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

up with a delivery to the lab at 3 or 4 a.m. By eight in the morning I was back on my motorbike and on my way to the daytime part of my job. On the way, I was often accosted by a teenager in white robes and a chequered turban, a member of the Laskar Jihad fundamentalist group which was at the time openly waging war on Christians in the eastern islands of Maluku. He rattled his collection box and distributed pamphlets promising a Maluku cleansed of Christians. This was a lot more shocking than the blossoming of gay bars or bookshops offering socialism and multiple orgasms. Though it was easy to make fun of the vague assertions of Pancasila, I took it for granted that religious tolerance was central to Indonesia’s continued existence. And yet in the jockeying for power that had been going on since the fall of Suharto, Indonesians killed one another in the name of religion, and the authorities did nothing.
    After Gus Dur was impeached, Sukarno’s daughter Megawati Sukarnoputri took over as president. She shared her father’s strong belief in national unity, but not his charisma; she had the well-upholstered look common to Ibu-Ibu in the Suharto era, and was famously aloof. Though hers was a colourless presidency, she didn’t needle the army in the same way as her predecessor had. Prodded into action by a bomb in a Bali nightclub that killed over 200 people in 2002, she began to take more serious action against Islamic extremism. The country gradually settled down.
    In 2004 Indonesia held its first direct presidential election; until then, presidents had been chosen by the legislature. In over half a million polling stations nationwide, voters stuck a nail through a ballot paper to indicate their choice. One of the polling stations was directly outside my house in central Jakarta. From dawn when the volunteers, officials and ballot boxes arrived until the final tally in the early evening, the air was electric with excitement. The poll was as well organized as anything I’ve ever seen in Indonesia, and it made me rather emotional. Five years earlier, Jakarta was in flames and the economy was pulverized. Since then Indonesians had been traumatized by the loss of East Timor and the army-sponsored carnage that followed, they had watched civil war unfold in Maluku and witnessed bloody rebellions in Aceh and Papua, they had impeached and replaced a president, and they were still materially a lot worse off than they had been before 1997. But 140 million voters went peacefully off to the polls on a single day and, with barely an incident, elected a new president. It was quite an achievement.
    Given a choice for the first time ever, Indonesians chose a Suharto-era general uniformly known as SBY, representing a party that had only existed for four years.

    I left Jakarta for the second time a year later. When I came back in 2011 to begin the wanderings that make up most of this book, SBY had been re-elected for a second term. In my absence Jakarta had completed its transition from a collection of scruffy but friendly neighbourhoods into a grandiose-but-grumpy megalopolis. In the few remaining alleyways, the noodle men still ting-ting, the vegetable vendors still chant their wares. But they must compete with neon-lit Indomaret convenience stores and the just-add-water Indomie noodles of the New Indonesia. Indonesia is being homogenized by the same force that pulled these islands together into a map of a nation, drawn by the Dutch and appropriated by the Indonesians: commerce. Since SBY has been in power, the economy has grown by 5.7 per cent a year on average. That’s close to five times more than the UK and nearly four times the US rate over the same period; it left Indonesians three times richer than they had been when I first lived in the country. The new wealth has created an army of new consumers armed with cell phones and satellite TV; it may have done more to blend Indonesia together than all of Suharto’s flag-waving