Free Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation by Elizabeth Pisani

of all and sundry to voice political opinions, the relative absence of military uniforms in public gatherings and a huge increase in the proportion of women wearing jilbabs (the Indonesian name for hijab headscarves). I arrived just in time for one of the great tests of the era of Reformasi – ‘The Reformation’. The Pope Suharto had been succeeded by his Vice President, B. J. Habibie. Though trained in engineering in Germany, Habibie was anything but Teutonic in style. He regularly allowed extravagant promises to escape his mouth before they had spent any time in his brain. Without so much as mentioning it to his foreign minister, for example, he made a public promise that the people of the fractious province of East Timor could hold a referendum on independence.
    The Portuguese, who made the Dutch look like wonderful colonizers, had left East Timor in a pathetic state. When Indonesia invaded in 1975, it set about developing its twenty-seventh province with gusto. Jakarta sent in thousands of (mostly Javanese Muslim) civil servants to run the (entirely Catholic) state’s affairs. In the eyes of Suharto and his supporters, they were doing the people of Timor a favour.
    In my reporting days, I had frequently been called to army HQ for re-education about Timor. Widespread dissatisfaction among the Timorese? Where on earth did you get that from? A searing resentment of a military that was quick with a gun-butt and a steel-toecapped boot? Come now, Elizabeth! Individual soldiers may on rare occasions have been a little heavy-handed in their treatment of the locals, conceded Brigadier General Nurhadi, whose fate it was to set me straight. But the government had built roads and health centres, provided education and contraception. They brought to East Timor development, Suharto-style. In time ‘tell them about the roads’ became the press corps’ shorthand for the denial that ran in the water supply of the Jakarta elite.
    Habibie had drunk deeply of this source. He seemed genuinely surprised when, in August 1999, eight out of ten people in East Timor voted to boot Indonesia out and become independent. And he was unable to rein in the military when it unleashed a spiteful campaign of retribution that left much of the Indonesian-built infrastructure in East Timor in ruins. Though Habibie did initiate some quite radical reforms, he neither disassociated himself from his former boss nor secured the support of the military. In the last elections of the Suharto era, held in 1997 and contested only by three state-approved parties, the ruling Golkar party had won three-quarters of the vote. A year after Suharto stepped down, with forty-eight parties on the newly democratic slate, Golkar managed just over a fifth of the vote. Habibie was out.
    He was succeeded by an ailing half-blind Muslim scholar named Abdurrahman Wahid, aka Gus Dur. Gus Dur was a brave but wildly eccentric man with no experience of government. He horse-traded himself into power after his party won just 13 per cent of the vote, striking fragile alliances with improbable partners. When I arrived in May 2001, a normally docile parliament had started proceedings to impeach him. On paper, this was because of a dodgy loan involving Gus Dur’s masseur. In fact it was because the President, both blunt and stubborn, offended the very groups on whom he relied for support.
    It was a very strange time for me. I had arrived back in a city that throbbed with political protests. And yet all around the demonstrators, my life went on as usual. If hanging out with transgender sex workers, rent boys and gay men half my age could be described as ‘usual’ – my job, at the time, centred around a survey of HIV and risk behaviour among these groups. I found it disorientating. Massage parlours where men sold sex to other men were a new feature of Jakarta’s entertainment landscape, and there had been no gay bars when I last lived in the city. The transgenders, or waria , on the