Nivell Rayda – When Gatot received a call on his cellphone from the hospital where his wife was being treated, he naturally assumed it would be about her condition. But soon it became apparent that the call from the nurse had nothing to do with his wife.
"The nurse was trying to get a handgun for her brother who she said was going to work in an oil field somewhere in the jungles of Kalimantan," Gatot, not his real name, told the Jakarta Globe.
"I'm not sure how she knew I was an arms dealer. I told her I didn't deal with handguns. I told her the weapons I deal in kill thousands at a stroke, rather than one at a time. It's people like that who make me more comfortable importing airplanes and missiles."
Gatot's two-story home is modest for a multimillionaire businessman like him.
The only signs that he is a gunrunner are the handful of Sukhoi aircraft models on one of the shelves in his home office and the photo on the wall of him with the late Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980s and '90s.
"This picture was taken in 1983," he said. "At the time, I supplied assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades to both the Mujahideen and the Taliban. That was after Afghanistan repelled the Soviet invasion."
He said it wasn't unusual for him to get calls from individuals looking for handguns. "Ordinary civilians looking for guns are mostly cowards," he said. "They're looking for an easy way out of their problems. I don't deal with them.
"When you carry a handgun, you become more temperamental. Having a pistol is like having power. Suddenly you feel you can do anything. You get into a quarrel and you just flash your gun. You owe money to the bank and you don't want to pay, just point your gun in the banker's face."
He says he is more interested in what he calls "serious buyers," but even then he is picky about who he sells to.
"Some Tamil Tiger rebels once sat right where you're sitting now, carrying $1 million in cash for a down payment, and I've dealt with them intensively ever since," Gatot said.
"But to the local rebel groups and terrorists that ruin this country, I say no. I said no to Fretilin back in 1993, but when East Timor gained independence, I said yes."
Spread of illegal guns
With the exception of senior public officials and lawmakers, it is nearly impossible for ordinary civilians to legally purchase or carry firearms.
However, the growing number of armed robberies and the discovery of a suspected terrorist training camp in Aceh last year suggest that the illicit gun trade is thriving in Indonesia.
"These incidents raise questions about how firearms fall into criminal hands and what measures are in place to stop them," the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a report that it released last September, called "Illicit Arms in Indonesia."
"The issue has become more urgent as the small groups of Indonesian jihadis, concerned about Muslim casualties in bomb attacks, are starting to discuss targeted killings as a preferred method of operation," it said.
Last month, police arrested a man for firing a gun at a TransJakarta bus in a road-rage incident in North Jakarta. An investigation later revealed the perpetrator was also a suspected drug dealer and the owner of a West Jakarta nightclub.
But it is not just the underworld kingpins who now carry firearms. Lower-level criminals increasingly use guns for their crimes.
Last month, armed robbers held up a businessman for Rp 100 million ($11,000) in Jakarta, while in Boyolali, Central Java, police confiscated seven rifles from a group of five robbers operating in the provincial capital, Semarang.
"Armed robbery has been around for years but the cases seem to have intensified recently," an independent weapons expert. Suryo Guritno, told the Globe.
"In the past, a lot of the guns were crude handmade pistols that broke after one or two shots. But now more of the real things are being used in robberies, or at least more sophisticated replicas."
According to the National Police's Crime Information Center, there were 991 crimes involving guns or explosives in 2010.
The police response to the problem has been to beef up security and deploy more officers to high-crime areas. "But they never bother to ask where the criminals get their guns from and do something about it," Guritno said.
Out of the armory
Questioning people like Army deserter Suryono, 38, may be a good place to start. "As a soldier, you barely make ends meet, so when I was just a private, I knew that selling bullets could be lucrative," he told the Globe.
"They gave us 200 rounds to practice shooting with," he said. "But most of the guys only used about half of them and sold the other half to civilians for about Rp 5,000 to Rp 10,000 each."
From there, Suryono figured out he could make more selling the guns themselves.
"Smuggling out bullets is easy, but smuggling guns out of the barracks is not that simple unless you're a colonel and can just take your weapon home with you," he said.
"I tried my luck because there was a guy willing to pay Rp 15 million for a pistol. I broke into the armory and stole a pistol just as I was about to go to my hometown."
He said he was caught trying to smuggle the weapon off the base but was set free after bribing his commanding officer with an offer of 70 percent of the money he would make from the sale.
Suryono said that after that first success, he smuggled out and sold weapons on at least five more occasions.
"But then there were inspections after some terrorists robbed a bank [in Medan in 2003]," he said. "I wasn't involved, but given my track record, I was at the top of the list of the most likely suspects. So I left the Army."
The ICG said the illicit flow of weapons out of the military and police force was one of the main sources of illegal arms in Indonesia, particularly in areas where supervision is weak.
In March 2010, two police officers were arrested for selling 28 weapons and nearly 20,000 rounds of ammunition from a police warehouse to a group of militants accused of running a terrorist training camp in Aceh.
In another case, Military Police officers conducting a routine inventory after the June 2006 death of Brig. Gen. Koesmayadi, an Army logistics chief, discovered 185 firearms and more than 28,000 rounds of ammunition in one of his many homes.
The discovery led to a House of Representatives inquiry but no criminal investigation was ever launched.
From home and abroad
Indonesian Police Watch chairman Neta S. Pane believes the flow of illegal arms from rogue police and military officers is nothing compared to the number of firearms being smuggled into the country.
"Most of the weapons confiscated from criminals are new, so smuggling is the biggest source of illicit arms," he told the Globe.
Taufik Andrie, research director for the Institute for International Peace Building, said smugglers used a variety of tricks to avoid detection. "Legal arms importers are known to dump some of their shipments at sea. Agents then go to the marked location and collect the guns," he said.
These days, however, people do not need contacts in the criminal underworld to obtain weapons. One only needs to go online. The Internet is full of Web sites claiming to be able to supply firearms, legitimate or otherwise.
Chief Comr. Sulistyono, director of cybercrimes at the National Police, said police were planning to conduct a cybercrime patrol to deal with the spread of the weapons online.
"We have been monitoring this illegal action and will deal with it in the near future," he said.
But for most Indonesian civilians who have guns, it seems they simply hold on to their previously legally issued weapons.
The use of guns for recreation is restricted to members of the Indonesian Shooting and Hunting Association (Perbakin), and even then is further limited to calibers of between 0.12 and 0.32 inches.
In the past, however, the police used to give permits to civilians to possess firearms for self-defense.
In 2005, then-National Police Chief Gen. Sutanto issued an order banning the renewal of these private gun permits, except for lawmakers and senior public officials. Keeping a gun was made a crime, but by 2010, 17,983 gun permits had expired but only 9,000 of the weapons had been recovered by the police.
"The police exhorted gun owners to hand in their firearms, but there was no compensation offered, no deadlines and no real implementation," ICG said in its report. "Certainly no one with economic or political clout was going to be forced to turn in a gun with an expired permit."
Neta says police corruption is the main obstacle to getting these guns out of circulation. "It's likely that corrupt officers are bribed by people who don't want to give up their guns," he said. "Let's face it, there aren't that many 'quasi-legal' guns like these. If the police were serious about confiscating them, they wouldn't still be among the general public."