Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (5 page)

After that, Sukarno started thumping his chest in the direction of former British colonies to the north which were trying to band together into a new country, Malaysia. He used the UN again, this time withdrawing Indonesia from the world body in protest at Malaysia’s seat on the Security Council.

Though they did carve Indonesian nationalism deeply into the world view of his generation, Sukarno’s theatrics could not distract attention from the nation’s collapsing economy and the frailty of its political structures. The republic was governed by fourteen different cabinets between the declaration of independence and the first legislative elections in 1955. Those elections put twenty-eight different parties into parliament. Sukarno’s nationalist party only just pipped the big Islamic parties, which came second and third. Though the communists had, through a series of badly planned uprisings, made themselves unpopular with the infant republic’s army, they did well at the polls, sweeping up one in six votes to come in fourth. The elections did little to increase stability; if anything, parliament became more raucous.

Finally the volatile Sukarno lost patience. He had never been a fan of confrontational parliamentary politics in any case. Much better, he said, to stick to Javanese village tradition, where people come to consensus in a discussion guided by a wise village elder – the fourth pillar in his Pancasila philosophy. In 1957 he declared that he would act as village elder to the nation. With the flair for euphemism which is characteristic of Java, he called his dictatorship ‘guided democracy’.

Sukarno was a bold thinker and a true visionary, and he remains wildly popular to this day. But he guided politics as though he were Cecil B. de Mille. He wanted all Indonesians to become extras in a political pageant under his direction, and damn the cost. The script was anti-colonialism; because the Dutch had ruled in the interest of profit, being anti-colonial was synonymous with being anti-capitalist. The 1945 constitution is decidedly hostile to the private sector, specifying that the state must control all natural resources and all strategically important branches of production.

This was distressing to everyone of any economic standing in the Outer Islands; they lived and breathed trade. But it didn’t serve Java well, either. As the economy languished and underemployment rose, the young people of Java increasingly joined in Sukarno’s political pageant, staging rallies and marching in parades. When Muslim youth groups confronted young communists in the streets, Sukarno, who was determined that Indonesia should remain secular, encouraged the communists. By the mid-1960s the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) claimed to have between two and three million members, making it the third largest in the world, after China and Russia.

The deeply conservative military, which lent a guiding hand to ‘guided democracy’, disliked both the communists and the political expression of Islam. The generals watched the mounting political chaos with dismay. On the night of 30 September 1965 the situation came to a head. The official version of events, publicly accepted for years, defies logic on virtually every level. It holds that a group of officers from the army worked in cahoots with the PKI to plan a coup against Sukarno. This seems unlikely; the army broadly loathed the PKI, while Sukarno was in fact a great supporter of the communists. The ‘rebel’ officers killed six generals and seized the national radio station. Suharto, then the commander of the Strategic Reserve, stepped in to save the day, ousting the traitors, restoring calm, and securing the safety of President Sukarno – so school children are taught. What they are not told is that Suharto later placed his predecessor under house arrest.

There are plenty of other theories, most of them published by foreigners: that Suharto planned the whole thing, or at least that he knew of it in advance; that it was an internal army squabble and Suharto was simply in the right place at the right time and made the most of it, or that the attempted coup was plotted variously by the CIA, Britain’s MI6 or some combination of the two.

Whatever the truth, the events of that night certainly unleashed a tsunami of anti-PKI propaganda, followed by revenge killings, begun by the army itself. Many ordinary Indonesians joined in with gusto. Different groups used the great orgy of violence to settle different scores. In East Java, Muslims got back at their long-time communist rivals. In Bali, as many as one person in twenty was killed – the highest rate in Indonesia. Though the rhetoric was all about protecting Hindus from the filthy atheists, the PKI were actually more of a threat to the privilege and landholdings of the island’s upper-caste aristocrats than they ever were to its piety. In northern Sumatra, gangster organizations affiliated with business interests developed a special line in garrotting communists who had tried to organize plantation workers. The Dayak tribes of West Kalimantan used the supposed perfidy of the PKI to start pushing the ethnic Chinese off the land.

The carnage wiped out a whole generation of socially committed activists and pulled up the roots from which they might regrow. It crippled the development of political debate and made Indonesians citizens wary of political allegiance. And it served Suharto very well.

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Francis Drake,
The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake . . . Collected Out of the Notes of Master Francis Fletcher . . . and Compared with Divers Others
[sic]
Notes That Went in the Same Voyage
, ed. Francis Fletcher. London: Nicholas Bourne, 1652.

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Manchester United’s international marketing machine has captured Indonesian hearts and wallets. Local Bank Danamon issues Man U-branded credit cards ‘for sports fans with a modern lifestyle’, for example.

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In 1962 the Dutch agreed that West Papua could be transferred to Indonesian rule after an interim period of United Nations administration, on condition that the people of Papua were ultimately given the right to choose their future. Indonesia took over the administration in 1963 and staged an ‘act of self-determination’ in 1969. A handful of tribal elders, encouraged by a heavy Indonesian military presence, voted for integration and the territory became a province of Indonesia.

Papuans, racially and culturally different from the peoples of the islands to the east of them, have disputed the ‘integration’ ever since. The issue, which has grown more complex because of recent economic and political developments, continues to fester.

2

The Ties that Bind

The Four Seasons Hotel, Jakarta’s poshest, rose like a Rajasthani water palace out of a temporary lake. In front of the uniformed doorman, on the water that washed across the valley between the edge of the highway and the raised entrance to the hotel, two giant blue laundry-bins were bobbing about. They were filled with guests, well groomed and slightly nervous-looking, who had clambered into them with the help of a ladder filched from the maintenance department. It was flood-time again in Jakarta, and enterprising hotel staff had set up an informal service to ferry guests to dry ground. The charge, not included in the US$250 a night room rate, was sometimes renegotiated midstream.

Jakarta is not an easy city to love. It is a vast, chaotic, selfish, stroppy monument to ambition and consumption, a city that seems to know no bounds. It is crowded, polluted and noisy, it is built on a swamp, and it floods ever year. Yet Jakarta’s citizens have a remarkable talent for turning the city’s vicissitudes into virtues. And its citizens are many. When the Dutch left, it was home to 600,000 people. But in the years that followed, Jakarta burst its banks and sprawled over 661 square kilometres, 40 per cent of it below sea level. By the time I started my trip in 2011, there were 17 times as many people living in Jakarta as there had been at independence, and the metropolis was gobbling up surrounding towns too. Greater Jakarta is now home to 28 million people – the second largest urban agglomeration in the world after Greater Tokyo. Waterways and drainage channels have been built over with thrusting skyscrapers and marbled malls; the canals that remain are lined with squatters’ shacks and clogged with garbage.

Unlike Tokyo, Jakarta has no mass transit system to speak of, so traffic jams are legendary. The super-rich rise above the problem; as a child, one acquaintance of mine used to be dropped at kindergarten every day in the family helicopter. But everyone else suffers to varying degrees. The lower-middle classes elbow their way onto sporadic, ageing trains and sordid buses or weave their way through the traffic chaos on motorbikes, dreaming of the day they will own a car. Each year, another 200,000 cars pour onto the streets. That means more traffic, and longer commutes. The chauffer-driven rich kit their cars out with mobile offices so that they can use the time they spend on gridlocked roads more productively. A few years ago, the city government decided it would cut congestion on the city’s main arteries by insisting that in rush hour, each car must have at least three passengers. Again, Jakarta’s infinitely creative residents made the most of the change. Within days, the pavements of the feeder roads were crowded with unemployed people hiring themselves out as ‘jockeys’, extra passengers for rich people’s smooth, air-conditioned cars.

It’s this sort of inventiveness that makes me love the city despite myself. When I first lived in Jakarta in the late 1980s, the capital already had a fair number of gleaming office blocks and traffic-clogged highways. But they huddled together for comfort, a few islands of self-conscious modernity in an ocean of tin roofs and off-kilter houses, of tangled backstreets and pungent markets. In the early post-Suharto years, when I worked at the Ministry of Health, the islands were growing larger and the sea was receding. But as I drove my motorbike through the rat runs of this low-rise city, taking shortcuts between one atoll of air-conditioned offices and the next, I would still catch glimpses into the heart and soul of the Jakarta I loved best. A schoolboy sat staring at a book, his hands clamped over his ears to block out the bickering of the three younger siblings who shared his room. A young father washed his toddler in a bucket on the street. Cycling past him was a tailor with an old Singer sewing machine welded to a workbench on the back of his bike. ‘LEVIS’ read the sign that hung from his handlebars.

Now, there’s barely a ghost of that Jakarta left. I did see an itinerant tailor as I was fussing around in Jakarta in 2011 preparing for my travels. He was on what used to be one of my former rat runs, still with an old Singer sewing machine, still advertising Levi’s. Yet the alleyways and the people who breathed life into them were gone. This man cycled slowly on the highway between the Stock Exchange and a forest of five-star hotels, abused on all sides by businessmen boxed up in their luxury SUVs who were impatient to get around the relic tailor and on to their next deal. It was a melancholy sight.

Nowadays, the capital of Indonesia is a city of malls, of condos, of fast-food restaurants and Indomarets – the ghastly over-cooled convenience stores that sit on every corner, wallowing in the miasma that wafts off gently warming chicken hot dogs. It is a city of expensive sushi joints and flashy nightclubs, of gleaming skyscrapers that stand erect and confident, beacons of the nation’s prosperity. As McDonald’s, Indomaret and gated communities have taken over from alleyway Jakarta, the city has grown almost feral. By late 2011, as I battled my way around town on a motorbike trying to track down ferry timetables and mosquito nets ahead of my trek around the rest of the nation, I was finding Jakarta increasingly unlovable. It seemed very different to the city I first got to know twenty-five years earlier. And all the changes in Jakarta stemmed from one fundamental change in Indonesia: Suharto was no longer in charge.

I had arrived in Jakarta to work for Reuters in 1988, when Suharto was in his twenty-first year in power, yet when I walked into the newsroom – a dreary, grey place inhabited by clunky screens winking green text against a black page – I had barely heard of the man. Suharto was remarkable among dictators precisely for being so outwardly unremarkable: a quiet, methodical person who lived modestly and put stability before all else. Where Sukarno had appeared at massive rallies in the guise of a visionary saviour of the people, Suharto appeared at family planning clinics in the guise of a concerned uncle. Where Sukarno had called together the leaders of the post-colonial world and kick-started the non-aligned movement, Suharto called together farmers and kick-started campaigns to keep rats out of rice fields. Sukarno’s string of flirtations and four marriages, the last to a teenage hostess he met in a bar in Japan, had provided a permanent stream of gossip. There wasn’t much to say about Suharto’s fifty-year marriage to Ibu Tien.

There was nothing glamorous about Suharto. But the ‘Old Man’, as we called him, was a source of endless fascination, chewed over during a merry-go-round of diplomatic cocktail parties that filled the evenings of the city’s foreign correspondents. I settled quickly into this rarefied life. In the leafy district of Menteng, I had rented a tiny Dutch-era villa set back off a narrow street used mainly by itinerant vendors wheeling kitchen carts, each with a signature sound advertising its wares. ‘Ting-ting-ting’ meant fried noodles were on offer, ‘toc-toc-toc’ signalled
bakso,
a meatball soup. Vocals came from the satay man or the vegetable cart: ‘Te-EH, Te-EH. SAA-tay!’, ‘OOooo, OOooo, SAY-ur . . .!’