Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (37 page)

The stage was set up as for a triple wedding, three love-seats in a row, each with its canopy of silk and brocade, each with its awkward-looking bridal couple, the candidates for governor of Aceh, bupati of East Aceh and mayor of Lhokseumawe with their respective running-mates. The governor/vice governor pairing seemed the most unlikely match. The aspiring governor was a portly, avuncular medical doctor with spectacles and a neatly trimmed moustache who had lived much of his adult life in Stockholm – he was Hasan di Tiro’s cousin, in fact. His political sweetheart was a central-casting guerrilla fighter with three-day stubble, a study in rugged chic. This was Muzakir Manaf, the man who had recently embraced the general who once tried to annihilate him, the man who was now so adamant about an indivisible Indonesia.

I had climbed up the building-site mosque to get a good vantage point and was writing notes when I was accosted by a Partai Aceh activist. He had seen my bookmark, one of Nazar’s election cards. He stuck out his hand, demanding to see it. When I handed it to him he scrunched it up and threw it to the floor. In Asia this constitutes a frontal assault but he was unapologetic. He gave me an emphatic lecture on the treachery of independents, how they were contravening the peace agreement, how anyone who didn’t vote for Partai Aceh was a traitor who was just asking for trouble. Then he invited me home to meet his parents. I said yes. (Later, after giving me a long lecture on Islam as the guardian of virtue, he invited himself to accompany me up to the hill town of Takengon – ‘So romantic, Bu!’ I said no.)

At his home, smallish, neat, sitting alongside disused railway tracks, he introduced me to his parents and to the local ‘district commander’ of Partai Aceh in his neighbourhood, another carefully stubbled man with a slim, straight nose and sleepy lids over disconcertingly fiery eyes. The Commander treated me to his version of history, which he said he learned ‘in the school of the jungle’. Aceh hosted the republican government in the 1940s, yes, and the merchants of Aceh contributed gold to Indonesia’s nationalist cause, certainly. But this was not in any way because the sovereign state of Aceh wished to be part of the emerging nation. ‘That’s always been a misunderstanding,’ the Commander said firmly. ‘These were simply gifts of solidarity to a brother Islamic nation, to keep, sorry Bu, but to keep the
kafirs
at bay.’ Aceh has never been defeated in war, Aceh has never been successfully colonized. Ergo, we must be an independent nation.

I was slightly nonplussed to hear Hasan di Tiro’s version of history fall unedited from the mouth of a man under thirty who had never left Aceh, particularly since he represented a political party now busily campaigning for elections within the Indonesian national system. Obviously the script hadn’t been rewritten as completely as the current leadership of Partai Aceh, which is doing very nicely indeed out of integration with Indonesia, might like.

On the night before the election, I went out for supper with Nazar. Usually, he texted me from the car when he was outside my hotel, then waited for me to emerge. This time, though, he came bounding in, taut with nervous energy. ‘There’s something I have to ask you, Eliz,’ he said. I raised an eyebrow. ‘The thing is, I need thirty million rupiah before tomorrow morning.’ Thirty million rupiah. That’s three thousand dollars – more than three months’ budget for me. I stared at him. ‘I mean, of course, I’d give it back next month, and it doesn’t all have to come from you . . .’ Then, somehow we were at the cash machine, and I was looking at the balance on my private savings account, the one I keep for friends in need, occasional indulgences, emergencies. It contained 12 million rupiah. I took out half of my savings, stuck the money into a brown envelope, and gave it to Nazar. He nodded, put it in his pocket, and that was that. I guessed, correctly as it turned out, that I would never see the money again. He didn’t even tell me what it was for, and I didn’t ask, though I later found out it was to pay students to monitor the polling stations.

Later, I wondered what had got into me. I always gave ‘kitchen contributions’ to families I stayed with, and they were always graciously received. But I was wary of giving people money for other things. In Indonesia’s what’s-yours-is-mine culture, where forward planning is the exception and people feel they have an absolute right to draw on the resources of the clan, a single act of generosity can establish me as a member of the extended family; that leads inevitably to an endless stream of wheedling text messages: ‘You are so good . . . we little people . . . since the car accident . . .’ Like Nazar’s Chinese restaurateurs, I can’t support everybody, so I end up refusing all but the greatest needs. And yet here I was giving a US-educated lawyer running an expensive no-hope political campaign six hundred dollars to pay his election monitors. It would have been a life-changing amount for some of the people I had met on this trip. And it made me realize, though only in retrospect, how easy it is to get carried away by the excitement of a campaign.

The following morning, Nazar and his retinue went off to the polls. ‘Vote with heart. No intervention!!!!’ read the election officials’ polo shirts, in English. And it did indeed seem that people were doing exactly that, waiting in orderly queues to get their documents checked and take their turn behind the plywood screen that shielded their hole-punching from public view, then pushing the folded ballot paper into locked tin boxes and dipping their fingers in purple ink to indicate that they had done their bit for democracy. My phone rang; it was the activist who had accosted me at the Partai Aceh rally – ‘your PA boyfriend’, as Nazar laughingly called him. He too was full of adrenalin. I complained that I felt left out, not being able to vote. ‘I’ll take you to one of
our
polling stations,’ he said. ‘Then we can fix a vote for you.’

We met in a coffee shop, and buzzed off on his motorbike to a polling station in the grounds of a mosque in the east of town. It was overrun by the thuggish short-haired men with sharp jaws and mirrored sunglasses that I had come to recognize as the Partai Aceh faithful; there was much slapping of backs and shaking of hands. ‘My friend needs a vote,’ said my PA boyfriend, and one of the thugs nodded and started looking down a list. Though I quickly made it clear that I had been joking, I’m pretty sure they would have arranged a ballot for me if I had wanted. Three times in the half-hour that I was there, sharp-jawed men came in carrying stacks of invitation letters with ID cards stapled to them. They distributed these among their friends, who trooped in to vote. The election official checked that the name on the letter matched the name on the ID card, but didn’t check that the ID card matched the person who carried it. A nod, and the ballot was cast. The monitors who were being paid by other candidates to check for fraud sat in a corner playing with their cell phones. When I asked one of these re-voters if he was ‘inked’, he held up his pinkie for me to see. Purple ink sat in droplets on a coating of wax on his fingertip.

I witnessed the vote count at the polling station directly outside Nazar’s office. Of the 274 cast there, my friend got 10. Overall, Nazar came fifth of eleven candidates. ‘The highest of those who didn’t play money politics,’ his campaign manager said encouragingly. As expected, the Partai Aceh candidates won in Lhokseumawe, as they did in well over half of the districts in Aceh. In elections for governor of Aceh, the doctor from Stockholm (who once had the title of ‘foreign minister’ in the mythical cabinet of Aceh’s government-in-exile) and his stubbled running-mate won hands down.

I was interested by the rewriting of Aceh’s recent as well as its more distant history. The hiatus in guerrilla activity from 1978 to 1989, the mish-mash of interests that threw separatists together with former soldiers and drug dealers in the early 1990s, the brutality of the rebels during that period and their later habit of burning schools, killing teachers, terrorizing migrants, executing supposed collaborators and squeezing all and sundry for money to support the cause – all these things seemed to have disappeared from the story of the conflict that I now heard in the coffee shops of Aceh.
*

I thought back to two people who I remembered particularly from my reporting trips two decades earlier – a student and an NGO worker – and decided to try and find them again, to see whether their accounts of those times had changed at all.

I met the student, Hanafiah, during a reporting trip to Aceh in November 1990 with Claire, from the BBC. It was close to curfew, and we had stopped in the tiny coastal village of Idi Cut and knocked on the door of the only guest house in town, which was barred shut. An eye peeked from behind a curtain, there was a lot of uncertain murmuring and some more peeking eyes. Eventually the door opened and we walked into what looked like a birthday party for a skinny, balding young man with an odd head-dressing, half turban, half bandage. This was Hanafiah. Claire and I left our bags and went straight off to the market for a quick, pre-curfew supper. One of the young man’s sisters, a teacher, tagged along. I left a copy of
Tempo
, an Indonesian news weekly, lying casually on the table of the restaurant. On the front cover was a smoking gun and the word ‘Aceh’; inside, a report questioned the veracity of stories I had written about rebellion, brutality and mass graves in Aceh. Critiquing the Reuters reports was
Tempo
’s way of backing into what would otherwise be forbidden territory for the Indonesian press. It landed me in hot water with the military but it was worth it, because it kick-started a lot of conversations in Aceh.

As Claire and I ate thick chunks of fish stewed in turmeric and coconut milk, the teacher devoured our copy of
Tempo
. She gave it back in silence, and would not be drawn into conversation. But as we wandered home, she chatted away in a low voice. ‘It’s hard these days in the teaching profession; the government doesn’t pay well but at least it’s secure. My brother was imprisoned by them for a month and just came back yesterday. And of course in Aceh most of the private schools are Islamic schools and it’s hard for a woman to get a job there. That’s why he looks so terrible; they beat him and didn’t feed him. But in the private sector the salaries are higher . . .’

Later, behind locked doors, in the dark and in whispers, we heard Hanafiah’s story. His sister did most of the talking; Hanafiah himself sat looking numb. He was still at college, and had been working in a photocopy shop to pay his fees. A fellow student came in for copies and he chatted to her, friendly. A soldier who fancied the girl took offence at Hanafiah’s familiarity, and smashed him in the head twice with the butt of his semi-automatic, knocking him unconscious. The next thing he knew he was in a cell four metres by five metres with seventy other men. As his sister told us this, the boy suddenly squatted down on the floor. ‘There was no space,’ he whispered. ‘We lived like this,’ and he pulled his skin-and-bone limbs in like an insect trying to make itself inconspicuous in front of a predator. Then he held out a cupped hand. ‘To eat, just this much rice every day.’ He lapsed back into silence.

The boy was questioned, poked and prodded for three days, then – perhaps because there were so many witnesses to his unprovoked beating – he was pronounced innocent. Still, they kept him in the suffocating cell for a full month, with no treatment for a festering head wound. Then they released him back to his family. It seemed like a strategy guaranteed to escalate rebellion. My notes from the time observed that a history of detention, even wrongful detention, would ‘put the boy out of the running for almost any job or respectable marriage, probably for ever’.

Now, twenty-two years later, I went back to the guest house in Idi Cut to look for the teacher and the skinny boy with the head wound. I knocked. A woman answered the door. Before I could explain who I was, she grabbed me by the hand: ‘You’re the one who came just after Hanafiah got out of jail!’ She dragged me over to an inside wall. There was a photo of Hanafiah, all dressed up in his wedding finery. Properly fed, he turned into a good-looking man, strapping, almost, with narrow eyes, high cheekbones and a generous moustache. ‘He’s a Big Man now, in the Department of Public Works.’ Next to that photo was a framed portrait of his sister, the school teacher. ‘She was taken to Java. She’s dead now.’