Uncle Dan’s Notes: Fun Facts About Indonesia

Posted by Uncle Dan on June 25th, 2008 | Categorized as General Forum | 198 views and 5 Comments

I lived for 14 years in Indonesia. People expect I know a lot about it, and I do, but not really beacuse of having lived there so long. Lots of expat friends I had there know less than I do, but some of them have a far more personal relationship with Indonesia that I can’t help but be a little jealous of. Really, I ended up knowing a lot because I was interested.

Relatively useless country as it can be, its culture is deep, complex, and utterly beautiful.

Indonesia suffers from some of the same problems that a lot of former colonies face. There’s nothing uniting it except the fact that all of the islands were once ruled by the Dutch, and to a smaller extent the Portuguese. There’s a distinctly nationalistic feel to the government, and any Communist party is banned.

They also have a corruption problem. This is a good and bad thing, as is common in such countries. On the one hand, you can do whatever you want so long as you have money, and as expatriates we did. On the other hand, anyone can do whatever they want so long as they have money. People complain all the time that the police force, judicial system, bureaucracy, government, army and everything is so corrup, but they don’t think twice to pay off a traffic cop rather than go through the legal process. As Charles De Gaulle once said about Brazil, Indonesia is a country of tomorrow, and always will be.

THat’s the thing, really. It has so much potential, but doesn’t use it, because it can’t be bothered. It’s a good and bad thing. I love how relaxed, chilled and easygoing Indonesians are, but I know that doesn’t get them anywhere. Anyone who’s afraid of Muslim militancy getting quakey about Indonesia needn’t bother, because Indonesians are too chilled to realy do anything these days.

I was living in Indonesia in 1998 when Suharto was toppled from power. Suharto’s regime wasn’t bad as far as dictatorships go, but far from bloodless. He had fake elections every few years, with big demonstrations for each party every time. Everyone knows though, that most of the time people in the street are paid to wear the T-shirts and wave the flags, generally making a ruckus for each party, and Golkar always won anyway.

After that, an interim president named B.J. Habibie (no, I don’t make up these names) took over before proper elections were held. He didn’t want to let go, but the next president was heralded in, whose nickname was Gus Dur. Everyone expected Megawati to get elected instead because of popular support (and more demonstrations of people paid in instant noodles), but Gus Dur came first. It probably says something about the nature of Indonesian government when Megawati was named VP after some more demonstrating in the streets after the results named Gus Dur at the top.

Anyway, Gus Dur was a former Muslim cleric, but we shouldn’t hold that against him. By all his writing and the speeches he DID make, he was a clever, shrewd and pretty witty guy. He was also old and pretty senile. And half blind. And handicapped. He had to have a couple of marshals help him into his seat in parliament. And he fell asleep in one session. Drooling into his chair. It was all over the news.

When they suggested that he leave office, he came out of the presidential palace in his underwear to say no. That was all over the news too. Anyway, he ended up going.

THe thing about Megawati Sukarnoputri was that she was the granddaughter of Sukarno, one of the founders of the country (read: Sukarnoputri literally means “Princess of Sukarno”). So people attributed the qualities of Sukarno to her. She didn’t want power, but kind of had it thrust upon her because everyone thought she’d be so great. It sounds like a nice kind of didn’t-want-it-nobility but…

She was pretty much a housewife in office. She didn’t do much, didn’t know how to do much, and didn’t really try. She wasn’t, after all, a real politician or leader. Everyone just thought so because of her family. In fact, she was pretty inept, cool as it might have been for a woman to be president of a Muslim country. When there was a particularly bad flood in Java, with half of Jakarta underwater, she was throwing a birthday party for her husband in Bali, and took a week to get back. There were nice pictures of her handing out Indomie to flood victims, but, well…

Anyway. National identity is important, because otherwise it’s just a zillion different tribes. Aceh fought for independence for 20something years, and settled for autonomy after the Tsunami virtually wiped out the area and they decided it was nice to be part of a bigger country that could help it out.

Sometime in 2001 (I think), Dayak tribesmen started coming out of the rainforests in Kalimantan and started killing people. During Soeharto’s time, he encouraged Madurese people to move to Kalimantan to settle, because they were traders and merchants. That meant they were stingy, argumentative bastards too, but I guess good for the economic development. It should be known that the Dayaks are headhunters. You know, the kind that cut off heads, shrink and petrify them, then hang them outside the hut. Tensions between the Dayaks and Madurese went up enough that the Dayaks decided to march out with machetes and go to town.

Only in Indonesia.

I think about roughly the same time there was trouble in Maluku (Maluccas, to some people), the original Spice Islands. Probably half the people there are Christian, the other half Muslim. Tension flared, and next thing you know, they’re killing each other with machetes and homemade guns. The police steps in, but because it’s mostly Christian, takes a side. The army then steps in, but because it’s mostly Muslim, they took a side too. So at one point, the army and the police were shooting at each other.

Only in Indonesia.

I lived in Kemang longest in Jakarta, which was kind of the cool area to go. The mayor of Jakarta decided to build his big new office there, and suddenly you saw a lot more gardens, lights and ornamentation around the place. Particularly in front where his office window would look out. The funny thing was that they started using it before the top few floors were finished. Turns out they’d run out of the money that they budgeted for the building, what with the bribes and everything.

Only in Indonesia.

Public transportation is pretty horrible, and it’s a status symbol to have a car or motorbike no matter how crappy, so one day the government decided to start a monorail project. And then they ran out of money. A few of the pillars were put up, but now no one knows what to do with them. One of the more recent attempts to help traffic congestion was to improve the bus system. They knew that no one wanted to travel by bus because that meant you were poor and couldn’t afford a car, so they bought brand spanking new buses, and tried to encourage use by making one whole lane of the highways exclusively for bus use. But since people STILL see buses as for poor people, it’s not used, and traffic is even more stuck with one fewer lane that no one else uses. And because no one cares about maintenance, the new buses now look pretty crappy.

Only in Indonesia.

Still, things were looking up when Bambang (yes, that’s his name) Yudhoyono was elected president. He seemed like the right kind of forceful character to get Indonesia going. But then they got lazy. As always.

I should note that Suharto, despite everything he’s done, has still not been arrested properly. Every time they get a warrant to do so, he says he has health problems and has to go to the doctor. In other words “Sorry, I can’t go to jail, I’m sick. Here’s my doctor’s note.” And it works.

Again, only in Indonesia.

Daniel Nguyen-Phuoc

Vietnamese in ethnicity, born in Houston, Texas. Lived in Jakarta, Indonesia for 14 years while going to a British International School to finish with the International Baccalaureate. Survived only two years in the University of Michigan before ending up in Switzerland. Graduated from an international (and that's meant in every word) hospitality college. Interesting life, to be sure. But not the only one.