Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (8 page)

The kretek affair uncorked resentment that had been brewing away, building pressure. Striking at kreteks in Indonesia is like messing with tea in Britain. Smoking is a social activity: every kretek smoked became an opportunity to have a little rant about the excesses of the First Family. That’s over 600 million rants a day, nationwide. The normally silent Indonesian press began openly poking fun at Tommy’s ham-fisted greed. Even the World Bank, which considered Indonesia one of its best clients and rarely breathed a word against Suharto, wrote a report pointing out the idiocy of the policy. It’s hard to get a genie like that back in the bottle.

Suharto had little in common with the flat-nosed, curly-haired, plain-speaking men and women from the faraway eastern islands of Indonesia where cloves were grown, and he did little to defend their interests. Javanese farmers, on the other hand, were closer to the Old Man’s heart. He rarely appeared happier than when he was among farmers in the rice paddies close to his birthplace, speaking in Javanese, using metaphors from the
wayang
shadow-plays which everyone in rural Java knew by heart. These were his people; when the greed of Suharto’s own children threatened the welfare of Javanese farmers, he sided with the peasants.

I spent a day in 1990 wading around in rice paddies at one of the field schools Suharto’s government had set up to help farmers grow more. When you first plop into a rice paddy off the bank, you feel like you’ll be sucked in. The mud squishes up between your toes and covers your ankle; water sloshes up your calves but your foot continues to sink. Then, suddenly it hits bottom, not hard exactly, but bouncy-firm. You stop worrying about the quagmire, and start schlurping your foot up and squishing it down a little further on. The mud oozes between your toes again. It’s slow going for a beginner, but fun. No one else at the Central Java field school was a beginner, of course. They had all grown up in the rice paddies and they had the squared-off feet of people who see shoes as an encumbrance. They were there to learn about bugs.

In 1986 Java’s rice crop was destroyed by a tiny insect called a rice brown plant hopper. The plant hopper thrived on the back of another of Suharto’s sons’ businesses, which supplied all the state-subsidized pesticide in the country – US$150 million a year’s worth. The pesticide killed the big bugs first, the spiders and water skimmers that used to eat the plant hoppers. But it didn’t kill hopper eggs; with all the spiders dead, they hatched into fields deliciously free of predators. There they fed on the rice, and spread viruses. Farmers, naturally enough, reacted with even more pesticide. That meant more profits for Suharto’s son but it didn’t kill the viruses. In 1986, Indonesia lost its hard-won self-sufficiency in rice. That mattered more to Suharto than his family’s income; he immediately wiped out subsidies, banned broad-spectrum pesticides, and set up thousands of field schools like the one I went to, to teach farmers to tell good bugs from bad bugs and so cut pesticide use.

Indonesia was the first country in the world to adopt ecologically sound Integrated Pest Management as a national policy. But these moments of common-sense government became rarer as Suharto aged. As I write this now, two decades after the fact, I can’t help being shocked at how much of Indonesia’s economy was, in the 1990s, chopped up into neat lines on a mirror to be sniffed up by the small handful of guests still standing at the Suharto party. Goodness knows there’s plenty of corruption around now, but at least most of it is on a fee-for-service basis. Someone takes a percentage because they helped get a new mining contract, they pushed through the approval of another province or district, they delivered a jail term of just three or four years instead of fifteen. It’s still corrosive, but it seems somehow less contemptuous of the majority than the brazen plunder of the Suharto years, when money was taken from farmers and companies and given to the President’s children just because.

Before I left Indonesia in mid-1991, I gave a big party in the mansion on the central square of the old Dutch city that had, during the time of the Netherlands East Indies, been Batavia’s City Hall. It had become a museum, still filled with heavy Dutch furniture, gilded portraits and dusty chandeliers, and was run by a friend of mine. He let me use it on condition that neither he nor his staff had to do anything in the way of organizing or cleaning up. I spent the afternoon scrubbing out the loos and filling the marble fountain in the courtyard with blocks of ice to cool the booze. I had invited the street vendors who ting-tinged and toc-toced their way past my garden every evening to provide the catering; they rolled their carts up from the centre of town and set to frying noodles and grilling satay in the Governor General’s courtyard.

I invited everyone I knew; cabinet ministers and generals, dissidents and activists, movie stars and designers, lawyers and economists. I spent the evening swanning around introducing colonel so-and-so to former political prisoner such-and-such, then watching them drink sangria and chat amiably with one another. I kept the guest book from that party. By the time I next set foot in Jakarta, some of the guests who had been in the cabinet at the time of the party were in jail, while some of the dissidents were in the cabinet.

After the clove monopoly got people talking about the previously unspeakable gluttony of the President’s family, things had gone from bad to worse and quiet coffee-stall rants rose in volume. The fallout from the Asian financial crisis brought things to a crescendo. In the six months from July 1997 to January 1998, the rupiah collapsed from 2,500 to the dollar to almost 10,000. Imports disappeared and prices of everyday items shot up. Suharto’s supporters tried to deflect the fury people felt about the excesses of his family by directing public anger against rich Chinese Indonesians. Glodok, Jakarta’s Chinatown, went up in flames and hundreds of ethnic Chinese women were raped, but the fury raged on, eventually finding its true target: Suharto. Students filled the streets and occupied the national parliament building. Because the President had for some years allowed his family to eat into the pies that used to feed the generals, the military just stood by and let it happen.

In May 1998, after thirty-two years in power, Suharto resigned. A new Indonesia was born, but no one had the slightest idea who should raise it.

Three years after Suharto’s resignation, a full decade after my farewell party in the former Batavia City Hall, I went back to Jakarta to work with the Ministry of Health. The weekend I arrived, a friend and I went for a walk around Glodok. Some of Chinatown’s shops lay abandoned still, their plate-glass fronts smashed and gaping. Other buildings were stained gauzy grey by the flames that had licked over them during the riots. We wandered into a bookshop. I found myself looking at a whole table piled with books on the rise of Communist China and the history of socialism. I was open-mouthed; in Suharto’s day such a display would have landed the bookseller in jail. I went to share my shock with my friend. He had drifted over to another table full of unimaginable books, and was flicking through one entitled
The Multiple-Orgasmed Woman
.

Other changes I noticed were the panoply of TV channels showing vapid game shows, the mouthy press, the willingness of all and sundry to voice political opinions, the relative absence of military uniforms in public gatherings and a huge increase in the proportion of women wearing
jilbabs
(the Indonesian name for hijab headscarves). I arrived just in time for one of the great tests of the era of
Reformasi
– ‘The Reformation’. The Pope Suharto had been succeeded by his Vice President, B. J. Habibie. Though trained in engineering in Germany, Habibie was anything but Teutonic in style. He regularly allowed extravagant promises to escape his mouth before they had spent any time in his brain. Without so much as mentioning it to his foreign minister, for example, he made a public promise that the people of the fractious province of East Timor could hold a referendum on independence.

The Portuguese, who made the Dutch look like wonderful colonizers, had left East Timor in a pathetic state. When Indonesia invaded in 1975, it set about developing its twenty-seventh province with gusto. Jakarta sent in thousands of (mostly Javanese Muslim) civil servants to run the (entirely Catholic) state’s affairs. In the eyes of Suharto and his supporters, they were doing the people of Timor a favour.

In my reporting days, I had frequently been called to army HQ for re-education about Timor. Widespread dissatisfaction among the Timorese? Where on earth did you get that from? A searing resentment of a military that was quick with a gun-butt and a steel-toecapped boot? Come now, Elizabeth! Individual soldiers may on rare occasions have been a little heavy-handed in their treatment of the locals, conceded Brigadier General Nurhadi, whose fate it was to set me straight. But the government had built roads and health centres, provided education and contraception. They brought to East Timor development, Suharto-style. In time ‘tell them about the roads’ became the press corps’ shorthand for the denial that ran in the water supply of the Jakarta elite.

Habibie had drunk deeply of this source. He seemed genuinely surprised when, in August 1999, eight out of ten people in East Timor voted to boot Indonesia out and become independent. And he was unable to rein in the military when it unleashed a spiteful campaign of retribution that left much of the Indonesian-built infrastructure in East Timor in ruins. Though Habibie did initiate some quite radical reforms, he neither disassociated himself from his former boss nor secured the support of the military. In the last elections of the Suharto era, held in 1997 and contested only by three state-approved parties, the ruling Golkar party had won three-quarters of the vote. A year after Suharto stepped down, with forty-eight parties on the newly democratic slate, Golkar managed just over a fifth of the vote. Habibie was out.

He was succeeded by an ailing half-blind Muslim scholar named Abdurrahman Wahid, aka Gus Dur. Gus Dur was a brave but wildly eccentric man with no experience of government. He horse-traded himself into power after his party won just 13 per cent of the vote, striking fragile alliances with improbable partners. When I arrived in May 2001, a normally docile parliament had started proceedings to impeach him. On paper, this was because of a dodgy loan involving Gus Dur’s masseur. In fact it was because the President, both blunt and stubborn, offended the very groups on whom he relied for support.

It was a very strange time for me. I had arrived back in a city that throbbed with political protests. And yet all around the demonstrators, my life went on as usual. If hanging out with transgender sex workers, rent boys and gay men half my age could be described as ‘usual’ – my job, at the time, centred around a survey of HIV and risk behaviour among these groups. I found it disorientating. Massage parlours where men sold sex to other men were a new feature of Jakarta’s entertainment landscape, and there had been no gay bars when I last lived in the city. The transgenders, or
waria
, on the other hand, had been feature of Jakarta life for as long as I could remember.

Though the word is a mash-up of
wanita
– woman – and
pria
– man, waria live entirely as women, sometimes with a husband. Most still have all their male anatomy intact, though many take female hormones, and breast implants are increasingly common. Culturally, they play a very singular role. They are accepted in part because of a long heritage that stems from the Bissu priests who often sailed in the magnificent trading schooners built by the Bugis people of South Sulawesi. The Bissu are often described as ‘intersex’; they are said still now to be able to channel the gods when in a trance. Though the Bugis ethnic group is fiercely Islamic, they have always accepted this duality. ‘Well, of course God speaks through the Bissu,’ the wife of a sub-district head in the Bissu’s heartland told me: ‘Because God has no gender. Allah is not a man and not a woman.’ Minutes later – sitting in her doilied living room, wearing a pretty silk sarong – the senior Bissu in the area described how s/he cured white discharge from the penis with red onions, and asked my advice on what to do about genital ulcers.

While the Bissu still perform quasi-religious ceremonies, most run-of-the-mill waria are more likely to feature in cabarets. Their ‘neither quite one thing, nor quite the other’ status once afforded them a political role. Not unlike the fool in Shakespeare’s plays, waria sometimes spoke truth to power when no one else was allowed to. Or at least to the wives of power. One of my abiding memories of the Suharto years was watching a cabaret in which a group of waria in a make-believe salon tended to their ‘clients’, puffing hair up into matronly helmets, pancaking on the make-up, and turning out perfect
Ibu-Ibu
: a replica of Tien Suharto’s circle. The salon chat among the clients was of the minister’s wife who was having an affair with the oligarch, of which foreign companies offered the best cuts for corrupt deals, of tips and tricks their husbands had developed for squeezing money out of Suharto’s kids. These were things that no one else talked about openly at the time. The audience shrieked with laughter, they clapped perfectly manicured claws in delighted recognition. Almost everyone sitting watching the show was herself a real, dyed-in-the-silk
Ibu-Ibu
.