The Malaysian Insider

OCT 26 – When Indonesia and Malaysia quarrelled in the past, their leaders reconciled on the strength of family ties. They should not make the same mistake this time.

With the two countries bickering for months over everything from culture to territorial waters and the treatment of migrant workers, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, who are expected to meet in Kuala Lumpur soon, have a chance to start afresh.

They will be tempted to bury their disagreements beneath declarations of blood brotherhood. Similar sentiments have been expressed before to ease tensions between the two countries.

Yet the idea of “serempun”, suggesting similar stock or race, has never been a sound basis for cordial relations. Quite the opposite, it has ensured that relations remained largely prickly, as each side held different views of what the relationship entailed, and both were inevitably disappointed.

The evolution of the two countries – notably Malaysia’s rapid economic development in the 1990s and Indonesia’s more recent democratisation – further dilutes the notion of kinship.

Rather, they need to engage more realistically for their own good and the cause of South-east Asian harmony.

It is easy to dismiss the two-way sniping, which began in August and continues intermittently, as frivolous.

After all, who can take seriously Indonesian complaints that Malaysia’s national anthem Negara-ku was based on the Indonesian song Terang Bulan and stolen by its neighbour? Apart from the inconvenient fact that the folk tune Terang Bulan most likely originated not in Indonesia but across the Pacific Ocean, why object now? Negara-ku has been Malaysia’s national anthem for more than 50 years.

But behind what one official in Kuala Lumpur dismissed as “mad fools’ rhetoric” when a ragtag bunch of Indonesians threatened to invade Malaysia, are some deep-seated insecurities. The cost of failing to manage them could be high.

Together, Indonesia and Malaysia have long been regarded as the cornerstone of Asean. Ill-tempered displays of friction undermine Asean’s credentials and weaken its claim to provide a solid base on which to build new arrangements to integrate the wider Asia-Pacific region.

The belief in a “special relationship” between the peoples of the Indo-Malay Archipelago – with a common language, culture and religion – goes back to pre-colonial times before the Dutch and British divided the area. Their boundary along the Malacca Strait became a permanent international frontier for the new nation-states of Indonesia and Malaysia.

Amid the regret over the separation, it has been often forgotten that while historical ties were intimate in the borderless “Malay world”, they were far from harmonious. A regional system of trade and intermarriage also featured politics “profoundly defined by rivalry and discord”, as political scientist Joseph Liow has written.

And, in truth, the Malay-Muslim identity was not shared by large numbers of people on both sides.

Divergent paths to independence increased the distance and disharmony, with the Indonesians regarding Malaysia’s negotiated end to colonialism as a phoney victory compared with their own blood-soaked triumph.

From the outset, Jakarta’s attempts – from the revolutionary high ground – to play abang, big brother, were resisted by Kuala Lumpur, the putative adik, little brother, spurring an ongoing rivalry.

Recurring efforts to repair or strengthen ties, typically appealing to “blood and racial” relations and to a rediscovered “common heritage”, only compounded misunderstandings as the countries continued to go their separate ways.

The two countries have reached the stage now where they think they know each other, but in fact don’t. And what they do know, they often don’t like.

Since Malaysia boomed in the late 1980s, millions of Indonesians have ventured there, legally and illegally, to take mainly menial jobs, most conspicuously as maids in the homes of the new Malaysian middle class.

This opportunity to find work unavailable at home, while welcome, is tempered by the jolting reminder it provides of how far Malaysia has left Indonesia behind.

More candid Indonesians acknowledge jealousy over Malaysia’s economic progress. They are also angered by regular reports of abuse of Indonesian workers in Malaysia, and by Malaysian comments that come across as insensitive.

For some Indonesians, all this amounts to national humiliation, which accounts for their sometimes bizarre or outrageous behaviour, such as setting up roadblocks to apprehend Malaysians and “sweep” them from the country.

None of this is to deny the existence of genuine disputes and the fact that some of the anti-Malaysia activities have been orchestrated for political purposes.

But the way the issue has resonated despite Jakarta’s wishes can be explained only by a collective resentment in an Indonesia now free to express itself.

With bilateral relations at an all-time low, the situation calls for leadership. Dr Yudhoyono and Datuk Seri Najib must lay a solid bilateral foundation for the future without invoking familial expectations and obligations. Those merely set a trap for further dissension. – The Straits Times