Indonesian Diary Entry

8 October 2001

I have been told to stay in the hotel, not go out, and do nothing to call attention to myself. This is not an easy assignment. It is essentially dinner time, and I am delaying going down to dinner, as that will be the only event of the evening. If I can delay it another 15 minutes that means 15 minutes less to deal with on the other side. I think I have seen every piece of video and related film on the first day of the attack on Afghanistan, not to mention interviews with a very large number of experts on all possible related subjects. The irony is that I don’t have a very good understanding of what is happening in Indonesia. My language is not good enough to make a whole lot of sense of the audio from TV newscasts, and the amount of captions and helpful pictures is too limited. So, I can tell you about the landscape of the Afghan-Pakistan border (compliments of CNN and a Japanese station that occasionally runs a news cast with an English voice over), but not about what is happening a few blocks away outside the American Embassy.

How dangerous is Jakarta? I’m tired of saying that it is not dangerous, or that it is in the same category as being fatally bitten by the neighbor’s cat. It is dangerous to be an American here, but not as dangerous as scary. Being frightened to go up the block for dinner is a new feeling, and one I can do without.

I will probably get out of the hotel tomorrow. If so, I will be able to send this to the diary and the entry for the week will be there. That will mean that I will have been in the hotel only for twenty-four hours. That is too short a period to carry on at great length about the offerings on TV, or the dimensions of the room, of the quality of the air, or any other aspects of my confinement. I suspect that if it extended (or should I say extends?) to two or three or four days, I would learn to cope.