Gods and demons, p.29
Gods and Demons, page 29
Perhaps Jet best summed him up. ‘He’s a great guy, but very tough, disciplined, never gives up and dreams high.’ I pondered the never gives up part – the quality that was haunting Bali.
Since Winata had started his Tambling ecological venture, the lush regenerated reserve had seen about a hundred endangered species, including elephants, rhinos, wild buffalo, monkeys, sambar deer and turtles, return and flourish. Tambling was also home to thirty-five endangered tigers, with a rescue and rehabilitation centre then housing seven ‘conflict’ tigers that had previously attacked and killed humans and livestock in Sumatra. In the past decade, five had been released into the conservation area with GPS tracking devices. They were fed live pigs, bred at the reserve.
With some reticence, I asked Winata to show me the refuge during feeding time. We would wait for ‘guests’ – local officials – who were being collected in the heli. A staffer explained that feeding was every three days but it had been delayed to induce an extra bloodthirsty session for Winata’s guests. I watched men pile out of jeeps wearing red T-shirts emblazoned with the words Satgas Anti-Narkoba [Taskforce Anti-Drugs], Lampung. They crowded round a wire-mesh enclosure separating the tigers. A small squealing pig was dragged by its tethered trotters and dumped inside. The tigers ignored it.
This standoff continued for about an hour. The men were getting antsy; Winata’s staff cut to the chase, flinging pigs into small tiger cages. In one, I watched the pig freeze in fear, its haunches rigid in a half-sitting position. A ferocious Sumatran tiger paced, surveying its trapped prey. Suddenly it lunged. Bloodcurdling screams resounded around the compound. As though signalled, the other tigers tucked into their lunch. Colossal paws and teeth tightened around the pig’s neck, deftly and savagely taking it down. The pig writhed, its legs madly peddling the air until it succumbed. ‘That’s nature,’ Winata said with a shrug, acceding to the law of the jungle.
Winata’s floating development was to tap into a market irked by crime upsurges targeting foreigners, trash and gridlocked traffic. Using a sanitised Bali brand, it would try to re-create what had once been defined as a unique, peaceful paradise. Critics continued to bemoan the development, arguing it was yet another example of Balinese property being expropriated for tourism with a complicit government contravening regulations.
In Denpasar, ForBALI’s coordinator, Gendo, told me, ‘We don’t have any problem with Tomy Winata, but we do with anyone who wants to occupy Benoa Bay with unethical methods. This is a war. The only person who can overturn the reclamation is Jokowi [Widodo]. But Winata is very powerful. He can negotiate with everyone.’
On the last morning at Tambling, Winata called a staff meeting at his cottage. At his balcony table, he ate a leisurely breakfast of nasi goreng and dumplings while dispatching instructions to silent, glum faces. A couple of hours later, enveloped by the roar of the heli, we hovered above the jade belt. Looking out the window, I watched the exuberant waves of grinning staff recede into the distance.
‘I hope this will be good for Pak Tomy,’ Jet later texted about my article.
‘It will be balanced,’ I responded.
27
THE SMILING GENERAL
By the time the silver heli returned to Jakarta, Tambling’s verdant forest had woven its spell on me. I understood why it was Winata’s passion. But business was his drug. Probably money too, though he denied that.
Journalists apprised me of strange Winata stories. A couple of unappreciated articles had legal implications and I girded myself for his reaction to my piece. When it was published, I was almost disappointed by the thud of silence. My editor had forensically combed my work, removing anything remotely litigious; she heaved a sigh of relief. I was slightly dissatisfied, curious about Winata’s opinion. But I thought it impolitic to inquire. The silence perhaps signalled displeasure, but at least he wasn’t complaining.
*
Suharto’s shadow was never far away. Hard-won reforms after his collapse were not necessarily set in stone, corruption remained and civil society worried the military was gaining the political power that had been stripped after Suharto’s fall.
But the divisive political-Islamic extremism that erupted in Jakarta in 2016 brought some nostalgia for the ‘old days’. In 2017, Jakarta lawyer Wirawan Adnan – with whom I had a long connection over Bali Nine cases – told me he longed for a return to the economic and social stability of Suharto’s reign and a halt to the hardline mass protests Suharto would have efficiently crushed.
That Suharto’s brutal rule had been toppled by student-led riots, political chaos, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and corruption didn’t disturb Adnan’s daydream, and he wasn’t isolated in his fears for the country’s future.
Intrigue still surrounded Suharto. Much about him remained as hearsay. He had preferred to be viewed as a benign sovereign but, like many, I speculated on what lurked beneath his deceptive smile.
When the opportunity arose to interview the Balinese man who had been Suharto’s aide, bodyguard and near-constant companion for twenty years, I flew to Jakarta. Little did I suspect that the seventy-two-year-old Nyoman Suweden lived in a fantasy devoted to Suharto’s memory and his family, in denial of known facts. I arrived at his office ahead of my interpreter and the moustached Suweden, wearing a batik shirt and dark pants, spoke no English so I stumbled along in my Indonesian. I had arrived at the tail end of Jakarta’s annual floods, and my interpreter was stuck in traffic; when I explained this to Suweden, he promptly ordered an elaborate Javanese morning tea.
The retired lieutenant colonel had remained the adjutant of Pak Harto, as he was known, after he’d been forced to resign in May 1998. Then asked by Suharto to be his personal bodyguard, Suweden could not have been more honoured.
In his office, which fronted the Australian Embassy, his amateur artworks of lush Balinese landscapes adorned the walls. Behind glass cabinets were countless photos of Suharto with his children and his wife Siti Hartinyah (also known as Ibu Tien; ibu means ‘mother’ or ‘Mrs’), and on ‘incognito’ impromptu visits to villagers. The office was like a small shrine. In one image, Suweden obsequiously bowed from the waist, clasping both hands over Suharto’s extended one; there was Suharto with Suweden overseas, the autocrat wearing his perennially enigmatic smile and black peci (cap); and Suharto on his hospital deathbed hooked up to tubes, surrounded by Indonesia’s power elite paying last respects to their immutable leader. Suweden proudly showed me dozens of images of himself posing with Suharto: at the Great Wall of China in 1988, in Hawaii, in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia in 1995 under tight security after a UN summit to Copenhagen, to Western Europe, to Japan and to Washington, DC. ‘In Bosnia he was given a flak jacket but he gave it to his assistant – he wasn’t afraid of death,’ Suweden marvelled.
Much has been made of Suharto’s inscrutability, and Suweden recalled that quality with vicarious pride. ‘He was never emotional. He was stable. He followed the Javanese proverb: Don’t be too proud; don’t be too curious. He followed it for his own emotional stability. He never showed anger, he had self-control. He believed in God, that God protected him. He was self-confident. Suharto was very wise. I loved him as a friend, he was very loyal and good to me. Yaah, yaah,’ Suweden blurted repeatedly. ‘He was very kind.’
Later, when I asked my Indonesian sources if they knew an unbiased Suharto source, I was met with derisory smiles. I had naively entered Suweden’s office.
After the death in 1996 of Ibu Tien, rumours abounded that she had been shot by one of her children. As did speculation that Suharto’s wayhu, or divine power and inspiration, had dissolved with her demise. Descended from minor Javanese royalty in Solo, Ibu Tien was believed to have conferred the wayhu on her husband. Suweden, scoffing at the theory, pointed to the 1997 Asian financial crisis and subsequent unrest that triggered Suharto’s downfall.
Suweden, the devoted servant, would rise at 3 a.m. to go to Suharto’s home in Jalan Cendana (meaning Sandalwood) and wake him for morning prayers at 4.30 a.m. ‘I helped him with breakfast, laundry, exercise until 11 p.m., sometimes later, until he died in 2008.’ When Suharto had a stroke in 1997, Suweden’s duties intensified and he tended to his boss’s every need, including showering and letter-writing. Until then, he said, Suharto had played golf, gone deep-sea fishing in the Thousand Islands off North Jakarta’s coast and to his cattle ranch in Tapos, Bogor, in West Java, with Suweden joining him. ‘After the stroke he was shaky, he couldn’t speak properly, but he could still think well.’ Reports emerged his frailty was initially overplayed, and that he had been spotted playing golf and jogging.
Suweden would have lived at Suharto’s house, but he had his own family. Sometimes he stayed overnight instead of returning home to East Jakarta. However, he said vehemently, ‘Pak Suharto was keluarga [family] Number 1. As a Balinese man I fulfilled my duty and yes, I felt honoured.’
‘What sort of man was Suharto?’ I asked.
‘Pak Suharto was not a dictator, like people said he was. Many spoke badly of him, few people talked about his goodness. At the office he was the commander-in-chief; he implemented government rules and regulations. But at home he was a different person. He never looked down at people, he never embarrassed anyone and he was caring.’
Why is he defending a long-dead, ruthless kleptocrat? I thought.
When I mentioned the cronyism and nepotism that had marked Suharto’s rule, Suweden denied it. ‘It’s blatantly untrue. Suharto never gave his children preference. Businessmen actually approached his children to take advantage. There is no proof Suharto was corrupt.’ Apparently the Smiling General had definitely not looted billions of dollars of state money – further, Suharto hadn’t even had any money. ‘The money went into foundations. Suharto didn’t have a bank account. There are accusations he had accounts overseas but there is no proof of that.’
When Suharto died, aged eight-six, he had escaped prosecution for corruption by declaring himself too ill to stand trial. He was accused in 2000 of embezzling US$600 million of state funds through charitable foundations to bankroll businesses controlled by his cronies and his children. In 2004 Transparency International ranked Suharto top of the leaders’ corruption ladder for misappropriating up to US$35 billion during his three-decade reign, with his family and cronies beneficiaries.
Yet Suharto had simple tastes. Along with a partiality for basic Javanese food, ‘tofu and tempe’, his house was modest and old-fashioned. ‘He didn’t want to live in the palace,’ said Suweden. ‘He didn’t want to be perceived like a king. His father worked in the rice fields, he came from ordinary people.’
Suharto had been born into a poor family in the village of Kemusuk outside Yogyakarta, in Central Java. His parents divorced soon after his birth. For much of his childhood he was passed between foster parents and carers. It was through a relative that he met Kiai Daryatmo, a noted Javanese dukun and healer, whose mystic arts left a lasting impact on Suharto’s life. Yet Suweden strangely insisted that Suharto hadn’t practised mysticism and had adhered only to the Muslim faith – fanatically, in fact. ‘He prayed five times a day. He did not practise mysticism.’
In later life, Suharto visited sacred sites, among them mountains, caves and rivers. In his autobiography, he revealed parts of his early childhood spent in Wuryantoro, Central Java, with his aunt: ‘I was … given spiritual training by my stepfather such as fasting every Monday and Thursday. I did it diligently and with strong belief.’
Endy Bayuni, the Jakarta Post’s senior editor whose journalism was sorely tested during the Suharto era, said the dictator was very open about his mysticism in the ’70s.
‘Three members of his Cabinet were dukuns. One was with the Jakarta-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies; he was a special presidential adviser. He said Suharto consulted him to gain extra power. The dukuns (in his Cabinet) shared the stories,’ said Bayuni.
The prevailing view among Indonesians was that Suharto was surrounded by mystical forces that later portended his demise. Spiritualists pointed to omens – not only his wife’s death in 1996 but landslides near her burial site and the death of his spiritual mentor four months before he was overthrown in May 1998. At his deathbed, dukuns expressed awe that despite multiple organ failure, Suharto’s spiritual power had sustained him several times.
I found it extraordinary that Suweden refuted Suharto’s mystic pursuits. Even former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had claimed sorcery was deployed against him during the 2009 presidential campaign. ‘Many are practising black magic. Indeed, I and my family can feel it,’ SBY was quoted as saying by Antara, Indonesia’s official news agency.
Javanese cultural genetics, the convergence of the real and transcendental worlds, was widely acknowledged and practised. Syncretic Islam, or Abangan – a blend of Hinduism, Buddhism and animism – integrated with Javanese Islamic belief.
A nominal Muslim until the 1990s, Suharto undertook a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 1991 to shore up his religious and political legitimacy and exert greater control. But throughout his life he was a devotee of the Javanese tales of wayang kulit – shadow puppetry – taking values from the wayang as a basis for his political power. In the wayang kulit, derived from Indian narratives that trace from the first century, the dalang, or puppet master, manipulates and controls leather puppets whose shadow images are viewed by audiences. Based on the legendary Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, life is a battle between anarchy and order, the goal to achieve the latter through mystical endeavour. Popular in Java and Bali, the shadow plays allegorically mirror the politics of the day.
In 1974, the year before Indonesia invaded East Timor, Suharto invited Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam to a mystical Javanese cave named Gua Semar (Semar Cave) on Central Java’s Dieng Plateau, where Suharto had meditated. Indonesians observed Suharto took Whitlam into his confidence. Australian documents released in 2000 reveal that around this time Australia gave tacit approval for Suharto to invade East Timor.
‘It was during this visit that Whitlam agreed to turn a blind eye to Indonesia’s imminent invasion of East Timor; as a sign of gratitude Suharto took him into the Cave of Semar, sacred to Java’s greatest native deity,’ wrote Richard Lloyd Parry in In the Time of Madness.
In Javanese mythology, Semar is a pot-bellied, comical but all-empowering mystic clown-god of the shadow plays. This entity’s name also invokes the document on which Sukarno signed over his presidential power to Suharto on 11 March 1966: it was called Supersemar, the abbreviation of Surat Perintah Sebelas Maret (Letter of Instruction, 11 March), a wordplay on Semar. In the document, Sukarno handed Suharto authority to restore order by whatever measures deemed necessary during the chaos of the anti-communist massacres.
*
In his adolescence, Iskandar Wawo-Runtu had been a regular visitor to the Suharto household. He was one of five children of Bali’s legendary Wawo-Runtu family, whose iconic 1960s Sanur hotel drew celebrities and royalty from afar. It was in Jakarta that the family found themselves amid the most influential of all.
Now in his early sixties, Iskandar guided me through Suharto’s home and personal life as he spoke to me in a phone interview from Yogyakarta.
The Suhartos had been neighbours during a tumultuous period between 1963 and 1967 in Jalan Haji Agus Salim, in the well-heeled Central Jakarta district of Menteng. During Suharto’s dethroning of Sukarno and the subsequent 1965–66 massacres, Iskandar was in junior high school. ‘We lived in No 94 and Suharto’s house was No 98,’ Iskandar said. ‘I grew up with his six children. My sister, Fiona, was close to Tutut’ [Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, the eldest Suharto daughter].
Significant benefits flowed to Suharto’s neighbours. ‘Definitely it was an advantage to us kids being neighbours as Suharto became the most powerful person in Indonesia. The whole street was closed to the public; we could bike around freely; we watched movies every weekend at Suharto’s house. They showed a lot of Western films, he would have had access to the censors. In those days it was a great luxury.’
Iskandar, then aged about thirteen, recalled the austerity, hunger and economic paralysis that marked the period under Sukarno, the charismatic but authoritarian founding president. In their blocked-off street, the Wawo-Runtu family were sheltered from Jakarta’s bloody rampages and riots.
It was in Suharto’s personal life that Iskandar gleaned the banal and mystical Javanese side of the man roundly feared. ‘Suharto came from the village; he followed simple habits and ate very simple Javanese food, rice and noodles,’ Iskandar recalled. ‘He dressed casually in the Javanese tradition of a sarong while indoors. If he had visitors, he changed into pants and a batik shirt.’
Inside a simple, semi-modern 1940s Dutch house were displays of gaudy souvenirs and trinkets. Neither his brother Yaya nor Iskandar remembered seeing books. ‘They didn’t have a sense of beauty, they put everything together, there was a stuffed tiger. It was tacky.’
As then head of Kostrad (the first-line warfare combat unit of the Indonesian army), Suharto had a modest salary. But in 1967 when the family moved to Jalan Cendana, a fifteen-minute walk from the former home, it was furnished in the same gauche fashion. Suharto had a penchant for caged animals, keeping orangutans and forest cats on the property in the tradition of army generals of the day. ‘It was a hobby of the powerful. When they moved to Cendana they had to become international and they spoke no English. They called my great-aunt [Jane Wawo-Runtu], also a neighbour, and she taught Suharto and his wife English.’
Of greatest interest in Suharto’s house was one room. ‘As a kid, I could go to an area of his house nobody visited. He had a room containing all his mystical objects, collections of spiritual artefacts from sacred sites, called pusaka, such as his kris,’ said Iskandar. The kris, a Javanese dagger, is said to possess mystical powers and provide protection, though the blades could render good or bad luck. ‘Suharto had a strong, traditional Javanese background. He had to respect the pusaka – give offerings and observe the calendar. It was an intense [thing] to them.’ The pusaka purportedly maintained Suharto’s hold on power. ‘I was curious about the objects. Certainly it’s a room you don’t want to enter unless you’re taken.’
