Supreme Court, Gender, and Backlogs -- Indonesia

There was an interesting article in The Jakarta Globe that suggests that a recent appointment to the Indonesian Supreme Court can thank her gender for her appointment.

Sri Murwahyuni who previously sat on the Surabaya District Court has successfully negotiated the fit and proper testing procedures conducted by the House of [not so] Representatives to take her place as the 51st member of the Supreme Court bench. Yes, you read right, 51 members of the bench.

The other appointment was Sofyan Sitompul. Unfortunately, it would seem his gender was not of any assistance as he only just scraped through with 29 out of 57 votes of Commission III on legal affairs.

There are now six women on the 51 member Supreme Court bench. Not truly representative in a population sense, but certainly a move in the right direction.

However, I would be somewhat concerned that the perception is being allowed to develop that she was appointed based on her gender rather than her qualifications and skills, and more specifically what she brings to the Supreme Court as one of its newest members. This perception has developed and will continue to develop if legislators and other commentators do not re-orient their sound bites.

Let's face it,when the Head of the Commission suggests that gender played a role and was an advantage this immediately detracts from the appointee. This is plain and simple sad. This is even more so when the following sentence runs along the lines of "Oh, and she was also qualified too!" But, to add insult to injury, Benny K Harman, the Head of the Commission went one step further to reinforce a stereotype about women being more emotional than men and relying on unknown and unquantifiable other skills.

In this case, Harman said that "A female judge can use her intuition more than a man can and this is what the people want." Huh? What the people want, Benny, is consistency and equitable application of the law. The people want fairness. The people want to know that when they enter the legal system in pursuit of justice that they have every opportunity to find it.

Sad, Benny, sad!

But on a slightly different note. Ruhut Sitompul, no relation to the candidate, stated that there was no corruption in the process because he had never met Sofyan before the vote. I have to say, Ruhut, this hardly engenders any confidence in the process. So, if you had met him before then you might have been open to some good old-fashioned horse trading? But, this is about par for the course for Ruhut in pursuit of getting his head on TV. After all, it was not all that long ago he was seeking support for an idea to amend the constitution to allow SBY to seek a third presidential term for no other reason than all prospective candidates were lousy (in his view).

Sad, Ruhut, sad!

On a completely different note. There are now 51 members on the bench of the Supreme Court. There really should be no delay in seeking justice at the Supreme Court. There should not be any backlog of cases. A country of a similar population size, the USA, has a Supreme Court bench of just nine justices. They seem to manage their workload pretty well in comparison.

Ho hum...

Punctuation

I teach a couple of legal drafting classes in local universities and law firms. I do not use the following as an example. Nevertheless, it illustrates a very important point.

Punctuation makes all the difference in terms of intent and meaning.

An English professor wrote the words:

"A woman without her man is nothing"

on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly.

All of the males in the class wrote:

"A woman, without her man, is nothing."

All the females in the class wrote:

"A woman: without her, man is nothing."

Interesting.

Women In Combat Roles -- Australia

The argument has traditionally been that women can not serve in direct such as the infantry and artillery gunners to name but two. It appears though that Australia is considering ditching those gender-based restrictions in favor of physical assessments.

The Australian Defence Forces remain predominately a male domain. Nevertheless, women make up a touch over 13% of the total number of personnel.

It will be quite an achievement if the ADF can remove gender-based barriers on women serving in direct combat roles and replace them with a set of physical characteristics that do not automatically exclude women. The current Minister of Defence, Joel Fitzgibbon, seems to be in favor of the idea.

I am not sure that it has the GI Jane / Demi Moore thing happening here but I have always thought that the primary consideration in putting women into combat must be can they do the job that is being asked of them.

I am sure there are those out there that see only disaster in having men and women serving in the same direct combat units. However, if the ADF is truly a professional force then men and women serving in the same combat unit should not be a problem.

The decision on whether women will serve in direct combat will ultimately depend on the results of the Defence Science Technology Organization (DSTO) and their report. I hope the DSTO makes it possible for women to serve in direct combat roles. Women join the ADF for the same reasons as men, to serve their country, and women must be allowed to serve in all the same ways that men are permitted to do.

Unspinning the Spin

The WTF factor has again come to my attention and despite assertions on a number of blogs where I suggested I was going to avoid entering the fray again on this particular topic, I lied! What is going on at Unspun's blog is ludicrous and the man deserves to be called for the overt racial and gender baiting that he is resorting to as well as the petty name calling, like dumbass!

What follows is not a clip mark but an unadulterated cut and paste of the comments made and Unspun's response (in pink)! You be the judge!

on March 21, 2008 at 5:42 pm2 Rob

Unspun,

I am a great believer in free speech and Anita and your good self can write and post whatever you feel you need to in order to make your point. You selectively cut and pasted the Baliblog comments and Anita has followed your lead in this respect with the way she cut and pasted my comments.

Doing this might make a point for you but it loses the necessary context of the whole…but once again your blog your right to post what you want…but in the interests of truth you should correct your error with regard to who has said what. I am happy to take any flak for my comments on this topic and would hope that those comments be directed at me personally and not at my wife or family.

Like power, with free speech comes responsibility…

The term whore was one I used and in fact the actual word is pelacur as it was uttered by an Indonesian in Indonesian. If you go back and read the posts you will see that Oigal has a point, it is not his term!

To suggest that in some way myself or Oigal are anti-Indonesian or label all Indonesians with the same brush is not only unfair it is wrong. In my own defence I don’t think that I said in any of my posts that it was a majority of Indonesians or even that the majority of bules in Indonesia have experienced what I have experienced personally to suggest otherwise is a distortion of what was posted…

I will still be reading your blog as I will still be reading Anita’s…I am a committed life long learner and despite the fact that I disagree with some of the things that you both write it does not mean that I cannot agree with you on other things…As I said I learn something new every day from reading different perspectives on how others view their life experiences…In the big scheme of things that is how we all should live life and reasoned debate about differences and similarities will contribute to the breaking down of stereotypes and bigotory across the board.

Cheers…

PS. If Akismet captures this as spam…I hope that you release it for publication…

on March 22, 2008 at 10:28 pm3 simon

Unspun;

Making a statement about “bitter white men disappointed with life in Indonesia (and who have nowhere else to go)” sounds rather vitriolic. Which “bitter white men” are you refering to exactly? Please clarify this.

When you claim that these Indonesian “women are seen with bule (Caucasian) men, and therefore are labeled as whores.”; you are are refering to; specifically the wives of two men (Rob and Oigal). Don’t you think that this is rather too personal and offensive; calling their wives “whores” on your blog?

You now want to know “If you have a Caucasian partner, did you specifically target the race as your potential other-half? Why?” Could it be because they fell in love? Honestly; this is some really awful stuff here.

on March 22, 2008 at 10:54 pm4 unspun

@Simon: The bitter white men - if I name them I would be making things personal, which I have tried to avoid so far.

On the “whore” reference. It was from Anita’s blog. I clipped it but didn’t say it, so wrong attribution there.

And if any dumbass is going to live up to their name by calling the clip selective, they’s better understand how Clipmarks works. Of course it is selective if you can only clip a maximum of 1,000 words

Agree tho that things are getting a tad nasty. is this because we’re hearing for the first time from the other side - articulate Indonesian women who’re smarter and more in-your-face than your average bar pickup or the subservient trophy girlfriend?



These are some of the points I made in response to Unspun's little rant. But as is the normal way my comments are not always posted automatically because they get captured by a spam filter. I am no techno whiz but with a little effort I can set my spam filters to let certain addresses to pass the filter, but that is just me!

My points are these:

Obviously the "dumbass" reference is directed at me this is not rocket science. My comments refer to selective clipping (actually cut and paste) of posts from blogs to highlight a point or support an argument but where the clip is done in such a way as to alter the context in which it was originally written. This is dishonest! The simple way to get around this would be to write under the clipmark that the quoted part is part of a longer post that discusses issue "X". Alas this is not Unspun's style!

Yet Unspun starts his response with the holier than thou idea that he is trying to avoid the nastiness and stay above the fray as an objective observer. He then hides behind Anita's skirt like a little boy saying the reference is not something he uttered but something he clipped from Anita's post, how noble!

The term 'whore' entered the argument way before Anita's post and because I used it in a reference to some personal abuse that my wife and I had experienced, my mistake for relaying a personal experience and not referring to the more general experiences. I learn from my mistakes! To suggest that the term ws clipped from Anita's blog and that is where it originated is plain wrong and a distortion of the truth. Simply, the term appeared on Unspun's blog first because it was posted in response to a clipping he had made from someone else's blog (Baliblog).

But the icing on the cake here is the belittlement of women when his blog and comments are supposedly in support of women with this beautiful little quote:

"... is this because we’re hearing for the first time from the other side - articulate Indonesian women who’re smarter and more in-your-face than your average bar pickup or the subservient trophy girlfriend?"

For me this is a tad sad! First it presupposes that bar pick-ups and trophy girlfriends are stupid and inarticulate! I would guess there might be a few women out there that might be a little concerned with such a charcterization. I am sure it would offend my mother and I am equally as sure that she would give a dressing down to any clown that offered such foolish remarks about women, any women! But I guess in Unspun's defence he does modify the bar girl / trophy wife analogy with "average", whatever average is!

I, personally, am not afraid of hearing or debating the other side of any argument. On the contrary, I live for it! The fact that it is made by articulate and smart women is not an issue. I readily except that there are plenty of women out there in the world who are smarter than I can ever dream of being.

There are others though that might be potentially smarter than me who have never had the opportunities that I have had in terms of education. And, therefore, have been forced in to making ends meet in ways that had they had access to other opportunities like education they might not been forced into the choices they have had to make now to support their families.

It is my sincere hope that Indonesian women write about the posts that Unspun is producing to exploit the position of some women in society. The analogy of bar women and trophy wives as inarticulate and stupid shows a complete lack of understanding of the problems but as usual simply engages in the perpetuation of another stereotype, as a man I find this characterization offensive but I will let women and Indonsian women in particular respond on this!

If they are not offended then so be it. If Unspun then feels vindicated that this reflects a bitter and twisted white man commenting outside of his realm of expertise, then so be it. It is a question of principle and I am willing to stand by those principles and argue for them.

I do not know Unspun personally and therefore cannot judge him on anything but his writings. He seems to want to label me and all of my "bule" friends as twisted and bitter what fellas with no where else to go. Indonesians should find that characterization offensive as well as it suggests that when you are a clapped out white fella with nowhere else to go you come to Indonesia.

My loyal readers, you be the judge as to whose comments elicit responses of twisted and bitter. But back to my point, the postings of Unspun are manipulative, deceptive, prejudiced, and quite often racist in their exploitation of racial stereotypes. Once again my loyal readers you be the judge.

This post is not intended to be personal in spite of the fact that it refers to one particular individual. Rather it is a critique of what has been posted and the manipulation of a particular debate surrounding a particular set of stereotypes that have been milked by this individual. It is also not nasty, not even a tad!

To Anita (excellent blog) and Marisa (also excellent blog) and all you other female Indonesian bloggers out there (too many to name)! Keep doing your thing! I enjoy reading your blogs and hope that we can enter into constructive debate where there is a topic that affords itself to such debate. But keep posting the "day in a life" type posts as well as it is interesting to read what people's life experiences are. Hopefully, from these experiences and these interactions we can break done the stereotypes and the bigotory that gets under our skin and gets the blood boiling!