Film dan Buku

Seorang teman saya menjadi asisten seorang professor yang akan mengajar mata kuliah Film and Politics untuk mahasiswa undergraduate. Beberapa hari lalu saya ketemu dia yang sedang sibuk mengumpulkan film-film yang akan dipakai mengajar oleh si professor di Spring semester yang akan dimulai seminggu lagi. Salah satunya adalah film dokumenter mengenai sejarah parlemen Inggris, yang sepertinya adalah parlemen tertua di dunia. Karena kuliah belum mulai (dan profesornya masih libur winter break di luar negeri), film dokumenter yang diproduksi oleh Film for Humanities itu saya culik dulu.

Tempo hari rekan saya yang lain, Ahmad Sahal, juga menyebut sebuah film bagus berjudul (kalau tidak salah ingat) “Debating the World”, sebuah film dokumenter mengenai diskusi-diskusi Irving Kristol dan dua rekannya semasa masih muda (kuliah). Irving Kristol adalah god father para neo-conservative yang sekarang disebut-sebut menguasai politik luar negeri Amerika. Sayang saya belum sempat meminjamnya dari perpustakaan kampus.

Film soal parlemen Inggris ini menarik buat saya. Soalnya saya suka menonton acara debat parlemen Inggris yang rutin disiarkan saluran C-Span. Seru melihat debat bernas, melihat Tony Blair dihabisi atau menghabisi pihak oposisi. Sebagai perdana menteri dan politisi, Tony Blair kelihatan cerdas sekali. Dalam menghadapi setiap pertanyaan/kritik pedas dari oposisi, dia jarang sekali meminta menterinya menjawab pertanyaan, dia dengan tangkas menjawab sendiri setiap pertanyaan. Dia selalu memegang sebuah folder tebal berisi data-data, dan sepertinya dia hapal luar kepala di halaman berapa folder itu harus dibuka ketika ia membutuhkan data konkret untuk menangkis kritik keras. Lumayan, setelah menonton film berjudul “Order, Order” itu saya lebih terang memahami sejarah dan proses debat-debat di parlemen Inggris.

Saya jadi terpikir, studi legislatif dalam kajian politik Indonesia sepertinya belum terlalu berkembang (mungkin saya salah). Yang jelas, dengan adanya pemilihan langsung anggota parlemen, dinamika hubungan antara anggota DPR dan konstituennya akan lebih menarik dan mendorong munculnya studi-studi baru mengenai lembaga legislatif di Indonesia. Ada seorang teman sedang studi Ph.D di Inggris, mengambil topik tentang dinamika parlemen Indonesia. Semoga studinya berhasil baik, saya juga ingin membaca disertasinya nanti.

Selain soal film, ada juga soal buku. Beberapa hari lalu saya dan Nico ke Chicago, mampir lagi ke Powell’s Book store (yang pernah saya tulis sebelumnya, silahkan klik di sini). Kami hendak menjemput professor pembimbing kami berdua yang baru pulang winter break, di bandara O’Hare Chicago. Kami berangkat agak cepat, mau berburu buku dulu sebelum ke bandara. Seperti sebelumnya, perburuan kali ini sukses juga…☺.

Saya dapat tiga buku second-hand, murah meriah:

1. Barbara Geddes, Politician’s Dilemma: Building State Capacity in Latin America (1994). Dalam kuliah comparative politics semester kemarin, beberapa tulisan Barbara Geddes yang lain menjadi bacaan wajib kami. Buku Politician’s Dilemma ini juga dibahas sedikit. Jadi merasa beruntung bisa dapat buku aslinya, hard cover pula…

2. J. Samuel Fitch, The Armed Forces and Democracy in Latin America (1998).

3. Leo Suryadinata, Military Ascendancy and Political Culture: A Study of Indonesia’s Golkar (1989).

Dua buku klasik mengenai Amerika Latin ini sepertinya akan berguna karena saya akan ambil mata kuliah Amerika Latin di Spring semester nanti.

Sementara ini saya sedang membaca dua buku yang saya pesan lewat Amazon.com (rekomendasi seorang teman baik), lumayan dibaca selama winter break ini. Entah apakah bisa selesai sebelum semester baru mulai lagi atau tidak:

1. Thomas Schelling, Micro Motives and Macro Behavior (2006, second edition).

2. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is it? How Can We Know? (2005).

Saya juga beli beberapa buah buku wajib untuk kuliah Spring semester nanti lewat Amazon.com (juga sebuah buku baru lain yang menarik hati), belum datang, mungkin baru beberapa hari lagi. Buku-buku dalam list bacaan mata kuliah semester besok bagus-bagus, saya putuskan membelinya saja. Toh pasti akan terus terpakai dan berguna karena pekerjaan saya sebagai peneliti di Jakarta. Betul kata teman saya Nico: Amazon.com memang mendorong mahasiswa seperti kami berdua semakin terpuruk dibawah garis kemiskinan, dompet terkuras…ha..ha..ha.

The last words of Saddam Hussein

When the news about the execution of Saddam Hussein broke out, I felt strange. I have no doubt that he was a tyrant who did not hesitate to exterminate his political opponents. But hanging him in front of a handful of audience (who later passed on the recording of the hanging) confuses me. ‘Revenge’ i think is the only word that can aptly describe the moment in which the executioners exchanged vicious words with Saddam Hussein. Certainly, the execution will only reinforce the circle of violence in Iraq.

What is more important to me is that the execution has made it impossible to uncover all of Saddam Hussein’s political crimes, which at various points were supported by the international community, including us in Indonesia. What I mean by ’supporting his crime’ includes ‘being silent’ on what he did. Two examples: we were silent when Saddam Hussein executed the Kurds, and we did nothing when he waged a war against Iran in the 1980s.

I suspect that we turned a blind eye to what happened to the Kurds because we were the stern supporters of state sovereignty. Just like Saddam Hussein who had to deal with the separatist Kurds, we in Indonesia have (had) to deal with the ‘problems’ in East Timor, Aceh and Papua. Just ask ourselves what many of us thought of the Acehnese who joined the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), the Papuans in the Free Papua Organization (OPM), or of the East Timorese who joined the pro-independence movement. I guess Stephen Krasner was very right to choose the title “Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy” for his famous book.

We viewed Iran as a Shiite state. In the 1990s many in Indonesia scorned Shiite followers in some cities, particularly in Jakarta and Bandung, denying their religious rights to exist. Yet, we cheered Ahmadinejad, the current president of Iran, when he visited our country a few months ago. It just presents a good example that in fact we always choose something that suits our interest (or mood?).

Oddly enough, in his last moment, Saddam Hussein managed to turn the image of his being a secular opportunist tyrant into a martyr through some Platonic words. Below is the last words of Saddam Hussein taken from The Guardian*:

By several accounts, Saddam was calm but scornful of his captors, engaging in a give-and-take with the crowd gathered to watch him die and insisting he was Iraq’s savior, not its tyrant and scourge.

“He said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians,” Munir Haddad, an appeals court judge who witnessed the hanging, told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Another witness, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told The New York Times that one of the guards shouted at Saddam: “You have destroyed us. You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.”

“I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persian and Americans,” Saddam responded, al-Rubaie told the Times.

“God damn you,” the guard said.

“God damn you,” responded Saddam.

New video, first broadcast by Al-Jazeera satellite television early Sunday, had sound of someone in the group praising the founder of the Shiite Dawa Party, who was executed in 1980 along with his sister by Saddam.

Saddam appeared to smile at those taunting him from below the gallows. He said they were not showing manhood.

Then Saddam began reciting the “Shahada,” a Muslim prayer that says there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, according to an unabridged copy of the same tape, apparently shot with a camera phone and posted on a Web site.

Saddam made it to midway through his second recitation of the verse. His last word was Muhammad.

The floor dropped out of the gallows.

“The tyrant has fallen,” someone in the group of onlookers shouted. The video showed a close-up of Saddam’s face as he swung from the rope.

Then came another voice: “Let him swing for three minutes.”

* I got the link from http://raincoaster.wordpress.com