It was further announced that with immediate affect, all adults would need to register for an identity card and on which they would need to state which of the five approved religions they followed. These were: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism and Buddhism. Confucianism was outlawed due to its perceived popularity in communist China. Finally, Chinese language schools and courses were banned and Chinese writing symbols forbidden. Some of these rules remained in force for over fifty years.
In 1967 the government went so far as to set up a committee to discuss the Chinese Problem or Masalah Cina as it was known in Indonesian. Possible solutions debated included the forced repatriation to China of all people of Chinese descent, and when this was declared ‘impractical’ other solutions were sought instead. It was decreed that Indonesia would attempt to find ways to take advantage of the economic and business skills of the Chinese-Indonesians whilst ensuring they were no longer in a position to uphold economic dominance.
As years were put between the so-called coup and the present, discrimination against ethnic Chinese continued on one hand, whilst perceived economic inequality existed on the other. A system of belief bordering on myth sprang up that ‘the Chinese’ were all rich and were squirrelling away the wealth of the country whilst employing indigenous Indonesians in less than salubrious working conditions. As time progressed, an uneasy kind of truce existed, but with racial undertones that would one day again bubble over and cause internal mayhem.
Anyway, this was all still to come as I continued my education and became a young man.
My early education was uneventful and reasonably happy until the time of the aforementioned aborted coup and the ‘years of living dangerously’ epoch that followed. My father worked as a civil servant in the land transmigration department and by all accounts was well liked and respected by his colleagues and business associates. This meant when the racial instability of that time transposed into something far more dangerous and sinister, he was in a position to be able to call in favours and thus protect his family.
His wife, my mother, would have been at serious risk of the mobs due to her ancestry had she not had my father and his connections to protect her, and, by extension, me. As it was, we were moved from the small private dwelling we rented into the relative safety of an army compound, and it was here that I proceeded to continue my studies until graduation from senior high school in 1977. By this time my father had carved out a second career for himself whilst laying down the foundations for my own.
Dad was still working for the government but in more clandestine areas of expertise. He was not permitted to talk too much about things, of course, but many years later I learnt that a by-product of the horrors of 1965-67 was the setting up of a government agency with connections to the intelligence services. The intelligence services in those days went by the acronym of BIN – which stood for Baden Intellijen Negara (State Intelligence Agency) – and dad worked for an offshoot of this organization. As the male indigenous partner in a mixed marriage, who just happened to already be working for the government, my father was deemed to have the special insight and skills required to be able to understand the sociological conflicts, concerns and underlying problems facing society under the rule of President Pak Soeharto’s New Order government.
My father was often away from home and his journeying included several trips overseas. As far as I am aware now, he was responsible for learning and then training recruits in the arts of subterfuge. It was also his remit to oversee the setting up of very small, localized agencies that would be run on the ground in a literally street-by-street or kampung basis. Simply put, each area or municipality was instructed to appoint a local head or chief. This head would be responsible for the registering and observance of citizens within a collection of maybe two to three streets. All these citizens would report to the local chief their personal details that included obvious information such as name, age, and address, but would also include details relating to ethnicity, religion, political leanings, property holdings and even bank
account details.
The neighbourhood chiefs would be charged with keeping an eye on those citizens within their locality and then reporting upwards to the village or kampung chief, who would in turn report upwards to the local municipality chief, and so on and so forth. It sounds complicated, but it was basically the establishment of a ‘spies charter’ and it remains in place today.
The whole system was very much self-financing, with citizens paying ‘administration fees’ to register with the chiefs who likewise paid upwards. My father was, by all accounts, near the top of this particular food chain and so did reasonably well financially, and this in turn led to us living in relative comfort.
In 1977 it was time for me to consider my future. In reality, though, there was not much considering done by anyone as it was decreed that I would take up a post at Yogyakarta Military Academy to undertake Officer Training while ostensibly studying for a degree in political history.
Fast-forward almost twenty years and Neil and I first entered each other’s orbits. At the time, I was moving towards the end of my spell in the military and was beginning to branch out and look for investment and opportunities within the private sector, and Neil himself was, I suppose, trying something similar in as much as he was teaching English and trying to make a living and even a business from doing so. Although he says he can’t remember our first meeting now, it is still clear in my mind. He was doing some
