They’re idealists working out of the center of Javanese arts, culture and education. They want to promote harmony, but are bumping into difficulties with the acceptance philosophy of their guru. The fourth President of Indonesia, the late Abdurrahman Wahid, was better known as Gus Dur. So his followers have dubbed themselves Gusdurians. Asian Currents teased […]
Are there any Australians left ignorant of Judge Brett Kavanagh and his successful scramble for a US Supreme Court seat? Or research psychologist Dr Christine Blasey Ford, his accuser of sexual assault at a last century teenage party? But who knows of Ustadz Haji Ma’ruf Amin, 75, seeking to be a heartbeat from Indonesia’s top […]
The #MeToo wave is an originally American phenomenon, but its spread worldwide now sees efforts against male harassment and violence manifesting a range of national shades. In South Korea, the country’s president, delivered to power in the 2017 Candlelight Revolution, directs government action against sex offenders in both the public and private sectors because ‘gender […]
“…never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” (John Donne, Meditation 17) The Sri Lankan civil war has been reviewed and debated by many scholars who argue its rootedness in historic enmities, its evolution from an ethnicised consciousness and its more immediate political struggles in relation to diasporic and party […]
On 30th September 1965, a group of army officers and soldiers called the Thirtieth September Movement abducted and killed seven army officers, and disposed of their bodies in a disused well, at Lubang Buaya, on the outskirts of Jakarta. While predominantly a movement of progressive soldiers and officers, the Thirtieth September Movement, as John Roosa […]
Just over 49 years ago on the 29 August 1969 the (former) Burmese Prime Minister U Nu who had been overthrown by General Ne Win and who was detained by General Ne Win and his Revolutionary Council from 2 March 1962 to 27 October 1966 announced in London, that he was still the ‘legal Prime […]
