INDONESIA A NEWS

A STAMPEDE on a docked ferry in Indonesia's East Java has left at least eight dead and dozens injured, an official says.  More than 500 passengers panicked when a truck overheated and caught fire around dawn this morning aboard the KM Kirana IX, docked at the Tanjung Perak port in the provincial capital of Surabaya. "The passengers heard there was a fire and they all panicked and ran off the boat," Disaster Management Agency head Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said. "Eight people have died and others have been taken to hospital." The vessel's owner, Bambang Haryo, told Metro TV that part of the deck was burned but that the fire did not cause any serious damage. "We quickly extinguished the fire, following standard safety procedures, by activating the sprinklers as soon as we detected it," he said. On Monday, another ferry serving the same route to the city of Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan province on Indonesian Borneo collided wi...

Malaysian maritime authorities said they arrested six Indonesians attempting to rob a ship in the Strait of Malacca, the latest in a surge of piracy attacks in the strategic waterway.The suspects were spotted by Malaysian patrols early Sunday morning as they tried to board a merchant vessel off southern Johor state near Singapore, Maritime Enforcement Agency chief Admiral Zulkifli Abu Bakar said. "The pirates realized they were spotted and tried to flee on their boat but our patrol vessel gave chase and fired several warning shots before intercepting the pirate ship in Malaysian waters," he told AFP.He said the pirates appeared to have come from the nearby Indonesian island of Batam and had gathered in the area intending to rob three ships. An investigation was under way. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) in June sent an alert to ships traversing the area, warning of a heightened piracy risk following the hijacking of three tugboats and a barge this year.The gl...

A regular but prestigious conference on Indonesia will be held in Canberra, Australia, on September 30-October 1. The Indonesia Update Conference 2011 of the Australian National University will host "Indonesia's Place in the World". A number of prominent academics, mostly from Australia and Indonesia, are scheduled to speak. The topics range from updates on politics and economics, Indonesia in regional and global economic and trade arrangements and "Indonesia's Rise", to considering Indonesia as a democratic Muslim power.  The title of the event itself is intriguing. Certainly, assumptions over Indonesia's place in the world will be varied. Optimists would argue that Indonesia has risen into a higher stage of the international arena, particularly after the elevation of Group of Twenty (G-20) interactions to summit level in 2008. Indonesia is one of the G-20's developing country members. Pessimists say that the country is still quite far from b...

A large number of Indonesian nationals, including men, women and children, gathered outside their country’s consulate Saturday, demanding immediate repatriation from the Kingdom.  Security vehicles and officers were called to maintain order.Several women, including some elderly ones, were seen sitting on the curb near the building and by the mosque opposite the consulate.Jeddah police spokesman Brig. Misfer Al-Juaid confirmed the demonstration had taken place.“The people gathering in the area are overstayers, but we haven’t received any security concerns on the nature of their presence,” he said. Al-Juaid added they included Indonesians who had overstayed on Umrah visas as well as those who carried expired work visa permits.Less than a year ago, a similar situation occurred in front of the Indonesian Consulate in Jeddah.In April, the Indonesian government sent a ship to Jeddah to take home more than 2,000 workers, mostly housemaids who were stranded in the Kingdom. ...

An extraordinary letter apparently written last week by Muhammad Nazaruddin, the former fugitive and onetime treasurer of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s Democratic Party, is shaking the country’s politics to the core ahead of 2014 national elections.  The increasingly murky Nazaruddin affair does not augur well for international investors who may have hoped that the country’s rising economic prowess would result in an equally rational political and governmental environment. The letter was made public by OC Kaligis, Nazaruddin’s lawyer, saying in effect that Nazaruddin would shut up about crimes committed by the Democrats if Yudhoyono would guarantee his family’s safety, leading to the obvious if unproven conclusion that the party’s leaders are culpable in as-yet-undisclosed offenses.  Analysts say it smacks of a cover-up that could wreck the part y. Founded in 2001, the Democrat Party came into power in the 2004 national elections, almost solely on Yudhoyono’...

Is the Arab Spring turning into a gloomy autumn? With brutal krackdowns in Syria, a bloody civil war in Libya, and Yemen teetering on the brink of chaos, the number of sceptics is growing.  Although Egypt and Tunisia's pro-democracy movements achieved rapid regime change, uncertainties remain in those countries, too. After a brief period of hope, many observers now wonder whether the region is capable of producing viable, and economically vibrant, democracies.Revolutions and their aftermaths, of course, are always fluid and fickletimes, and the outcome is often perched on a knife's edge. Bridging thevast gap between high expectations and the reality of limited budgets and capabilities is a test in itself. Redressing past injustice and building an economy that offers opportunity to all are major challenges as well, fraught with volatility, uncertainty, and the dangers of political opportunism.But transitions are also times of great opportunity. In the 1990s, I wasamong those In...

Saudi Arabia has shown a gesture of support and friendship to Indonesia by sparing a housemaid from being beheaded and repatriating her to Jakarta. The news comes at a time when a high-powered delegation from Indonesia is holding talks with the officials of the Ministry of Labor here since Tuesday in an effort to work out a compromise formula to boost relations in the manpower sector and to defuse the crisis in the process. This was disclosed by Tatang Budie Utama Razak, director for Protection of Indonesian Citizens and Legal Entities in Indonesia, on Wednesday. Razak, who arrived with the 12-member delegation from Jakarta to participate in the talks with Saudi officials, confirmed that Darsem Binti Dawud Tawar, 26, arrived in Jakarta on Wednesday morning and was received by her family members, friends and several Indonesian officials. Darsem, from Subang, West Java, was convicted of murder by a Saudi court in 2009 and was sentenced to death for killing her employer, who allegedly...