Monday, March 9, 1998 Published at 16:39 GMT
Indonesia: Top Internet links
Frans Prayoga of the BBC's Indonesian Service offers a guide to some of the best resources on Indonesia available online.
Indonesian National Media.
Official Indonesian Government Sites.
Official Indonesian political parties are thinly represented on the Internet.
- The website of Golkar (http://www.golkar.or.id/), the government party, was not active at the time of writing, nor was that of the PDI (http://www.banteng.org/), one of the two official Indonesian opposition parties. The other main opposition party, PPP website is accessible, but has not been updated for some time.
- Indonesia's unoffcial political opposition does however have some presence on the Internet. Supporters of Megawati Sukarnoputri , who has become something of a figurehead, have set up a bilingual site in the US.
- Indonesia's Muslim population - the largest in the world - are making increasing use of the web to communicate their message. Kisdi is a movement for Islamic solidarity, whilst ICMI, the Organsation of Muslim Intellectuals, is a more moderate organisation currently receiving government support.
- Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International
both produce extensive reports and briefings on the human rights situation in Indonesia, best found by using their site search engines.
- Watch Indonesia is a German-based human rights group.
American CIA fact book on Indonesia is a worthwhile resource.
- The US government also carries information on Indonesia via the website at its embassy in Jakarta with regular updates. Conversely you can also access the Indonesian Embassy in Washington DC
- One of the best sources for a wide range of news on Indonesia is Indonesia - Daily News Online, based at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. Whilst for an update on Indonesia's financial situation you can access the Jakarta stock exchange website
Internet resources and forums
- A number of other organisations have also compiled links pages to Internet resources on Indonesia, one of the most comprehensive being the Indonesia section of the Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library project, based at the Australian National University.
- For online discussion of all things Indonesian, you could try Indonesia-L, a popular e-mail based cyber-forum, although mostly in Indonesian only. The US-based Indonesia Forum and news groups such as soc.culture.indonesia are other English-based fora.