans. Compared with the situation in Afghanistan, in Iraq aerial bombings seemed to be less frequently a cause of civilian deaths, after the initial invasion. The reports were only as good as the soldiers calling them in. One of the most infamous episodes of killings by American soldiers, the shootings of at least 15 Iraqi civilians, including women and children in the western city of Haditha, is misrepresented in the archives. The report stated that the civilians were killed by militants in a bomb attack, the same false version of the episode that was given to the news media.
Civilians have borne the brunt of modern warfare, with 10 civilians dying for every soldier in wars fought since the mid-20th century, compared with 9 soldiers killed for every civilian in World War I, according to a 2001 study by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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