Mary Steedly argues that the Western mind often takes the surprising and the seemingly mysterious Indonesia for granted. Most recently, the Western media focused on the brutality and violence in Indonesia with the same sense of bafflement. In fact, if one closely examines the social tension and the declining legitimacy that had been there a few years ago, the recent violence would not seem as surprising.

Each year on August 17, Indonesians celebrate the proclamation of their nation’s independence. Main streets throughout the archipelago are decorated with strings of electric lights, banners and billboards; houses and cars are aflutter with bright new red-and-white flags. Freshly painted ceremonial gateways stand at the entrances of rural hamlets and urban neighborhoods, on side streets and in front of public buildings. On either side of the gateway, red-stenciled numerals mark off national history: on the left, 17-8-45, the date of the independence proclamation and the beginning of a five-year struggle against Dutch colonial rule, and on the right 17-8 of the present year. Often the gateways are decorated by school children. The pillar on the left, representing then—1945—features stereotypical depictions of ragged, long-haired youths brandishing bloody bamboo spears or Rambo-esque shirtless wonders with enormous muscles and machine guns. On the right pillar, representing now, are equally stereotyped images of prosperity and development: urban skylines, classrooms, laboratories, and planned, two-child families. This mythographic history of heroes and progress is repetitively inscribed not just on ceremonial gateways, but also on billboards, in schoolbooks, comics, and the like. It is reenacted in Independence Day parades and plays by children dressed as heroes of the revolution or as heroes of science.

Every year on Independence Day, precisely at 9:00 in the morning the President reads the familiar words, in their familiar, rhythmic intonation: Pro-kla-mas-si. Ka-mi bangsa In-do-ne-sia . . .

A flag-raising ceremony follows immediately. A white-uniformed student honor guard marches to the reviewing stand, where an "heirloom duplicate" flag is presented to one of its members. She (for on every such occasion that I have witnessed the flag’s recipient has been female) then delivers the "Grand Old Red-and-White" to the team of four who perform the actual raising of the flag. Once the sergeant-at-arms has formally reported the ceremony’s successful completion, the national anthem, "Indonesia Raya," is sung in heartfelt unison by the crowd. This entire ceremony is synchronized across the nation. You can see it on television, and imagine it being performed in exactly the same way, and at exactly the same moment, in the capital of each territorial sub-unit—province, district, subdistrict, hamlet, and so on—throughout the archipelago. In a country that spans some 13,000 islands and contains the fourth largest population in the world, this is a breathtaking display of "unity in diversity," to quote Indonesia’s national motto.

Or so it seemed in 1995, when I witnessed the festivities commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian independence. Not surprisingly, the celebration was elaborately orchestrated by a central planning committee in Jakarta. On this occasion, the committee decided to forgo the martial imagery of years past and instead emphasized national continuity and universal participation. Television spots that year featured ordinary people telling stories of their experiences during the war for independence, rather than the standard pantheon of official "national heroes." The committee chose as the national symbol of the celebration a golden circle with an abstract background suggesting waving red-and-white flags and the number 50 in the center. This ubiquitous and virtually content-free image did not differ much from an advertising logo. In fact, I saw one Coca-Cola billboard that reproduced it with the slogan "Always Indonesia." These golden circles popped up everywhere, like "mushrooms in the rainy season," as Indonesians say, and provided the impetus for a new but short-lived cottage industry for vendors who made and sold them on every street corner. On the ceremonial gateways, golden circles replaced or stood above the traditional images of embattled revolutionaries and modern laboratories. In downtown Jakarta, the streets were lined with decorations, and the skyline was ablaze as hundreds of new high-rise banks, hotels, and office buildings competed in the grandiosity of their neon displays—each repeating that same golden circle. Yet, amidst this festivity, signs of trouble were appearing across Indonesia. The dramatic and turbulent events that ensued might seem enigmatic or puzzling to outsiders, but close observation of the social situation in the early 1990’s might have provided some hints of what was to follow.

Since that enthusiastic celebration of national unity and success four years ago, Indonesia has had three presidents. Its economy, which crashed in 1997 following the collapse of the Thai baht, still has not recovered. There have been massive riots and anti-government demonstrations in major cities throughout Indonesia. In a number of places, angry mobs targeted ethnic Chinese, the traditional scapegoats for Indonesian economic failure. Waves of communal and political violence swept through Java, West Kalimantan, Ambon, and Aceh, to mention only the most publicized instances. Following a referendum, East Timor’s independence was recognized by Jakarta. After a wave of horrific violence, UN peacekeeping troops were grudgingly admitted to the territory. The army, once admired (and feared), is now dangerously fragmented and retains little credibility or respect. Military units have been unable or unwilling to stop the violence, which many say emanates from the armed forces themselves. The continuing territorial integrity of the nation is at risk. Independence movements at both ends of the archipelago are demanding referendums on regional autonomy, and several other areas in between are also threatening to break away. In early December, the West Papuan liberation movement celebrated its 38^th anniversary by flying its "morning star" flag, an action that in the past brought immediate, brutal military retaliation. This time, according to newspaper accounts, the occasion was peaceful. December 4^th is the 23^rd anniversary of the Free Aceh Movement. Despite escalating violence, the province is preparing for the event in a "festive" atmosphere, the local paper reports.¹ The golden circle of "Always Indonesia" is looking less substantial by the day. What can we expect in the future?

The end of Indonesian President Suharto’s thirty-two years of authoritarian rule was startlingly undramatic, particularly given the turbulent events that surrounded it. In less than ten minutes on the morning of May 21, 1998, he announced his retirement from office, offered a conventional apology for any mistakes he might have made, and, flanked by high-ranking military officers, watched Vice President B. J. Habibie be sworn in as the nation’s third president. Outside in the streets of Jakarta, the student demonstrations and mob violence that had precipitated his resignation continued, though they soon lapsed into factional disarray as the once-united students split into groups supporting or opposing President Habibie. A week before, six university students had been killed when troops had unexpectedly opened fire on a group of demonstrators. A month before that, hundreds of people were killed in riots, many of them trapped inside a burning shopping mall. Stories began to circulate of mass rapes of ethnic Chinese women. New waves of violence soon spread across the country. Each was greeted by expressions of bafflement from Western observers.

Like many American scholars who have a special interest in Indonesia, I have been monitoring these events from afar, via newspapers, radio and television, but above all on the Web. Over the politically charged year before Suharto's resignation, and the volatile year and a half since, we have charted the rise and fall and rise again of Megawati Soekarnoputri, daughter of former president Soekarno and the first real figure of political opposition to the Suharto regime. We watched the Habibie presidency falter and then slide into incoherence in the face of a new round of scandals and political missteps. We saw a democratic election for the first time since 1955 (only the second one ever in Indonesia) and held our breaths through the post-election period, waiting for something to go wrong. We were astonished when President Habibie’s reelection bid was derailed at the very last minute by a legislative rejection of his "state of the union" speech. We were surprised when Megawati, the electoral front-runner, was passed over for a Muslim cleric, Abdurrahman Wahid, who had never really campaigned for the presidency and who responded by choosing Megawati as his vice president. And we have by and large been gratified by the first weeks of President Abdurrahman’s tenure.

But we also watched the nightmarish follow-up to the referendum in East Timor, when so-called integrationist (i.e. pro-Indonesian) militia groups fostered by the occupying Indonesian army went on a rampage that left the capital city of Dili in ruins and an unknown number of people killed or displaced. We saw acts of incredible brutality displayed photographically on the Internet. We opened files warning us of graphic images of violence and viewed charred bodies from a burned shopping center or gang rapes and tortured bodies. One photo of so-called ninja killers of East Java showed a group of excited young men holding up the severed head of a "ninja" victim, presumably a stranger whom they had taken for a supernatural assassin. Similar images appeared later, as Dayak "headhunters" in West Kalimantan engaged in an ethnic war with migrants from the island of Madura. We read about "killing fields" in Aceh and mass graves in Timor, about church- and mosque-burnings in Jakarta and elsewhere. We saw Muslim refugees fleeing from the predominantly Christian island of Ambon and heard eyewitness accounts of the violence inflicted on ethnic Chinese. We watched video clips in Quick-Time of armed police attacking student demonstrators, or of mobs looting businesses, with burning buildings in the background and columns of black smoke looming above. Everywhere there were rumors of "provocateurs" behind the disorder, perhaps from the military, perhaps political masterminds, or maybe just local gangsters taking advantage of the unsettled situation.

Over and over again, the American journalists and political analysts described Indonesian leaders as "mysterious," "shadowy," "enigmatic," "secretive," or "mercurial." The situation was described repeatedly as a "crisis," as chaotic, near anarchy. Senior state-department officials publicly admitted they did not understand what was going on in Indonesia. a convenient set of metaphors provided a justification for this inability to understand. The wayang kulit, the Javanese shadow theater, with its flickering lights and mystical philosophy, its doubled perception of object and reflection, and its puppetmaster hidden behind a screen, maneuvering his fistful of players in a battle of good versus evil, seemed to epitomize a peculiarly Indonesian mystery, one beyond the ken of outsiders. The shadow play, we were told, was the key to understanding Indonesia, but what it told us was that the place was fundamentally incomprehensible, that beneath its illusory surface was another reality inaccessible to us.

This is an old story. It is the theme of much Dutch colonial literature, including Louis Couperus’s De Stille Kracht ("The Hidden Force"). Published in 1900, this novel is one of the masterpieces of Dutch literature. It describes the gradual destruction of a competent, well-meaning colonial official beset by supernatural forces. These may have been wielded by a local prince he unwittingly insulted, or perhaps they simply emanated from the island of Java itself, "this land of profound, secret, slumbering mystery." This hidden force, Couperus writes, is something "unutterable, that lurks in the ground, that hisses under the volcanoes, that slowly draws near with the far-traveled winds, that rushes outward with the rain, that rattles by in the heavy, rolling thunder, that is wafted from the far horizon of the boundless sea." Both seductive and dangerous, enigmatic and profound, it seems to be the essence of the place, inhabiting the "impenetrable soul" and "black mysterious gaze of the secretive native."²

Another Dutch writer, a woman by the name of Augusta de Wit, wrote in a similarly mystified though more picturesque vein in her 1912 memoir of colonial Indonesia, Java Facts and Fancies. For de Wit, it is the "constant intrusion of the poetic, the legendary, the fanciful into the midst of reality, which constitutes the unique charm of Java. This is the secret of the unspeakable and irresistible fascination. . . . And this too, is the reason why, to me as to so many who have beheld Java not with the bodily eye alone, it must still remain a land of dreams and fancies."³ De Wit is charmed rather than disturbed by her Javanese "fairy-land," but, like Couperus, she too is caught up in the romance of incomprehension. Like their contemporary counterparts, they project their own lack of understanding onto the objects of their regard—shadow plays, student demonstrations, national elections, or mob violence—and insist that Indonesia is a mysterious, enigmatic, and fundamentally unknowable sort of place. This convenient trope has been borrowed by news analysts, state department officials, economists, and, from time to time, academics to explain why they—and we—can’t understand Indonesia.

The proliferation of information on-line has done little to change that perception. Indeed, it seems almost to reinforce it, as we encounter one astonishing or disturbing or inexplicable image after another. The Internet has put us in closer touch with events around the world than has ever been possible before, but it does not help us make sense of what we see. we receive information without context, and images that merely dazzle or dismay. What we don’t see [ARE] the occasions of everyday life, the routine occurrences that frame or contain exceptional events for those who live through them. The Web puts us in the middle of things as they happen, but it does so in a detached, fragmented way. This is of course true for Indonesians as well as for its outsiders. The relative freedom of the Indonesian press since Suharto's resignation and the increased accessibility of the Internet have opened communication flows across the archipelago. Individuals in Aceh, for instance, can see pictures of fellow-Muslims fleeing the city of Ambon, and students in West Sumatra or South Sulawesi can learn, almost instantaneously, about police brutality against student demonstrators in Jakarta. Inside jokes, rumors, political manifestos, news reports, scandals, and eyewitness accounts of protests, reprisals, and riots are reproduced, repeated, enhanced, and proliferated electronically, in new, often unpredictable, and usually uncontrollable forms, via Internet cafés, photocopied broadsheets, and cell phones. Debates, opinions, flames, truths and delusions, prejudices and propaganda are all on display. Here, too, what is transmitted is mostly the sensational, not the routine. Strangeness, not regularity, is what the Internet excels in conveying.

Even with all this information available, few people recognized what was coming. Perhaps it was because we had been anticipating Suharto's downfall for so long. But the signs were surely there between 1993 and 1995, when I spent a total of 13 months in the city of Medan, North Sumatra. It was my first return to Indonesia since I finished three years of dissertation fieldwork there in 1985. The third largest city in Indonesia, Medan was the scene of the first major street riot in the run-up to Suharto's resignation and probably the worst urban violence outside Java.

In the early 1990s, Medan, like much of the rest of Indonesia, was experiencing an extraordinary economic boom, yet I found a strangely combined mood of euphoria and failure. There were banks and new businesses, with grand modern buildings, everywhere. Open-air markets were being replaced by air-conditioned shopping malls. But the very same potholes I recalled from my motorcycle-riding days a decade earlier still made the streets tricky to negotiate. I went to a college commencement in which the two speakers warned the new graduates not to despair when they didn’t get a job; "intellectual unemployment," as it was called, was rampant even at the height of the "economic miracle." Students whose families had sacrificed their savings or mortgaged their fields to send them to college found themselves with no prospects for work, unless they paid the enormous bribes necessary to obtain a civil service position.

In the 1980s, interesting and creative films were being made in Indonesia, but by the mid-90s, the film industry had virtually evaporated. Movies from Hollywood filled the new shopping-center multiplexes. New television networks carried American television shows, from The X-Files to The Price Is Right, along with English-dubbed martial arts epics from Hong Kong, Bollywood extravaganzas, Mexican telenovelas, cheap horror films and ultra-violent B-movies. These programs routinized grotesque acts of violence, celebrated the supernatural, glorified consumerism and, at the same time, fed what seemed an insatiable national urge to learn English.

Corruption had long been a taken-for-granted fact of life in Indonesia, but by the 1990s it had reached levels that left Indonesians both astonished and infuriated. This was a negara Drakula, a "vampire state," as one Internet contributor described it, that survived by draining the lifeblood of its people. I was told, for instance, that veterans of the independence struggle applying for a pension could expect to pay a full year’s pension as a bribe to get their application processed. A civil service job would cost at least that; and in cases where the position provided opportunities for bribes and kickbacks the "processing fee" could be much more. The complicity of military officers in illegal activities and "squeeze" operations was commonly asserted. Political parties, including the government’s Golkar party, organized nationwide associations of youth gangs to serve as informal security guards and occasional thugs or "dirty trick" agents. In Medan, and presumably elsewhere, these gangs carved up the city’s markets and streets into zones of proprietorship, in which each controlled the casual labor market, neighborhood watch, protection and gambling rackets, and even parking concessions.

In 1994 government censorship tripped up three of the nation’s largest and most eminent news magazines, but rumors proliferated along the new electronic lines of communication. Almost any occurrence could provide the basis for new scandals about the Suharto family. Every day seemed to produce a new joke about the situation. After an airplane disaster in 1997, one joke had Suharto, Vice-President Habibie, the much-despised information Minister Harmoko, and the President’s ethnic Chinese business crony Bob Hasan on an airplane. The plane crashes, but who is saved? Answer: the Indonesian people, of course! People who had once defended Suharto's regime as appropriate to the Indonesian context, or at least better than other alternatives, now asked me how American democracy worked and told me that his dictatorial style was out-of-date and humiliating. The issue of human rights was raised regularly in conversations and in the media. NGOs, especially labor unions and legal aid associations, were at the center stage. While I was in Medan in 1994, an unauthorized workers’ strike turned into an anti-Chinese riot in which at least one person was killed. The riot was said to have been instigated by an undercover agent, perhaps a soldier in mufti. Around the same time, a female labor activist was brutally murdered in Java; her bosses were indicted for the crime but finally acquitted. Again, rumors attributed the deed to shadowy figures with military connections.

As popular acquiescence to Suharto's rule waned, tension between Muslim and Christian communities escalated. Religious conflicts were sometimes exacerbated by ethnic differences—as with Muslim Javanese in predominantly Hindu Bali, Christian Bataks in Jakarta, and Chinese Indonesians everywhere—but on the whole religious differences comprised a distinctive pattern of reciprocal hostility and fear. Muslims said that Christianity was a divisive force and that Christian churches did not contribute to Indonesia’s valued "unity and unification." Christians associated their Muslim neighbors with Libyan terrorists and spoke of themselves as surrounded and massively outnumbered by a militant Islam poised to destroy them. National and international events could be interpreted within this framework. The Gulf War, for instance, was perceived by both sides as a religious conflict, with sympathies falling strictly along lines of faith. Indonesian labor unions were identified as "Christian" even though their rank-and-file membership was predominantly Muslim because they were endorsed by the American AFL-CIO. Christians complained of government interference in church business and spoke privately of unreported church-burnings as well as reprisals against mosques. Religious affiliations likewise shaped people’s attitudes about government actions in predominantly Christian East Timor and Irian Jaya, as well as in the strongly Islamic province of Aceh.

Taken together, these signs should have indicated that some profound change was underway in Indonesian political life. We were all, I think, rather too transfixed by the economic success story of the "Asian miracle" to take these matters as seriously as we should have done. When things suddenly fell apart, we fell back on the old story of Indonesian incomprehensibility, now Internet-enhanced to become a virtual enigma.

Predictions are, of course, easiest to make in retrospect. But where might we look for signs of things to come? By way of a conclusion, I would like to suggest a few possibilities. First and most visibly, there is the ongoing independence movement in the province of Aceh. While President Abdurrahman Wahid has promised to hold a referendum there, he has indicated that Aceh’s secession is not a possibility. The ongoing violence in Aceh is pushing movements for autonomy in other areas such as Riau, which, like Aceh, has seen local resources drawn off to support economic development in Java. The Acehnese outcome will thus have a crucial impact throughout the archipelago. A second, and related, issue is resource distribution and the capacity of regions to fend off the extractive efforts of the central government, international corporations, and well-connected Indonesian entrepreneurs. In order to achieve a more equitable distribution of resources, it will be necessary to contain, if not curtail, corruption in both the public and the private spheres, starting at the top. Overcoming prejudice against the ethnic Chinese is of course crucial, and some tentative steps have already been taken in that direction. I believe, however, that a more significant indicator of future success will lie in government efforts to re-create an atmosphere of greater religious tolerance. Finally, I would look at what efforts are being made (or not made) to reform the educational system, top to bottom. These may not be the most important issues facing Indonesia in the near future, but they do seem to me to be the defining ones.

From colonial literature to CNN, the one thing that we thought we knew about Indonesia was that it was incomprehensible. This attitude has led us to accept as only natural our own inability to comprehend the place and to view what we could not understand as both dangerous and chaotic. It has led us to expect the unexpected. In many ways this expectation has been fulfilled in the past year, as events in Indonesia have repeatedly astonished and mystified us. But it is worth remembering that the most astonishing events of all have been the ones that exceeded even our most hopeful expectations: the political career of Megawati Soekarnoputri, the resignation of President Suharto, the successful national election, the Timor referendum, the legislative selection of Abdurrahman Wahid as Indonesia’s fourth president, and, at least so far, the quality of his presidency. In the next year, the golden circle of national unity might remain strong, or it might break apart. Which of those options would be better for the Indonesian people is not yet clear. We can only hope for more surprisingly good news yet to come.

Endnotes

¹ In the end, the celebration in Aceh turned violent after all. In several places, Acehnese demonstrators were shot by Indonesian police or soldiers.

² L. Couperus, The Hidden Force. Trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1985. Pp. 229-30.

³ Augusta De Wit, Java: Facts and Fancies. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1984 (orig. publ. 1912). P. 316.