Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (7 page)

In 1981 Suharto banned advertising on telly ‘to avoid detrimental effects which do not promote the spirit of development’. That freed up more programming time for his own messages. More relentlessly than ever, TVRI’s crashingly dull broadcasts promoted the spirit of family planning, dutiful citizenship and pride in the nation’s glorious growth. Many an earnest researcher ran regression analyses showing that family planning messaging on television was especially successful, because the birth rate fell soon after a village got a public TV set. I was not the only person to suggest that watching television might simply provide something to do in the evenings other than make babies.

Then, in 1989, TVRI’s monopoly was broken. Suharto handed out licences for private stations first to his son Bambang, then, in quick succession, to his cousin Sudwikatmono and his daughter Tutut. Suharto allowed his family to import soap operas from Latin America, to sprinkle them liberally with advertisements, to drop any pretence that TV might have a social purpose. At first these stations only reached an urban elite. Over time, though, they found their way onto the satellite and into the homes of people living on tuppence ha’penny a day in places that none of the Suharto children would ever visit. People very much like Suharto himself, in his younger days.

Suharto grew up as poor as the next villager, dropping out of junior high school and giving up a job in a bank because he fell off his bicycle and ripped his only set of presentable clothes. He joined the army, rose through the ranks, grabbed power. But he always cared deeply about improving life for the Javanese farmer, and once he was on the throne, he set about doing that with conviction. Though he put generals in charge of most aspects of Indonesian life, Suharto had the good sense to put the economy into the hands of a small clique of competent and cautious economists collectively known as the ‘Berkeley mafia’ because many of them had studied in California with sponsorship from the Ford Foundation. They first pushed through policies that got agriculture back on its feet. The country went from being the world’s biggest importer of rice to being a net exporter.

Having watched South Korea and other countries grow rich by helping private companies make things other countries wanted to buy, the Berkeley mafia welcomed foreign investors and promoted manufacturing for export. The economy boomed. The proportion of kids in school doubled, access to basic health services rocketed. In his first two decades as President, Suharto kept the country on an even keel by delivering just enough to keep everyone on board, and to keep them obeying the captain’s orders. It was a giant balancing act. If Catholics in the military were growing too strong for comfort, Suharto would throw a little meat to Muslim intellectuals. He allowed the army to keep its fingers in most of the huge state companies that were the legacy of Dutch times; in return, soldiers were obliged to keep workers in the embryonic manufacturing sector in their place. The President invited foreign companies to invest in Indonesia, then made them team up with one of the businessmen who bankrolled his own various political ventures.

This made for what World Bank economists called ‘high transaction costs’ and everyone else called corruption. And yet from the early 1980s foreigners
did
want to invest in Indonesia, precisely
because
of the stability that this web of compromise delivered. Many people saw the pay-offs to generals and cronies as a reasonable price for that stability. The investors turned a blind eye to the other price, the one paid by the communities whose objections to logging or mining were silenced with gunfire, by the workers who requested the minimum wage and wound up in hospital, by the journalists who were locked up for describing these things.

For many years, most Indonesians turned a blind eye too, because the stability that Suharto delivered worked well for them. On my very first day as a correspondent for Reuters in Jakarta, Suharto’s autobiography was published in English. The reporter I was to take over from threw the volume across onto my empty desk. ‘Give us a couple of pars on that,’ he said. Seeing my panic, he added: ‘The story’s probably the extra-judicial killings.’ And indeed in his autobiography, the serving president mentioned almost casually that he had, a couple of years earlier, ordered his defence minister to kill over 2,000 common criminals without trial. ‘Shock therapy’, Suharto called it. I went to a nearby restaurant in search of some ‘vox pop’ – Indonesians who might, in English, tell me what they thought of the President’s admission. ‘Before the killings, my daughter couldn’t walk the streets at night,’ shrugged one. ‘Now, she can.’ His daughter, and the sons and daughters of millions of other more modest Indonesians, could go to school, get decent primary health care, go to bed with a full stomach every night, and dream of what they would be when they grew up. Their parents’ generation had not been able to take any of these things for granted.

Like most dictators, Suharto ruled past his sell-by date; the world remembers the ugly final years and it is thus unfashionable to concede that he ever did anything worthwhile. Yes, Suharto suppressed every form of political expression. Yes, he tried to press the country’s magnificently diverse cultures into a single, Javanese mould. Yes, he turned over large chunks of the country’s wealth first to his generals and business cronies, then to his increasingly rapacious children. But for the first two decades after his ugly confiscation of power, Suharto made life measurably better for tens of millions of Indonesians. He was genuinely popular.

It was about the time that I arrived in Indonesia in the late 1980s that things started to go badly wrong. They went wrong in part
because
life was getting so much better. With their basic needs met and a better education, people began to want more. They could see the economy booming, then saw all the growth go into a handful of pockets. Increasingly, they were the pockets of Suharto’s children, who were growing up and getting greedy. Workers who heard ministers making speeches about the ‘trickle down’ economy felt that the profits from the Barbie dolls and Nike shoes that they were making weren’t trickling down fast enough, and they started to say so. As generals watched joint ventures go to Suharto’s children instead of to the armed forces, they did less to silence the workers’ protests.

I don’t want to suggest that Indonesia suddenly turned into a cauldron of dissent. To this day I keep a shirt of scratchy light-blue nylon, silk-screened over with numbers. It is made out of a banner which a group of workers from the nation’s single government-approved union had strung up outside a footwear factory in the suburbs of Jakarta. On the banner was printed the article of the labour law that detailed the minimum wage. That was all; no call to arms, no commentary, just the amount companies ought by law to be paying their workers. It hung up there for just half a day before the army moved in and tore it down, leaving my friends in the union to cut it up and make it into shirts.

Indonesia was not South Korea, with its mass protests and street riots. It was not India, with its mouthy democratic opposition and million-strong sit-ins. But by the time I arrived in 1988, there was just enough stringing up and forcible taking down of banners, just enough outbursts of rage and looting of Japanese shops, just enough anti-Jakarta skirmishes in restive provinces to keep a journalist busy.

From my villa in Menteng, a former Dutch suburb and still the greenest part of Jakarta, I would leap on my motorbike and explore the less comfortable areas of town. I talked to the deckhands who congregated at the city’s northern docks, waiting to sail glorious wooden cargo schooners to ports too small for container ships. I wandered the old Dutch city, a mini-Amsterdam of cobbled squares and elegant facades towering tall and thin over canals. It was neglected now, the canals clogged and fetid, the colonists’ palaces of commerce taken over by petty traders and petty thieves. Under a colonnade that would once have sheltered pale wives from the tropical sun, a group of prostitutes and their clients now twirled to tinny music from a cheap cassette recorder.

I took up smoking in the service of my work. Nice girls didn’t smoke in those days, but buying a single cigarette and borrowing a lighter was a good way to strike up a conversation with the street vendors who saw every change in traffic patterns around the presidential palace, who knew exactly which shopkeepers paid protection money to which branch of the police or military.

Quite often I was in the company of Enny Nuraheni, the Reuters photographer, my partner in all manner of crimes. Mostly we conspired to commit surreptitious acts of journalism, breaking through police lines around a church bombing, or charming our way into a refugee camp off-limits to the press. We must have been an odd sight, these two diminutive women, one white, one brown, trundling around on a rusty motorbike in unexpected parts of town. Sharp-eyed Enny would poke me in the ribs the minute she spotted something interesting. I’d skid to a halt without question, and she would swing her camera into the path of a monkey in a tutu dancing to an accordion, or a punch-up between men in suits outside the Stock Exchange. The punch-up was just part of the hysteria surrounding the growth of the Jakarta stock market. When I arrived in late 1988, there were only twenty-four shares listed on the Jakarta exchange, and foreigners were only allowed to buy eight of them. I bought a handful of shares in three listed companies on one day, just for the fun of it, and I accounted for nearly a quarter of the day’s stock-market turnover. A year later, after technocrats pushed through deregulations that ate away at the anti-Western legacy of the Sukarno years, there were three times as many companies on offer and dozens more were queuing up for a listing. Banners up and down the thoroughfares of Jakarta screamed ‘GO PUBLIC!’ Men in suits fought to get their hands on newly minted shares; the application forms alone were trading for as much as US$170 each. And all the while, soldiers were tearing down banners reminding factory workers that they were entitled to earn 90 cents a day.

In a delightfully circular replay of colonial history, it was a clove monopoly that turned the public spotlight most firmly on to the rot at the heart of Suharto’s state.

The biggest consumer of Indonesia’s cloves nowadays are Indonesia’s smokers, who like their cigarettes scented with the spice, not least because it doubles as an anaesthetic and smoothes the passage of toxins into the lungs. The country smokes 223 billion clove cigarettes, or
kreteks
, every year, thirteen times more than ordinary ‘white’ cigarettes. Many kreteks are still hand-rolled, some of them in small sheds cooled only by ceiling fans too lazy to send tobacco scraps flying, some in jarringly modern factories in which uniformed women work in air-conditioned spotlessness. Paid a bonus for productivity, they roll so quickly that viewing the factory floor from above feels like watching a speeded-up film.

Indonesia produces nearly 80 per cent of the world’s cloves, and its cigarette industry translates most of them into the thick, languorous smoke that hangs over virtually every conversation about politics, family affairs or the price of rice or rubber in rural Indonesia. This did not escape the attention of the Suharto family. The President’s youngest son Tommy decided to try a replay of the strategy that made the VOC rich three centuries earlier: a clove monopoly. Clove trees are moody as teenagers, coming out with smilingly generous crops one year, then sulking through periods of low productivity that last an agonizingly unpredictable length of time. Tommy claimed his enforced, fixed-price purchase of all the country’s cloves was a way of stabilizing prices for farmers. Then he sold them on at three times what he paid for them.

Tommy doubtless thought he could get away with this because the cigarette firms were owned by a handful of toweringly rich ethnic Chinese families. The ethnic Chinese walk a knife-edge in modern Indonesia. They are assumed to be universally wealthy and are seen by many as leeches, but they provide the capital and business skills that keep the economy growing. Their wealth is tolerated as long as they stay out of politics, and they usually try to avoid controversy. This time, however, they refused to do as they were told. Many of the factories had huge stockpiles of cloves; they simply didn’t buy from Tommy. In the end, at the President’s command, Indonesian taxpayers bailed out Tommy Suharto.