Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (20 page)

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.

I had walked into the Ministry of Health in Jakarta just at the start of Indonesia’s administrative fragmentation in 2001. At first, everyone in the ministry carried on as usual. We wrote guidelines and trained provincial staff, we talked to the planning ministry and lobbied parliament. Sitting happily in our air-conditioned offices in Jakarta, working with people in the provinces that my colleagues had known since before the firework display, we behaved as though decentralization didn’t exist. And for a while, until districts began to assume the responsibilities that had been thrust upon them, decentralization didn’t really make that much difference to the way the country was run.

The big change came after 2004, when citizens began to elect their district head or
bupati
directly.
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It was then that local politicians really began to flex their muscles, to introduce bold initiatives that may not line up with what Jakarta wanted, but that would go down well with the local electorate.

To this day, the central government ministries in Jakarta continue to behave as though they are in charge, but the disconnect between what comes out of the capital and what goes on in the districts is growing more pronounced.

It was perfectly possible that the Director of Fish Resources was surprised to hear of dolphin slaughter in far-off islands. In response, Jakarta fired off a new injunction against killing the animals, underlining laws passed in 1975, 1990 and 1995. This they sent down through the ministerial hierarchy. Because Lamalera was named in the video, they must have made a special effort to get district officials in Lembata island to take note. But when officials in the district capital, Lewoleba, started muttering about national regulations, the people of the whaling village shut them up.

‘They tried to do that conservation thing here a few months back,’ said one of the hunters. ‘But the whole village went to Lewoleba to demonstrate. The local government didn’t have the balls to enforce [the new rules], so nothing came of it.’

Every day, before the sinetron, the national news now shows images of angry Indonesians massing in front of a government office, waving placards and venting.
Turun demo
, to go down to the streets and demonstrate, seems to be the Indonesian electorate’s default mechanism for expressing its demands. But demos have become something of an industry, too. Brokers deliver up crowds to order, supplying readymade banners and briefing protestors on the gripe of the day. The demos sometimes run for days, often getting out of hand. Cars get overturned, buildings get burned down, sometimes the police are called in and people get beaten up, even shot.

‘It’s Democracy by way of Anarchy,’ the retired director of a state company told me. But for most Indonesians, these raucous expressions of desire and dissent seem to beat the buttoned-down obedience to Jakarta of the Suharto years.

As I continued on my travels, I came to recognize the signs of a new district. From the boat, an island appears, fuzzy on the horizon. After a while, the cell-phone towers come into view, piercing the sky from the highest points. Then, as the boat steams towards land, a white smudge appears on a hill above the port. It looms into a palatial building, often with a princeling palace at its side. These are the Office of the Bupati and the District Parliament, respectively, often wildly out of whack with the size of the population. In one district in southern Maluku, for example, I calculated that the bupati’s office had one front-facing sea-view window for every 441 residents of the district. This is not the office of the district government – each department has its own sizeable building – this is just for the elected head of the district.

I came to know that when I went up the hill to the bupati’s office, I would find in front of it two lovely, smooth strips of asphalt, the only divided highway in town, sometimes the only smooth asphalt in town. Occasionally, there were added extras. In Anakalang, the capital of Central Sumba district, a spur of road smooth as a black billiard table branches off the dual carriageway and sweeps through a village of megalithic graves, pot-bellied children and pot-bellied pigs to stop, abruptly, right outside the door of the current Bupati’s childhood home. ‘A gift from the contractor,’ said one of the uniformed adjutants who was washing the SUV parked outside the door of the house.

It takes a while for some previously raggedy market town to dress itself in the finery of a District Capital. Savu, the tiny island between Sumba and Timor that I visited after the whale hunt, was still in its Cinderella phase as a new district.

I was chatting with a group of civil servants outside the district hospital when a black SUV bowled through the gates. The beige uniforms leapt upright, stamping out cigarettes, pushing coffee cups out of sight. One of them tugged at my elbow to get me out of my chair and into the guard of honour. The car shuddered to a halt just inches from my nose and a good-looking young man in a snappy black uniform jumped out of the front passenger seat and sprang to open the back door. Slowly, as if he were the
capo dei capi
in a mafia movie, the Bupati of Savu stepped out. Our hastily assembled guard of honour clicked its heels, saluted and shouted something military-sounding. The Bupati, resplendent in a silk
ikat
shirt, golden badge of office glowing on his chest, clicked his own heels in acknowledgement. Through glasses that misted up as he left the air-conditioned bubble of his car, he spotted me. He shook my hand without a word, and swept into the air-conditioned bubble of his office.

Savu was crowned a district in 2008. According to a newspaper I picked up on a boat, it was the poorest district in Indonesia.
*
Two-thirds of households in Savu don’t even make it to Prosperity Level I, the lowest of Indonesia’s four wealth classifications; they are, in the government’s delicious phrase, ‘pre-prosperous’.

I remembered Savu from a visit many moons ago as a dry, desolate place where women wove beautiful
ikat
cloth and men chanted as they swayed in the tops of lontar palm trees collecting sap.
Ikat
is often translated as ‘tie dye’, but Indonesia’s
ikat
fabrics have nothing in common with the ringworm T-shirts of the Woodstock generation. With
ikat
weaving, the pattern is died into the threads themselves, before the fabric is woven. A pattern which was visible only in the mind of a the woman who laid out threads, tied them in clusters, dyed them one colour, re-tied, re-dyed in another colour, emerges, as if by magic, when the threads are actually woven together on a back-strap loom. It can take several months to finish an especially elaborate piece.

In the hungry months before the corn harvest, the weavers were sustained by palm sap, boiled down into syrup. When last I visited, the syrup accounted for two out of three meals a day for many people in Savu. But now the main town, Seba, was a district capital. ‘It’s absolutely bustling these days,’ a coffee-stall owner in Sumba had told me. He himself was from Savu but had left because business was too slow. He used to drive one of the six minibuses that constituted virtually all the motorized transport on the island last time I was there.

In 2011, three years after becoming a district, there were packs of brand-new motorbikes, a steady procession of the yellow lorries that speak of government-funded construction contracts, and a handful of flashy SUVs, almost all of them with the red number plates that signal government functionaries. There was a post office, still announcing its postcode as Kupang, the district from which Savu split. There were a handful of open-fronted shops along the two blocks that constitute downtown Seba. At the end of the road, the pier.

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 Bugis 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. Now, ferries came in to Seba almost every week. There was even a new ferry terminal with a blue-tiled roof, another ubiquitous sign of ‘progress’ in the outer islands.

But ‘absolutely bustling’? Not yet.

I went back to the place I had stayed in 1991, the home of the local schoolmaster, now long retired. I remembered it because his wife had been unusually insistent that I register in her book, ruled into tidy columns: date, name, nationality, passport number, religion. She had hovered by my shoulder as I filled it in, tense, expectant. KATOLIK, I wrote in the last column and she gave an audible puff of relief. She would not need to scratch around for halal food to feed me with, then. Now, twenty years later, she was much more relaxed. She had a steady stream of Muslim guests from Java and elsewhere, sent by the central government to do the most basic tasks until Savu could find its own staff for its miniature replica of every government department.

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.

When I visited Savu, 4.1 million of those equalizing dollars were being used to build the statutory grandiose Bupati’s office on the hill above town. While the construction went ahead, the Bupati, whose ‘Vision/Mission’ includes better health for all citizens, had requisitioned half of the only hospital in Savu. One of the hospital wards had been transformed into a debating chamber for the twenty MPs of the regional parliament. A posse of aides sat guard on the hospital porch; it was they I had been chatting to when the man himself pulled up. The civil servants on the porch were all ‘from’ Savu, but all of them had lived and worked most of their lives in Kupang or even Java. I asked the most talkative of them why he chose to come back. He looked at me witheringly. ‘Chose? Your boss asks you to help with the development of the district. What can you do?’

I drove across Savu to discover what resources the Bupati might draw on to achieve his ‘Vision/Mission’: ‘To make Sabu Raijua an innovative, advanced and dignified district.’ There was not much to see.

At one point I turned off down a coral path and tipped out on to dunes which were covered in giant clam shells. There were hundreds of them, some more than a metre across, all grinning toothily up at the sky, each filled with grey water, slowly evaporating down to a crackly sand. Salt production, Savu-style. I stuck my finger into one of the shells, expecting the flaky sweetness of Maldon sea salt. The solution was viscous, almost oily, bitter on the tongue.