Jammed in Jabodetabek

It’s fortunate that most Indonesians have a flexible attitude to time. In many Asian and African countries, there’s a sliding scale on the value of timeliness, based on location, the business at hand, and those involved. Business meetings in the capital city are expected to start within ten to fifteen minutes of the scheduled time; in a provincial city, people will show up thirty minutes late without apology; in a village, the meeting will happen when it happens. Social events also operate on a loose schedule, where no one is criticized for showing up “late.”

Jakarta residents, who are expected to be more punctual than people in other places, find it more difficult to be so because of the city’s legendary traffic snarls. With a population of more than ten million, Jakarta is the largest city in Southeast Asia. Its metropolitan area is so large that it has its own name, Jabodetabek (the first letters of Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi combined); with a population of more than thirty million, it’s the second-largest urban agglomeration in the world. Most residents of the largest—Tokyo-Yokohama—rely on public transport. In Jabodetabek, where public transport is slow and unreliable, many take to the roads; every day, Jakarta’s population is swelled by millions traveling into the city to work and trade.

Even outside the official rush hours, it can take three hours to travel across the city (about ten miles). The only sure way to arrive anywhere on time is by motorcycle, weaving in and out of the traffic. One of the fastest-growing e-commerce businesses is Go-Jek, a play on ojek, the word for the popular motorcycle taxi.

The ojek is not as safe as a traditional taxi, or even the three-wheel auto rickshaw bajaj, but if you need to travel fast, this two-wheeled version of Uber is the best option. Taking advantage of the fact that Indonesia is the world’s fourth-largest mobile phone market (it has more SIM cards in use than there are people, according to the Economist), Go-Jek lets users use an app to call a driver for a ride or a delivery.

Slower than a bajaj or an ojek—a bicycle rickshaw

Stephanie and I sampled most forms of public transport—minibus, train, taxi, bus, and bajaj—during a three-day stay in Jakarta. We didn’t expect to travel by ojek. Then the rains came and the side street leading to our guest house was blocked by flooding. Jakarta lies in a low coastal plain, with canals (many of them heavily polluted) running throughout the city. Here, the drains had been blocked by trash, and the water was about nine inches deep. We were about to start wading through it when someone suggested we could get through on motorbikes. We set off on two machines through the muddy water, the drivers weaving around stalled vehicles and floating furniture and over invisible speed bumps. They had a remarkable sense of balance at slow speeds.

The two Balis

For many people, Bali conjures up images of long, pristine beaches, palm trees, and some of the best surf west of Waikiki. That’s South Bali, the destination for most tourists. After decades of real-estate and commercial development, it isn’t exactly a tropical paradise any more, but it’s still a lovely place, where ancient Hindu temples and rice paddies back onto swanky resorts and spas, and simple warung (local restaurants), hole-in-the-wall laundries, and barber shops, vegetable stalls, and motorbike repair sheds crowd onto the same block as night clubs, high-priced art galleries, and boutiques.

On a visit in 2009, Stephanie and I stayed in a small hotel in Seminyak, down a shady lane away from the traffic, and a two-minute walk from the beach. I’m not much of a beach person, but I have to say that it was breathtakingly beautiful, with all the elements—warm, clean sand and clear water, coconut palms waving in the breeze, and bronzed Australian surfers who looked as if they’ve stepped out of magazine covers. Most people expected us to be Australian, so I temporarily dropped my carefully learned Indonesian greetings (there are five, depending on the time of day) and adopted “Gid’dy” (sometimes adding “mite” if it was a man).

In some ways, Bali is the Australian equivalent of what Cancun represents for American tourists or Majorca for the British—in a recognizably different country, but with familiar sights and sounds. We had dinner one night at the Bush Telegraph, one of the four or five Aussie pubs near the hotel. The menu featured Australian steaks, meat pies, and fish and chips. None of the faux décor of an Outback restaurant with its “Blokes” and “Sheilas” signs on the restrooms. Just Australian Rules football on TV and Foster’s on draft. A place where an Australian can feel at home.

Despite the rampant tourism development in the south, much of Bali has been little touched by the beach crowd. After leaving the sprawl of the capital Denpasar, the road north through the mountains offers vistas of rice paddies and small villages.

We stayed two nights in Ubud, a string of fourteen villages famed as a center of Balinese arts, dance, and culture. Then north again along twisting mountain roads, passing dormant volcanoes with dense jungle slopes, Hindu temples and communal meeting houses, and coffee plantations.

We stopped at warungs for simple, tasty meals. Grilled river fish, sate (chicken, pork, and fish), fried rice and noodles, chicken and fish curries, and roast suckling pig. Fresh fruit juices—lemon, lime, mango, papaya, watermelon, pineapple. And wonderful snacks, especially the banana fritters.

Along the roads, the most common (but temporary) landscape features were the flags and posters of political parties. Regional elections were coming up, and all the parties were showing their colors. Because of low literacy rates, all candidates were identified by number, not name. Each poster featured a picture of the candidate, looking businesslike or religious or youthful or just well-dressed, with the party’s symbol and color, a patriotic backdrop, and a sample ballot with the number checked. Stephanie conducted an informal windshield survey and came up with her own political punditry: “No. 12 looks shifty, No. 4 looks too young to vote, No. 9 looks good in blue, No. 23 needs a haircut.” Basically, she decided that all the men looked pompous or incompetent and that most of the women should be elected. We agreed that in a society with paternalistic traditions, it was a sign of progress that many women were running for office.

The enemy is faceless

The American journalists I accompanied on a 2008 trip found plenty to admire about their Indonesian colleagues. They had camped out with guerillas in the jungles of Aceh, gone undercover to report on human trafficking in Kalimantan, been threatened and beaten up by police, soldiers, and hired thugs, been accused of inciting social and religious discord, faced lawsuits from politicians and business owners, and seen their organizations pressured by special interests and advertisers.

David Smith, a photojournalist from Cincinnati TV station WXIX, said that their experiences made his own daily concerns pale by comparison. “They’re facing real danger,” he said, “and we’re complaining about the parking situation at city hall.”

A decade after the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime, the journalists were still groping their way through a forest of shifting political and business alliances, balancing newfound freedoms against new pressures. They talked earnestly about the role of media in educating people, to make them aware of democracy and to serve as a watchdog on government and special interests. At the same time, they were conscious of the responsibilities that freedom brings in a diverse society.

“Before 1998, there was friendly persuasion,” Luki Sutrisni of the national newspaper Media Indonesia told us. “The censors would call and tell you to be careful about what you wrote on an issue. It wasn’t direct interference. We camouflaged how we felt and hid behind words.” Those who resisted faced economic and legal pressures; in June 1994, Suharto ordered the closure of the leading news magazine, Tempo, and two other weeklies.

Most formal restrictions on news were removed after Suharto’s fall, but old habits of media repression die hard. Political and religious groups, corporations, and the military still attempt to influence coverage and are not afraid to wield a range of weapons—from pressure on advertisers and expensive-to-defend libel suits to physical intimidation. Mobs have attacked newspaper offices, destroying equipment and injuring staff, and forced radio and TV stations to suspend broadcasting. “The enemy is faceless—you don’t know who you’ll offend when you cover a demonstration,” said Arief Suditomo, editor-in-chief of the TV network RCTI.

There is also a history of corruption, the so-called practice of envelope journalism, where reporters are paid to present stories with a certain slant. One reason is economic: journalists’ salaries, particularly in the provinces, are often very low. Culture is also a factor: in Indonesian society, it is considered rude to reject a gift. Many journalists who accept “the envelope” form close relationships with business and political elites. Those who refuse or criticize the practice have been harassed by the police and others in power.

Conflict coverage is particularly sensitive. A tried-and-trusted tactic by government and military officials to restrict coverage is to accuse the media of inciting violence through its reporting. “We try to avoid stories that could cause disorder,” one Metro TV journalist told us, while admitting that it was impossible to predict the impact of a story. “We try not to show footage of victims and bodies, and we identify combatants by their villages, not by their religion.” Another who had covered the conflict in Maluku said that he was able to provide balanced reports by traveling with two press cards: one identified him as Muslim, one as a Christian.

In his office in central Jakarta, we met the grand old man of Indonesian journalism, the modest, soft-spoken Jakob Oetama. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Central Java in 1931, he worked as a teacher before becoming editor of a weekly newspaper. In 1965, he and a colleague, the ethnic Chinese P. K. Ojong, with the support of the Catholic political party, started the newspaper Kompas (Compass) to counter propaganda from the Indonesian Communist Party.  A few years later, with Suharto in power and the Communists crushed, Kompas dropped its political affiliations to become an independent newspaper, or at least as independent as any could be under the New Order regime. Its daily circulation grew from under five thousand to more than half a million in 2015, making it the largest national newspaper in Indonesia. Oetama, now 87, manages the Kompas Gramedia empire, with at least fifty print publications, a TV network, and interests in the property sector. He is still active in journalism, campaigning for professional standards and independence.

“I am a Catholic, educated by Jesuits, but the newspaper is for general readers,” Oetama told us. “I believe in freedom with social responsibility. Freedom has its limits. We try to express this positively and when we cover religious issues, we are careful not to hurt any parties.” Oetama worries about his country’s fragile democracy and political institutions. “Democracy is in the making, in transition. I am concerned how it can survive with so many political parties and factions. Every issue needs to be discussed in parliament, so progress is slow. Our nation is a talking democracy—what we need is a working democracy.”

I wondered how, in such a volatile situation, Kompas and its sister media maintained their independence. Oetama smiled. “It’s simple,” he said. “We are not a publicly traded company. If we were, we would lose our independence.”

Another perspective on rights and responsibilities came at Republika, Indonesia’s largest mainstream Islamic newspaper. It was founded by Islamic scholars in 1993, with future Indonesian president B. J. Habibie as its first chairman. Although it has less than half the daily circulation of Kompas, its owners claim each copy is read by at last four people and is shared among students at pesantrens, the Islamic boarding schools. Today, Republika is part of a group that includes media for general and targeted audiences—TV and radio stations, a Mandarin-language newspaper, and sports magazines, including the Indonesian Golf Digest. As radical Islamic groups have gained strength, Republika has attempted to represent many views while ultimately serving as the voice of moderate Islam.

“Muslims must turn to Mecca five times a day to pray,” said then editor-in-chief Syaiful Syam, “but Republika needs to turn both right and left because of the diversity of the Muslim community. Our message is that every Muslim must create peace within himself. Islam should spread peace and protect every group in society.”

Syam said that there was little difference between Republika and secular newspapers in the topics covered—the usual mix of politics, business, culture, and sports—but the sources and perspectives differed. “We focus on the mainstream Islamic community while still providing a forum for liberal and fundamentalist views,” he said. In conflict reporting, Republika journalists avoid words that identify religious groups. But, as Syam noted, “it’s not easy to run an Islamic newspaper and offer balance.” He cited the example of polygamy, which is legal in Indonesia. “Modern Muslims reject polygamy, but if the newspaper does not support it, some leaders get mad and we have demonstrations outside the office.”

The boat above the house

It sits, incongruously, across the roofs of two houses—a one-hundred-foot fishing boat, slightly tilted as if still rocking in an ocean swell. Except that it is nowhere near the sea.

The boat was left high and dry by the tsunami that struck the province of Aceh in northwest Sumatra, Indonesia’s largest island on December 26, 2004. It’s estimated 170,000 people in the province died or disappeared, their bodies swept out to sea or crushed beyond recognition against buildings and trees. In Banda Aceh, the capital, the tsunami swept ashore most of the fishing fleet. Many boats were destroyed, but a dozen or so ended up stuck in buildings.

In the cleanup operations, most boats were removed. This one was left where it landed, a stark memorial to the lives it saved. It’s now on the tsunami tourism trail, with street signs pointing to Kapal di atas rumah (the boat above the house).

After the earthquake struck, Fauziah Basyariah and her five children found a house that was still standing and reached the second floor. Water started filling the room. “We were floating with our heads touching the ceiling—I thought we would drown,” said Basyariah.

All around them, buildings collapsed, and people, animals, vehicles, and market stalls were swept away. Among the victims was Basyariah’s husband, who had taken the family motorbike to go shopping, and her parents. After the disaster, the widow, with five children to support, lived in a temporary shelter and learned new skills. Today, she owns a small business that packages and sells dried tuna. A picture of the boat is on the label. No wonder local people call it Noah’s Ark.

Two miles inland, the Apung I, a power-generating ship owned by the local electrical company, crashed down on two houses, killing the inhabitants. I joined tourists from Jakarta, pushing past the postcard and souvenir sellers to climb the metal gangplanks, stand on the top deck, and survey the city below. The twenty-six-hundred-ton ship is mostly intact, and some say that there are still bodies beneath it. To many, it testifies to the awesome power of nature.

Standing on the beach that evening with American and Indonesian colleagues, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, it was difficult to imagine that this idyllic place had been the scene of such death and destruction. The tsunami was triggered by the world’s second-largest recorded earthquake—estimated at 9.1 to 9.3 on the Richter scale—with its epicenter off the west coast of Sumatra. I had watched the TV reports of devastation across the Indian Ocean—from Indonesia to Malaysia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

Some of the video from Aceh was taken by one of my companions on the beach that evening. Dendy Montgomery, a freelance videographer based in Banda Aceh, was in a group of eighteen Indonesian TV journalists who took part in a training and exchange program funded by the US Department of State that I managed. The group spent three months in the United States in 2007; the next year I accompanied journalists with whom they had worked on a visit to Indonesia. Dendy and two others were our hosts for a tour of Banda Aceh.

Dendy had been out on the streets soon after 8:00 a.m. on December 26 to shoot the earthquake damage. Then the first wave hit. “I heard my wife yelling, ‘Come on—we need to go. The water is coming.’” Dendy kept on filming; he had seen other floods and was not worried. “Then I saw the first water coming from behind the Grand Mosque—it was maybe five to six meters high.” A few seconds later came a second, higher wall of water. Dendy started running. “I jumped in my jeep with my wife. Usually, I need at least three times to start the engine, but this time only once and then—vroom!” With other survivors packed inside and hanging on the outside, Dendy sped off. Somehow, he found his mother and younger brother on the street and picked up a blind woman who was begging for money. “Mine was the last car to get out of the area,” said Dendy. “The others were swept away.”

Members of Dendy’s extended family were killed or lost in the tsunami. It was more than a year before he could return to the beach. Ten years later, on the anniversary of the tsunami, he told Britain’s Sky News, “I’m still really shaky when I’m at the beach. I’m yelling as loud as I can, ‘I’m not scared anymore.’” He will never forget the lives lost. “It was as if all my family was going to Mecca in one big group and never coming back.”

Except for boats on houses, Banda Aceh seemed to show few scars from its near-destruction less than four years earlier. An extensive rebuilding program, funded by the Indonesian and foreign governments and international aid agencies, had transformed the city, with new apartment and office blocks, schools, mosques, hospitals, and government buildings. The roads were wide and well maintained. The markets were busy. A provincial election was coming up, and billboards along the highways featured photos of candidates, all promising a bright future for the province. Banda Aceh looked like a prosperous place.

We visited TV and radio stations and newspapers and met with the mayor. Almost everyone talked about how people had come together to respond to the disaster. The earthquake and waves toppled mobile phone towers and telephone poles and destroyed local radio and TV stations, making communication almost impossible. Aid agencies flew in “suitcase” low-powered FM radio transmitters to broadcast information about shelters and pickup points for food and water, and to air messages from people looking for family members. The daily newspaper Serambi (literally “front porch”) Indonesia lost thirteen journalists and thirty-seven staff, half its workforce, when its building collapsed. Yet, within a week, Serambi, with support from its parent company, the Kompas media group, was printing on temporary presses and distributing free copies, helping families reunite by publishing photos of survivors.

Metro TV, Indonesia’s first twenty-four-hour news channel, had reporters and videographers on the ground within hours. With local TV and radio stations off the air, national TV channels played a key role in disaster recovery and relief. For a time, Metro dropped all advertising spots and ran uninterrupted coverage, while collecting $18 million in contributions from viewers. TV crews brought in food and medical supplies, and many stayed for extended assignments; a year after the tragedy, Metro still had almost one hundred staff in Aceh. The tsunami had psychological effects on journalists, and some needed counseling. “Four days after the tsunami, you could still see hundreds of dead bodies,” one told me. “I know I was breaking the rules about showing emotion, but I just cried.”

            Then the fishing boat became wedged on the roof. Basyariah’s fourteen-year-old son punched a hole in the ceiling, lifted himself through, and pulled the family out, one by one. They climbed aboard the boat and were joined by others. Huddled together, the fifty-nine survivors prayed as the boat, which had taken on water, wobbled on its perch. They were stranded for seven hours until the waters receded.

Counting islands

Indonesia is the world’s largest archipelagic state (although Canada has twice as many islands in its Arctic archipelago). East to west, the archipelago stretches more than three thousand miles (that’s more than the continental United States); it’s more than one thousand miles north to south. Its islands range in size from Borneo and Sumatra, respectively the third and sixth largest islands in the world, to tiny uninhabited islets with only local names.

How many islands? It depends on whom you ask. A 2002 survey by Indonesia’s space agency concluded that the archipelago had 18,307 islands; in 2010, Indonesia’s mapping agency offered a more conservative estimate of 13,466. The CIA’s World Factbook uses a 1996 Indonesian government figure of 17,508. Bottom line: no one knows for sure, but the answer has important geopolitical and economic implications.

The problem, of course, is defining an “island.” Do you include tidal islands, such as reefs and sand spits that are submerged at high tide? Then there’s all that earthquake and volcanic activity that keeps blowing islands apart and creating new ones.

Despite these challenges, Indonesia has good reason to count all its islands and have the United Nations officially recognize them under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Once an island is recognized, Indonesia can claim an Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) for two hundred nautical miles around it, giving it fishing and mineral rights. This brings it into conflict with neighboring countries that also claim outlying islands.

In 2002, the International Court of Justice ruled against Indonesia in a dispute with Malaysia over two islands; the same year, two islands were ceded to Timor Leste (East Timor) when it became independent. Indonesia has a long-standing spat with Australia over the maritime boundaries of the Timor Gap, the three-hundred-mile strait between Timor and the Northern Territory. The more serious territorial disputes are to the north, where Indonesia faces off against Malaysia, Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam, and, most ominously, one of its largest investors, China. Since 2014, Indonesia has blown up hundreds of foreign fishing vessels seized while illegally fishing in its waters. It has beefed up its military presence in the Natuna Islands, northwest of Borneo, a region with large fish stocks and undersea oil and gas resources. Indonesia renamed the northernmost part of its EEZ the “North Natuna Sea,” a defiant challenge to China’s territorial ambitions in the South China Sea.

According to Susan Herawati of the Coalition of People for Justice for Fisheries (Kiara), 60 percent of Indonesia’s islands “don’t have a name or official legal status, so they can easily be taken or claimed by another country.” UN status may also protect islands from being grabbed by developers. Herawati says more than one hundred families were expelled without compensation when an island near Lombok was leased to develop a private tourist resort. Although Indonesia officially bans the private ownership of islands, several online real estate companies list islands for sale.

The Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries wants to add at least seventeen hundred islands to the UN’s approved list. The UN defines an island as a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is still exposed at high tide. That takes tidal islands off the list but leaves a question mark over low-lying islands that may be submerged as sea levels rise. The ministry team must also come up with a name known to local people (even if the island is uninhabited), and a description of the island’s history and geography.

Indonesia has strong motives to claim as many islands as it can—not so much for the islands themselves, most of which are not worth inhabiting, but for the maritime real estate all around. “This is about our identity as a nation,” Herawati told the BBC. “By clearly listing our islands then our fishermen have legal protection and rights over the islands and our ancestral seas.”

Shipping news

From Taman Fatahillah, the central cobblestone square of Batavia, the former capital of the Dutch East Indies, it is a short walk along Kali Besar to the old port of Sunda Kelapa at the estuary of the Ciliwung River. For three centuries, trading ships and military vessels sailed from the port as the Dutch expanded and consolidated their control of the Dutch East Indies, fighting off the English, the Portuguese and the pirates.

The harbor entrance was too narrow and shallow to accommodate larger vessels which had to anchor further north. Rowboats and smaller ships, known as lighters, were used to transport cargo and passengers to the port. In the 19th century, the condition of what the Dutch called the Haven Kanaal (Harbor Canal) deteriorated. It became costly and time-consuming to carry passengers and cargo into the port, and dangerous during stormy weather. In 1885, partly to accommodate increasing traffic following the opening of the Suez Canal, the colonial administration built a new port five miles to the east.

Today, Sunda Kelapa is lined with brightly painted wooden pinisi, the traditional two-mast wooden schooners that for centuries have carried cargo and people between islands. The first ships, said to be modeled on the Dutch pinnace, were built for the spice trade at Makassar, the VOC trading fort on the island of Sulawesi.

The modern version, with a crew of a dozen, is similar in design but longer and larger (up to 350 tons), with navigational equipment and a diesel engine. The pinisi no longer carry cloves, nutmeg, and other spices. Most were unloading tropical hardwoods such as camphor, meranti, and mahogany, logged in Kalimantan or Sulawesi, and taking on cement, sand, bricks, and other building materials.

I asked my port guide to describe a typical voyage. “One week from South Sulawesi to Jakarta with a cargo of wood,” he said. “Load up with cement and then three days to Jambi [a river port in central Sumatra], and back to Jakarta with a cargo of coconuts.” Although a few small cranes and winches were in operation, most of the loading was done by laborers, hoisting wooden planks on their shoulders and cement sacks on their backs. For transporting bulk materials across the archipelago, pinisi are still the cheapest and most efficient option.

Going Dutch

It’s a quiet corner of Indonesia’s bustling capital, Jakarta, away from the traffic snarls, street markets and mega-malls. It has a cobblestone central square, canals and stately 17th and 18th century houses with gable fronts. Ignore the palm trees and the tropical heat and you could be, well, in Amsterdam.

From its modest origins as a trading post, Batavia, named for an ancient Germanic tribe, the Batavi, became the thriving commercial center of the jewel in the Dutch imperial crown—the East Indies. Over almost three centuries, administrators and military commanders sailed out of the port of Batavia to expand their dominion throughout the archipelago by conquest and alliance.

The Dutch imperial mission was driven by economic motives, although trade and politics soon became intertwined. From the mid-sixteenth century, the Dutch were duking it out with the Portuguese, Spanish, and English for control of the East Indies trade and sea routes to China. Each established fortified trading posts along the main sea passages; the Portuguese were first to claim the famed spice islands of the Moluccas (Maluku). Realizing the potential of the East Indies trade, the Dutch government merged competing merchant companies into the Vereenigde Osst-Indische Compagnie (VOC), the United East India Company. By 1605, the VOC had driven the Portuguese out of the Moluccas.

In 1610, the prince of Jayakarta (Jakarta) granted trading rights to both the VOC and the English. Relations between the two powers were never cordial. In 1619, the English defeated the Dutch in a sea battle and, with the support of the prince’s army, besieged the VOC fort. Reinforced by troops from the Moluccas, the Dutch governor Jan Pieterszoon Coen kicked out the English and razed Jayakarta. The VOC named its fortress and trading post Batavia.

Batavia was a closed community, with a mixed population of Europeans, Asian laborers, and slaves; Javanese were not allowed inside the walls for fear of an insurrection. The Dutch built canals from the Ciliwung River and lined them with stately mansions.

Today, many are abandoned and in poor repair, their roofs leaking and trees sprouting through cracks in the floors. Jakarta’s city government wants to revitalize the district, now called Kota Tua, but has offered property owners few incentives to restore the buildings. Some Indonesians say good riddance: the country should not be spending money to spiff up relics of its colonial past.

The best example of colonial-era architecture is the palatial Stadhuis (City Hall), built in 1710 to serve as the headquarters of the VOC and later the Dutch colonial government. Since 1974, it has housed the Jakarta History Museum. Viewed from Batavia’s central cobblestone square, the Taman Fatahillah, it is easy to imagine how Batavia might have looked three hundred years ago when its streets bustled with traders and laborers, hurrying between the harbor, warehouses, and trading offices. One block west of the square is what used to be Batavia’s high-rent district. The main canal, the Kali Besar, is lined with stylish three- and four-story eighteenth-century mansions with balconies and arched roofs. The last remaining Dutch drawbridge, dating from the seventeenth century, crosses the north end of the canal. In Batavia, the Dutch created a little corner of Amsterdam, albeit with palm trees and better weather.