As the abc’s Jakarta correspondent for five years, Michael Maher
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- CONTENTS
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- INTRODUCTION
| INDONESIA
As the ABC’s Jakarta correspondent for five years, Michael Maher covered the deepening crisis across the Indonesian archipelago, producing award-winning journalism for both television and radio and gaining a reputation for incisive reporting. An Asian Studies graduate, Maher has lived and worked throughout South-East Asia. He is currently Asia Editor at The Bulletin. INDONESIA MICHAEL MAHER VIKING Viking Penguin Books Australia Ltd 487 Maroondah Highway, PO Box 257 Ringwood,Victoria 3134, Australia Penguin Books Ltd Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Putnam Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA ’ Penguin Books Canada Limited 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd :, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd : 5 Watkins Street, Denver Ext 4,2094, South Africa Penguin Books India (P) Ltd 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India First published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2000 10987654321 Copyright © Michael Maher, 2000 The moral right of the author has been asserted All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Cover design by John Canty, Penguin Design Studio Text design by Erika Budiman, Penguin Design Studio Map on pp. viii-ix by Craig McGill Typeset in 12/17 pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed and bound in Australia by Australian Print Group, Maryborough National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Maher, Michael Bret, 1962- . Indonesia: an eyewitness account. Includes index. ISBN 0 670 88532 0. 1. Religion and social problems - Indonesia. 2. Religion and state - Indonesia. 3. Indonesia - Politics and government - 1998- . 4. Indonesia - Economic conditions 1945- . 5. Indonesia - Religion. I.Title. 959.8 www.pengmn.com.au For Susan CONTENTS Map viii Author’s Note xi Introduction . . 1 1 Java Days 4 2 Suharto’s Kingdom 14 3 The Ties That Bind 39 4 Dr Strangelove and the Brotherhood of Islam 63 5 Insulting the Sovereign: Communists, Subversives and Traitors 89 6 A Race Apart 115 7 The Asian Contagion 127 8 The May Revolution? 150 9 The Balkans of South-East Asia 173 10 East Timor 202 11 A Million Mutinies Now 231 Epilogue: In the Shadow of a Dictator 254 Acknowledgements 259 Index 263 AUTHOR’S NOTE I EMBARKED ON THIS PROJECT with the singular aim of writing an accessible book on Indonesia - one that might reach as wide an audience as possible. For many outsiders, Indonesia is an intimidating subject. It’s a nation so vast and seemingly complex that it defies ready judgement. Even those who have made the study of this archipelago their life’s work often stumble in the face of its subterranean politics, its regional differences and its unexpected quirks. A noted scholar once told me:’No matter how much of a so-called expert you are on Indonesia, you invariably end up getting a lot wrong.’ Indonesians themselves joke that they sometimes have trouble fathoming the undercurrents of their nation. After all, j getting it’right’when analysing a country of more than 200 million people and 250 ethnic groups spread over 13000 islands is no simple task. This book doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive or detached study of Indonesia’s politics, its economy or its relations with the rest of the world. Rather it is a personal account of the years I spent covering a nation in the midst of great change. It is the story of the struggles, the hopes, the defeats and the victories of a diverse people living under the dead weight of an authoritarian, deeply corrupt xi AUTHOR’S NOTE regime. Of course, Indonesia’s story is far from over. I conclude with the rise of the country’s first democratically elected president, Abdurrahman Wahid, and the resolution of the long-running East Timor dispute. Now new chapters have begun, every bit as challenging and daunting as those that have just come to an end. For Australian readers, I hope I have gone some way towards lifting the veil that often shrouds our largest Asian neighbour to reveal that there are as many common bonds and aspirations uniting us as there are differences that divide us. For the many Indonesians who generously gave their time, insights and friendship - often under threat of retribution from an oppressive state -1 hope this book will be seen as an outsider’s honest and sympathetic attempt to chronicle tumultuous times. Michael Matter nil INTRODUCTION FROM A KOOFTOP I WATCHED as Jakarta burned. To the north, the city’s Chinatown was ablaze. At all other points - south, east and west - there were yet more fires. Department stores, banks, police stations and homes. All engorged by the flames. Down below, the streets were empty.The garishly painted kaki lima foodcarts, dispensing satay on banana leaves and spicy noodles in stained china bowls, had disappeared. So had the rust-eaten Metromini buses careening murderously along Jalan Sudirman, passengers hanging on for dear life.The din of traffic, the cries of hawkers and the crush of office workers, street urchins and commuters had come to a halt. The cacophonous rhythm of this giant Asian metropolis was no longer beating. Only the occasional forlorn wail of a siren disturbed the quiet. Looking out over the city I had lived in for five years, I knew we’d reached the end. For months the pressure had been building. Student unrest, street riots and looting had broken out around the country. Indonesians were not only thinking the unthinkable, they had now begun to act. Millions were demanding that the country’s aging dictator, General Suharto, stand down. As the plumes of acrid black smoke gradually smudged out the INDONESIA blue mid-day sky, I reflected on how one man had been able to drive his nation to the edge of such a precipice and still grimly press on, despite the promise of certain disaster. I reflected on all the other dictators who had done the same, marvelling at history’s ability to repeat itself, at humankind’s inability to learn the lessons of the past. But most of all I was struck by the breakneck speed with which events were finally unfolding. For five years I had watched as cracks began to appear in the towering edifice that was the Suharto regime. While cashed-up foreign banks, hungry multi-national corporations and an array of eager world leaders lined up to hail Indonesia an ’Asian miracle’, away from the gleaming office blocks of Jakarta’s Golden Triangle miracles were getting harder to find. To be sure, President Suharto had brought three decades of stability to this unwieldy, archipelagic nation. He’d raised literacy and health standards and had put rice on peoples tables. But at what cost? In the process he’d ruled Indonesians as a feudal king rules his serfs - at times benevolent, occasionally tolerant of grievances but ultimately prepared to use brute force to put down those who threatened his own political and economic interests. Now it had come to this. Weighed down by an Asia-wide economic collapse, the capital had exploded. Jakarta had succumbed to the anarchy of the mob. Just a few streets away from my observation post stood Suharto’s heavily guarded bungalow at 8 Jalan Cendana.The president wasn’t home. He was at a conference in Egypt.As his country continued to freefall deeper into crisis, Suharto’s absence underlined once again just how remote he’d become. And now it was too late for him to make amends. Perhaps, as he sat in his hotel suite in Cairo, watching the news reports on his burning capital, the besieged president was also reflecting. Was he asking himself what had gone wrong? Was INTRODUCTION he blaming his misfortunes on treachery and incompetence within his own palace? Or was he, old soldier to the last, plotting his next move? As I left the roof to file another despatch for the hourly news bulletin, Suharto had just seven days left in power. It was Thursday 14 May 1998. The next week would bring moments of terror, intrigue and, finally, sheer jubilation. But at the end of it all, after Asia’s most enduring strongman had been brought down, Indonesians would be forced to confront the crushing truth. Suharto had promised to build foundations that would secure Indonesia’s future. Instead, he bequeathed his people a house of cards . . . JAVA DAYS ’... Java is probably the very finest and most interesting tropical island in the world.’ - ALFSED RUSSEL WALLACE, THE MALAY ARCHIPELAGO, 1861 TIRING is TOO GOOD FOR YOU! I’m sending you to Jakarta.’ So read the caption to a cartoon of a hapless reporter standing, head bowed, before the desk of his hard-bitten editor. In my office at the back of a mouldering bungalow in the old Dutch quarter of Menteng, this cartoon took pride of place on the permanently damp walls. It was a favourite among many of Jakarta’s other foreign correspondents as well. Not that we needed reminding of the fraught relationship between the Western media and the Suharto regime. In this job the sword of Damocles teetered permanently above your head. A single call from the dreaded Department of Information, known to all by its suitably Orwellian acronym DEPPEN, could have you packing your bags for the next plane out. Never to return. And so it was that after telling one of Australia’s most seasoned journalists in early 1993 that I’d just been appointed to the ABC’s JAVA DAYS Jakarta bureau, all I received was a wry smile and the muttered response, ’You poor bastard.’ Colleagues all earnestly acknowledged the significance of my new position. Indonesia, after all, was that brooding nation of 200 million people, hovering like a heavy weight just to our north. And hadn’t the prime minister of the day, Paul Keating, intoned that no country was more important to Australia than Indonesia? Few of those colleagues wanted to work there, however - at least not for any length of time. Not only did the zealous lieutenants of Suharto’s so-called New Order go out of their way to make life difficult for foreign reporters, they appeared to reserve their greatest disdain for reporters of the Australian variety. In fact, the name of one eminent journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald, David Jenkins, had become a byword for the myriad sins committed by the perfidious foreign press. In 1986, Jenkins had written an article on the spectacular wealth of Indonesia’s First Family.’After Marcos, Now for Suharto’s Billions’ the headline read. It was an entirely fitting reference to the kleptomania of two South-East Asian dictators, one who’d just been toppled, the other at the very height of his power. And therein lay the problem. Suharto was so firmly entrenched that there was close to zero tolerance for criticism of his rule. References to his family’s spectacular, but ill-gotten, wealth were highest on the list of taboos. Adding insult to injury, the Sydney Morning Herald had the temerity to plaster Jenkins’ article over the front page. Within a year of the story appearing, most of the Australian press corps in Jakarta had been thrown out. It was not uncommon for an Indonesian general, government official or Suharto business crony, upon learning I was from the Australian media, to exhale ’Ah, David Jenkins!’And that was it. No INDONESIA more explanation was required.The mere mention of Jenkins’ name was enough to convey a catalogue of wrongdoing. As luck would have it, I was doubly cursed. Not only was I an Australian journalist but I also worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It wasn’t that our reporting was any more or less critical than that of other foreign media organisations. But our ’crimes’, in the eyes of the humourless men at DEPPEN and military intelligence, were writ larger because we broadcast back into Indonesia - in Indonesian - through our short-wave radio and satellite TV services. With the local media heavily bridled, these news bulletins became an important source of independent information for millions of Indonesians - information more often than not at odds with the government’s official line. On mornings after a particularly critical item had gone to air, I’d brace myself for the inevitable telephone call from the Information Ministry. ’Selatnat pagi, Pak Michael. About your story last night.We’ve received complaints from other agencies about it.’ ’Other agencies’ was a euphemism for military intelligence, which seemed to spend much of its time monitoring our reports and most likely, we suspected, our telephones. ’Why did you say in your report that Indonesia annexed East Timor when you know perfectly well that the East Timorese voted to become one of our provinces in a free and fair referendum? You mustn’t report negative things about Indonesia. It gives us a bad image.’ And then, to end the homily, there was always the veiled threat. ’By the way, Pak Michael, how much longer does your journalist’s visa run for?’ , IAVA DAYS Overhanging all this surface tension, like a dark, sinister cloud, was the death of five Australian-based reporters at the hands of Indonesian soldiers in East Timor in 1975. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, the Indonesian government maintained steadfastly that the reporters had been caught in crossfire between warring East Timorese factions. What’s more, the killing of these young men - all in their twenties - was constantly advanced by officials in Jakarta as the reason for the perceived hostility of the Australian media towards Indonesia. It was a charge easily made. But the tawdry human rights record of Suharto and his generals, sustained over three long decades, guaranteed that no single incident could account for the regime s on-going battles on the public relations front. So why was I clambering over the ropes to force my way into this wrestling ring? Why was I volunteering for immersion in reams of red tape to accomplish the most simple of journalistic tasks? Why was I condemning myself to the ulcer-inducing frustration of having expensive satellite feeds ’pulled’ at the last moment because the censors at Indonesian state television didn’t like the look of the pictures we were filing? The answer was simple: because Indonesia was a major story just waiting to happen. And it was right on Australia’s doorstep. * * * Despite being the fourth most populous nation on earth, the world’s largest nation of Moslems and an archipelago with a vast array of ethnic groups and languages, in the early 1990s Indonesia rarely made it to the pages of international newspapers, let alone into foreign television and radio bulletins. 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