In the Time of Madness

I always feel like I am totally blind when it comes to the history of Indonesia, my own country. When I was a kid, History was my least favourite subject. I hated it so badly for we had to memorise all those confusing names and years. I buried my knowledge about Indonesian history so deeply that I don’t think I’m now able to remember anything about it. I hardly watched any news, not even read any newspapers! I was so ignorant. I entirely excluded myself from those valuable information, perhaps because you know… high school.. playing.. flirting (LOL) haha. Not until I graduated from High School that I started to become aware about what’s happening in the outside world; the conflicts, politics, wars, etc. Now I regret that I’ve missed so many historical events that happened in Indonesia. From the May Riots, the fall of Suharto’s regime, the ethnic conflicts, to the East Timor’s separation from Indonesia. All those happened within very short times.

That’s why I decided to read more books about Indonesia. I’m particularly interested in the current events, those that happened between the year 1996 to present. I chose to read foreign books because I believe that censorship still exists in our country. And I’m glad that I found this book titled In the Time of Madness: Indonesia on the Edge of Chaos written by Richard Llyod Parry who is a British foreign correpondent. In this book, he focused on three main events took place from 1997 until 1999: the Dayak and Madurese conflicts, the fall of Suharto, and the independence of East Timor. Although I haven’t finished reading this book, I’m quite enthusiast to share about his accounts and experiences regarding the conflicts in Borneo. The first thing that came out of my mind after reading about the Madurese vs Dayak violence was: did it really happen the way it was described in the book??

The Dayaks are the indigenous people inhabit the great island of Kalimantan. Although Dayaks in the old days lived in longhouses, pierced their penis with metal pins, and famously practiced headhunting, many of them nowadays are becoming urbanised. The Madurese are originated from Madura, a dry island off the northeastern coast of Java. They are famously known for bull racing competitions and their sickles as weapons. Madurese are those people who always proud to maintain their culture wherever they go. They have a great solidarity among their people and sometimes they would do anything to defend other Madurese no matter how good or bad they are. As a result of transmigration program applied by our government, many Madurese nowadays live outside their island, in Sumatra or Kalimantan. Although I, myself, never have a Madurese neigbour, I’ve heard many people complaining about them. I seriously have no idea how bad they are, but I think it’s mostly a common stereotype. As Parry described in the book:

The Madurese, I had heard several times, were ‘the Sicilians of Indonesia’; educated Jakartans smiled wearily and shook their heads when they spoke of them… I had heard them blamed for church burnings, attacks on Christians, and several riots during the election campaign. Everywhere they settled, the Madurese had become the neighbours that nobody wanted.

The tensions, fights, and violence attacks between Dayaks and Madurese had been breaking out for years. The most widely-known events occurred in 1999 and 2001, but in reality, the ongoing clashes had started in 1996, when local media had a limited press freedom under the old and nasty former ‘King of Corruption’ Soeharto.

It had begun at the very end of the previous year in a town called Sanggauledo, close to the border with Malaysian Sarawak… At some point during the course of the evening, two Dayak women had been bothered by a pair of Madurese boys. A fight broke out, the Madurese brandished their sickles, and a young Dayak, the son of the local village head, was stabbed. Scared and outnumbered, the Madurese took refuge in the local military outpost, where a delegation of Dayaks quickly presented themselves, demanding that the two be handed over. The soldiers refused, so they walked to the nearest Madurese enclave and set it on fire. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-eight houses were burned,’ Budi said. ‘Some of them were completely destroyed.’

I’ve heard about burnings and killings between the two groups, but one thing I didn’t know about these clashes was headhunting and cannibalism that were still practiced by them!!

The Dayaks took the bodies and cut their heads off with mandau. Then they cut open their backs and pulled out the hearts, and they ate the hearts and drank the blood. Page 44

… On New Year’s Day, he [Father Andreas - a Dayak] was in the town square when a crowd of a thousand Dayaks returned from one of their expeditions. ‘They were wailing like Indians in a Western, “Whoo-woo-woo-woo.” One of them was carrying a head, and another guy came up to me holding something that looked like a piece of tongue. He said, “This is a heart,” and raised it to his mouth and started eating it in front of my face.’ Andreas mimicked the action of someone ripping a lump out of a piece of meat. ‘It was dark red, but there wasn’t a lot of blood on it. It wasn’t fresh.’ His droopy grin was wider than ever. Page 43

…I asked what happened when the Dayaks returned from an attack on a village. ‘They brought back bags of heads. The heart, they eat directly. The idea is that it should be still fresh. A fresh heart has different power from lungs, and lungs are different from stomachs. Even the blood. From children to old people to babies, no exceptions at all. Four thousand of them, all beheaded with mandau. Yes, it is remarkable.’ Page 33

I felt so sick, I felt like vomiting. I couldn’t imagine that these things happened in my country. It’s terrible, sickening, horrible. How could a human do this to other humans?? Where were the police, soldiers, and army? Where was our government???? I don’t even know whether the story of ‘human eating human’ was publicised in Indonesia. If it wasn’t, then certainly the government did a pretty good job to cover this up :(.

Besides those firsthand and secondhand reports, Parry also witnessed the horror in Kalimantan; dead bodies without hearts and heads on the roads, Dayaks carrying bags of human’s heads, and the boys playing with a head of a dead man on an oil drum. One day when he was in a sate stand, a tall man who held the stick of “grey, fibrous, partly cooked meat” smiled to him and asked him to eat it. The man and the other boys laughed. They ate the meat and said “Delicious. Like chicken.”

… I thought about how easy it would be to take the meat, and to eat it. I thought about the animals which I had eaten over the years: horse, dog, monkey, snake, snail, slug. I remembered in particular the monkey, which had been grilled over a fire in a jungle village. Its meat had been tough and gamey, but afterwards I had seen a relic of it: a simian right arm, hand and portions of a ribcage. The skin was charred, but patches of fine grey fur were still visible and the hand had ten delicate fingernails, like the nails of a newborn baby. How far was a monkey from being a human? How close was I to being a cannibal? My dreaminess deepened as I pondered the consequences of my actions in the next two or three seconds: I, a cannibal…

Oh my God… I could not imagine if I was in his position!!!! Soooo scary…! Do you believe that these cannibals existed during the conflicts???

More info:

• Communal Violence in Indonesia: Lessons from Kalimantan
• ICE Case: Kalimantan Ethnic Violence