Review: Both books illustrate the way the Suharto family exploited Indonesia
Ron Witton
In 1625 Sultan Agung of the East Javanese kingdom of Mataram conquered Surabaya by besieging the city and poisoning its water supply by throwing rotting animal carcasses in the Brantas River that flows into the city. The first book under review is a tale of what happened 350 years later, when the people of Surabaya again faced a poisoned water supply. This time, it was caused by New Order 'development' industries on the river banks, dumping their toxic effluent into the Brantas. The way the book describes local authorities and NGOs fighting valiantly throughout the New Order period to oppose the rich and powerfully connected is quite gripping.
After the Suharto era, environmental politics flourished as they never could before. The title refers to a traditional community attitude that always saw the river as an easy way of getting rid of rubbish. Disaster results when chemical firms and other highly polluting industries adopt the same attitude. A wonderful collection of cartoons from Surabaya's surprisingly outspoken newspapers illustrates the struggle over the city's water supply.
The second book documents two case studies where the land of ordinary people was alienated by the New Order's elite. In one, it became golf links for the rich. In the other, a cattle ranch for Suharto. The story highlights the bravery of those ordinary people who dared to speak out. Doomed to failure under the New Order, they can now at last hope for justice. This book, perhaps, marks the beginning of that process.
Both books illustrate the way the Suharto family exploited Indonesia. In one, we read of Suharto's ranch. In the other, Tommy Suharto's water pipeline company defaulted its contractual obligations with impunity, and thus managed to extract vast sums of money from the Surabaya provincial government.
Anton Lucas with Arief Djati, The dog is dead, so throw it in the river: Environmental politics and water pollution in Indonesia, Clayton: Monash Asia Institute, 2000, 152pp, ISBN 0732611814.
Dianto Bachriadi and Anton Lucas, Merampas tanah rakyat: Kasus Tapos dan Cimacan [Plundering the people's land: The Tapos and Cimacan cases], Jakarta: Gramedia, 2001, 360pp, ISBN 9799023440.
Dr Ron Witton (rwitton@uow.edu.au) has taught social science in Australia, Indonesia, Fiji and Malaysia.
Inside Indonesia 68: Oct - Dec 2001
Gus Dur's troubles
10-13 November, 1998 - The first superparliament (MPR) session after Suharto resigns fails to address fundamental reform issues.
20 October, 1999 - Abdurrahman Wahid, backed by only a small party of his own, is appointed the compromise president by an unstable coalition of mostly New Order parties.
30 January, 2000 - Gus Dur visits Geneva and paves the way for an internationally mediated 'humanitarian pause' in Aceh, signed 12 May.
13 February, 2000 - Gus Dur sacks Gen Wiranto, his coordinating minister for politics and security and responsible for the East Timor mayhem. This removes the army from top government.
28 February, 2000 - At Gus Dur's insistence, Lt-Gen Agus Wirahadikusumah is appointed Kostrad elite force commander. Agus was seen as a liberal - too liberal for his military superiors, who managed to have him removed again on 31 July.
21 March, 2000 - Gus Dur hits headlines till the end of April with his proposal to allow communist ideas again, banned since 1966. No parliamentarian agrees with him.
24 April, 2000 - Gus Dur sacks Laksamana Sukardi, a competent minister, from an economic portfolio, apparently because of pressure from 'black conglomerate' Texmaco that Laksamana was pursuing.
29 May-4 June, 2000 - Papuan Congress, partly paid for by Gus Dur's government.
7 August, 2000 - Gus Dur's accountability speech to super-parliament (MPR) is severely criticised by all party fractions but one.
28 August, 2000 - The main defendant in the US$57 million Bank Bali corruption scandal (allegedly involving a 1999 Golkar election slush fund) is acquitted, leading to cries of continued judicial corruption. All other defendants are acquitted later.
14 September, 2000 - A military-style car bomb explodes at the Jakarta Stock Exchange, killing 15, the day before Suharto's trial resumes. More bombs explode at other times, including dozens all over Indonesia on Christmas Eve.
26 September, 2000 - Tommy Suharto is sentenced to 18 months jail for corruption, but he goes into hiding before police eyes.
28 September, 2000 - A court declares Suharto medically unfit to stand trial for corruption. No other Suharto family members face charges.
Early October, 2000 - State Audit Agency (BPK) says 96% of Rp 144.5 trillion (US$14 billion) of public recapitalisation funds to 42 sick post-crisis banks was improperly used.
1 February, 2001 - Parliament (DPR) passes a censure motion against Gus Dur over two alleged cases of corruption ('Buloggate' and 'Bruneigate') totalling US$6 million.
Inside Indonesia 66: April-June 2001
Sulphur miners risk their lives on an active volcano. How do they do it?
Ciaran Harman
Agus Alam turned from watching me struggle up towards him, and looked down the mountainside beside the steep path to the squares of rice fields far below. Beyond him, the stubby grey-treed slope, folding and unfolding like a fan, was cut with a path like a fault-line. The first miners were beginning the first descent of the day down it from the smoky crater high above. Slung across their backs were woven baskets filled to the brim with brilliant yellow ore. Sulphur.
In Kawah Ijen (One Crater), far eastern East Java, sulphur ore is mined by hand from an active volcanic crater. On a break from my studies in Yogyakarta in April, I took the night bus heading out that way with vague intentions of photojournalism and trying to understand what a life of hard physical labour would be like. I came back knowing only that I would probably never be able to understand the lives the people I saw, and that to write about them here as though I did would be a flat-out lie.
Java's buckled spine of volcanoes, from Krakatau off the west coast to Gunung Merapi and Kawah Ijen in the far east, form part of the 'ring of fire' that surrounds the Pacific Ocean. Earlier, as my motorcycle taxi buzzed towards the volcano and up its slopes, I had seen the nearby peaks by the vast triangles of stars they blotted out in the pre-dawn sky. Now the sun was feeling its way across the slopes, slowly unfolding them to me, yet leaving so much hidden.
I had caught up with Agus as I began up the path that led from the end of the road and the weigh station where the transport truck was parked. It was 3km up to the crater rim. Short and simple hair, a dirty tee shirt, shorts and thongs; he was in his twenties, about my age or younger, and walked slowly, unwillingly. It was his first day as a sulphur miner.
Agus Alam quietly answered my questions as we ascended. He said he had come to work as a miner for the same reasons his father had many years before. They were poor and owned no land. Agus told me how every day his father left their home well before dawn to walk almost 20km from their village to the crater. Sometimes he stayed away for a couple of weeks and lived on the mountain in a shack shared with other miners. Agus would only ever see his father in daylight on the days he was too sick or tired to work.
Ailments
His father, I imagined, suffered from many of the ailments I was told are common to those who work in the sulphur clouds. Bad eyes, sore lungs, teeth corroded from the acid fumes. Agus must have known that he too would develop the calluses on his shoulders where up to 100kg of sulphur was balanced for three descents from the crater every day. He said he hoped not to work there long. You could earn a fair bit of money, especially if you were strong. The miners were paid for the weight they carried: about Rp200 (less than 5 cents) a kilo. He would save enough, perhaps, to buy a motorbike and cart around the throngs of tourists that come to see the crater and snap pictures of themselves and a miner in the dry season. But Agus carried his fear as a burden up the mountain, just as later he would carry those yellow rocks down, the load measured with every step.
We came to a station on the path where the sulphur is weighed and the miners' shacks stand that Agus had told me about. In one shack, before my eyes became used to the gloom, it seemed as though stars surrounded me. I remembered for a moment the stars that had been blotted out from the night sky by the mountains. These pinpoints of light, however, turned out to be a thousand holes in the walls and roof. I wondered what the miners did when it rained. They would never be able to avoid a drip from the ceiling or a draught from the walls. The black soot coating everything and the pile of wood in the corner bore testament to the way they staved off the cold and clogged their lungs with smoke at the same time.
Up the path the vegetation began to thin out. There was less lush green. The trees were getting greyer and the undergrowth withered to a scrubby, stunted tangle. And then, as I turned a corner in the path, just by where an old miner had stopped to adjust his load of brilliant yellow rocks, I was there. It was as though the peak of the mountain had been struck and shattered. The grey, gaping wound was filled with a grey, steaming lake. The crater rim, jagged like torn paper, encircled it. I could smell the sulphur; I could see it too. Yellow steam roared out of vents in the rock below me. It twisted upward and was carried east by the morning breeze. To the west, up an invisible path through the exploded landscape, the miners ascended, visible only by the way their burdens flared against the dead landscape. It was like Jacob's Ladder in reverse. But these were men, not angels or devils.
Gas would drift over me and I would be reduced to a hacking, coughing mess between the grey rocks.
My descent into this pit was graceless. The miners, balancing the baskets of ore on their shoulders, knew where to place their sandaled feet. They heaved their way up the occasionally vertical route to the rim. I clambered over boulders and slid across sections of gravelly stones, thankful I had my steel-capped work-boots on. The path seemed to go on forever. The rim thrust up above me like a wall. I crossed a stream of hot water where a miner washed the yellow from his hands and then I was at the mine face.
The sulphur vents were far above me. Spilling down from them was a wall of congealed sulphur ore, that brilliant, noxious yellow. Pipes had been built to capture some of the gas and carry it down the slope and let it sweep back up, aiding the process of congealment. The miners would climb up by the pipes and break off the ore, their eyes and lungs stinging from the fumes. By the time I got there though, most of the miners had gone. Just a few old men were left, making artificial sulphur stalactites for tourists by getting the sulphur to congeal on twigs and leaves. I would have to go soon, they said. The wind was about to change and blow the gas westward, over the path to the rim. I watched the rushing steam and the dead lake for a while and then climbed back up the crater wall. Occasionally the gas would drift over me and I would be reduced to a hacking, coughing mess between the grey rocks.
I can never place my feet in their sandals and walk that ruptured path to the rim. I can't tell you what it is like to wonder if one more rock will feed your family or break your back. All I can do is tell you of the shadows of desperate men I saw up there. Some old, trapped in a job that will destroy their health and perhaps ultimately kill them, but that provides for their families, as long as they keep carrying ore. Some young, with their eyes constantly turned down the slopes, working at the mine only so that, one day, they will not have to any more.
Ciaran Harman (ciaran69@hotmail.com) is a student at the University of Western Australia in Perth. He was participating in the Acicis Study Indonesia Program in Yogyakarta.
Inside Indonesia 64: Oct - Dec 2000
Reformasi has not made life much easier for trade unionists
Terry Symonds
A strong labour movement is a powerful force for change. Suharto knew this better than most, having come to power on the slaughter of thousands of union activists and communists. Today, under a new and more liberal government, imprisoned labour activists are mostly free and independent unions are on the rise. But they continue to face repression at the factory level and their battle for union rights is by no means won.
The economic and political crisis of the last two years has had a dramatic and contradictory effect upon workers' organisations in Indonesia. Students led the 1998 wave of protest, but it quickly extended to the urban poor. Workers felt encouraged to join the democracy protests and raised demands of their own. Sensing the potential strength of a worker-based opposition, the dying Suharto regime cracked down hard in response.
Immediately before Suharto's re-election in March 1998, some 30 police officers visited the office of the Indonesian Prosperity Trade Union (SBSI) and forced its closure until after the election. In the week before the election, several lower SBSI officials were arrested for crimes ranging from distributing leaflets to organising plant level unions. Its leader Muchtar Pakpahan was already in jail.
Only two months later Suharto resigned, and Muchtar Pakpahan was released. But other labour leaders remained in prison, including Dita Sari, who was not released until July 1999.
During the turmoil of the Habibie administration, labour organisations continued to play a small but vocal role in the fight for democracy. Just weeks before Wahid was elected president in October 1999, several key unions joined street protests against the proposed new state security laws. Among them were the SBSI and the radical National Front for Indonesian Workers Struggle (FNPBI).
Since then, the workers' struggle has provided conflicting signals. Union activists I spoke with earlier this year believed most workers shared some level of optimism about the reformed political process and might be willing to give the government and economy a kind of 'honeymoon'. On the other hand, more recent reports show industrial disputes flaring again, some spilling into the streets.
One thing is certain: trade union activity will grow from a low base. Up to half the workers in footwear and non-garment textile industries were retrenched, while an estimated three quarters of construction workers lost their jobs. Most unemployed workers did not return to their villages but remained in the cities, seeking casual labouring work or driving transports. Recent research indicates that these workers were unable to return to agriculture because they have lost the skills and contacts they need to find work in the village. Many do not want to return anyway. Instead, they remain in large new communities of workers, such as those scattered on the outskirts of Greater Jakarta, sharing the work and earnings of their neighbours.
This huge reserve army of unemployed exerts significant pressure upon workers' confidence to take industrial action, and helps explain the drop in strike rates the last two years. It also confirms that the transformation of Indonesia's workers into a permanent urban class over the last twenty years has not been reversed by the economic crisis.
Vedi Hadiz says in an important 1995 study of the Indonesian working class that urbanisation has closed off any avenue of 'retreat' to the village. Workers will now 'stay and fight it out in the cities'. Urbanisation allows traditions of union organisation to grow and be passed on from one generation to the next.
Bolder
'Workers are becoming more bold because of reformasi,' said one company director in June last year. There are growing signs that he may be right. Labour activists insist that the new freedoms haven't made things any easier at the factory level, where they face constant intimidation and harassment, but they aren't wasting the opportunity to build.
The Suharto regime effectively smashed Dita Sari's Centre for Indonesian Workers Struggle (PPBI) after she was thrown in jail. But her comrades resurfaced with a new labour organisation, the National Front for Indonesian Workers Struggle (FNPBI). Even before she was released, they elected Dita to head it up.
The FNPBI, barely a year old, held a national council meeting in West Java in February of this year. It brought together delegates from 11 affiliated labour organisations, four more than last year. The FNPBI remains small, but some of its sections are sizeable organisations with an impressive record of organisation. It is distinguished by a socialist outlook and a commitment to political protest not shared by other independent unions.
The commitment of these new labour organisations is matched by growing bitterness among workers. In February 2000, sacked shoe factory workers from Reebok producer PT Kong Tai Indonesia blocked the toll road outside the Manpower Ministry office for several hours with an angry protest over severance pay. When this didn't work, over a thousand workers staged an occupation of parliament which lasted more than a week. These workers seem to have had little prior history of independent unionism. Their spontaneity is a reminder that workers' frustrations do not always express themselves through established organisations.
Demonstrations have been taking place outside parliament almost every week this year. In April, 5000 teachers, whose profession has no reputation for militancy, swamped parliament house during a strike for a 300% wage rise. They had rejected the government's offer of 100%.
Shoe factory workers at PT Isanti in Semarang won 23 of their 25 demands, including a holiday on May 1 to join the international commemoration of workers struggles. Their union believes this will help to revive a May Day tradition that was forced underground for its association with communism.
Wahid
The relationship between labour and the new government is shaky and not likely to improve. When I asked one group of striking workers what they thought of the election results, they told me that 'only the clothes have changed'.
Muchtar Pakpahan's SBSI is Indonesia's largest and most well established independent union. It is generally close to Wahid, but even that relationship is showing signs of strain. In a test case for the new government, the SBSI is fighting for the release of two members convicted under subversion laws for leading a strike last year at a tyre factory in Tangerang. Muchtar also criticised the recent small rise in the regional minimum wage, saying it was 'just enough to eat and smoke a little, and breathe the air.'
Almost all independent unions, including the SBSI and FNPBI, declared their opposition to the appointment of Bomer Pasaribu, a New Order figure, as Labour Minister. Muchtar Pakpahan calls on international unions to apply pressure for his removal (see box).
Wahid did delay the recent IMF-inspired fuel price rise, but 2,000 protesters gathered at parliament to remind him of what lies ahead. When the price rises inevitably come, bigger protests are expected.
Indonesia's new labour movement is small but growing and the mood of workers is hardening. Trade unions are unlikely to occupy centre stage in the political process unless the economy turns around and the bargaining position of their members improves, but they will be an increasingly important player in the looming confrontations over economic reform. Wahid will ignore them at his peril.
Terry Symonds (tsymonds@powerup.com.au) is the convenor of Australia-Indonesia Union Support. He lives in Brisbane, Australia. The group has wide union links and brought Muchtar Pakpahan to Australia for a visit.
Inside Indonesia 63: Jul - Sep 2000
20 October 2025by JOSEF CHRISTOFER BENEDICT & CHRISTISIA NATALIA AGNES ABADI
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