CHAPTER 14

DECADE OF DISASTER

(1955-1965)

Nationalists, Communists and the Later Sukarno Years

During the later Sukarno years (1955–65), Bali underwent profound political, economic, social and cultural change which seriously troubled many of its people. A clique of Sukarnoists, civilian and military, more of them Javanese than Balinese, dominated the island, competing vigorously with one another for power and wealth. They exercised administrative authority mainly to reward themselves and their friends and to punish their enemies, a category of people which came to include many of the island’s leading citizens. Their offices were packed with badly trained and badly paid bureaucrats who demanded bribes before performing even the most routine services. After having been one of the best administered regions of the archipelago in the late colonial period, Bali became one of the worst neglected and most exploited provinces of the new Republic.

The one most significant political development of the period was a process of massive and sinister politicization. Prior to the mid-1950s the Balinese were not much interested in national politics and not much attracted to the national parties. Regarding themselves primarily as Balinese and only secondarily as Indonesians, they remained aloof from the great Nationalist Party (Partai Nasionalis Indonesia, or PNI), whose ultra-nationalistic leaders, in fact, regarded the Balinese as anachronistically non-revolutionary. As Hindus they were not much disposed to associate themselves with the major Muslim parties, either the traditionalist Nahdatul Ulama, or NU, or the modernist Masyumi. The Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) seemed to them to promise only the desecration of all their cultural institutions. Their leaders tended to affiliate themselves, if at all, with the Socialists (Partai Sosialis Indonesia, or PSI), the small clique of intellectual élite headed by Sutan Syahrir. But in the 1950s the Balinese Socialists, like their counterparts in Java and Sumatra, were much too rational for their own comfort or even safety under an irrational regime increasingly dominated by the PNI and the PKI, the chosen instruments of the demagogic Sukarno.

In the 1950s, as economic conditions very seriously deteriorated, the PNI began to win many Balinese converts, and so too, soon afterwards, did the PKI. The PNI was able to offer the quick, easy profits of official appointment or favor, and there proved to be many Balinese who were happy, as new PNI loyalists, to acquire goods and properties at artificially cheap prices, and to exercise influence on behalf of their friends and to the dismay of their enemies. The PKI adopted subtler tactics. It patronized the arts and the artists, employing as its early vehicle of penetration the cultural foundation LEKRA (Lekra Kebudayaan Rakyat), upon whose members were bountifully bestowed the paints, canvases, musical instruments, dance costumes and other goods which were otherwise almost unobtainable. Both the PNI and the PKI thus undermined public and private probity, at the same time posing as benefactors of the people and advocating the very reforms which their own activities made the more vitally necessary. In Bali in the early 1960s, virtually no village was without its conspicuously identified PNI office and its PNI-sponsored activist movements of peasants, women and youth, all of which the PKI duplicated and not always by any means in a spirit of fraternal cooperation.

Politics in Culture and Land Reform

Thanks to LEKRA, the PKI succeeded remarkably well in injecting politics into culture and making political capital of cultural change. Balinese actors, renowned for their skill at improvization, began lauding the Sukarnoists and attacking their opponents, frequently doing so with such polished wit that they commanded an amused hearing even from those people who most deplored what was happening. Dancers performed propaganda-packed people’s dances which might have been choreographed in Moscow or Beijing. Painters adapted the verbal slogans of the Sukarnoists as visual symbols. To those who knew and loved the genuine traditions of the island, these manifestations were quite frightening. What was most disturbing of all was that Bali, the island of religion and culture, was being drenched with the most poisonous of politics. The mystical Balinese were being converted into political zealots, mouthing the Sukarno slogans about death to all demons and monsters, suddenly no mere mythical creatures but actual living people.

What LEKRA was to the arts, land reform was to agriculture, a fraudulent promise of the fulfilment of the people’s wishes. In Bali ever since the turn of the century, the pressure of a rapidly expanding population upon an inelastic supply of land had resulted in a great annual increase in the number of landless people who had to eke out a living by combining tenant farming with day labor. Perhaps as much as 15 percent of Bali’s land had come into the possession of landlords, mainly the scions of the high caste families whose own numbers had increased so remarkably that holdings were generally small and income modest. These were precisely the people who were most likely to have acquired education and position in colonial days, to have been associated politically with the Socialists rather than the Sukarnoists, and to have eyed the PNI–PKI rise to power with gravest misgivings. They were easily targeted as feudalists, colonialists and counter-revolutionary conspirators whose properties should be distributed forthwith among the people. The landlords were therefore deprived of their land, sometimes receiving token payment years later in rupiahs which had lost at least 90 percent of their value. The lands were more or less parceled out among the people—the people, that is, who had proven themselves most loyal and active in the PNI–PKI cause. This redistribution of lands, rewarding some and victimizing others and ignoring both the agrarian and the social consequences, lighted delayed-action fuses which ignited demolition charges throughout the island in 1965 and 1966, when the fall of Sukarno and the eclipse of the PNI and the PKI signaled that the time had come for retribution.

Economic Manipulation; Rice Supply

The Balinese economy, meanwhile, suffered setbacks at least as serious as those which occurred in other Indonesian provinces. The central government had rejected the conventional and hence reactionary and non-revolutionary concepts that income should equal outgo, exports should balance imports and expenditures should be contingent upon calculation of resources and returns. Political favorites, civilian and military, plundered the island by taking advantage of ruinous economic controls. They were able to buy up produce or property at a small fraction of its value, sell it at enormous profit and repeat the cycle as frequently as opportunity presented itself. Labyrinthine economic regulations made it possible, as inflation escalated and foreign exchange operations became more and more fanciful, to buy an automobile for Rp. 10,000, sell it for Rp. 10,000,000, then use the rupiah profits to buy up coffee and copra at low official prices for export to foreign countries against payment in good hard currency. Or one could merely pocket official funds and abscond with official equipment for which accounting procedures were rudimentary and easily obscured. While the few became very, very rich, the many suffered hardships which began to remind them of the evil days of the Japanese occupation.

Rice, the one most essential commodity, was in short supply at inflated prices despite—or rather because of—government efforts at control, and the politicians rather than the farmers reaped the rewards of the flourishing black market. Clothes, medicines and all other necessities were so scarce that much of the island reverted to barter. The transportation system deteriorated so desperately and all conditions became so unsettled that even tourism almost came to a stop.

Sukarno’s Visitations and Affronts

The frequent visits to Bali by President Sukarno and his entourage did nothing to dispel but served only to intensify the apprehension of many of the Balinese that the island had fallen under a curse. President Sukarno, whose mother was Balinese but whose father was Javanese, made Bali his favorite retreat and built himself a showy palace and guest house. He chose the site of an earlier Dutch official rest house on a superbly beautiful hilltop site above the especially sacred Tampaksiring Temple. It gave special offence to the Balinese that he built his private quarters to overlook the temple springs and baths. Sukarno frequently called upon the priests to stage ceremonies of welcome for himself and his guests when they landed at the airport or arrived at the palace. He called command performances anywhere and everywhere of the actors, musicians and dancers. For his own collections he appropriated the finest works of the painters, the sculptors, the woodcarvers and the other artists and craftsmen. In his palace he allegedly staged night-long parties which deteriorated into orgies.

Sukarno affronted the Balinese by converting their sacred ceremonies into government theatricals and by requiring tens of thousands of common people to line the roadways to wave, smile, sing and shout as he passed. He outraged them even more by allegedly dispatching his aides to collect the prettiest young girls to be delivered to the palace, there to be debauched by himself and his party. The President, his state guests, who included many of the world’s notables, his one hundred ministers, his very numerous generals and his male and female camp followers, were not welcome in Bali except among those who profited enormously from their visits. This category did not include many of the common people. The ordinary Balinese can recall all too vividly the occasions on which an advance party of military personnel would shoot the pigs and the dogs which the Hindu Balinese love. They did so in order to avoid any possibility of giving offence to a fastidious Muslim visitor for whom any contact with a pig or a dog was a contamination and even the sight distasteful. Most Balinese preferred pigs and dogs to state visitors.

Premonitions of Evil; Plague of Rats

In Bali, to an ever more marked degree than in the other parts of Indonesia, there was premonition of disaster. Prevailing circumstances were so unusual as to seem ominously unnatural. The supernatural powers, it was feared, were being provoked to some truly dreadful visitation and retribution. Human beings would somehow be compelled by acts of nature or the gods to revert to the standards and the values of the past and to impose order upon the present. The first unmistakable signal that the divine powers were seriously displeased, and that their displeasure would be even more disastrously manifested unless there were indications of human repentance, came in 1962 when a plague of rats infested the fields and the granaries. Rats by the thousands and by the millions, huge, insatiable rats such as had rarely been seen before, feasted upon the ripening grain and then upon such grain as remained to be harvested. The destructive hordes seemed to multiply rather than to diminish as a result of the efforts to destroy them. The government proved totally incapable of rising to the emergency. It promised but could not provide rat poison, which was not a commodity in which the corrupt economic operators chose to deal. Eventually, the farmers and their families engaged in a war of extermination which terminated the affliction. They then piled up token mounds of corpses and gave them symbolical cremations in order to atone for taking even rodent lives, the rat being regarded, in fact, as the familiar of the rice goddess. But the conviction persisted that the gods were displeased. The conclusive and awful evidence came in 1963 with the first eruption in modern times of the sacred Mt Agung.

Eka Dasa Rudra Celebration and Eruption of Mt Agung

In late 1962 and early 1963 the people of Bali began to prepare for the celebration of the Eka Dasa Rudra, the most sacred of all Balinese temple festivals, which occurs only once in a hundred Balinese 210-day years. The Eka Dasa Rudra is held in what is regarded as the most ancient and hallowed of the island’s shrines, the magnificent Besakih temple complex on the slope of Mt Agung. It still evokes the prehistoric animistic worship of the spirits of the great volcano which dominates the island and signals the attitude of the gods toward the people by its own serene or violent aspect.

In Bali in 1962 and 1963 there was abundant reason to fear that the original tutelary deities of the island were far from pleased with recent developments. There was great consternation on the part of the priests as they made their calculations to determine on exactly which days the festival should be held—or whether it should be held at all. The learned authorities differed widely in their readings of the omens, and casting and recasting of the horoscope led only to greater confusion in its interpretation. It was a matter of especially grave concern when the high priest, as was required by custom, made his ceremonial ascent to the very brink of the crater to draw lustral water from a sacred spring. He discovered that the spring had gone dry and that the fumes from the crater itself were alarmingly pervasive.

Bali’s religious authorities went into prolonged and agitated consultation with each other regarding postponement or even cancellation of the ceremonies and how such an unprecedented decision could be justified on the basis of divine revelation. The signs, they feared, were not auspicious, and to schedule the island’s most sacred festival under unpropitious circumstances would constitute a sacrilege. But everyone knew that the time was nearly at hand for the observance of the sacred centennial. The civil if not the religious authorities were determined that the celebration must be firmly scheduled. The prestige of the state was at stake, since even hesitation seemed to be an admission of lack of confidence in Sukarno’s much acclaimed new era.

President Sukarno had already publicly announced his intention of attending and of participating. In one of its sporadic attempts to promote tourism the government had also invited travel agents from nearby countries to hold their annual conference in Jakarta and to attend the Eka Dasa Rudra as the climax of their visit. The priests were constrained to defer to official decree. The Eka Dasa Rudra was scheduled to begin on March 8 and to continue for about one month as a sort of command performance for President Sukarno and his state guests.

On February 18, just as the preparations at Besakih were getting well under way with the construction of a special archway honoring President Sukarno and other works of ornamentation at the temple site, Mt Agung suddenly began to emit smoke and ash, and occasional earth tremors could be clearly felt. In the course of the next several weeks volcanic activities continued and intensified. Again the religious authorities argued for reconsideration; again they were overruled. On March 8, therefore, although swirls of smoke and a dusting of volcanic ash were perceptible in the immediate Besakih area, the ceremonies began. But the priests were fearful of profanation of the sanctuary; the crowds were apprehensive rather than festive; Sukarno himself failed to show up. The Eka Dasa Rudra, which started as a disappointment, turned into a disaster.

On March 12, while the ceremonies still continued, Mt Agung began to throw out mud and rock. By March 17 great rivers of molten lava were pouring down the mountainside. Flames leaped higher and higher into the sky and smoke and volcanic ash blotted out the sun and darkened the countryside. The Besakih temple complex, situated on a sharp ridge and bracketed by deep valleys through which the lava flowed, escaped the main line of destruction. But it was covered deep in hot ash. The palm fiber thatch of the shrines was set ablaze, as were some of the wooden superstructures. The main sanctuaries themselves were miraculously spared, but the very first casualty was the ornamental gateway built to honor Sukarno. By then not only Bali but the whole of the nation was aware that Mt Agung had terminated the ceremonies which Sukarno had ordered. Javanese as well as Balinese interpreted this as a divine judgment upon the Sukarno regime. Not only the island of Bali but the eastern end of Java, including the city of Surabaya, was darkened at midday by dense clouds of smoke and ash such as no one could remember ever having experienced before.

The volcanic eruptions of early 1963, which had been preceded by a frightening plague of rats, were accompanied by scenes of horror and terror and followed by widespread famine and disease. The year 1963 is indelibly engraved upon Balinese memory as the worst in historic times—at least, that is, up until the even more dreadful years of 1965 and 1966. Entire villages were wiped out, and thousands of hectares of rich farmlands were covered deep in lava, boulders and ash. Over 100,000 refugees were driven from their homes and farms. Many of them died of asphyxiation when trapped by blocked paths and roadways. Others died later of injuries, exposure or starvation. For many months famine prevailed over wide areas and epidemic was a constant threat. National and international bodies attempted to mount relief operations, but the agencies came into serious conflict. Personnel and supplies sent from abroad were not properly utilized and often did not reach Bali at all, Indonesian agencies of the Sukarno period being both jealous of prerogative and corrupt in handling valuable medicines, foodstuffs and other relief goods. During the worst of the crisis, Jakarta officials authorized planes, which were desperately needed for relief, to fly the visiting tourist agents to view the scenic spectacle by moonlight and firelight.

GESTAPU Coup and 100,000 Killings

The island’s disasters of 1962, 1963 and 1964 were still fresh in Balinese memory in late 1965 when disaster very suddenly, but so far as the Balinese were concerned, not unexpectedly, struck the entire nation. The Sukarno regime had obviously long since passed the point of no return on the road to self-destructive folly. During the night of September 30, 1965, a clique of pro-Sukarno conspirators staged an abortive coup d’état. The most gruesome aspects of GESTAPU (Gerakan September Tiga Puluh, or the 30 September Movement) were the kidnapping and murder of five top army generals and one lieutenant (mistaken for General Nasution, the Commander-in-Chief). It was a tactical blunder which provoked popular revulsion and military vengeance so prolonged and widespread that the conspirators themselves were virtually wiped out and the Sukarno regime collapsed. But it required the better part of a year after GESTAPU for the nation really to begin to steady itself with the clear emergence of Suharto as Sukarno’s unchallenged successor. In the meantime there had occurred a nation-wide bloodletting, nowhere more frightful than in frightened little Bali.

At the time of GESTAPU, Bali was under the control of a PKI-symphatizing Governor of the royal family of Negara and a strongly PKI-and PNI-infiltrated and indoctrinated clique of civil and military officials, all of them deeply implicated in the excesses and the extravagances of the Sukarno regime. The Governor himself fled from Bali to Jakarta together with all of his immediate family. In Jakarta President Sukarno provided him with shelter, assigning him a house within the well-guarded Senayan sports complex, then virtually a military cantonment. It was only a few weeks, however, until the Governor vanished—picked up by a party of Balinese activists, according to a well-informed report, and taken off to a nearby rubber plantation to be executed.

The events of late 1965 and early 1966 in Bali have never been fully reported and perhaps need not and should not be. A total of some 100,000 people were killed, thousands of homes were burned and immense damage was done to the island’s economy and its morale. One of the special causes of convulsion in Bali was that the PKI and the PNI, the two strong political parties which had maintained an uneasy but mutually profitable alliance during the late Sukarno period, turned upon one another, and everyone who had a grievance to settle settled it then. After years of wretched misrule and exploitation, Balinese grievances were numberless. The military supplied logistic support for vigilante squads which rounded up people accused of being Sukarnoists, Communists, corrupt or mere sympathizers with the coup. Truckloads of victims were lined up on the river banks to be machine-gunned or beheaded. The bodies were buried in shallow graves or merely rolled into the river. These very numerous Balinese dead, having never been cremated, have no chance of reincarnation in human form. In Bali the thought frequently occurs that the spirits of the guilty and the innocent alike cannot be expected to submit indefinitely to such impious neglect, and that the island may not even yet have atoned sufficiently for its sins, including the 100,000 1965–66 killings. The divinities, who have already visited a series of catastrophes upon the island, may still be unappeased.

After the events of the early and middle 1960s, times in Bali could scarcely have grown worse and they did, in fact, improve. The new government of President Suharto undertook and achieved major reforms of administration and minor miracles of rehabilitation. The government offices were purged of the more incompetent and corrupt of the Sukarnoists, and a new spirit of responsibility was infused into the civil service. The government undertook a program of development which enabled the economy and the society to function at least as well as in the 1950s. This was far from good enough for the 1970s, but it was much better than might have been anticipated in 1965. One of the most significant achievements, the result as much of the people’s initiative and energy as of government assistance and encouragement, was the repair of much of the damage wrought by the 1963 eruption of Mt Agung.

In the late 1960s a visit to the state of Karangasem, which Mt Agung dominates, was no longer the dismaying experience of the post-Mt Agung eruption when one traveled over ruined roads across a blighted landscape. The road to Besakih revealed very little evidence of the volcanic action save that a fine new bridge, one of the most important provincial construction projects, crossed a river bed deeply overlaid with lava. The temple complex itself had been largely restored to its earlier state, and the view from the temple terraces was again one of scenic splendor unmarred by evidence of devastated fields. Other areas much more adversely affected by the eruption could not be said to be beautiful, but life was much more than faintly stirring in the ruins. The town of Karangasem was being so rapidly rebuilt that new structures masked old houses and shops which stood several feet below ground level. On the edge of the town it was still possible to see the dramatic contrast between rich rice fields and an adjacent expanse of what seems like pock-marked moonscape. Such contrast was not so sharply apparent in the more distant rural areas where the transitions were much more gradual. With the help of the patient farmers, the eternally verdant life forces of Bali were vigorously reasserting themselves. It is prophetic, one trusts, of triumphs over other and even graver problems that the Balinese were surmounting a natural disaster of major dimensions. In Bali to a much greater degree than anywhere else in Indonesia, recurrent natural convulsions such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes have conditioned the people to rely for regeneration upon divine favor and their own vigorous efforts. Both will be required to the fullest degree for the island to meet the all too predictable emergencies of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in which, as yet, productivity cannot keep up with population nor achievement with aspiration. The new formula for restoration of Bali’s former fortunes is the vigorous promotion of international tourism, a prescription which may adversely affect the rich but ailing culture it is meant to preserve.