Summer and I spent the last month in Indonesia. I haven’t written about it until now because the country is so vast that I wasn’t sure where to begin. From Aceh in the west to Papua in the east is roughly the same distance as from California to New York, and 200 million people spill across the 18,000 islands that make up the archipelago. It has the greatest biodiversity - number of species per hectare of land or sea - of any place on earth. It is the world’s third largest democracy, the largest Moslem country.
But let’s start with whether we should have gone at all.
There are places that Summer and I would not even consider visiting right now, because our sense of self-preservation outweighs our curiosity. I trust no one will be offended when I say that Iraq and Somalia head that list.
For most countries it’s not so obvious. General reading leads me to think that Chile and Argentina are safer choices than Colombia and Venezuela, but what is the most reliable source of up-to-date information?
You can ask people who’ve recently travelled there, or look at sites like Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree forum. But no one can claim to be an expert on a country after spending a few weeks there, and no one should be surprised that all the people working in the tourist industry were ‘friendly and welcoming.’
If you have friends in the country, as we did in Indonesia, you can ask them. That’s very helpful if you have concerns about crime or the threat of disease. But without direct access to the police or the terrorists, what can anyone say about the threat of a terrorist attack in their own country, apart from what they’ve seen on TV or read online? In New York we’ve been on Orange alert since September 11th. What use is that?
Most Americans have a simple solution to the problem of foreign travel: never leave America. 77% of them do not have a passport. The rest of us look to the advice of our governments. And the U.S. Department of State, the FCO, and the Australian and Irish Departments of Foreign Affairs all say Don’t Go To Indonesia. In fact all four rate Iran - stealth-missile-testing, uranium-enriching, axis-of-evil Iran - as a better choice for your family vacation this year.
As the overwhelming majority of Indonesians are peace-loving, moderate Moslems who are not interested in clashing with anybody’s civilization, and the people of Bali are Hindus who haven’t even been invited to the clash, they are not happy about this at all, particularly since none of these four countries has suggested that you avoid New York, Madrid, or London. True, Bali was bombed in 2002 and again in October last year. But London was bombed far more regularly at the height of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and foreign visitors were just advised to be cautious.
There was a magnetometer at the Borobodur hotel in Jakarta. At the Bandung SuperMall a security guard checked the underside of our car with a mirror. At our hotel in Yogyakarta, the trunk of every car was inspected. In Bali we had to open our backpacks once or twice. But precautions like these were commonplace in London in the eighties and nineties and in New York now.
Whether people are following the advice of their governments or just reacting to the latest bombing, foreign tourism in Indonesia is suffering badly. One travel agent in Bali told me that her income dropped from $60 a month to $30 after the second bomb. We were her only customers that day. She offered me a ride on the back of her motorbike to a place near the site of the 2002 attacks, a place some people just call ‘the bomb.’ We puttered through a maze of side streets filled with guest houses, cafes, and stores selling surfboards and souvenirs. Most were empty. Some hadn’t bothered opening. It was still the low season, but business was slow even by that standard. The bad guys are winning.
So who writes the ‘advisories’? I asked three people I know who are diplomats, representing three different countries. Typically the advice is written by consular officials, based on conversations with the police, intelligence reports, local media reports, and … what the other embassies say. The most cynical of the three said that they are written by people who never leave Jakarta, people who see a small protest outside their own embassy and assume that the whole country is on the point of collapse. That’s probably unfair, but the advice is compromised in many ways. They don’t want to offend the host nation, jeopardize trade, or be seen to give in to the bad guys. But they don’t want their citizens to get killed on their watch. A public inquiry in Australia after the first Bali bombing criticized the Department of Foreign Affairs for not publishing a warning, given that they knew there was some risk of an attack. This suggests that from now on, unless the Australian officials believe that the risk is zero, they will advise their citizens not to go to Indonesia.
Still. In the calculus of risk, one thing makes Indonesia different. Terrorists in New York, Madrid, and London, whether foreign or domestic, do not usually target foreign visitors. (The IRA relied on foreign donors. Blowing up Americans was bad for business.) In a given attack, tourists may be more or less at risk than locals; more if the terrorists bomb a famous landmark at noon, less if they bomb the subways at 9 am. In figuring your odds, you can divide by the whole population.
In Indonesia, you count all the other western tourists and divide by that. If you had been travelling around with us for the last month you would have counted to ten in Jakarta; five in Bandung; maybe fifty in Yogyakarta; twenty in Flores. Only in Bali would you have lost count.
Here is what we decided:
Stay away from places where there are a lot of people who are unhappy with the West: embassies in Jakarta and devoutly Moslem places like Aceh and Solo.
Stay away from fights that don’t concern us: long-running ethnic conflicts in Maluku, Sulawesi, and Papua Barat.
Stay away from crowds in Bali.
And support the introduction of terrorist prediction markets.
