It took 24 hours—and apparently an angry call from a blindsided President Joko Widodo—for Home Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo to revoke a raft of new restrictions on visiting foreign journalists, which were similar to those …
Articles by: "John McBeth"
With Indonesia’s annual growth rate now heading below 5%, President Joko Widodo’s cabinet reshuffle may have been mainly designed to revitalise the country’s flagging economy. But the political changes and what lay behind them also …
Indonesia’s religious affairs minister, Lukman Hamid Saifuddin, is a breath of fresh air. He’s a break from a long line of ineffectual predecessors who did nothing to defend minorities and showed extreme cowardice in facing …
When President Joko Widodo was presented with an army beret recently, he caused general amusement by planting it like an upturned flower pot on his head, rather than flattening it rakishly across his right ear. …
Indonesia’s economic slowdown seems to be going from bad to worse with economists and business leaders blaming a lack of confidence in Joko Widodo government’s policies as much as plunging exports and a drop in …
When Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi used the term ‘pull factor’ in a recent interview, she was reprising an expression coined four decades ago to describe how the promise of resettlement was the reason for …
It appears that, in the end, nothing could have saved Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran—and, incidentally, six other drug convicts—who were executed by firing squad on the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan early yesterday morning. …