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More reviews by Kerry Brown
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In the Time of Madness by Richard Lloyd Parry
RICHARD LLOYD PARRY, a long term resident of Asia, and correspondent for the British Independent newspaper for the period 1997-1999 covered by this book, has chosen violence as his theme for understanding recent Indonesian history. As Clausewitz famously argued, war is the continuation of politics by other means -- and part of Parry's argument is that violence, historically, and in contemporary Indonesia, has performed a continuing political function. Any attempt to understand modern Indonesian history without recognising the prominent role of violence would be incomplete.
Part of the cause of this violence derives from the tensions in the impossible complexity of Indonesia -- a colonial creation with 17,000 islands (the exact figure seems impossible to calculate) forged by the three centuries of control by the Dutch and the Japanese invasion in the 1940s, and then in the struggle for national liberation after the second world war, and resolved finally by the 'mystic' ruler Sukarno and his creation of the 'new Indonesia' between 1945 and 1950. It is hardly surprising that there has been so much scope for conflict and strife in a territory that stretches a distance the equivalent of London to Moscow, and which embraces hundreds of different languages, ethnicities, religious beliefs and cultures.
While this is an very personal account focussing on the fall of Suharto, ruler of Indonesia from 1966, during the Asian Economic Crisis in 1998, and the plebiscite by the government succeeding his in 1999 on independence in East Timor, it begins with a description of Parry's search for 'real cannibals' and the headhunters in Borneo, a place he visited in 1997 in the final days of the Suharto period. Parry simply sets out the practice he has heard reported amongst warring 'tribes' and social groups on Borneo to kill, and then behead and eat the flesh of opponents. Their use of violence bewilders him. His determination to hunt down real 'flesh eaters' is rewarded in one remote village by a genial group of people who offer him 'something like chicken meat' after the violent death of an unpopular local teacher! This story will satisfy the ghoulish, and supports a number of assumptions about the 'barbaric' activity of remote, primitive people -- but whether it helps much in understanding contemporary Indonesian political reality is another matter.
The more interesting part of Parry's book covers his experiences during the downfall of Suharto in 1998. Suharto was, seen outside his cultural and historical context, something of an enigma. His early career as a soldier was undistinguished, and he almost chanced upon power in 1965 when he survived the purge of the Generals alleged to have been planning a Communist coup by the Sukarno government. This left the way for Suharto to make his gamble for power when it came, in 1966 -- unleashing a huge purge of Communists, something Parry comments, which involved the enthusiastic involvement of thousands of 'normal people' (rather than the army or security services) who managed to slaughter between half a million to a million purported `communist' activists. Suharto's ensuing 33 years of rule were characterised by a depoliticisation of society, and a blandness which was almost miraculous in view of the country's massive complexity and the potential for conflict. This paradoxical blandness was personified in Suharto, a man who lived in relative simplicity (his house in Jakarta apparently largely furnished with kitsch) and who travelled rarely, never raised his voice in public, and yet who instilled fear in his subordinates, and dealt with any opposition for three decades with ruthless efficiency.
Parry was in Jakarta throughout the crisis in 1998, and was able to watch Suharto's eerily unconcerned television performances as the students and then other sections of society took to the streets, appalled by the near-complete wipe-out of the Indonesian economy as a result of the economic crisis blazing through Asia. Just as his ascent to power in the 1960s had been bloody, so was his exit -- though this time, the violence was limited and came not from the army, who had so loyally supported him almost to the end, but from vigilantes and looters who targeted, among others, the wealthy ethnic Chinese. The demise of the 'mystic' ruler, as Parry describes Suharto (he was increasingly interested in Islamic mysticism in the later stage of his rule, and apparently imputed his downfall to 'Zionist' elements) was, however, mercifully swift -- and by 1999, in a further paradoxical twist of Indonesian history, Suharto's deputy Habibie was passing some of the most radical legislation in Indonesian history, reengaging with the disaffectations of regions like Aceh and Papua, and trying to resolve the perennial problem of East Timor, at the time a `Special Region' of Indonesia.
East Timor takes up the last part of this book -- and indeed, encapsulates the lingering spectre of violence -- this time, a violence produced by Indonesian-government supported militia groups during the UN-supported plebiscite conducted in East Timor in 1999 to decide on whether or not it would stay part of Indonesia. As others have pointed out, East Timor's mismanagement by the Indonesians since its claimed `incorporation' into the Republic in 1976 after the Portuguese withdrawal had resulted in the death of 200,000 of its 600,000 population (see Ben Kiernan's recent article in Critical Asian Studies on the demographic evidence for this -- http://www.yale.edu/gsp/publications/KiernanRevised1.pdf). Parry managed to get into East Timor just before the plebiscite was held, and describes the haunting moment when the result -- a massive victory for independence -- was announced in the capital, Dili. This news was not greeted with much jubilation locally, because it was already suspected that the price of Indonesian withdrawal would not be cheap. This proved to be the case -- and the events and activities over this period, some of which Parry witnessed and describes in this book, continue to be dealt with by, among others, the UN Special Crimes Unit, and the recently established Commission of Experts (supported by the UN), and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (the latter an Indonesian and East Timor body).
Having enjoyed remarkably tranquil elections in 1999 and 2004, one for the parliament and the other two for the first ever direct elections for a President in Indonesian history, Indonesia has moved on much further than Parry and witnesses like him must have imagined possible in the dark days of 1998. But as Parry several times alludes to, the history of political behaviour, and the importance of precedents in the political personality of its leaders and in social action in Indonesia is still important. For the optimistic, the future of Indonesia might see one of the most extraordinary diverse, decentralised and devolved sovereign states of modern times succeeding in its attempts to introduce a stable, democratic system. The pessimists will point to history, which has seen a fairly solid tradition of authoritarian, sometimes openly despotic rule interspersed with violence. We can only hope that, just as history is written by the victors, in this case the victors are the ones foreseen by the optimists, and Parry's account marks the last time when such wide-spread violence played a part in Indonesian political life.
Kerry Brown
04/05/2005
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