earlier than usual and the ratu priest called for the Pasola to take place, with everybody ready assembled. Unfortunately the local governor, top brass, and police were there to forbid the proceedings. It transpired that a recent glossy brochure published by the Jakarta tourist board had stated that this year’s Pasola in Wanokaka would be on 26 March, and various Jakarta notables and tour groups had arranged to come. It seems that centuries-old tradition and the very significance of the Pasola is to be sacrificed to tourism. Reminiscent of the government tax-incentives to encourage Torajas to hold their celebrated funerals in the peak tourist season.
We were lucky at Kodi, where there was a huge crowd but few soldiers and police and the event went off in traditional fashion. What happens is that thirty or forty mounted men armed with javelins line up in semi-circles facing each other and, after an exchange of taunts and insults, champions challenge each other to single combat and ride out to do battle. The government has forbidden the use of steel tips on the javelins so the contestants break off the ends, leaving jagged spikes of wood. No one was killed at the Kodi Pasola, although this sometimes happens, but a rider got a javelin through his cheek. They have very strict rules against cheating or throwing a javelin when an opponent’s back is turned. This happened while we were there with a wildly excited crowd pouring into the field of battle, and the police blazing away with their submachine guns — luckily for us into the air. The one drawback to all this excitement was the ritual food we had to eat. The ratu stood over us while we were forced to consume really enormous piles of rice cooked in brackish water. This took up at least a half-hour, and the Pasola had started before we had got it down. The story is that Jakarta is thinking of having a Pasola every month.
There was another note, too, from the friend who had sent me the cutting from the Financial Times: ‘I gather you’re in this part of the world now, so thought I’d send you the enclosed, published in Tapol.’
On 1st June a Dutch journalist published accounts of two mass murders in Aceh. One occurred on 12th September 1990 on the road from Bireuën to Takingeun. A truck carrying 56 detainees from Rancong Prison, Lhokseumawe, came to a halt. The detainees were shot with M16s, their bodies thrown down a ravine … in April a truck with 41 men and women drove to a point 30 kms from Takingeun. The victims alighted and were shot dead. Local people insist that the murders were the work of army murder-squads wearing civilian clothing. [NRC Handelsblad 1st June.]
A second cutting gave the views on such matters of Major-General Pramono, military commander of North Sumatra, as expressed in an interview with the Jakarta weekly Tempo:
I have told the people the important thing if you see GPK [the army term for Free Aceh Movement activist] you should kill him. There’s no need to investigate. Just shoot him or knife him. People are forced to do this or that and if they don’t want to they are shot or get their throats slit. So I have instructed people to carry weapons, machetes or whatever. If you see a GPK just kill him.
We discussed these new revelations concerning our immediate geographical surroundings. Suddenly our involvement in Aceh had changed. Until this moment we should always have remembered Lhokseumawe for a huge breakfast served in a splendid but vacant hotel, but now this image would be overshadowed by the news of its prison where so many final solutions were arranged. The thirty miles from Bireuën on the coast down to Takingeun and the peerless Lake Tawar had staged for us a succession of mountain and forest profiles that would endure in the memory. But now I understood that it was for its loneliness and therefore for the absence of prying eyes that it was chosen — for the concealment of those they preferred not to bury in a grave, but simply
We were lucky at Kodi, where there was a huge crowd but few soldiers and police and the event went off in traditional fashion. What happens is that thirty or forty mounted men armed with javelins line up in semi-circles facing each other and, after an exchange of taunts and insults, champions challenge each other to single combat and ride out to do battle. The government has forbidden the use of steel tips on the javelins so the contestants break off the ends, leaving jagged spikes of wood. No one was killed at the Kodi Pasola, although this sometimes happens, but a rider got a javelin through his cheek. They have very strict rules against cheating or throwing a javelin when an opponent’s back is turned. This happened while we were there with a wildly excited crowd pouring into the field of battle, and the police blazing away with their submachine guns — luckily for us into the air. The one drawback to all this excitement was the ritual food we had to eat. The ratu stood over us while we were forced to consume really enormous piles of rice cooked in brackish water. This took up at least a half-hour, and the Pasola had started before we had got it down. The story is that Jakarta is thinking of having a Pasola every month.
There was another note, too, from the friend who had sent me the cutting from the Financial Times: ‘I gather you’re in this part of the world now, so thought I’d send you the enclosed, published in Tapol.’
On 1st June a Dutch journalist published accounts of two mass murders in Aceh. One occurred on 12th September 1990 on the road from Bireuën to Takingeun. A truck carrying 56 detainees from Rancong Prison, Lhokseumawe, came to a halt. The detainees were shot with M16s, their bodies thrown down a ravine … in April a truck with 41 men and women drove to a point 30 kms from Takingeun. The victims alighted and were shot dead. Local people insist that the murders were the work of army murder-squads wearing civilian clothing. [NRC Handelsblad 1st June.]
A second cutting gave the views on such matters of Major-General Pramono, military commander of North Sumatra, as expressed in an interview with the Jakarta weekly Tempo:
I have told the people the important thing if you see GPK [the army term for Free Aceh Movement activist] you should kill him. There’s no need to investigate. Just shoot him or knife him. People are forced to do this or that and if they don’t want to they are shot or get their throats slit. So I have instructed people to carry weapons, machetes or whatever. If you see a GPK just kill him.
We discussed these new revelations concerning our immediate geographical surroundings. Suddenly our involvement in Aceh had changed. Until this moment we should always have remembered Lhokseumawe for a huge breakfast served in a splendid but vacant hotel, but now this image would be overshadowed by the news of its prison where so many final solutions were arranged. The thirty miles from Bireuën on the coast down to Takingeun and the peerless Lake Tawar had staged for us a succession of mountain and forest profiles that would endure in the memory. But now I understood that it was for its loneliness and therefore for the absence of prying eyes that it was chosen — for the concealment of those they preferred not to bury in a grave, but simply
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