Quotes from A History of Modern Indonesia, by Adrian Vickers

- ‘Java is the most populous island, with over 100 million people.’ (1)

- ‘It may have the largest Islamic population in the world, with 90 percent of the population identifying themselves as Muslim, but no more than a few hundred would want to be associated with the fanatical violence of terrorism.’ (1)

- ‘There are still many Indonesians who practice ancient forms of ancestor worship or animism, and these earlier spiritual beliefs pervade the observances of the larger religions.’ (2)

- ‘Indonesia has turned, slowly and hesitatingly, towards democracy, as shown by the mass demonstrations that brought Suharto down. After more than thirty years of military-dominated dictatorship, Indonesians have entered the twenty-first century with a desire to clean up government and make it representative of the people. Indonesia has had far fewer political assassinations than the United States or India – no president has ever been killed.’ (2)

- ‘Before 1945 there was no Indonesia, but rather a collection of islands spread across the Equator that the Dutch made into the Netherlands East Indies.’ (9)

- ‘The politicians and military leaders were able to claim they had a moral duty to free common people from oppression or backwardness. They had to punish or modernize independent indigenous rulers who practiced slavery, ruled unjustly, and did not respect international law.’ (14)

- ‘By 1909 the Dutch had established an integrated territory.’ (14)

- ‘Liberals had promised that, as the economy expanded, the life of the natives would be improved because local opportunities would increase as prosperity trickled down. The Depression exposed this as an illusion.’ (16)

- ‘Whatever form ‘progress’ took, the basis of the colony was still profit: ‘the liberals entered ‘Love for the Javanese’ in their published accounts, but did not let it touch their pockets; and when the Ethical [Policy] leaders hauled down the Jolly Roger and hoisted the Cross, they did not change their sailing orders.’ ’ (18)

- ‘Big multinationals came on the scene: the British Billiton Tin Company moved into mining, Standard Oil from the US was attracted to oil-rich areas such as Aceh, while Royal Dutch Shell was established as a joint venture.’ (18)

- ‘Government policies placed great emphasis on education as the path to native progress, at the same time trying to keep the native population from assuming too great a role in the colony.’ (21)

- ‘For some Dutch advocates, educational expansion was the opportunity to open up the Outer Islands for missionary activities. It was a way of bringing the Light without the government making major investments in building schools and providing teachers, providing only subsidies as they did to church schools in the Netherlands.’ (22)

- ‘While religious politicians were all in favor of expanding missionary activities, rationalist planners, including Snouck, saw such moves as an unhelpful provocation to Islam. The planners succeeded in curbing the missions, and banning them entirely from some areas.’ (22)

- ‘The social results of the Ethical Policy and decentralization were best seen in the new neat public space of cities. In the first three decades of the twentieth century the Department of Public Works sponsored major public buildings and introduced city planning.’ (23)

- ‘Large-scale vaccination programs were well underway by the 1850s.’ (24)

- ‘Health expenditure was never more than 5 percent of the budget for the Indies, sometimes as low as 2.5 percent, half what was spent on education, one-fifty to one-ninth of what was spent on the military.’ (25)

- ‘The colonial rulers needed to be able to keep social groups apart, keep them from conceiving of a common interest, and make the European presence seen somehow natural. The main mechanism by which the Dutch achieved this was through institutionalizing the concepts of race that were common throughout all colonial societies at the time. These ideas produced a version of what would later be referred to in South Africa as apartheid.’ (25)

- ‘All aspects of life were racially distinguished, from train tickets to toilets.’ (28)

- ‘To be poor was to have only one servant.’ (28)

- ‘In 1942 the Dutch surrendered to the advancing Japanese with a rapidity that shocked their subjects. For most of the Dutch who lived under Japanese rule, the main memory is of privation and suffering in internment camps.’ (30)

- ‘Blora exemplifies the cultural and social diversity found throughout the islands of Indonesia. In this one town were local lords and commoners, strict and liberal Muslims, peasants who adhered to local spiritualism, farmers fixed to their land and laborers forced by poverty to travel thousands of kilometers to find work. Just as there was a massive gulf between the Dutch and those they called natives, so Dutch rule magnified the differences between future Indonesians.’ (33)

- ‘The Dutch supervised the awarding of titles, and vetted marriages between Central Javanese royalty and the families of the outlying regents. The Dutch very clearly conveyed the message to the nobility that they should be ‘feudal’.’ (36)

- ‘The aristocracy were the first to get access to Western education.’ (40)

- ‘Most Indonesians were seen to need only vocational education, but a small number were able to study in the Netherlands.’ (41)

- ‘The tax collectors expected High Javanese as their due, and were unimpressed by peasants speaking down to them with implied deference. There was no direct refusal to carry out orders to perform their [feudal] service, but instead a series of oblique Javanese puns that added up to acts of passive resistance. These peasants were followers of Samin (b. 1859), an influential local spiritual teacher. For Saminists, there was no colonial law, only ‘laws of action, speech and necessity’, which included ‘not doing evil, not arguing, fighting, being jealous, coveting or stealing…not telling lies or slandering…’. It was impossible for officials to reason with them, because to any question or command to carry out service to the state a Saminist man would just point to his genitals and say ‘I am in service, my work is sex with my wife.’ ’ (43)

- ‘Tasks were divided on gender lines, but women usually did over 60 percent of the work of rice farming. Their daughters could not be hidden away like the aristocratic Kartini was: they were needed for work.’ (44)

- ‘Incomes were supplemented by working for others during harvest time, and growing secondary crops in the dry season, as well as by harvesting coconuts for oil, tapping palm trees for sugar, and weaving locally grown cotton. Typically, peasants arose before dawn to look after their houses, sweeping the yards before going off to work in the rice fields where they hoed, planted, weeded and eventually harvested. Their children worked in the fields with them. Lunch was a hasty meal gobbled in the middle of the day, before resting through the hottest hours. After siesta it was time to tend the fowl and perhaps buffalo and goats (or pigs in non-Muslim areas), before an evening meal and sleep. Rice was the basis of every meal, but in times of poverty it was replaced with cassava. Peasants rarely ate meat, they mostly had spiced vegetables, such as different forms of beans or peas, water spinach, and chilies, cooked with a paste made from the essence of fermented seafood – a salty black flavoring known as terasi.’ (44)

- ‘Resources that had once been regarded as common property, such as the teak forests and forest lands, were no longer accessible to the people of Blora, even for activities such as collecting firewood. Forestry officers attempted to husband the teak as a state resource and keep people from using the land and harvesting the tress. Attacks on these officials were common.’ (45)

- ‘Meditation was another way to influence the spiritual world: if one fasted and meditated in a certain place for a set period, usually to fulfill a vow, then the resulting inner strength brought outward rewards.’ (48)

- ‘In 1929, sugar, the king of Indies’ industries, collapsed and never recovered.’ (50)

- ‘On the rubber plantations coolies had to get up before dawn to cut the bark of the havea trees, drain off the sap that was to become rubber, carry the heavy pails to the foul-smelling factories, weed and clear land for more trees to be planted. If they were too slow they were beaten. If they stood up to the foreman they were beaten. If they broke any clause of the contract-they-could-not-understand they were liable to penal sanctions, that is, criminal conviction and canings or jail. The one benefit coolies did receive was medical attention in the plantations’ private hospitals, which meant that they suffered less than their contemporaries from cholera, beri-beri and other debilitating diseases. After all, sick workers were not productive workers.’ (51)

- ‘[Peasants] have played a major role as social institutions in Indonesia over the centuries, emphasizing core values of sincerity, simplicity, individual autonomy, solidarity and self-control.’ (55)

- ‘In the Indonesian context there is no clear line between orthodoxy and heresy in Islam. It is a religion that has been adapted and maintained in a variety of ways since it came from India toIndonesia in the twelfth century. The founders of Islam on Java brought the religion peacefully, through trade. The early teachers of Islam in Indonesia were mystics who traveled around passing on knowledge from teacher to pupil. They taught inner awareness, something already present in Javanese mysticism. Some forms of Indonesian Islam incorporated pre-existing indigenous forms, as in the Hindu influences.’ (55)

- ‘Anti-Chinese views were encouraged by the fact that most money lenders were Chinese, mainly recent migrants… Dutch attitudes and policies fostered anti-Chinese racism, so it is no coincidence that times of unrest in Java have been marked by anti-Chinese riots.’ (68)

- ‘The workers of the city lived poorly. Many of them were servants. In 1930, there were an estimated 350,000 servants in the colony working as cooks, cleaners and nursemaids for the Dutch and the rich, but many more were servants of other Indonesians. The majority of servants of the Dutch worked in cities, and over 60 per cent were women. They were given pitifully small rooms attached to their employers’ houses, and women who had been in service recall their time as one of tedium and hard work. Those employed by the Dutch lived under constant suspicion, and complained about the awful way the Europeans smelt because of their milk-based diet. Wages and conditions for urban coolies and servants were never good. In a 1937 government study on workers in Batavia, over half of those surveyed earned less than 30 cents a day, with food costing them just over 60 per cent of their incomes, and housing another 15 per cent… The houses of the poor were often single rooms with an earth floor, bamboo supports, and woven matting for walls. Less than one-eighth of houses had latrines – and those were just pits. Most families lived from pay to pay on credit, their food intake amounting to only 1,581 calories each per day. The indigenous quarters of the cities were built around rivers, because, as in villages, these supplied water for bathing and drinking, as well as toilets and garbage disposals. Dutch-made canals and drains along the streets served the same roles. As population density increased, disease and death became rife.’ (72)

- ‘The segment of the intelligentsia to which Marco and his colleagues belonged diagnosed the problems of the workers as arising from one source: capital. Others argued that there were different causes and presented different solutions. Many nationalists, especially progressives from an aristocratic background, saw ignorance as the problem, and education as the solution to a better life. Conservative aristocrats wanted to return to tradition and improve cultural life, religious leaders sought moral reform, others saw the development of indigenous enterprise as a major goal and others campaigned for better wages and healthier conditions for workers, to ban prostitution, or to eliminate child marriage and polygamy.’ (72)

- ‘Indonesia’s nationalist movement was much slower in its development than that of other countries because the colony had been unified by the Dutch only recently. The newness of ‘the Indies’ meant that until the early nineteenth century there was no ground on which a nationalist spirit could take roots, no strong links, even including a common enemy of the Dutch, to enable people to conceive of themselves as a nation.’ (73)

- ‘Political leaders of the 1920s used strikes and revolutionary language to challenges Dutch rule, but they did not have a strong enough organizational vehicle to spread their actions.’ (79)

- ‘By 1920, the most intriguing of words appeared in the parties’ vocabulary: ‘Indonesia’. Originally coined by a nineteenth-century English naturalist to classify the distinctive ethnic and geographical identity of the archipelago, this was a word that could be adapted to new ends. Previously the Youth Alliances had talked about a separate Balinese nation, Javanese nation, Sumatran nation and so on, now ‘Indonesia’ spoke of a single people.’ (79)

- ‘Sukarno’s father had been a teacher, and he [sic] realized that a new nation could only be created through education.’ (81)

- ‘The Dutch for their part regarded the nationalist schools with justifiable suspicion, but were not able to suppress them as easily as the suppressed the political leaders because these schools were too widespread and their teaches were willing to work for a pittance. Throughout the 1930s, more and more nationalist schools were set up. The Dutch called these ‘wild schools’.’ (81)

- ‘ ‘No longer were history lessons straight out of The History of the Netherlands or The History of the Netherlands East Indies. Now they focused on the history of the people of Indonesia. [A teacher] had his brother…pain life-size portraits of historical figures whom he considered to be heroes in the struggle against the Dutch. He also wrote songs about these people and taught them to his students.’ This was the most effective way to spread the idea of an independent Indonesia.’ (81)

- ‘Sukarno, like many others, was arrested and exiled for refusing to cooperate with the Dutch authorities. His speech at the 1930 political trial, ‘Indonesia Accuses’, one of the great works of anti-colonial rhetoric, was widely circulated and inspired many younger Indonesians.’ (82)

- ‘Nationalist organizations had emerged through the diversity and sense of modernity that the cities fostered.’ (83)

- ‘Given the success that the Dutch had in suppressing the small nationalist movement in Indonesia, the country would not have come into being without Japan’s intervention. The Japanese encouraged and spread nationalist sentiments, created new institutions such as local neighborhood organizations, and put political leaders like Sukarno in place. Equally they destroyed much of what the Dutch had built. The combination of nationalism and destruction were essential ingredients for the Revolution that followed the end of World War Two.’ (85)

- ‘Over 100,000 other civilians (including some Chinese) were put in detention camps on Java, while a further 80,000 military from the Dutch, British, Australian and US Allied forces ended up in prisoner-of-war camps. The death rates in those camps ranged from 13 to 30 percent.’ (87)

- ‘Men were drafted by the Japanese as laborers, smaller number of women to provide ‘comfort’… There have been no estimates of how many Indonesians suffered this way, but there were tens of thousand of ‘comfort women’ throughout the Japanese empire. May have had to live out their lives with the disgrace of their experiences.’ (89-90)

- ‘Sarman was fortunate not to have been among the forced laborers involved in what may have been a botched Japanese biological warfare experiment in 1944. Between 5,000 and 10,000 men from a group of forced laborers held on the outskirts of Jakarta, awaiting shipment outside Java, died writing in agony from injections of tetanus. Japanese scientists had prepared the lethal vaccines to see what their effects would be but an Indonesian scapegoat was found after a number of physicians were tortured by the Kenpeitai, the feared secret police. The scapegoat’s punishment – he was beheaded, his body crushed by a steamroller and then dumped in a mass grave – was presented as ‘relatively light’ in official accounts.’ (91)

- ‘Possibly as many as 2.4 million Javanese died of starvation in those years [of Japanese occupation].’ (92)

- ‘According to the terms of the surrender, the Japanese were supposed to maintain order in the period up until the Allied forces under Lord Louis Mountbatten could take control. This meant that the first blows of the Indonesian revolution had to be struck against Japanese, in attacks to secure control of cities and take arms. These attacks mainly occurred as a result of Allied orders that the Japanese should disarm the Indonesian troops, which many militia leaders, and a few Japanese, had no intention of letting happen. In places like Bandung open conflict broke out, and the first heroes of the Revolution fell.’ (97)

- ‘The British-led forces arrived in the middle of the struggle for control, and attempted to restore Jakarta to the Dutch.’ (97)

- ‘During this period there were frequent attacks on Dutch, Eurasians and Chinese and anyone suspected of being a spy; in some instances these amounted to organized massacres, particularly of women and children. Such atrocities continued throughout the Revolution.’ (98)

- ‘In Surabaya a British brigadier-general died in a confused incident, shot either by the revolutionaries or by ‘friendly fire’. The British response was swift and angry. Throughout November they bombed and shelled this city of 600,000, fighting the Indonesians hand-to-hand, house-to-house, street-to-street. Sukarno came and went on the wcene, but he wiped his hands of the struggle forces, leaving them to fight, flee or be killed. On the Allied side fourteen were killed, but there was no way to determine the total number of Indonesian freedom fighters dead; estimates vary between 6,300 and 15,000. The latter number probably includes civilian casualties, including at least 1,000 Chinese, and probably a similar number of Dutch and Eurasians, killed by Indonesians.’ (98)

- ‘More Indonesians than the fighters felt the impact of the Revolution. Indonesians, often armed only with bamboo spears and mystical powers of invulnerability bestowed by teachers and talismans, died in much greater numbers than their enemies. The total number of British and Dutch troops killed over the whole period from 1945 to the end of 1949 was 700, the majority of whom was British. More Japanese were killed… There has been no accurate count of the Indonesians who died over the course of the Revolution, but those who died in fighting could be anywhere between 45,000 and 100,000. Six thousand Indonesians were estimated to have been executed as a part of ruthless Dutch counter-insurgency tactics in Sulawesi in late 1946 and early 1947… Over 7 million people were displaced on Java and Sumatra. Tens of thousands of Chinese and Eurasians were killed or left homeless, mostly at the hands of Indonesians, despite the fact that many Chinese supported the Revolution.’ (99-101)

- ‘The local lords of Aceh, who had been the backbone of feudal policy, were executed or otherwise deposed, and Aceh remained a firm Republican stronghold throughout the Revolution, unlike most of the sultanates, which fell back into Dutch hands as the surviving rulers struggled to regain their pre-war power.’ (102)

- ‘The Indonesian army started as a government-run competitor with the many militias. The Republic’s political leaders used Dutch- and Japanese-trained officers as the foundation of their army, in the form of a People’s Security Body. This was the first stage in the creation of state apparatuses.’ (105)

- ‘In December 1949 the final victory of the combination of struggle and diplomacy took place, with the Dutch eventually agreeing to hand over sovereignty to Indonesia.’ (112)

- ‘The country was not yet unified, the nationalists were still a small minority who had to translate their spirit in the form of a state, based on the myth of common struggle against the Dutch. The legacy of division from the Dutch era, the Japanese occupation and the Revolution was too deep to be overcome by this foundational nationalist myth. It was an imperfect new nation that had been born of the fire of occupation and revolution.’ (112)

- ‘Indonesians were faced with the task of building a state and nation, but Pramoedya Anata Toer, reflecting on the fate of the poor, was right to ask if anything had been done to improve their lives. Colonial rules had created institutional structures that could be converted to Indonesian needs, but had also crated massive inequalities and an economic system that drained resources and sent profits overseas.’ (113)

- ‘Sukarno’s great gift was that he could speak directly to the hearts of the people. He made extensive use of his mixed Javanese and Balinese ethnicity to show that he was not just an expansionist Javanese. His periods of exile in Flores and Bengkulu, as well as sojourns in Sumatra during the course of the Revolution, were called upon to show that he understood the daily lives of people no matter where they lived in the archipelago. His language was a blend of European and local Indonesian terms, combining images from the shadow theater with descriptions of international affairs, intended to give Indonesians the sense that they were simultaneously cosmopolitan participants in a new world and a people firmly rooted in their own traditions. There are still many people today who heard him speak and fondly recall his vividly inspiring words.’ (115)

- ‘The Revolution effectively removed two classes from power: the European ruling class and their uneasy allies in the traditional aristocracy.’ (115)

- ‘The main strategy for achieving consensus was to hold a series of elections, the most important of which was the national election of 1955 for the People’s Representative Assembly (DPR) and the Konstituante, an upper house whose main role was to rewrite the Constitution. This election was the first experience of participatory democracy for most of the 39 million voters.’ (123)

- ‘Out of 257 members of the Assembly, fifteen were women. This was a high proportion compared to many Western countries, and was in accordance with the government’s claim to be ending the gender and racial discrimination of the colonial period.’ (123)

- ‘Within the bureaucracy, high-level civil servants lacked experience, and there was massive overemployment – more than 500,000 were employed in the civil service. Bureaucratic positions were often a reward for parts played during the Revolution.’ (124)

- ‘The local party directorates, the new ruling groups of towns and villages, argued their differences more and more fervently. For the poor in rural or urban areas, joining a faction under a local leader linked to national policies was the only way to guarantee access to resources. Strong competition between political groupings meant they had to look after their followers, find them jobs, supplement meager incomes with rations of rice, cigarettes and coffee as gifts for loyalty, or ensure that a development project was directed to their area.’ (125)

- ‘Indonesia’s role in world politics was elevated in 1955 as an outcome of the Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung, West Java. The conference produced the Non-Aligned Movement, creating a separate identity for those countries that did not want to be clients of either the USSR or the USA in the Cold War. All the leaders of Africa, the Middle East and Asia were invited, excepting South Africa, Israel, Taiwan and the two Koreas, but including the African National Congress leadership and China. From this conference came the term ‘Third World’, originally coined to refer to those countries that did not belong to the First (US-dominated) or Second (Communist) sides of the Cold War, but which acquired its more pejorative meaning of ‘underdeveloped’ as the non-aligned countries became increasingly impoverished.’ (126)

- ‘Those who had grown up during the periods of the rise of nationalism and the Revolution shared the deep conviction that literacy was crucial to realizing Indonesia’s aspirations of becoming a modern nation. Pramoedya was cynical about the narrow view of education many people held. Many came to Jakarta for education, and stayed in the city afterwards rather than go back to their towns or villages. ‘The academic titles obtained each year sit paralyzed on placards in the offices, while your region remains barren, wanting leadership. And that leadership still remains suspended high up in the blue sky.’ He called for more schools to be built in the villages, for people not to see education as the acquisition of titles and status, ‘I gave a lecture in my town of birth two years ago: mobilize every pupil to give their service to the people, to study how to be of service, to turn away from intellectualism that only knows without having the capability of making use of knowledge.’ But funding and facilities for education were limited… In the 1950s Jakarta had 280 schools, but only 180 buildings in which they could be held, which meant that schools had to be run in morning and afternoon shifts. Paper was still in short supply, textbooks almost non-existent.’ (131-132)

- ‘Others shared the view that education should be more than just formal qualifications. The nationalist women’s groups of Bali who were educated in the 1930s, for example, knew that what they had experienced was just the beginning. For that reason they continued to campaign to eliminate illiteracy, especially against women. They saw education as the first step towards freedom and equality, something started by ‘upper-class’ feminists in the early twentieth century, but in which ‘the excesses of partiarchy’ were still too great to overcome. For that reason, they argued, a second stage of emancipation was needed, one in which women’s work opportunities were expanded, in which there was a change in the ‘production process’, the nature of work and property rights, that would give women equal rights in all aspects of life.’ (132-133)

- ‘One of the first hurdles for independent Indonesia was to overcome a national debt that would have crushed many countries. When the United States brokered the final settlement of the Revolution, it sacrificed the new nation’s interests for its own. The US insisted that the Indonesians accept a deal in which they had to take over Dutch debts of US$1,723 million plus interest. The US wanted to protect the economic rebuilding of Europe established in the Marshall Plan and to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the basis of their campaign against Communism. Instead of the Dutch compensating the Indonesians for colonial rule, the Indonesians had to compensate the Dutch, based on the fiction that the Indies had been an autonomous entity, not part of the Netherlands.’ (133)

- ‘Suspicions that the CIA was behind the revolts were confirmed when a US pilot was shot down in Eastern Indonesia. The US had become increasingly suspicious of Indonesia’s stance of non-alignment, and acting on the principle of ‘whoever is not my friend is my enemy’, sought to undermine any leftist leanings in the government. US companies such as Stanvac and Caltex had their investments in the oilfields of Sumatra to protect. CIA sponsorship of right-wing military officers in the regional revolts came in the from of substantial provision of arms, training and intelligence support, similar to the support for military dictatorships in other parts of the Third World that was US policy during the Cold War.’ (141)

- ‘Sukarno could have done more to promote democracy, and while he was not economically corrupt, he allowed his own desire for power to undermine the novel and delicate institutional structures Indonesia needed to survive.’ (141)

- ‘Sukarno’s declaration of Guided Democracy was the most dangerous step taken by a political leader in Indonesia’s history. It set in motion a chain of events that led to the fall of his own government, the deaths of as many as 1 million people, and the creation of a military, centralized, rule that would last until the end of the twentieth century. Indonesia would not see democracy for another forty years, and its early leaders’ hope of building a just society would be dashed on the rocks of political ambition. From 1957 to 1965 Sukarno’s authoritarian tendencies pushed the country beyond the limits of its economic base, its social framework and its political institutions. In the name of continuing the Revolution, Sukarno nationalized Dutch industry and increased the power of the military. Then, to try to keep the military under control he supported the Communist Party. The crash-through or crash approach led to the greatest disaster in the nation’s history.’ (144)

- ‘During the period in which Guided Democracy was institutionalized, the army and ministers around Sukarno were able to act almost arbitrarily. The armed forces developed the basis of what was later to become the doctrine of the ‘dual function’, by which the military defended the nation, and maintained society by intervening in government.’ (145)

- ‘When Sukarno was at the height of his anti-American and pro-Communist rhetoric, the CIA made a pornographic film starring a Sukarno look-alike to discredit him. It had the opposite effect, of enhancing his reputation for ‘conquest’ over the West.’ (149)

- ‘This anti-imperialist struggle had already provided the excuse to take over all Dutch assets in Indonesia. The campaign was run under the command of Major General Suharto… In just over a year the campaign succeeded, although the United Nations wanted a plebiscite to determine whether Indonesian claims that the Irianese wanted to be integrated were true. In 1965 Indonesiawithdrew from the UN.’ (149)

- ‘Economic policy became an eight-year plan in which the main aim was to create welfare through projects aimed at improving health, education and the provision of basic necessities. These were to be paid for through other projects for promoting exports and paying off foreign debt. Massive dams were built, and basic infrastructure expanded rapidly. Sukarno, like his predecessors in the period of constitutional democracy, saw that the primary aim of the state was to improve the lives of the people, rather than promote capital. This socialism was deeply offensive to the US. When challenged, Sukarno told the US, ‘go to hell with your aid’, and proclaimed another slogan, ‘Standing on Our Own Two Feet’, which meant setting up import substitution schemes and putting resources into state enterprises. Most of these – with one of two exceptions – quickly failed, often because their managers treated the money flowing through them as private income. This creaming-off of state resources, which economists have called, rather generously, ‘rent seeking’, established a patter that has continued to the present day. ‘Standing on Our Own Two Feet’ rapidly meant seeking alternative aid from the USSR and China. By the early 1960s, the military’s equipment was mostly Soviet-made.’ (150-151)

- ‘On 30 September 1965 a group of military officers from the air force and Sukarno’s praetorian guard launched what they called an action to defend the Great Leader of the Revolution, proclaiming themselves a ‘Movement’. Based at Jakarta’s Halim air force base, they set out to kill seven of the country’s generals.’ (156)

- ‘Suharto, leading one of the military’s most elite units, seized control of the center of the capital, and from there denounced the Movement as a coup.’ (156)

- ‘In Sumatra’s plantation areas the PKI had organized squatter movements and agitated against foreign companies, so in strongly Muslim areas such as Aceh quick action was taken to wipe out all Communists. Approximately 40,000 were killed around the plantations, one-fifth of all the killings on Sumatra.’ (157)

- ‘There were a few individual acts of heroism. Djelantik, the Balinese prince who had been sent to study in Malang in 1931, was head of Denpasar hospital when the killers arrived. He stood at the door and refused to allow them entry. Very few would have dared to risk being the next victim in this way. Instead the death squads went away peacefully.’ (158)

- ‘The military, perhaps exaggerating, later estimated the total number of killed during this massive purge as 1 million. Most estimates agree that it was at least half a million, with 80-100,000 killed on Bali alone. Chairman Aidit was killed early on, but many others were jailed, and for the next ten years people were still being imprisoned as suspects. The Communist Party was banned.’ (159)

- ‘Sukarno was still the Supreme Commander, president by virtue of the Constitution. If Suharto wanted to be seen as defending the nation from a Communist coup, he could not be seen to be seizing power in his own coup. So for eighteen months after the putting down of the 30^th September movement, there was a complicated series of political maneuvers… Sukarno transferred much of his authority over the army and parliament to Suharto in a presidential decree of 11 March 1966. Claims emerged many years later that he signed the decree at gunpoint. By 1967 Suharto had effectively had his hold over power legitimated through the Upper House. Even so, in 1968 Suharto was given the title of ‘Acting President’ only, and he had to organize an election in 1971 to confirm his position. Sukarno died a broken man in 1970.’ (160)

- ‘The US government had closely followed the events of 1965, and approved of the abolition of Communism, by whatever means. While being careful that there should be no direct involvement in the massacres, the US made it clear that it was ‘generally sympathetic with and admiring of what [the] Army [was] doing’, to quote one US embassy document. Although at first hesitant until they knew who was going to take over and what Suharto was like as a leader, US support for the new regime came once Suharto could demonstrate that the held power legally. Aid programs were restored. In particular, Indonesia resumed its membership of the international agencies created to manage the world economy, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.’ (163)

- ‘The UN’s view was that the people of Irian should have a plebiscite, an ‘act of free choice’, as to whether they wanted to be Indonesians or not. In 1969 US, Australian and other observers from the United Nations were invited to see this in action. In accordance with New Order principles of democracy, the Irianese were not considered ‘advanced’ enough to be able to participate in a vote of the whole population, so just over 1,000 ‘community leaders’ were chosen by the Indonesian military, in a fashion eerily reminiscent of the Dutch colonial government’s appointment of its People’s Council. Foreign observers were not allowed to view the actual voting, but they heard enough stories of intimidation by the army to christen this ‘the Act of No Choice’. US advisers involved in the process ensured that a positive report was submitted to the UN. Irian was Indonesia’s reward for getting rid of Communism.’ (163)

- ‘When the children of the rich went to Gambir railway station in the center of the city they saw others who scavenged cigarette butts to make new cigarettes for a living, and they passed shanties and the muddy black filth of canals that were bathrooms, toilets ad sources of water for slum dwellers. A number of film-makers attempted to draw attention to the cause of the poor, and contributed to a growing feeling among that young who had campaigned against Sukarnoist corruption that they should continue their struggle for a more just society.’ (165)

- ‘Another appeal to US anti-Communism was made as part of Ali Murtopo’s biggest campaign. In 1974 Portugal’s fascist dictatorship fell, and the socialist government decided belatedly to carry out a process of decolonization. In the colony of East Timor, forgotten by Portugal and the rest of the world, locals greeted this decision by establishing a number of political parties, the largest of which was the Front for the Liberation of East Timor, Fretilin. Fretilin’s declaration of independence was contested by a second more conservative party, the UDT, and a third and much smaller body, Apodetai, that advocated integration with Indonesia. Indonesia used Fretilin’s vaguely Marxist leanings to discredit it in the international media, and the specter of a civil war was conjured up to induce Indonesian ‘volunteers’ to visit East Timor as a show of goodwill, while secretly building up military forces along the border and working with the Apodetai group to prepare the way for a massive invasion and annexation of East Timor. At least 125,000 East Timorese perished in the civil war, the invasion and the starvation that followed. Six Western journalists were also killed by Indonesian forces, the Indonesians say accidentally, East Timorese witnesses claim deliberately. Sadly, the deaths of the journalists received more attention that those of all the East Timorese, but the campaign to expose their murders rallied support for East Timorese independence at a time when most governments, the US and Australia in particular, would have liked it forgotten. For the next twenty-five years the Indonesian military used East Timor as its training ground. This was where young officers were ‘blooded’ into a culture of torture and murder, where they learned to dispose of bodies and to eliminate potential opponents. Many of these officers had been trained in the US, and specifically copied the CIA’s program developed in Vietnam and code-named ‘Phoenix’, which taught how to target civilian support for guerilla resistance fighters through assassination and terror.’ (167)

- ‘Suharto’s methods produced two experiences of his rule during an extraordinary period akin to that of Stalin’s rule in Russia, where fear and aggrandizement made sure that the regime held control of the nation. This period was punctuated by regular elections with predetermined results, called ‘festivals of democracy’, and by changes in both the membership of the ruling group and their targets, as first Communism, then Islam, then non-governmental organizations were identified as threats to the nation. Throughout all this the great constant was Suharto, the ultimate politician.’ (170-171)

- ‘The grimness of the killings affected more than family and friends of the victims. Other witnesses still live with life-long trauma. In many villages locals can still point out who were the killers. While some of these killers were well rewarded with public office by the regime, many went mad from the burden of what they did. This was a terror that blighted millions of lives.’ (171)

- ‘In 1980 one of Indonesia’s leading playwrights made a film called The Treachery of the Gestapo-PKI. The three-hour film became compulsory viewing on 30 September each year for all school students, supported by school textbooks with plays telling the government’s story.’ (171)

- ‘Sukarno was removed from public presentations of national history, no mean feat given his omnipresence from 1957 to 1965.’ (172)

- ‘This totalitarian system was not simply the work of one man, Suharto, rather it was the expression of a group, the military, that had come to power by overtaking the new political class of the Revolution and the 1950s. The military was as much as product of the Cold War as of its own trajectory since the Revolution. The military thrived because membership provided ready access to the crudest forms of power. As a modern institution the military provided upward mobility for young men, while providing a framework for that mobility that was even more hierarchical than the world of the Javanese courts; it was both traditional and modern.’ (172)

- ‘Beginning with Jakarta’s University of Indonesia, state universities were moved out of the centers of cities, to underdeveloped areas where access points could be controlled by the military and where demonstrations would not spill over into busy public spaces. Academics were strictly monitored by government appointees, who were installed at all levels of the education system. Many of these had little in the way of university qualifications, but were kept in position to report on ‘dissent’. Students had to join campus cadet corps, wear military-style uniforms and take part in exercises that would give them ‘discipline’.’ (174)

- ‘Readers of the 1960s Indonesian newspapers would probably have found newspaper reports of the 1980s unreadable. The short, direct sentences written for readers for whom the language was newly acquired in the post-Independence education boom, had been replaced by long and contorted statements filled with complex constructions and neologisms designed to give the effect of great import without actually saying anything. This New Order style of language was based on a top-down view of society, where ‘authorities’ told a passive population what it should do. The inflated nature of the language was meant to enhance the speaker’s or writer’s prestige. Instead of Sukarno’s radical slogans, the New Order produced slogans that were almost meaningless, posting banners on public buildings proclaiming such things as the need to ‘sportize society, and societize sport’.’ (175)

- ‘The only television station was government-owned. TV sets were distributed to every village so that public broadcasts of the government’s messages could be viewed as widely as possible. Although initially television advertising was allowed, in 1981 it was removed from the screen because Suharto and his ministers were worried that the ‘ignorant masses’ would be took easily led by commercial messages. Thereafter program breaks were punctuated by patriotic music.’ (175)

- ‘Even when there was only one candidate for a local election, New Order attention to formality demanded that there be signs of a choice – the candidate’s ballot box was placed next to an empty box. If villagers disapproved of the candidate, they placed their votes in the other slot, and the empty box won the election.’ (176)

- ‘The 1970s was marked by international waves of Islamic renewal, encouraged particularly by the Iranian Revolution.’ (177-178)

- ‘The major event in the manipulation of Islam took place in the harbor area of Tanjung Priok in Jakarta in 1984. Preceded by strongly worded sermons, defamatory posters, and rumors of unrest, a riot took place outside a mosque. A heavy army presence suddenly materialized, and the rioters found themselves trapped in a confined area, where they were quickly gunned down by troops. Officially fifty were killed, but more realistic estimates give the number of dead as ten times that. The Tanjung Priok riot was used by the government as an excuse to crack down on all forms of Islamic radicalism.’ (178)

- ‘One of the by-products of the revival of House of Islam sentiments was that it encouraged local leaders in Aceh to reignite their own ambitions for a separate Muslim state.’ (179)

- ‘The heavy hand of terror played a similar role in Irian (West New Guinea) and in East Timor. In Irian the forcible integration involved in the ‘Act of No Choice’ had to be continually backed up. Any expression of dissent was ruthlessly squashed. A Papuan anthropologist, Arnold Ap, had been involved in preserving and promoting local music and other forms of cultural expression in the 1970s. The military saw this as potential support for separatist aspirations, so they arrested Ap as part of a crackdown on the Free Papua Movement. In 1984, Ap was shot in the back ‘attempting to escape’. While the Free Papua Movement remained a small group fighting on with bows and arrows, the Fretilin Movement of East Timor had some modern weaponry from their brief period of government before the 1975 invasion, and were able to capture weapons from the Indonesian military in ambushes. Despite the capture and execution of Fretilin’s leader in 1978, they successfully waged a guerilla struggle throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The fact that they were able to kill some 20,000 Indonesian troops in twenty years of fighting did not lessen the suffering of ordinary East Timorese.’ (180)

- ‘As in Aceh and Irian, constant military use of murder, torture and rape, and the abduction of children, to control the population, increased, rather than diminished, support for those who wanted an independent East Timor. Mr. Hong, an ethnic Chinese East Timorese, was typical of those who were not involved in the fighting but got caught up in it. He described his experience of torture, of electric shocks and beatings, to an Australian researcher: ‘When they beat me they ask always if this person or that person is Fretilin. But I really don’t know. So they keep beating me. They say I should know and then they beat me.’ Such actions were never going to convince East Timorese that they should be part of Indonesia. The military used the heavily censored reports of what was going on in the outlying provinces to argue that the army was an essential part of the state, because they guarded the nation from separatist disintegration.’ (180-181)

- ‘Through Peratima [state oil company], Suharto, and other members of the power group, had ready access to an ongoing source of funding which meant that they were not accountable. They ran this cash-cow into the ground, using it for both military and personal ends. For example, Ibnu Sutowo paid over US$1 million for his daughter’s wedding in 1972, and indulged in lavish displays of hospitality as well as personal signs of status such as gold-plated fittings on his Rolls-Royce. Sutowo’s mismanagement left the company US$15 billion in debt when borrowing restrictions prevented him from rolling-over debts. He was never held responsible for this. All errors and corruption were attributed to deputies, and Sutowo was allowed to quietly [sic] retire, later becoming head of the Red Cross in Indonesia. His family remained in the power group, his son taking over the franchise of Hilton Hotels in Indonesia… On his death in 2001, Ibnu Sutowo was interred in the National Heroes’ Cemetery.’ (185)

- ‘The Sutowo story was typical of the way Indonesia’s vast wealth was used during the Suharto years – some deployed for projects to help the poor, but not before huge amounts were raked off for benefit of the governing group.’ (186)

- ‘At each stage of the transaction chain somebody was getting a percentage, so that the money left over for buying the actual pipes was a small proportion of the recorded total. If accidents occurred, as in 1972 when eighty impoverished workers died in an explosion as they scavenged petroleum from one of the leaking pipes, they could be covered up. Such commissions fromJakarta to local contractors occurred in projects funded by World Bank loans, and at the end of the Suharto era, the Bank itself could not deny that between 20 and 30 per cent of all their US$25 billion in loans had disappeared in this manner. Such debts had to be repaid, and as a result Indonesia because of the world’s largest debtor nations.’ (187)

- ‘A desirable area into which to buy was the traffic police, whose main activity was collecting bribes. In one of the periodic attempts to stimulate the economy under the government’s five-year plans, in 1985 the entire customs service was paid to stay at home while their work was outsourced to a Swiss company so that import and export goods could move freely.’ (187-188)

- ‘Despite the system of fraud and fakery the New Order put in place, there was genuine success. Even though the number of qualified medical practitioners in the country remained only in the thousands until the 1980s, remote regions received basic health care in the form of rural nurses and polyclinics. According to official figures passed on to the World Bank, infant morality rates, which had been at a disastrous level of 200-300 per 1,000 births during Dutch colonial rule, had fallen to 56 per 1,000 by 1995.’ (188)

- ‘Benevolent paternalism also increased the number of schools and trained teachers, but the teachers were so poorly paid that they usually had to moonlight in private schools or find other employment, meaning that there was no time for lesson development or attention to the educational needs of students. The school curriculum was heavily imbued with the New Order version of history and the message that society should be the passive recipient of government wisdom. Basic education was achieved for the whole population, a miraculous achievement, but the skill level of the workforce was not greatly improved, and throughout the Suharto era Indonesia remained a source of cheap labor for foreign companies, with the lowest wage levels in South-east Asia.’ (189)

- ‘The Green Revolution came to Indonesia in the late 1960s, but it was not until the mid-1970s that it began to take over in most rice-growing areas. Farmers complained that the new varieties of rice tasted bland, and indeed they did have lower nutritional content. More important to the structure of rural economies, the new varieties depended on heavy use of fertilizer and insecticides, which locked peasants into government subsidy schemes, and ultimately had devastating effects on the delicate ecologies of the Indonesian islands. Whereas the old varieties had to be harvested by peasant women working collectively and using labor-intensive small knives, the new varieties could be harvested with sickles by fewer people. With the Green Revolution came labor-reducing mechanized threshing and milling processes, irrevocably changing the lives of the peasantry, causing mass unemployment and pushing farmers into a more commercialized world, albeit one mediated by government agencies. Despite droughts at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s, Indonesia increased its overall rice production markedly, until it could claim to be a net exporter, rather than an importer, of rice.’ (189)

- ‘In the villages of Indonesia people commonly refer to the period before the 1970s as ‘before electricity’. The 1970s saw major improvements in the provision of basic infrastructure throughout most of the islands, including electricity and clean running water. Significant improvements in transport, especially the building of sound roads that linked up with major highways running through each of the islands, broke down the barriers of distance to trade and communication.’ (189)

- ‘Indicators such as access to radio and television, and standards of health care, show that areas such as the Southeastern Islands became poorer and poorer in relation to the advantaged areas. One province that was a success story in this area was East Java, which achieved a balance in the nature of its development between high growth rates and income disparity. Numbers of absolute poor were reduced from two-thirds to one-third of the population by the 1980s. This development was achieved without substantial foreign investment, but instead growth in agriculture went hand-in-hand with growth of areas of manufacturing… The locus of Indonesia’s poverty had moved away from Java.’ (190)

- ‘Street children remain a major problem in Indonesian cities, their lives lived by begging at traffic lights, prostitution or petty theft, their only ambition, according to Topo, a street child of Java, ‘To become an old street kid’. One of his colleagues put it in these terms, ‘It must be nice to be a neighborhood kid. You go to school in the morning and when you come home all you have to do it eat. It’s not like being a street kid who has to fight for the leftovers.’ ’ (191)

- ‘Despite primary school levels of education being provided to all, Indonesia lagged behind many Asian countries in its expenditure on education, and the proportion of those achieving secondly education during the Suharto era actually fell, an indicator that fewer and fewer people were being equipped for anything other than basic labor.’ (192)

- ‘Sari, in her twenties and working twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week in a garment factory in Central Java for less than minimum wages, was typical of the young women of the new workforce of the Suharto era. Such women had no recognized rights: their fathers – or husbands if they were married – had to provide written permission for them to make any decisions about work. When they were initially hired they were expected to work a few months without income, as an ‘apprenticeship’. When they were paid, their salaries were always one to two months in arrears.’ (192)

- ‘The answer to overpopulation was a policy called transmigration, an idea which came from Dutch policies. Suharto made transmigration one of his pet projects. Initial government plans were to move out 200,000 people per year, but this was never realistic, and the targets were regularly halved so that officials could report modest success. The scheme was funded by World Bank, and so was seen as part of development aid.’ (193)

- ‘The government put particular pressure on transmigrants to move to East Timor as a way of Indonisianising the province, in particular of increasing the Muslim population of this largely Christian and pagan region.’ (193)

- ‘The bear monopoly on violence by the government meant that it could maintain an image of quiescence that assured it of international support. Western countries built up close relations withIndonesia, particularly with the military, to whom Britain sold arms, the US provided intelligence training and Australia co-sponsored exercises with the Special Forces Command, the elite troops responsible for maintaining control in the rebellious provinces. Inside and outside Indonesia, authoritarianism was seen as the price the country paid for development, a view that served the interests of Western governments keen to support the operations of multinational oil and mineral companies in Indonesia.’ (197)

- ‘The World Bank, realizing that it was almost impossible to work through the corruption of the New Order, began to direct funding to NGOs as alternative social institutions.’ (198)

- ‘The new US-sponsored ideology of free markets and political liberalism did not allw room for old Cold War dictators, and put pressure on the corrupt control of the economy exercised by Suharto, his family and friends. Coinciding with the end of the Cold War Indonesia’s government proclaimed a period of liberalization of the economy, together with an official policy of social liberalism called ‘Openness’. Laws restricting foreign investment, including purchase of land, were challenged to allows a freer flow of capital, and suddenly the country was awash with money.’ (198)

- ‘Overall the number of those living below the poverty line dropped markedly to just over 10 million in 1996.’ (199)

- ‘Whereas once unfavorable international media reports could be blacked out or cut out of imported magazines, the growth of new forms of media meant that controlling information was getting harder and harder. This was dramatically illustrated in 1991, when Indonesian troops massacred East Timorese protestors in Dili. Although hardly the first military massacre in the province, it was the first televised massacre, as a Western journalist was able to smuggle footage of the killings out to world attention. Subsequently copies of this footage were circulated back to Indonesiathrough videos brought in through NGO networks.’ (200)

- ‘The New Order boom of the 1990s had been built on huge foreign loans, and when signs emerged that the boom really was a bubble, lenders became nervous. Following a sudden and dramatic fall in the Thai Baht, currency speculators and Indonesian companies rushed to sell off the Rupiah, which crashed to one-fifth of its value against the US dollar. The currency crash coincided with Indonesia’s worst drought of the twentieth century. The effects were more drastic than the economic crises of the 1960s or the Great Depression of 1929-31. Talk of Indonesia’s place in a globalizing world was replaced by one word that summed up the national experience: ‘crisis’. Most industries collapsed, and the number of officially registered poor more than doubled, slipping back to levels not seen since the early 1980s.’ (203)

- ‘IMF support was provided to lessen the impacts on Indonesians, and to protect investors from wealthy countries so that the crisis did not lead to another world depression. Funding was dependent on reforms to Indonesia’s financial sector, the end of monopolies and of government subsidies for many areas of the economy, albeit with IMF provisions to create social ‘safety nets’ for the very poor.’ (203-204)

- ‘No matter how much Suharto and those around him tried to engineer mass violence against their enemies, the call for ‘Reform’ was now heard on all levels of society – students, supporters of Islamic groups, the poor who backed Megawati, even elements of the military from whom a future president would arise. The demonstrations continued, the student’s capacity to organize enhanced by the increasing use of mobile phones and the internet. One demonstration, at the affluent private Trisakti University in the main part of Jakarta, resulted in troops killing at least four demonstrators. The violence of government forces had turned from marginal areas to the center of power, against the children of the middle class. The outrage was overwhelming.’ (205)

- ‘Suharto was brought down by a combination of factors. The end of the Cold War meant that the US was no longer willing to turn a blind eye to the regime’s abuses of power, but external pressures for human rights were only a small part of the story. A more important external pressure was that to liberalize the economy and let Indonesians participate in the international consumer society.’ (205)

- ‘By the early years of the twenty-first century young women, following the example of Marsinah, the factory worker who died defying the New Order, were beginning to organize into unions, learning from their Filipina sisters, and taking part in international Ngo networks. Slowly, reluctantly, the Indonesian state has had to take notice of its citizens overseas and try to protect their rights, if only because their remittances have became the mainstay of regional economies.’ (209)

- ‘Indonesia after Suharto saw three presidents in the space of four years.’ (209)

- ‘The IMF policies have been partially implemented with mixed results. The middle class was reduced in size overnight, particularly as savings were wiped out when banks folded. Never having been able to afford imported goods, the poor continued to recycle whatever was on hand, but were nevertheless hard hit between 1997 and 1999. The overall level of poverty increased 100 percent. After 1999 the worst effects of the crisis were over, but in some areas people had sold assets or gone into debt to tide them over. People found that the real value of wages had declined by up to 40 percent, meaning that they would never be able to recover to their original precrisis standard of living.’ (210)

- ‘Suharto suffered a stroke and was considered too ill to be prosecuted.’ (212)

- ‘Suharto left the state an empty shell, unable to address social problems, its personnel mostly unwilling to act beyond self-interest.’ (213)

- ‘In the years following the fall of Suharto, the most immediate impact of political changes in Jakarta for ordinary Indonesians was political violence.’ (213)

- ‘One of the important reforms just after Suharto fell was to separate the police force from the military.’ (213)

- ‘It was the Chinese who were the first victims of violence in 1998 and 1999.’ (214)

- ‘The most-publicized violence, this time with definite military instigation, surrounded the independence of East Timor in 1999. The most important Habibie reform was hit attempt to solve the problem of conflict there by offering the people of East Timor a referendum for independence. In the lead-up to the referendum, military leaders organized local militias in a clear attempt to continue the Suharto-era manipulation of voting. The people of East Timor were not intimidated, and chose overwhelmingly to be independent… Violence led by pro-Indonesian East Timorese militias broke into open conflict and massacres of at least 2,000 people.’ (215)

- ‘The conflict was represented in the media as one of Christian East Timorese against Muslim Indonesians.’ (217)

- ‘By 2001 there were over 1 million people displaced by various conflicts, including Madurese who once sold meat balls on the street on Palangkaraya, East Timorese who supported militias, or followed them out of fear, and Christian and Muslim Ambonese whose neighborhoods had been turned to rubble.’ (217)

- ‘On 12 October 2002 over 200 people, mostly Westerners, the largest number of whom were Australians, were murdered in three coordinated bombings on Bali.’ (218-219)

- ‘…a bombing in the center of Jakarta, at the luxury Marriot Hotel in 2003, and then the bombings of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004…’ (219)

- ‘Even the most reluctant politicians were forced to admit that the evidence was overwhelmingly against a small group of violent agitators led by Basyir. The prosecutions of those linked to Basyir helped to turn public opinion away from extremist uses of Islam in political violence, but they also strengthened the hands of intelligence of intelligence bodies, the police and the military. In the complicated politics of Indonesia, however, political leaders have to be seen not to be surrendering to US or Australian pressure in the US-proclaimed ‘war against terror’.’ (219)

- ‘Indonesians who had experienced the upheavals of the fight for independence, the conflicts of the 1950s and 1960s, the threatening atmosphere of the New Order and subsequent struggles were not going to be convinced that suddenly they were in a new ‘age of terror’.’ (219)

- ‘Probably the most far-reaching of the many dramatic changes after Suharto’s fall was the policy of decentralization, called Regional Autonomy.’ (220)

- ‘Regional Automony was based on US models of local government, and its main architects has been trained in, or at least visited, the US. Underlying the US models was opposition to the state, a key part of the ideology perpetuated by international aid agencies as well. However, in the US case, there are strong traditions of local government built around a federal system. From the Dutch period onwards Indonesia has mainly known top-down systems of government.’ (221)

- ‘The temptation for regional leaders to recreate themselves as local lords has been great, and in many regions there has been a strong revival of traditional royal families. Given the ‘feudal’ style of the New Order, it is ironic that in the post-Suharto era regional autonomy has the potential to promote a return to aristocratic bureaucracy. The same policy, however, could produce other possible results.’ (221)

- ‘All kinds of local taxes were invented, and the number of local civil servants multiplied a hundred-fold. These increases in taxation and bureaucracy have increased the cost of doing business in Indonesia, and, dangerously, have restricted trade between different parts of the country. For nationalists…all this adds up to the potential for the nation to disintegrate.’ (222)

- ‘The national elections of 2004 have demonstrated that post-Suharto Indonesia’s combination of optimistic reformism and cynical fatigue has at least leavened the worst aspects of crisis. The violence of previous elections was absent, and for the first time direct election of representatives and of the president gave Indonesians the feeling that participation means more than just joining rallies orchestrated by political parties.’ (222)

- ‘Following earthquakes in Flores and Alor, the tsunami resulted in 98,000 deaths on Sumatra alone, and coming in the middle of a military crack-down in Aceh, presented great logistical problems. Sadly, it took a disaster of such magnitude to remind the world that Aceh existed; the impoverished Achenese will take a generation to recover.’ (224)