The Fifth Season (32 page)
In the early hours of the morning, before the first call to prayers heralded the new day, Hababli had, with considerable reservations, agreed to General Winarko's requests. The brash Praboyo would be immediately removed from his position as commander of Kostrad and transferred to Bandung, out of harm's way. Winarko would reshuffle the ABRI leadership, preventing those who might be tempted to overthrow the fledgling government, from effecting their coup.
Outside, in the main foyer, he could hear General Praboyo shouting at the Palace guard commander.
'Let me pass!' he ordered, but the other officer stood his ground.
'Get rid of the weapon, then we'll talk,' the colonel argued.
'I am giving you an order!' Praboyo's voice rose, his anger evident.
'You can not pass carrying a weapon!' he was told.
'Get Hababli out here, then!' he shouted, his voice carrying clearly through the building. Outside, elements of Kostrad forces waited, dressed in full combat dress and heavily armed. Three Saracen armored personnel carriers stood, threateningly, guns pointed towards the Palace entrance, while two Scorpion light tanks blocked the main gates, preventing both escape and access to the grounds. As the officers argued, Hababli was ushered away through an adjoining room into an area which could be better defended.
'The President is not here,' the guard officer lied. His ruse appeared successful as he observed a flicker of doubt cross the other man's face. 'Look, General,' he continued, taking the advantage, 'why not leave your weapon here with your men? I'll leave mine as well.' Praboyo seemed confused by the suggestion. He hesitated, turned to his men, barked an order for them to remain alert, then unbuckled his belt and passed the holstered gun to an aide. By this time, Hababli had been hurried through the upper levels and had reached the flat, concrete roof.
'Let's go,' he insisted, marching towards the President's office. 'I'll just satisfy myself that he's not here.' His heavy army boots struck the marble loudly sending their ominous message that he was coming. He reached the room where he suspected Hababli would be, and stormed in unannounced. His eyes darted around searching for the man who had betrayed him and, at that moment, he heard the familiar sound as a helicopter lifted away from the roof-top pad, his anger spilling over with the discovery that the President had escaped.
Praboyo's plans to take him hostage and declare martial law, had been narrowly frustrated. Now, empty handed, the cold realization that he had missed the one opportunity which might have brought him to power, only added to his rage.
'Get me Winarko!' he bellowed, and the guard officer nodded, deciding that this would be best for all. He phoned the Chief of Staff 's personal assistant and within minutes located the General. The officer then briefed Winarko, and handed the telephone to Praboyo.
' You are very foolish,' Winarko said, in a controlled voice.
'I still have the support of Kostrad,' Praboyo responded, arrogantly.
'That won't be for long,' the more senior officer declared, calmly. Praboyo detected a smugness in the other man's tone, and clenched his fists.
'I can also count on Kopassus,' he claimed. He had not spoken to the Special Forces commander that day; now he understood why his friend had been unavailable.
'No you can't,' Winarko replied. 'He was replaced two hours ago.' Praboyo's face tightened.
'There are others who will support me,' he tried, but unconvincingly.
'Forget it, 'Boyo,' Winarko said, 'you're finished. The Americans will not support you. I have already spoken to their Embassy. Carruthers has been recalled.'
Praboyo pulled the phone away from his ear, tempted to smash it to the ground but, instead, swore at the other man. For a brief moment there was silence, then Winarko spoke to him again. He listened, intently, the armed forces chief outlining the steps he had taken to prevent Praboyo from effecting his coup.
As the other man rattled off the list of officers who had either been relieved of their commands, or promoted away from direct control over any troops, Praboyo knew he had lost. In pragmatic fashion he accepted defeat, agreeing to abandon his attempt to seize power, and in typical Javanese style his superior offered a compromise which he knew he must accept.
With forced smile he returned to his waiting troops and dismissed them all, then instructed his driver to take him home to his wife. When he informed Tuti of his posting to the ABRI Staff College, in Bandung, the irony of this appointment was lost on them both, for her father had also been relegated to this lesser position by his chief of staff, in another time, when he too had challenged those in power, and lost.
But had Praboyo known this story, it might have lessened the burden of his heavy heart, as his father-in-law had used his own exile to re-group, waiting patiently to fulfill his destiny as President of the Republic of Indonesia.
****
In the days following Suhapto's shock resignation, General Winarko reshuffled his ABRI leadership. At first, there was surprise, then confusion as Praboyo's sidelining became known, and his successor also replaced less than eighteen hours after being appointed commander of the powerful Kostrad Strategic Forces group. Christian generals were quietly shuffled out of harm's way, the Mufti Muharam's powerful influence suddenly becoming apparent as the new Indonesian leadership bowed to their demands. Although assured of American support, Winarko decided to postpone his own claims on the Presidency. The country was teetering on bankruptcy; this was not the time to take control. He would wait.
For a brief time tensions eased as the new government set about restoring stability and international confidence, desperate for the IMF and the World Bank to restore the flow of funds to the ailing economy. Then, precisely seven days to the hour when Bapak Suhapto's reign had finally come to an end, the world shuddered again.
From Libya to Cairo, across to Baghdad, Teheran, Kabul and Islamabad, and down the Malay-Indonesian archipelago, hundreds of millions of faithful followers swarmed into the streets, rejoicing, when Pakistan's Moslem leaders announced that their scientists had detonated a twenty- kiloton device in response to the Indian tests. A frightening, new era had arrived and with it, the first Islamic nuclear bomb.
The melancholic strains of Idris Sardi's golden violin filled the empty room, adding to her feeling of depression. Mary Jo sat slumped in the cane chair, observing the once lush surroundings of the deserted hotel's beer garden, wishing she had not returned to the now neglected resort.
Gone were the prized and well-cared for orchids and shrubs; gone too were magnificent tapestries and paintings which greeted guests as they entered the well-appointed lobby. She knew that the hot, humid, equatorial climate was not entirely to blame for the hotel's rapid deterioration; the country's failed economy had contributed to that. The colonial-styled resort had become one of the Republic's many idle monuments, reflecting the nation's dramatic decline as it continued to slip towards anarchy.
Mary Jo looked up at the overhead ceiling fans, the cutting edges blackened with neglect and spotted a
gecko
lizard, upside down, waiting for passing prey. Above, and to the centre of the atrium, splinters of light touched a broken porcelain lamp, hanging idly in lost splendor. Across the terrazzo-tiled courtyard, a fountain fed water into a lily-covered fish pond. Mary Jo guessed that the golden carp which had so fascinated tourists in the past, would have been amongst the first to disappear from this scene, no doubt to grace the barren table of some staff 's hungry family. She sighed, more so from exasperation than from weariness.
Who would have
thought that the country would slip this far in less than one year?
With one hand, Mary Jo extracted one of the filtered
kretek
cigarettes from the plastic packet and, with practiced mechanical motion placed one between her lips and lit this with the throw-away, plastic lighter. Her lungs immediately identified the taste of clove as she inhaled deeply, the warm, soothing sensation calming her frayed nerves. She remained still, permitting the cigarette to carry her thoughts away, inhaling from time to time as she sat alone, unconcerned that to others she might appear untidy, although she was in desperate need of a bath. Relaxed as the nicotine entered her blood, Mary Jo stretched, recalling the long, tiring drive back into the cool hills, away from the filthy, scorched Surabaya sidewalks, and the monotonous, steaming, muggy climate, that perpetually clung to the Java coast.
More than a year had passed since she had last visited Tretes, the hillside mountain resort area south of the Javanese port-city of Surabaya.
Here, the air was noticeably cooler, and the thought of sleeping without an air-conditioner appealed to her. Electricity had become unreliable.
Deprived of sleep, the erratic, mechanical thumping of compressors starting, then failing, often drove her to despair and, in desperation, she had decided to flee to the mountains, to rest. Now, observing the deteriorated surroundings, she was uncertain if her escape had been such a great idea.
Lazily flicking the ash from her
kretek
onto the unswept floor, she considered returning to the city, then decided that there wasn't much in the choice. Even her accommodations in Surabaya had become neglected, and now, claustrophobic.
Mary Jo was unsure if the country would ever recover from the malaise which had stifled the nation's economic recovery. And, as events continued to unfold with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, the destabilizing, decolonization process had begun. Indonesia was slowly, but surely, ripping itself apart as separatists in many of the twenty-seven provinces agitated for independence from the Javanese.
She had just returned from the eastern string of islands which led from Java and Bali, across to Timor and New Guinea, as world attention again focused on the bloody uprisings. Within months of Hababli becoming President, the inhabitants of Timor, Ambon and Irian Jaya, the western half of New Guinea, grew confident that the centralist Indonesians would establish a dialogue which would lead, ultimately, to independence.
Their timing was perfect; the Javanese dominated archipelago was suddenly confronted with uprisings in North Sumatra as hard-line Moslems declared their region autonomous, refusing to acknowledge the Indonesian imposed Constitution. When fighting had again erupted, Javanese troops had been deployed to deal with the Aceh separatists, inflicting a bloody and devastating defeat upon the fundamentalists, as they had done in the past. Buoyed by their success, these battalions had then been air-lifted to North Sulawesi where, to
ABRI's
chagrin, the Menadonese rebels proved more resilient, taking as many lives as they lost during the first of two major battles.
Convinced that the central government would be too preoccupied with further outbreaks in East and West Kalimantan, the Timorese challenged the reduced troop presence, resulting in the systematic slaughter of tens of thousands of East Timorese by the feared
Kopassus
groups.
Fighting had broken out, simultaneously, throughout the thinly populated mountain regions of West Irian. There, the still primitive tribes went to battle against greatly superior forces, their archaic spears no match for the Indonesian soldiers' automatic weapons, helicopter gunships, and OV-10's which randomly strafed isolated villages across the highlands.
Within six weeks, the disastrous uprisings had been brutally, but successfully, put down. In the months that followed, the first waves of refugees boarded their flimsy vessels and fled their traditional lands, driven by the fear of retribution and empty stomachs. As thousands of children died, the first flood of East Timorese heading towards Northern Australia were turned back by Australian Navy coastal patrols, resulting in these displaced people changing course, towards the less-hostile, and many, smaller islands, across to Bali.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimated that approximately one hundred thousand East Timorese had escaped the brutal Indonesian soldiers by boat, only to be subjected to further atrocities as their numbers threatened to inundate the sparsely populated, and lesser islands. The refugees met with fierce resistance wherever they landed. Unwelcome, starving and bewildered as to how the world could permit this genocide to continue, they were finally captured and herded into camps, where many of their number died of malnutrition and disease, even before Hababli could celebrate his first anniversary as President of Indonesia.
Mary Jo had temporarily moved her base of operations to Surabaya, placing her almost a thousand kilometers closer to the eastern trouble spots. She had retained the Jakarta villa, and along with her assistant, Anne, they had become regular passengers on the revamped feeder airline service which now operated throughout the island. Garuda Airlines had all but collapsed, unable to repay three hundred million dollars in foreign currency debts.