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span class="inline inline-left">JP/Ricky Yudhistira“Perhaps, both the personal and professional lesson is to be more alive to diversity – the diversity of opinions, the diversity of backgrounds,” Martin Alan Hatfull, the outgoing UK ambassador, summed up on lessons learned during his three-year tenure in Indonesia.

His stay in Indonesia became a lesson in spanning cultural differences after he came into contact with people of a multitude of ethnicities and social positions that make up the country — home to at least 300 ethnic groups.

Respecting these differences, he said, was “tremendously important as a diplomat and as a human being”.

“I’ve worked in other places before but I’ve never worked anywhere where the cultural, ethnic and religious backgrounds are as mixed as they are here in Indonesia,” he told The Jakarta Post during an interview at his ambassadorial residence in Central Jakarta.

On the day of the interview, stacks of books and boxed items were neatly tucked in corners of the living room. Colorful sticky notes were affixed to drawn out drawers, framed photographs and even a wayang puppet.

“The sticky notes tell the movers which things are ours,” he said of the moving process.

Martin, a career diplomat, officially took up his post in Indonesia in 2008 after being posted in Brussels, Rome and Japan.

He said that he “didn’t really have any clear idea of what to expect” of the country when he took office, given that he only had visited Indonesia “briefly” before.

However, now that three years have passed, he has many impressions of the country through interactions with people he met along the way, from those in high places to those in villages.

“The strongest impression that my wife and I have taken away is actually of the people of Indonesia who have been amazingly welcoming, friendly and positive; and have made a real impression on us throughout our stay,” he said.

He added that he found Indonesians as people “an amazing resource, very resilient, very adaptable, and very imaginative”.

“I especially think that the young people I’ve met have such ambition and such commitment to improve themselves and Indonesia that it makes me feel very confident about the future of the country,” he said.

Martin had a considerable number of encounters with Indonesian students during various programs that sought to strengthen education links between Indonesia and UK.

In his country visit earlier this year, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, also showed support for education in Indonesia by witnessing the signing of the first ever memorandum of understanding for a joint PhD between the University of Newcastle and the University of Indonesia.

According to Martin, programs like that were a sign of progress in education links between both countries. But, much was still left to be desired because of the limited number of Indonesian students studying in the UK and the lack of partnership programs.

There are 1,400 Indonesian students in the UK. Meanwhile, there are around 14 Indonesian and UK universities that have joint partnerships.

“I hope that my successor will be able to take that work forward quicker than I have been able to,” he added.

Reinforcing education links, Martin said, was important because education was a form of soft power in cementing ties between both countries. An example is the program in which the British Council joined up with Premier League coaches and trainers to work with children in schools, Islamic boarding schools or pesantren and youth groups across Indonesia.

“That is already happening in one or two places in East Java, for example, and I think it will grow,” he said. “I was talking to the executives of the Premier League in London only a few weeks ago and they were very enthusiastic about that.”

Going on educational tours and meeting people during his travels have an added bonus for Martin; it gave him a break from the formal settings usually arranged for him as an ambassador. The less formal settings allowed him to gather firsthand opinions of what people really though of the UK.

“It’s always a very interesting area to explore — how Indonesians see the UK,” he said.

He added that he had observed much progress in partnerships in the domain of trade, counterterrorism and combating climate change. He said he found government officials “very open, very accessible and very keen to work with [the UK] in these areas”.

Juggling a myriad of responsibilities as an ambassador was bound to cause certain frustrations for Martin, although he refused to “get drawn far down that road”.

Therefore, much work was required to “get relatively modest progress partly because things do sometimes grind pretty slowly” in the Indonesian system as well as in the UK.

“I think one genuine frustration is that people in Britain don’t know enough about Indonesia,” he said, adding that this was a different story for countries with traditionally strong links with the UK.

This condition meant that he and his colleagues had it much harder convincing the London end about the business and education partnership opportunities Indonesia offered.

“So that’s homework for my successor. But it is also homework for Indonesia to keep raising its profile in the UK,” he said.

Now it is Martin’s time to get back to his own plans for the future.

“In the short term, my wife and I are going back to London. We have an apartment that we have barely lived in so we will be spending some time trying to sort that out,” he said.

He added that he was looking forward to his secondment from the foreign office to the private sector to “try to get some experience” in the latter sector.

“I’ve worked only in the foreign office since I left university so I need to broaden my horizon before it’s too late,” he said with a chuckle.

And as the trip back to London loomed closer, Martin remarked on what he would miss most from
Indonesia.

“The remarkable combination of the stunning natural beauty you still have in Indonesia — which I do hope gets protected and preserved — and the friendliness and warmth of the people is what I’ll miss very much indeed,” he said on a final note.