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Asia Buzz: A 'Matt Drudge' You Can Respect
We won't tell you who 'Joyo' is, but he's someone you should know
By ERIC ELLIS
September 7, 1999
Web posted at 10:30 a.m. Hong Kong time, 10:30 p.m. EDT
Every day, several times a day, some 2,000 decision-makers and opinion-formers around the world receive a barrage of e-mails from someone called "Joyo."
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The e-mails, totaling about 50 each day, are mostly news stories and comments about matters Indonesian from the world's media-print, radio and TV, usually focused on East Timor. Occasionally there's a leaked World Bank report or an IMF memo that's embarrassing to Jakarta, or details of a conversation between, say, Megawati Sukarnoputri and President B.J. Habibie. Often it's good fly-on-the-wall stuff.
Joyo may well be Asia's Matt Drudge, the over-hyped Net freaker with a trashy, gossipy website who has turned himself into a millionaire and Murdoch TV personality. But unlike Drudge, Joyo is someone to listen to.
I know who Joyo is but I have pledged secrecy because, he thinks, revealing his identity might be dangerous to him. And it would probably lessen some of his impact and mystique. (President Habibie's office apparently gets Joyo's mails.)
I will say that Joyo is not East Timorese nor necessarily a front-line advocate for independence. Indeed, I'd be surprised if he knew Jose Ramos-Horta or Xanana Gusmao. Joyo would be horrified by the comparison to Drudge and, acting alone, prefers to keep a low profile. But the astonishing thing about Joyo is his commitment to his cause, the cause of the free flow of information.
As recipients of his service would attest, he seems to be awake nearly 24 hours a day. He also seems to have an uncanny knowledge of deadlines, be they of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Irish Times, Kompass, the New York Times, even the Svenska Dagsbladet in Stockholm. Barely a minute after a news report has been posted to the web, Joyo will have it packaged up and dispatched to subscribers. For free. The output is overwhelming. It's impossible to take so much in, a relentless news attack as arresting as a terrorist bomb.
Joyo's output provides a compelling platform for East Timorese liberationists and anyone else who wants to see Indonesia, and the rest of Asia, made a better place to live. Journalists get it to see what their colleagues are up to; diplomats get it to see what outrages Indonesia's soldiers and militiamen are perpetrating; Indonesia gets to see how it is being portrayed.
Had e-mail been widely available in 1975, some 200,000 East Timorese lives might not have been lost, and the Dili Country Club, if there was one, might today be playing host to APEC summiteers instead of marauding militias.
Expert use of the Internet is a PR weapon that Jakarta lacks but that the East Timorese resistance has employed with great skill. Only last month in the tense build-up to the independence-or-autonomy referendum, East Timor's foreign-minister-in-waiting Ramos-Horta vowed a campaign of cyber-terrorism against Jakarta if Indonesia tried to sabotage the ballot.
"More than 100 computer wizards," he claimed, were ready to launch a dozen specially designed computer viruses to cripple the computer networks of the Indonesian government and military as well as those of the country's banking and financial institutions. He also said he would launch a worldwide campaign to boycott the tourist island of Bali, where Jakarta bases the military headquarters with jurisdiction over East Timor. Ramos-Horta is a media technology performer par excellence.
When it gets its nationhood, as it surely will, East Timor will be the first country to have been created in the Internet age, in part by the Internet age. And from his perch somewhere in the U.S., Joyo will probably be among the first to report it, and allow himself a little self-satisfied smile. The Net empowers and informs in ways never thought possible. Other just causes around the region, and their opponents, would be wise to take Joyo's lead.
Joyo can be reached at joyo@aol.com
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