“I am enchanted with these islands!” exclaims the main character in Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory, set in the East Indies at the start of the last century. Many other foreign visitors continue to find magic in the Indonesian archipelago, which spreads as wide as the United States along the equator in Southeast Asia.
For this writer and others, it was a romantic place to start a career as a foreign correspondent. Though the islands had been explored, occupied, and exploited by the West for centuries, the newly emerged Indonesia was somehow outside the world’s mainstream. It had an aura of beauty, sensuality, chaos, and violence. Those who came and stayed saw the possibility of a great but gentle nation arising here; one retiring American ambassador titled his book about Indonesia The Possible Dream.
In the late 1970s, Jakarta was a city of intermittent electricity, frequent flooding, prohibitive rents (thanks to an oil boom), limited telephones, and taciturn officials. Yet our small house, which was off an alleyway called Gang Sekayu, was surrounded by a welcoming community. Neighbors watched over our small child. The family of the respected hajji (a returned pilgrim to Mecca) welcomed her to Muslim ceremonies and exhibitions of silat (martial arts). A housekeeper from Kediri, in East Java, became like a second mother. This woman’s hometown became my case study of grassroots politics: there I met a former military commander and a venerated kyai (an Islamic scholar), who together had wiped out the local communists a decade earlier and who were now political enemies in the highly controlled “New Order” regime.
Indonesia had changed, old hands said. Yet it was still possible to call at the home of the president at the end of the fasting month and shake Suharto’s hand. Nonetheless, my journalistic sins mounted up in the black book kept at the Ministry of Information. After three and a half years, further visa extensions were refused. I wrote a book, Suharto’s Indonesia, which for some years became a primer on the country. A decade as persona non grata followed.
A conciliatory foreign minister, Ali Alatas, persuaded the system to relax, and in 1989 I resumed making short visits to a rapidly changing country. My book by now was out of date. At last Suharto was pushed from power in the financial crisis of 1997–8, in an almost unbelievable repudiation of what had seemed an unbreakable system. Then, in Dili, the violent side of Indonesia emerged. Back in Jakarta, we journalists waited long into the evening at the presidential palace; near midnight, the small figure of B. J. Habibie, Suharto’s successor, announced the end of thirty-four years of occupation in East Timor. When I saw the grim faces of the army generals around him, it seemed impossible that this experiment with democracy would be allowed to continue. Yet it has.
Fifteen years later, Jakarta is beset with protest and bold media reports. Demonstrators mock the president in front of the palace. The city is bigger: the once-empty boulevards are choked with cars and lined with high-rise offices and shopping malls. Where a motorbike was once a luxury, now millions zoom through gaps in the traffic and along footpaths. Orderly commuters pack trains to and from the nearby towns.
There are more mosques, and their muezzin and prayers broadcast more loudly. More of the women and girls wear the hijab, either a headscarf or a cowl. A more egalitarian spirit prevails: everyone is Bapak (Mr.) or Ibu (Mrs.), rather than the graduated titles of the more hierarchical recent past. During my several months back in Jakarta, no one addressed me as Tuan (Master), a term of the feudal and colonial era that was often reserved for European men. Instead of the gaunt men from the villages who once waited for customers and slept in their rented becak (pedicabs) at street corners, there are now clusters of ojek (motorbike taxis) and their drivers: burlier, urban types who are full of swagger.
When I went to look at my old house, I discovered that the entire neighborhood had been razed, in preparation for a large construction project. The alleyway, Gang Sekayu, had disappeared from the map. Indonesia’s own leaders were thinking bigger.
Today, analysts are forecasting Indonesia’s rise to the top half-dozen economies by GDP within two decades, and the nation is being mentioned as another important strategic “counterweight” to the fast-rising China. But it remains a country that is hard to figure out. This, then, is a new attempt to provide a starting point for understanding.