Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (38 page)

The woman, another sister, gave me Hanafiah’s phone number. I called, and launched in to an awkward ‘you-won’t-remember-me-but . . .’ introduction. He remembered me perfectly, this man whom I had not seen or spoken to for over two decades. He spoke almost as though I were a friend who was just back from a couple of months away in the capital. When we met, a warm smile spread over his face and he took my hand in both of his and held it for a long moment. He bore no resemblance at all to the raggedy skeleton with the bandaged head wound that I remembered from 1990, and yet there was a familiarity which went far beyond the ID check that I got from having seen his wedding photo. Sharing or even just witnessing someone’s adversity, however glancingly, seems to create a visceral sort of bond. Hanafiah was more talkative these days, but he still spoke in a near whisper, as though he didn’t really trust the peace, as though he thought anything he said might still, some day, be used against him. Sometimes, he would just let sentences trail off . . .

He said that he never went back to college, and for two or three years after the soldier bludgeoned him he could do no real work. ‘I was no use to anyone, I used to faint all the time,’ and he flopped his body sideways in his chair, letting his head roll and his tongue loll. Despite constant harassment, Hanafiah’s family kept up the pressure on the military. Hanafiah said that the soldier who had attacked him was eventually court-martialled and dismissed from the army.

After the way the army treated him, I thought that Hanafiah might have joined the rebels. GAM fighters were given a lot of plum posts after the peace agreement, so that might also explain Hanafiah’s job in the Department of Public Works, the ‘wettest’ of all the government agencies. But when I asked if he had joined GAM, he looked horrified. ‘Why would I do that?’ he asked. ‘The rebels were no better than the army!’

In 2000, when a civilian president was trying to bring the military to heel, the government offered jobs to people who had been on the wrong end of army violence in Aceh. Hanafiah was one of them. Some of these people had no more than a primary school education; all had been brutalized by the very government they were going to work for. I asked Hanafiah if that hadn’t been strange for him. ‘I try not to bear grudges,’ he smiled, spreading his hands as if to say: what’s the point?

The second person I remembered very clearly was Asya, a slim young woman with long, wavy hair about the same age as me who worked at a Save the Children-sponsored safe motherhood project. The office was in the tiny village of Tangse, in the hills of north-eastern Aceh, which was said to be a rebel stronghold. When Claire and I arrived, we found Tangse swarming with soldiers. A clutch of them were lounging around at a coffee stall, drinking tea or coffee and smoking kreteks in various states of undress, shirts undone or stripped off, legs splayed, booted feet hoisted onto empty benches. The village children circled in cautious fascination around weapons dumped carelessly on the table or slung over the back of a chair. The soldiers were Javanese boys in their early twenties, but if they were at all frightened to be in the thick of guerrilla warfare, they didn’t show it. One of them started hamming it up in our honour, stroking the barrel of his gun, billing and cooing at it. ‘She’s my wife,’ he explained. ‘I kiss her, I sleep with her and she kills for me.’

Tangse huddles on the edge of a fertile valley in the eastern foothills of the Bukit Barisan mountains. Wooden houses are hoisted on stilts like elevated Swiss cottages, their gables elaborately carved and painted with flowers, vines, the crescent moons and stars of piety; they are raised to keep them out of the flash floods that sometimes sweep down the river. At dawn, a pink mist hangs over the rice paddies and fuzzes up the tops of coconut trees that seem somehow out of place in this mountain landscape. I was leaning out of the window of the wooden NGO mess where we had stayed the night, contemplating this picture of tranquillity, when the silence was shattered by the crunch of boots on stone. The youngsters from the coffee stall, now strapped up in full combat kit, jogged past in formation. When they caught sight of me, a couple of them waved their weapons overhead. ‘Now we’ll get them!’ they yelled. ‘Now we’ll kill them!’
*

Asya, Tangse born and bred, came and stood next to me. She rolled her eyes, then turned away. In daylight, she would not say a thing. ‘The only way to survive is with your mouth shut.’ But after dark, she and her colleague had bolted the door of the mess and whispered of life in the hills. They were absolutely disgusted with the way the soldiers behaved, and just as horrified by the nameless rebels. ‘They’re brutes, the pack of them!’ It was Asya’s colleague who had told me of the soldier left stripped naked by the roadside with his penis in his mouth.

I went back to Tangse in 2012 and found Asya still living there. She had filled out over the years; when I knocked at her door and disturbed her at her prayers, her dumpling form was accentuated by her puffy white prayer robes. She welcomed me in. ‘We couldn’t say much back in those days, could we?’ Now, she had the slow, elliptical speech of a woman who spends too much time on her own. Her husband disappeared in 2000 and had never been heard of since. She had no idea who was responsible. ‘It was so messy,’ she said, raising her questioning palms to the heavens. ‘I could blame this one or that one but really, it could have been either side and if you try to blame you end up hating them all.’ Save the Children shut down because it seemed too dangerous to continue work after the conflict intensified, even though the project had successfully reduced deaths among mothers and babies. ‘Such a shame,’ Asya said, shaking her head.

There’s nothing about Asya of the ‘that would be tiring’ that I had heard in the languid villages of eastern Indonesia. She does whatever she can to make ends meet: she takes in washing, cleans houses, plants rice for other farmers, dries rice crops out after harvest, does the occasional evaluation for a village development project. With this, she is putting her one child through college. ‘What I pray for is peace. I pray that my child does not have to live as we did, always afraid, always confused, never trusting anyone.’

Now that I look back through my notes, I realize that I heard comments like this with fair frequency, but never in a coffee shop. In the women’s territory of the kitchen, squatting around a tub of vegetables that needed peeling or standing over a wok of slowly roasting coffee beans, I would hear less triumphalism, fewer stories of glorious battles fought in the name of justice, a more nuanced view of history. The coffee shop is the place where men gather to sharpen their resentments and hone their grudges, the pastimes of a wealthy trading nation that has always been able to afford leisure and war. It is here that you get the braggart’s view, and it is that view, expressed in the public realm, that most often makes it into history.

Of all the cities I revisited on my recent travels, the one that has changed most is the capital of this troubled province, Banda Aceh. Previously a pretty but dusty sprawl of low-rise villas, it was rebuilt almost from scratch after been flattened by the pitiless tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004. Banda Aceh is now a real city, with multi-lane roads, orderly traffic roundabouts and gleaming government offices. There are new hospitals and university buildings, huge supermarkets, and a lot less public transport than there used to be. In Indonesia, that’s taken as a sign of progress: everyone’s rich enough to have at least a motorbike. The city has also become markedly more religious. Restaurants and shops bar their doors against customers during Friday prayers, though I did discover that Tower, the city’s slickest internet coffee shop, operates a lock-in policy rather like an Irish pub. As long as you’re inside at closing time, they’ll lock the doors on you and allow you to keep drinking.

The west coast of Aceh, too, has become suddenly more modern. When I was there in early 2012, steamrollers were flattening down the very last stretches of a splendid highway that now runs the length of the coast. For a while, it hugs the mountainside. Below, a ribbon of white lace marks the place where an innocent sea kisses a peaceful shore, but it’s a spooky drive; it’s impossible not to think of what that sea can do when it’s enraged, the utter devastation it can wreak. As the road flattens down to the coast, more reminders. I passed whole plantations of what look like telegraph poles standing in waterlogged soil. These were once coconut trees, now dead and leafless, utterly forlorn. I was woken at dawn by the call to prayer from a mosque which consisted of nothing but a loudspeaker rigged up a high wooden pole. And 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.

All the houses in any given cluster are identical, though the models vary between groupings. There were one or two complexes of wooden houses tottering on stilts in traditional Acehnese style, but most were grounded breeze block and cement, in this village painted hospital-ward green, in that village the pinky beige of a school-lunch caramel pudding. Each cluster was funded by a particular donor. Logos have become addresses. ‘Ibu Amna? She lives in Oxfam, by the football field.’ Over time, the dwellings have been modified by their residents, the backs of houses are swollen with lean-tos, satellite dishes sprout from roofs. But very few have been repainted. The uniformity acts as a reminder that we are all equal before the wrath of God.

In the centre of the new Banda Aceh stands the tsunami museum. It commemorates something that is etched on the mind of everyone who was in Indonesia at the time. For days, maybe weeks, after the deluge, every TV station played funeral music and ran rolling images of the disaster: rows and rows of dead children, their corpses laid out like dolls in a toyshop; walls of black water powering towards hastily climbing cameras; buses, houses, trees all uprooted and carried relentlessly inland. The mosque in Banda Aceh rising majestic from the ruins, the ship tottering on top of a roof, the wailing survivors, the grim rescue workers, the unimaginable scenes that follow when the vengeful ocean rises thirty metres out of its bed and crashes down on a civilization going about its business.

The tsunami museum is an impressive building, a great, rounded sweep of latticework raised on vast pillars that from one angle looks like a cresting wave, from another like a ship. Walking in, you squeeze down a long, dark passage hemmed in on either side by black walls of water. I felt both awed and slightly panicky.

When I emerged on the other side I found holes in the walls, patches of mould, wiring hanging out of the ceiling, all in a monument that cost US$7 million and was built less than three years previously. The library was locked, the bathrooms too. On dozens of lecterns showing the identical slide show on a continuous loop, in the photos pasted higgledy-piggledy onto panels interspersed with drawings of the museum itself, in the bright 1970s-style dioramas hectic with mannequins and plastic coconut trees, even in the nine-minute film that I watched in the company of children not even born when the wave struck, there is virtually nothing that recreates that muffled-thudding, sludgy-sick feeling that we all felt when we first saw the rows of shrouds on TV. In fact, in this vast museum dedicated to an event that killed 170,000 people in Aceh, there was almost no death. I saw just one photo which included, peripherally, a single orange body bag.

I commented on this to the staff member who was shepherding the schoolkids around with a loudhailer. He shrugged. ‘Maybe they wanted to avoid rousing emotions.’ A monument to something you don’t really want to help people remember. A museum of amnesia, a selective rewriting of history. On reflection, it seemed oddly appropriate to Aceh.

*
Even this has been rewritten over time. More recent papers about Aceh render GPK as
Gerombolan Pengacau Keamanan
, the ‘Security Disturbing Gang’. It is as though the ‘freedom fighters’ take pleasure in making the army’s epithet more dismissive than it actually was.

*
Hasan di Tiro,
The Price of Feedom: The Unfinished Diary of Tengku Hasan Di Tiro.
Norsborg, Sweden: National Liberation Front of Acheh Sumatra, 1984, 321.

*
The brutality of the early 1990s I witnessed myself. For accounts of later periods, I’m indebted to Ed Aspinall, Elizabeth Drexler and Kirsten Schulze. Schulze reports that in Lhokseumawe, the rebels routinely demanded US$4,000 from every city ward, a 5 per cent cut on all business deals won by international contractors and 20 per cent from local contractors.

*
I later learned from people who had fought on the rebel side in this area that the regular troops, those who had been stationed in the area for a while and who worshipped at the same mosques or belonged to the same martial arts groups as men who were rebels, would sometimes radio ahead to warn the fighters of an upcoming raid.