Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani

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.
    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