Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (46 page)

‘I’d be on my way home from class and these guys, boys I knew, would be walking along the road swinging people’s heads in their hands. Their favourite thing was to tie two heads together by the hair and throw them up over an electricity wire, so that they would swing there like a pair of shoes tied together by the laces.’

‘If you looked scared, it got worse,’ she went on. ‘A teenager would yell: “Hey, you! Catch!” and they’d throw a severed hand at you. They seemed to find it really funny. It was horrible.’

Ibu Ibit related this completely flatly, as though it was horrible, but also somehow quite normal. The other women in the office shook their heads with a sort of disgusted resignation. Yes, that’s how it was in those days. And then the conversation moved on and we talked about the best place in town to eat seafood and planned a visit to a brothel where Olin often goes to hand out condoms.

The Institute of Dayakology vigorously defended the first wave of this slaughter, saying that it was required by adat.
*
This was inconvenient for the international indigenous-rights movement. Underdogs are expected to rail against a patriarchal state or an exploitative multinational, perhaps even to resist by throwing a spear or burning a vehicle or two. But they are not supposed to slaughter other landless peasants and eat their hearts in the name of indigenous traditions.

The violence of 1997 shocked the nation, and the Dayaks turned the attention to their own advantage. They demanded more political involvement and Suharto, still on the throne at the time but growing less sure of himself, quickly appointed Dayaks to several positions of local importance that had always gone to the Malays. This angered the Malays. Severed heads and cannibalism are not traditionally part of the Malay repertoire, and the group had never been in conflict with the Madurese, who are fellow Muslims. But when they lost their jobs, Malay tempers frayed. When a Madurese immigrant stole a chicken from a Malay, a fight broke out and three people were killed. Suddenly the Malays were running around beheading the Madurese and throwing severed hands at Ibu Ibit. At least another 500 Madurese died in 1999 and 50,000 left the Sambas region, including second- and third-generation immigrants who had no other home and who ended up in camps in the provincial capital Pontianak.

Though the Dayaks have continued to press their advantage through a decade of decentralization, they took note of the Malays’ willingness to play dirty and have been increasingly willing to compromise with them. In Kalimantan as in many ethnically mixed areas of Indonesia, politics has become a process of political ‘cow trading’. For every mayor or bupati, there’s a deputy. Often, these pairings will run across ethnic lines, one a Dayak, the other a Malay. Even the despised Madurese now get a look-in. So many of them fled to Pontianak that they swelled into a voting block. When I visited the city in 2012, the mayor was Malay, his deputy Madurese.

Magnesium flashes of extreme violence are common in modern Indonesia. In the early Suharto years they tended to get stamped out very quickly. The violence in Kalimantan ran for longer because the military’s support for the President had already grown threadbare. Then Suharto stepped down and the jockeying for power between the civilian old guard, Islamic radicals, the armed forces and local potentates began. Traffic accidents turned into local rampages, the forces that should have put out the flames fanned them instead, and thousands died needlessly.

The worst of the post-Suharto violence had been in the eastern spice islands of Maluku, some 2,000 kilometres south-east of West Kalimantan. The roots of that conflict go back centuries and are tangled enough for a book of their own, but to summarize very briefly: the Dutch colonizers favoured the Christians of the southern Moluccan islands over the Muslims of the sultanates to the north. The better-educated Christians maintained their lock on the bureaucracy until the mid-1990s. That was when Suharto, in one of his intricate political balancing acts, started wooing Muslims. ‘Christian’ jobs were given to Muslims. At the same time, immigrants from hard-working Muslim tribes in Sulawesi began taking over Maluku’s markets from more laid-back local traders, and there was growing rivalry between criminal gangs that organized along religious lines.

It took one fight between a Christian bus driver and a Muslim passenger in January 1999 to put a match to the haystack.

The two sides set about needling one another, and though the jealousies that underpinned the conflict had nothing to do with faith, the battle lines were quickly drawn between church and mosque. Graffiti insulting Mohammad was scrawled on one wall of the provincial capital, Ambon, a picture of Christ was defaced on another. People who had no real interest in prayer tied on headbands – white for Muslims, red for Christians, almost as though they were going to a football match – and joined the fighting. In some areas of Ambon, seven out of ten young men were out of work; this impromptu Holy War was a way of venting frustration and developing a sense of purpose.

The army did nothing. The police did nothing.

Fighting broke out as far south as Tual and as far north as Halmahera. By 2002 over 5,000 people had been killed and another 700,000 – a third of the entire population of Maluku – had been driven from their homes. Even in idyllic Ohoiwait, where I had spent Christmas on this trip, the Muslims had been run out of town. Though a decade later some were beginning to trickle back, many of the tidy collective gardens maintained by Mama Ince and her friends in the lower village are planted on plots first fertilized by the burning of a Muslim home.

Nowadays, the people of Maluku explain the violence as being the work of unspecified ‘
provokator
’. ‘We’ve always got along just fine with our neighbours,’ I had heard all over Maluku: in Ohoiwait, in Tual, in Banda, in Saparua, in Ambon. ‘Yes, the Muslims/Christians had to leave the island, but we didn’t want them to go.’ In Banda, almost everyone I spoke to about ‘the Troubles’ told me that they personally had taken their Christian neighbours down to the port to see them off when they fled. ‘I cooked for them specially, I gave them pillows for the journey.’ The same script, word for word, from at least a dozen people. ‘I cooked for them, I gave them pillows. We didn’t want it to happen. We couldn’t protect them against the
provokator
.’

Provokator
is part of Indonesia’s vast vocabulary of political obfuscation, a word whose meaning is left deliberately vague, usually because naming a problem more specifically would mean that the government might have to address it in some way. But in this case, everyone knew that
provokator
meant a radical Islamist group named Laskar Jihad which arrived from Java with the blessing of senior politicians from Muslim parties and the express intention of cleansing Maluku of Christians.

In fact, the
provokator
did not arrive in Maluku until more than a year after the Muslims of Ohoiwait had to flee their homes and the Christians of Banda went into exile clutching their neighbours’ pillows. In the sixteen months of conflict before the Javanese jihadis even showed up, many hundreds, probably thousands, of people of both religions were hacked up or shot by neighbours, cousins, colleagues, schoolmates, customers who were also indigenous Malukans.

The violence in Maluku was billed as religious, that in Kalimantan as ethnic. But as with most conflicts, both were really about access to resources. And both were initiated by indigenous populations who believed that immigrants from other parts of the nation were getting a better deal in ‘their’ native land. While I travelled the country in 2011/2012, churches in Java were being burned because the Sumatran Bataks who worship in them were doing well economically, and Hindus in Sumatra were attacked because hard-working Balinese transmigrants had bought nicer motorbikes and built nicer houses than the Lampung locals.

‘Indigenous’ is a tricky concept in the Indonesian context. Despite having integrated into the coastal communities of Java in the 1300s and formed a democratic republic in Kalimantan more than 200 years ago, Indonesians with Chinese roots will never be considered indigenous, that’s clear. But almost everyone else is indigenous to one island or another, and in the historical rhetoric, all of those islands joined together voluntarily to form a nation in which all citizens have equal rights. It’s hard, then, to argue that the Dayaks are somehow more ‘indigenous’ than the Malays, of whom the hunter-gatherer Rimba in Sumatra are a subset, and who have been in Kalimantan for all of recorded history. Constitutionally, the Madurese – who are also indigenous to this unitary republic – should have the same right to live in West Kalimantan as anyone else. The Dayaks I met disagree.

The bus to Sintang, bang in the heart of West Kalimantan, had a hole in the windscreen, just in front of my nose. Radiating from it was a great, star-shaped fissure, sealed with plastic cement, though not well enough to stop the rain from dripping through. A sticker of Sukarno, cool in his black
peci
cap and shades, held together the most dangerous-looking edges of the crack. From higher up the windscreen, a buxom blonde naked but for a nurse’s cap, a Red Cross bikini and Russian hooker shoes looked down on the President. There were no windscreen wipers, but a lot of water was shaken off the glass by the vibrations from a giant boom-box. The playlist was rock from my early teen years in which
Hotel California
featured prominently; odd, since the ethnic Chinese driver looked like he was fourteen years old. At one point the bus juddered to a halt. ‘Rest stop’, called the driver, though we had clearly broken down. I went to take my ‘rest’, and emerged from the bushes to see the driver lying on his back, sucking petrol through a rubber hosepipe, something to do with creating a siphon, he said when I asked, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. It worked, and we trundled off again. I hadn’t had high expectations of the town we were headed for, thinking it would be an undistinguished little place, but I lowered them anyway.

In fact, Sintang is large, thriving, pulsing with new motorbikes and curiously devoid of public transport. How do poor people get around? I asked Danaus, a young Dayak civil servant whom we befriended in town. ‘There aren’t really any poor people in Sintang,’ he said. Rubber and palm oil has put money into everyone’s pockets.

Unusually for an Indonesian city, Sintang makes quite good use of its riverfront. The banks of the majestic Kapuas river are lined with restaurants and bars built up on stilts to avoid flooding; most of them have terraces over the water from which one can watch the sunset. Well, usually over the water; we arrived at the end of an unusually long dry season, when the river was at its very lowest. Most of the restaurants were now hundreds of metres away from the water’s edge. Marooned on the sandbanks at impractical angles were boathouses built on platforms of massive logs. Their residents longed for the river to rise again, so that they could straighten out their lives.

Melanie and I spent disproportionate amounts of time in the high-and-dry restaurants; for all their political tensions, Malay and Dayak seem to have fused in the kitchen to produce an extraordinarily delicious cuisine. From the Christian Dayak side come giant river prawns, pork with crunchy forest fungus and lots of leafy things: fiddle-head ferns and bright pumpkin flowers, for example. The Malays add spices and give us creamy
jengkol
beans, tasting not unlike over-ripe Camembert, cooked with tomatoes and shallots. The two influences come together perfectly in a dish of thick chunks of fish, slathered with garlic, ginger, chilli and lemon grass, wrapped in a large, edible leaf with a slightly bitter tang, and stewed gently in a coriander sauce.

Melanie and I set out in search of a Dayak longhouse. On the provincial map, the area around Sintang is jungle. On the ground, it is oil palm. For mile after mile, evenly spaced trees rise from bare earth, their straight, grey trunks topped with a dense crown of spikes that block the sky. We bumped along through this monotonous landscape for a couple of hours. Finally, the jungle. That lasted about six minutes. Then a clearing, and a Dayak longhouse.