Empire of the East (8 page)

Tucked away in an obscure corner was something quite out of place in the heartlessness of this setting, a little café glistening with fresh paint, its protest against Lame on the brink of despair. We went in to find a smiling young Balinese couple, who had been in business here for three years. It may have been the smallest café anywhere, only able to contain four customers at a push, with the owner and his wife squeezed into three square feet of space behind the counter and three delectable children popping in and out of a hole in the wall. There was a picture from a magazine of a
legong
dancer, and a three-inch chaplet of flowers on our table in offering to the household spirit. Although I had never at this point visited Bali I was sure that the café in the backwoods of Sumatra enshrined the grace of that island unreached by the cataclysm of tourism.

We inspected what was on offer: chicken-noodle soup, and a pile of the most elaborately wrapped sweets. We took the soup and presented the children with a few sweets apiece, enormously repaid by their delight. The man had a few words of English and, helped out by Andy, we were able to listen to the story of their recent life. They had been in business here for three years and, hard as it must have been, he made it sound no more than the minor frustrations suffered by the hero of a side-plot in the
Ramayana,
certain of eventual triumph. Unaccountably, they had been separated from fellow Balinese with whom they had hoped to start the new life together, and dumped down in Sumatra with a mixed bag of Javanese, whose language they did not understand, and whose lifestyle was different in every respect. None of these people who had come from city backgrounds possessed agricultural skills, although they had been brought here to raise crops. Some went home, others found jobs on the palm oil plantations, or with the logging companies, as did he. After two years of it his left arm had been crushed by a falling tree, but he had saved enough to start up the café, and here he was.

In her splendid book
In the Rain Forests,
Catherine Caulfield tells of the predicaments of some of these early Balinese arrivals in Sumatra. She describes the adventures of a family whose choice was the village of Karangsari in Lampung Province, where they had asked to be sent because they had friends there. However glowing the description they had been given of this place, they found that it was a desolate fragment of what had once been one of the most celebrated and extraordinary of the game reserves of South-east Asia. Shortly before their arrival loggers had removed two hundred and fifty thousand acres out of three hundred thousand of the original forest, and the Suwendris found they had been allocated a patch of elephant grass on which nothing would grow until they spent six months burning and clearing it. Now, twenty years later, they have created a little corner of Bali. ‘Today five hundred and sixty-six families live in Karangsari … the houses have the same beautifully elaborate stone carvings, the same strictly ordered arrangement of domestic buildings and temples. Not only did the pioneers of Karangsari struggle to make this unfamiliar land productive, but they worked to make it home. Flowering shrubs surround every house, the roadsides are lined with hedges and dotted with trees.’

It is hard to keep up to date with the millions that have been shipped from Java and Bali to the outer islands. By the end of the first Five-Year Plan, back in 1984, nearly four million had gone and there was euphoric talk in Indonesian government circles of moving some sixty-five million in the next quarter of a century. Impetus has been maintained almost to the present time, when a slackening is perceptible. The existence of spontaneous migration in the reverse direction by failed transmigrants is now officially recognized and referred to as
reimigrasi.
Those making their way as best they can back to their native villages in Java and Bali have given discouraging or even horrific accounts of their experience in some of the island backwoods. The site may have had hardly more than a phantom identity, with houses unready, or not even built. Their reception by the local people might have been hostile. In remote areas wild animals could pose a problem; two sites in Lampung have repeatedly been attacked by wild elephants. Settlers have been murdered near Banda Aceh. They seem to receive no advance warning that their customs may differ dramatically from those of the societies with which they are compelled to associate. For this reason they may give extreme offence. Muslims from Java and elsewhere are killed by the Papuans of Irian Jaya for ritually washing their private parts or urinating in streams.

An additional cause for waning enthusiasm for the programme is the realization that the supply of suitable sites is finite. All prime agricultural land has its owners. Even the areas left unclaimed through difficulty of access or low-grade fertility have largely been handed out, and when they are at an end, where is the living space to be found for the incoming multitudes?

Foreseeing this problem back in 1967, and in the hope of heading off troubles that were bound to arise, the government passed Basic Forestry Act No. 2823, stating: ‘The rights of traditional communities [natives of the islands] may not be allowed to stand in the way of the establishment of Transmigration sites.’ This meant that the forests by which so many of these people lived could now legally be cut down to provide living space for the newcomers. By an ironic twist, many of those threatened by this act were the very transmigrants it was supposed to protect, the first of whom, arriving in the 1950s, had managed to establish what are approvingly referred to as mature sites, in which the transmigrants — after years of pain and travail — have finally conquered all the setbacks of the alien environment and settled to a comfortably regulated life.

There are few of these, one being Palanpanggung, also in Lampung Province. These people had been advised to abandon all hopes of growing the crops they had been accustomed to raise in the old days and to turn themselves into coffee growers, which they did with considerable success. By 1988 they numbered more than forty thousand but in this year the government applied the Forestry Act to their case, according Palanpanggung ‘protected forest’ status, and then served the successful transmigrants with relocation orders. The younger members of the community, aged between twenty and thirty-five, would be sent to a new transmigration nucleus on the island of Riau, off the Malaysian coast (nothing was said of the fate of the rest), and no compensation would be paid.

By November 1988, no one had been persuaded to comply with this order, so special police squads appeared on the scene and burned down four hundred and seventy-six houses. Defending this course of action, the Lampung Governor, Poesjono Pranyoto, told a press conference that allowing the villagers to stay in the forest would be more inhumane than evicting them. It appeared that concessions had been granted to a plantation estate which was in a hurry to take possession, and in clashes with the armed forces a number of villagers were killed. Following this, another two thousand houses went up in flames. This time Vice-Governor Sukki Hassan put the government point of view. When asked why he had ordered so many houses to be burned, he replied: ‘Because it was cost effective.’ The local authorities didn’t have enough time or personnel to demolish the houses one by one, he said. The provincial government admits allowing the burning to go ahead because it was short of funds.
(Tempo,
Jakarta, 29 July 1989.)

The burnings were followed by a government notice: ‘All persons found in this area of the forest are to be arrested and sentenced to one year in jail.’

Painstakingly, all Brazil’s errors in the movement of populations from rural wastelands and city slums into the Amazon were copied in Indonesia, although on a much larger scale. It is obvious that in both cases those who were persuaded to leave their homes in the hope of a fresh start in a far-off place of which they knew nothing would have been the less skilled, the less energetic, the possessors of less ideas and initiative. The main and much publicized aim of transmigration was to relieve Java and Bali of the pressure of excess population. This has not happened. Perhaps because the more effective elements of the community have been given more breathing space, an increasing birth-rate in both islands has more than compensated for the number lost, and demographically speaking things are rather worse than at the start of the programme.

The secondary aim was to guarantee national unity by the spread of Javanese culture through the islands. This so far has not happened. In fact the resentment provoked by what are generally viewed as government-sponsored Javanese colonies tends to diminish whatever ingredient of Indonesian patriotism may have previously existed. However many transmigrants are sent to East Timor, nothing is more certain than that only a permanent presence of the army will prevent it from declaring its independence.

Once clear of the straggling remnants of Lame, the road collapsed. Inaccessible and unspoiled Aceh was now at an end, and we turned into the foothills of the Gayo Height, where the loggers had only recently done their worst and made a mess of the landscape — before dropping everything, we suspected, and scurrying away at the approach of Free Aceh Movement separatists. All the signs were of a panic-stricken withdrawal. Demolished trees lay abandoned everywhere. Branches and ferns were scattered over the road itself, which had only recently been cleared of the trees that had fallen across it. The largest bulldozer I have ever seen lay on its side where it had fallen into a gully. Apart from this recent disruption and the additional hazards involved in avoiding or removing fallen branches, we had learned in Lame that there was little to be hoped for of this road for another hundred miles until we joined the main north-south highway at Sidikalang.

The Gayo people of these hills, and the villages where they had settled to enjoy life, came as a relief from the dismal hugger-mugger of the transmigration settlement. At the Lamainang market girls in blue and scarlet were bargaining excitedly for jungle fruit and several kinds of bats. A pet stall offered cockatoos, long-tailed mice and a small member of the tarsier family which surveyed the world with troubled eyes, as it climbed, baby attached to its underside, with gentle, sluggish movements up the pole on which it perched. Everyone’s existence in Lamainang was enlivened by a clear mountain river squeezing through this small town, which drew a happy attendance of people out for a stroll with nothing to do. They stood on the bridge for a moment to look down into the water as people like to do the world over, then moved on clearly the better for it. We followed their example. Below us, the black gondola-shaped boats were lined up, with their owners making small unnecessary adjustments to them, or playing cards or chatting with their friends. Laughing, kite-flying children ran up and down the street; a thin old man, trousers rolled up, dabbed in a pool with a net; a woman brought her duck, carried under her arm, for its daily excursion on the river. This was life as it had once been in most of Aceh.

We were soon approaching the western boundary of the G. Leuser National Park, calculating that it could be hardly more than five miles away. The eight-thousand-square-kilometre reserve is the largest in South-east Asia, and it has been claimed that the richness and variety of its wildlife are unequalled elsewhere on earth. These opinions may have been founded upon a situation which has brusquely changed. The reserve was once recorded as containing many species of monkey, the Malayan Sun Bear, mouse and barking deer, tigers galore, elephants, tapirs, hundreds of species of birds, and thousands of insects, including a whole catalogue of butterflies to be found nowhere else. Tracts of it were said to remain unexplored, and if so, would remain in their pristine condition until the logger invasion reached them.

The rumour that the park itself had already become a principal victim of the all-out attack on the forests of Sumatra seemed feasible when you considered the UN study which had revealed that, out of eighty-eight nations, rainforest clearance in Indonesia is exceeded in annual acreage only by that of Brazil.

During the next few miles our fears that a massive invasion had already occurred were strengthened by the appearance of side-roads too new to be on the map, all leading inland in the direction of the park. They plunged straight into the low hills and the laterite soil laid bare on the road surfaces and the steep embankments cut through the hillsides had been sun-seared to that shade of vermilion which warned that nothing would grow on it again.

Barriers kept private vehicles out, and there were threatening notices in Indonesian warning off unapproved visitors. Nevertheless we passed through and continued on foot to a point where a road crested a hill, and offered a wide view of the surroundings. The forest had once covered these hills, but it had been clear-felled and then burned over. What was left here was a painted wilderness of sand, a billowing Sahara doodled over with patterns of ash.

Conquistadors of the kind who once went overseas in the hunt for gold ran the country, and as deeply in commerce as politics pursued their conquests at home. A single log of a rare dypterocarp fetches up to £2,000 in Japan. In Indonesia, timber is the gold of our day.

D
ESPITE WHAT MUST HAVE
been in normal times the almost constant thunder of log transporters through their villages, the fishing communities of this zone exuded an immemorial tranquillity. Their names — Kutabuloh, Teungoh and Keu Deu Tantanoh — ended, as Andy pronounced them, on a soft aspirate, as if the last intake of breath before sleep. Nevertheless, committed to a calling in which time and tide waits for no man, an imperceptible but meticulous order of the day’s activities was not to be avoided. There is a time to bait the fixed lines, a time to repair the nets, a time to salt and dry the catch, a time for post-dawn sleep. Special urgencies rule in the seasons of the shoals of fish, and those are timed, too. Fishermen the world over, apart from those drawn into an industry based upon big ports, lead self-sufficient, immutable lives, bound to the wheel of custom, and it was clear that this applied in Teungoh.