Mukti-Mukti sings protest songs about land
Anton Lucas
We are on our way to Cikalong Kulon, a subdistrict in the hilly southern part of Cianjur regency in West Java. I want to talk with farmers about their struggle in the 1980s with the State Forestry Corporation (Perum Perhutani) in a dispute over boundaries, and what has happened there since era reformasi. I also want to find out the fate of the national land reform program here. As the car ducks and swerves in the traffic, a sad song is playing about the fields of a place called Pareang. Straining to catch the lyrics, I reach for the cassette entitled A concert of love music by Mukti-Mukti 1999 and find the words to a song called Pareang ladang Parangan:
'In the forest kampung of Pareang in the field of Parangan I watch my child with her gloomy faceHolding the post of the hut, daydreaming in the dusk The wind is blowing the gathering clouds, wiping out the daydreams of - an unlucky child. Run my child, run my child,Find a goat for a friend, Run my child, run my child, Find a rabbit for a friend, Run my child and find a faithful friend.'
I notice that the song is dedicated to farmers in the Cikalong Kulon land dispute in South Cianjur, where we are heading that day. The music and lyrics of the entire cassette are by a singer called Mukti-Mukti. In the back seat of the car I am sitting next to a guy with a guitar on his knees. He turns out to be Mukti! His voice sounds completely different. He is coming with us because he knows Pak Budjil, the farmer who beat the State Forestry Corporation in a court case in1989, and we want to interview him.
I chat with Mukti for the rest of the journey. Eventually we arrive at a small village in an isolated valley with steeply sloping wet rice lands carved out of the forest. We leave the car and walk zigzagging up along rice terrace embankments, trying not to slip into the paddy fields, till we get to Pak Budjil's house. Perched on a slope with wide verandas recently added (so people could come and sit, talk and sleep there) it reminds me of a Queenslander.
Mukti has made many trips to the area and also to other land disputes. He was there when ten thousand students marched from Bandung to Garut in support of the Badega farmers in 1989. 'At first I didn't know what I should do for all these farmers who were being dispossessed of their land. So I just did what I knew best, I began to sing. I sang about former times when farmers had to ask their raja for land, about their ancestors who left their land to their children, and about farmers who were fighting the authorities'. Mukti says his songs try to help the people fight for their rights, but they also need more formal education.
Mukti says farmers have tried to ask for land using the proper procedures, but their formal requests for title to the lands that they cultivate never get anywhere because of the 'mafia' inside the local Land Office (BPN). Farmers have to put up with a lot of intimidation. Mukti tells me he was visiting one village in the early 1990s, where farmers had lived in fear of the authorities for a long time. Someone came up to him out of breath and said 'Mukti, we have to hide you in a kampung over that hill, because the Koramil (local military authorities) know about you being here'. 'It was like one of those Indonesian war movies you used to see on TV' Mukti says. 'Deep down I thought, why the hell do I have to leave. We are supposed to be a free country!' The next day Mukti was invited to give the address at the Friday prayers in a new village mosque. He told the farmers that no one had control over their lives, and they should not be afraid of village officials, the local military commander or anyone else. They should be in awe only of God, who created everything on earth.
According to Dianto Bachriadi, Mukti began his career as a singer during the student protests over land in West Java, which began in earnest in 1989. 'Almost all the farmers who were victims of compulsory land acquisitions in West Java between 1989-94 knew who Mukti was because of his songs'. But Mukti was never just a guitar playing student protestor. He is a fine musician who has organised his own solo concerts every year since the mid 1990s. 'I don't want to make a concert just for the sake of it. Music I play in concerts has to enlighten people, at least it has to make them more aware'.
Anton Lucas (anton.lucas@flinders.edu.au) teaches in the Asian Studies and Languages Department at Flinders University. The cassette 'Konser musik cinta Mukti-Mukti' is available through the Konsorsium Pembaruan Agraria at kpa@kpa.or.id.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Why are the democrats in Jakarta not interested in land reform?
Dianto Bachriadi
In May President Gus Dur told farmers he would have 40% of state-owned plantation land redistributed to landless peasants. He said this because farmers had begun unilaterally to occupy plantation land they believed belonged to them. Some of these actions had resulted in arrests, injury and even death. The landless farmers reacted with great enthusiasm, but there has been no follow-up.
Their claim on the plantation land had a historical basis, but the New Order government acted inconsistently with Sukarno's Old Order, resulting in thousands of farmers being pushed off land they had worked for many years. The recent economic crisis increased the desire for land among people who used to look to the cities for work. A scarcity of land made them take the step of occupying other land. Under the influence of reformasi, and with the security apparatus showing more restraint, about 60,000 hectares of plantation land have been taken over and farmed in these massive farmers' actions, leaving about 120 plantation companies feeling aggrieved.
These figures came as no surprise to the Consortium for Agrarian Reform (KPA), a non-government organisation that has been following land conflicts for a long time. Their records show that throughout Indonesia land disputes, particularly on plantation lands, are more numerous than any other type of legal conflict.
Landless
How many farmers need land, and is there enough to go around? The last census in 1993 showed that 5,989,534 peasant households in Indonesia, or 28% of the total, owned between zero and 0.1 hectares of land. The economic crisis will have increased that figure as unemployed people return to the land from the city. Many of them had migrated to the city in the first place because there was no more land.
A similar number, 6,315,091 households or 29% of the total, had between 0.1 and 0.49 hectares. If we consider half a hectare as adequate for small agricultural production we can see that 57% of rural households in Indonesia do not have enough land. This is a minimal figure, because it does not count all those who have been permanently removed from the land but who still want to return there.
But how much land is available? Ironically, the government does not make available comprehensive data on the amount of land available for land reform. The figures it does release are clearly too low when compared with more credible sources. One such source, Maria Soemardjono, estimates that the cumulative total is 1,397,167 hectares, of which 787,931 hectares or 56.4% had already been redistributed by 1998. It's not quite clear what kind of land is being referred to here.
The 1960 Agrarian Law provides for four kinds of land to be redistributed: (1) land that exceeds a certain maximum area, (2) land held by absentee landlords, (3) land (formerly) owned by traditional ruling families or courts (swapraja), and (4) state-controlled land. All land subject to reform is in practice first declared to be state land before being redistributed.
The National Land Agency (BPN) said in 1998 that about 84% of all the land for which it had issued a location permit for commercial purpose (izin lokasi) was in fact not being used productively. One reason was land speculation. This amounts to 2,543,944 hectares. Unproductive plantation land, meanwhile, amounted to 2,431,75 hectares. New rules say that land left unused (lahan tidur) or not being used for the purpose of the lease returns to the state to be given to those who will use it. The point is that a certain amount of land is available under the existing law on land reform.
Another rarely mentioned matter is the absentee landlord. The state agency BPN never releases figures in this area. No one knows whether they don't have them or don't want to publish them. Maybe they are afraid of offending the officials (including BPN officers), big businessmen, generals and so on, who control this land without living on it. But whenever we visit the country everyone can point out the land owned by absentee landlords. The BPN office in Bekasi (east of Jakarta) once said 20% of land is absentee land. Research by William Collier and his colleagues says 13.8% of agricultural land in Java falls into this category. If on average each village in Java has 150-250 hectares, redistributing just this absentee land alone would give between eight and fourteen families in every village enough land to live on.
Of course absentee landlordship is a difficult problem to solve without very strong political pressure. Even during the most intensive phase of land reform in the 1960s, only 39% of absentee land could be successfully redistributed. If land reform had been slow under that government, it stopped altogether after the New Order regime took over. The massacres and horizontal conflict of 1965-66 were held up as a reason for viewing land reform, which is blessed by the constitution, as 'unrealistic'. Even though the New Order regime kept talking about land reform and even publishing statistics, this was merely political rhetoric without substance. The populist land reform program effectively died in 1969.
When the first Five Year Plan (Repelita I) was unveiled in 1969, land reform no longer appeared on the 'agricultural development' agenda. Instead the effort was directed at agricultural intensification based on the green revolution. The term land reform did reappear in subsequent plans, but it was connected with transmigration and the resettlement of nomadic tribes people. The special land reform court was abolished in 1970, showing that the program to create a more balanced system of agricultural land control had been systematically abandoned.
Business
Another aspect of Indonesian land reform is that the law is limited to land owned by individuals. It makes an exception to the maximum area rule in the case of land leased by a company. This has allowed companies to control huge tracts of land. Another exception is that land controlled by village chiefs (tanah bengkok or tanah jabatan) is not subject to land reform, with the result that some chiefs control up to 10% of the entire village land.
If the New Order neglected land reform, so did the transitional Habibie government and today's Gus Dur government. In particular they have often allocated land controlled by the state (such as ex-forestry or ex-plantation land), not to landless farmers as the land reform law requires, but back to the big companies who will invest in agribusiness. The two governments that followed Sukarno's Old Order government continued the manipulation of plantation land originally leased by the Dutch that was nationalised in 1957. Leases were given to state-owned plantation companies.
In reality, local farmers had worked a lot of this land since the Japanese occupation and since the revolutionary independence struggle of 1945. That reality was validated in Emergency Law no.1/1958. In some, but unfortunately not all, places this occupied land was formally handed over as part of the national land reform program in the 1960s. It all depended a lot on local political dynamics. As a result a great deal of this land, which had been worked by farmers continuously since that time, was only protected by a few formal acknowledgements. The New Order routinely regarded these acknowledgements as legally invalid. New research I did with Anton Lucas has shown how easy it has been to seize this redistributed land in manipulative ways from the farmers working it.
Things became even more complicated when those state-owned plantation companies (PN Perkebunan or PT Perkebunan) then passed control to large private concerns to be used for a plantation, tourism, or luxury housing. The New Order usually just issued a new lease (Hak Guna Usaha) without considering the fact that the land was in fact being worked productively albeit without formal certification.
The land reform law unfortunately only has jurisdiction over land owned by private individuals, and not that controlled by companies or cooperatives that might be active in plantations, forestry, shrimp farms, or other agro-industry. Only in 1999 did two new government regulations come out in response to reformist pressure to limit mainly the expansion of oil palm and forestry concessions (Hak Pengusaha Hutan) over land. We still need to see how effective these regulations will be.
The uncontrolled seizure of land by big business interests has given rise to serious conflicts with ordinary people all over Indonesia whose productive farming land has been taken over. Much of this land in fact lies fallow as it turns out the company is unable to put it to immediate use.
There are so many farmers who badly need land. Will the Gus Dur government - or anyone else interested in taking his place - listen to them by reviving the land reform program? The executive branch of government is increasingly being controlled by parliament. Yet until now parliament has never asked the government why it is not implementing its constitutional duty of land reform. All the parliamentarians seem to be concerned about is how to increase their party's share of power. KPA has put up a resolution on agrarian reform to the country's supreme parliament the MPR. Plantation interests opposed discussion of this resolution, and two years later it has evoked virtually no comment from those who call themselves the peoples' representatives. They invariably say that land reform is 'not realistic' for Indonesia.
Dianto Bachriadi can be contacted through the Konsorsium Pembaharuan Agraria, KPA (kpa@kpa.or.id) in Bandung, or through penk@bdg.centrin.net.id.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
A conference on recent violence in Indonesia
Jemma Purdey
Suharto is gone and the structures that maintained his power are weakened, yet the violence remains. Violent conflict in Indonesia has become more frequent and more varied. It is no longer sufficient to explain it in terms of state terrorism orchestrated by 'third party agents' alone.
From July 3-7, a panel on 'Violent conflict in Asia: Comparative perspectives' was part of the biennial Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference. It was followed by a two-day workshop on 'Violent conflict in Indonesia: Analysis, representation, resolution'. Both were held at the University of Melbourne. Australian and overseas researchers and academics joined a number of Indonesian activists, academics, a lawyer, journalist, and a publisher.
In post New Order Indonesia there is increasing recognition of the plurality of truths about violent conflict. State truths, 'media reality' and the 'factual' and 'moral' truths told by human rights organisations are all in tension. The challenge for researchers is to navigate around the various representations of violence to understand what happened. During the New Order, researchers most often found explanations within the authoritarian system. Today the links between the actors involved in the conflicts in Ambon, West Kalimantan and even Aceh with the state elite in Jakarta cannot be made so easily. Tim Lindsey urged us to turn our focus to new structures that have emerged in the absence of state controls. These have evoked what he terms the 'preman state', driven by corruption and violence. Elsewhere we see local communities bypassing the state system altogether and enacting their own forms of justice and order, also violently. Nick Herriman described lynchings in South Malang, East Java, where weakened local authorities have no power to halt these acts of 'community justice'.
The complexity of unraveling the 'truth' about violent conflict was made very clear by Suraiya from Flower Aceh. In a moving account, she spoke of the terror gripping the people of Aceh every day as they struggle to make sense of a conflict in which they have become pawns (see elsewhere in this issue). The truth about the violence has been monopolised by both the Indonesian military TNI and the armed Free Aceh Movement GAM, leaving no space for the victims to tell their story. Beth Drexler noted in her paper that by negotiating a ceasefire agreement with GAM in May this year, the government and military have accorded this group an international credibility and authentication, albeit false, as representatives of the people of Aceh.
Hilmar Farid of the Volunteer Team for Humanity (TRuK) demanded that the experiences of the victims be given a central place in the search for understanding and resolving violence, because the 'events of violence are not just in particular points of time, they have a great influence on the social structure of the community.' In his paper on the torture of ex 'communist' political prisoners, Budiawan Purwadi demonstrated how the trauma endures for many victims.
Discussion about resolution and justice issues after the violence reflected the difficulties this process will encounter in Indonesia. New Order ways of thinking persist. The South African 'Truth and Reconciliation' model being offered by the government and its elite advisers aims to seek out the 'truth about the past' - to finally be able to tell the whole story and thereby bestow justice. Retribution and revenge would be unachievable and futile. However, many outside those elite circles, the victims of the New Order, fear that once again their voices will not be heard. Mary Zurbuchen of the Ford Foundation contrasted this elite push for 'reconciliation' with work being done by human rights organisations and victim groups to research the violence. The latter emphasise the 'truth' aspect, and not necessarily 'reconciliation'.
The violence in Maluku constitutes perhaps the greatest challenge so far to the ideal and reality of Indonesian nationalism. As government officials continue to declare, this is an internal conflict in which there can be no clear division between those representing 'good' and those representing 'evil', as there was in East Timor and now in Aceh. Richard Chauvel depicted the conflict in Ambon as localised and specific to this place. He argued for local sources of resolution, a method which Gus Dur, for a time, also appeared to support. However, it is increasingly clear that such a process will not work. The conflict in Ambon and the surrounding islands baffles even analysts, politicians and historians with intimate knowledge of the place. It is clear that a new discourse on violence is necessary to understand this next chapter in the country's history.
Jemma Purdey (jepurdey@hotmail.com) and Charles Coppel (c.coppel@history.unimelb.edu.au), both from the University of Melbourne, organised the conference panel and workshop with the help of an advisory committee. For the program and abstracts see www.history.unimelb.edu.au/indonesia. Jemma Purdey is a PhD candidate researching anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Islamic rebellion in Aceh and Mindanao is not so irrational
Jacqueline Aquino Siapno
'Mountain goats eat the corn; village goats get hit with stones.' This Acehnese saying poignantly captures the ongoing violence there. Unable to capture Free Aceh guerrillas, the Indonesian military go after Acehnese villagers. My own work in the Southern Philippines and in Aceh tries to help dispel the negative propaganda against the Acehnese and against Bangsamoro in Mindanao as 'fundamentalists' and irrational troublemakers. It is astounding to see how easily the government, media, and 'experts' can influence the public into forming opinions about these movements without a need for critical reflection and careful investigation. This fosters a pernicious cycle of violence and ignorance.
News coverage of the rebellions in Aceh and Mindanao against the Indonesian and Philippine states respectively has much to say about the 'terrorism' conducted by Free Aceh (GAM) and by Abu Sayyaf. The latter, leader of a splinter group of the factionalised Bangsamoro rebellion, was responsible for kidnapping tourists from a Malaysian resort in April. Yet hardly anything is said, at least not in the Australian media, about what the Indonesian and Philippine governments are doing to the unarmed civilian populations there, or about the political-economic dimensions of the conflicts, or about why independence movements emerged in the first place.
Mention is rarely made of a history of more than twenty five years of armed rebellion in Mindanao, producing at least one million internal refugees, including more than 100,000 Filipino Muslims who have fled to Malaysia, and about 120,000 dead. Propaganda against the Free Aceh Movement and against Muslim 'rebels' in Mindanao as 'security disturbing gangs' (GPK), as extortionists, kidnappers, and extremists is pervasive in the media, and uncritically reproduced even by progressive intellectuals. Institutionalised, systematic state violence in Aceh and the Philippines, meanwhile, is hardly ever called 'criminal'. Only recently are observers belatedly beginning to acknowledge that members of the government and the military have behaved like no less than war criminals in these two places.
Making a state
My own interpretation places the armed rebellions in Aceh and in Mindanao within a larger context. The construction of modern nation-states and citizen-subjects in these areas is itself a new and violent historical project. This project tends to paint populist movements that are anti-occupation culture, anti-colonial, anti-secular, and anti-capitalist as a sort of 'quintessence of evil'. It dismisses acts of resistance as 'fundamentalist', 'fanatical' responses to depressed rural conditions, conditions that need to be dealt with by education and the mediation of a secular, representative government.
The state-building project justifies state terror through a judicial system that makes it impossible for its victims to seek redress or even challenge its language. It portrays whole communities who threaten to break up the nation-state and put it to shame as terrorists, kidnappers, and 'subversives'. The Philippine government and the Indonesian government have failed in Mindanao and in Aceh. They have failed because they have had to resort to extremely brutal measures to implement their goals of integrating the Acehnese and the Muslims in Mindanao into the nation-state project.
The reasons for the continuing Acehnese and Bangsamoro rebellions are complex and numerous, but certainly not irrational. More than twenty five years now of political instability and violence, class conflict, and underdevelopment have produced impoverishment. The most basic infrastructure is lacking, as is access to schools and higher education. Moreover, occupation culture has been a culture of terror. It has produced militarisation and sadism. Both areas have suffered from policies of massive transmigration of non-organic groups: from over-populated Luzon to Mindanao, and from other areas in Indonesia to the under-populated, fertile lands of Aceh. This has created conflict by dispossessing people from their land.
In Aceh, colonising power has been institutionalised through an extensive system of surveillance, torture, road checkpoints, street harassment, sexual harassment and rape, 'sweeping operations' and house-to-house searches. Aceh's oil and natural gas resources are exploited for the benefit of Jakarta. Its over-centralised administration has alienated the people. The independence movement and its sympathisers are demonised as 'enemies of the state'. Indonesian government officials constantly use a language of paranoid absolutes, for example: 'referendum is out of the question'; 'separation would be a violation of national integrity'.
I do not wish to be misunderstood as an apologist for independence and/ or Islamist movements, nor for predominantly male nationalist movements which claim to represent their entire nation while keeping the female half of the population invisible. But unless the structural roots of the conflicts are genuinely addressed, any short-term measures will serve merely as band-aid solutions. That could include the humanitarian assistance and 'confidence-building measures' recommended these past few months by 'conflict resolution' consultants to the Indonesian and Philippine governments.
In both cases, armed rebellion has a history which spans several decades, if not centuries if we incorporate their anti-colonial struggles against the Dutch in Aceh, and against Spanish and American colonialism in Mindanao. Given these long histories, it would be fatal to bludgeon them from the arrogant centre with a quick-fix, ahistorical, militaristic solution.
In the Philippines, the historic peace agreement known as the Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao, signed with the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) led by its founder Nur Misuari in 1996, did not end the armed rebellion. A different faction, namely the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), rejected the agreement. Less than a year after the historic 'peace' agreement was signed, on 16 March 1997, the Philippine armed forces shelled the MILF's main Camp Abubakar and hit a religious school (madrasah), resulting in the deaths of ten female students and their male teacher. In June and July of 1997, armed clashes occurred between the MILF and the Philippine military that involved the aerial bombardment of the MILF's Camp Rajamuda. This produced more civilian and combatant casualties and evacuations, much like the present situation in Aceh.
This may be a useful comparative study for Acehnese who want to understand the lasting effect of 'ceasefires' and 'peace negotiations' that neglect to include all important groups. In a glaring omission, women's groups that have been at the forefront of political organising, among them the Duek Pakat Inong Aceh Congress participants of last March, were not included in the Joint Understanding on Humanitarian Pause for Aceh signed in Switzerland in mid-May. A genuinely democratic negotiation with any hope of lasting should include the women's groups, however ideologically diverse they may be.
There is too much emphasis on the role of the Free Aceh Movement GAM. The independence movement in Aceh today is much larger than GAM. Any genuine solution to the conflict ought to include all the other groups outside GAM. These also want independence, but talk about it in very different terms - in some cases extremely critical of GAM's policies.
Islam
The dominant myth that needs to be dispelled is that the conflicts in Aceh and Mindanao are religious conflicts aimed at setting up an Islamic state. Most analysts like to portray the Mindanao conflict as one between a dominant Catholic majority and a Muslim minority. This argument is seriously problematic. It says nothing about the just redistribution of economic capital or the problem of underdevelopment. And it is certainly not applicable in Aceh, where a Muslim majority is oppressing a Muslim community. In reality, the conflicts in Aceh and Mindanao are about natural resources, about land and capital, and about social justice for the victims of state terror. At bottom, they are about the structural re-organisation of the nation-state - much like the struggle for justice in West Papua and East Timor.
In any case, contrary to popular phobias against Islamic law as being somehow more oppressive of women than secular law, in some cases it is actually more egalitarian and in favour of women's rights, particularly in the fields of inheritance and divorce. The ongoing debate about gender and Islamic law in Aceh and in the Muslim world generally is complex, but it would serve us well not to assume that secular law is somehow more liberating for women.
Perhaps we should ask why it is that Islam in both these places has become such a powerful expression of cultural identity and mobilisation. Conceptions of social justice in resistance Islam are in fundamental opposition to the bureaucratic values of the secular state, which emphasise integration into the national economy and global capital rather than political community. The earlier idealisms of 'Islamic socialism', Third World nationalism, the 1955 Bandung Conference, and Sukarno's 'Go to hell with your aid!' have faded. But the vision of Islam as a form of community that demands social and economic justice remains very much alive.
Jacqui Siapno (j.siapno@politics.unimelb.edu.au) lectures in political science at the University of Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
These women want to silence all the guns, whether Indonesian or Acehnese
Suraiya Kamaruzzaman
Aceh is rich in natural resources. Large corporations moved into North Aceh following the discovery of natural gas. Related industries spread through the Greater Aceh region (Aceh Besar). Outsiders dominated these huge corporations. Their displays of wealth alienated the Acehnese, who were largely excluded from the economic gains of industrialisation.
Even in North Aceh, referred to in jest as the petro-dollar region, 70% of villages remained officially in the 'backward' category (desa tertinggal). According to some sources, Aceh's natural resources supplied Jakarta's coffers with Rp 33 trillion each year, of which only one percent was returned to the province. Locals who live around these companies are just spectators who watch the prosperity inside from their poverty outside. This has gone on for decades.
This was the context in which the armed struggle for Acehnese independence, GAM (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, Aceh Freedom Movement) was established under the leadership of Hasan di Tiro. In 1990 the Suharto government launched its Operation Red Net (Operasi Jaring Merah) to root out what the New Order chose to call a Movement to Disturb Peace and Order, or GPK. The operation continued for eight years, but failed to resolve the Aceh problem. Instead, innocent civilians faced state-sponsored brutality. Anyone who refused to support the Indonesian military effort was labelled GPK.
Thousands of women were widowed, their husbands murdered or kidnapped. Children were orphaned. Some women faced sexual violence from soldiers, in part as a deliberate instrument of terror against their communities. The women became pariahs in their own communities, which did not want to associate with anyone dangerously tainted by GPK suspicions. These single women, with children to support, could no longer go out safely to work in the fields.
In late 1998, after the fall of Suharto, and with many human rights abuses well documented, the commander of the armed forces General Wiranto revoked Aceh's status as 'special military operations area' (DOM).
Data from the Coalition of Human Rights NGOs had documented 7,727 cases of human rights abuse between 1990-98. But the situation did not improve when DOM status was revoked. From January 1999 to February 2000 the coalition documented nine cases of 'massacre' in which 132 civilians were killed and 472 wounded, 304 arbitrary detentions, 318 extra-judicial executions, and 138 disappearances.
Refugees
From February 1999, the Indonesian army started deliberately displacing inhabitants from some parts of Aceh. From June to August 1999 there were 250,000 to 300,000 internally displaced persons in Aceh. No human rights investigation has been conducted so far on this tragedy. Then the numbers of refugees fell, with only a few hundred remaining displaced by May 2000.
However, in the following two months, despite the relative reduction in armed conflict, the numbers of displaced rose rapidly again into the thousands. In one camp there were 4,110 refugees, including 712 infants, 818 children less than five years, 52 pregnant women and 112 women who were still nursing infants.
The following is a summary of their reasons for seeking refuge:
Frequent searches for GAM members carried out by the Indonesian army in villages. These searches were inevitably brutal, involving beatings, forcible removal of individuals from their home, and destruction or forcible removal of property.
Continued armed contacts between GAM and the army in rural areas, threatening the security of villagers.
In some villages, the Indonesian armed forces and other unidentified groups burnt homes.
Kidnappings carried out by both the military and civilian militia, the latter suspected of being supporters of GAM.
Certain groups prohibited the refugees from returning to their village, even though the refugees themselves considered the situation safe.
Some wealthier villagers such as business people found themselves openly harassed by alleged armed GAM members demanding money. One witness said a man had his house burnt down after refusing to contribute. However, such cases were relatively few and these people could usually afford to make a permanent move and start business elsewhere. Also, it is not entirely clear whether such attackers were always GAM members, or Indonesian soldiers or even ordinary criminals taking advantage of the chaotic law and order situation in Aceh.
The camps did not always provide the safety the refugees sought. On 13 October 1999, in the Abu Beureueh Mosque camp in Pidie, the army, allegedly in search of GAM activists, fired several rounds. The shooting scattered 10,000 refugees in fear of their lives. Several women were sexually assaulted. On 29 December, 150 refugees in the Seulimun Mosque camp were poisoned and had to be hospitalised.
Living conditions in many camps remain appalling. Many have only plastic sheets as shelter. Malnutrition is rampant among pregnant women and children. Dozens of babies have been born in the camps, with little or no medical facility. Sickness due to lack of clean water and exhaustion is commonplace.
Even in the camps no gender equity has been established. The women's 'double burden' continues to operate! Like the men, they face the brutality of the state. But they also continue to be repressed by patriarchal social practices. In Acehnese norms, the woman's place is at home. While many women work in the fields and in the markets, they are always seen as only 'helping their husbands'. It was therefore normal for the women to assume food preparation as their function in the camps. However, that was regarded as a public activity, so men took over the work. This deprived women of the one function that legitimised their existence as social beings.
Men make all decisions in the camps. Women, many of them war widows with no access to any particular male, are deprived of information and other facilities.
Children have been severely traumatised by their experience of the war and by being displaced. Hundreds of schools have been burnt. According to one report the war has disrupted schooling for more than 11,000 Acehnese children.
When a group of women activists provided paper and pen to children in a refugee camp, their drawings visualised the violence they had experienced. There were pictures of marching Indonesian soldiers, of battle between GAM and the Indonesian army, of weapons, dead bodies and mutilated corpses.
The armed struggle between the Indonesian army and the Aceh Freedom Movement has been disastrous for the civilian population. There are villages where only women and children remain. Some of these women are working for other people in return for a few kilos of rice. Others are feeding their family on boiled trunks of banana trees.
Women for peace
The armed conflict in Aceh must be brought to an end - by whatever means. And women must be included in that peaceprocess. This is not only because women constitute 53% of Aceh's population. It is because women have suffered grievously throughout this conflict. As citizens, they have suffered at the hands of the state, having been raped and abused by the Indonesian army. Culturally, they have been repressed by patriarchy and through the wrong interpretations of Islamic law (such as the forcible imposition of dress codes). Even at home, they have faced domestic violence, being beaten and raped by their husbands. Women must be included in any decision making process. Data from the provincial government shows there are no fewer than 460,000 female heads of households, of whom 377,000 are widows.
Women are organising for peace. They are praying, marching in the streets, distributing flowers and the message 'stop violence against women'. Women have held discussions with President Gus Dur and even with the army. They have also proposed to the commander of the Aceh Freedom Movement army that a special zone of peace for women should be set up. They have taken their campaign to the United Nations.
With the cease-fire arranged in May this year, there are new hopes for peace. But there is no peace yet in Aceh. Violence continues, from both the Indonesian army and GAM. New sweeps as the army searches for GAM members are starting a fresh movement of refugees in East Aceh. Women want all weapons to cease fire, whether they belong to the Indonesian army or to the soldiers of GAM. We hope that the current agreement between the combatants for a humanitarian cessation of hostilities is not just rhetoric for the Indonesian army and Aceh Freedom Movement.
Suraiya Kamaruzzaman is executive director of Flower Aceh (flower@aceh.wasantara.net.id). Established in 1989, this was the first women's group set up by Acehnese women to deal with the consequences of the Indonesian army's brutal crackdown on the Aceh Freedom Movement (GAM). This article is extracted from her passionate presentation at the recent conference on Indonesian violence held in Melbourne.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Chusnul Mar'iyah thrives on controversy
Peter King
A short listing of Chusnul Mar'iyah's NGO involvements would include the Indonesian Women's Coalition for Justice and Democracy (Koalisi Perempuan Indonesia untuk Keadilan dan Demokrasi); the National Commission on Violence Against Women (which took up the cause of the Chinese women raped during the 'constructed chaos' before Suharto fell); the Selendang Lila Foundation (for women); Movement to Promote Women's Political Awareness (Gerakan Perempuan Sadar Politik), funded by the UN Development Program; the Indonesian Institute for Democratic Education (funding from USAID and the Friedrich Neumann Stiftung); and Women's Coalition for Peace and Justice(Perempuan Peka untuk Perdamaian dan Keadilan). The latter was a force in organising the path-breaking Women's Congress held in Banda Aceh from 19-22 February this year. Here several Acehnese women (and even some Javanese, including Chusnul) emerged as players in the peace process for the first time.
In addition to her not insubstantial teaching commitments and almost daily NGO activity, Chusnul maintains a punishing media regime. ('We need a marathon mentality,' she says.) Apart from regular TV appearances on such booming background and talk shows as Nol Kilometer (RCTI) and Bincang-Bincang (Interview, on ANTV) and Cuma Dua Jam (Only Two Hours, on TVRI), she makes endless radio appearances, especially with Jakarta's Trijaya FM, for whom she filled a slot daily for seven weeks in the run up to the June elections last year. The daily (or more frequent) radio stint is often performed on the mobile phone in the taxi to the new and rather distant (Suharto's idea) Depok campus of the University of Indonesia.
This media pace has led her to become one of the more quoted Indonesian experts in western media, including Time, Far Eastern Economic Review, Sydney Morning Herald, Radio Australiaand the ABC. She is also much profiled domestically, including by Kompas, Prada and several other women's magazines, and the Women and Work program on TVIndosia.
Peter King (peterk36@cpi.kagoshima-uac.jp) is visiting professor at the University of Kagoshima Research Center for the Pacific Islands, in Japan.
Chusnul Mar'iyah thrives on controversy
Peter King
She left Sydney University with a doctorate in local government studies early in 1998, Indonesia's Year of living dangerously Mark II. Back in Jakarta, Chusnul Mar'iyah began living energetically. By her own reckoning she is only the third female Indonesian PhD in political science. That makes her one in 70 million! Resuming her old job at the University of Indonesia (UI), she plunged into the post-Asian meltdown politics of driving the New Order from power. UI students carrying the campaign into the streets came to her for advice. She was at the parliament building more than once before Suharto's overthrow was finally clinched on 21 May 1998. Amid the erratic liberalisation of what she likes to call Habibie's New New Order (Orbaba -Orde Baru Baru), she evolved into a prominent national expert and media personality.
The elections followed in June 1999, and opposition figures Abdurrahman Wahid and Megawati Sukarnoputri won the top two jobs in October. Chusnul found herself deeper in than ever. How to push ahead with reformasi in the era of its democratic legitimacy? Indonesia's abortive affair with parliamentary democracy in the 1950s made clear the risk of failure. The task was the same as it had been in the 1950s - to preserve democracy and the republic, and to offer people the chance of a decent life. But Chusnul's political language is quite new. To a surprising extent, it derives from the 1980s and '90s western discourse of civil society and feminism.
She tells her UI students that she was already on the streets back in 1979, a student aktivis rallying for the overthrow of Suharto's authoritarianism. She was already prominent in the environmental umbrella group Walhi and other non-government organisations (NGOs). And she was a feminist. Her teacher mother and education department official father in the East Java village where she was born had always encouraged her to think about education and a career. She read Simone de Beauvoir. But she has always been a strongly committed Muslim. Today many know her for her feminist readings of the Qur'an. 'I stand for gender justice', she says, but as a Muslim.
The Prophet had only girl children, but he always showed them to the people with pride. Perhaps naively, Chusnul likes to point out that his last and youngest wife, As'iyah, aged seventeen when he died, is responsible for recording ten times more sayings of Muhammad (hadis) than his celebrated son-in-law Ali. Chusnul likes to quote the leading scholarly feminist of the Arab world, the controversial Professor Fatima Mernisi of the University of Rabat, Morocco, who famously insists on revising the traditional Qur'anic, 'Man is the leader of women' to 'Man is the protector of women'. Together with the Women's Coalition for Justice and Democracy, Chusnul campaigned among the pre-election political parties for '32 per cent affirmative action'. They wanted the parties to feminise their candidates one per cent for every year of Suharto! (In the end only 38 women managed election to the 500 strong parliament.)
Chusnul is quite consciously pressing several other moderen discourses on her long-stifled fellow countrypersons as well. Her view of civil society requires that NGOs should have power and legitimacy, that courts and universities should be autonomous, that the fight against corruption should be transparent, that conflicts should be resolved non-violently, that federalism is the answer to the current crisis of the unitary state.
A decisive moment here was a jungle encounter she had to dialogue with the military commander of the Aceh separatist movement, Abdullah Mohammad Syafi'ie. His men were bristling with guns, which they refused to put aside, and she was shocked. A visceral hatred of violence lies at the heart of her feminism - women and children are the main victims of war. Aceh suffers from a two-sided tyranny of the gun - the Indonesian army on one side, Acehnese separatists on the other.
All this brings her regularly into the myriad hectic debates of women and student groups trying to make sense of reformasi. It is important work - the heavy hand of the New Order is far from dead. She commutes constantly around the republic. In Irian Jaya, now called Papua, she directly queried the Papuan consensus in favour of independence (merdeka) at any cost. In West Kalimantan she joined a team to help resettle Madurese victims of violence by aggrieved Malays and Dayaks. In Maluku and Aceh she has been involved with hands-on peacemaking through Indonesian Alert for Peace and Conflict Resolution.
Gus Dur
She is much in demand, and much in collision, not only with New Order remnants ('The military is very much afraid of me, I think'), but also occasionally with those most famous leaders of reformasi, President Gus Dur and Vice President Megawati. Over what? Embedded authoritarianism and patriarchy, for one thing. Chusnul concedes Gus Dur has a 'gender perspective in his opinions'. But at an open house meeting in his Jakarta home in January 1999 she asked him: 'Could a woman lead NU?' (Nahdlatul Ulama or NU has 30 million mainly rural Muslim followers. For many years before he launched his PKB party for the 1999 elections, this religious organisation was Gus Dur's political base.) His reply: 'Don't dreamnot yet!'
Just before last year's election she appeared with Gus Dur on a TV panel. Again she raised the issue of lack of democracy within NU. Gus Dur was notorious for having his way in NU by decree. 'What you say everyone must follow', she said to him. He replied: 'This is me: it's up to you'. That is, take it or leave it. He then made a joke about woman as a chicken (babon). It left a bad impression with the viewers. Afterwards Chusnul found she had achieved some fame by association with the maligned hen!
After the election Chusnul also sharply criticised Megawati in newspaper interviews and on TV. In Mega's one and only programmatic speech during her presidential bid (such as it was), she failed to make a single reference to women or the gender issue. Chusnul berates Mega for failing to include women in her inner circle and for never attending women's gatherings. She 'shows no gender concern', says Chusnul, who also worries about her obtuseness: 'Mega doesn't understand anything.'
With her signature smile, her memorable (after a while) signature phrase 'Do you mind?', her confident crash-through manner, and her tastefully decorative scarf (never quite a jilbab), Chusnul Mar'iyah has emerged as a determined upholder of due process and civility in post Suharto politics. Seven years immersed in Australian feminist and civil society debates have left their mark. To be more than a little vulgar, AusAID and the Australian taxpayer got their money's worth in supporting Chusnul over quite a long PhD enrolment.
But it is all rather a balancing act. Her Rp 500,000 a month 'salary' - little more than AU$100 - does not actually pay her mobile phone bill. She makes do with paid lectures and public appearances, supporter-subsidised internal travel, and separately funded university graduate teaching, where user pays is beginning to apply. Projects funded mostly from overseas, by USAID in particular as well as by private German and American foundations such as Ford and the Asia Foundation, keep her on the go.
She recently crossed the orbit of George Soros and his Europe-based multi-multi million dollar political philanthropy in support of struggling civil societies everywhere. He flew her to Paris and Budapest for consultations in February. So far she is adopting a wait and see approach. She is not impressed with his recent purchases in the Indonesian cigarette industry.
Plenty of temptation besets the still fairly junior lecturer, who would like to own a BMW as well as reform Jakarta's democratic elite, but actually lives fairly humbly in 'my slum', albeit air conditioned and about three long stone throws from Suharto's Menteng mansion. She lives with her sister and brother-in-law, both high school teachers. To retain credibility, she must guard her independence, she says. She rejected two lucrative offers as ministerial adviser, but may accept an offer to advise parliament (the DPR) on committee reform.
Let's talk
What then is the ultimate meaning of an activist life like Chusnul's in the context of Gus Dur's faltering steps towards reform? Chusnul's challenge is to Indonesiansociety at large - to women and men, Javanese and Outer Islanders, victims and persecutors, rich Chinese and poor becak drivers, Christians and Muslims - everyone. Her message, for those who want to hear - and with some rhetorical embellishment - might be summed up as follows:
Let us Indonesians renounce all violence and threats thereof. Let us grasp our democratic opportunities. Let us practice the civility which our religions, traditions and acquaintance with the better side of Europe have taught us. Let's have constructive dialogue with each other without let-up or limit.
Yes, Papuans and Acehnese and many other 'outers' are victims of a Java centric past dictatorship (or two) - but so are the Javanese! We have all been and maybe still are victims together. That is why we must talk through our future together. We would all like to secede if that would save us from the return of a Suharto, but the pressing question is: Can we make Indonesia work again for the people?
You are nevertheless prepared to fight for independence? Is that now the best way? Will we really be better off with 26 (now 29 or 30) separate sovereignties after the Timor experience? Why not try the special autonomy the government is offering, or the federalism that Amien Rais says he would offer? Why not pour into conflict resolution and creative political solutions the energy you are expending on a possibly futile struggle with a powerful and determined centre? Anyhow let's discuss it!
You want revenge and punishment of the guilty? Why not try the Truth and Reconciliation Commission which is coming soon? But anyhow let's talk.
It is quite a performance. And it is impurely echoed in the muddled but nevertheless impressive efforts of the president to engage Acehnese and Papuan secessionists, intimidatory generals and ailing ex-dictators, militant Muslims and aggrieved Chinese and Christians in his own dialogues for reconciliation. Gus Dur dismisses and then 'misses' the disgraced General Wiranto and calls round for supper; Gus Dur denounces but then undertakes to pardon Suharto whatever the court may decide about his corruption; Gus Dur promises to open the Papuan Congress last May (and subsidises it to the tune of a billion rupiah) when its agenda is obviously all about independence.
As I say, it's been quite an act by Chusnul, Gus Dur and other authentic protagonists of reformasi. But will they, can they, in the end succeed in - to borrow Chusnul's words - 'making Indonesia Raya happy'? More to the point, can Greater Indonesia (Indonesia Raya) make its unhappy minority peoples happy? And can the palpably disintegrating unitary republic be held together, with or without federalism or real provincial autonomy?
Quite frankly, I think not. Constructive disintegration needs to be considered, especially for Papua. But Chusnul, I am told, thinks that supporters of an independent Papua inhabit 'an unreal world'. For her, 'Papua is a part of Indonesia,' and conflict should be solved by dialogue. But, for Papuans, Papua has never been part of Indonesia. And if conflict cannot be resolved, what then? Should the army be made ready for another exercise in exorcising unreality on the lines of East Timor?
Despite her years in Australia Chusnul is no friend of Australian peacemaking in East Timor, which arguably helped save the fledgling Indonesian democracy of late 1999 from itself. Equally hard choices for the Jakarta elite, and soft opportunities for military mayhem, are looming in Papua. Australia will inevitably be drawn in again. It is not too late for the friends of civil society to come together across the Timor Gap, but blind faith in Indonesia Raya is not going to be helpful.
Peter King (peterk36@cpi.kagoshima-uac.jp) is visiting professor at the University of Kagoshima Research Center for the Pacific Islands, in Japan. Contact Chusnul at (cmariyah@indosat.net.id). She recently wrote 'The Indonesian political transition: Democracy and women's movements - experience and reflections', to appear soon in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Parliament, the constitution, and the future, as seen from the presidential palace
Greg Barton interviews President Abdurrahman Wahid
Tell us your impressions of this annual session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR).
The most important thing about the current MPR session as expressed by some PKB members is that instead of having the arrogance of the executive, as was the case in the past, now we have the arrogance of the legislature. We need to understand the reasons for this. In my opinion many are afraid of an executive that is too arrogant and because of that they want something to check its power. The check and balance has shifted from the one envisioned in the constitution of 1945.
The necessity now is to adjust the powers of the two sides: the legislative as well as the executive branches of the government. I think that this problem has existed for many years, even in 1945. Do you know that when independence was declared and the 1945 constitution was applied, a declaration was issued that gave the prime minister the power to form a parliamentary cabinet with a parliament dominated by the parties? That was in clear breach of the constitution. If we see now people like Heri Achmadi (PDI-P parliamentarian) and Budi Santoso (Golkar parliamentarian) and many other members of the MPR, this same mistake can be repeated again in a bid to check the power of the executive.
As I told Megawati Sukarnoputri during this session: 'They can check the power of the executive but they should not do it at the expense of changing the constitution. You see, if you change the basic formulation of the constitution of 1945 I am afraid that this will provoke the other side to stage a coup d'etat. That will mean the constitution of 1945 has been violated.' So I told her that if this scenario should develop I would have to take the side of those who launch the coup d'etat. Why? Because for me it is only possible to have democracy if you have a state. But if you constantly have such turbulence that the very form of the state is questioned then you have will have no democracy at all. So the most important thing is to guarantee the existence of the state. The important thing is to avoid the situation deteriorating to the point of a coup d'etat being launched.
It is essential to have a stable state. Without it democracy cannot function. So because of this I have stressed the importance of returning to the constitution of 1945. But of course the holder of the presidency has the duty to heed the warnings as well as the wishes of those who would like to have a more balanced government. The executive should not be too powerful. This we can achieve not by weakening the executive as a whole but by weakening the presidency.
So I had to reply to the parties that I will assign technical daily tasks involving the cabinet to the vice president, in order to distribute the power of the office holder. Each decision needs to be made on the basis of discussion between myself together with the vice president and the two coordinating ministers. Through this arrangement, in which the leadership team discusses all important matters, the power of the president will be checked so that he is not able to simply do things for his own purposes.
And the system will remain a presidential one with the final authority left with the president?
Yes, of course, until the MPR is convinced otherwise.
In what way will your new cabinet be different to the cabinet of the past ten months?
I think that the stress will not be on balancing party-political interests but instead upon expertise. Technical matters will be taken care of by three people: the two coordinating ministers and the vice president, whilst I will take care the 'big picture matters' both domestic and international.
If, to some extent, assessment of the previous cabinet's performance was a matter of perception, is this partly a result of the fact that many did not appreciate that regime change takes at least five years, and often ten to make substantial changes?
Whatever people say about Indonesians as a whole, as a nation, one thing that seems clear to me is that they understand that the changes have to be profound, have to be fundamental. Although they might be very noisy in protesting many things, both the intellectuals and everyone else, in the end they understand that we have to change. This is very important to understand. Otherwise, if we don't know our own people we will be returning to the clichof the past, and I am against this sort of attitude. We have to stick to the principles and apply them to the day-to-day realities of our nation.
What sort of 'cliche of the past' do you have in mind?
Well the sort of things said recently by (UN human rights commissioner) Mary Robinson that we have to be against those in the armed forces. That's crazy because we have so many good people among the soldiers. So we have to differentiate between the institution and the individuals. There are so many individuals and it may be that many of them were not good but we have to back the good people, the honest people. You know the most democratic of people, Ali Sadikin, was a lieutenant general in the marines.
So your vision is one of moderate and gradual change?
We have to continue to stress the fundamental direction of change but also not to forget the reality of the situation.
How would you summarise your vision for what you want to achieve over the next four years?
The most important thing is to establish democracy, which means bringing the principles of democracy to bear on the day-to-day realities of life in this nation. The second thing is to revive the economy, this is very important. We have to stimulate foreign investment and build confidence. We have to rationalise the entire way in which this nation functions, the way that business works here. I see that one of the main obstacles that we need to overcome is establishing sufficient infrastructure to enable future development in the form of roads, bridges, airports, harbours, schools, hospitals and so forth.
Apart from that I think that Indonesia as the fourth-largest nation and the third-largest democracy has the right to play an important role in international affairs. It is important to monitor and contribute to international affairs and I intend to do this, with the assistance of the minister for foreign affairs.
In this context it is important to recognise that we have not, and will not, take the path of pure socialism. Instead our system is based on capitalism but it needs to be a capitalism which is mindful of the needs of all people.
What about the political parties? After all it is not possible to have a healthy democracy without good parties. In particular, how do you see the future for PDI-P and PKB?
One thing that is clear now is that our political landscape will change. The change will be caused by many things. The first is that Golkar is so discredited by its past. To some extent the Golkar leadership could rectify the situation by acknowledging the fact that they were guilty of many wrongs in that past and declaring that they now want to make amends, to ask for forgiveness from the people. But up until now they have not done that. If they continue like this Golkar will be soundly rejected in the next election.
The second thing is that the next election will be determined by complex party affiliations that cut across a wide range of social groupings. Both PDI-P and PKB need to become parties with broad-based support across society. The parties need to apply rationalism to develop their positions and not simply rely on emotionalism. PDI-P needs to move beyond a simplistic kind of 'Sukarnoism' and stress a more thoughtful understanding of Sukarno's legacy. I myself follow him in many ways, adapting his thinking and techniques but seeking to be true to his principles.
At the same time PKB needs move beyond Islam and Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) as its political base. It needs to move beyond politics based on communal affiliation. That is why I said to the chairman of PKB, Matori Abdul Djalil, that whilst in the short term we need to draw our party leadership from largely Islamic sources we should try to be as inclusive as possible and draw from across the full spectrum of Muslim communities, associations, NGOs and social groupings.
Greg Barton (gjbarton@deakin.edu.au) teaches at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He is writing a biography of Abdurrahman Wahid. These are excerpts from an exclusive interview recorded for 'Inside Indonesia' on 15 August 2000, partway through the MPR session.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
A spectacular joint Australian-Indonesian performance bursts boundaries
Robin Laurie
The premiere performance of Theft of Sita took place at the Adelaide Festival in March this year. It was an outdoor performance set among huge old Moreton Bay figs, beautifully lit against the black night sky. The audience sat in rows of steep bleachers looking down on a square of wooden staging. Ten musicians, five of them Balinese gamelan players and five from the Australian Art Orchestra, took their places. Five puppeteers, a Balinese dalangand four Australians, emerged onto the stage and lit the screen light or damar. A large fabric screen descended from above at the front of the stage and we were in the enchanted forest of creation.
Before us lay the idealised classical landscape of the ancient Ramayana story, complete with shadow puppets of the lovely Sita, her princely lover Rama, and their farting, chatting servant/ clown companions Tualen and Merdah, the latter a father and son pair from the Balinese wayang kulit known aspunakawan. A range of whimsical and funny animal shadow puppets pass across the screen. But there is always trouble in paradise. Sita is captured by the giant demon Rahwana and carried off to his kingdom of Langka. Then huge logging machines invade the forest and begin demolishing trees...
This Ramayana begins conventionally, but quickly explodes into a metaphor of the tumultuous events surrounding the overthrow of Suharto. Computer-generated images and photographic projections of demonstrations coexist with giant shadow puppet logging beasts. There are white water rafters and withering paddy fields in Bali. And Langka becomes a futuristic city of gleaming steel and glass towers, and of rubbish tips. Giant screens lift and disappear, perspective shifts from screens at the front to screens at the back of the stage. Shadow puppets emerge on tiny screens in the middle of the space and then shift again.
In those turbulent days of 1998-9 two main avenues of expression for radical views were satirical political comment by performers of all kinds, including the wayang, and the internet. Theft of Sita consciously brings together these two screens, the fabric screen of the wayang and the electronic screen of TV and the internet.
The working behind the scenes was as complex as the images in front. Associate director and puppeteer Peter Wilson describes how the puppeteers had to work from trolleys lying on their backs, keeping the puppet level as they hurtled downstage, or trying to look at the puppet as they moved backwards away from the audience.
Through all this impressive scenery wander the determined and shrewdly amused figures of Tualen and Merdah. Their mission from Rama is to rescue Sita from the clutches of the demon Rahwana. Theirs is a people's mission. Normally that mission belongs to the nobles and to the White Monkey General Hanuman and his army, but these do not appear in this version.
The clowns pass through burnt-out forest landscapes. Tualen explains to his son the strange and remarkable transformation of forests into toilet paper for the west. The two punakawan continue on their quest, engaging in a struggle to restore water to the rice paddies of Bali, traveling through a surreal world of factories, electrical pylons and freeways, before at last coming upon the awesome sight of Langka just as Rahwana's black limousine glides ominously past. Merdah and the army of the poor then join students and demonstrators. Together they storm Rahwana's palace as his financial empire collapses. The night I was in the audience, as the demonstrations reached their peak, a real helicopter flew overhead. One of the unpredictable pleasures of outdoor performance.
Collaboration
How did this epic collaboration come together? Director Nigel Jamieson and composer Paul Grabowsky were offered a commission for the 2000 Adelaide Festival. Sydney-based Performing Lines produced. Nigel and Paul wanted to do something based on the Ramayana story. Nigel had invited the Balinese dalang I Wayan Wija to Australia in 1998 for the Australian Theatre for Young Performers. Nigel wrote versions of the Sita script, eliminating some characters, as he felt it would be hard for western audiences to recognise too many. He sent these drafts and ideas to Wayan Wija.
A team of puppeteers, designers and the composer went to Bali to rehearse in November 1999. It was the height of the tensions around Timor and the choice of a new president. I Wayan Wija decided that because of the political tensions he was unable to continue with the project. Nigel and Arif Hidayat, the Australian-based interpreter for the team, went off on their own mission to find a new dalang. The rest of the team meanwhile found a shed in Denpasar, negotiated streets filled with demonstrators and burning tyres, and began experimenting with the lights and computer images using equipment they had brought with them. Nigel and Arif finally met I Made Sidia, who teaches at the arts college STSI in Denpasar and is the son of the famous Balinese dalang I Made Sija. Made is a mask (topeng) dancer and choreographer as well as a dalang. He had worked in New York on a version of the Mahabarata epic with one of the more experimental New York groups, Mabou Mines, as well as throughout Asia and Europe.
Nigel and Peter both tell the story of Made's arrival at the Adelaide rehearsal space in February this year. Peter was lying on the floor manipulating one of the giant logging beast puppets. Made had just got off a plane. His puppets, traditionally imbued with the sacred power of the gods, had been confiscated and gassed by Australian customs. He arrived in the space, saw what Peter was doing, took off his coat, lay down on the floor, picked up another puppet and the two puppeteers began playing together.
What are we to think of these international collaborations? Are they not manifestations of cultural globalisation in which western idioms inevitably dominate? Doesn't the commercialisation of the ticket-buying international festival circuit destroy local culture? Global television and western economic dominance certainly do threaten cultural diversity as never before. But a project like Theft of Sita is different. Decisions were not made in some far-off place that caused another country's economy to crash.
In this kind of project a group of people work together intensely over a period of time, in a cheap, large room somewhere. They discuss and argue about issues of power and culture, politics and gods, life and art and how they are to be represented. If it's a good process, understandings and accommodations and creative transformations occur. By all accounts, Theft of Sita was a good process. Arif and Peter both tell me this was because it was in fact something new for all of them.
Transformed
But doesn't this process ruin the authenticity of the Ramayana? The story was totally transformed, new puppets were invented, the god-like voice of the single dalang in charge was abandoned, overtly political comments on environmental issues and the voices of the people were heard. However, no culture is static. Wayang has constantly adapted to new political circumstances, new social values and technologies.
New puppets have often emerged. Helen Pausacker, a Melbourne based dalang, tells me there have been puppet bicycles and motorbikes. When President Sukarno used to arrive everywhere by helicopter there was a period in the 1960s where the god Visnu would descend in the same manner. TV and video created a demand for faster action and more realism if wayang performers were to attract younger audiences. Multiple dalang and multiple screens, electric and coloured lights have all been used before in Indonesia. Sometimes the puppets even move through film projections of exploding volcanoes. These changes are popular with audiences. There are rock songs in the middle, comedians (pelawak), singers, and people get up and dance. In one wayang performance the dalang smashed his puppets in a manner reminiscent of Who concerts.
Indonesian environmentalists have used traditional performance structures before. The Earth Cleansing (RuwatanBumi) of April 1998 was a series of performances based around Earth Day. Clearly traditions are not only located There, in Indonesia, and innovation Here, in Australia. Barbara Hatley notes that western interest encouraged Indonesian performers to explore their own traditions in the 1970s. Conversely, interaction with Asia has encouraged western performers to explore ritual and spiritual aspects of performance.
Indonesia's crisis is creating turmoil and change. The phrase Think Globally Act Locally is heard in Indonesia as well as Australia. Theft of Sita is global in its concerns with the environment. It recently performed at a festival in Germany. It is local in that it is part of creating new cultural relationships and artistic collaborations in our region. In Indonesia progress became modernity, became development, and now democracy is the word on everyone's lips. Theft of Sita ends with images of the celebrations following the overthrow of Suharto. A confused Merdah and Tualen nervously approach the ballot box. Plot mirrors politics.
Robin Laurie (nibor@vicnet.net.au) is a performance director in Melbourne. She was a founder of Circus Oz, and has just been in East Timor recording traditional dances and songs for a CD. 'Theft of Sita' will be part of the Melbourne International Festival in October 2000.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
A well-known artist explains his work, his activism, and why he is in Canada
Yvonne Owens interviews Semsar Siahaan
Since arriving in Victoria, Canada, in the spring of 1999, you have had three exhibitions. Some of them contained quite gripping political imagery, including 'A self portrait with black orchid'. Could you comment?
A self-portrait with black orchid (1.5m x 2m, oil on canvas, March 1999) is dedicated to fourteen activist friends who were kidnapped and killed by the military in early 1998. The painting is also about the chaos and violence in Indonesia sponsored by the military, about the struggle of the political parties and the students and pro-democracy activists who kept on with their 'moral force' actions for reformation. My self-portrait is central to the painting, because the painting is about my self, my thoughts, my feelings, and my experiences that need to be shared with the audience. This image is about the last moment of the New Order regime before it collapsed after the killing of the four students by military snipers at the Trisakti University in Jakarta. I was there with some activist friends and members of the 1978 class of the Bandung Institute of Technology. I was there, near the four bodies lying pale, in pools of blood on the floor. I was there among those brave students until 1:45am. I was there before and after the killing, preparing a huge banner that had been requested by the activists and students for the memorial ceremony for the four slain students, planned for the 21st of May 1998.
I could not finish the banner because extreme violence began the next day, after the funeral, with widespread looting, burning, chaotic rampage and student demonstrations in the area in which I lived. Thousands of poor people surrounded that area. Those are the people for whom I dedicate my art, my thoughts, my feelings, and my sympathy. Instead of fighting with them (like those who did so in protecting their property), after five days I decided to leave my house and possessions and walk away. I left my home unlocked and returned in July. The layered imagery of the painting fills in the background and context - of the events and of my reactions - during this crisis. It completes the banner I was unable to finish, and addresses my audience, the victims of totalitarianism and violence. One needs to understand the dialectical process of visualisation in my art works, and my background of social-political activism.
The painting also shows the multinational corporate industrialists and international investors gambling on Indonesia's political and economic crisis for profit. The violence engineered by the military, which caused suffering to the motherland, is shown in the iconography of the victimised mother and child.
There has been some misunderstanding recently, in print, of the nature of the imagery in your painting 'Women workers between factory and prison'. This involved the mistaken view that the painting revolved around the iconography of the factory worker Marsinah as a martyr.
The iconography of Women workers between factory and prison (1m x 1m, oil on canvas, 1992) is not related to the late Marsinah at all. Marsinah was tortured and killed in 1993, while I did the painting in 1992. I did design a poster commemorating Marsinah's death as a martyr that was printed in five hundred copies in December of 1993 for the Indonesian pro-democracy activists, for the annual Yap Thiam Hien human rights award. The award that year went to Marsinah's father and family. The poster was then disseminated among all the Indonesian non-government organisations concerned with workers and others.
Why were you expelled from your university, the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), in 1981?
It was my 'happening art' that I was doing at the art department of ITB at that time. My artwork was called Oleh-oleh dari desa II - February 9th, 1981 ('Remembrance from the village II'). In this work, I took my teacher Sunaryo's sculpture called Citra Irian dalam torso ('Irian image in torso'), since he took the Asmat ornaments as a part of his work of art. I also used mud, fire, banana leaves, water, yellow rice and a placard on which was written my statement with red paint, that 'Indonesian modern art should return to reality...'. [As a result, the sculpture was burned. - Editor].
Sunaryo used the Asmat-West Papua sacred ornaments by putting them in his wooden sculpture series. At that time it was made clear that 'Indonesian modern art should explore traditional art forms and ornaments so that Indonesian modern art could achieve its national identity.' Those words were part of a 'secret formula' but I think it was formulated by the military think tank Lemhanas. That formula suggested some kind of national security approach to culture and art, and was a strategy to oppose the strong 'latent' influence of the communists' cultural wing Lekra (People's Cultural Council) after the 1965 affair, where an estimated one quarter million alleged communists were killed. The formula was clearly a method to eliminate social criticism from Indonesian contemporary artists' work. That formula was systematically implemented in the art academy curriculum. As a result, artists became exploitative towards indigenous culture and art. These artists became extremely rich, while the indigenous people remained in the same condition - in poverty and being exploited.
So, I wasn't yet expelled from ITB, not for seven months, when I was accused of organising the three day ITB fine arts student strike, demanding more freedom of expression.
It has been written that you are planning to mount an exhibition of your installation work called 'Slaughterhouse', about the brutality of the Suharto regime, in Victoria, BC. Could you tell us about this?
I never had any plan to mount an installation work entitled Slaughterhouse here in Canada. Many Canadian friends and friends in the US know that the exhibition was planned for Seattle, USA. And the work was not going to deal with Suharto's New Order regime or its brutality, but about the Global Butchers - such as the arms industry, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and capital investment corporations that push indigenous cultures from their land everywhere on this planet.
When did you start painting?
I enjoyed drawing since I was nine years old. My mother supported me greatly with this, as did my father, supporting me with books of art - and it was the happiest aspect of my childhood. Another time during which I produced a lot of art works was when I was with my girl friend, Widya Paramita - because during this time, for six years, she morally supported my creativity. Also during my marriage with Asnaini, when I created the Homage for the Christo's mother.
I must ask you, why are you in Canada?
Well, it is like I was saying before, I was there when the New Order regime collapsed. But even the new regime of BJ Habibie was no different from the old regime. He was nothing but Suharto's crony. Later, I became really sick, with high blood pressure - 150/250. This was caused by tension due to the continuing violence, the kidnapping of activists, and political uncertainty in Indonesia. So I flew to Singapore, where I saw two doctors. My weight was extremely low. They concluded that I had a major illness that would take six months on medication to treat. This is a well-known factor of my residency here. They suggested that I stay away from the tensions and chaos happening in Indonesia temporarily for the sake of my future health.
And I do not agree with the label of 'exile,' as I have recently been described within these pages. I also don't agree, as was stated here, that Hendra Gunawan was in exile after the '1965 affair.' As far as I know, he was in imprisonment in Bandung, and then moved to a Yogyakarta prison. And Sujana Kerton, I don't think he was in exile either. He was in the USA and stayed there temporarily until he went back to Indonesia in the late 1970s.
What are your projections for the future?
First I have to rebuild my artistic image professionally - internationally - after the 'character assassination' in a previous issue of this magazine. Secondly, I am still working on the idea of the Slaughterhouse installation, but it has been postponed for production reasons. And my next solo exhibitions will hopefully be in New York, and in London. I'll also keep busy with some non-government organisations and activism, as always.
Yvonne Owens is an author and art critic in Victoria, Canada. Semsar Siahaan was first profiled in Inside Indonesia no.16, October 1988. The Inside Indonesia article referred to in this interview is 'Hero into exile', by Astri Wright, edition no.62, January-March 2000. See also Astri Wright's reader's letter in the current edition.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000{jcomments on}
Once feared as the mark of a criminal, tattoos are today almost a teenage fad
Megan Baker
Athonk knows his art form like the back of his tattooed hands. The owner of Pure Black Tattoo Studio in Yogyakarta can tell you that Australians in Melbourne have the most desirable tattooing skin because the needle easily penetrates their fine, cold hide. Indonesians have the least suited skin. A red heart tattoo on his throat beats as he swallows.
His passion for tattooing grew out of drawing comics. Athonk studied at the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) in Yogyakarta until lack of funds put an end to formal education. He then learnt to apply his artistic skills to skin through friends, magazines, and a trip to study the art form in Australia. A vast collection of photographs proves his technical competence. Designs range from small simple turtle motifs to large detailed tribal patterns applied to limbs and backs.
New Order tattoo artists used to work underground. In the early 1980s Yogyakarta was the least safe place for tattooed Indonesians. Tattoos were a sign of a previous prison sentence. The government embarked on an operation to 'clean' the city of troublesome citizens. 'Mysterious gunmen' (petrus - penembak misterius) shot down tattooed street thugs known as gali (gabungan anak liar). Men with tattoos were told to report to the police. Their tattoos were noted, and in some cases forcibly removed with a hot iron. The stigma forced artists underground, where drugs or alcohol became payment for artwork and hence part of tattoo culture. Athonk once received a chicken from a poor client.
The tattoo artist creates a lifetime mark. The relationship between designer and client at times resembles that of psychologist and patient. In a state of pain, Athonk says, clients easily 'confess all'. One got a tattoo because he was ordered to marry someone he did not love. Rebellion continues to be a prime inspiration, like the anti-military 'peace punk' tattoos in the US in the 1970s. Many clients make a ceremony of the process, inviting friends, preparing party food for the minute of completion.
Hygiene is a big concern. In the 1930s tattoo studios in New England were blamed for the spread of syphilis. Athonk worries about street tattooists who use dirty tools. Few studios use gloves as they are expensive and artists do not know where to purchase them. Athonk tries to educate other artists by organising Tattoo fashion parades and establishing the Java Tattoo Club. Artists need to learn the technicalities of tattooing machines and the latest ink types, as well as how to apply designs to skin. There are too few skilled tattoo artists to meet increasing demand. Studios not ready to 'go public' continue to operate from small outlets in heavily touristed areas of Yogyakarta like Sosrowijayan.
The tattooed community considers non-tattooed people 'stark naked' (telanjang bulat), a term Athonk claims originates with tattoo. In the early 1990s the music of Red Hot Chili Peppers and Guns 'n' Roses had a 'phenomenal' influence on Indonesian youth. They wanted tattoos of the cover image on the first Red Hot Chili Peppers album. Now Indonesian youth, aware of a new 'individuality' which comes packaged in consumerism, are requesting more self-devised designs as well as common popular hearts and roses. Their choice of designs provides a visual reading of attitudes in a transforming society.
Athonk also owns the only professional studio in Jakarta. Many clients come from wealthy families. In fact most are teenage girls who come to the studio with their parents. Tattooists are increasingly seen as 'fine artists'.
But 'sensationalism' remains part of modern tattooing culture. Foreign tourists come to Indonesia in search of the more raw tradition lacking in the West. They ask for exotic tribal designs, symbols of eternity and spirituality, or pictures of Javanese wayang puppets.
Javanese do not have a strong tattooing tradition. But tattooing is an integral part of the more tribal Dayak and Mentawaian cultures. Bunga Terong, the top part of an eggplant, originated in Borneo and is now an internationally recognised tattoo. In Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) women tattoo symbols on their foreheads to indicate skills such as weaving which increase their worth in the eyes of potential husbands. Men were expected to earn their tattoos by taking heads.
Megan Baker (megabak@hotmail.com) studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Find Athonk near Supermans in Sosrowijayan, Yogyakarta
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Radical Yogyakarta artists get among the people
Heidi Arbuckle
It is World Food Day, Yogyakarta 1999. Dr Syarifuddin Karamoy, secretary general of the Department of Agriculture, is due to open an Agricultural Expo. But his address has been delayed. Outside, a chorus of voices. Farmers, students and activists are chanting 'anti-revolusi hijau' (anti-green revolution), 'tolak bahan pestisida' (refuse pesticides), 'cabut SK 527'(withdraw the proposed bill). Most vocal of all is 67 year-old Magelang farmer Mbah Seko. He holds up a petition signed by 260 fellow farmers from the vicinity of Yogyakarta - Klaten, Pacitan, Bantul and Kulonprogo. The petition is clear - withdraw the bill that proposes to re-introduce several harmful pesticides.
Most striking about this demonstration is the diverse array of supporters the anti-pesticide cause attracts. The people (rakyat) are young and old, rural and urban. Among them is an unusual group of rakyat who have been particularly active at protests the last few years. They are not your ordinary animate Indonesians, but shadow puppet (wayang)adaptations of real people. Made from simple materials like cardboard, bamboo stakes, and paint, these life-size wayang characters represent members of a newly democratising Indonesian society.
The puppet-masters (dalang) of the protest wayangis a group of radical artists, members of a progressive arts network called Taring Padi. Taring Padi refers to the sharp tip of the rice plant, and is a metaphor for people's power. The group emerged in 1998 following the popular movement that brought down President Suharto. Many of those involved in Taring Padi were active in student politics throughout the 1990s. They were among the architects of the radical art actions that highlighted the Yogyakarta protest movement in 1998.
Yogyakarta is renowned historically as a centre for radical cultural protest, particularly in the visual arts. Radical Yogya artists have embraced anti-colonial and revolutionary causes since early in the twentieth century. Like their predecessors, Taring Padi artists promote the concept of people's art - seni kerakyatan-a loose term that defines the artist's social commitment and popular orientation. Taring Padi attempt to put this credo into practise through concrete action, rather than just aesthetic empathy for the plight of the 'oppressed masses'.
Mainstream art, the conventional system of curators, galleries and art collectors, is something Taring Padi avoid. Rather, they cultivate relations with other progressive organisations including students, farmers, and the urban poor. Such was the case for the World Food Day action, when Taring Padi collaborated with Mbah Seko and his group of organic farmers called Petani Lestari (Conservation Farmers), as well as with activists from the environmental non-government organisation Keliling. At the demonstration, activists shared out the protest wayangamong themselves. The cast of wayang figures symbolised the various 'actors' involved in the pesticide 'drama'.
Taring Padi dalangs do not narrate their wayang performances. Rather, the characters themselves tell the story. The pesticide drama involved the general public. Mothers holding babies, school children, workers, and religious figures were all depicted as the potential 'victims' of polluted food. The protagonists were the 'enlightened' farmers, who knew the effects of poisonous farming inputs and were willing to boycott them. The antagonists included the 'capitalists' and corrupt bureaucrats who were intent on re-introducing dangerous pesticides for their own financial gain, impervious to the public interest.
This adaptation of the popularwayang tradition subverts standard wayangconventions whereby the people (rakyat)are portrayed as bungling clowns (punakawan), 'unrefined' and characterised by crude features. In contrast, protest wayangportray positive, realist images of the rakyat, who are wise to the deceptions of their conventionally 'benevolent' rulers. Power-holders, who are normally characterised by their 'refined' features, are here depicted as beast-like creatures often resembling pigs, wolves, rats or grotesque monsters. These characters don modern day attire such as business suits and military greens, often juxtaposed with symbols of the traditional elite, or the 'national' Indonesian icon, the kopiah or male Islamic headdress.
Taring Padi and their theatre of protest wayang have 'performed' at a number of events throughout Central Java and in Jakarta. Their dramas take on issues like the role of the military, the 'conviction' of New Order 'criminals', electricity and fuel price hikes, and the debt trap. In February 2000 they created about twenty wayang characters for a mass action in Jakarta to oppose renewed loans and austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. The anti-debt coalition KAU that organised the action timed it to coincide with a meeting of the international Consultative Group on Indonesia to discuss debt rescheduling.
Pacifist
Taring Padi often uses wayang for 'agitation' purposes and to depict conflicting class relations. But Taring Padi's artwork also promotes pacifist causes. In the period before the June 1999 elections, a number of Indonesian cities experienced heightened unrest. Political commentators predicted 'civil war', and the media fuelled the volatile pre-election atmosphere by nurturing perceived religious, ethnic and racial tensions. As a response, Taring Padi began to produce a series of woodcut posters which carried messages promoting solidarity and peaceful social interrelations.Between March and June 1999, they distributed approximately 10,000 woodcut posters throughout major cities in Java, Sumatra and South Sulawesi. The woodcuts, hand-printed on draft paper, were pasted on city streets, on churches and mosques, on village notice boards, in food stalls, in market places.
Among their other artwork, Taring Padi issue a popular pamphlet called the People's trumpet. A series of banners and murals resemble the work of Mexican muralist Diego Riviera. Taring Padi banners are often commissioned by other organisations. The women's division of the National Human Rights Commission ordered a series of them. Titled The evacuation, the banners depict the harsh realities of the refugee crisis in Aceh by focusing on women's daily struggles.
But Taring Padi also use banners and murals for community purposes, and invite local people to be part of the painting process. Taring Padi's creative ethos involves a collective, process-oriented production of artwork. They want to eliminate illusive notions of the artist as 'genius' or 'eccentric' individual, and of the artwork as somehow 'sacred'. Taring Padi artwork does not carry recognition of the 'individual' artistic creator. It is stamped instead with the Taring Padi 'kerakyatan' insignia - a sprig of rice, red star and cogwheel.
Most Taring Padi activities are self-funded. Many Taring Padi artists are hostile toward the art market. The group ekes out a living from informally selling posters, postcards and books. They are lucky to have an advantageous living arrangement - the group squats in the former visual arts campus of the Indonesian Institute of Art (ISI) in Yogyakarta. The abandoned arts campus is now a melting pot for young Yogya radicals to meet, camp, and plan their 'revolutionary' activities. The buildings have not escaped their rhetoric. Graffiti, painting, and poetry cover its inner walls, quoting Ho Chi Minh, Lenin and the Indonesian poet Agam Wispi.
But they are by no means an in-group. They also engage in more community-oriented events such as creative activities with village children, theatre performances, workshops, and even wedding receptions.
Under the New Order regime, artists of social conscience struggled to maintain a community-oriented approach to their artistic activities. Persistently plagued by bureaucratic red tape and harassed by the military, artists and the community became forcibly detached. Now, amid the wave of recent reform in Indonesia, new possibilities for a lively community arts network are opening up.
Heidi Arbuckle (a.heidi@mailcity.com) recently completed her honours thesis on Taring Padi at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. She lives in Yogyakarta and studies at the Indonesian Institute of Art. Contact Taring Padi at taring99@hotmail.com.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Underground music gives young people back their voice
Jo Pickles
Halfway down the road to Parangtritis, in the isolated Gabusan Art Building, wedged between sugar cane and rice paddies, a crowd of Yogyakarta youths endure the intense mid-day sun to watch an underground music concert.
Outside, near the parked motorbikes, the atmosphere is vibrant. Small groups cluster in narrow strips of shade to dodge the harsh noon glare. Some chat and joke as they wait for their favoured bands to come on. Others rest in silence, conserving energy before they perform, or recovering from a stint of brutal pogo dancing inside the airless hall. Not all the spectators are from Yogya. Many travelled from neighbouring cities in Central Java or from further afield in Bali or West Java to see the poster-billed bands and check out new local talent.
Vibrations from the hall hum through the air. Each time watchful police open the venue's doors to let sweaty bodies slip through, broken lyrics and fast drum phrases spill out into daylight.
Like most underground concerts these days, this event showcases several music genres: the loud angry disorder of Punk, the low growls and grunts of Grindcore, the melancholic and nihilistic screeching of Doom Metal, not to mention Black Metal, Brutal Death and Skacore.
Distinctive musical styles are coupled with dramatic fashion. Metal fans decked out in monochrome black contrast with the vivid ripped punk style, as do the checked shirts, braces and black boots of the skinheads. This is an 'anything goes' space, both stimulating and disseminating self-expression.
Underground concerts are not unique to Yogyakarta. The scene has flourished throughout Indonesia since the early nineties. Similar events are mirrored in Bandung, Malang, Denpasar, Blora and numerous other cities.
United by the desire to reclaim artistic creativity, the underground movement offers musicians an escape from the clutches of commercial culture. Hollers, screams and growls are let loose. Unlike the mainstream music world which is engineered by profit-oriented major label corporations, expression is not restricted. 'When I'm fed up, this music lets me get out my emotions and become positive' says Dempak, vocalist for the Bandung hardcore punk band Jeruji.
For many of the kids at this concert, music is more than just a hobby. Close-knit communities of young people sharing an interest in underground music have emerged throughout Indonesia. Underground youth cultures provide a network of like-minded people to experiment, hang out and jam with. A place of refuge from families who don't understand the aspirations of their youth, and from a society preoccupied with other issues. These groups provide a sense of belonging and family-like support for members who choose nomadic life on the streets in preference to living at home. Distinct from other more segregated social structures, the underground scene is open for all to join and participate in. Money and education are not barriers.
History
With its roots in the underground movement, punk is the most theatrical youth culture in Indonesia. Intentionally in your face and necessarily cheap, punk dress code, music and lifestyle have been adopted by young people from a cross section of classes, religions and ethnic backgrounds. Uni students, street kids, salespeople and the unemployed unite in a show of studded jackets, gravity-defying hairstyles and pants patched with angry slogans. They have redefined these symbols of a western tradition in a new setting.
The seventies British punk scene grew out of a climate of high youth unemployment, poverty and illiteracy. Found objects were given new 'absurd' contexts: over-sized safety pins pushed through earlobes and spiked dog collars buckled around human necks. These visual statements set out to ridicule the conventions of respectable social life. The tough non-conformist attitudes of punkers were a reaction to a conservative government which offered limited prospects to its youth.
Indonesian punk has a similar history. According to those who have been involved in the scene for almost a decade, some of Indonesia's youth began parading punk fashion as a rebellious visual stab at unappetising social 'norms'. At that stage, fear of repercussions ensured that they rarely voiced discontent with the establishment openly.
Ironically, the increased freedoms after the fall of the New Order produced an intellectual rift that divided the punk scene. One section chooses to remain uninterested and disenchanted by politics. Others look to punk activism in other parts of the world as a blueprint for how to voice concerns. 'It's time for us, the next generation, to open our thoughts, hearts and ears to fight for what we are sure of and what is right' cries a cut-and-paste photocopied leaflet, handed out during a concert in East Java.
The Do-It-Yourself ethic long associated with this branch of the underground music movement encourages young people to be active in a sub-culture they can call their own. The realisation that anyone can record their own music or publish a homemade fanzine is self-empowering. Alternative distribution systems replace dependence on the unattainable and limiting commercial media. The movement values independent thinking and self-education. Most opinion pieces in underground newsletters cockily invite critical feedback.
Samples from political speeches are mixed into three-chord thrash and then coated in layers of rebellion and dissatisfaction. Weapons of consumer culture such as packaging are appropriated and disarmed. Album covers, for example, are used as a space for critical commentary. Stamped with images selected to stimulate a reaction, this medium opens another doorway for bands to communicate directly with their audience. The compilation Punx 'n Skins: Street Sounds of Revolution is wrapped in the printed aspirations of the thirty bands involved in making the album. A short text inside the simple cover dedicates the album to the ideals of freedom, togetherness and the environment. It states its opposition to injustice and oppression. The words 'ELIMINATE THEM!' ('Basmi mereka!') in bold capitals are aimed at the corruptors who have eaten through Indonesia's bureaucracy.
Music is not their only medium of criticism. Concern for the future of Indonesia often leads these youths to the forefront of heated demonstrations. They assert their personal beliefs and try to raise awareness in others through street posters, stickers, badges, fanzines and handouts.
Prejudice
But sharp spikes, superfluous zippers, and tattoos still twig a sensitive nerve in today's Indonesia. In the rare event the media looks at this group of young people it usually paints an ugly ('jelek') portrait. When last November the weekly tabloid Adil published a feature article on 'Bandung's sea of gangs', it described the punk community as 'disturbing' and placed it on a par with the thugs who rule Bandung's underworld. Music mag Mumu in its April edition said punk members were paid to take part in demonstrations. ('They are happy to do it as they are getting paid' - 'Mereka sih senang-senang aja disuruh seperti itu karena diberi uang'). Prejudice stemming from conservative values also comes in more sinister forms. Random beatings, threats and tales of harassment are not uncommon.
Punk and other underground music may have originated in the west. But Indonesia's youth have indigenised these cultures and given them new meanings. Amidst Indonesia's current upheaval, they offer young people an identity to participate in, and a support base. Even more important, the underground has broken down barriers to expression and given youths back their voice after a long period of silence.
Jo Pickles (joanna_pickles@hotmail.com) is a student at the Australian National University, Canberra. She was in Yogyakarta with Acicis (the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies).
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Some directions in post-New Order theatre
Lauren Bain
Many within the arts community in Indonesia experienced a sense of euphoria after the fall of Suharto. Two years on, is theatre really 'floundering and directionless' as a recent article in The Jakarta Post suggested (6 August 2000)?
Under the New Order the performing arts were subject to tight state controls. Yet theatre groups were to varying degrees able to resist and to make critical comment on many aspects of New Order society.
The late New Order saw increasing numbers of theatre companies producing non-linear, non-text based works using physical performance forms. This form of theatre invited multiple, pluralistic responses from audiences, and in a western theoretical framework could be described as 'postmodern'. Much of this work was also highly critical of the New Order state, but perhaps because of its non-text based format was largely able to avoid censorship. By saying the 'unsayable' without using words it perhaps positioned itself outside the parameters of perceived threats to New Order hegemony and thereby subverted it.
Teater SAE, Teater Kubur, Payung Hitam, Bali Exsperimental Teater and Teater Re-Publik are all groups which produced work along these lines, each in its own unique way. Most are producing it still. Numerous other groups including Teater Api (Surabaya) and Teater Ruang (Solo) continued to use text in their work but also developed a highly physical performance style.
But how has reformasi impacted on this type of theatre production? Is this style of work, this idiom, still an appropriate strategy for subverting the status quo? In fact if there is no clear 'status quo' is it possible to be radical? Many theatre groups and artists are grappling with these questions.
Some maintain that the impacts of the New Order are still so widely felt that there is no need to adapt styles of performance which were successful at that time. The most recent production of Payung Hitam, under director Rachman Sabur, is DOM: Dan orang mati, performed in June 2000. It created a sometimes terrifying spectacle of chaos, violence and confused national identity - a chaos in which the audience itself was also clearly implicated, as massive military search lights passed overhead. Huge floor-ceiling banners, bearing the outlines of the heads of Suharto, Habibie and Wiranto moved back and forth across the stage. Both thematically and stylistically DOM is very similar to the work Payung Hitam have been producing over the last five years. The work is still powerful, and the performance well crafted and disciplined, but for how long will this approach be valid?
Other theatre groups are challenging the paradigm within which for example Payung Hitam work. For Yogya-based Teater Garasi, subverting what they call 'dominant theatre culture' is an important agenda. Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, the group's artistic director, argues that in order to 'subvert' the dominant theatre culture of the late 1990s, it was necessary to return to what he refers to as 'simple' themes - such as relationships between men and women. In addition, Teater Garasi chose to deal with these themes through performing realist text based theatre. Yudi Tajudin also argues that the kind of abstract, physical theatre which dominated the scene in the late New Order was 'killing acting', a trend which Teater Garasi's style of work attempts to reverse.
Whilst Teater Garasi deliberately defines its work as 'subversive', their method of subverting the dominant theatre culture could be seen as a return to a more conservative style. It is also perhaps ironic that a company which draws heavily on postmodern/ cultural studies theory should be so concerned with saving 'acting' - or perhaps the notion of 'the actor' - from the 'threats' posed by physical and overtly political theatre.
Perhaps Teater Garasi's approach exemplifies a more general shift away from a deliberately political theatre culture. 'Theatre (in Indonesia) has become the media of agitators' lamented one artist-academic in Kompas recently (22 June 2000). Nano Riantiarno, director of Jakarta's Teater Koma, who experienced consistent problems with censorship under the New Order, says that he is deliberately taking a more 'mainstream' approach to his work since the fall of Suharto.
Whilst there is a need to question whether the styles of work used under the New Order are still valid, the idea that theatre which does not deal directly with political themes is 'apolitical' is surely a naive misconception. Although Teater Garasi argue that they are 'relaxed about ideology' their work still has ideological implications.
It should not be surprising if there is a sense of a loss of direction within Indonesia's theatre community. Many other types of groups in Indonesia are also re-evaluating their position in relation to structures of power. Theatre artists are developing new modes of critique, and in some cases are re-evaluating strategies which may have been successful under the New Order. If theatre is to continue to be radical in the post New Order era, it is critical that both the continuing use of 'New Order' idioms and the strategies used to 'subvert' this 'political' style of work are themselves opened to question.
Lauren Bain (lhbain@hotmail.com) is a PhD candidate at The University of Tasmania. She is researching contemporary theatre of the reformasi era from her base in Solo.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Artists rebuild community identity in new, democratic ways
Halim HD
Centralism violates everything that is good about society and the arts. It is the cause of the disintegration now threatening this nation of thousands of islands once held together by some common memory and some common hope. When we decided that 'decentralisation' would be the theme of an arts festival in Makassar, South Sulawesi, some of my artist friends enjoying the good life in Jakarta wrote to tell me they thought it was a poor idea. But those who came, not just from around Makassar but from all over Indonesia, thought it was fantastic.
We started talking about the concept of a Makassar Arts Forum in a coffee shop in front of Fort Rotterdam in July 1998, just two months after Suharto resigned. It was going to be something entirely democratic and separate from the official arts establishment. That coffee shop became our secretariat, where anyone could drop by and discuss ideas. Asmin Amin was there, a well-known activist in a non-government organisation (NGO) combating HIV/Aids in South Sulawesi. Another activist there was Shalahuddin, better known for his interest in maritime ecology and organic farming. These people had worked with theatre groups such as Teater Pilar and Teater Petta Puang, and with the music and dance troupe Batara Gowa, to spread their message all over Sulawesi since the mid 1990s. I was in Makassar for another festival, but these people asked me and some other arts activists from Java to stay and help them organise the arts forum.
It soon became clear that the official arts bodies were rather afraid of these influential NGO 'outsiders'. Word was that people in the Makassar Arts Council, the South Sulawesi Arts Council, the Indonesian National Arts Coordinating Body, and South Sulawesi Taman Budaya thought they would politicise the arts. The arts councils were set up in many regions under the New Order in the 1970s. In fact these institutionalised artists had themselves long politicised the arts. They had lots of money, were close to officialdom, but had only weak roots in the community. The success of the much more open Makassar Arts Forum was soon to make the arts council model look outdated.
Andi Ilhamsyah Mattalata, a local businessman and retired sportsman, said he was prepared to help out financially. He lent us some space and a telephone. We scrounged around for a computer and paper, and for more volunteers.
By this time it was nearly a year since Suharto's resignation kicked off reformasi. Friends wanted somehow to commemorate the date. We used donated old newspapers to wrap the 5-6 metre high walls of the historic Fort Rotterdam in newsprint. The idea was to celebrate the new press freedoms, and to remember that we are surrounded by news all the time. The participants also wrapped themselves in newsprint and paraded around town - buskers, dancers, theatre players, street kids, painters and even some sidewalk sellers, about 150 of them! All the kids joined in, as did lots of motorbikes, bicycles and cars. It was like a spontaneous carnival. For three nights from 19 May '99 there was music in the streets, and dancing, theatre, poetry reading, and art shows, holding up the traffic for a kilometre or more till midnight. Every night new groups came to participate. They liked it because it was so democratic, and there were no bureaucratic hassles like funding proposals.
At the same time the South Sulawesi Arts Council (Dewan Kesenian Sulawesi Selatan) was putting on a visual arts show with artists from around South Sulawesi. I heard they spent about forty times more than our meager two million rupiahs, and there were rumours of corruption. The governor and deputy governor opened it, but hardly anyone came because it was held at the cold and inaccessible Mandala Monument, built to commemorate the 1962-63 Mandala Operation led by Suharto to recover West Irian for the Republic.
Good art
In the 1970s the Makassar Arts Council became a place where ambitious people snuggled up to the governor and to big business, perhaps with an eye to getting into parliament themselves. Any artist close to Golkar was guaranteed to get lots of projects and official appointments.
But times have changed and now younger artists can see that this is not the way to promote good art. In the 1990s many new groups began to emerge who knew that to express themselves freely they needed to keep their distance from power. At the same time a NGO movement grew more influential among the people and also began to hold cultural activities. This offered new opportunities to the artists. As an arts practitioner on the ground, I can see that many of these younger independent artists see this as their protest against the Jakarta 'centre'.
Finally it was 7 September 1999, and the ten day Makassar Arts Forum was ready to open. It had been organised by just three people, Asmin Amin, Shalahuddin, and Pak Andi Mattalata, with minimal funds. But none of the artists made a fuss about how little they were paid. Local coffee shops sent packed lunches, some of the artists themselves contributed coffee, rice, bottled water. All personal contributions. It was amazing.
Nearly all the artists from around South Sulawesi came. More turned up from all over Indonesia. There were painters, dancers, musicians and theatre artists from Yogyakarta, Solo, and from so many other cities in Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, all over Sulawesi, Lombok and Irian Jaya. Four hundred artists altogether. There were foreigners as well, from Australia, the US, Switzerland, Canada, South Korea. We worried about how we would feed them all. We went around to the restaurants in town and many contributed food or some money. Villagers sent fried bananas or cassava. All this happened outside the well-funded official arts organisations.
The 'decentralisation' theme was there as an expression of self-confidence by people on the 'margins', and as a statement welcoming difference. I thought it was a wonderful recognition of diversity and generosity, of empowerment.
Mak Cammana played the rebana - a traditional drum. She comes from a village in Polewali-Mamasa regency, in the Mandar region of South Sulawesi. She learned the rebana from her father and her grandfather. The rebana player is an important person in the community. They do not merely make music but also teach the Q'uran and officiate at weddings and circumcisions.
Mak Coppong performed the old courtly dances from Gowa, also in South Sulawesi. They are very slow and require a lot of discipline. Unfortunately many talented dancers are lost to the art when they marry and their 'modern' husbands forbid them from going on. Quite ironic, because there are older women who have danced all their married lives. The form remains very popular in the villages for traditional ceremonies.
In the New Order, these art forms were always shaped for public display by the demands of officialdom. These were occasions for officials to demonstrate their own ideas, and they would interfere in what the artists wanted to do. Sometimes officials themselves would dance, or at least train the dancers. It was all about their own ambitions.
The model of the Makassar Arts Forum has in fact been developing since the 1980s. In Solo, theatre groups have long organised themselves informally, based on mutual solidarity and sharing. Anyone can contribute ideas. News goes out and comes in by letters, telephone, fax or email, through a wide network of friends within the arts community and even beyond. That is how artists in Solo grew close to the NGO movement, which was flourishing at the time as a reaction to the total failure of the political parties to reach the grassroots.
Indonesia still exists. Otherwise all those artists wouldn't want to come from all over Indonesia. Some of them even suggested we should all stay together for six months or even a year and learn together.
Some wanted to make the Makassar Arts Forum an annual event. They thought of Makassar as an emerging centre for the whole of eastern Indonesia. But I hope the forum will not become a monument, an annual ceremony to the greatness of any 'centre'. It should be like sand by the seaside, where children build a castle and the waves wash it away again. We need to live our traditions every day, and not turn them into a ritual. To me, decentralisation is not about making new centres to oppose Jakarta. Makassar is just a small part of South Sulawesi and of the wider region. No area should be sacrificed for someone else's 'centre'. Decentralisation means that every region is its own centre.
HalimHD (halimhd@hotmail.com, pinilih@hotmail.com) is an arts networker in Solo, Central Java.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
These young artists revolt against the political crisis with their own bodies
M Dwi Marianto
Young Indonesian artists have started using nudity in new and quite personal ways. One artist showed a video of he and his wife making love to climax on a wet canvas. Just as some segments of society are being drawn into more normative religion, and in the midst of a Javanese society that disapproves of frank personal expression, these artists are brazenly creating a space to make very private statements. This could be their personal revolt against a necrophilic mass media culture that revels in violence, chaos and death. Like so many Indonesians, they want to know what use it is to listen to the big ideas of an intellectual elite that seems so righteous yet is so powerless against the intrigues of that very same elite.
In June I visited the home of Laksmi Shitaresmi (born in Yogyakarta in 1974). She had just given birth to a baby girl. Her husband is also a painter. In their tiny living room I was shocked to see two large nude paintings of Laksmi. The breasts and pubic hair were quite naturalistic. I had seen the paintings before, but what shocked me was where she had hung them, precisely where every visitor could see. Amidst a society growing more puritan, Laksmi didn't care if anyone thought this was impolite. As I sat there snacking in her living room, my eyes were exactly on a level with her genitals. This was significant! Laksmi seemed to want to speak directly, without being bound by traditional norms that in practice stop people from saying anything personal or critical.
Erica (born in Yogyakarta in 1971) is a dropout from the Indonesian Institute of Art in Yogyakarta, and one of the few female painters making a living from her work. At present she is doing a 'bathing' series. Up till now she has been painting playful, nascenes from in and around her home, and she has become quite successful. But in 1999 she began to be more personal. Bathing in my favourite villa is a self-portrait in the bath. Only the pubic area is discreetly scattered with soap bubbles (see cover). She wants to depict bathing as a relaxing and refreshing activity, but also one in which she can shed her restrictive 'cultural' clothing, at least on canvas. That is something many Indonesians long for at a time when so many crises give them a headache.
Made love
Arahmaiani (born in Bandung in 1961) is different again. This artist, who once studied at the Bandung Institute of Technology, has long made critical statements through her art. She has occasionally made use of clearly depicted genitalia, which in her work symbolise domination and militarism in an Indonesian context. As one of the few critical Indonesian women artists her work might appear more radical because there is so little comparison. At a performance in the French Cultural Centre in Bandung in 1999 she took off her shirt (leaving a bra) and invited the audience to take a marker pen and draw or write anything they liked on her skin. This is the first time a Sundanese woman has done this. When Sundanese greet one another they only touch with the tip of their finger. Men and women do not touch at all - they just tip their hand to their own breast when they meet.
I thought Arahmaiani had been the most radical ever in terms of using the body as an artistic medium, until Nurkholis came to my home to show me a video. This artist, born in Jepara in 1969, is well known for his religiosity, and remains so to the present day. He hates pretence and has always acted just as he has spoken. His work could be called surrealist. The body painting on his VCD was truly radical. The first part showed him painting the canvas with his own naked body. That is already unusual for Indonesia, but it was nothing compared to the next part, which involved his wife. They made love, and let their natural movements imprint themselves on the wet canvas. He showed this VCD at the opening of an exhibition in the Dirix Gallery on 1 July 2000. The audience was stunned. Some reacted cynically, others looked embarrassed, while others again congratulated Nurkholis.
The technique came to him after a period of dryness, when conventional painting with the brush no longer satisfied. In frustration he kicked the wet canvas and it left an impression of his foot. He then developed this idea until his entire body was painting on a canvas already covered in wet paint. A simple idea, but it had a big impact especially among younger artists and collectors in Yogyakarta and beyond. I think Nurkholis' search for a new language to express himself is shared by many Indonesians, who are no longer satisfied with the 'true and correct Indonesian' (bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar) they were taught at school to understand their national crisis.
These four artists are looking for an answer to a personal problem, but their discoveries represent an open visual text and a symbolism with much wider relevance. They are working in the midst of a multi-dimensional crisis that directly or indirectly affects their personal lives. They speak visually in a language whose vocabulary is drawn from the body - a very private language.
When I still lived in Rawasari Kampung in Jakarta I often overheard the neighbourhood women bicker. A few times one of them would turn around, bend over and in her fury lift her skirts and say: 'Your face is just like my arse!' Maybe these four artists are like many other people who find themselves simply confused by all the very true but also very remote political analysis in the media. To all that big talk they want to say: 'Why don't you just shut up and learn to control your inner self first'.
M Dwi Marianto (isiyogya@yogya.wasantara.net.id) is a well-known art critic. He teaches at the Indonesian Institute of Art in Yogyakarta.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Review: How one man's courage changed the course of history
Ron Witton
This book is a beauty. It tells how the sixteenth century Dutch East India Company, the grand old VOC, spread its tentacles across the globe in search of the inordinately valuable spices of the eastern islands of present day Indonesia.
The Dutch, like other European nations (particularly the English, their greatest competitor), initially followed Columbus westward from Europe in order to find a passage to the East Indies. This resulted in the Dutch establishing themselves on Manhattan Island, which they named New Amsterdam. They sailed up the Hudson River hoping to reach the Pacific. When that proved unsuccessful, they began to explore northwards in search of the fabled, but ultimately impassable, northwest passage. Others travelled northeast from Europe in search of an equally fabled, but also unpassable, arctic passage along Russia's northern coast. Mariners had horrifying experiences caught in winter ice floes thousands of miles from home, on routes that would prove fruitless.
Even the proven passage to the east via the Cape of Good Hope was perilous, but with luck they returned to Europe with cargoes of spices worth far more than gold. There are enough stories here of heroism, horror and adventure to keep the reader awake until late at night, exploring the roots of modern empire. Contemporaneous illustrations and maps are an added bonus.
Not till two thirds through this gripping book do we meet Nathaniel, whose 'courage changed the course of history'. He was an Englishman committed to his nation's titanic economic struggle against the Dutch. He succeeds in taking over and fortifying the now forgotten island of Run, which lies 'in the backwaters of the East Indies, a remote and fractured speck of rock that is separated from its nearest land mass, Australia, by more than six hundred miles of ocean' (p2). Forgotten today, it is not even shown on modern maps. However, Run Island figured prominently on seventeenth century maps because of the fragrant nutmeg that grew in abundance there. The island was the key to monopoly control of the world's supply of this fantastically valuable spice.
For five years, Nathaniel Courthorpe and his half-starved band of thirty men were besieged by a Dutch force one hundred times greater. Their heroism led directly to one of the most momentous geo-political rearrangements of the world. Stymied by Courthorpe's courage, the Dutch were forced to give the English the island of Manhattan in exchange for this now insignificant speck of rock. Thus New Amsterdam became New York. It is a tale so fantastic that one is left wondering why it has never been previously told.
Giles Milton, Nathaniel's nutmeg. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999, 388pp, ISBN 0340696761 (pbk)
Ron Witton (rwitton@uow.edu.au) teaches at the University of Wollongong, Australia.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
The environment after Suharto
Gerry van Klinken
The colonial Dutch romantically called their tropical possessions 'a girdle of emeralds'. Even today many Javanese living rooms are adorned with paintings of rustic villages amidst luxuriant green in a style called Mooi Java, Beautiful Java. But the 'unspoiled' coral reefs and boundless wilderness proclaimed in the tourist brochures have been under threat for at least a century, and especially during the rapacious industrialism of the New Order. Now that the New Order is gone, how is the environment faring? This edition of Inside Indonesia addresses that question.
The single biggest change since the end of the Suharto era is the weakness of central government. Just as its strength under Suharto was a mixed blessing, so is its weakness today.
On the one hand, weakness in Jakarta provides locals living around destructive megaprojects with the opportunity to reclaim their right to clean water and land. We should welcome, not regret, local pressure on paper pulp, mining and other such companies.
On the other hand, weakness has robbed government of any leverage it may have had to keep destructive activities in check. If under Suharto the government was not brilliant on implementing environmental regulations (to say the least), today even that minimal effort has become nearly impossible, as Lesley Potter and Simon Badcock's article on the Riau forests demonstrates.
The answer, our authors seem to be saying, now lies elsewhere. Non-government organisations, of whatever nationality, working for a sustainable Indonesian environmental policy need support. And international companies with poor environmental records - Australian miners, Malaysian palm oil companies - need to be pressured in their home countries to raise their standards. We hope this edition will contribute to that answer.
As always, our sincere thanks to all those who made this edition a reality, especially our expert and therefore busy authors who made time to write.
Gerry van Klinken is the editor of Inside Indonesia
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
Across Kalimantan by boat and on foot
Ciaran Harman
Pak Rabun was padding along the mulch in the sparse undergrowth when he stopped and went tense. When he turned around, he had an enormous grin on his face. 'Babi!' he mouthed past me to his grandson Tusung behind me. 'Thank God!' I almost said out loud. Even I could see them. The track we were following sloped downward between giant rainforest trees and the straining saplings between them, and turned left to run upstream beside the Hubung River. Just on the other bank, lit up angelically (or so I remember it) by a shaft of light let into the forest by the slice the river cuts through it, were a family of wild boar.
Pak Rabun was doing a little dance while Tusung quietly dropped his pack and began stripping down to his shorts. They were as happy at the prospect of something other than rice and fish to eat as I was. Tusung took off his rubber shoes and the long flour-sack socks that tied up under his knees to keep the leeches off. He tied a bandanna around his head, picked up his ten-foot ironwood spear and with his grandfather right behind, trod down the track, around a tree and out of sight.
They were such an odd pair. Tusung was huge, his shoulders a mile wide, but coloured like an old map where the untreated eczema that covered them and ran down his arms had taken the pigment out of his skin. He spoke rarely but deliberately, and usually jokingly. He had an appreciation of sarcasm. I liked him. His grandfather Nyurabun, or just Pak Rabun, was the toughest 63 year-old I had ever met. He didn't wear shoes. Ever. He kept leeches off with chewing tobacco and a large and expertly wielded mandau, a type of machete. He had long stringy hair and a metal bar through his penis and I am quite sure he thought I and every other tourist he had taken through the jungle were completely mad.
The rainforests of Borneo have the greatest species richness of any patch of ground on this earth. They are also rapidly disappearing. Rafts of giant logs lashed together had floated past my riverboat every half-hour or so on my three-day journey up from the coast at Samarinda. Every now and then a red scar and a logging camp would appear on the banks as we pushed past. As though some rough beast had hauled itself up from the river and begun devouring the jungle. My plan was to travel up the Mahakam River in East Kalimantan as far as I could, then find some guides to take me across the Muller Ranges and into the catchment of the great Kapuas River, which led to Pontianak on the west coast. I wanted to see what was left of the wilderness. I wanted to breathe it all in. I wanted to become part of it. As it turned out I became more a part of it than I intended. The leeches siphoned off about a pint or so of my blood and thus made me well and truly part of the ecosystem.
From Samarinda in East Kalimantan, the Mahakam kinks and bends up through the lakes and the plains, through Long Iram where it crosses the equator, past mosques of diminishing size (the Javanese transmigrants prefer the coast) to the inland town of Long Bagun. You can only get so far inland by riverboat though. To get the rest of the way to the last major outpost on the river, Tiong Ohang, you have to either fly in with the missionary airline from the coast or spend a couple of exhilarating days in a high powered longboat shooting the rapids above Long Bagun. Always the sucker for the long way round, I spent one amazing day in a boat gunning against the forces of nature between cliffs of fern and waterfalls. On the second day rain set in. With water all around me I had little choice but to sit under a leaky tarpaulin beside chain-smokers and crying children, only now and then getting a glimpse up into the vast forests I was entering.
Fortune seekers
Tiong Ohang was a mixing place, a strange sort of frontier town where the local Penihing Dayak people co-exist with young Banjar men from the south. Upstream there was only the forest and a few small and very old Dayak villages, but in Tiong Ohang the Banjar fortune seekers live. They scale the crumbling limestone cliffs to collect edible birds nests for about four million rupiah (approx. A$800) a kilogram. The young men told me you could make a thousand dollars in a month. Many did, they said, only to go down to the coast and blow it all in a couple of days of carousing. One even bought himself a motorcycle and managed to lug it all the way back to Tiong Ohang.
Some of the young fortune seekers told me they knew some people that could take me across the mountains and into West Kalimantan. They took me to the end of the town, out where the slash and burn fields began. Pak Rabun's house was raised up on stilts like all the others, and inside was furnished with rattan mats. He certainly looked the part of the Dayak guide. He had broad feet and thick stumpy legs. His hair seemed like hanging lianas, black and ropy. At first Pak Rabun reminded me of an old English gaffer. He kept his viney hair under an old flat cap and smoked a pipe as we negotiated costs. No quiet old Englishman could boast Pak Rabun's strong nimble body though.
Across his muscled chest and shoulders the skin sagged only slightly under his tattoos. 'Devil' was printed roughly on his left arm. Pak Rabun was Catholic. He said it was to remind him that evil was always close by. As close as his left arm apparently. Across his chest was written 'Hatiku Bahagia Karenalah Engkau', or 'My heart is happy because of you'. He was always ambivalent about who this referred to. On his right arm was the most cryptic: 'Masaq Lona'. 'It is what it is,' he would say, 'Masaq lona. Far from my eyes, close to my heart.'
We settled on a fee for Pak Rabun and his grandson Tusung. A couple of days later we set out. In a long thin boat called a 'ces' we pushed upriver until well into the afternoon and camped in the unoccupied home of a friend of Pak Rabun. The next day we began climbing up from the river and into the forest.
Shades of green
The journey through the forest was painted in manifold shades of green. At times it was like walking underground. There was not the sense of distance or time that pervades the Australian landscapes I am used to. This was an ecology of the intricate, not the vast and explicit. Trees fought their way into the canopy, spreading roots like armies across the wet ground. When they died they did not really die, they were chewed up by a billion termites and bright fungi and became new. Sometimes a skeleton of fig vines would remain to mark the spot. The air was cool under the canopy but thick with life. It hummed. I had expected it to sound different. I thought rainforests sounded like zoos, with thousands of birds and howling monkeys. Instead, one bird would sing with a voice that filled up the whole forest, and always off to the left or the right was the bright rustle of the river. Otherwise it was quiet.
Perhaps the quiet was my fault though. My puffing stumbling frame could probably be heard for miles and could have scared off most animals. That was why when we came upon those wild boars on about the fourth day, Tusung and Pak Rabun hushed me up and sat me on the ground as they stalked off ahead. I picked leeches out of my shoes as I waited. Socks were no defence against them and wearing boxer shorts instead of briefs had been a very bad idea. Sitting there alone, the silent forest felt bigger. I felt like I was inside a living thing, rather than just surrounded by trees.
Suddenly, with a rustle and a crash, an animal bounded out onto the path in front of me. When it saw me it stopped rock still. It might have been a barking deer or a kijang. It was no more than four feet high and had a brown velvety coat. For about half a second, we stared at each other in shock. For that deer it must have been as strange to see me sitting there as for me to see a wild deer skipping through the centre of my native Perth. The lovely animal caught its wits and bolted, crashing away through the undergrowth again.
I felt like an intruder. As though I had walked in on Mother Nature in the shower. I had seen parts of nature that would otherwise have tried hard to remain hidden. It wasn't an epiphany or anything of that sort, but I understood then the importance of wilderness. To strip nature down to resources and a few scattered national parks was to leave it dressed in rags. Wilderness, the untamed places, where those like Pak Rabun and Tusung become part of the forest in order to survive within it, rather than bend it to their own will: those are the places were we can see into the life of things.
Tusung and Pak Rabun soon returned empty-handed. I was not really disappointed at all.
Ciaran Harman (ciaran69@hotmail.com) is a student in environmental engineering and Asian studies at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He was participating in the Acicis Study Indonesia Program in Yogyakarta (wwwshe.murdoch.edu.au/acicis/).
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
What will Indonesia look like in 2010?
Dedy A Prasetyo
Four scenarios for Indonesia in 2010 were launched on 1 August 2000 at the Proclamation Statue in Jakarta. A quarter of a million copies were slipped into newspapers around the country. They contained four pictures of what Indonesia might look like, in the form of stories entitled 'On the edge', 'Into the crocodile pit', 'Paddling a leaky boat', and 'Slow but steady'.
These were not predictions of the future, nor were they strategic plans. They did not describe some utopian future or even one we would quite like, but simply possibilities that might occur because of what we do today.
One of several approaches to picturing the future is known as scenario planning. Scenarios are a tool to help us perceive different futures, each of which is influenced by decisions we make today. Put simply, they are a combination of stories - written or oral - that make up a bigger plot. A scenario gives a multi-perspectival picture of a complex future. Precisely because the future is unpredictable, scenarios are good planning tools.
Creating a scenario is a dialogical process that brings together different visions and interests. The aim is to bridge the gap between key analyses of present day problems and various possibilities in the future.
Our view of 'the future' usually contains three elements: what is likely to happen, what I would like to see happen, and what might happen. The first leads to prediction, the second to subjectivity (wishful thinking). But scenario planning emphasises the third - what might happen.
Scenario building has been much used in international business, but it has also been used at the national level. Perhaps the most famous example of the latter is the South African Mont Fleur process. In 1991/92 South Africans came up with four scenarios of what might happen there in ten years time (2002). In 1997/98 Columbians produced Destino Columbia, with four possible futures for the year 2013. Most recently, Guatemalans built three scenarios that they named Vision Guatemala. The small island state of Singapore has been using scenario planning since 1993. Japan has three scenarios for the year 2020.
The steering committee for Future Indonesia 2010 consisted of about thirty individuals - academics, human rights workers, politicians, economists, businesspersons, religious figures, military, and others. They were supported by the Future Indonesia Working Group, including Asmara Nababan, Marzuki Darusman, Binny Buchori, Emil Salim, HS Dillon, Felia Salim, Emmy Hafild, as well as some facilitators - Daniel Sparringa, MM Billah, Edy Suhardono, and Rudolf Budi Matindas. These groups wrote the preparatory studies and then spread the word to many different groups all over Indonesia.
It all began with a meeting in Bogor early in 1999, where activities were set in train to eventually come up with the Future Indonesia scenarios (Indonesia Masa Depan). The idea was to stimulate discussion, fresh thinking, and debate among Indonesians about the future of their country. We hoped that some collective consciousness would be born within society that tomorrow is the result of our actions and decisions today. We also hoped people would not stay trapped in mutual recriminations over the problems of today or yesterday, but would set out on a constructive journey in search of the alternatives stretched out before us in the future. This way, we hoped, the Indonesian public would take part in thinking about Indonesia's tomorrow, and become involved in creating that future.
Various groups within society, each as varied as the other, then began taking initiatives. They engaged in dialogue, while avoiding dogmatism. It began in East Java in July 1999, where about thirty quite different individuals from all over the province came together. For three days, they tried to build future scenarios for Indonesia in 2010, from an East Java social perspective.
Similar dialogues followed in other cities and regions, among them Medan, Mataram, Riau, Makasar, Samarinda, Pontianak, Palangkaraya, Bali, Yogyakarta, West Java, Kupang, Jayapura, Central Java, and Jakarta. Fourteen dialogues were held in all.
The results of all of these dialogues were then compiled and synthesised in a national dialogue meeting attended by representatives from each region.
A great number of fresh ideas came out of this dialogical process, as did much anxiety and sharp criticism about what kind of future Indonesia was heading for. Among the matters most often raised in the discussions were these: centralisation and decentralisation, injustice, religious conflict, the growth of democracy after Suharto (including cynicism about it), law enforcement, gender issues, constitutional amendments, national leadership, environmental and cultural exploitation, state involvement in the economy, relations between Javanese and non-Javanese, and the role of the police and military.
All these issues could be divided into two groups - those that mainly concerned people in Java and outside Java. Participants within Java focused more often on the rule of law, whereas those outside Java focused on (de)centralisation. However, civil society issues concerned everyone, whether within or outside Java.
New ideas are not always readily accepted, and so it was with this dialogical project. Depending on their region of origin or their personality, people responded in many and varied ways. People outside Java often felt suspicious there was some hidden agenda at work in the project. Inside Java, on the contrary, suspicion was far less. It generally revolved around the question of who would benefit from this dialogue, where the money came from, and whether there was a 'conspiracy' behind it. It was an exhausting process that now and then broke out into frustration when confronted by these various 'bad' thoughts.
Very clear explanation was especially required when speaking about the concept of the scenario. Unless misconceptions were cleared up here at the very beginning, they were likely to reinforce already existing prejudices. However, as the dialogue proceeded, suspicion, pessimism and cynicism tended to recede. Sometimes the dialogue closed in quite a touching atmosphere, as people said with tears in their eyes that their suspicions had been unfounded. Whichever wise person said that democracy is expensive and exhausting, said a true thing.
Scenario planning is a clever instrument to explore the views that live within society. Straight from the heart, these views can then become the basic capital for a strong civil society in Indonesia. Ironically, the Future Indonesia dialogues often threw up some strange contradictions. At a moment when so many participants had the opportunity to represent the strength of civil society, they often spoke like government spokespersons. As a result, it was hardly surprising if at times the vision put forward was no real alternative to the dominant vision produced and reproduced by the state. Even more saddening was the discovery that many participants seemed to retain the New Order perspective that there is only one truth. This made it very difficult to make the necessary linkages leading to a new future.
However, scenario planning is a vital tool in learning democracy. In several regions, the dialogue forum became a medium for reconciliation between various elements of society that had hitherto been at odds with one another over the spoils of office. Even if they did not become a collective movement, the forums bore witness to a new possibility and created a space that brought people together without regard for the attributes of power, politics, ethnicity, religion or social standing. Let us hope that this kind of dialogical process can continue, drawing on the lessons that have already been learned. The choice is ours - we, the people of Indonesia. And Indonesia's future is made today.
Dedy A Prasetyo (deape@hotmail.com) was a program officer with the Working Group for Indonesia Masa Depan. He is a law student at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta.
Inside Indonesia 65: Jan - Mar 2001
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