Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (6 page)

The roving restaurants provided the backing track for meals served under a candle-lit frangipani tree in my garden – a source of bemusement to my Javanese friends, who think frangipanis belong in graveyards. Around the table, journalists, diplomats and the braver Indonesian intellectuals put forward their theory about who was in, who was out, whether the absence of this minister from that cocktail party signalled that the Old Man was unhappy with a faction of the military or was a warning to a particular business conglomerate. Since nothing much was known, everything was plausible.

A young British diplomat named Jon Benjamin, whiplash smart and very grounded, frequently came down on the side of what he called the Fuckwit Factor. Behind all the smoke and mirrors, the most likely reason that this minister was not at that cocktail party was that his driver forgot to put petrol in the car. The cancellation of the joint military exercises with Singapore, the postponement of the trade mission to the US, the blackout at the radio station scheduled to broadcast a vice-presidential address: again and again Jon would advance the theory that someone, somewhere, just fucked up. As events unfolded, Jon was often proved right.

Sukarno had tried to pull ‘Indonesia’ together through sheer force of personality. Suharto used the steely threads of bureaucracy. The quiet general often paid lip service to the motto that appears on the national coat of arms: ‘Unity in Diversity’. But he made it abundantly clear that he was more in favour of the tidy unity than of the troublesome diversity. His flunkies set about pressing the ‘diversity’ into acceptable forms: local costumes were redesigned for modesty, traditional dances were shorn of their flirtations.

The Suharto version of diversity was on display for me on the second day of my new job at Reuters. ‘Come! We’ll show you the country!’ declared my Indonesian colleagues. They whisked me down a broad avenue lined with plate-glass office blocks, past several of the gargantuan socialist-realist statues erected by Sukarno to inspire the proletariat, and out to Mini Indonesia, a nationalist theme park designed by Suharto’s wife Tien. Soon we were swinging in a cable car above a huge artificial lake dotted with the islands shaped like the major land masses of Indonesia. Then we trekked dutifully around a few of the pavilions built to represent the nation’s hundreds of cultures. There was one pavilion per province, twenty-seven of them at the time, each an example of traditional architecture, each containing dioramas of people in traditional dress (though none of the mannequins topless as the women of Bali used to be, none of them wearing loincloths with severed-head motifs typical of the warriors of Sumba). There was one house of worship for each of Indonesia’s approved faiths, too: churches Catholic and Protestant, a Hindu temple, a Buddhist stupa and, of course, a Mosque. There was no sign of the hundreds of folk religions that I later found bubbling alongside those sanctioned by Suharto. No ritual slaughter of buffalo here at Mini Indonesia, no midnight offerings of afterbirth on the night of a full moon.

While his wife scrubbed up the nation’s more ‘primitive’ cultures for display in Mini Indonesia, Suharto himself imposed national symbols and institutions uniformly across the land. Though his rhetoric encompassed the nation, much of the symbolism was Javanese, and most was delivered through the state. Every Monday morning, schoolchildren sang the national anthem while the head boy and head girl solemnly raised the flag. There were other anthems of unity too, including a song that glorifies the union of the necklace of islands that runs between the towns of Sabang in the north-west and Merauke in the south-east. ‘I used to be so proud, standing in my little red shorts singing “From Sabang to Merauke”, before being forced to swallow everything about Java,’ a Balinese friend told me.

Every Saturday throughout the Suharto years, civil servants from Arab-tinged Aceh to the Melanesians of Papua (5,000 kilometres and three time zones away) held their own version of the school flag-raising ceremony, all dressed in identical Javanese batik emblazoned with the national Pancasila Eagle motif. From the point of view of an outsider, there was something slightly comforting about these enforced displays of unity. In every unexplored town there were things you’d recognize. I knew there would be neat white signboards outside every official building, school and place of worship, giving its function and its address. At the entrance to each village, carefully hand-painted on strips of wood in many colours, would be the ‘Ten core programmes of the Family Welfare Union’ – a supposedly grass-roots women’s organization that was in fact invented in Central Java and replicated throughout the land under the watchful eyes of the provincial governors’ wives. These women – referred to as
Ibu-Ibu
, ‘The Ladies’ – represented a species of upper-middle-class wife found throughout Indonesia. Taking their lead from Suharto’s Ibu Tien, they all wore their hair combed up and then lacquered into massive globes – rounder than a beehive, but puffier than the traditional
konde
bun. There was pancake make-up, much silk and brocade, and manicures that could strike terror into the hearts of small children. The look was Cruella de Vil meets
The Mikado
, but the ‘10 Programmes’ they promoted were more domesticated, enshrining the duties of a good wife and mother. They ranged from the concrete – ‘Health’, ‘Food’ – to the more esoteric: ‘Understanding and Practice of Pancasila’.

To try and iron out regional differences and modernize the bureaucracy, Suharto imposed an identikit framework of government across the whole country in the 1970s. Previously, local communities had organized themselves according to their various traditions – the Dayaks of Kalimantan gathered in longhouses under the supervision of a respected elder, for example, while in West Sumatra clans clustered around communally held land. By sweeping away these variations, Suharto undermined the very foundation of many of the nation’s cultures. He hoped they would be rebuilt with a set of building blocks that were identical nationwide. There were five principal levels of government: nation, province, district, sub-district, and village.
*
They followed a fairly strict chain of command. Suharto stripped the provinces of any vestige of decision-making, appointing governors – many of them military men, several of them Javanese, all of them fiercely loyal – to do Jakarta’s bidding. He backed them up with two uniformed armies, both also largely Javanese. The first was of soldiers, who were given licence under a doctrine known as ‘dual function’ to meddle in civilian life down to the village level. The second was of civil servants. The distinction between the two was not always clear.

When I travelled in eastern Indonesia during the Suharto years, it was rare to find a civil servant who spoke the local language or had the dark skin and crinkly hair of the dry and neglected islands that nudge Australia. Most bureaucrats came from Java or other areas where accidents of colonial history had left a better-than-average educational system. The locals treated them like a separate species. During a trip to the tiny, arid island of Savu, just north of Australia, in 1991, I recorded the comment of a farmer I met: ‘Here we eat once a day, for the rest we drink palm sugar. Except for civil servants, they eat three times a day.’

There was another species, too, that local populations regarded as quite separate from themselves. These were Javanese ‘transmigrants’ – poor peasants who were paid by the government to shift from the overcrowded rural heartland to roomier islands. The programme actually dates from Dutch times when it was called ‘colonization’; it was judiciously renamed by Sukarno, who planned each year to send a million and a half Javanese, with their obedient, collectivist values, to other islands to homogenize the nation. Always better at vision than delivery, he managed to shift just one thousandth of his target number over fifteen years.

Suharto shared his predecessor’s hope that government-sponsored transmigration might foster national unity. He ramped up the programme, sending around 300,000 people a year from Java and Bali to other islands. Halfway into Suharto’s term, his minister of transmigration said: ‘By way of transmigration we will try to . . . integrate all the ethnic groups into one nation, the Indonesian nation. The different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration and there will be one kind of man, Indonesian.’
*

If the minister believed that transmigrants were happily flirting in coffee shops with the local population, settling in to make truly ‘Indonesian’ babies, he was mistaken. In fact, they clumped together like sticky-rice in villages named after their home towns. I visited a transmigration site in the north-eastern province of Aceh in the early 1990s; it was among the most forlorn places I have ever been in Indonesia. Sidomulio, it was called – a Javanese name if ever I heard one. It was a tiny hamlet carved out of the jungle bordering a rubber plantation. There were a few creaky shops named after the great towns of Java – ‘Solo Agricultural Products’, ‘Malang Barber’. They were all boarded up. Most of the houses had been stripped of their more valuable contents, padlocked and abandoned. Peeking in, I could see toys strewn across the floor, half-full glasses of tea left on tables. The only sign of life was a pack of hungry dogs.

An old man, Acehnese, appeared on a prehistoric motorcycle. I asked where all the villagers were. They had left because they were unwelcome, he replied. Acehnese rebels accused Jakarta of stealing its resources, and had launched a guerrilla war against the central government. But the people who bore the brunt of their ire were the unskilled landless peasants who had been sent here in a failed attempt to engineer national unity. The villagers of Sidomulio had left after their headman was stabbed to death in the middle of the night, presumably by guerrillas.

The victimization of transmigrants in Aceh was an extreme case of local dissatisfaction. But even where transmigrants rubbed along well enough with their neighbours, they carried on speaking their mother tongue, they cultivated the crops they grew back home, they set up the gamelan gong orchestras that mirrored those of Java or Bali. It was more transplantation than transmigration, hardly a homogenizing force.

Transmigration was a rare failure in Suharto’s nation-building efforts. More successful, and perhaps more surprising for a man who was a peasant at heart, was his foray into television.

Suharto knew that if he were to replace the turmoil of the Sukarno years with more stolid progress, he was going to have to improve health, education and agricultural practices. And he needed a platform to tell Indonesians,
all
Indonesians, about their part in building this glorious nation. Telly was going to be that platform, he decided. In the mid-1970s Indonesia launched a satellite with a footprint that covered the whole country (and dusted most of South East Asia as well). It was a bold move – the US and Canada were the only countries in the world with domestic satellites at that stage – and it was a move Indonesia could ill afford. But it provided a megaphone through which Suharto could proclaim the gospel of development to all of his people. It also signalled to the world that a door had been firmly closed on Sukarno-style chaos, and a new door opened on to modernity.

Once the satellite was launched, the government began handing out ‘public’ TV sets, 50,000 of them a year. They usually sat in the home of the headman; the whole village crammed in of an evening to watch together. There was only one channel on offer, TVRI. The airwaves over the outer islands were suddenly crammed with images of national development. And with ads. Many in Jakarta worried about that. It was one thing to advertise consumer goods to the privileged few who could afford televisions in the largely urban areas covered by the terrestrial stations. But it was potentially dangerous to show the Have-Nots in the villages and on distant islands the cornucopia of consumer goods that was on offer to the Haves in Java. Satellite TV was supposed to turn the tribes of the land into Indonesians, not to turn them into an army of disgruntled Want-But-Never-Could-Haves.