‘ Sialan — Damn,’he thought. The country was deteriorating at an alarming rate. Inflation had eaten his salary away to the point where it was practically valueless. At least the monthly rice rations kept everyone going. It was difficult to secure a position where a little extra income could be earned. He should have joined the police force, he mused. Without exception, police, because of their close access to the public, could always extract those little extras whenever they wished. At any time they could just stop any car with a Chinese passenger and squeeze him for a little cash.
Although a minority group, the Indonesian Chinese had a very real stranglehold on the Indonesian economy and were easy targets for extortion. Nobody cared when a Chinese was roughed up a little for they had not integrated with the indigenous races and often manipulated commodity prices to the point where many pribumi people starved. Wherever they settled, the world’s oldest trading race eventually became embroiled in some form of racial violence and Indonesia was no exception. The Chinese were despised. They controlled the flow of all agricultural products and other basic necessities. They had their own schools. They controlled the shops.
And all that gold they wore!
“Sialan mereka semua!” Seda muttered, cursing the whole race as he continued to gaze through the window. Perhaps he should not complain, he brooded. After all, he’d done reasonably well with his life so far, considering that he had been born and raised in a small village near Dili in East Timor. There, life had been excruciatingly hard. His father had died from one of the many fevers that plagued the rural dwellers.
Seda had difficulty remembering much about his father, only his strong, sharp facial features remained fixed in his mind. He had obviously inherited his father’s nose, for when he moved to Jakarta as an adult and visited the whores around the Blok M graveyard, they often mistook him for a foreigner. He would never know whether these genes were the result of some careless Portuguese sailor or some Dutch seed sown lustfully generations before.
The Portuguese began trading with Timor almost a century prior to any serious attempts by the Dutch to develop a foothold on the island. The division of the island between these two seafaring nations ultimately resulted in the development of considerable religious and cultural differences between the Catholic northeast and the Protestant south.
Although both colonial powers in Timor concentrated their efforts on preventing each other from expanding their spheres of influence, some trade in produce did develop. Coffee became the main export from the two colonies.
Dutch Timor inevitably became part of Indonesia as a result of the Independence movement. It was officially absorbed into Nusa Tenggara province by the central government in Jakarta during subsequent provincial restructuring. Kupang remained the provincial capital. For a time, Catholics, Protestants, and a few Buddhists, Hindus and Moslems co-existed without any real racial or religious turmoil. Even the head-hunters put aside their old habits.
When his mother was obliged to migrate to another village across the border, she remarried. Seda became one of seven children in what was already an impoverished family. He slept on a tikar mat alongside his new brothers and sisters cramped together on a dirt floor in a one room house which provided only the barest protection from the elements. There were two small meals a day, taken sitting cross-legged on the roughly woven mat. Some days, when his stepfather was unable to find part time work to supplement his pitiful income, they went without food altogether.
He remembered that his mother often stood outside, alone, looking down the dry slopes towards the sea and across to where they had lived when his father had still been alive. Occasionally, he would slip quietly outside so that the other children would not follow and go to her, leaning against her frail body, his head tilted against her hip trying to understand just what she stood and stared at from under the old mango tree.
She would not talk during these private moments but he didn’t mind as he always felt a sense of warmth as her calloused hands softly stroked his hair and the side of his face. He knew that she frequently missed meals, ensuring that the children were fed first. She was often sick and he wanted to cry out for someone to care, but he knew, even in his youth, that almost every hut in the dry desolate village housed another mother whose suffering was similar.
Poverty and hunger can be great motivators. When his mother had arranged for him to attend classes at the local Catholic school he grasped the opportunity and studied diligently. At first he experienced great difficulty as the other children were more advanced, having had the advantage of attending classes since turning seven.
Seda was nine before he could read. When he was twelve he had recovered all the lost time and was increasingly being singled out by the priests for his rapid progress in class. These hard working men of the cloth struggled to educate all of the children, regardless of their talents, but their efforts were often severely restricted by a government which favoured non-Christian institutions. During the heat of the day when the classes rested, the children would literally drop to the floor in the school and sleep for several hours, enjoying the cool of the tiled floor against their undernourished bodies.
Schools were inadequately equipped. The population was desperately poor. The Church provided a semblance of basic primary education to many however funds were limited as the government restricted the growth of non-Moslem faith educational institutions.
The priests were obliged to be extremely careful and selective when allocating positions in their school.
As a teenager Seda continued to study diligently. Excellent grades created the opportunity for the young student to attend the Armed Forces Academy in Java which resulted in his eventual escape from the provincial backwater. His mother had been delighted that her son had been selected for such a career opportunity. Now, his future would be secure. He would never again experience the hunger of his childhood.
Seda contemplated his humble origins. Although born in Portuguese Timor this was never reflected in any of his earlier school registration documents. Border crossings were frequent and registrations of village births on both sides of the border mainly went unrecorded. He remembered his mother and the tears of joy when his selection had been announced. Her tears were not just in appreciation for the blessing her god had passed to her son. She wept knowing that she would lose him. Once he had tasted the exotic life of the main island she knew he would never return.
Seda had never been convinced that the army had been the correct choice. In retrospect, he felt that perhaps he should have elected to fly with AURI, the country’s Air force. Many of the pilots and technical officers had been sent to the Eastern Bloc countries for advanced training. This inevitably meant additional funds for clothes, travel and other expenses and a chance to travel away from the disorder that prevailed.
Indonesia had entered its most dangerous period. Everything appeared to be confused. The country’s leaders had all but embraced Communism yet this strange political ideology did not, in fact, accept religious belief! Bewildering enough for an uneducated Muslim population which followed the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed. The people had been instructed to follow the President’s dictates. NASAKOM was the new political order — Nationalism, Socialism, Communism. The Russians had poured in billions of dollars in foreign aid to ensure that the Communist political agenda could be realised in this resource-rich archipelago.
Within a few short years, the country was equipped with tanks and every kind of sophisticated weaponry. Airfields boasted MIG15s, 17s and 19s. Indeed, Seda had read a report just the day before about the amazing Russian strategic bombers, designated TU-16’s, which had the capacity to bomb every major city in the country to the south in just one sortie!
Seda found that there was so much to learn from the new military jargon. IL-28s had been positioned at the Malang and Surabaya airfields. SA-2 missiles were sitting on their launch sites ready for firing from their revetments. There was also talk that the Russians had built a submarine base in Cilacap, on the south coast of Java!
Seda had seen the new steel mill under construction in Cilegon.
All of this, he thought, and still not enough money to feed the hundreds of thousand of troops the country had mustered. Everyone