AIA News, April 1994


Forgotten People

Anton Alimin

It is a fact that Indonesia has moved from being impoverished backwater to being an economically influential country in South East Asia, with an average annual growth rate of six percent since the mid 1980s.

In two decades Soeharto’s government has managed to drop the proportion of people living in poverty from 60 % to 15 %. But a layer of Indonesia’s society which seems untouched by the climate of development and the figures drawn from the World Bank analysis are the beggars.

When I asked some friends about this, they said, ‘Anton, do not worry! They are organised and they are not that poor! In their kampungs they have rumah, sawah’.

I said to them, ‘Are you saying that to clear your guilty consciences or do you really mean it? It does not matter what the reasons are, a mother would not sit in the open with her baby in a temperature of thirty degrees Celsius if she does not have to!

In other words, the gap between ‘the haves’ and ‘the have nots’ are widening. It is especially obvious in big cities such as Jakarta and Surabaya. The situation is less obvious in smaller towns.

The worst thing is that this layer of society is organised and exploited. There is no justification for exploitation whatever the reason. Soekarno once said, ‘Penindasan antara sesama manusia, eksploitasi antara sesama umat harus dibasmi dari muka bumi ini’.

In the old times, it was the Dutch colonialists who exploited the people. In modern times, it is high competitiveness to survive which creates a tendency for some people to exploit the situation to their own advantage. It seems that this phenomenon is happening in almost any society in which ‘money is everything’, particularly in a society which is at the stage of moving from an agrarian society to modern society. It is even more than that. Indonesia’s economy is not only moving from agrarian to industrial but it is moving towards higher stages of industrial and technological development.

But I think Indonesia’s economy is moving too fast. But at the same time could they afford not to go so fast? Indonesia is trying to catch up with the rest of the world and to put herself in a respected place among the countries in the region after having gone through the turbulent times such as the Madiun Affair, PRRI, Permesta, Kartosuwiryo and the 1965 coup.

There are always dampak of economic development, which in Indonesia’s case is para pengemis. I want to quote a poem by one of the most famous Indonesian poets, Chairil Anwar:


Kepada Para Pengemis


Baik, baik, aku akan menghadap Dia
Menyerahkan diri dan segala dosa
Tapi jangan tentang lagi aku
Nanti darahku jadi beku

Don’t tell that story anymore
It’s already been vaccinated all over your face
Pus is trickling out of it,
You wipe it away as you walk.

Bersuara tiap kau melangkah
Mengerang tiap kau memandang
Menetes dari suasana kau datang
Sembarang kau merebah

Breaking into my dream
Throws me onto the hard ground,
I feel it biting at my lips,
Buzzing in my ears.

Baik, baik, aku akan menghadap Dia
Menyerahkan diri dan segala dosa
Tapi jangan tentang lagi aku
Nanti darahku jadi beku……..