To my Indonesian friends, I come in peace. Kindly refrain yourself from making inflammatory remarks/using profanities in your comments. Constructive criticisms in Bahasa/English are more than welcome...Thanks!)
(The following letter was published on TheMalaysianInsider news portal a couple of months ago)
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I would like to start this letter with a handful of comments posted on one of the daily news portals in Indonesia (I personally do not think they need any translations):
putra merah putih @ Jumat, 28 Agustus 2009 | 22:59 WIB kata bung Tomo dulu, selama darah orang Indonesia masih bisa membuat kain putih menjadi merah dan putih tidak ada kata menyerah kepada siapaun apalahi pada bangsa rendah dan gak mutu kaya malingsia itu. satu kata aza PERANG.... PERANG
andy @ Jumat, 28 Agustus 2009 | 22:30 WIB walah di malay juga produk buatan indonesia semua mereka mana bisa bikin gimana bisa bikin jumlah penduduk nya aja kalah banyak sama jakarta kita kencingin rame2x juga banjir malaysia hahahaha
firanda @ Jumat, 28 Agustus 2009 | 21:43 WIB ayo... bangsa Inonesia bersatu bikin Malingsia jadikan PROPENSI RI YG BARU MENGGANTIKAN TIMOR TIMUR, MERDEKA
Adib @ Jumat, 28 Agustus 2009 | 21:22 WIB Udah PERANGIN aja tuch Malaysia,brani bgt ngelecehin lagu kebangsaan Indonesia
eksan @ Jumat, 28 Agustus 2009 | 21:11 WIB Kita harus berpikir ulang untuk menjalin hubungan baik dengan Malay..bisa kita lihat mulai dari individu,institusi,dan pemerintahnya jelas tidak ada niat baik yang kita tangkap..mulai dari siksaan TKI, merebut kebudayaan dan lagu2 kita..juga ada sinyalemen Noordin M Top kiriman mereka juga..PR besar untuk para Diplomat, Deplu, Dubes dan semua elemen masyarakat..
These are only a few deprecating, not to mention extremely provocative comments written about our country on the news portals. By the time I finished writing this letter, thousands more could have been posted. Mind you this is only from one Indonesian news portal.
To be honest, I do not have any intentions to incite hatred between the two neighbouring nations by quoting those comments. What I am intending to do is quite the opposite.
I can tell you, right now is definitely the lowest point of our post-Konfrontasi bilateral relationships with our so-called serumpun neighbour.
I do not know for certain whether it could get any lower than this, but judging from the current developments, and the way the issues are handled by both of our governments, I think it could.
To be fair to the Indonesians, I will state here the prevalent views about Malaysia in Indonesia, shared by many of the Indonesians (but not all of them), whenever a problem crops up between their country and ours.
First of all, they do view us as a bunch of arrogant people who, over the years, keep “stealing” many of the things that they regard as solely theirs, be it in the form of two isolated tiny islands (Sipadan and Ligitan), cultural heritage (wayang kulit, keris, batik, gamelan, angklung, Reog Ponorogo, Balinese Pendet dance), folk songs (Rasa Sayange, Terang Bulan), some ambiguous oil-rich sea territory (the Ambalat oil block), illegal logging in Kalimantan, (allegedly sponsored by Malaysian ‘taukeys’), and some other isolated ‘stealing’ episodes which I cannot recall.
So prevalent is this view of us as a “nation of thieves” that they now casually refer to our country as ‘Malingsia’ (Maling means thief).
Secondly, stories about Indonesian workers who get abused/cheated/tortured while working in Malaysia make headlines in Indonesia. As a result, it is not surprising if they tend to have this skewed notion of us as one cruel nation whose citizens do not have anything else to do but leisurely torture their people who come to Malaysia, over and over again.
Another reason for them to label us “arrogant” would be our usage of the ‘I’ word, which we frequently, innocently, with no malice whatsoever intended, use whenever we refer to the nation and the people of Indonesia.
To them, the ‘I’ word is insulting, offensive, not to mention condescending as well. I bet not many of you know about the negative connotation of the ‘I’ word among the Indonesians.
Even I was not aware of this fact, not until I set my foot in Indonesia some six years ago.
The Manohara controversy did rattle some of the raw nerves in Indonesia. And oh, Noordin Mat Top, too, did his bit to help make matters between the two countries go from bad to worse.
The latest incident would be some Internet user, purportedly a Malaysian, who launched a smear campaign on the Internet by rubbishing the lyrics of the Indonesian National song. A lot of anger is in the air now, as manifested in the writing of the comments above.
Personally, I do not know who to blame for this mess. It would be convenient for me to put the blame solely on the Indonesian media for always putting our country in a bad light whenever a problem arises, but I don’t think that is the right thing to do. It would be like making a scapegoat out of the media for the depth of the trouble we are in now.
(Although I am of the opinion the media are responsible and partially to blame for sometimes reporting totally biased and provocative reports about our country. As such, a lot of people get unnecessarily worked up after reading/watching the news. News like a group of Indonesians in Malaysia indulging themselves into some serious criminal activities would almost certainly be blacked out. It pretty much explains the holier-than-thou attitude among some of them.)
I do not know what went wrong. It has reached to the point where name calling and verbal diarrhoea from both sides have become the order of the day.
Hatred among the netizens of these two countries has translated into a lot of wars of words on the Internet. Website hacking and counter-hacking incidents are on the rise.
Many of the Malaysian students here suddenly found their Indonesian friends venting their anger by saying something nasty on Facebook/Friendster/Twitter about how they would love to “ganyang” our country, or something to that effect. Overnight, friends have turned into foes.
It is a sad thing indeed. I pity these people. Most of them are ill informed about the problems we are facing now, probably getting the so-called “news” from many of the gossip programmes in Indonesia.
The solution to this problem? Again, I do not know. Perhaps both sides should sit down together and learn more about the historical ties between our two countries.
Like, for example, the fact that before the Anglo-Dutch treaty was signed, there was no such a thing as Malaysia and Indonesia (thus explaining the close cultural ties between the countries in this region).
Enough already with the claims and counter-claims.
Perhaps both of us should take some time off and travel to each other’s countries. That way, we will probably realise, “Hey, not all of them are as bad as I thought”.
Perhaps both of our Governments (and the media) should stop stoking any more hatred and confusion into the hearts of the people, and be more responsible in making statements/reports that could potentially hurt our neighbours.
Perhaps some advertisement agency should first do their homework before launching a commercial that includes the Pendet dance with the Petronas Twin Towers as the background. Come on, even the Aussies know that dance belongs to the Balinese.
Perhaps someone up there with the authority to reverse this whole sad episode between our two nations is listening.
And yes, please stop calling them using the ‘I’ word, as much as we expect them to stop calling our country ‘Malingsia’. Name-calling is something that kindergarten kids do.
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