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