Gods and demons, p.30
Gods and Demons, page 30
Suharto’s two older sons, Bambang Trihatmodjo and Sigit Harjojudanto, with whom Iskandar had grown close, invited him into Suharto’s sacred room.
Iskandar recalled Suharto as a ‘calm’ man who smoked cigars but didn’t drink. The ‘calmness’, or absence of expression, was known to deflect analysis of a thirty-two-year unchallenged rule synonymous with repression and cronyism.
Just as Suweden described Suharto’s inscrutable face, Iskandar witnessed it. ‘He never showed his emotions. He was a very controlled person; that’s very much the behaviour of Javanese elders. That’s how you earn respect, by having self-control, people don’t know your position, if you’re angry or not.’
It also commanded fear. But to the young Iskandar, Suharto was a nice man – a president at that – who waved and called out his name from his car window while passing. ‘What president would do that?’ he marvelled on the phone.
When the first family moved to Jalan Cendana, Iskandar rarely saw them. ‘We had completely different lives.’
But the connections ran deep. Iskandar’s English mother Judith had sold her paintings and jewellery from her shop, Rama Sita, at the family’s Menteng home, and Suharto’s wife Ibu Tien – derisively nicknamed Madame Ten Percent, for her unscrupulous money-skimming exercises – had sold her batik fabrics there. A running joke quoted in a 1996 obituary reported she was known to be in the ‘mining business’: ‘That’s mine, that’s mine.’
‘She was a very aggressive merchant,’ conceded Iskandar.
*
As I was leaving Suweden’s office, he handed me two tomes depicting Suharto as a beneficent ruler, published by his daughter, Tutut. One, titled Pak Harto: The Untold Stories, is an anthology of hundreds of anecdotes by politicians, aides, army personnel and acquaintances. The foreword is written by former vice-president Jusuf Kalla.
Most tales referred to Suharto’s Islamic fervour, none to his mystical endeavours. The overwhelming sentiment was of a sage and unpretentious leader blessed with unalloyed control. In one account, a former interpreter Quraish Shihab recalled asking Suharto, ‘Sir, what made you decide to take over the command when the G30/PKI [30 September Movement] coup attempt took place in 1965?’ Suharto replied, ‘I don’t know, Quraish, I just had this very strong push in my heart to do it. I also did not know precisely how I eventually managed to appear so convincing.’
I later messaged Suweden, asking if his mentor had gifted him property or concessions. He didn’t reply.
28
FULL CIRCLE
Seeking respite, I nipped across to tranquil Lombok in April 2016. The former Indonesian lawyer for Bali Nine mule Renae Lawrence was an island resident, and when I called she excitedly disclosed she had a new villa venture in Kuta. Would I like to stay a night?
I’d known Anggia Lubis Browne for years, a middle-aged woman from Medan in North Sumatra who’d married an Australian man. I regularly quoted her in my stories but this was a peep into her private life. Collecting me the next morning, she smoothly navigated her SUV over the ninety minutes from Senggigi’s tourist strip. In her laid-back but coolly shrewd voice, she chatted about Kuta’s neobuilding boom. I thought, She’s a lawyer, she understands the scams, the problems. And if anyone got hurt, it wouldn’t be this woman.
The villas were bungalows, small and a bit gloomy, more of a guesthouse. We ate lunch at the attached bale-style Indonesian restaurant, an oasis amid swaths of sandy fallow land waiting to be cultivated with lush plants and vegetables. But Lubis Browne was riding the crest of a lucrative investment wave at Kuta’s new frontier; she had several properties and boundless enthusiasm. Not only was she excited about this particular venture where I was a guest, but she also had a novel plan for it.
It was nearly sunset when she surprisingly advocated that Lawrence serve parole under her custodial care at the property, if the prisoner were permitted; she was nearly eligible for parole, but she would require a guardian in Indonesia. Her father, Bob Lawrence, seeing no prospect of that, had discounted the idea. ‘I trust her,’ Lubis Browne continued. ‘She can teach the local children English, gardening and cooking.’ The media-savvy lawyer had methodically thought it through.
She went on, discussing the void stretching before the remaining six on life sentences. To her, it was indefensible they still languished behind bars a year after the 2015 executions of Chan and Sukumaran. ‘It’s time the six Australians on life terms are released on humanitarian grounds,’ she said. True, they had virtually disappeared from the face of the earth. Only the two still at Kerobokan jail – the youngest, Matthew Norman, thirty-two, at my time of writing, and Si Yi Chen, thirty-four – continued voicing hope for release. ‘Send them back to Australia. While they are still alive, they should never give up,’ said Lubis Browne. ‘They were just mules. They have done their punishment. They’re just boys, give them a chance. Don’t play God,’ she implored her government from afar.
We moved to a restaurant on the beachfront. As the blazing sun slid into a tangerine-streaked sky, she proposed a lifeline: she would write to Widodo requesting clemency for the six whose legal appeals were exhausted. (There are now five after the death of Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen in May 2018.) Beyond a merciful president or a revision to the penal code – which sat on the backburner – prospects crumbled.
‘They were naive and young and worked in poorly paid jobs. When the offer came to go on this trip they didn’t think about what they were doing,’ Lubis Browne said. Failing clemency, she would happily take them into her custodial care, also – they could start a school and teach locals to surf. ‘It could be the Bali Nine Surf Camp,’ she joked, yet also seeing the attraction. ‘Jetstar would resume flights.’ (The Australia to Lombok leg had been ditched due to flat demand in 2014.) We laughed at the whimsical idea. Prisoners serving life weren’t entitled to parole: life means life in Indonesia.
Invoking comparisons with Schapelle Corby – whose first lawyer had been Anggia’s sister, a rookie, Lily Lubis – she went on, ‘Why [did] the Australian government only [fight] for Corby? What is the real story behind Corby’s release? What was the reason? I don’t believe she should have been.’
The following day it was sundown when we left Kuta for Senggigi. Along the way, Lubis Browne suddenly remembered committing to a girlfriend’s birthday party. ‘Do you mind if we stop?’ she asked, already swerving off the freeway to Mataram.
The apartment was abuzz with excitable Indonesian women, music, food and alcohol, though most weren’t drinking. Here was Lubis Browne, shedding her cool, closed lawyer exterior, in the groove among friends. It wasn’t a face I had seen on her before. Generous and inquisitive, the giggling women plied me with homemade spicy food.
The party girl’s Australian husband, an older man, sat on a stool with a beer, extolling the virtues of local women before proudly showing me a renovation he had built above the swimming pool. It was a tiny retreat for visiting family, he said. We had to climb a ladder to reach it; probably his man shed, I thought.
For the next few months I quizzed Lubis Browne on the progress of her clemency letter but she kept stalling and the idea eventually fizzled. Realistically, she was with Bali Nine lawyer Wirawan Adnan, who nailed his colours to political conservatism. Pardons for drug crimes were patently futile – although Frenchman Michael Blanc had bucked the trend as the first foreign drug criminal to walk free on parole from a Jakarta jail a month before Corby did in 2014. Also granted a presidential reduction of his original life sentence, like Corby he never admitted his crime, and he too became a cause célèbre at home. But Corby’s parole had been bitter and polarising, provoking a local backlash with antidrug campaigners trying to overturn her clemency. She’d caused then president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono huge political damage, said Adnan.
Lawrence was released in November 2018 to a media scrum after serving thirteen years, including six of remissions for good behaviour. She was deported smartly, but not before the Lubis sisters farewelled her inside Bangli prison.
*
I came full circle on a trip to Sydney in March 2017.
I had reviewed Sukumaran’s first art exhibition in Jimbaran, southern Bali, in September 2010, and it had given me a palpable flutter of excitement. In iconic Andy Warhol-inspired style, a pastiche of portraits depicting the Nine titled The Brady Bunch had nearly missed the opening. Still wet when it was hung, the centrepiece sold for $300 to a Western man who wished to remain anonymous but ‘wanted to help them’. Sukumaran told me he was intrigued to know who it was.
Seven years later, I took the train to the Campbelltown Arts Centre in south-west Sydney to Sukumaran’s posthumous, first major exhibition, Another Day in Paradise, a couple of months after it was launched. Many of his disturbing self-portraits, painted in Ben Quilty’s style using thick oils, had been created in his last days from Kerobokan and Nusa Kambangan jails. He had turned the mirror on himself, as Quilty suggested. In so doing, the world witnessed the personal savagery of execution. Many paintings had also been wet when they were unveiled to journalists on Cilacap’s dock, across the strait. The darkness engulfing Sukumaran as he awaited his fate was on display, the politics of the death penalty in defiance of his oppressors never more confronting. What depths did he plumb as he painted an execution chair and cross on which he would be tied in preparation for the firing squad? It was beyond comprehension.
Embedded in my subconscious is an anguished double self-portrait. A haloed, otherworldly Sukumaran on the left joins his human self, holding a voluminous pure-white cloth over his heart: the point of entry for the bullet. The bi-facial images – alarmed and sorrowful – were like gaping wounds. I had seen the painting and others in Indonesia; in this setting, the urgency had passed but not the impact. If anything, they seemed starker and more subversive.
I wandered slowly around the exhibition space in a trancelike state, viewing each painting lining the white walls. This was a far cry from the pandemonium of screeching sirens and macabre preparations surrounding them in Cilacap, Central Java, two years previously. But still the raw self-portraits screamed out.
Co-curated by Ben Quilty, the exhibition had attracted crowds but it was nearing the close, and I was relieved to be alone to reflect on Sukumaran’s violent end-journey, the catalyst that had brought the pictures home. I felt I was reliving this horror story. But the portraits of his grief-stricken mother, brother and sister, depicted as old beyond their years, cut to the bone.
A female assistant accompanied me after a while, curious to glean something tangible of Sukumaran and the Bali Nine members, whose representations hung like alarm bells in a row, each personality laid bare on canvas. Sukumaran had, I thought, got them right.
It was the closest they had been to the outside world since their arrests. Who knew if the six surviving lifers would ever see beyond the slammer?
I lingered, reluctant to leave. A personal attachment to the Bali Nine story gripped me. Sukumaran’s nightmare and crusade for mercy, giving credence to the futility of the death penalty, filled the sanitised space.
I wondered what it meant to viewers who knew him from a distance as an infamous painter who had destroyed his precious life, transformed himself and begged for mercy.
*
It was the end of an era. After a decade of living in Indonesia I was ready to return to the West – and my family, whom I missed every day.
This journey had left me suspended between two worlds, pulled as I was to the customs, people, foibles and magic of Indonesia. In the end, though, I’d been a foreigner in a foreign land. As an outsider, I was also regarded with suspicion by some Bali expatriates decrying negative exposure of their home. But along the way, I made firm friends with Indonesians and expats, some of them with me from the start.
Exposed to the good, bad and vicissitudes of the tropics, I had one day in April 2018 woken to the ravages of dengue fever. I couldn’t move. For a month, in the midst of writing this book, the mosquito-borne virus rendered me useless. I lay on my back hammered by a vicious hangover, cared for by a good friend between hospital visits.
On the flip side, one morning I opened my PC to find I was a Walkley Award finalist for my terrorism work. I had to read the email several times before it registered; it was a wonderful way to wake up.
But with Joko Widodo – the continued reformist hope – at the helm in his final presidential term, fears abounded that the country was lurching into hardline Islamic conservativism.
When I asked leading Indonesian author and astute chronicler, Eka Kurniawan, his view of the shifting political tone, he spoke pragmatically of a dynamic culture. ‘The rise of conservative religion is part of the tension in Indonesian politics. It’s not beautiful, of course, but not something new, too. Socially and politically, Indonesia is like a laboratory, where various experiments are inserted into a soup bowl. Sometimes we find it tastes good, but also it’s erratic. Communism, liberalism, democracy, pan-Islamism. These ideas are mixed, sometimes mingling, more often smashing each other. This is what creates all the beauty of this country, as well as its tragedy.’
Over a decade, I had become entwined in that tapestried tragedy and beauty. The erraticism is a worrying trend, the concern that Indonesians, known for pluralism and religious tolerance, may be forsaking their liberal democracy. Yet for all of Indonesia’s paradoxes and difficulties, I couldn’t have imagined the extraordinary experiences and insights I would gain along the way, nor my addiction to the resilient, cheerful people who live in diverse circumstances, many with nothing. Coming back from this journey, I saw life in broader brushstrokes, in a larger context with a heightened sense of light and shadow.
One night, early on, I had ordered a motorbike taxi and waited some time in a central tourist spot. Growing impatient, I was about to cancel it when an esoteric message flashed across my phone screen: ‘I am in the Heaven.’
My heart sank; I imagined the driver lying in a pool of blood, reaching out for their phone, this text a last gasp. What to do? I wandered off feeling helpless. Five minutes later, when I looked across the road, a young woman was sitting on her motorbike beneath a hotel sign: The Haven.
Many things were not as they seemed in Indonesia, but as though it was a vision I had stared at for too long, I had missed the obvious. So too, while immersed in this mysterious, mystical country, I had missed the lifting of a burden from my shoulders. No longer was I haunted by the corpse of my relationship or my dispirited self. Without thought, I had moved on.
PHOTO SECTION
Guests at the cremation ceremony of 83-year-old Anak Agung Ngurah Anom Mayun, the last king of Kerambitan, in Bali’s south-west Tabanan Regency, in 2009.
At the cremation ceremony, with one of the king’s twin cousins Prince Anak Agung Ngurah Rai Giri Gunadhi, the king’s niece Princess Giri Putri and my friend and contact Asana Viebeke Lengkong.
The five wives of Anak Agung Ngurah Anom Mayun.
At the ninth-century Borobudur Temple in central Java, with Thai Buddhist monks, 2011.
Bali Nine’s Renae Lawrence with female inmates at Kerobokan jail, 2010.
(Photo: Made Nagi)
At Bali’s Kerobokan jail in November 2013, interviewing prisoner Myuran Sukumaran, with my assistant Telly (Lia) Nathalia.
(Photo: Jason Childs)
Scott Rush on his twenty-ninth birthday, in Karangasem jail, north-east Bali, 2014.
(Photo: Made Nagi)
Caged man in Bali, 2015.
Interviewing an Islamic State follower at Jakarta’s rebuilt Marriott Hotel, 2015.
Interviewing the then Indonesian chief of police, Tito Karnavian, and the last surviving member of the Bali bombers’ inner circle, Ali Imron, at Jakarta’s police headquarters, 2015.
At the end of the day, after interviewing Ali Imron, with the Singapore counter terrorism team headed by Rohan Gunaratna (in suit beside Tito Karnavian), 2015.
With powerful Indonesian tycoon Tomy Winata and villagers in Sumatra, 2016.
Balinese men on an odyssey to save Bali’s Benoa Bay from reclamation, 2016.
On a boat in Benoa Bay, Balinese praying to their gods for salvation from the reclamation project, 2016.
Bali Nine lifer Matthew Norman in Kerobokan jail, Independence Day 2017.
Entrance to Nusa Kambangan penal island.
Celebrating the annual agricultural festival in Plaga, central Bali.
Preparing medicinal offerings in the midst of a busy upmarket Seminyak street.
Taking photos of students and teachers at Jakarta’s only refugee school, Roshan (‘Bright’ in Farsi), April 2017.
Talking to refugees at Roshan.
A quiet moment: waiting for Schapelle Corby with Indonesian media outside Denpasar’s parole office, 27 May 2017, before she returned to Australia.
Cadging a lift with Jakarta’s Metro TV crew while covering the 2017 eruptions of Bali’s sacred Mount Agung for The Times of London. Thousands were evacuated.
Passing rice paddies near Rendang’s volcano-monitoring post, east Bali, during my coverage of Mount Agung’s eruptions in 2017.
President Joko Widodo at the Klungkung sports centre, east Bali, distributing supplies to evacuees fleeing Mount Agung’s 2017 eruptions.
With the senior editor of The Jakarta Post, Endy Bayuni, at the 2018 Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, Bali.
