In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos
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In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos
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Overview
In the last years of the twentieth century, foreign correspondent Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious, and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years, it had been paralyzed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto, but now the age of Suharto was coming to an end. Would freedom prevail, or was the “time of madness” predicted centuries before now at hand?
On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a rampage of headhunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. Then, after Suharto’s tumultuous fall, came the vote on East Timor’s independence from Indonesia. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Richard reached his own breaking point.
A book of hair-raising immediacy and psychological unravelling, In the Time of Madness is an accomplishment in the great tradition of Conrad, Orwell, and Ryszard Kapuściński.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555848637 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 328 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SOMETHING CLOSE TO SHAME: BORNEO 1997-1999
WHAT YOUNG MEN DO
One
A friend of mine in Jakarta, a television reporter for one of the big international networks, came back from Borneo with a photograph of a severed head. To be accurate, what he had was the video of a photograph; the man who had taken the original, a local journalist, had refused to hand the print over, and making a copy was risky because the photo labs were under surveillance. So the cameraman had zoomed in on it, and held the camera steady. A newspaper could never reproduce such an image, and in my friend's film it remained on the screen for only a second or two.
It was lying on the ground, appeared to be male, and was rather decomposed. It was more absurd than atrocious, with a Mr Punch leer and wild holes for eyes. It looked mask-like and carnivalesque, but almost immediately it was gone and the film cut away to burned-out houses, and to soldiers stopping the car and confiscating tapes. The image flashed so quickly across my eye that at first I didn't realise what I had seen. The second time, I thought: so that's what a severed head looks like – well, it could be worse.
It was May 1997, ten months since my visit to Bali, and I was back in Indonesia to report on the elections. It was the last few days of the official campaign period and thousands of teenage boys had occupied the streets of Jakarta in long, aimless parades of chanting and flag waving. There were three official parties, and each had its own colour, its own symbol and its own number. Red Bull Number Two (the democratic party) and Green Star Number One (the Muslim party) were on good terms, but when either encountered Yellow Banyan Tree Number Three, the ruling party, there were jeers and scuffles which usually ended with burned cars, thrown rocks, and water cannon and tear-gas charges by the police. The president referred to the elections as the 'Festival of Democracy', and the atmosphere in the street marches was closer to that of a football crowd than a political rally. There were party T-shirts and bandannas, party pop songs, and the sky above the flyovers was full of kites.
My friend Jonathan made ravishing films of the rallies. The dominant colours – red, yellow or green – gave them a medieval quality, like battle scenes from the films of Kurosawa. In Jakarta, the newspapers kept a count of 'campaign-related deaths' which, by the official reckoning, were always the result of traffic accidents rather than political unrest. But every few days, stories filtered through of more sinister trouble in other cities and other provinces – East Java, Sulawesi, Madura Island. The morning after the tumultuous final day of the election campaign, I flew to one of these cities, Banjarmasin in southern Borneo, where grim news had been reported the day before.
Taxi drivers at the airport were reluctant to go into town. Even on its outskirts I could smell smoke, and a Protestant church at its centre was still burning after twenty-four hours. An entire slum block had been destroyed, and the rioters had set fire to the offices of the ruling party, a dozen shops and cinemas, and the best hotel in town. In the big shopping centre, 132 bodies were found. A police colonel from Jakarta told me that they were looters, trapped by their own fire, though others said that they were victims of the military who had been murdered elsewhere and covertly dumped in the burning building. I saw two of these bodies in the hospital mortuary. They were burned beyond recognition, their skulls cracked by the heat.
As I was preparing to leave Banjarmasin, I glanced at the map of Borneo and noticed a name in the province of West Kalimantan: Pontianak – the place where Jonathan had filmed the photograph of the severed head. Borneo is vast, and the two cities are hundreds of miles apart. But the Chinese travel agent in the hotel was enthusiastic: Pontianak was a splendid city, he said, with a large Chinese population. He quickly fixed the flights, and gave me the telephone number of a friend who could act as my guide there.
From the plane, West Kalimantan was flat and regular, but cut through with exciting rivers of chocolate brown. There were naked patches in the jungle, and thin lines of smoke rose from invisible fires. Through the porthole I saw metal roofs and boats, and more brown river water. Then the plane banked and I was looking at jungle again, then at an airport in the jungle.
The city below me was Pontianak (the word means 'evil spirit'); it lies on the Equator (dead on it, according to my map). Things learned about the Equator as a child came back to me, such as the way the direction of water going down the plughole reverses when you cross it. I caught myself thinking about ways of testing this – perhaps in different hotels, one north, one south. Then the plane tilted down and began its descent towards the centre of the earth.
Two
My knowledge of Borneo was vague. I seemed to remember that it was the second biggest island in the world. I thought of jungles, of course, and of copperplate encounters between European explorers in canoes and cannibal chieftains. I thought of a poster which I had seen as a child, featuring a wrestler known as the Wild Man of Borneo. I found myself trying to remember if the adventures of Tintin had ever taken him there. At the airport, I bought a glossy guidebook and recalled what I had heard in Jakarta.
In February, rumours had filtered through of fighting between two ethnic groups, the Dayaks and the Madurese.
The Dayaks were the original inhabitants of Borneo, famous during the nineteenth century as the archetypal Victorian 'savages'. For thousands of years, before the arrival of the Dutch and the British, they had dominated the immense island. They were a scattered collection of tribes who lived in communal long-houses, practised a form of animism, and survived by hunting and by slash-and-burn agriculture.
More titillating, to the Victorian mind, was the promiscuity held to be rampant in the longhouses, and the practice of 'male enhancement' – the piercing of the penis with a metal pin. Dayak warriors increased their prestige, and brought good luck to their villages, by collecting the heads of rival tribes in formalised, set piece raids. Certain of the victims' organs, including the heart, brains and blood, were believed to bestow potency on those who consumed them, and the heads were preserved and worshipped in elaborate rituals. 'Beautiful young girls,' my guidebook informed me, 'would snatch up the heads and use the grisly trophies as props in a wild and erotic burlesque.'
The Dayaks' bloodier traditions were outlawed by the Christian colonists; since 1945 they had been full citizens of the Republic of Indonesia. My guidebook contained photographs of old people in beaded headdresses and men in loincloths clutching blowpipes, but they had about them the glazed neatness of tourist entertainments. 'These days Dayaks keep their penis pins and tattoos well hidden beneath jeans and T-shirts,' I read. 'Apart from a few villages in the interior, the longhouses have been replaced by simple homes of wood and plaster.'
The Madurese, I had heard several times, were 'the Sicilians of Indonesia'; educated Jakartans smiled wearily and shook their heads when they spoke of them. Madura was a dry, barren island off the east coast of Java, the frequent beneficiary of the government's programme of subsidised 'transmigration' to the more fertile territories of the outer archipelago. Its inhabitants had a national reputation for coarseness, armed violence and an uncompromising form of Islam. I had heard them blamed for church burnings, attacks on Christians, and several riots during the election campaign. Everywhere they settled, the Madurese had become the neighbours that nobody wanted.
As transmigrants, they were accused of thievery and thug-gishness, but their differences with the Dayaks ran deeper than that. The Madurese were proud bearers of curved sickles; Dayak tradition abhorred the public flaunting of blades. The Dayaks hunted and reared pigs; the Madurese were strict Muslims. Violence had been breaking out between the two groups since the first Madurese arrived in West Kalimantan a century before. But nothing had ever been seen like the events of the previous months.
I had a cutting from the Asia Times of 20 February 1997. It was headlined FIGHT TO THE DEATH FOR TRIBAL RIGHTS.
It's been two generations since the last reports of headhunting by the Dayak, one of the most feared tribes in Southeast Asia. Now one of Indonesia's oldest societies is running amok and returning to its brutal traditions.
The Madurese, a migrant ethnic group from the island of Madura, east of Java, are bearing the brunt of the Dayaks' anger, fueled not only by cultural conflicts but by political and economic discontent. Following several clashes between the two groups, Madurese have watched dozens of their settlements northeast of Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan, burn to the ground.
The burnings and killings continue. Despite repeated government announcements that the area is safe, the Dayak and Indonesian army roadblocks still stand. There is widespread fear that violence, even in Pontianak, can break out anytime.
'This is a time bomb. It can explode at any minute,' said one Dayak.
A government estimate of a few hundred dead was quoted. 'Local Christian church leaders' were said to put them 'in the thousands'. The author of the article, a woman from Sumatra, was a friend of Jonathan; her visit to West Kalimantan, he told me, had left her badly scared. 'At a roadblock the next day – during a 300km journey my companion and I encountered 32 roadblocks –' she wrote, 'an old Dayak man with a rifle asked: "Are you Madurese? I want to drink some Madurese blood."'
But her article made no explicit reference to the most striking fact about the war in West Kalimantan. For the Dayaks had not merely driven out and killed their Madurese neighbours. They had ritually decapitated them, carried off their heads as trophies and eaten their hearts and livers.
Months later, when the forests were burning and money had become worthless, the killings in Borneo seemed like a portent, the first faint rumbling of a catastrophe that would overtake the entire country. At the time, though, they went virtually unreported. Jonathan had heard vague stories about the violence in February; a few days later, he flew over to Pontianak with a small group of foreign journalists based in Jakarta. They checked into the city's one good hotel, the same one to which I was heading. Its lounge, restaurant and karaoke bar were full of poorly disguised military spies, the men known to everyone as Intels. The next day, they hired a driver and a jeep, and drove north out of Pontianak. There were soldiers on the streets, and checkpoints every few miles with spikes and mines spread across the road. They got through the first few by waving press passes, or by pretending to be tourists.
At a village called Salatiga, they saw the first signs of destruction: dozens of burned, skeletal houses. They pulled over, but after the cameraman started filming, a group of soldiers appeared, angry and nervous. Calls were made to headquarters, and the cameraman's tapes were confiscated (though a few had been hastily concealed in the jeep). Back in Pontianak, they were held for several hours and then released, with orders not to wander outside the city itself.
They spent the evening in the bar of the hotel, watching the Intel men get drunk and sing karaoke.
The next day they talked to people in Pontianak, and realised for the first time how little of the full story had reached Jakarta. There had been massacres, people said, in most of the villages in the interior. First, the Madurese had attacked the Dayaks, then the Dayaks had taken revenge. They assembled from all over Kalimantan, ritually summoned by an artifact known as the 'Red Bowl'. Then they had systematically purged the villages of Madurese settlers, burning their houses and hunting them down.
The Dayaks' magic made them invulnerable to bullets, people said. They could identify the Madurese by their smell. A woman from Salatiga claimed to have looked out of her window and seen a man walking down the road carrying a head impaled on a stick. A journalist on a local magazine had a photograph of a severed head – the photograph which Jonathan would use in his film.
The Dayaks were trying to get through to Pontianak where thousands of Madurese were living as refugees. The army was protecting the Madurese and, it was said, killing Dayaks. According to the official count three hundred people had died. It was obvious that the true figure was far, far higher.
Everyone was scared of something: the Madurese of the Dayaks, the Dayaks of the army, and the army and the local government of the terrible trouble which this was going to cause back in Jakarta. Military reinforcements had been flown in from Java, and the hospitals were under guard.
The Intels followed Jonathan and his friends everywhere they went, and people were afraid to talk to them. After a couple more nights of karaoke, they flew back to Jakarta.
That was three months ago. Since then, there had been no more reports of significant trouble, and these days everyone in Jakarta was preoccupied with the election. An extraordinary thing had taken place, and passed by with no more than a glance from the outside world: an ethnic war of scarcely imaginable savagery, fought according to principles of black magic, a couple of hours' drive from a modern city of banks, hotels and airports.
Three
The morning after arriving in Pontianak, I drove out of the city with my guide, a Chinese man named Budi who always wore black shoes, black trousers and a white shirt.
We crossed Pontianak's two rivers, where the seagoing schooners docked, glistening and curved like great white icecream scoops, and where the riverboats began the long chug to the interior. The outskirts of the town were dominated by water, and wide ditches divided the houses from the road and from one another. Bouncing planks were laid across them; some families even kept tiny tublike boats moored by their front doors. We passed the Equator monument, a strange black sculpture of concentric hoops, and drove north along a crisp new road unrolled like a carpet on an underlay of dusty red earth.
Budi could tell at a glance which houses were Dayak and which were Madurese, by the arrangement of the stilts, the direction of the windows, and the presence or absence of batik decorations above the door. His English was as crisp as his clothes; he could put a date or a number to everything. As we drove north, he told me what he knew about the struggle between the Dayaks and the Madurese. He had no hesitation in calling it a war.
It had begun at the very end of the previous year in a town called Sanggauledo, close to the border with Malaysian Sarawak. A stage had been specially built for a live performance of dangdut, the bouncy, Indian-influenced pop music adored all over Indonesia. At some point during the course of the evening, two Dayak women had been bothered by a pair of Madurese boys. A fight broke out, the Madurese brandished their sickles, and a young Dayak, the son of the local village head, was stabbed. Scared and outnumbered, the Madurese took refuge in the local military outpost, where a delegation of Dayaks quickly presented themselves, demanding that the two be handed over. The soldiers refused, so they walked to the nearest Madurese enclave and set it on fire. 'Nine hundred and ninety-eight houses were burned,' Budi said. 'Some of them were completely destroyed.'
Tension between the two races had been building for years; there had been a similar spasm of violence a decade before. But this time, as news of the latest stabbing spread from Sanggauledo, there were revenge attacks on Madurese living in the interior. Within a few days the government in Pontianak got together a group of Dayak and Madurese leaders and drew up a 'treaty' to end the fighting.
Over the years the Madurese had not been the only objects of the Dayaks' fury. During the Second World War, they had been recruited by both sides in the fighting between the Japanese and the Allies. Twenty years later, during the great bloodletting of the mid-1960s, they had turned on the Chinese of Kalimantan. Budi was old enough to remember that time, but he spoke warmly of the Dayaks.
'Inside, I am pro-Dayak,' he said. 'They are good people, very gentle, they don't cause trouble for no one. They want to be left alone. But they are lazy. My brother works with Dayaks in his office, and if you leave them alone they will sit there all day talking and smiling. Their IQ is very low, unfortunately.'
Even from our brief acquaintance I knew that Budi worked from seven o'clock in the morning until midnight every day. I suspected that, through his eyes, the world was a very lazy place.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "In The Time Of Madness"
by .
Copyright © 2005 Richard Lloyd Parry.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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Table of Contents
Prologue: Bad Dreams in Bali 1996,
Something Close to Shame: Borneo 1997–1999,
What Young Men Do,
The Best People,
The Radiant Light: Java 1998,
Krismon,
Time of Madness,
Strength Without Sorcery,
The Sack of Jakarta,
The Wayang,
Ascension Day,
The Shark Cage: East Timor 1998–1999,
The Crocodile,
With Falintil,
Vampires,
Eagle of Liberty,
Flat of the Blade,
The Compound,
In The Well,
Acknowledgements,