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Under the volcano

Source
Far Eastern Economic Review - March 13, 1997

Margot Cohen, Cirebon, West Java – Rohiman used to make a decent living selling eggs and cooking oil, but those entrepreneurial days are long gone. Now he spends his days sweating behind the handlebars of a pedicab, hauling people and goods through the streets of his hometown of Cirebon, West Java.

He is haunted by his fallen social status. "Most people think pedicab drivers are no better than animals," blurts the 36-year-old father of two.

Bitterness. Frustration. Insecurity. These are the feelings rumbling beneath the sleek surface of Java's rapid economic transformation. As shopping malls and upscale hotels multiply across the landscape, the heady rush of consumerism masks rising anxiety among those who feel left behind.

Taken to the extreme, these feelings can erupt into violence. In recent months, four major riots have occurred across Java, thrusting obscure towns like Tasikmalaya and Rengasdengklok into world headlines. Some of the violence has been aimed at homes, businesses, and places of worship belonging to ethnic Chinese a historical target of economic resentment in Indonesia. While foreign investors remain bullish, pushing the Jakarta stock market to record highs, local politicians, academics and religious leaders voice deep concern.

Change is sweeping Indonesia, but the family remains the bedrock institution of society and thus provides a window to society's ills. This is the story of one Javanese family struggling to hold its own in the midst of disintegrating traditions and rising modern pressures. It is not a family prone to violence, or even public protest. But the anger and frustration expressed by its members particularly the men provide a sobering insight into the forces that drive similar Indonesians in nearby towns to riot.

If the sons in the family speak to the problems that presage further eruptions, however, their sisters provide some hope for stability and positive change. The eldest daughter, like many hard-working, apolitical Indonesians, believes that her sacrifices will pay off in a better future for her children. Her two younger sisters socialize easily with ethnic-Chinese neighbours and friends, indicating that familiarity erodes stereotypes rooted in the Dutch colonial past (see story on page 44).

On the surface, Cirebon, a town of 256,000 on the northern coast of Java, seems peaceful and thriving. In the 16th century, Cirebon formed the hub of an Islamic kingdom, becoming a Dutch protectorate in 1705. It was jointly ruled by three sultans, whose courts dripped with royal luxury. White colonial facades still grace many of the old buildings, while new hotels line its broad boulevards. A July keraton, or palace, festival is expected to draw elaborately costumed royals from across the archipelago, and spark renewed tourist interest in Cirebon's own royal palaces, batik cloth, and painted wooden masks. But nothing can mask the town's hollow failure to attract the new factories necessary to absorb local high-school graduates. Their favourite place to loiter is Grage mall, a pink spaceship-shaped building erected just last November.

Grage's garish glamour is a world away from the humble traditional market in Kalitanjung, a district on the south side of town. For the Muslim traders here, a haj pilgrimage is the ultimate sign of success. Rohiman's mother, Alimah, overcame hardship to make the trip. Married off at age 13, she gave birth to nine children, seven of whom survived. To support such a large family, she and her husband began selling fried snacks from home, enlisting their children to roam the neighbourhood with covered platters. In the mid-1970s, the family managed to open a kiosk in the Kalitanjung market, selling basics like chili peppers and rice.

By 1993, Alimah had saved enough to go to Mecca, where she died. Hers had been a life of hard work, but one that brought dependable rewards. The sons had different ambitions they wanted to join the marines, drive buses, do something more liberating than being the dawn-to-dusk sentinel in the marketplace. But Alimah had vetoed these ideas as too risky. In the market, you were your own boss, she had counselled. If you got sick, a family member could always cover for you.

In 1992, the fifth son, Nurohman, opened a shop in the same neighbourhood. He, too, started out peddling basic foodstuffs, but quickly decided to offer more sophisticated wares like Mickey Mouse drawing books, Brisk hair cream and Q-tips. Today, those wares remain on the shelves, but they are covered in dust. Nurohman closed the shop in 1995, leaving the unsold goods as a testament of his determination to reopen one day. When he tells the story of his commercial failure, the villains that emerge are ethnic-Chinese shopkeepers and Cirebon's new crop of supermarkets.

"As soon as people get their salaries, they run to the supermarket," complains the 30-year-old bachelor, a small-boned high-school graduate with a pencil moustache and a baseball cap. "Then, if they run short towards the end of the month, they come to shops like mine and ask for credit. Can we sell everything on credit? No way!"

Nurohman knows that the supermarkets can offer lower prices; they deal directly with factories or wholesale grocers. He also knows they provide customers a certain social status, a bright plastic bag with prestigious names like Matahari, Yogya, Alfa stores that have all sprouted in Cirebon within the past five years, seducing villagers from hundreds of miles around to gawk at shiny vacuum cleaners and romp through video arcades.

Who's profiting? The people "on top." For Nurohman, this shadowy category includes both big businessmen and the government. He reasons that the government can get heftier taxes from big stores than from small fry like him. What seems unreasonable is Cirebon's rapid pace of development, which he likens to a sudden rainstorm. "No one even had time to see the clouds," he grouses.

Groping for an umbrella against this onslaught, he looks suspiciously at those who seem safely shielded: the ethnic Chinese the men and women who have been prospering since his childhood, even his mother's childhood. For Nurohman, their success is no accident. It grows from a combination of unfair business practices and certain tactics which he, as a Muslim, cannot tolerate.

His own views are shaped by Friday sermons at a mosque near Grage mall, where Muslim preachers rail against Eddy Tansil an ethnic-Chinese businessman who bribed his way out of a Jakarta prison last May after being convicted in 1994 of swindling a state bank for a record 1.3 trillion rupiah ($542 million). Seen as a classic example of collusion between Chinese tycoons and New Order officials, the case spurred cries of "Hang the Chinese!" at trial. The Indonesian authorities' subsequent failure to track down Tansil has fanned anti-Chinese prejudice across the country.

"Most Chinese here are dangerous. They dominate the economy. They dare to drag prices down below standard," Nurohman says bluntly. He claims that the ethnic Chinese are willing to accept slim profit margins, because they have the capital to buy in bulk and receive discounts from the factories. (This claim is disputed by some ethnic Chinese in Cirebon.) The pribumi or indigenous traders, with much less money at their disposal, can only afford to buy in small quantities and must seek higher margins.

To acquire capital, Nurohman continues, the Chinese borrow within their own community or borrow from the bank. The pribumis are scared off by high interest, he claims. His greatest fear is that the bank would seize his family's newly renovated house if he couldn't pay the interest. "If that happened to a Chinese, he could always go home to his own country," he argues, ignoring the fact that most ethnic Chinese have lived in Indonesia for generations.

Nurohman insists that he has nothing against the ethnic-Chinese Muslims who worship alongside him at the mosque (5% of Cirebon's ethnic-Chinese community adheres to Islam). But despite his own complaints about deadbeat customers, Nurohman targets his non-Muslim economic rivals for reportedly repossessing televisions and other goods that have not been fully paid off. "Our Prophet says, do not pressure people through trade. Help people. We don't want to oppress our neighbours," he says piously, as though parroting a sermon. He also claims that winnings from roulette tables abroad are pouring into local Chinese businesses. "If we used gambling money for trade, we would be fattening ourselves up in an unclean way. Better that we go bankrupt," Nurohman concludes.

To remain solvent, Nurohman occasionally works as a public-transport driver. He makes about 10,000 rupiah a day when his earnings are not clipped by policemen hunting for bribes. More than a hint of rage creeps into his voice when he speaks of the lack of opportunity in Cirebon. With many of the newly created, low-paying jobs at supermarkets, shopping centres, hotels and factories across Indonesia going to young, single women, the men seem to find themselves at a loss. While the diminutive Nurohman hardly casts an intimidating shadow, the same cannot be said for the growing numbers of unemployed young men, many of whom are just spoiling for a fight or even a riot.

For Nurohman's eldest sister, Saoda, the possibility of rioting in Cirebon is one of her greatest nightmares. When riots broke out in Tasikmalaya in December, she worried that they would spread to Cirebon. If that happened, she might have been forced to close her kiosk in the Kalitanjung market, just down the street from her home. "We wouldn't be able to trade. We wouldn't be able to eat," she frets.

Rising at 3 a.m., the gaunt 43-year-old mother of five works every day of the year but one during the Muslim holiday of Lebaran. Even after the birth of each child, she was back at the kiosk within two days. Saoda dropped out in third grade and admits she can't read, but she has trade in her blood and her voice. Even though she has just finished supper at home, she speaks in the raucous staccato of public commerce."My life is the market," she squawks. "I go to sleep at 9 p.m. I hardly watch TV. I never go to the movies. Better to sleep than to go out. It's a waste of money." Is she happy? Saoda finds the question a bit ludicrous. "Happy or unhappy, I'm used to it." With little time to supervise her children, she dispatched three of them to Islamic boarding schools. It costs 75,000 rupiah, per month, per child. To finance their annual visit home, Saoda relies on the 1.2 million rupiah she gets from her arisan, a women's collective in which participants make daily contributions and draw lots to collect the accumulated capital. "I hope my children won't be like me," she says. "A stupid coolie."

With his trim leather jacket, cropped haircut, and macho black motorcycle streaked with orange and purple, Saoda's 23-year-old brother Agus Junadi hardly looks like a coolie. But despite a high-school education, he has ended up working as a labourer on a construction site. Like many other youths his age, he just can't seem to find a good job.

Agus applied for a job at the Matahari department store, but didn't make the grade. He is philosophical about his rejection: "Maybe I didn't fulfil all the requirements," he says softly.

Agus is the youngest in the family, and his older brothers and sisters feel a bit guilty about him. He never really got much attention from his parents, and now the others feel they should make up for it. After their mother passed away, they spent some 5 million rupiah of the inheritance to buy Agus his motorcycle.

Agus graduated from an economics-oriented high school in 1994 and planned to study banking in Yogyakarta. Given the rest of the family's aversion to the banking system, it was an interesting choice. But after concluding that he couldn't afford to continue his education, he cast around for work. Luckily, he didn't have to look very far. His brother Ramli, the eldest son in the family, was working on a giant petrochemicals project in Cilegon, West Java. Agus was immediately hired for a year. He was happy. For the first time, he was making his own money 240,000 rupiah a month and living in a dormitory with workers from all over Indonesia. He dreamed of working overseas on similar projects.

But when the one-year contract ran out, so did his happiness. By then, Ramli had moved on to another project, and couldn't find work for Agus. So he went back home to Cirebon. His sister offered a spot in the marketplace, but he wasn't interested.

For Agus, the "connections" system in Indonesia has proven to be a double-edged sword. It helped him once, but it has also failed him, leading to a year of unemployment. Meanwhile, the system has engendered a sense of resignation. He has applied for three or four different jobs, but there doesn't seem to be any fire burning beneath him. "I'm still depending on my brother," Agus admits. "There's a lot of competition. If you don't have anyone on the inside, like a father or a brother, it's difficult. If you know someone on the inside, you get hired immediately."

What would happen if he showed up at a job site out of town and applied for work independently? Agus says he would be forced to wait three weeks or more without any guarantee of success. At his last job, he says, workers without connections paid 100,000 rupiah in "administration fees" out of desperation for steady employment.

While he waits for his brother to come through, Agus has decided to dispel his boredom by taking a construction job. He mixes cement, carries planks, and hauls bricks for 4,000 rupiah a day, plus a meal allowance of 2,500 rupiah. It's a job more appropriate for a primary-school graduate but all his friends on the construction crew completed high school.

"The little people don't feel the impact of economic growth," Agus insists. "They are moving backward, not forward."

That sentiment is seconded by Agus's brother Rohiman, the trader-turned-pedicab driver whose stringy muscles emerge from a white T-shirt that has been scrubbed to shreds by his wife. He doesn't approve of riots, but echoes demands for "security" and "justice." Like his brother Nurohman, he sees little justice in a system that seems to favour the supermarkets and the ethnic-Chinese traders. Unlike his sister Saoda, he failed to cultivate the loyal customer base that might allow him to ride out the development whirlwind.

His resentment also stems from his experiences working in construction, a sideline he started after withdrawing from the marketplace. Rohiman reports that he and his fellow pribumi workers have built stores, warehouses and large new homes, all the property of ethnic Chinese. (A number of pribumis, particularly government officials, are known to enjoy spacious Cirebon residences as well.) "The Chinese are the No. 1 colonizers," Rohiman says curtly.

Has he ever purchased anything from a Chinese shopkeeper? "The prices are cheaper, so I buy," he admits. Rohiman exhibits a similar ambiguity towards Matahari and other crowded department stores. He likes to take his family to these places, "to walk around, see how Cirebon has progressed. It feels good. Everything is so luxurious. You can get anything you want, as long as you have money." He says he'll drop as much as 50,000 rupiah on one visit, even though that represents as much as five days' income from his pedicab. "I don't want my family to be behind the times," he insists.

None of these purchases are reflected in his simple home on the outskirts of Cirebon, where he lives with his wife and two small daughters. He once had a TV and a motorcycle, but he sold them both. The windows are covered in chicken wire. The floor is bare earth. Parked outside is the brightly painted pedicab, purchased for 300,000 rupiah.

Actually, Rohiman makes at least twice as much with his pedicab as he would as a new employee at Matahari, where the starting salary is just 132,000 rupiah a month. But that's small comfort, given his sudden drop in social status and the anxiety of competition. Like many other small towns in Java, Cirebon is crammed with pedicab drivers, who seem to spend much of their time lounging mournfully.

Anxious to project a "modern" image to the world, the local government in Jakarta outlawed pedicabs in 1990. What would Rohiman do if the same thing happened in Cirebon? For a moment, he falls silent. "I don't know," he replies.

He is not alone in his uncertainty over the future. The "modern" life has already been rather hard on 26-year-old Siti Zubedah, Rohiman's youngest sister. She and her husband and seven-month-old son live in a brand-new suburban housing estate called Villa Intan, or Diamond Villas. Life does not exactly sparkle within this complex of freshly painted white houses with maroon-tiled roofs. Like many other housing estates on the outskirts of Javanese cities, Villa Intan was constructed in a hurry, and it shows. The tapwater and bathwater is salty, due to proximity to the harbour. Worse, water oozes up through the white-tiled floors, a constant reminder that the estate was built on top of a rice field. Development has not quite conquered Cirebon's pastoral past.

Siti's existence is isolated compared to her former life at her mother's house, where she was constantly surrounded by chattering relatives and neighbours in a close-knit, traditional atmosphere. "Before, I was close to the market," she reminisces. "Now, even finding a banana for my son is tough. If anything goes wrong, the doctor is far away." Whether it's the stress of motherhood or the pressures of living in suburbia, slender Siti looks nothing like the plump, determined bride in the wedding picture decorating her living room.

On the bright side, Siti has got to know some of the neighbouring ethnic-Chinese housewives, whom she enjoys chatting with. "The Chinese mix with the pribumis. There's no problem. They're just like us," Siti says matter-of-factly.

Siti's older sister Saomi, a housewife with five children, is also favourably disposed towards the ethnic Chinese, whom her husband brings home from work. "We have a lot of Chinese friends," Saomi says. "We respect each other."

That respect has a practical economic benefit that may point the way to a more harmonious future. Friendship has led to occasional favours, and vice versa. If an ethnic Chinese is looking to purchase land, used cars or used motorcycles, Saomi and her husband don't hesitate to point a finger in the right direction. For the family, it means a commission of at least 50,000 rupiah. She has earmarked the extra money so that her children can have a better life than hers, another ambition Saomi shares with her Chinese friends. "I want my children to go to university," Saomi insists. "Not like their dumb mother."

She also nurtures hope that her husband will eventually ditch his 250,000 rupiah-a-month warehouse job and set himself up as a trader at a local market. Saomi holds fond memories of her own childhood experiences helping her mother in Kalitanjung. "Maybe we'll have good luck," she smiles.

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