Introduction by Vincent Bevins

In 1965, when General Suharto seized power in Indonesia, the United States recognised his authority even before the legitimate President realized what was going on. Over the next few months, his military government oversaw the extermination of approximately one million leftists (and people accused of being leftists).

In 2024, his former son-in-law, General Prabowo Subianto, was elected president. Prabowo is himself widely accused of carrying out atrocities in the country and in East Timor. Things have gone rather the same way in the Philippines. In 2022, Bongbong Marcos – the son of US-backed anticommunist dictator Ferdinand Marcos – won the highest office by a landslide.

The continuity between the two eras is obvious, even if the former was supposed to have ended. In liberal anglophone circles, it is generally understood that we are living in the democratic world created by the ‘people power’ revolutions of the 1980s and 1990s. What is supposed to matter in Indonesia is the 1998 Reformasi or ‘reformation’ – ultimately supported by President Bill Clinton – not the scorched-earth campaign of the 1960s and the dictatorship.

Today, Indonesia is being forced to confront the fragility of the formal transition to democracy at the end of the Cold War. Elites linked to the former dictatorship are once again in power, and the crimes of the military are being buried. It is salutary, then, to revisit the Reformasi – its dreams and possibilities, struggles and defeats.

Afrizal Malna is an ideal guide to this period. Born in Jakarta in 1957, he has been an active presence on Indonesia’s artistic and activist scene for decades. He is known both for his intellectual sophistication and at times chaotic literary experimentation, which both reflects the fast-changing texture of life in the mega-city and served as a rebuke to Suharto’s sterile militarism.

Malna was in the streets during the epochal protests of the Reformasi, which are recounted here with dry and troubled irony. After the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime in 1998, he quit writing for five years and worked with the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC), supporting anti-eviction struggles. As such, he knows very well how precarious, unpredictable and explosive life can be in Jakarta.

Anglophone readers – who are seldom given access to the rich tradition of socially charged literature in Bahasa Indonesia – will learn much from his jagged history of an unrealised future.

About the city, its poverty and fury. How? Forget it. About a bowl of chicken porridge that overflows onto the floor. Fine, whatever. Memories of a chicken whose coop’s independence came less than a century ago. What’s this all about? Enough already …

15 January 1974. My first day of high school. The first time I set out from home towards the SMA 5 building on Jalan Budi Utomo, Central Jakarta – only to find the Planet Senen shopping centre ablaze, surrounded by torched vehicles and thick clouds of smoke. The modern products sold at the mall were then still new in Jakarta, and so were the Japanese cars that would soon overtake their European rivals. 

I darted between the scorched chassis, afraid of being late. But the school gates, it turned out, were closed. Later I would learn that student demonstrations had erupted against a state visit by Japanese prime minister Tanaka Kakuei. At the time, I was perplexed by the fact that cars far beyond my family’s reach – and our most prominent shopping centre – could easily be burned to husks. I watched people carry away all sorts of loot from the burning shops: televisions, radios, tape recorders. Their arms were covered with rows of wristwatches, their necks wreathed in gold chains.

From the outside, the ‘Malari incident’¹ might have looked like a protest against the domination of Japanese capital. But on the inside, we heard rumours about a power struggle among Suharto’s top brass – particularly between the generals Soemitro and Ali Moertopo. Either way, students were once again praised as model rebels, and the urban poor damned as criminals.

That night it rained. My house in Senen flooded. Then everything fell quiet. I woke to the sound of the front door opening and soldier’s boots splashing through the floodwater. A harsh flashlight shone in my face. Time moved sharp as needles. Night transformed into four walls.

Something similar happened during the Reformasi, in May 1998. By then, I was living in South Jakarta. Hearing explosions and screams, I left the house. Cars were on fire; buildings were ablaze. Black smoke, the reek of burning rubber, an atmosphere of treachery. A group of brawny men were trying to flip over a car. Where did they come from?

I joined the masses moving towards the parliament building along Jalan Sudirman. In Semanggi, I saw soldiers shooting rubber bullets into the crowd, and gangs of turbaned men holding long, gleaming swords. It felt like I had entered another era, or a postmodern film.

I saw brutality flare. I saw human bodies burning inside shops and houses that had been set alight. The students chanted that famous line from Wiji Thukul’s poem: “There’s only one word: resist!” Again, they were idolised – especially after the military fired live ammunition into a crowd at Trisakti University – while common people were dismissed as criminals or victims. A photograph shot that day by Julian Sihombing, which was published in the daily Kompas, has since become iconic: a young student sprawled in the middle of the street. But it turned out that Rizky Rahmawati Pasaribu wasn’t dead. Today she works at a law firm. At an event to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the protests, she recalled that a rubber bullet had only grazed her head.

Chinese-Indonesians were again targeted during the Reformasi, though the government denies it to this day.

I was eventually dragged into the parliament building, which the masses had broken into and occupied. That terrible, palatial structure. They made its walls and its enormous columns convulse with the fury of a wild animal. So many aspiring parliamentarians, claiming to represent the people, have sought a place in it. Inside, I felt only fear.

The Jakarta I knew was full of potholed streets, narrow alleys that flooded in the rainy season, sputtering city buses that spewed fumes beneath the cries of the conductor, slums where fires often broke out, gridlocked traffic, and the threat of damnation in hell. 

I want to place my experience of the Reformasi beside Zeffry J. Alkatiri’s 1999 poem “Bang Ali and 70s Jakarta”:

Twi-dwi-dwi Kramat Jati yeah
Bang Ali seven iron seeds
Wer-wer-kutawer-jebrot!
While sleeping, the ghosts
of J.P. Coen and Daendels come creeping
into his body, hand over a sledgehammer
to bash the stubborn
citizens’ faces
First thing when he wakes, he smashes the city
Into five pieces
And fills the streets with Roburs, bemos, Dodges,
and helicaks.
Then, he
Gathers the artists at TIM
Gathers the gamblers at Jakarta Fair
Gathers the prostitutes in Kramat Tunggak
Gathers the wholesalers in Kramat Jati
Gathers the schoolchildren to sing
at City Hall
Gathers the buses in terminals
Gathers the athletes in sports halls
Gathers the celebrities in Kuningan
Transforms the swamps of Ancol and Bina Ria
Transforms the weeds around Monas into Taman Ria
Transforms the muddy kampung roads into concrete
And gathers the corrupt in their offices

Jakarta changes faces in no time flat
Neck throttled, eyes bulging
Makes the provincials stumble
A prison for the luckless

Who told you to come to Jakarta?
You swear it yourself, you bear it yourself
Eda… e… baby
(says the singer Vivi Sumanti)

But so many are bent on gambling with dreams
As the Koes Plus song goes:

I’m going back to Jakarta …
Come hell or high water …

Jakarta was transformed at a speed that made my childhood lonely and solipsistic. The city did not stand still long enough for me to arrange its spatial meanings. Every new governor seemed to reorganise it. Under Ali Sadikin, prostitution was contained within Kramat Tunggak and gambling in Ancol: both industries, neither of which exist anymore, brought a lot of tax revenue – which was put into laying roads and expanding public transport. “I could get 24 billion rupiah a year from the gambling tax,” Sadikin said in his 1999 cultural address at Taman Ismail Marzuki’s Graha Bhakti Budaya². “Now it would be as much as 15 trillion rupiah per year.” I was stupefied by the thought of such sums circulating in Jakarta. In 1983, the Suharto administration had devalued the currency from 700 to 970 rupiah per US dollar. Now, in 2014, it is 12,500.

As Zeffry observed, “the gathering of the corrupt in their offices” became more frequent after Sadikin’s term. Especially once Tramtib (an abbreviation of ‘ketentraman dan ketertiban’, meaning ‘peace and order’) was set up in 1990. The city security corps were tasked with evicting the homes and informal businesses of the poor.

I want to consider the poem through the lens of other memories. Memories that are always vivid – and always leave me dumbstruck. Memories that make me wonder whether to use ‘saya’ (the formal first-person pronoun) or ‘aku’ (the informal first-person pronoun) or ‘kita’ (the third-person plural pronoun, inclusive of addressee) when referring to myself. ‘Aku’ and ‘kita’ – an ‘I’ and a ‘we’ that often switch places – or are forced to stand on a foundation that turns out to be groundless.

The frame is almost never the same as the content. But content cannot be delivered without a frame. Sometimes, gradually, we become so absorbed in the frame that we do not realise that the content has disappeared. As in Seno Gumira Ajidarma’s 1998 short story “The Beggar’s Party” – a satire of the political parties that proliferated after the Reformasi, which were resplendent with frames but poor in content:

“‘I’ve been tricked by their clothes,’ he thought. ‘I’d assumed their tattered rags represented the beggar’s life, represented an idealism without self-interest or ulterior motives. I had forgotten that when the beggar’s life becomes the centrepoint of a political party, its meaning is only that it claims for itself the right to absolute truth. The beggar’s life is a kind of liberation, but the political party is a limitation. Panji Tengkorak was a wandering martial arts master who not only refused to serve as the head of the Beggar’s Party, but refused to be seen at all, vanishing from the world of martial arts forever and ever.’”

In 2001, a group of NGOs organised a forum at the Hotel Ibis in Slipi to discuss the fate of Jakarta’s becaks, or cycle rickshaws. Five becak drivers from the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC) were invited, but only to listen to the NGO representatives. So one of the them got up and invited his friends to walk out. When the shocked moderator begged them to return, the driver spoke his mind: “You’re talking about our fate – the becak drivers of Jakarta – but we’re not allowed to speak for ourselves. Our fathers fought for this country too. But we’ve never tasted the fruits of that struggle. We don’t know where this ‘freedom’ is for us. In all my life, today is the first time I’ve set foot in a fancy hotel. But even here, where our lives are being discussed, we’re still not allowed to speak.” They left.

The becak driver’s statement reminds me of the Papuan writer John Waromi’s 2010 poem “Statement on Civilisation”:

You say you’ve come to chase the coloniser
from our land.
You say we live backwards and poor
And so you will raise us up to be the equals
of other nations
…
Turns out all this time
you’ve never spoken honestly and openly.
Which is why, all this time,
you’ve never understood our will.
Because you don’t know our language.

It’s difficult for someone who hasn’t been to Papua to appreciate the depths of Waromi’s pain, just as it isn’t easy to understand the depths of the becak driver’s anger. Because it’s too late – we’ve already perceived them through the stigma attached to the urban poor. Our idea of poverty it itself impoverished.

On another occasion, a group of day labourers were waiting under the overpass in Grogol in West Jakarta for trucks that might take them to a construction site. Instead a Tramtib vehicle pulled up.

An officer asked: “Where’s your ID card, sir?”

The worker, holding out his hoe, responded: “This is my ID card.”

“Don’t mess around with me!” 

“I’m not messing around. My life depends on this hoe. This hoe is clearer than my ID card. The buildings of Jakarta stand today because of this hoe.” 

On 29 October 2001, four hundred families – around 1,600 people – were evicted from Rawadas, a kampung settlement spread across 15 hectares in Pondok Kopi, East Jakarta. They had lived there for more than 15 years. Some were public transit drivers (metrominis and microlets), others day labourers. Their negotiations with various city officials, including some from PDI-P,³ had gone nowhere.

The evicting forces included 400 Tramtib officers, 300 cops, 100 hired thugs who claimed to act in the name of the Betawi⁴ residents of Pondok Kopi, 20 soldiers, 100 municipal representatives, and several employees of the National Electrical Company. They cut the electricity, smashed homes and left the settlement in shambles. When the residents fought back, 14 were arrested and 22 were injured. Amid this battle, one resident, Ibu Tarigan, delivered a speech from the crowd, which a UPC volunteer managed to capture on video:

“Don’t let them say that since PDI-P won, the people can enjoy the results. Turns out this is even worse than the New Order. They give us a PDI-P card so we can unite and work together. Turns out, we can work together into the sea. The colonial time… wasn’t like this. Even though we were enslaved, we were given food to eat, milk to drink, a place to live, treatment when we were sick. Now, no. We only eat the fruit of our own sweat. Coming here wasn’t free, we had to pay. Freedom, they say. Independence, they say. Take down the red and white. Tear it up. There’s no freedom anymore. The people are left to suffer alone. There you went to make your case – I defended you! There you went to report – I defended you! Everyone said defend, defend, defend! But this is the reality of defending the state. It doesn’t mean anything. Just drop the bomb now. Let us die in the first cemetery. Our parents, our grandparents, made Indonesia free. And now this is our fate. I’ll tell that Mega⁵, I’ll write her a letter… ‘Mega, go to your parents’ graves and ask them.’ We came here, it wasn’t free. We bought this land. Now you evict us just like that. All the parties promise to support us, to defend us. But after they take the government, take the power, they just force us out… There’s no freedom! Throw that flag in the trash!”

All of this happened when I was still actively volunteering at the UPC, side by side with the urban poor. These memories I think of as a ‘community ring’ – full of magnetism, drawing us together for our collective survival. 

In 1999, at the turn of the millennium, various social, political and business organisations put on big events to greet the next century. But do the poor think about centuries? What might the span of 100 years mean to them? We organised a meeting to find out. Their responses surprised us.

“A century? One hundred years? We couldn’t imagine such a long perspective, such a vast projection of time. You could almost say that living, for us, is a kind of emergency management, a way of negotiating the crisis between ‘today’ and ‘tomorrow’. There is no other day. Our dreams and hopes are contained within these two days, which are endlessly repeated. The question is: how are we going to eat – today and tomorrow?” 

“What part could we take in the celebrations?”

“We’re poor. How can we display poverty in this celebration of 100 years?”

We laughed. Some of us stuck out our hands, palms up – the gesture of beggars. We laughed some more. Poverty had been reduced to the stereotypical image of beggars – which we rejected. But how were we to make poverty present? A sensitive question.

“Are the stoves of the rich any different from the stoves of the poor?” 

This provocation cleared the gravel that obstructed our view of ourselves, cleansed our discussion of the garbage of stigmas. We began to gather everyday belongings, which we eventually brought to the National Gallery of Indonesia, for our “Millennium of Poverty” exhibition. The UPC transported these objects from the slums of Jakarta, Tangerang and Karawang. We piled them on the gallery floor, as if unloading the contents of a junk shop. There were rotting pushcarts and rusted-out tin roofs, even salted duck eggs. 

We were suddenly able to appreciate their presence, see them on their own terms, separate from our lives. We realised that they held so many memories, so many stories, so much of our history. In tears, someone told the legend of our ancestors through an old lamp. Time was no longer a matter of 100 years or 1,000 years, today or tomorrow. It was something that lived and was stored in the material world.

Poverty isn’t a condition inherited at birth.

1. What began as student demonstrations against government corruption and economic policy turned into a riot and eventually into an anti-Chinese-Indonesian pogrom. It is likely that the violence was instigated by agents provocateurs employed by elements involved in the power struggle between Soemitro and Ali Moertopo.
2. Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) is a massive, government-sponsored multidisciplinary arts complex in the Cikini area of Jakarta. TIM was established under Ali Sadikin in 1968, and its programming is managed by the Jakarta Arts Council, a rotating board of artists and writers. Graha Bhakti Budaya is the largest of TIM’s buildings, a 954-seat theatre.
3. Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (PDI-P), the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, popularly seen at the time as the most viable progressive party in the post-dictatorship politics of democratic reform.
4. A creolised ethnic group native to Jakarta, comprised of communities who had settled there long before the waves of mass migration in the twentieth century, when the city served as the capital of the Dutch East Indies and was called Batavia in Dutch or Betawi in the local dialect.
5. Megawati Sukarnoputri, head of PDI-P, daughter of Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, and newly elected president (2001-2004) at the time of this eviction.