Glass Houses

The US Embassy here has seemingly just woken up to the fact that Indonesia's airlines don't have the best track (flight/landing?) record in the world and has taken the precaution of advising its citizens to be scared, very scared.

Whenever possible, Americans traveling to and from Indonesia should fly directly to their destinations on international carriers from countries whose civil aviation authorities meet international aviation safety standards for the oversight of their air carrier operations under the FAA’s International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program.

I expressed concerns about the proliferation of budget airlines here nearly three years ago.

We Make You Fly: offhand, I can't remember which of the newish cheapo airlines has the above slogan, but it scares me a little. At least it's more reassuring than Trust Us To Fly. The proliferation of these budget airlines post-9/11 initially seemed like a good thing and, strange to relate, there haven't been any disastrous landings recently. (Touch wood ~ if you can find a tree.)

Could the 16.5% of my readers who are in the good ol' U.S.of A please ask your embassy in Jakarta, whose website is supposedly brought to you by the staff of the Information Resource Center, to read what local bloggers have to say about life here.

A further reminder is given to those Americans who could become about terrorist targets.

Terrorist attacks could occur at any time and could be directed against any location. Terrorists may target individual American citizen residents, visitors, students, or tourists, and tactics could include but are not limited to kidnapping, shooting, or poisoning.

Kidnapping? For plain extortion maybe, but, to my knowledge, there is no history of a terrorist kidnapping in this country.

Poisoning? Yep, but the targets here are Indonesian citizens and Munir was allegedly poisoned at Singapore's Changi Airport.

Shooting? Obviously it's a darn sight safer here than in Iraq. Or on an American campus where the death toll includes an Indonesian student.
 

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