Indonesia’s presidential race is not until July, but there is already one winner.
Basuki Tjahaja Purnama (鍾萬勰), better known by his Hakka nickname “Ahok,” has taken over as acting governor of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.
He is the first ethnic Chinese to do so in a country that is 95 percent native Indonesian and has the world’s largest Muslim population.
Photo: Reuters
A Christian, Ahok succeeds Joko Widodo — popularly known as Jokowi — who has stepped aside to run for the presidential election on July 9, which opinion polls suggest he will win. Ahok would automatically take over to complete Jokowi’s five-year term if he does win.
Indonesia’s Chinese make up only about 2 percent of the population of 240 million.
Resented for their wide control over trade and business and suspected of loyalty to China, Indonesians of Chinese descent have been deliberately kept out of the political and military hierarchy for most of the country’s almost 70 years of independence.
The resentment, which has burst into bloody riots in the past, appears to be on the wane, although it is not over.
Even critics of Jakarta’s acting governor complain mostly about what they see as his abrasive style of governance, not his background.
“People are voting for a track record today... It’s not about the race or religion ... or some primordial idea of who should run [the country],” Ahok told reporters in an interview in his office last month.
Ahok has played the “bad cop” to Jokowi’s “good cop.”
In contrast to the typically soft-spoken Jokowi — who is Javanese — Ahok has gained a reputation for being a tough guy not afraid to shake up the city’s sleepy bureaucracy.
“The first thing we have to fix here is the bureaucracy ... by testing and evaluating their performance... We say to them if they don’t want to follow us, they can get out. Sometimes we have to kick them out. Of course they are angry, but we don’t care,” Ahok said.
Ahok, 48, has served as Jokowi’s right-hand man since winning the 2012 Jakarta gubernatorial election when the pair toppled the incumbent with their can-do, transparent ideas on fixing the many problems of the chaotic city, including chronic traffic congestion and flooding.
“I personally don’t agree [with Ahok becoming governor] because he’s too temperamental,” Jakarta City Councilor Boy Bernardi Sadikin told media.
Sadikin is the son of a former Jakarta governor from the 1970s who many residents believe was the last popular and effective leader the city saw before Jokowi and Ahok.
Videos of Ahok losing his temper with inefficient bureaucrats have gone viral in Indonesia, but the public has been largely supportive of the acting governor’s no-nonsense style in a country bedeviled by corruption and bureaucratic inertia.
When running in the 2012 Jakarta election, Ahok, who is from the resource-rich Bangka-Belitung Province near Sumatra, faced smear campaigns from rivals.
However, the occasionally blatantly racist attacks had little effect: Jakarta residents voted in the Jokowi-Ahok team with a 55 percent majority.
Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, has a history of tensions that have at times boiled over into violent attacks specifically targeting ethnic Chinese or other minorities.
The country saw one of the most horrific attacks on the Chinese community in 1998, as Indonesia descended into political and economic chaos following the Asian financial crisis.
Rampaging mobs targeted Chinese-owned businesses and in some cases killed and raped Chinese-Indonesians, forcing hundreds to flee the country.
Hardline Muslim groups, who last year protested the appointment of a Christian woman to a Jakarta district office, have also threatened to protest Ahok’s rise to power.
However, Ahok believes that Indonesia is becoming more pluralist.
“The Jakarta election was a test and ... we see more ethnic Chinese running for [office] now. One day soon Indonesia will be ready for a non-Muslim or ethnic Chinese leader, even president,” Ahok said.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Yemen’s separatist leader has vowed to keep working for an independent state in the country’s south, in his first social media post since he disappeared earlier this month after his group briefly seized swathes of territory. Aidarous al-Zubaidi’s United Arab Emirates (UAE)-backed Southern Transitional Council (STC) forces last month captured two Yemeni provinces in an offensive that was rolled back by Saudi strikes and Riyadh’s allied forces on the ground. Al-Zubaidi then disappeared after he failed to board a flight to Riyadh for talks earlier this month, with Saudi Arabia accusing him of fleeing to Abu Dhabi, while supporters insisted he was
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
RSS