Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (36 page)

I got off the bus in Langsa. Along one side of the main square in town was a vast banner, perhaps twenty metres long: ‘DECLARATION OF PEACEFUL ELECTIONS, 2012’, it read. It declared the intention of the populace to ensure an election free of violence and shooting, and urged the security forces to refrain from those vices also. It was signed by everyone from the current Mayor to the head of the Langsa Scooter Club. Across the square was a giant poster of a fat man in a suit, drooling at the mouth and rushing for the Mayor’s seat. From his pockets fly red 100,000 rupiah notes; an empty trouser pocket is marked ‘5–20 billion’, indicating that in this part of the country it costs between 5 and 20 billion rupiah to get elected: up to US$2 million. ‘Right, like he’s not going to be corrupt to pay that back,’ observes a character in the poster, which was erected by the city electoral commission. ‘Stop MONEY POLITIC . . . !’ runs the headline, the last two words in slightly erratic English. From this I deduced that politics in Aceh was not so different from politics anywhere else in Indonesia, local parties or no local parties.

A woman I met in Medan had given me the phone number of her son as well as her former husband, the acting head of the local parliament in Langsa (the real head was in detention). ‘Let’s have breakfast on Sunday,’ the ex-husband suggested when I called. ‘Meet me at the central square at 6.30.’ I peeled myself out of bed, covered my head with a silk scarf and went bleary-eyed to the square. Music was thudding out of giant speakers; up on the raised bandstand, a woman was barking orders: ‘One and two and
pump
your arms, and three and four and
spin
around.’ The municipal aerobics was led by a clutch of lithe women in tracksuits and jilbabs up on the stage. In the square beneath, a motley collection of townsfolk, including a surprising number of portly middle-aged men, struggled to keep up. I looked around for anyone who might answer to the description of Deputy Speaker of Parliament, then gave up and joined in the pumping and spinning.

As the aerobics wound down, one of the middle-aged men grabbed the microphone. With the air of someone who was looking for votes, he thanked us all for committing to the healthy lifestyles that would power Langsa to a glorious future. I guessed this was my man. I introduced myself and he invited me to join his posse for breakfast. I had been hoping for a quiet chat about local politics, but it seemed there would be ten of us for breakfast – the politician, his wife, seven flunkies and myself. I asked one of the flunkies if he went diligently to aerobics every Sunday morning. He pulled a face. ‘There’s nothing diligent about it, Bu. It’s compulsory,’ and he nodded at the Deputy Speaker.

I tried to engage the politician but it was difficult; he was busy with his phone, then there was a discussion with his wife about the price of a pink laptop. But I did learn that he believed that Partai Aceh sporadically instigated violence in order to wring concessions out of Jakarta. ‘Basically, whatever Aceh wants, Aceh gets, as long as we don’t ask for independence. Anything but that, we get given right away,’ he said. This was not, in his view, a good thing. It perpetuated dependence on support from the centre, and made for a very fragile democracy. The threat of violence had become a negotiating tool, one that may become hard to control.

Langsa is a relaxed town that feels more like Medan than Aceh. Young people zip around on fixie bikes and the coffee shops play jazz rather than dangdut music. Feeling the need for a bit of youth culture, I called the Deputy Speaker’s son Reza on the number his mother had given me. He came to pick me up in a jeep. He was in his late twenties, bright as a button, and not at all concerned that I had dashed out of the hotel to meet him without remembering to cover my head. 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.

Later, I carried on up the coast to Lhokseumawe and latched on to my friend Nazaruddin’s campaign team. The city is engraved on my memory from a reporting visit in 1990, when I was investigating tales of a rebel attack on a gas plant that was selling seven million dollars’ worth of gas to Japan and Korea every day. Most of the proceeds were split between US petro-giant Mobil, which ran the plant, and Suharto’s government in Jakarta. This made rebels cross and reports of an attack plausible, though it turned out that the alleged ‘attack’ was actually an industrial accident that the company did not want publicized. When I got back to my hotel room after slipping past security and visiting the gas plant, the phone rang. ‘Is that Miss Elizabeth?’ Ya, Pak. ‘This is Intel,’ said the disembodied voice of Indonesia’s military intelligence service. ‘We seem to have misplaced our skeleton key, we might have left it in your room. Could you have a look around for it?’ Of course, Pak. ‘I’m so sorry for the inconvenience,’ he said.

To this day, I’ve never been sure whether they were trying to intimidate me, or whether they really had lost their skeleton key. Both seemed equally possible.

Since then, Lhokseumawe had sucked dry its reserves of natural gas and gone into a bit of a slump. Nazaruddin wanted to pull it back up by its bootstraps. He dreamed of building up a major industrial port complex, drawing in commodities from around fertile Aceh, processing them and exporting them across South East Asia and beyond. His campaign office was easy to find; it was right behind a gargantuan poster showing Nazar and his running-mate in front of a futuristic mosque-scape. ‘BRIDGE TO METROPOLIS CITY’ read the slogan, in English. He was running as an independent; I noticed that he and his running-mate were the only candidates to appear bare-headed on their campaign posters. Candidates from local Acehnese parties all wore gold tea-cosies; everyone else, including other independents, wore the black velvet
pecis
of a good Muslim.

The campaign office was open-fronted. On the wall inside was a giant red palm-print, a reminder to voters to choose Nazar’s number, five, on election day. Under it sat an assortment of men: campaign workers mostly, but also hangers-on. In the middle of them was the candidate himself, a good-looking man of around forty-five with a million-watt smile. He leapt up when I arrived, and whisked me into an air-conditioned back room, closed off from the main office. ‘What a relief to have an excuse to get away from those crocodiles,’ he said. I became familiar with them over the next couple of weeks, the ‘campaign crocodiles’ who hovered around the office talking about how many votes they had locked down in different parts of town. They flattered, they wheedled, and they invented many excuses to shake hands with the candidates and their senior staff, each time hoping that a banknote would be pressed into their palm.

‘You can’t turn them away completely, because they might go off and run a “black” campaign against you,’ explained Nazar’s running-mate, Zoelbahry Abubakar. ‘So you give them sometimes 50,000, sometimes 20,000, sometimes just posters and stickers to give out. It gets to the point where it is worth it just to get rid of them.’ Once paid their two-to-five dollars, the crocodiles moved off to another campaign office and repeated the procedure.

They were not the only ones who were promiscuous. One day a poet came into the office; he had penned verse in a classical Acehnese format in praise of Nazar; it would be read out at a ‘community meeting’ which would also feature rap music and comedians – ‘We want to appeal to younger voters, too,’ said the candidate. The poet began to read his verse – five pages of close type – interrupting himself every now and then to explain a particularly complex allegory. He had forgotten to insert the name of his new patron, however, and thus sung the praises of the Partai Aceh candidate to whom he had already sold the verse. Nazar pressed two red 100,000-rupiah notes into the bard’s hand nonetheless, then answered a clearly fake phone call, using that as an excuse to shoo the man out of the office.

Nazar invited me to a fundraising dinner with a couple of Chinese businessmen, in a restaurant owned by one of the target contributors. The restaurant staff brought out dishes piled with grilled prawns in chilli sauce, with barbecued fish, with garlic-fried squid. While I tucked into this feast with the rest of Nazar’s entourage, our Chinese hosts picked at prawn crackers. The candidate launched into his pitch. He said that the private sector was the engine of the economy, that as mayor, his first priority would be to cut red tape, to facilitate job creation and stimulate growth. The entirely chinless restaurant owner, whose expression had so far hovered between resigned and fed up, actually cracked a smile when Nazar diverged from the ‘you give me money, I give you projects’ script that he expected from those aspiring to win an election. But he also knew that the politician would have to get elected before he could realize those neo-liberal dreams. The prospects for any independent candidate were slim. ‘Of course, you understand that we can’t support everyone,’ grunted the second restaurateur. They urged us to enjoy the feast they had laid on, then excused themselves politely and moved off to another table. There, the Partai Aceh candidate and his courtiers were devouring chilli prawns, waiting for their turn with the purveyors of slush funding.

I once asked a Chinese businesswoman which party she supported. ‘With my vote, only one,’ she replied coyly. ‘But with my facilities, well, pretty much all of them. This one needs to borrow a car, that one needs some posters printed, why not?’ She was not interested in the contracts that might flow from this relationship so much as the access that it gave her to (sometimes compromising) information. ‘You want to know about local politicians? Ask a businessperson,’ she said. ‘We’re the ones who really know.’

In Lhokseumawe, all candidates are allotted time in one of the city’s big public spaces so that they can hold a campaign rally. Nazar wouldn’t be using his slot; with no political party picking up the tab, it was just too expensive. There was the cost of providing entertainment: several thousand dollars for any singer good enough to bring in the crowds. You need to buy T-shirts and jilbabs in party colours, then pay people to put them on and show up to the rally – around three dollars per person. A minibus driver told me that he got paid three times for each rally, once to hang election banners on his bus for the day (US$25), a second time to ship in the participants (at double the regular fare) and a third time to hang around near the rally grounds causing a traffic jam (price negotiable). ‘They want it to look like it’s really busy; all you have to do is park somewhere inconvenient, and spend the afternoon smoking,’ he chuckled. ‘I just
love
election time.’ On top of that, rally participants expect to be fed and watered. It is an expensive business.

Instead of holding a rally, Nazar went to the market to meet voters. He walked about shaking hands and flashing his brilliant white smile at all and sundry. The rest of the
Tim Sukses
, the success team – candidate for vice-mayor, campaign manager, various flunkies and several well-heeled wives – bustled behind handing out cards. ‘Vote number five, vote number five.’ This was the extent of the policy discussion. One team member videoed the proceedings, another took photographs. Later, he would submit the pictures with text to a local paper, who would print the ‘news story’ in accordance with their agreed ‘package’. Two thousand dollars buys a photo and a three-column spread every day during the two-week campaign period. On the corner, always a few steps ahead of the candidate and his trailing ‘journalists’, was a huge, bald-headed man wearing wrap-around sunglasses and an unmissable shirt in fluorescent pink. He stood with legs wide and his arms folded across his chest, impassive. Everyone in the market could see that Nazar was important enough to need a bodyguard.

Later in the day, when the afternoon cooled and people were sitting on their verandas ahead of evening prayers, we did the rounds of a fishing community on the outskirts of the city. Like the Queen, Nazar did not carry money. But he instructed one of his entourage to buy shucked oysters from the ladies at a street stall on the corner, another to help a supplicant with a small donation ‘for my sick child’. Again, the handing out of cards, the ‘vote number five’. ‘We’re easy to remember, the ones with no hats,’ said the candidate for deputy mayor. The voters looked expectant, then, when no envelopes or T-shirts were proffered, disappointed. ‘Skinflints,’ I heard more than once as I trailed behind the cortege. No one asked about policies.

The next day I went to a Partai Aceh rally on the vast square in front of the skeleton of the new mosque in Lhokseumawe. The red party flag fluttered from almost every lamp post in town. It streamed out, too, behind the convoys of flatbed trucks and motorbikes that raced around town, horns blaring, ratcheting up the excitement. The streets close to the rally grounds were choked with SUVs covered with hologram portraits of the Partai Aceh candidates. A few were decorated with a black and white photo of a feeble, elderly gentleman in owlish glasses, above the English headline: ‘MY KING OF HEROES’. It was Hasan di Tiro, who had come back from Sweden to live in Aceh in 2009, just eight months before his death.

Yes, there were women in standard-issue jilbabs. Yes, their children were gorging on free candyfloss. But this rally, which looked like a funfair set up in an army barracks, was electric with genuine enthusiasm, almost fervour. Men wearing red, white and black military fatigues and red berets stomped about in solid lace-up boots, barking into walkie-talkies. This was the party’s own militia. They moved with aggressive self-importance through the crowds, young boys tiptoeing reverentially in their wake. Many people listened rapt to the speeches of the heroes of the revolution.