The past few years of political, economic, and social turbulence in Indonesia have led observers to wonder: "What is Indonesia?" Implicit in this question are others: "What has Indonesia been?" "What is it becoming?" and "What will become of it?"

To explore and debate possible answers, a roundtable has been scheduled for 5 April at the annual convention of the Association for Asian Studies in Washington DC. The six analysts who will speak at the roundtable have prepared brief essays--two or three pages each--that have been posted in easily downloadable form on the Asia/Pacific Research Center's website, at .

The most prominent of these analysts is Goenawan Mohamad, arguably the leading public intellectual in Indonesia today. "An Unfinished World" is his websited response to the question "What is Indonesia?" Those planning to hear Goenawan on 8 April here at Stanford need not have read his essay to understand his talk, which will go beyond his written words, but are welcome to download, print, and read it.

Goenawan Mohamad has for many years championed press freedom in Indonesia. In 1963, under the leftward regime of the country's first president, Sukarno, he signed a cultural manifesto against "socialist realism" in the arts. The manifesto was soon condemned as "counter-revolutionary." In 1964 the regime banned writings by independent-minded intellectuals such as Goenawan. In 1967 he returned from Europe to join a student newspaper that had opposed Sukarno's rule. Seven years later, the paper was banned by Sukarno's successor, Suharto. In the meantime, Goenawan had become chief editor of a weekly newsmagazine, Ekspres, and been fired by its owner for opposing government interference in a union of Indonesian journalists. Goenawan then helped to found a new weekly newsmagazine, Tempo, and became its chief editor. In 1984 Suharto banned the journal for two months because of critical coverage of the country's ruling party. Ten years later, Tempo was banned indefinitely for having criticized one of Suharto's cabinet ministers. The journal soon resurfaced on the Internet, but would not reappear in print until after Suharto's fall in 1998. Since 1999, in Jakarta, Goenawan has managed a community of media, cultural, and political activists dedicated to freedom of thought and expression. Over the course of his career, he has published books of essays and poetry, written a libretto for an opera that premiered in Seattle in 1999, and held visitorships at Harvard and UCLA, among other institutions.

She will present her photos and discuss her experience of being in Indonesia during that violent period.

Ian Buruma was born in the Netherlands, where he studied Chinese at Leyden University. From 1975 to 1978 he was a research fellow in Japanese cinema at Nihon University College of Arts. He lived in Tokyo until 1980, and worked as a translator, actor, photographer, documentary filmmaker and journalist.

From 1982 to 1986, he was cultural editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. During that time he traveled to most parts of Asia. He moved to London in 1990, where he worked for one year as foreign editor for the Spectator. In 1991, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin. In 1990 he spent a year in Washington, D.C. at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, and in 1991 he was the Alistair Horne Fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford.

Buruma is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and other publications in the United States and Europe. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian in London.

Buruma's book The Wages of Guilt analyzes the collective memory of Germany and Japan in the post-war years. Delving into their emotions, thoughts and anger, Buruma tries to uncover how people in both countries dealt with, and are still dealing with, the stigma of being the war aggressors in very different ways.

Join us for a panel discussion of the issues raised in Buruma's book. The panel discussants are Professor's Daniel Okimoto, Shorenstein APARC and Political Science and James Sheehan, History. Professor Thomas Rohlen of Shorenstein APARC will be the moderator.

Dr. Chowdhury is a vascular surgeon and pioneering public health leader from Bangladesh who wrote "The Politics of Essential Drugs: The Makings of a Successful Health Strategy: Lessons from Bangladesh." In 1971, Dr. Chowdhury left England to return to what was then East Pakistan and join the war of liberation for Bangladesh. He helped establish a field hospital for freedom fighters and refugees, which lead to the development Gonoshasthaya Kendra (GK) or "The People's Health Center." GK has trained more than 7,000 barefoot doctors, and serves 1,000 villages in 14 Bangladeshi districts. A pharmaceutical factory was established by GK in 1981 which produces medicines on the World Health Organization's essential medicines list; employs 1,500 people and has an $11 million annual budget. One-half of its profits are reinvested and the other half go to GK's other projects. In 1985, Dr. Chowdhury and GK were awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award (sometimes called the Asian Nobel Peace Prize) and in 1992, the Right Livelihood Award (also known as the alternative Nobel Prize). Dr. Chowdhury was instrumental in convincing the Bangladesh government to adopt a National Drug Policy in 1982. This controversial policy promotes essential medicines and discourages the use of drugs with little therapeutic value. GK hosted the People's Health Assembly in December 2000, which challenged global health organizations to improve public health care for the poor. Dr. Chowdhury is this year's International Honoree of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Heroes.

Democracy in South Korea has gone through four decades of transition and is finally at a consolidation stage. Democratic constitutionalism is slowly being accepted as a new guiding principle in the public life in the country which is still a predominantly collectivity- or person-oriented society. Democracy as a political ideal and institution came from the West and, is, by virtue of its origins, individualist in that the individual conscience is the ultimate source of decision about what is right and wrong (E.H. Carr). Will constitutionalism, then, eventually replace collectivism-personalism (which puts emphasis on group and person over and against the individual) and establish an individualist democracy in South Korea? Or, since the traditional collectivist-personalist ethic survived democratic encroachment and accommodated itself to the democratic polity, will there be a new form of democracy? If so, how different it will be from Western democracy? The aim of this paper is to explore these issues.