Empire of the East (16 page)

Rich volcanic soil was the wealth of Bali, and the successful distribution of this wealth created an equable and interesting society providing an enormous range of satisfactions for the whole population. In almost every village where two or three crops of rice a year can be grown there are a great number of pleasurable ways of occupying spare time. Hardly a week passes without a temple festival, a wedding, or a spectacular cremation to be attended in the vicinity. Balinese life is a web of social obligation, most of it enjoyable, and theatrical entertainments, largely confined to cities in the West, are a regular ingredient here of the rural life. The people of Jimbaran have been debarred by barren earth and their consequent penury from these organized pleasures. This scene provided a sort of ready-made substitute, and they watched with enthralled, even reverent attention all the details of what elsewhere would have been seen as a market operation, but here had been transformed into a performance. This was a daily involvement with the drama of life as played in the outside world, and an hour or two’s release from the boredom of mere existence.

‘What’s going to happen to these people?’ I asked.

‘They may go to become transmigrants,’ Sueba said.

‘Would this be a good thing for them?’

He thought it would. What had they to hope for? Here in Bali peasants like this at the end of their tether would hang on to their patch of land whatever the misery they lived in. Now they would be forced to pack up and go. It was the best thing that could happen to them.

‘And you think that whatever they find in Kalimantan or Irian Jaya is going to be better?’

‘In such places they will quickly find work. Here there is no work and no money. There, they will be paid wages. They will fill their children’s stomachs.’

There was a café on a headland overlooking Nusa Dua which was just about to become an eight-hotel complex (the biggest in Bali), and here we stopped to drink tea and discuss such matters.

Sueba expressed his views with such unusual frankness by Indonesian standards that I wondered whether he believed polite evasions were unnecessary because we were foreigners. He was pro-government, slightly reactionary. Besides producing cash incomes, he said, transmigration expanded the individuals’ horizons. People wrote glowing letters home. He added with a touch of cynicism that they were obliged to do that. Opportunities were better, he thought, in the outer islands. Two policemen friends had volunteered for service in the carnage of East Timor, and had encountered no problem in imposing the national will in that unruly island. He was now on a subject carefully avoided by most of his fellow countrymen, but Sueba plunged ahead. A drawback, as one of his friends had explained, about doing one’s bit in the police rather than the army was that the police were not housed in secure barracks, but billeted in villages where it was to be assumed that the whole population was hostile. The nice man next door who smiled and bowed every time you met, and presented you with a pot of stew made from a partridge he had snared, could be a bloodthirsty terrorist, capable of crawling through your bedroom window at night and slicing your head off as you slept. Soldiers were safe in their camps, with their enemies miles away in the mountains, and when they got the order to attack they went up there and killed them. After that they could relax again.

‘And what about the nice man with the partridge stew next door?’

‘Ah, the civilian suspects,’ Sueba said. Two children playing nearby had come up and planted themselves in front of us. He told them in a kindly way that it was rude to stare, then gave them a wrapped-up cube of sugar apiece that had come with the tea. ‘Well, in this case,’ he said, ‘the civilian suspects had to go. Too many of our people were dying. I think if we had been policemen, you or I would do the same.’

It was in the course of these discussions that an idea began to take shape. All the Indonesians I had so far met avoided comment on anything that might be said even vaguely to touch on politics. Topics were invariably bland, and this may have been the case even among themselves. Not only politics but all controversial matters were left out of conversations, just as my little booklet on Indonesian protocol said they should be. In the company of young people one talked about celebrities, music, fashions, holidays, films, sport. The older people with families were obsessed with their children, and seemed invariably to be photographers who spent time looking at each other’s snaps. My protocol book emphasized that Indonesians of all ages liked to give play to their sense of humour and much enjoyed jokes — the cornier the better. The ones I met did not seem to be greatly impressed by what was going on in the world. Most of the newspapers were very provincial indeed.

With Sueba it was evident from the first moment that these limitations did not apply. Being a taxi driver in a place like Sanur, he probably spent most of his waking day in the company of foreigners, which had clearly taken effect. He would have noticed that foreigners came out with what they felt like saying, and Sueba did this too. In any case he had nothing to lose. The foreigners were isolated from the Indonesians. They were here today and gone tomorrow. When he had told us about police killings in East Timor I was staggered and I was quite sure that he would never have taken an Indonesian fare into his confidence in such a way.

What had occurred to me was that this extraordinary frankness might provide the opportunity to learn something of the facts of the great Indonesian blood-letting of 1965–6, described by the CIA as one of the greatest mass-killings of this century, with a cost in human lives comparable to the slaughters of Pol Pot, yet so promptly and efficiently hushed up that few foreigners — even those who have visited Bali — have ever heard of it, and in Bali the subject remains taboo. Although the exact number of victims will never be known, the total number throughout the islands may have exceeded one million, and it is supposed that in Bali up to one hundred thousand were done away with. This holocaust was provoked by the refusal of President Sukarno — himself an ardent empire-builder — to fall into line with US strategy in the Cold War, and his eccentric determination to remain on good terms both with the USSR and China. This was at a time when the United States was dangerously embroiled in the Vietnam war, and from the evidence it is likely that the CIA masterminded his dismissal and replacement by General Suharto, of whose wholehearted collaboration there could be no doubt. There followed the great witch-hunt through the island for communists, atheists and such non-political minorities as the Chinese, who on the whole were successful in business and therefore generally disliked.

As I had suspected, Sueba had not the slightest objection to telling us about the massacre. Where was he at the time? Teaching at the school in his old village. I asked him if he would consider taking us to his village, and he said, ‘Why not? Whenever you’re ready.’ Next morning he called for us at the hotel, and we set off.

Desa Pusang was down one of many narrow side-roads feeding into the countryside from the main north-south highway from Denpasar to Kubutambahan. Leaving the main road we seemed to slip back instantly into the past century. There was no traffic, no dust; there were lots of holes in the road, and it was very quiet. The village was full of pinkish light reflected from many ornamental brick surfaces. It was scented with the water gurgling and gushing everywhere in ditches and conduits down the steeply inclined street to an overbrimming central tank guarded by gambolling stone lions. We saw courtyards full of images and doves, an ancient diaphanous man leading a vast white ox by the ear, another at a plough followed by ducks, paddies like slivers of mirror-glass, a corner of the grey skirt of the distant volcano of Batur. People had gathered socially down by the tank and we noted instantly that family resemblances between one another were very great. Fighting cocks in their cages had been left here, where they would be stimulated, Sueba said, by what was going on around them.

‘These people are ruled by an all-powerful village council, the banjar,’ Sueba told us. ‘It keeps them in the old ways — nothing can be done unless it says, “OK. Go ahead.” Only a single family has been allowed television and the number of neighbours who can watch the programme is strictly controlled. The government ordered them to open a factory, but it makes nothing but concrete shrines.’

The old man with the ox had caught up with us and the ox had decided to go no further. The old man was pleading with it and the bystanders were laughing.

‘They have a strange belief,’ Sueba said, ‘they believe they have already reached perfection, so it is pointless to attempt improvement. All old men die at the age of sixty-five. It is the custom, so they refuse to go on longer. Only one thing has changed since I was a boy. In those days people died of cholera. Now they die of cancer.’

A child tried to force a handful of flowering weeds between the ox’s lips, and the animal shook it away. This caused more laughter, and the child burst into tears and was comforted by a passing woman.

‘They’re so gentle, aren’t they?’ Claudia said.

‘Yes, but they killed each other,’ Sueba told her.

‘It’s hard to believe.’

‘They were forced to. If it’s another man’s death or your own, even a gentle person will choose. The government told them the communists would take their religion away. That made it easier to kill them, but really they had no choice.’

Sueba led the way to the square, which was small and intimate in the Balinese way, with the banjar building and the fateful kulkul hanging in its tower, the ancient Founder’s Temple and other buildings devoted to religious cults.

‘I was in school when the kelian who is head of the banjar sent someone to beat on the kulkul to call the men to the square,’ Sueba said. ‘Knowing what was to happen, I felt myself begin to tremble all over. I sent the children home, closed the school, and followed the other men put into the square where we saw the soldiers and the Javanese men they brought with them waiting for us.’

‘So it didn’t come as a surprise?’

‘No one was surprised. We knew that the soldiers had gone to other villages to kill the communists.’

‘And you thought the same thing would happen here.’

‘Everybody had ceased to think. All we felt was fear. The fear was so great that all work had stopped in the fields, and the animals had been left to stray.’

‘I can’t imagine communists in a place like this,’ I said.

‘They had no real idea what communism was. All our people loved President Sukarno, and a lot of them thought he was a communist. There were some Christians who thought that the initials PKI really stood for Partai Kristen Indonesia — the Indonesian Christian Party — so they joined. These are simple people.’

‘Why didn’t they try to get away?’

‘It was useless. In Bali there is no hiding place. If a man tries to escape he is certain to be caught, and that will be taken as proof he is a communist. The only thing is to stay and hope the priest will say this man is going to the temple every day.’

‘So what happened?’

‘The kelian ordered all the women and children to stay in their houses, then a Javanese man who was with the officer read names from a list.’

‘Of communists?’

‘And atheists. People who were not certified in the banjar as members of any religion. The kelian called out these people and the Javanese men who were with the soldiers roped them in lines. The officer said to the villagers, “These are your enemies. I call upon you to fight for your religion.” He told us to put cigarettes in their mouths because they could not use their hands, but when we did this the cigarettes fell out again because they were too afraid. The officer was angry because nobody wanted to have anything to do with killing these men. He asked the kelian for lists of members of the Hindu or Buddhist religions. These were exempt because they must not take life. I was on the list as a Buddhist. All the other village men were given pangahs or clubs and told to kill the communists.’

‘And they were prepared to kill the people they had grown up with?’

‘They knew that otherwise they must die themselves.’

‘So they killed them.’

‘Yes, they did that. It was very difficult for them because village people are not practised to kill. One man fainted and a man from Java killed him with a club. Some old men were too weak even to kill a man tied in ropes, so the men from Java came to help them. One of these old men went home and never took food again. He starved to death.’

So this was the end product of the secret accords between Jakarta and Washington. Things had not been going as well as hoped in the war to contain communism. Those ancient adversaries, China and Vietnam, had been suspected of drifting together, and a precautionary blood-letting among those who had opposed the new President Suharto in East Java, Bali and the poverty-stricken outer islands of Indonesia might not be a bad thing. But it had to be discreet. The army officer ordered a severed head to be placed in the middle of Desa Pusang’s square and left there for one day, with the warning that if it were removed the village would be burned down. Meanwhile the bodies of the communists were to be hidden in the houses, and at night weighed down with stones and thrown into rivers or the Danari Batur lake. In no circumstances were they to be cremated or buried.

The story of the hauntings that followed attracted more attention in the foreign press than the great massacre itself.

‘When did the hauntings start?’ I asked Sueba.

‘They started immediately. The day after the killings and as soon as the head had been taken away from the square, the ghosts came to the village.’

‘Did you actually see them?’

‘No, they were invisible, but they were everywhere. Wherever I went there was always a ghost at my back, in the house, the washing place, the fields. The ghosts were waiting for the ceremonies to be made, but the government said that it would cause too much anger and the ceremonies must be delayed ten years.’

‘Which must have made things worse.’