Top Quotes: “Indonesia, Etc: Exploring the Improbable Nation” — Elizabeth Pisani

Introduction

“Indonesia is full of such improbable moments. In Indonesia, a presidential candidate who doubles as a sultan and moonlights as the head of the national chamber of commerce keeps a posse of albino dwarves at his court for good luck. In Indonesia, a local police chief will explain how crocodiles are called together so that the innocent reptiles can point out the man-eater for capture.

It’s a country where it is possible to share a beer with a general who cheerfully admits to prolonging a guerrilla war to inflate his budget, and to take tea with a corpse. Indeed the nation itself is improbable — a string of 13,466 islands inhabited by people from over 360 ethnic groups, who between them speak 719 languages. It exists today because its combination of volcanic ash and sea air produced spices, and spices drew Europeans. Not content to trade with local princes and sultans as their Arab, Indian and Chinese predecessors had, the Europeans introduced monopolies that led to conflict, colonization, kleptocracy and a war of independence. The modern state of Indonesia was cobbled together out of the wreckage of all of that.

When the country’s founding fathers declared independence from Dutch colonists in 1945, the declaration read, in its entirety:

‘We, the people of Indonesia, hereby declare the independence of Indonesia. Matters relating to the transfer of power etc. will be executed carefully and as soon as possible.’

Indonesia has been working on that ‘etc.’ ever since.”

“Many countries have struggled to find a raison d’être that goes beyond lines drawn on a map by former colonists.

But few have had to mash together as many elements as Indonesia. Modern Indonesia runs around the girdle of the Earth, covering the distance from London to Tehran, or from Anchorage in Alaska to Washington DC. At the northwestern extreme on the tip of Sumatra is Aceh, peopled by Muslim Malays with a dash of Arab etched into their features who are proud to call their land ‘the Veranda of Mecca’. Some 5,200 kilometres to the southeast is the province of Papua, which makes up much of the western half of the giant island of New Guinea, home to black-skinned people many of whom, when I first visited, went naked but for penis-gourds, and who had developed some of the most sophisticated farming techniques in the archipelago. The people of Papua and those of Aceh eat different food, pray to different gods, play different music and are of different races. In between, a riot of other cultures is adapting ancient traditions to modern times in wildly different ways.

Today’s Indonesia is home to one in every thirty of the people on this planet — 240 million at the last count. That makes the country the fourth most populous in the world. Jakarta tweets more than any other city on earth, and around 64 million Indonesians use Facebook — that’s more than the entire population of the UK. But 80 million live without electricity (all of Germany), and 110 million live on less than two dollars a day (all of Mexico). Hundreds of thousands live without electricity on less than two dollars a day and are on Facebook.”

“Though it makes up just 7% of Indonesia’s land mass, Java is home to 60% of Indonesia’s population. That’s 140 million people in an area the size of Greece. Javanese rulers have spread their influence through the many other kingdoms of the island with varying success since the 12th century.”

“That fondness brought me back to the country in 2001, three years after protesting students had seized the parliament building, ending Suharto’s thirty-two years in power.”

“I had unlikely encoun-ters. A tattooed junkie I was talking to on a dingy train platform once treated me to a Fanta. ‘We were going to rob you, miss, but actually you’re quite funny,’ he said.”

“I trekked 21,000 kilometres by motorbike, bus and boat, and covered another 20,000 kilometres by plane.”

“When the flamboyant nationalist leader Sukarno proclaimed the independence of Indonesia, he was liberating a nation that didn’t really exist, imposing a notional unity on a ragbag of islands that had only a veneer of shared history, and little common culture. The haphazard declaration, with its ‘etc.’ and it’s ‘as soon as possible’, was blurted out just two days after Japan’s unexpected surrender in the second World War. Japan had invaded the Netherlands East Indies in 1942, kicking the Dutch colonists out of the islands. This was a cause for celebration among Indonesian nationalists; 350 years of Dutch kleptocracy left them deeply distrustful of white rulers. But the Japanese turned out to be just as bad, though in different ways. The hasty declaration by Sukarno and his fellow nationalists was designed to keep the islands out of the hands of any other grasping outsiders.”

“Born again as ‘Indonesian’ for political reasons in 1928, the lingua franca of these islands is actually a form of Malay which has been used by traders for millennia. Foreign merchants moved through the polyglot communities of the straits in waves; the Persians dominated in the seventh century, but were later eclipsed by the Arabs. They in turn were challenged by Indians from Gujarat on the west coast and Coromandel on the east, while the Chinese began a strong showing from the 1100s.”

“Their legacy is handy for travellers today; though private conversations usually take place in the hundreds of local languages spoken throughout the islands, virtually everyone can speak Indonesian, it’s the language of public discourse and is used in day-to-day life.”

“Commerce shaped the archipelago’s religion, as well as its language. From the seventh century, scholars travelling with Indian merchants began to spread the Hindu and Buddhist religions to the southern Sumatran kingdom of Sriwijaya, which went on to become the region’s first indigenous empire. The rulers of Sriwijaya grew rich enough on trade to build up armies and conquer neighbouring islands, spreading their religions across the water to Java (and recruiting vassal states as far away as southern Thailand and Cambodia). The plains and hills of central Java began to sprout glorious temples. Borobudur, the largest Buddhist temple in the world, was built in the ninth century. A rival dynasty answered with the breathtaking Prambanan complex, at which Hindus worshipped.

The next wave of traders were Muslims from South Asia, southern China and the Middle East. Because a shared religion greased the wheels of commerce — men could eat and pray together — the traders of the islands were among the first to adopt Islam. Over time, Javanese princes abandoned their Sanskrit names and began to take the title of Sultan. By the start of the sixteenth century, virtually all of Java’s rulers had converted; only Bali, directly to the east of Java, kept its Hindu courts and its caste system.

The people of the archipelago’s various fiefdoms did not think of themselves as part of any larger whole. The constant to-ing and fro-ing of merchants did, however, create an easy openness and acceptance of difference among ordinary people that persists to this day. It translates into an almost voluptuous hospitality, and makes these islands a deeply seductive place to explore. But the openness had a downside. It left Indonesia vulnerable to a European onslaught that changed the way that business was done.”

Colonialism

“When Constantinople fell to the Turks in the mid-fifteenth century, Christian businessmen could no longer easily buy from Muslim traders. By that time, spices were an essential ingredient in the larders of rich Europeans — spices preserved meat in an age before refrigeration, and they masked the taste when the flesh rotted. If Europeans wanted to maintain the supply of pepper, cloves and nutmeg, they would have to go directly to the islands where the spices were grown. That became possible in 1497, when the Portuguese adventurer Vasco da Gama sailed around the bottom of Africa and ‘discovered’ the sea route to the East.”

“According to Drake, ‘The Portugals … seeking to settle a tyrannous government over this people . .. cruelly murthered the king himselfe.’ Their plans backfired; the people of Ternate revolted and kicked the Portuguese out. Then other Europeans — Spaniards, British and Dutch — sailed in. As they competed to buy spices in Maluku and sell them in Europe, prices in Maluku rose and profits in Europe fell. The backers of these expensive expeditions were displeased. In 1602 the merchants of the Dutch republic decided to do something about it. They banded together to form the Dutch East India Company, the VOC.

The VOC was the world’s first joint stock company, with 1,800 initial investors. The hype around the company’s formation also gave rise to the world’s first stock exchange; early investors were selling off their stake in the company at a premium before the first ship had even sailed. The company’s directors, the ‘Gentlemen 17', were under huge pressure to deliver value to their shareholders. The first step towards greater profits was to corner the market for spices, eliminating competition from other Europeans. Their strategies were bribery, co-option and brute force.

In the seventeenth century as now, many families in northern Maluku would spend harvest season knocking clusters of pink buds off their clove trees. Children spread the buds on flat, round trays woven out of palm leaves, and adults hiked them up onto the nipa-palm roof of the cottage to dry. After a few days being toasted by the sun and caressed by the breeze, the buds shrivel and blacken into the round-topped nails that we toss into mulled wine. If you are sailing downwind from one of the smaller islands of Maluku in the July clove-drying season, you can sometimes smell Christmas before you can even see land.

The VOC wanted to buy up every single clove, but they couldn’t — almost every family in the northern Maluku islands owned trees, and they would rather sell them to Muslim traders than to these hairy white infidels. Then the Gentlemen 17 hit upon the idea of destroying the clove trees in all but one island, Ambon. They paid the local sultans handsomely to achieve this, beginning a tradition of bribing and co-opting local leaders that was to last for over three centuries.”

“The massacre of 1621 was led by Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the ambitious new Governor-General of the VOC, who had, as a young trader, witnessed the ambush and murder of his boss by the rulers of Banda twelve years earlier. He responded with genocide. His men killed anyone that they didn’t think would make a good slave, then exported the rest, reducing the islands’ population of 15,000 to a few hundred souls. The Gentlemen 17 told Coen off for his excessive use of force. They also paid him a bonus of 3,000 guilders.

The monopolies on cloves and nutmeg contributed disproportionately to the income of the VOC for many decades, but the cost of enforcing the monopolies was also high. The company got sucked into a series of expensive wars between squabbling Javanese princes, and was distracted, too, from its profitable trade with China. The VOC began to lose money; in 1798 it toppled into bankruptcy. By then, just four years short of its 200th anniversary, it employed 50,000 people and had a fleet of close to 150 trading ships and dozens of warships. The VOC was deemed Too Big To Fail; the Dutch crown took over the company’s possessions and its debts. It was to rule the colony of the Netherlands East Indies until the Japanese invaded 150 years later.

It was unclear, though, what exactly constituted the Netherlands East Indies. When the VOC crumbled, it had more or less stamped its authority on Java and the spice-producing islands of Maluku, it controlled the buzzing port of Makassar in Sulawesi and it had an outpost or two in Sumatra. Over the following century and a half, the Dutch crown spread its tentacles across a much wider area, but only gradually. Like the VOC before them, the Dutch colonists were more interested in profit than people; they were driven always by the wealth of the land. They cut down jungles in Sumatra to plant rubber and cocoa, they cleared scrub in Java, Sulawesi and other islands for coffee, tea, sugar and tobacco. They opened the earth to dig out tin and gold, they sank wells for oil. If an island or a region could produce nothing of interest to Dutch businessmen, the colonizers allowed local princelings to carry on setting the rules until well into the 1880s.”

“In the Javanese heartland, the new colony could consolidate power simply by buying off squabbling aristocrats and turning them into bureaucrats. Java’s grandees were allowed, still, to strut their stuff in front of their people, to go out in great processions under twirling golden umbrellas, to stamp their feet, play boss and collect taxes as they had always done. But when they got back to their palaces they had to turn those taxes over to the King of Holland, taking a salary in return.

As the Dutch bosses got more demanding the grandees grew more oppressive. From the 1830s, farmers who had always grown whatever they wanted — mostly food for their families — now had to reserve part of their land to grow cash crops which the government bought at fixed prices. They also had to spend a certain number of days working on commercial plantations, pumping profits into the coffers of the motherland. At one stage, half of the Netherlands’ national income was being siphoned in from Indonesia. At the beginning of the twentieth century, left-leaning politicians in the Netherlands forced through the ‘Ethical Policy.’ This recognized that the government of the Netherlands East Indies bore some responsibility for the welfare of the 34 million people who then lived nominally under Dutch rule. The colonists were obliged to start setting up schools for the children of the more privileged ‘natives’.”

“At the other extreme, in the jungles and swamps of ‘Dutch West Papua’, the colonial presence was even more notional. Papua was so far out of the fold that it was not even part of the nation that was handed over to Indonesian rule at independence. And in the eastern half of the island of Timor, the Dutch never set foot at all. The Portuguese had settled in East Timor after being ousted by the people of Terate in the sixteenth century. It remained a Portuguese enclave until 1975, when Lisbon abandoned it following a socialist revolution at home. Indonesia quickly sent in troops and ‘integrated’ East Timor as the nation’s twenty-seventh province.

Ironically, it was the well-meaning ethical policy that sowed the seeds of a true anti-colonial movement. For the first time, young ‘natives’ were allowed an education, and in a European language that gave them access to books and newspapers full of new ideas about sovereignty and social justice. For the first time, young men from across the archipelago came together in the major cities of Java, finding common cause against a common enemy. It was in the minds of these young men that the notion of Indonesia was conceived. It was made flesh in 1928, when a congress of youth groups from around the archipelago pledged, in the name of the ‘sons and daughters of Indonesia’, that they would fight for ‘One Homeland: Indonesia. One Nation: Indonesia. One Language: Indonesian.’”

“The time lag between those two dates, the iconic 1945 and the rarely mentioned 1949, was in fact the time it took the Dutch to admit that they had lost their colony.

Throughout the 1930s, with the encouragement of leftist parties in Holland, the Indonesian nationalist movement had grown. But it had also diverged. One group thought that the hammers and sickles of workers and peasants would drive the colonists away. The other believed that the Koran was the strongest weapon with which to confront the Dutch. They probably would have gone on squabbling indefinitely had the Second World War not intervened.

It was the Japanese occupation that really catalysed Indonesian independence. By dispatching the Dutch so swiftly, the Japanese shattered the myth of European superiority. Espousing ‘Asia for the Asians’, they encouraged Sukarno and other nationalists to prepare for self-rule within an Asian commonwealth. And because they anticipated an Allied invasion, they set about militarizing the Indonesians, training many young men in the use of arms and guerrilla warfare.

Then came Hiroshima, the Japanese surrender and the hasty declaration of independence. The first item on Indonesia’s long list of Etcs was simply to make sure that the former colonial power didn’t settle back in. The Australian, British and American troops who moved in to reclaim Indonesia from the defeated Japanese were not enthusiastic about handing the territory back to the Dutch. But in the absence of any transfer of sovereignty, the Allies all still recognized the Netherlands as the legitimate authority in the archipelago. And the Dutch wanted their colony back.

The nationalists disagreed about how to stop that happening. Many leaders favoured negotiating their way to independence. But Sukarno, outstandingly the most charismatic of the young leaders, was for fighting. He set about trying to make the islands ungovernable through insurrection. There followed four years of intermittent warfare and bad-tempered diplomacy.”

Independence

“They had to decide: should it be federal, or a unitary state with a strong central government? Hatta and Sjahrir, who were to become Vice President and Prime Minister respectively, were both from West Sumatra. They feared that in a centralized state, Javanese colonizers would simply replace the Dutch, imposing their will on other islands and cultures. Sukarno, later President, believed the nation’s disparate elements could be held together only by a strong centre. He invoked a mythical past in which the Sriwijaya and Majapahit empires ruled the whole area coloured Dutch on the imperial map. In fact, the pre-colonial empires were much more limited than Sukarno claimed, their sphere of influence established largely through a loose system of tribute. But by retrofitting history, Sukarno was able to justify reclaiming the empire from the colonizers, recasting it as a republic, and ruling it from a central court in Java.

Sukarno did not immediately get his way; he was denied a place at the table at which the formal transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands was negotiated because he was considered to have collaborated with the Japanese. When the Dutch offered self-rule for seven individual federated states within the United Republic of Indonesia, a commonwealth headed by the Dutch crown, Hatta and Sjahrir signed up. Within a year, however, support for a federation had imploded and Sukarno was firmly back on track towards a unitary state ruled from Jakarta.”

“The Netherlands had retrospectively excluded mineral-rich West Papua from the territory it handed over to the nationalists. It’s ours, said Sukarno, and went to the United Nations — a bold move for a newborn nation. Most countries at the UN sided with the flamboyant polyglot, though not enough to force UN action. That allowed Sukarno to keep up his nationalist belligerence. In 1961 he sent the paratroopers into Papua to begin the process of grabbing back what belonged, in the eyes of most Indonesians but few Papuans, to the republic.

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.”

Politicide

“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.”

“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.”

“Suharto’s flunkies set about pressing the ‘diversity’ into acceptable forms: local costumes were redesigned for modesty, traditional dances were shorn of their flirtations.

The Suharto version of diversity was on display for me on the second day of my new job at Reuters. ‘Come! We’ll show you the country!’ declared my Indonesian colleagues. They whisked me down a broad avenue lined with plate-glass office blocks, past several of the gargantuan socialist-realist statues erected by Sukarno to inspire the proletariat, and out to Mini Indonesia, a nationalist theme park designed by Suharto’s wife Tien. Soon we were swinging in a cable car above a huge artificial lake dotted with the islands shaped like the major land masses of Indonesia. Then we trekked dutifully around a few of the pavilions built to represent the nation’s hundreds of cultures. There was one pavilion per province, twenty-seven of them at the time, each an example of traditional architecture, each containing dioramas of people in traditional dress (though none of the mannequins topless as the women of Bali used to be, none of them wearing loincloths with severed head motifs typical of the warriors of Sumba). There was one house of worship for each of Indonesia’s approved faiths, too: churches Catholic and Protestant, a Hindu temple, a Buddhist stupa and, of course, a Mosque. There was no sign of the hundreds of folk religions that I later found bubbling alongside those sanctioned by Suharto.”

“Suharto stripped the provinces of any vestige of decision-making, appointing governors — many of them military men, several of them Javanese, all of them fiercely loyal — to do Jakarta’s bidding. He backed them up with two uniformed armies, both also largely Javanese. The first was of soldiers, who were given licence under a doctrine known as ‘dual function’ to meddle in civilian life down to the village level. The second was of civil servants. The distinction between the two was not always clear.

When I travelled in eastern Indonesia during the Suharto years, it was rare to find a civil servant who spoke the local language or had the dark skin and crinkly hair of the dry and neglected islands that nudge Australia. Most bureaucrats came from Java or other areas where accidents of colonial history had left a better-than-average educational system. The locals treated them like a separate species. During a trip to the tiny, arid island of Savu, just north of Australia, in 1991, I recorded the comment of a farmer I met: ‘Here we eat once a day, for the rest we drink palm sugar. Except for civil servants, they eat three times a day.’”

“There was another species, too, that local populations regarded as quite separate from themselves. These were Javanese ‘transmigrants’ — poor peasants who were paid by the government to shift from the overcrowded rural heartland to roomier islands. The programme actually dates from Dutch times when it was called ‘colonization’; it was judiciously renamed by Sukarno, who planned each year to send a million and a half Javanese, with their obedient, collectivist values, to other islands to homogenize the nation. Always better at vision than delivery, he managed to shift just one thousandth of his target number over fifteen years.

Suharto shared his predecessor’s hope that government-sponsored transmigration might foster national unity. He ramped up the programme, sending around 300,000 people a year from Java and Bali to other islands. Halfway into Suharto’s term, his minister of transmigration said: ‘By way of transmigration we will try to...integrate all the ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation. The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration and there will be one kind of man, Indonesian.’

If the minister believed that transmigrants were happily flirting in coffee shops with the local population, settling in to make truly ‘Indonesian’ babies, he was mistaken. In fact, they clumped together like sticky-rice in villages named after their hometowns.”

“Sidomulio, it was called — a Javanese name if ever I heard one. It was a tiny hamlet carved out of the jungle bordering a rubber plantation. There were a few creaky shops named after the great towns of Java — ’Solo Agricultural Products’, ‘Malang Barber’. They were all boarded up. Most of the houses had been stripped of their more valuable contents, padlocked and abandoned. Peeking in, I could see toys strewn across the floor, half-full glasses of tea left on tables. The only sign of life was a pack of hungry dogs.

An old man, Acehnese, appeared on a prehistoric motorcycle. I asked where all the villagers were. They had left because they were unwelcome, he replied. Acehnese rebels accused Jakarta of stealing its resources, and had launched a guerrilla war against the central government. But the people who bore the brunt of their ire were the unskilled landless peasants who had been sent here in a failed attempt to engineer national unity. The villagers of Sidomulio had left after their headman was stabbed to death in the middle of the night, presumably by guerrillas.

The victimization of transmigrants in Aceh was an extreme case of local dissatisfaction. But even where transmigrants rubbed along well enough with their neighbours, they carried on speaking their mother tongue, they cultivated the crops they grew back home, they set up the gamelan gong orchestras that mirrored those of Java or Bali. It was more transplantation than transmigration, hardly a homogenizing force.”

“Suharto knew that if he were to replace the turmoil of the Sukarno years with more stolid progress, he was going to have to improve health, education and agricultural practices. And he needed a platform to tell Indonesians, all Indonesians, about their part in building this glorious nation. Telly was going to be that platform, he decided. In the mid-1970s Indonesia launched a satellite with a footprint that covered the whole country (and dusted most of South East Asia as well). It was a bold move — the US and Canada were the only countries in the world with domestic satellites at that stage — and it was a move Indonesia could ill afford. But it provided a megaphone through which Suharto could proclaim the gospel of development to all of his people. It also signalled to the world that a door had been firmly closed on Sukarno-style chaos, and a new door opened on to modernity.

Once the satellite was launched, the government began handing out ‘public’ TV sets, 50,000 of them a year. They usually sat in the home of the headman; the whole village crammed in of an evening to watch together. There was only one channel on offer, TVRI. The airwaves over the outer islands were suddenly crammed with images of national development. And with ads. Many in Jakarta worried about that. It was one thing to advertise consumer goods to the privileged few who could afford televisions in the largely urban areas covered by the terrestrial stations. But it was potentially dangerous to show the Have-Nots in the villages and on distant islands the cornucopia of consumer goods that was on offer to the Haves in Java. Satellite TV was supposed to turn the tribes of the land into Indonesians, not to turn them into an army of disgruntled Want-But-Never-Could-Haves.

In 1981 Suharto banned advertising on telly ‘to avoid detrimental effects which do not promote the spirit of development’. That freed up more programming time for his own messages. More relentlessly than ever, TVRI’s crashingly dull broadcasts promoted the spirit of family planning, dutiful citizenship and pride in the nation’s glorious growth. Many an earnest researcher ran regression analyses showing that family planning messaging on television was especially successful, because the birth rate fell soon after a village got a public TV set. I was not the only person to suggest that watching television might simply provide something to do in the evenings other than make babies.

Then, in 1989, TVRI’s monopoly was broken. Suharto handed out licences for private stations first to his son Bambang, then, in quick succession, to his cousin Sudwikatmono and his daughter Tutut. Suharto allowed his family to import soap operas from Latin America, to sprinkle them liberally with advertisements, to drop any pretence that TV might have a social purpose.”

“Suharto grew up as poor as the next villager, dropping out of junior high school and giving up a job in a bank because he fell off his bicycle and ripped his only set of presentable clothes. He joined the army, rose through the ranks, grabbed power. But he always cared deeply about improving life for the Javanese farmer, and once he was on the throne, he set about doing that with conviction. Though he put generals in charge of most aspects of Indonesian life, Suharto had the good sense to put the economy into the hands of a small clique of competent and cautious economists collectively known as the ‘Berkeley mafia’ because many of them had studied in California with sponsorship from the Ford Foundation. They first pushed through policies that got agriculture back on its feet. The country went from being the world’s biggest importer of rice to being a net exporter.

Having watched South Korea and other countries grow rich by helping private companies make things other countries wanted to buy, the Berkeley mafia welcomed foreign investors and promoted manufacturing for export. The economy boomed. The proportion of kids in school doubled, access to basic health services rocketed.”

“In his autobiography, the serving president mentioned almost casually that he had, a couple of years earlier, ordered his defence minister to kill over 2,000 common criminals without trial. ‘Shock therapy’, Suharto called it.”

Post-Suharto

“In a delightfully circular replay of colonial history, it was a clove monopoly that turned the public spotlight most firmly on to the rot at the heart of Suharto’s state.

The biggest consumer of Indonesia’s cloves nowadays are Indonesia’s smokers, who like their cigarettes scented with the spice, not least because it doubles as an anesthetic and smoothes the passage of toxins into the lungs. The country smokes 223 billion clove cigarettes, or kreteks, every year, thirteen times more than ordinary ‘white’ cigarettes. Many kreteks are still hand-rolled, some of them in small sheds cooled only by ceiling fans too lazy to send tobacco scraps flying, some in jarringly modern factories in which uniformed women work in air-conditioned spotlessness. Paid a bonus for productivity, they roll so quickly that viewing the factory floor from above feels like watching a speeded-up film.

Indonesia produces nearly 80 per cent of the world’s cloves, and its cigarette industry translates most of them into the thick, languorous smoke that hangs over virtually every conversation about politics, family affairs or the price of rice or rubber in rural Indonesia. This did not escape the attention of the Suharto family. The President’s youngest son Tommy decided to try a replay of the strategy that made the VOC rich three centuries earlier: a clove monopoly. Clove trees are moody as teenagers, coming out with smilingly generous crops one year, then sulking through periods of low productivity that last an agonizingly unpredictable length of time. Tommy claimed his enforced, fixed-price purchase of all the country’s cloves was a way of stabilizing prices for farmers. Then he sold them on at three times what he paid for them.

Tommy doubtless thought he could get away with this because the cigarette firms were owned by a handful of toweringly rich ethnic Chinese families. The ethnic Chinese walk a knife-edge in modern Indonesia. They are assumed to be universally wealthy and are seen by many as leeches, but they provide the capital and business skills that keep the economy growing. Their wealth is tolerated as long as they stay out of politics, and they usually try to avoid controversy. This time, however, they refused to do as they were told. Many of the factories had huge stockpiles of cloves; they simply didn’t buy from Tommy. In the end, at the President’s command, Indonesian taxpayers bailed out Tommy Suharto.

The kretek affair uncorked resentment that had been brewing away, building pressure. Striking at kreteks in Indonesia is like messing with tea in Britain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Bugs 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 Bugs 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.’”

“In the jockeying for power that had been going on since the fall of Suharto, Indonesians killed one another in the name of religion, and the authorities did nothing.

After Gus Dur was impeached, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri took over as president. She shared her father’s strong belief in national unity, but not his charisma; she had the well-upholstered look common to Ibu-Ibu in the Suharto era, and was famously aloof. Though hers was a colourless presidency, she didn’t needle the army in the same way as her predecessor had. Prodded into action by a bomb in a Bali nightclub that killed over 200 people in 2002, she began to take more serious action against Islamic extremism. The country gradually settled down.

In 2004 Indonesia held its first direct presidential election; until then, presidents had been chosen by the legislature. In over half a million polling stations nationwide, voters stuck a nail through a ballot paper to indicate their choice. One of the polling stations was directly outside my house in central Jakarta. From dawn when the volunteers, officials and ballot boxes arrived until the final tally in the early evening, the air was electric with excitement. The poll was as well organized as anything I’ve ever seen in Indonesia, and it made me rather emotional. Five years earlier, Jakarta was in flames and the economy was pulverized. Since then Indonesians had been traumatized by the loss of East Timor and the army-sponsored carnage that followed, they had watched civil war unfold in Maluku and witnessed bloody rebellions in Aceh and Papua, they had impeached and replaced a president, and they were still materially a lot worse off than they had been before 1997. But 140 million voters went peacefully off to the polls on a single day and, with barely an incident, elected a new president. It was quite an achievement.

Given a choice for the first time ever, Indonesians chose a Suharto-era general uniformly known as SBY, representing a party that had only existed for four years.”

“Since SBY has been in power, the economy has grown by 5.7 per cent a year on average. That’s close to five times more than the UK and nearly four times the US rate over the same period; it left Indonesians three times richer than they had been when I first lived in the country.”

Jakarta

“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 every 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.”

“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!’, ‘00000, 00000, SAY-ur…!’”

The East

‘Violence is just part of life here.’

He was not the first to make this observation. The one lonely administrator sent to establish a Dutch foothold on Sumba in the 1870s reported back to his bosses in the colonial capital of Batavia that ‘there is no other rule than that of the strongest’. Headhunting and slave raids, he said, had ‘reduced the value of a human life to a very low level, often well below that of a horse’. The Dutch didn’t consolidate their hold on Sumba until 1913, after a bloody two-year fight against the famous headhunter Won Kaka. He had provoked the Dutch by decapitating soldiers and hanging their scalps with those of his other enemies on his clan’s skull tree.

After the Dutch soldiers came Protestant missionaries. In the crowded islands of Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi, most Indonesians are Muslim. But out here in these eastern villages, I didn’t see a single jilbab. The people of Sumba are nominally Christian, though on previous visits I had found that many still cleaved to the ancient Marapu religion, guided more by what they read in the entrails of a chicken than by what they read in the Bible.”

“The chicken and I found the Waikabubak post office crowded. It was payment day for the families with poverty cards. The key to Indonesia’s nascent social security system, these cards provide access to subsidized rice, free medical care and cash payments. They are highly prized, and because of a little payment here or a small favour there, do not always go to the poorest families.”

“Violence seems to be woven into the fabric of this island, despite the best efforts of the soldiers, missionaries and bureaucrats who have trickled through since Dutch times. It’s one of the reasons the people of Sumba still cling to their fortified hilltop villages; inconvenient for the women who have to spend three or four hours a day fetching water up from the valleys below, but more defendable than villages on the plains. To this day Loli can’t stand Weyewa, Lamboya hates Ede, nobody likes Kodi. The smallest event can spark a conflict, in 1998 dozens were hacked to death and hundreds displaced when a complaint about favouritism in the civil service exams exploded into a full-blown clan war. Nowadays the outbursts are smaller but regular. As I headed up to Kodi on my motorbike one day, I got a text from Doctor Fajar: ‘5 corpses in Kodi. Because of elopement, apparently. Watch out for a war.’”

“I planned to take the monthly Pelni ferry from Sumba’s eastern port of Waingapu across to tiny Savu. As far away as Waikabubak, a four-hour drive across Sumba on a road first built by Japanese troops during the occupation, people knew when the ferry was due. My West Sumba friends booked me into a share-taxi, making sure I would get to the boat on time.

But when we arrived at the port, there was no sign of the ship. ‘Lagi doking, Bu,’ the guard said amiably — it’s in dry dock for its annual repairs. ‘But it will be back in service next month.’”

“Anton, the ojek driver, told me that his real interest was animal husbandry. He was almost ashamed to be offering lifts for money. ‘It’s not that I’m stupid, Miss, or lazy. I graduated from high school. But look around. I can’t afford to go to college, and what is there to do here except grow rice? It’s not like over there, in Java …’

Java, that mythical Other Country whose values Suharto had tried to etch across the nation. I asked Anton if he had ever been there. ‘What, to Java? Oh no …” His tone was of awed disbelief, as if I’d asked if he had ever been to St Peter’s in Rome. Later, though, he mentioned that two of his brothers were working in Java. Couldn’t he go and live with them, go to college, pay his way by driving an ojek over there, just like he’s doing now? ‘But things are different there, Miss. It’s not like here.’ He swerved to avoid a huge bite-mark taken out of the road by a landslide, then laughed. ‘You see, you’d never have something like that in Java!’ Anton was worried, too, that he wouldn’t get into college ‘over there’, that he was too much of a hick. I gave him the standard ‘you’ll never. know until you try / the worst that can happen is that you come back to doing what you are doing now’ pep talk.

For several months, Anton continued to send me the occasional ‘what’s up’ message, and I’d always reply. Then, nearly a year later, I got a surprise: ‘Hello Miss, where are you now? I’m in Surabaya.’ As it happened, the text came in as I was waiting for a flight to Surabaya, Java’s second largest city. We met for a coffee the following evening.

Anton was in college, studying to become a vet. ‘I thought about what you said, and thought yes, she’s right. I can’t succeed unless I give it a go.’ Java turned out not to be as impossibly alien as he had feared. He still felt like a bit of a country bumpkin, he said, but there were other students from Flores who were showing him the ropes.”

Indonesia Globally

“There’s no doubt that Indonesia punches below its weight on the world stage. Just twenty-two athletes went from Indonesia to the Olympic Games in London in 2012 — not even one per ten million Indonesians. Though Indonesian soldiers were once popular as UN peacekeepers, very few Indonesians have made it to the top echelons of international organizations and none has ever headed one. No Indonesian has ever won a Nobel Prize.* The country had a higher profile when Sukarno (who spoke nine languages) roamed the world denouncing imperialism and wagged his finger at interfering neigh-bours. But Suharto, ever the yin to Sukarno’s yang, spoke little English and was uncomfortable in the international arena. He came out of his shell with his immediate neighbours; he was the driving force behind the establishment of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, a sort of mutual support group for the not-very-democratic leaders of the region. But for three decades Suharto kept a low profile internationally, and Indonesians themselves did nothing to raise it.

Remarkably few Indonesians have chosen to settle in other countries. They do travel as contract labourers: in 2012, four million Indonesians trekked overseas to clean other people’s loos, weed their plantations and build their hotels, mostly in Saudi Arabia and Malaysia. But almost all of these people are on ‘package deal’ schemes; they are sent out in batches by government-approved agents and will be brought home when their contracts are up. This is not the sort of migration of which a diaspora is made, and it is a diaspora that spreads a country’s influence overseas.”

“I went back to my nationalist navel-gazing: why do so few Indonesians live overseas? One reason is that having studied or worked abroad carries great kudos in Indonesia; the social status and earning power it brings act as a magnet, pulling people home. But there’s another reason too, suggested by Luwi as he dolloped shrimp chilli on his omelette and gave a contented wave at our impromptu midnight feast: ‘How could you live without all this?’

Even Indonesians who are less contented with their lot, young men such as Anton the ojek driver, don’t need to go overseas to look for a better life. Why bother, when there are plenty of places within your own country that provide opportunities almost as foreign? By drifting to another island, you can unlace the stays of place and clan, you can learn new dances and try new foods, without having to denude yourself completely.”

Food

“On the streets and in hole-in-the-wall restaurants, food is provided by a handful of itinerant tribes who have cooked their way across the nation. Most famously, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra who gave us nasi Padang, the cuisine named after their provincial capital.

The Minangkabau gave us the word most Indonesians use to describe migration: merantau. Merantau means to travel abroad to seek one’s fortune. It’s something Minangkabau men have always done. Until recently, several generations used to live together in large wooden houses whose walls slope outwards slightly, topped with a roof which sweeps up in a series of dramatic curves, like nested buffalo horns. These houses belong to women among the matrilineal Minangkabau. Young boys could live with their mother, but they had to move out when they grew up. After leaving mum’s house, a young man had nowhere to go until he married and could move into his wife’s house. The solution: to seek his fortune outside of West Sumatra.

The West Sumatrans conquered the nation one restaurant at a time, just as McDonald’s conquered the United States, though without a corporation siphoning profits out of the pockets of hard-working family restaurateurs.

Padang restaurants are signalled by a truncated version of the buffalo-horn roof, often sticking incongruously out from a row of flat fronted shop-houses selling mobile phones or motorcycle parts. If there’s no space for a curve of corrugated zinc, then they will at least have a Minang house logo painted on the window. The symbol is universally distributed across the nation, as recognizable as the Golden Arches to fast-food fans.

Padang restaurants have a subculture of their own. The cooking starts around dawn. By mid-morning, vats of food sit along the bottom shelf of the shop window. There will always be rendang, a stew of tough beef simmered for several hours with red chillies and coconut milk, until the liquid, spices and meat amalgamate into a stringy-tender whole. There will always be wilted cassava leaves or chunks of giant jackfruit swimming in a rich, coconutty sauce. But there will be dozens of other dishes too, many of them already portioned out onto small saucers which are stacked in pyramids on shelves above the vats.”

“These carts are ingeniously modified to suit most needs. Drawers, sliding shelves, built-in ice chests, on-board charcoal braziers or gas bottles, fold-out benches, pop-up umbrellas and pull-out awnings; each ambulant vendor has found his own way to minimize effort, maximize space and pull in the punters.”

“The es kelapa boys are among the best-travelled Indonesians I know. They drift from island to island, from small town to small town. ‘It never ceases to amaze me,’ said one young Sasak man. ‘There are coconuts all around, but the locals never think to sell them. Then one of us comes along, and we do a good business for two or three months. Finally, three or four locals decide that they can do it too, and then the market is saturated and we move on somewhere else.’ Doesn’t that mean that the window for itinerant sellers was getting smaller and smaller? ‘Not at all. It’s hard work, standing out here in the sun ten hours a day. The locals are too lazy to keep it going for long. They start selling only in the cool of the morning, or in the evening, but that’s not when people are thirsty for es kelapa. So they start losing money, and they drop out. Then there’s no es kelapa until another Sasak moves in.’

There are other tribal monopolies too. Barber shops across the nation are run by people from Madura, while women from Java have a lock on the sale of jamu, traditional medicine cooked up daily from roots and herbs. Boats are built by the Bugs of South Sulawesi; their schooners ruled the waves in both trading and piracy long before the Europeans arrived, and long afterwards too. Their close neighbours the Makassarese do well as traders, while the people of the once-proud sultanate of Buton, a hop across on the south-eastern limb of the truncated octopus that is Sulawesi, have always been traders of dried fish. The merantau tradition provides a sort of consistency across Indonesia. Anywhere I go, I will find nasi Padang and jamu Jawa, es kelapa NTB and a Maduran barber. Indeed, you could argue that the peculiarly predictable mix of these different ethnic specialities is the essence of Indonesia: ‘Unity in Diversity’ in action.’”

Language

“It’s a funny one, Indonesian. Like many languages that evolved principally to ease negotiation in polyglot marketplaces, trading Malay/Indonesian is grammatically very simple. Instead of fussing with plurals, Indonesian just doubles up the noun. Anak: child; anak anak (often written anak2): children. There are no tenses; Indonesians just stick time words into the sentence to indicate past, present or future. ‘I pay you yesterday,’ or ‘I pay you tomorrow.’ It’s also a very vague language, besok ‘tomorrow’ – can mean the day after today, but it can also mean some unspecified time in the not-too-distant future.

The early nationalists chose Malay as the common language for the yet-to-be-created nation because it was easy to learn and already widely spoken, at least in the commercial realm. But there was also a more overtly political reason: it was not Javanese.

Most of the educated nationalists were Javanese speakers, and it would have been easy for them to adopt their mother tongue as the language for the new nation. It is a credit to them that they did not. Javanese is fiendishly complex, had it become the national language, Indonesians from other islands would have been at a permanent disadvantage. Javanese is also fiercely hierarchical; there are whole different vocabularies for talking to superiors and to inferiors. Sukarno and his cohort were at least rhetorically egalitarian; they did not want to entrench the feudalism which runs deeply through the culture of Java by spreading a class-conscious language nationwide. Sukarno delighted in being addressed as Bung, ‘brother’. The paternalist Suharto, on the other hand, wanted to be called Bapak, ‘father’.

Since independence, all schools have taught in Indonesian. Within a generation, almost all Indonesians spoke the national language; local languages persisted at home and crept into the marketplace, but I rarely heard them used in the public realm in either of my previous incarnations in Indonesia. That has changed, possibly because of a political decentralization which has reduced the number of outsiders in the civil service and puffed up local pride.”

The Provinces

“Mama Lina’s village is one of the most isolated in Adonara, sitting high on the slopes of the volcano. A concrete path leaps straight up the side of the volcano from the main road, the incline so steep that motorbike passengers have to press themselves up against the driver to avoid sliding off backwards. Since there was just one motorbike taxi hanging around at the bottom of the path, Mama Lina sent me on ahead. Where the concrete path came to an abrupt full stop and I was unceremoniously unloaded from the bike, a clutch of women sat gossiping. They stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me with wide eyes. I greeted them cheerily, commenting on the gathering rain clouds. It was as though a dog had just trotted up and started chatting about the weather. They continued to stare, unable to muster a response. Then Mama Lina arrived on another bike; she explained me with a curt ‘My friend. She’ll be staying for a while’ and bustled her trophy guest off home with no further explanation, leaving them speechless still.

We scrambled as quickly as we could up a path that wound between wooden houses, but the clouds were ahead of us; the first, fat raindrops plopped down and we sought refuge with Lina’s in-laws. Within minutes the rain was drumming down so hard that we had to forgo the niceties of introductions. Mama Lina’s sister-in-law made coffee while Lina and I collected the rainwater that now gushed from the corrugated tin roof in determined rivulets. We’d position cooking pots under one or other of the individual streams, then reposition them as the wind blew the water out sideways. “Look, that stream’s bigger,” pointed out the sister-in-law, and we would shift one of the pots. ‘Over here, over here.’ More shifting. It seemed a haphazard way of collecting water in a mountainside village that had no well. By the time it stopped raining it was getting dark. ‘Sorry, no lights,” Mama Lina had repeated, and we slip-slid the rest of the way to her house through the mud by the light of my torch.

I was a little surprised, then, to see a satellite dish next to a papaya tree in the garden, and a TV in the inner sanctum of the house. The village, it turned out, had a communal generator. By common consent this was prodded into life every evening at an hour set by TV programming executives in Jakarta, a whole time zone away. As the lights came on and the television sprang to life, random neighbours would wander into Mama Lina’s house, spread palm-weave tikar mats on the floor and flop down with the family for an act of collective worship at the altar of the sinetron.”

“Though plants seemed to spring out of the ground with no husbanding at all, many Indonesians, especially in the eastern islands, seem to feel that green vegetables are not real food. The result is that fertile Indonesia has astoundingly high levels of malnutrition. According to the Ministry of Health, more than a quarter of children under five in Indonesia are anemic and 11.5 million Indonesian kids of that age – well over a third of the total nationwide – are significantly shorter than they should be for their age.”

“When Malaysia finally got shot of Britain in 1957, the country was on a par economically with Indonesia, which had by then been independent for over a decade. By 2011 Malaysia earned over three times more per person than Indonesia. And – here’s where Malaysia’s perceived superiority creeps into the consciousness of people even in the remotest parts of Indonesia – Malaysians are spending lots of that extra cash importing people like Mama Lina from deepest Adonara to sweep floors and tap rubber. Between 2006 and 2012 an annual average of 150,000 Indonesians travelled to Malaysia to work on official government-registered programmes, and many thousands more did so illegally. ‘It’s just embarrassing,’ I would hear over and over, sometimes from people who were living on money sent back from relatives in Malaysia.”

“These women speak Butonese at home, and when they sally forth in their jillabs to sell salt-fish and cream biscuits to the people of Adonara, they use Indonesian. In lots of ways, they are emblematic of what it means to be Indonesian. And yet when they were speculating about my nose, they wondered if I was Western or Javanese. To these ladies who live not all that far from the geographical centre of the nation, Java-foreign was every bit as foreign as Western-foreign. The concept of ‘Indonesian’ was not even in play.”

“These days, it’s perfectly plausible that the Director of Fish Resources, sitting in Jakarta, had no idea at all what ‘local people’ do, especially in Lembata where you can only make a phone call by holding the trunk of a particularly tall cashew tree at the top of the village which seems to act as a natural antenna.

The chains of command so carefully wrought by Suharto – chains that passed the will of the capital’s bureaucrats down to the villages and sucked resources and information back to the centre – have, during The Reformation, been shattered. And the shattering is deliberate. It was largely the idea of President Habibie, who stepped into Suharto’s shoes when the Old Man threw in the towel in 1998. Decentralization was a reaction to Indonesia’s loss of East Timor.

Blindsided by Jakarta’s crushing defeat, Habibie was forced to wonder what implications East Timor’s referendum on independence might have for the rest of the country. Lots of other regions felt they had been slighted by the Suharto oligarchy. In islands that were made of nickel and copper, that sat above pools of oil and gas, or that were once covered in precious hardwoods, the universal rhetoric was that Jakarta was sucking riches out from under local feet, and was using the treasure to develop Java. Yes, nearly 60 per cent of the population is squeezed into the single island of Java, but that still left a hundred million citizens in other islands. To add insult to injury, Jakarta had for years sent Javanese governors and Javanese troops to stamp on any sign of protest at this injustice.

Habibie, himself from the eastern island of Sulawesi, knew that Java could not continue to dominate the other 13,465 islands so completely if the nation was to survive in a more democratic form. That meant more power to the provinces.

But there was the dilemma: several provinces, including oil-rich Aceh in Indonesia’s far west and mineral-rich Papua in its far east, were so cross that they might just try to follow East Timor’s example and cut loose from Indonesia entirely. Better cut the provinces out of it and give power directly to the districts, Habibie reasoned. Then no single district would be strong enough to make a break for it.

Astoundingly, he made this decentralization happen. At a stroke, in the space of just eighteen months, the world’s fourth most populous nation and one of its most centralized burst apart to become one of its most decentralized. The centre still takes care of defence, fiscal policy, foreign relations, religious affairs, justice and planning. But everything else – health, education, investment policy, fisheries and a whole lot more – was handed over to close to 300 district ‘governments’, whose only experience of governing had, until then, been to follow orders from Jakarta.

As regional Big Men began to realize what this meant, they lobbied for more districts. The result is like watching one of those glorious fireworks that blossom into a giant flower, and then burst again, right and left, into a series of smaller golden showers. In fact Indonesians even use the word ‘blossoming’, pemekaran, to describe the administrative shattering of the nation. Since Suharto resigned, the country has added another ten provinces; by the time I finished my wanderings in Indonesia in late 2012, the number of districts had increased by 70 per cent, blossoming to 509.”

“It was from here, two decades ago, that I had given up waiting for a ‘scheduled’ ferry that never came and persuaded the captain of a Bugs cargo schooner to take me across to Flores. I slept on the deck of this majestic wooden boat, regularly misted with spray like lettuce in a posh greengrocers, startled awake every now and then by the slap of a flying fish on deck, reassured by the crackling glow of the crew’s kreteks. When we arrived, the captain said he had no landing permit. I jumped overboard, and kicked my way ashore, glad of the lifesaving classes that had taught me to swim while holding packages above the waterline. When I reached the beach, I hailed a passing minibus with seaweed still sticking to my clothes.”

“Savu is in the process of a massive change. From virtually nothing just a few years ago, the local government now controls a budget of over US$30 million a year. Because it earned only US$29,000 in revenues and royalties on its own natural resources in 2012, 96 per cent of the funding comes straight from Jakarta’s ‘equalization funds.’ There’s a lot of equalizing to do. At the other end of the wealth spectrum from Savu stands the coal-rich district of Kutai Kartanegara in East Kalimantan, which made US$429 million, over 14,000 times more than Savu. As a consequence, less than 2 per cent of its income comes from Jakarta.”

“I looked around at my fellow passengers. I had expected a dozen hardy souls, but the deck was packed; there must have been close to 300 people on board. Every square inch of deck space was taken up. People were hunkered down in fortresses built of boxes of electronics, rice sacks, stacks of eggs in square cardboard trays. There was no eye contact; the whole scene bristled with hostility. I made for a mouse-hole of about two foot by three foot behind a sack of garlic, but was warned off by a growling neighbour. The only empty space seemed to be on top of a warm, humming freezer. There, I unrolled my sleeping mat. Immediately, a terrier of a woman bore down, menacing me with a giant wooden spoon. One of the crew directed me back to the mouse-hole, to the fury of the growling neighbour.

Saumlaki, where I was headed, was five days away.

To my horror, I found that the territorial wars were reignited almost every time the ship stopped. As the harbour master had said, Perintis ships are cargo ships, and cargo is carried under decks. That meant that in most ports we pulled in at, in the blazing sunshine of midday or the dead of night, the tarpaulin that covered us was rolled back, the box fortresses were deconstructed and sleeping mats rolled up, the passengers clambered down. a plank onto the pier, and the whole deck of the ship was lifted up so that it could disgorge its contents.

The unloading stops ranged in length from a couple of hours to a whole day. But the instant the first section of deck went back down, the battle for territory began. Passengers old and new swarmed on board to occupy prize spots, oblivious to the sections of deck still swinging from ropes at neck height.”

“In terms of transport time, the nearest hospital was in Kupang, the capital of NTT, a day and a half away. But this frail old lady couldn’t go there, because Liran is in Maluku province, so her health card, which gives her cheaper treatment, wasn’t valid in Kupang. So she sat stoically for three days and three nights to get to hospital in Saumlaki. Even there, she would have to pay a bribe to be seen. Now that Southwest Maluku has gone its own way as a district, the hospital in Saumlaki was no longer supposed to accept health cards from Liran.

If she were to do things by the book, this sick seventy-something-year-old would have to travel another three days to the provincial capital of Ambon. ‘But if you know people from the old days, you can usually fix it, the old lady said.”

“During the reading of the administrative notices, the church warden announced that there was a new sasi, a taboo, on collecting sea slugs, while the sasi on Pak Okto’s mango tree was lifted. Sasi (or pomali further south in NTT) works as a traditional form of resource management. Most often, the taboo is declared by village elders to prevent overfishing in the breeding season or to husband communal resources. Sometimes villagers who wanted their own crops protected from theft would slip the elders a small fee to declare a taboo.”

Education and Bureaucracy

“Of 65 countries included in the PISA international tests for fifteen-year-olds in 2012, Indonesia came 60th in reading and 64th in maths and science, a performance more dismal even than three years previously. Just 0.3 per cent of Indonesian students made it past the advanced benchmark in that maths test. Not one of the universities in the world’s fourth most populous nation is rated as among the 100 best in Asia.

The dismal results are a result of dismal teaching, and that is in turn the result of patronage. A teaching job is the easiest way to squeeze into the coveted beige uniform of the civil servant; local politicians give jobs in schools to their political supporters all the time. That means the schools are rammed with people whose goal is to be a bureaucrat, not an educator. And they behave just like other bureaucrats in Indonesia: they see working hours as a movable feast and take time off more or less at will.”

“Some of the obsession with civil service jobs may be a hangover from the chaos and hyperinflation of the mid-1960s. Salaries were worthless across the board, but government jobs at least came with something useful: rations of rice, cooking oil and sugar. At a time when poor Indonesians wore sackcloth in the marketplace, there was fabric, too, for uniforms. Perhaps that contributed to the uniform-mania that persists to this day. Indonesians love uniforms of every type. Civil servants, even ministers and bupatis, wear uniforms every day. Most central government agencies allow formal batik shirts on Fridays, and some local governments require a weekly showing of the traditional textiles of the region.”

“A small fraction of jobs in the bureaucracy are awarded based on competitive exams. But most of the jobs that are not given out to political supporters get sold. The most expensive jobs are in the ‘wet’ industries, the ones awash in money for proyek or services. Public Works, for example, and the Ministry of Religion, which has a monopoly on organizing the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. But even relatively ‘dry’ ministries such as health can charge two years’ base salary under the table for an entry-level job. The result is a lot of incompetent bureaucrats. The minister in charge of the ‘state apparatus’ recently said that 95 per cent of Indonesia’s 4.7 million civil servants didn’t have the skills they needed to do their jobs.

Indonesians complain about this system all the time. Yet, in the newer districts of Indonesia at any rate, they do nothing about it because it delivers to so many people, I can’t think of a single family I stayed with anywhere in Indonesia who was separated from the bureaucracy by more than two degrees of kinship.”

More Travels

“I would stay in a guest house; my host would not call other villagers in at six o’clock in the morning to watch me drinking ‘empty coffee’. Coffee without sugar.”

“You’re not allowed to carry durian on planes in Indonesia, or take them into posh hotels, because their methane smell oozes through the air-conditioning system into every corner.”

“Yes, the volcanoes destroy things. But the ash they cough out also makes these islands some of the most fertile on the planet. Indonesia strings together 127 active volcanoes; down one side of Sumatra, the giant island that guards Indonesia’s western flank, and along the whole spine of neighbouring Java, volcanoes spur rice fields to extraordinary bounty. Many farmers manage three rice crops a year, against just one in less fertile regions, and they produce an abundance of fruit and vegetables too. The fire-mountains bypass Borneo, taking the southern route and sweeping up in a great arc through the hundreds of small islands that make up Maluku, and pimpling the northern tip of Sulawesi as well. It is in these eastern regions, and especially in the smaller islands such as the Bandas and Ternate where sea breezes waft constantly over the volcanoes’ slopes, that the ash gives life to spices.”

“In terms of land mass, Indonesia is the fifteenth biggest country in the world. But it is among the world’s top three producers of palm oil, rubber, rice, coffee, cocoa, coconuts, cassava, green beans and papayas, as well as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and vanilla. It’s also in the world’s top ten for tea, tobacco, maize and groundnuts, together with avocados, bananas, cabbages, cashews, chilli, cucumbers, ginger, pineapples, mangoes, sweet potatoes and the humble pumpkin. It’s a top-ten producer of forestry products, and pulls more fish out of its seas and waterways than any country except China.

And there’s another layer of bounty, under the crust. Indonesia sits above huge chambers of natural gas. The Grasberg mine in Papua has more known gold reserves than anywhere else on the planet, and it’s not even a gold mine; its day job is to produce copper. Indonesia is the world’s second largest producer of tin and coal, after China, and it’s by far the biggest exporter of both minerals. It produces bauxite (for aluminium) and lots of nickel — again, it’s already the world’s number-two producer (after Russia, this time) and number-one exporter.”

“There’s no doubt that Indonesia’s infrastructure is in a parlous state. It’s the largest country in the world to consist entirely of islands, yet the World Economic Forum ranked it 104 out of 139 countries for its port infrastructure; even landlocked countries such as Zimbabwe, Switzerland and Botswana reported better access to ports. It did nearly as badly on roads, air transport and electricity.*

It’s hamstrung in part by decentralization, which has created a war of egos. Individual districts can’t afford huge investments in things like ports or railways, so they need to club together. But no bupati wants to put his own district’s money on the table for a port which provides jobs and bragging rights for some other district, and provincial governors can’t bribe them to, because they’ve got so little cash of their own to bring to the table.

In its airily vague economic Master Plan, the central government dreams that half of the money Indonesia needs to pour into infrastructure over the next decade — some 90 billion dollars’ worth — will come from private investors, despite a dodgy legal system, capricious export rules and price-limits that bring in votes for politicians but make it nearly impossible for companies to turn a profit. Over the course of my travels in Indonesia, I spent hundreds of hours burning up fuel in intercity minibuses, not getting from A to B, but just driving around town for an hour or two before departure, looking for extra passengers. With subsidized petrol then at just 4,500 rupiah a litre, bus drivers didn’t have to worry too much that they’d burn up more in fuel than they’d make in extra fares.

Households pay less for their electricity than it costs to generate it. In places with twenty-four-hour electricity, Indonesians seem to leave the TV on permanently and the lights on all night, if not in the bedroom itself, then certainly in the sitting room and on the veranda. The fear of ghosts outweighs the price of electricity.

Power is subsidized for domestic consumers, not for industry, so the money the government shells out does little to create jobs or stimulate the economy. Through energy subsidies, the government is channelling a fifth of its total spending into the pockets of middle-class people with cars, air-conditioners and microwaves. Every mention of a price hike brings people out onto the streets and revives the ghosts of 1998, when a demo about rising fuel prices spiralled into the nationwide protests that brought down Suharto. What private company would step into that market?

Private companies are right to be wary. At least since the days of the Dutch VOC traders, the political Powers That Be have stuck their oar into every aspect of production and trade in these islands.”

“”All you have to do to make money in Indonesia is to figure out what no one else is doing,’ Ade said. It made me think of how often I had noticed copy-cat businesses in smaller Indonesian towns. I was caught out by it early on. In Waikabubak, for example, every third shop prints photos. Even the little tailor opposite the market has a sideline in photo printing. This made me lazy; having promised to print photos and send them to people before I left Waikabubak, I thought: I’ll do it in the next town I go to. But the next town is all pharmacies — there’s not a single photo printer. Here it’s wall-to-wall perfume sellers, there it’s all hair salons. When I commented that I thought his approach unusual in small-town Indonesia, Ade agreed. ‘People see a business doing well, and they just copy it,’ said Ade. The concept of market saturation is not well understood.’”

“The sculptor’s brother Luwi extracted me and bundled me off downstairs to inspect a cupcake stall run by another friend, Nungky. He bought three cupcakes for 45,000 rupiah. Everywhere in rural Indonesia, a cake costs 1,000. None of them is piled up with pink and purple swirls of buttery icing like these ones; none is sprinkled with little silver sugar-stars. But still, if he were in the States and paid the same amount compared to average wages, Luwi would have just shelled out US$400 for three cupcakes.”

Aceh

“I bought a couple of silk scarves that I could use to cover my head with: jilbabs are compulsory for Muslim women in fiercely religious Aceh, though non-Muslims didn’t technically have to wear them.”

“The dominant colours by far were the red and black of Partai Aceh, Indonesia’s first legal regional party. Partai Aceh was the political offshoot of Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the Free Aceh Movement or GAM. This was hard for me to take in; the previous time I had visited Aceh, in 1991, GAM leaders were sitting in exile in Sweden, prodding along what they said was a fight to the death against the Indonesian state. Now these same men wanted to be elected officials of that state.

Free Aceh was a separatist movement begun (under a series of different names) by an Acehnese businessman called Hasan di Tiro, who had been based in the US for many years. In 1976 he returned to Indonesia and declared himself head of an independent Aceh. He appointed a full cabinet of ministers, including many of his friends and relatives. In his memoirs he describes reading Nietzsche, listening to classical music and writing patriotic plays in the jungles of Aceh for just over two years before Suharto’s army weeded him out. He ran off to exile in Sweden in 1979, and the rebellion sputtered to a halt. It was kickstarted again a decade later, after Hasan di Tiro managed to organize guerrilla training in Libya for a group of young rebels-in-waiting. At the time, though, it wasn’t really clear that separatists were behind the new wave of violence.

From where I sat in the Reuters newsroom in Jakarta, the first signs of trouble were reports in the national news agency, Antara, of small raids on police and army posts in rural Aceh.”

“People called the troublemakers the GPK, just as the government did, and they had many theories about who they were. Most involved some combination of the following: disgruntled former soldiers who had been fired in a short lived campaign against corruption in the military; thugs who wanted a bigger share of the marijuana trade (saus ganja was once a common ingredient in the cuisine of the region, and Aceh remained a centre of production for the crop); hot blooded separatists back from training in Libya. It seemed wildly improbable to me that an organization that didn’t have a shift key on its typewriter and couldn’t spell its own name would be linked to international terror training networks; it was only years later that I found that some of the fighters were indeed graduates from Middle Eastern training camps, though all the other theories also proved to be true.”

“Schoolchildren told us that they would no longer take the short cut through the plantation to class in the mornings because they so often found dead bodies dumped there by soldiers. The ‘rebels’ were no less vicious. An NGO worker in a remote mountain village said she had recently seen a soldier’s corpse left on the roadside by the rebels, stripped naked ‘for the flies to feast on’, his penis hanging out of his mouth. ‘The GPK (rebels] come to your door and ask for rice,’ she said. ‘You don’t give it to them, they shoot you. You do give it to them, the army will come tomorrow and shoot you. If you’re lucky, they’ll leave the body in the village, where your family can bury it. If you’re not, it will end up in a ditch miles away where no one will dare touch it except the flies and the dogs.’ Denying people a decent Islamic funeral was one of the greatest black marks levelled at both sides.”

“The ‘Saracens’ and those who followed have left their mark on the population; many Acehnese are tall and well built, with smooth, caramel skin, aquiline features and fiery eyes. They call their homeland the Veranda of Mecca.

The riches of Aceh attracted the attention of European traders once they reached these waters, but they resolved not to fight over the territory; the Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1824 recognized the Sultanate of Aceh as a sovereign, free-trading state. When the Europeans changed their minds and the Netherlands East Indies moved in to take over, the Acehnese fought them off. Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the Acehnese killed 15,000 Dutch troops and crippled another 10,000 in a war that was cast as a conflict of Muslims against the kafir infidels. The colonists finally got the upper hand in 1903 and the Dutch ruled Aceh until the Japanese invaded thirty-nine years later. These details were passed over in rebel leader Hasan di Tiro’s version of history. He claimed that Aceh was always an undefeated sovereign state, and that it could not therefore become part of the Indonesian nation when the Dutch handed over sovereignty.”

“In the coffee shops of Aceh, the issue of Acehnese sovereignty was rarely mentioned and the self-proclaimed former rebels who were now fighting on the hustings for positions of power within the Indonesian state never spoke of it at all. In a Medan newspaper I read as I travelled to Aceh for the first time in over two decades, I saw a photo of the Javanese general Soenarko — one of the Indonesian army commanders who had done most to crush the rebels in Aceh — embracing Muzakir Manaf, the former guerrilla commander of GAM. Muzakir was now running for vice governor of Aceh, alongside another former rebel. Soenarko was supporting their ticket. That really did my head in; it’s like a senior Israeli general becoming campaign manager for Hezbollah. As the former rebel welcomed his old enemy into his party’s campaign team, he declared that they also shared a single aim, vision and goal: Negara Kesatuan Republik Indonesia — ‘The Republic of Indonesia, Indivisible!’”

“Several parts of the new nation revolted in the 1950s. Rebels wanting an Islamic government fought Jakarta in West Java, South Sulawesi and West Sumatra as well as in Aceh, while at the other end of the country, Maluku tried to hive off a Christian state. The republican army squashed all of those rebellions; their grip on the nation tightened even further when Suharto came to power.”

“The East Timorese never had any choice at all about ‘integration’ with Indonesia. When Portuguese colonists abandoned the territory practically overnight in 1975, Suharto simply marched his troops in. Given their history, it was no surprise that these provinces had produced guerrilla movements. But Aceh had been an integral part of Indonesia at independence (Hasan di Tiro’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). Its later rebellions were no more or less serious than those in other regions.”

“It wasn’t until the tsunami of 2004 swept away 170,000 Acehnese lives that the unelected leaders of the movement, most of whom had not set foot in Aceh throughout the decade and a half of fighting, conceded that it may be time for the killing to stop.”

“The unimaginable tragedy of the tsunami allowed both Jakarta and the rebel leaders to climb out of the trenches they had dug for themselves and to talk peace. The torrent of support from ordinary Indonesians helped too; the rebels could no longer argue that Indonesians wanted only to take from Aceh, not to give.

The tsunami provided an opportunity to start again. And it brought in US$7 billion in aid, and lots and lots of construction work. This meant contracts for former rebel leaders and jobs for the boys; it helped reintegrate the fighters into society, a condition of a peace agreement signed in 2005 between Jakarta and the Stockholm-based separatists. The agreement gave Aceh a bigger cut of mining, logging and fishing revenue than other provinces got. On top of that, there’s around US$1.2 billion a year in no-strings-attached cash transfers from Jakarta to Aceh’s districts, and another US$700 million a year in ‘special autonomy funds’. Most importantly, the agreement allowed former guerrilla leaders to form local political parties in Aceh, though these remain forbidden everywhere else in Indonesia. That meant that men who led the charge for Acehnese freedom in their youth could now, in their greying years, run for office without being seen to join the Indonesian establishment. That in turn meant that the former rebels could get their hands on all the money that flowed from their sworn enemies. Jakarta had found their price, and bought them off.”

“It’s one of Indonesia’s richest regions, made of gold and copper, covered with precious hardwoods and surrounded with valuable fish. In Suharto’s day, Jakarta didn’t even pretend to do anything for the Papuans. They were lesser beings (they don’t even eat rice, imagine!), capable of working the mines and the plantations but not of governing themselves. Jakarta sent in managers and bureaucrats, and they worked with foreigners to extract the riches and send them back to the motherland. It was a replica of the way the Dutch had treated the Javanese for a couple of hundred years.

Papuans had been fighting a low-level guerrilla war against Jakarta since their land was first ‘integrated’ into Indonesia. When Indonesia decentralized after the Suharto era, Papa was extremely ill-disposed to remain shoehorned into the republic. Losing tiny, unproductive East Timor during the transition to civilian rule in Indonesia had been a blow to the nation’s pride. But losing what many Papuans sourly refer to as Dapur Java, ‘Java’s Kitchen’ — that would be a huge blow to the nation’s income. And so the co-option began. Jakarta still sucks in taxes from Papua, but a special autonomy bill similar to Aceh’s now feeds most of the royalties from mining, logging and other resource extraction straight to the new Papuan elite.”

“We were cruising around the large central square when Reza suddenly barked at me. ‘Head down! Head down!’ It sounded urgent. I put my head between my knees. After a bit, Reza said, “All clear” and I popped back up. In the wing mirror I could see a phalanx of olive uniforms — the women in jilbabs and long skirts — pulling people over. They were the religious police, state employees whose only job is to enforce sharia regulations, and they were checking to see that all Muslim women were wearing jilbabs. Technically, I was exempt from the regulation. “But there’s no sense looking for trouble,’ Reza said.”

“All. down the coast, I saw thousands upon thousands of prefab houses, standing in tight clusters, almost all on the inland side of the road, facing the hills. Indonesians have never shared the Western obsession with a sea view; all around the country beachfront houses have their bathrooms and kitchens where a picture window would be in the West. But on the west coast of Aceh people have especially good reason not to want to while away their evenings contemplating the sea.”

“In the Suharto years, foreigners were supposed to report to the police when staying in rural areas, and in Aceh the habit persisted throughout the conflict that ended in 2005. I sometimes still report in very remote areas when I am staying with villagers just to spare them any suspicion.”

Kalimantan

“After another brief pit-stop in Jakarta, I had flown to Pontianak, the largest city in West Kalimantan and the only city in the world that sits exactly on the equator, and it was the day of the autumn equinox, the day when, as the sun reaches its zenith, people’s shadows disappear.”

“As early as the eighteenth century, a large Chinese community established an independent state in the west of the island. Much more recently, migrants from Java, Madura and other overcrowded parts of Indonesia filtered in, some on government-backed transmigration programmes, others drawn by work in the oilfields and coal mines that have made southern and eastern Kalimantan among the richest parts of the nation. Nearly one in five people in Kalimantan was born elsewhere.”

“Many of the earliest Chinese immigrants were actually traders who had the doors to their home ports slammed on them by a Ming Dynasty emperor who banned private trade in the late 1300s. Unable to go home to China, these men settled in ports along the north coast of Java. They learned Javanese and married local girls. In the mid-1700s the local rulers of at least four cities in Java were of Chinese descent.

The Chinese also brought skills that local rulers needed. Princes and sultans, admiring the merchants’ business acumen, often appointed them as harbour masters, customs officers and tax collectors. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, followed suit. They used ethnic Chinese islanders to collect an unpopular rice tax that funded the company’s many skirmishes with local sultans and princelings. The colonial government, wary of allowing the large ‘native’ population to grow rich, later gave the small Chinese minority a monopoly on opium dens, pawnshops and gambling houses.

The Dutch also sold the rights to run big businesses — mining gold in Kalimantan and tin in Sumatra, farming sugar in Java and tobacco and pepper in Sumatra — to well-established Chinese merchants. Rather than hire locals, these bosses shipped in hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers from the Chinese mainland. This new wave of immigrants did not need to integrate as the traders had done. By the start of the twentieth century, there were over half a million people of Chinese descent in the Dutch East Indies, half of them outside of Java. Many of them lived in a bubble of Chineseness, speaking the language of their home province in China, recreating the dishes, the prayers and the marriage rites of their ancestors and working, working, working.”

“The anti-communist conflagration of 1965 gave many indigenous Indonesians a chance to avenge the jealousy they felt for the hard-working, clannish Chinese on whom they depended for so many of the things they wanted or needed. Sukarno and the PKI had both been flirting with Beijing, ergo, any Chinese person must be a communist and therefore fair game. ‘It was doubly unfair, because lots of the Chinese community here were refugees who fled China after the communists won the civil war in China in 1949, said Hermanto, the chrysanthemum tea shop owner. ‘Then they get accused of being PKI and . ..’ He drew his finger across his throat.

The Chinese Indonesians that survived 1965 were roundly discriminated against. They were not welcome in the civil service, the military or the other institutions of state. Relatively well educated, they were pushed even further into the markets, shop-houses and small factories that are the private sector in most of Indonesia. They kept their heads down, worked hard, and strengthened kinship networks that they could draw on in dangerous times. These networks are really not so very different from the web of exchange which ties Mama Bobo into her vast extended clan in Sumba. Except that among Chinese Indonesians the medium of exchange is not buffalo but contracts and capital, and they are not slaughtered, but used to spawn more contracts and capital.

Like the Javanese princelings of the pre-colonial age, Suharto needed the capital and the commercial networks that the Chinese diaspora could provide. He handed out monopolies; in return, the Chinese Indonesian compradors underwrote many of Suharto’s political operations. Indonesia got capital investment in export-led industries, and the Chinese got richer. Typically, though, what Suharto gave with one hand he took away with the other.He entrenched social discrimination against the Chinese; Chinese schools, temples and newspapers were closed down, and the ethnic Chinese were pressured into taking Indonesian-sounding names.

In the mid-1990s the Australian government published a book that included an eye-catching table showing that ethnic Chinese controlled 80 per cent of the Indonesian economy. Much less eye-catching and always overlooked (including by me, in my reporting for Reuters on the subject), was footnote 17, which mentioned that the figures didn’t include those bits of the economy that are controlled by state enterprises or foreign multinationals. A reworking of the numbers suggests that Chinese Indonesians owned just under a third of the nation’s wealth, still eight times more that you would expect for a group that makes up just 3.5 per cent of Indonesia’s population.

Their disproportionate wealth made Chinese Indonesians an easy scapegoat when the rulers of the day felt the need to allow people to blow off political steam; the first major assault on the Chinese community dates back to 1740. Looting and the systematic rape of Chinese women reached a peak in the chaos that led to the downfall of Suharto. Since then, many of the discriminatory laws of the Suharto era have been repealed, and Chinese Indonesians have begun setting up bilingual schools and drifting back to Confucian temples. ‘It’s got a lot better now,’ one Chinese shopkeeper told me. ‘By which I mean, I no longer live my whole life thinking: I wonder if I’ll get through this year without my shop being burned down?’”

“Recently, the relatively independent Commission for the Eradication of Corruption (KPK) has arrested several judges in the corruption courts for taking bribesto throw out charges against the accused. Judges find it easy to acquit defendants because prosecutors havetaken bribes to prepare a case full of loopholes. And they are very bad at policing their own system. The KPK had to step in because a Judicial Commission set up to clean up the courts has been so hopeless. The most recent data show that in 2008, it received 1,556 reports of misconduct by judges. The commission investigated 212 cases and referred twenty-seven cases to the Supreme Court, which did not act on any of them.”

“Nowadays, there are three times as many Indonesians as there were in the early 1950s, but only half as many court cases. The distrust of law enforcement starts long before anything gets to court, with the police. Over six in ten Indonesians think that the police are corrupt or very corrupt. So Indonesians often take the law into their own hands. People get beaten to death by angry crowds because they have been caught stealing a chicken, because they lost control of their car and knocked over a pedestrian, because a jealous neighbour has accused them of witchcraft. If one of these incidents happens to involve someone who thinks of themselves as ‘indigenous’ and someone who is thought of as an ‘immigrant’, a tiny incident that ought to be resolved at the police station or the magistrate’s court can turn into a minor civil war that costs hundreds of lives. With alarming frequency, mobs are turning on the police themselves. As I write this, in late March 2013, the newspapers tell of a sub-district police chief who was beaten to death as he led the arrest of a bookie who was running a gambling racket. Crowds closed in on the arresting cops after the bookie’s wife accused them of being buffalo thieves. This was one of thirteen incidents in which mobs attacked the police in the first three months of 2013 alone.”

Religious Revival

“Since Suharto’s day, every citizen has had to state their religion on their ID card. ‘Belief in One God’ is the first precept of the state philosophy, Pancasila. One can’t be a Godless communist if one has a religion.

In Suharto’s day, Indonesians could pick from a menu of five religions: Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Protestant or Catholic. Nowadays, they can also choose to be Confucian. There’s no room for the hundreds of locally specific beliefs like Mama Bobo’s Marapu religion in Sumba; those faiths have been redescribed as adat, and people who practise them have superimposed the ‘religion’ that fits best with their history and dietary traditions. No group that celebrates its true religion by feasting on pigs and cattle could be Muslim or Hindu, for example, so Mama Bobo’s ID card reads ‘KRISTEN’, which is shorthand for Protestant.

The one thing you absolutely can’t be as a good citizen is an atheist, which is what I am.”

“They knelt and mumbled their troubles to a Muslim cleric outside the shrine. They handed over the flowers — these were wafted over a brazier of incense and handed back — and an envelope full of cash, another 100,000 rupiah, which was pocketed. Next, they went into the little shrine which covers the saint’s grave, prostrated themselves, sprinkled holy water, rubbed their flowers up and down the lozenge-shaped ends of the grave, and mumbled their troubles all over again, this time to the dead saint.

Then they emerged from the shrine, and looked for a stranger to have sex with.

It’s this anonymous sex that seals the saint’s blessing and restores people’s business to health. ‘Where there’s a womb, there’s God,’ a Javanese writer told me when I expressed my surprise at the goings on at Kemukus, ‘Sex and spirituality always go together.’”

“The most spectacular fight came in 1965. The orthodox Muslims considered themselves morally superior to the more old-fashioned villagers. When the army encouraged the anti-communist bloodletting of that year, Muslim leaders in Java were at the forefront of the violence. By equating heterodox religious views with communism, they gave their young followers permission to kill those Java-style Muslims whose beliefs were less pure.

When the dust had settled back over the blood-puddles, Suharto engineered a divorce between religion and politics. His bureaucracy worked to ‘enrich’ the spiritual side of Islam; religious teachers were trained and supported, mosques became more accommodating to all-comers. The effect was to push Islam further into the lives of many millions of Javanese who had previously shown only the most desultory interest in their religion. Though some of the Javanese-flavoured Muslims who survived 1965 converted en masse to Christianity, the majority stamped ‘ISLAM’ on their ID cards and started going to the mosque more regularly. In school their children were newly exposed to more orthodox Islamic beliefs.

As it happened, the shift was well suited to the times; more and more Javanese were leaving their villages and drifting to the disordered world of the cities, places where the webs of exchange that had tied them to their neighbours and that supported their local belief systems did not exist. A homogenized, geographically deracinated, reformist Islam, one that they now shared with other Islamic communities outside of Java — the Acehnese, the Minangkabau, the Bugs — served their needs much better than a religion that depended on worship at the village shrine.”

“Saudi Arabia has been underwriting schools and mosques in Indonesia that teach Islam off a Middle Eastern template. The classic mosques of central Sumatra and Java, with their modest, three-tiered roofs in terracotta tiles that echo the shape of Indonesia’s volcanoes and blend into its villages, are increasingly giving way to variations on the Middle Eastern style — domed, minaretted, ostentatious. The simple scarf-over-the-head that used to serve for a jilbab is losing out to elaborate constructions that leave no wisp of hair visible; some girls now wear jilbabs even before they can walk. A small but increasing minority of women are covering themselves completely, and in parts of the country such as Madura and South Sulawesi, it’s now quite common to see men trooping off to the mosque not in traditional sarongs and skullcaps but in full-length robes and turbans.”

“The mayor who defeated my friend Nazaruddin in elections in the east Aceh city of Lhokseumawe came out with a classic: a by-law forcing women to protect their modesty by riding side-saddle behind a man on a motorbike.”

“No one could ever tell me how the Ahmadiyah’s beliefs differed from their own.

In fact, the sect is stained in the eyes of the back-to-Medina Sunni purists by the original sin of its founder. Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, a scholar in the British-India era, was a great self-promoter and declared himself a prophet. To Sunni purists, that’s sacrilege. There has been no prophet since Mohammad; anyone who believes otherwise cannot call themselves Muslim. Compounding their error, the Ahmadiyah are pacifist, they reject the notion of physical jihad in favour of a Holy War waged by the pen. But most of the people who take exception to them don’t even seem to know this.

Some years ago the villagers of Ketapang in western Lombok burned a community of around thirty Ahmadiyah families out of their homes.”

“The whole community lives in a single large hall, divided up by thick brown curtains which don’t reach the ceiling. This makes two rows of houses, each about two metres by three metres.”

“I asked why they thought the villagers of Ketapang had taken time out from making brooms to attack them. Nur and the other young women in the group put it down to ‘social jealousy’, a vague but ubiquitous term used in any situation where one community comes into conflict with some other group that is doing better economically. The Ahmadiyah had moved to the west Lombok village of Ketapang after being run out of the east of the island. They were better educated than the locals, they had better contacts and they worked harder. They got richer. It is the story of migrants all over Indonesia.

Pak Syahudin let them speak, then disagreed. For him, the spark was political. ‘Eight times we’ve been hounded out of whatever village we were in. Eight times. And every single time it is after the visit of some political bigwig or other.’ He mentioned a cabinet minister from the Islamic Moon and Star Party and a candidate for bupati from the PKS. Syahudin believed the attacks were deliberately provoked by people who thought there were votes to be gained by taking an uncompromising stance against a religious minority.

It’s quite likely that religious bigotry does produce votes in very local elections, where prejudices are more easily manipulated. But it doesn’t work at the national level. In the privacy of the poll booth, most Indonesians show no interest in being governed by people who want to mix politics and religion. In fact, support for Islamic parties, highest in the 1955 elections at around 44 per cent, has been on a steady slide since properly democratic elections resumed in 1999. In the 2009 elections, fewer than 30 per cent of voters opted for Islamic parties: the big three winners were all staunchly secular. And the opinion polls were predicting an even worse outcome for religious parties in 2014.

Despite this, the national government has recently done little to uphold the law and protect religious minorities. In 2011 over a thousand people attacked about twenty sect members in an Ahmadiyah mosque in West Java, killing three of them. Police arrested some of the mob. Then trucks of white-robed supporters with bullhorns started rocking up at the police station, threatening apostates and all those who support them. As a result, the police did not charge any of the attackers with murder.”

Conclusion

“Evi’s husband began another complicated game on his phone. The cousin-driver smoked. All the wheeling and dealing, the polite chit-chat and hard-edged ultimatums came from the mouths of women. It mirrored what I had found in more domestic situations elsewhere in Indonesia: the people in formal positions of power — the bupatis, the village heads, the religious leaders, the shamans — were all men. But it was usually the women who actually decided how many buffalo would be slaughtered, which rice fields would be sold off, which of the children would go to college.”

“Without orders from above, no one would even talk about anything, let alone do anything.

Even the man who presided over this culture of craven obedience got fed up with it. In the early 1990s, Suharto launched a campaign against the ‘petunjuk’ culture. He instructed his Vice President to instruct his civil servants to stop waiting around for instructions, to take more initiative. I thought this would make an interesting feature for Reuters. I called the Vice President’s office, and asked his chief of staff if he could arrange an interview on the subject. ‘T’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ the chief of staff said. ‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Belum dapat petunjuk, Bu’ — I haven’t yet received instructions.”

“For young Indonesians long on linguistic ambition but short on cash, there’s Kampung Inggris: Englishtown.

I had heard about Englishtown from several young people I had run into on my travels: a village in East Java where everyone speaks English all the time. No one I met had actually studied there, but I heard tales of intensive English classes, of using English in the post office and the coffee shops, of boarding with English-speaking families.”

“Muhammad Kalend Osen settled into Indonesian to tell me his story. He was a Kutai Dayak, one of the few Muslim Dayak tribes, born in East Kalimantan. ‘But I knew I didn’t just want to stay in the jungle.’ At the age of twenty-seven, with barely any education, he took himself off to Java and studied for a few years with a polyglot religious teacher. Then, only because the cleric was away, Pak Kalend started tutoring civil servants who needed to pass English tests. That was in 1977. Now, BEC takes in 1,600 students a year. ‘So far, 19,000 people can speak English because of us.’ Pak Kalend beamed with pride, but he is not a show-off. BEC stands for ‘Basic English Course.’”

“There’s such an assumption of littering that some companies even use it to appeal to consumers. Frutamin, a brand of sugary water that comes in various toxic flavours and was until recently owned by Pepsi, is packaged in single-dose plastic cups which turn into pretty coloured flowers if you throw them on the ground and stamp on them just right.”

“In 2001, that heady time soon after Suharto lost his grip on the nation, Surabaya’s dump was closed following mass demonstrations by its neighbours. Actually, the dump was there long before the residents. They moved in because there was a good road leading to cleared land. “Then they started protesting about the trucks and the noise and the smell,” said Anis. ‘You wanted to say well, you shouldn’t have built an illegal house next to the dump! But what can you do?’ With the dump closed, the garbage started to pile up in every corner of the city; there was no ignoring it. That made it easy to get a grassroots movement started, Ibu Anis said. With help from Unilever’s do-good funds, the city trained neighbourhood ‘garbage cadres’. I raised an eyebrow at this: Unilever is one of the biggest producers of household and beauty products in Indonesia, and therefore one of the biggest producers of the shiny packaging that gets dropped in the canals. ‘I know, I know. Ironic, isn’t it?’ said Ibu Anis. But the programme worked; there are now 40,000 volunteers around the city, each organizing recycling in their neighbourhood. Most have also taken on the task of greening their areas; even the narrowest backstreets of Surabaya are lined with murals of open green landscapes fronted with rows of potted plants and flowers.

There’s also a large network of Garbage Banks, run by an NGO with the support of the city government. These are not just places to get rid of recycled materials, like London’s bottle banks. They are real banks, with savings books, cash payments and interest rates. Individuals and neighbourhoods can sign up for an account. Their waste gets weighed and they get paid for it; 5,000 rupiah a kilo for clean plastic if they put it in their savings account, slightly less if they want to be paid in cash. The NGO then sells it on to recycling plants at 7,000.

I visited one of the Garbage Banks. A woman with a hunched back and only one tooth limped in with a sack of plastic bottles. She showed me her savings book; she had over 200,000 rupiah in her account. She would use it, she said, to pay her electricity bill. The Garbage Banks have brokered a deal with the state electricity firm so that people can keep the lights on with their garbage savings.

The neighbourhood accounts are usually emptied a few weeks before the annual ‘clean and green’ competition, in which each little clump of city blocks competes fiercely to cover itself with orchids and glory. ‘It’s amazing how hard people will work to win a cup for the neighbour-hood and to get their names in the paper,’ Ibu Anis had said. The most energetic Garbage Cadres will be taken on a study tour to Singapore, a favourite source of new ideas for the current Mayor of Surabaya. Trained as an architect, Tri Rismaharini was one of only eight women among Indonesia’s 500-plus heads of government. She was elected Mayor after heading the City Cleanliness Department.”