Hi folks, did you miss us? It has been a while hasn’t it? We‘ll make sure you’ll be seeing us a little more regularly in 2022. Speaking of 2022, can you believe 2021 is over? Man… what a year it has been, right?
This year we got Delta sending the whole country to a state of grief and despair. We saw trust towards the once widely loved Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) severely eroding. We also got to see authorities freaking out over some graffiti and banners.
There were also times when the entire nation got duped, first, over a werepig which turned out to be an elaborate hoax and later by a ridiculously large donation which proved to be too good to be true.
2021 sure has been a rollercoaster. Whether you are glad or sad to see it go away, it’s definitely been a year to remember, one that shaped and defined all our lives. Which is why for this edition, we prepared a list of some of the biggest and craziest stories that shaped the year.
Disasters, Plane Crash, and a Missing Sub
The year began with the crash of Sriwijaya Air, flight SJ 182 on January 9. The plane was carrying 50 passengers and 12 on duty and deadheading crew members and was bound from Banten’s Soekarno Hatta airport to West Kalimantan’s Supadio. The 26-year-old plane crashed into the Java Sea just minutes after taking off, killing everyone on board, including a couple from East Nusa Tenggara who flew using other people’s ID cards.
We won’t know exactly what happened until the National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT) concludes its one year investigation. But a preliminary report suggests that there were anomalies at the plane’s autothrottle lever system, which might have resulted in an imbalance in engine thrust that ultimately sent the plane into a sharp roll and finally a dive into the sea.
Just as officials struggled to retrieve debris, wreckage and human remains from the crash site, a 6.2 magnitude quake hit West Sulawesi in the early hours of Jan 15. 108 people in the city of Mamuju and the town of Majene were killed with thousands more injured.
On April 21, the KRI Nanggala 402 submarine sank during a military exercise off the Northern coast of Bali. A search and rescue attempt ensued after instructors made numerous failed attempts to contact the submarine which failed to reappear when the submarine was scheduled to resurface.
Finding a submarine designed for stealth is no easy matter. Which is why it took rescuers days and help from various countries to locate the wreck. The submarine was located 838 meters below the surface, broken in three parts. 53 lives were lost in the incident.
Heavy rainfalls, strong winds and high waves brought by tropical cyclone Seroja caused a series of flash floods and landslides in the two Nusa Tenggaras in April. 183 were killed in the province of East Nusa Tenggara, 42 in neighboring East Timor and one in Australia. Thousands more were left homeless as the cyclone destroyed homes and various structures in its path.
On December 4, 51 people were killed when East Java’s Mount Semeru erupted, sending a towering wall of hot ash into a number of villages on the southeast part of the volcano. A series of intense lahars, or mudflow of pyroclastic materials and debris swept away by the rain, caused further devastation, burying thousands of houses and hectares of farmlands. The lahars also destroyed bridges, cutting off access to devastated areas.
The Delta Wave
The biggest and most frightening story this year has to be the presence of the Delta variant.
Indonesia first detected the variant in early May and since then the number of confirmed cases spiked dramatically. On a day-to-day basis, we were averaging about 4,900 confirmed cases daily in early May. On July 15, we hit a record of 56,757 cases over a 24-hour period.
As a result, hospitals and clinics struggled to keep up with the influx of people in need of healthcare. Some hospitals had to erect tents to treat Covid-19 patients because they ran out of isolation beds while others had to treat Covid-19 patients in hallways and corridors.
Many people had to go to several different hospitals before they received proper treatment. Many died at home because they couldn’t find any hospital that would accept them.
Meanwhile, oxygen tanks were in such short supply, some hospitals required patients to bring their own and people had to queue for hours at oxygen tank refilling stations.
Many lives were lost when the second wave hit. On July 27 alone, there were 2,069 confirmed deaths over a 24-hour period. They were our fathers, our mothers, our brothers, our sisters, our sons and daughters, our cousins, our neighbors, our friends, our forever love.
Nusantara “Vaccine”
It’s not really a vaccine, not really from the motherland, and its research is not really up to standards. But that doesn’t keep some people from advocating the so-called “Vaksin Nusantara” and pushing the Food and Drug Agency (BPOM) to give their stamp of approval.
The BPOM has refused to give the greenlight because its preclinical trial is non existent and phase 1 clinical trial is faulty. Several institutions who were initially involved in the project – spearheaded by former health minister, his cloudestness, Terawan Agus Putranto – even decided to bail. We even wrote a special Nuiceletter on why the whole thing is problematic.
Despite this, some members of parliament, prominent politicians, former ministers and celebrities decided to get the “vaccine” even though they already got the jab using Sinovac. These people even insisted that the “vaccine” is recognized by the app PeduliLindungi and included in the government’s vaccine booster program.
A spokesperson for the government’s vaccination program confirmed that they are deliberating whether to include Vaksin Nusantara in the booster program, slated to begin in 2022. Deliberating? They’re taking this “vaccine” seriously?
The KPK Fiasco
It was once the most trusted, most respected, and most beloved institution in the country. But the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has become a mere shadow of its former self.
According to an annual integrity study, which the KPK itself conducted, the anti-graft agency ranked 26th out of 57 non-ministerial public institutions surveyed. Meanwhile, a survey by Indikator Politik Indonesia showed that public trust towards the agency has slid from 80.5% in 2019 to 73.5% in 2020 and 71.1% in 2021. This put the KPK below the TNI (94.3%), the president (86.4%) and the police force (80.2%), which also hit it rough this year. We’ll explain it further below.
The KPK has been hit with a string of controversies this year. One of its investigators was arrested for blackmailing a North Sumatra mayor in April, one of its commissioners was found guilty of ethical violation by alerting that same mayor that he was being investigated. The former has been fired and is now on trial. The latter gets to keep her job and only has her basic salary cut while still get to enjoy thousands of US$ in benefits.
The KPK also received widespread condemnation for dismissing 57 employees after they failed the controversial “Tes Wawasan Kebangsaan” or Nationalism Comprehension Test.
The test was controversial because it contained highly irrelevant and inappropriate agree or disagree questions. Participants were required to express how they feel about topics like LGBT and Chinese Indonesians.
The test was also controversial because among those who failed are some of the KPK’s best and most senior investigators and members of the KPK workers’ union who have been critical towards their superiors.
You can read our special report on just how dubious the test here.
The 57 were formally dismissed on Sep 30. Oddly enough, 44 were recruited by the National Police – the other 10 found other jobs – to fill in the position of an upgradedanti-corruption task force. They even got full civil servant status, something which the KPK refused to bestow, without any test, reaffirming the suspicion that they were ousted not because of their lack of patriotism but because the tests were designed to oust them.
Tainted Cops
Another institution seemingly attracting public outrage is the police force. This year, the cops were lambasted after one performed a full on WWE-style body slam on a protester in Banten, another is accused of sexually assaulting a university student in Malang and telling her to perform abortion twice which led to her suicide. The cops also stopped the investigation against a civil servant suspected of assaulting his three children in South Sulawesi.
Recently, the police force was in the news again after an officer in East Jakarta told a robbery victim to go home and calm herself down, explaining to her that efforts to track down the robber (the robbery was recorded on CCTV by the way) would be in vain and even scolded her for having so much cash with her.
That officer was later transferred from one precinct to another in the so-called “tour of area”. The latest assignment was to West Papua. Police eventually managed to arrest three of five perpetrators of the robbery. Not so futile after all, ain’t it Adjutant Inspector Rudi Panjaitan?
Of course, the victim had to speak her mind on social media and the post went viral before any action was taken.
Conversely, it didn’t take much for the police to respond to a number of wall arts and banners criticizing the government’s handling of the pandemic, the dwindling economy and the government itself. The graffiti was painted over, the banners taken down and the people behind them were either questioned or hunted down by the police.
After being lambasted for stifling free speech and democracy, police responded by staging a mural competition in October and a demonstration oration contest in December.
The second half of the year really wasn’t kind to the men and women in brown with so many being transferred, reassigned, or removed from the force in disgrace, not to mention the integrity of the force itself being seriously questioned, despite the survey mentioned above.
Cyber Insecurity
Personal data belonging to 279 million Indonesians, living or dead, were stolen from the state insurer BPJS Kesehatan and sold at the online platform, Raid Forums, by a user identified as “Kotz” in May. The data contained people’s identity card details, mobile phone numbers, emails and salaries. Some even had photographs of the victims.
To convince buyers, Kotz gave away data of around 1 million Indonesians for free, and sure enough some people said that they saw some familiar names there, confirming that the data was valid. Adding insult to injury, the personal data of 279 million Indonesians were offered at a price of 0.15 Bitcoin. That’s just over Rp 80 million (at the time).
On July 15, a team of security researchers from vpnMentor discovered that the personal data of 1.3 million eHAC users were exposed in an open server. eHAC is that old app people had to use if they wanted to travel out of town or into Indonesia.
The team reached out to the Ministry of Health twice but got snubbed. Government response finally came on August 22 after the team informed the National Cyber and Encryption Agency (BSSN) which finally took down the unsecured server.
Around the same time as the discovery, on July 27, a hacker claimed that he had stolen 250GB of data, including sensitive personal medical information, from insurance company BRI Life.
Experts noted that institutions and companies often become defensive when these things occur, doing more to downplay the situation instead of working to fix the flaws in their system. If only we have a dedicated public institution whose job is to stop these things from happening. Oh wait we do. We have two actually, a ministry and an agency, the latter had its website defaced in October.
Werepig, werepig, what’chu gonna do?
Apparently some people in Indonesia still believe in the shapeshifting, money-stealing werepig, popularly known as Babi Ngepet. Which is why a video showing residents of the Bedahan area in the Jakarta suburb of Depok capturing what they believed to be the metaphysical creature on Apr 27 immediately went viral.
Indonesians believe that Babi Ngepet is a type of black magic which allows a thief to shapeshift into a pig so the thief can go around the neighborhood unnoticed. Because let’s face it, who would notice a pig roaming around at night in a Jakarta suburb? Amirite?
That’s not all. According to the legend, practitioners of the art of babi ngepet can simply lean themselves onto the wall of their victim’s house and cash would miraculously change hands. And you don’t even have to worry about getting caught, because the story goes, people can’t catch you unless they are butt naked. And that was what seven residents of Bedahan claimed they did. They said they took off all their clothes and shortly after midnight, they caught the pig.
People believed in the story so much that hundreds flocked to see the supposed werepig. The crowd grew so large residents of Bedahan charged people money to see the poor pig, which was eventually slaughtered.
Serving as yet another example of the Mandela Effect, the community chief of Bedahan swore that residents had seen the pig multiple times and even claimed that some had witnessed the supposed thief physically transforming into the pig while wearing a black cape.
In a plot twist that would make M. Night Shyamalan proud, the whole thing was one big fat lie. Police were so concerned that people keep coming to Bedahan to see the slain pig that they had to take the remains away and bury it elsewhere. While they’re at it, they questioned the locals on what they know about the pig.
Police were curious to know just who exactly saw a guy shapeshift into a pig. The locals all point to one person, a cleric named Adam Ibrahim. Adam admitted that he made the whole thing up, not wanting people to point fingers at each other over reports of stolen (possibly misplaced) money in the neighborhood., Adam told the locals that a babi ngepet did it. He told the cops that he recruited seven other men with whom he produced the tale for a seemingly foolproof plan to end the missing money saga and stop people from pointing fingers at each other. There was never an effort to figure out where the money went or what happened to them.
Sadly for Adam, he was sentenced to four years in prison in December for spreading lies which caused unrest. We think this is a bit harsh though. He only gave the nation the funniest, most bizarre story of 2021.
The Omicron Factor
We’ve come to the end of the year. The vaccines are here, fewer people are getting sick, fewer people succumbed to the virus, you don’t hear the sirens as often, more provinces are recording no new cases, and we’ve managed to flatten the curve, so it’s fair to think that the pandemic is finally under control. Not so fast.
With the borders open, international flights returning, and travelers trotting the globe, some of them are unfortunately bringing back unwanted hitchhikers, the omicron variant of the virus which spreads much more easily and a lot faster. Many countries that have seemingly managed to get things under control are seeing ridiculous spikes in the number of cases ever since the omicron variant was identified in South Africa at the end of November.
But guess what? It had actually been making the rounds in Europe even before then! People somehow kept quiet instead of properly reporting them. What gives, Europeans? So now we’re dealing with a potentially even worse outbreak domestically. Overseas and globally we’re seeing record numbers of cases in places where many refuse to vaccinate and to mask up.
Indonesia so far has yet to record such rapid increases as most omicron cases are from incoming international travelers who are being quarantined as they arrive. Unfortunately the numbers are rising exponentially. Indonesia had its first case announced in mid December and as of 29/12 there were 68 cases with one local transmission announced.
Although when you think about it, the first case really should have been declared a local transmission because the patient is a worker at Wisma Atlet who apparently caught it from a returning traveler. The Health Ministry however is reluctant to record it as such due to lack of hard evidence.
Anything Else?
There’s plenty of major events or significant moments of interest as far as Indonesia is concerned and this is already a really long edition, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the Olympic gold medal for women’s doubles badminton from Greysia Polii and Apriyani Rahayu and Anthony Ginting’s bronze from the men’s singles, the continuing controversy over Formula E, the delay yet again of the sexual violence eradication bill, the contempt of the Indonesian Broadcasting Commission executives over a staff member who claimed that he was bullied and sexually harassed at work for several years, and the case of the sketchy Rp2 trillion (yes, trillion) donation from the late businessman Akidi Tio which cost the jobs of a number of high ranking police officers.
So What is 2022 Going to Bring Us?
To start off, we’ll hopefully see the roll out of the third dose or booster shots in January as planned. Effective medicines for Covid-19 treatments have been announced by Merck and Pfizer which should help us deal with this illness, and surely more are coming. The Mandalika circuit in Lombok will host a Moto GP race in March while Jakarta will be home to Formula E in June.
Politically, we’ll very likely see an increase in ads from potential presidential election candidates, still two years away, potentially more controversial laws (it’s almost a given every year), especially when it comes to revisions to UU ITE and RUU PKS/TPKS, and certainly major shake ups among heads of regional governments as many will see the end of their terms but they will be replaced by caretakers or temporary holders given that no local or national elections will be held until 2024.
Oh, Winnie the Pooh, Franz Kafka’s The Castle, and F.W Murnau’s Faust (of the faustian deal fame) will enter public domain next year. This means if you’re interested in creating your own versions based on these classic works of fiction, nobody can chase you for royalties. Just try not to step on Disney’s shoes.
A whole bunch of weird and crazy stories and events are surely going to make a splash next year, as always, so we can certainly count on them getting weirder and crazier. We can hardly wait.
From all of us at Nuice, have a safe New Year celebration!
I don’t know ‘bout you, but we’re feeling 2022 😉🎉