The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  Endless fields of rice stretched into the distance, dotted with workers in wide-brimmed, circular hats with a central point, who bent down at the knees with flagpole-straight backs to gather in the harvest. A few minutes later another bike stopped. The rider was in his thirties and despite the scorching hot and sticky temperature was decked out in a chunky padded jacket and a pair of stone-wash jeans. Like most of the bikers I had seen, he wore no helmet. He spoke next to no English, so to secure the deal I resorted to mime. Rubbing my thumb and forefingers together, I indicated money, then waved a hand across my chest while shaking my head and politely saying “no,” punctuating it with a hand on heart gesture at the end, to say “please.”

  It did the trick. I was on the move again.

  For a scooter ride it felt long, coming in at around ten miles and continuing until the high-street of busy regional capital Tabanan. Such was the pattern for the next couple of hours, with scooter rides coming and going with varying ease, and for differing lengths, until I found myself walking along a section of road surrounded by verdant fields, bordered by a thin grass verge that dropped away steeply into a bank below. It began to rain. However, when hitchhiking, rain is your friend. The sight of a soaked-through hitchhiker on the side of the road elicits a big dose of sympathy. Within a minute of the first drops falling a battered truck with the words “Trust to God” emblazoned in English above its cab pulled over.

  The passenger door swung open revealing three guys in their late twenties with deep cola-colored skin. None spoke English so the usual miming ensued to establish the lift was for gratis. It was. I moved to haul myself inside, but then slipped on the wet grass underfoot. My backpack’s weight added momentum. Over I went, toppling down the muddy bank, falling about a hundred and thirty degrees backwards, landing with a thud. My humiliation wasn’t over. In cartoon fashion I began sliding head first down the bank, legs splayed wide apart behind me. Leaping from the door, one of the guys lunged for my ankles, grabbing a hold of them and dragging me feet first up the bank through a carpet of mud and rain-soaked grass. It didn’t make for the most dignified of introductions.

  Despite the language barrier between us, I established my companions names—Antok, Opik (the ankle grabber) and Ahmad (the driver)—and that they were heading to Bali’s ferry terminal for Java. As we bumped along a poorly maintained road, the gentle shower of rain turned suddenly into a giant block of descending water, lashing the truck and the world outside, sending locals scrambling under cover or those caught out in it on motorbikes to hastily don large plastic ponchos. Water began pouring from the foliage of trees, ripping into the gravely road and peppering its surface with a thousand miniature explosions. Then it was gone, expiring, as if by the flick of a switch, into waves of faintly visible humidity, driven from the land by a huge tropical sun.

  Standing across two and a half miles of shimmering sea appeared Java, a world of fertile greenery, rising steadily in elevation to form the smooth conical peaks of the distant Ijen plateau. Soon we were skipping across the waters of the Strait of Bali, riding the ferry between the islands and landing on the other side where things took an interesting turn.

  Opik made a call on his cell, then passed it over to me.

  “Where do you want to go?” queried a man on the other end in reasonable English.

  It was a good question, which in many respects depended on where the guys were going. Having initially just asked for “Java,” now that we had reached it some specifics were called for. Java is a sort of mutated cigar shape stretching from east to west, and since we were at its far eastern point, and I was ultimately heading west to Mt. Bromo, just about anywhere they were going was in the right direction. But a nonchalant “anywhere” is hardly the sort of reply you expect from a hitchhiker when asking where they desire to go, so I decided to request logistical help instead.

  “Somewhere I can buy a map.”

  “Map?—oh, atlas. Okay, give the phone to Opik,” said the man.

  I did, and kind of assumed I’d be dropped at a local store where I could buy one, but to my surprise we came to a halt outside a shady-looking pool hall where a row of motorbikes was lined. We were in the city of Banyuwangi, about fifteen minutes’ drive from the docks. The guys led me inside. Sitting around drinking, smoking, holding court and playing pool and billiards were several groups of tough-looking locals. On a stool at a central bar section sat what looked like the boss, a flinty-eyed tough guy with a neat, well-trimmed goatee beard, wearing a white “wife beater” vest, and black, belted dress pants. His arms bore several chunky scars as well as multiple U.S.-style gang tattoos, including one that depicted a medieval scroll-like document upon which was written “Game is Over.” The guys who’d given me a ride approached him.

  “I run this town,” said the man, remaining seated on the stool. “You will be safe here, no one will harm you.”

  Up until now I hadn’t felt unsafe.

  “I have sent someone to buy your atlas,” he said, revealing himself as the guy on the phone.

  He introduced himself as Rio Rossano Hansa.

  Rio summoned a lackey from behind the bar who promptly poured two shots of unknown liquor into dainty glasses.

  “Welcome,” he said, handing me a glass. He was friendly, yet somehow still menacing.

  I have no recollection of what the booze tasted like other than being very alcoholic.

  “You speak good English,” I said, just making conversation. “Where did you learn?”

  “The United States, I spent eight years in a Californian penitentiary.”

  I was surprised at nothing but his candor. Was it bad criminal etiquette to ask what he had been inside for? I didn’t know but couldn’t resist.

  “Narcotics and shooting someone,” he replied, unperturbed at my inquiry. “I used to be a gang-banger.”

  This was a most odd situation to have suddenly found myself. Moments earlier I had been happily plodding away on the road, and now, out of the blue, I had been thrust into the Indonesian equivalent of the Sopranos and was making the acquaintance of a bona fide gangster. Despite this, I can’t say I felt uneasy at my change in circumstances. After all, Rio seemed welcoming to me, as had his three stooges who introduced me, and so instead of concern, I felt intrigued.

  “Would you like something to eat?” offered Rio.

  I accepted, and on Rio’s say-so the barman began ladling out a serving of tofu and noodle-based stew laced with red-hot shaving of chili, taken from a large urn behind the bar. Rio pointed the barman towards a nearby table.

  “Take your time,” said Rio, gesturing me to the table—the unspoken implication being that we would only converse again once I had finished.

  Moments after tucking in, my “atlases” arrived. I owed the delivery man roughly four dollars, but gave the equivalent of five. They were two big fold-out road maps: one of Java; the other of the next island to the west, Sumatra. Both islands are far larger than Bali and would require several days of hitching to cross.

  When I finished my stew, Rio came over and asked about my plans in Indonesia.

  “It is too dangerous to wait on road,” he stated on hearing my intention to hitchhike. “You must get bus or train.”

  I did my best to explain that this was not within my remit, but it fell on deaf ears, with him just repeating himself several times, until it sounded more like an order than a suggestion. In the end I just pretended to agree.

  “Okay,” I said, “You’re right. I’ll catch a bus.”

  He seemed happy with that.

  By now it was early evening so I made inquiries with Rio as to local accommodation, with the intention of crashing out and hitting the road at first light—and not in a bus.

  “I will arrange for you,” he stated.

  The same guy who had delivered the maps was sent out again, this time with the task of visiting local boarding houses and reporting back on their availability and price. While he was gone I queried Rio on his time as a guest
of the U.S. government.

  “You have to have these experiences,” he said with an air of the philosophical, as if prison was just one of those things everybody had to go through once in a while.

  “In England we say you have to take the—” I paused, having intended to say, “rough with the smooth,” but then concluded this might not translate, so just said, “good with the bad.”

  It was hardly a deep and nuanced insight worthy of passing on, just bullshit conversation making, but Rio saw different.

  “Yeesss!” he responded enthusiastically as if I had imparted something terribly apt and astute, and he had finally, after all these years, come across a fellow great thinker of depth and gravitas whom he could converse with on the same highbrow philosophical wavelength. He looked at me with a touch of admiration. We were buddies now, and while waiting for his associate to return, Rio chatted more openly with me; mainly about himself. He’d been married four times, had children who still lived in the U.S., and had just got out of prison in Indonesia. This time though he was adamant he’d been framed.

  “My sister is running for mayor,” he told me. “They did this to me to make her look bad.”

  Accommodation-wise, it turned out that my best option was a little motel across the road, where I could get a room for about seven dollars. For the next hour or so I hung out with Rio. When it finally got dark outside I thanked him for his assistance, then made my excuses and headed to the motel—after falsely agreeing to consult with him in the morning about a bus or train.

  The room was miserable, a gloomy little hovel that could have been out of a horror film. Several recent blood splats decorated the woodchip wallpaper, and creeping over the walls and floor was an army of cockroaches whose numbers increased in concentration in a dingy shower cubicle where the plug hole was thick with human hair and a horrible sludge; a cocktail of what looked like dead skin, dirt, and soap scum.

  I made the best of it and settled in for the night with a book, the only one I had with me, and one that I had already read: Unpeople, Britain’s Secret Human Rights Abuses by Mark Curtis. Emily had been reading it on the plane to Australia, but somehow it had found its way into my backpack during my frantic high speed packing in Hobart. The subject matter seemed unlikely to lighten the atmosphere of the room, but I delved into it once more nonetheless, turning to its section on Indonesia, which began in somber fashion: “Few people have suffered as much from Britain’s backing for repressive regimes as those living in the islands of Indonesia . . . [Britain’s] strategy has been remarkably consistent: forces are supported according to their ability to do Whitehall’s bidding; the Indonesian people are an irrelevance.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A Little Shooting

  If you want to understand modern Indonesia, then you have to understand the bloody legacy of the country’s former dictator, General Suharto, and the role Western governments—particularly the United States, Britain and Australia—played in his rise to power. This, and their subsequent collusion in his atrocities, is something very often skimmed over, whitewashed or swept beneath the editorial carpet by his Western corporate media apologists; but not by me. After all, when the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie. It is an episode they might well like to forget, for it speaks volumes about the true designs of Western power and how the world is run, where governments say one thing and do another, and justify murder on an industrial scale in resource rich countries for strategic and economic gain.

  In 1955 a great conference full of hope and optimism was held in the Indonesian city of Bandung, where leaders from twenty-nine African and Asian countries, many of them newly independent states, met to discuss a peaceful coexistence, where non-aligned countries—states seeking a third way, unaligned to the major capitalist or communist power blocks—could join together, forge common interests and find a powerful harmonious voice on the world stage, distinct from the agenda of rapacious corporate or imperial power. Such a viable alternative model for development was seen as a direct threat by the Western powers.

  Hosted by Indonesia’s President Sukarno (not to be confused with the above mentioned General Suharto), who had led his county’s struggle for independence from the Dutch who colonized Indonesia in the sixteenth century, the conference declared a path of mutual respect and neutralism for the underdeveloped world, the majority of humanity. To the C.I.A. it was little short of heresy. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles condemned neutralism in the face of communism as “immoral.”30 His younger brother, Allen Foster Dulles, held the same view; and he ran the C.I.A.

  “I think it’s time we held Sukarno’s feet to the fire,” said Frank Wisner, the C.I.A.’s Deputy Director of Plans (Covert operations), in 1956.31

  And so began a sordid U.S. and British campaign to discredit, oust or kill the president of a resource rich country of “great potential wealth,”32 which sat as the jewel in the crown of a region that declassified British Foreign Office files called for the “defence” of Western interests in, noting that “the region produces nearly 85 percent of the world’s natural rubber, over 45 percent of the tin, 65 percent of the copra and 23 percent of the chromium ore.”33

  Sukarno was a nationalist, not a communist, a non-aligned populist who did his own bidding, by and large, using the Indonesian Communist Party (the PKI) and army as counterweights, granting concessions to both to create a workable balance of power. But with the PKI playing a role in a Sukarno-led coalition, his enemies could label him a protector of their party. Over a million strong, and having made significant electoral gains, if true democracy was to be served, then the PKI could not be excluded by Sukarno, who stated, “I can’t ride a three-legged horse.”34 Such pragmatic accommodation to the subtleties of governance played badly with the black and white, with or against us, politics of Washington and London. They cared not that the PKI was a peaceful or law abiding constituent of the Indonesian political process, who had, in the words of Australian historian Harold Crouch, “won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing system,”35 only that they were the PKI.

  The size and breadth of the C.I.A.’s planned military operations against Sukarno required substantial resources from the Pentagon, something only obtainable if deemed necessary and appropriate by top officials of the National Security Council acting on behalf of the President. To garner such approval, the C.I.A. cooked the books, a classic case of intelligence and facts being fixed around policy, long before the Downing Street Memo revealed as much about Iraq, only this time it was the C.I.A. determining policy over the government. As then head of the C.I.A.’s Indonesia desk, Joseph Burkholder Smith, reveals in his memoir Portrait of a Cold Warrior, before suggesting any plan to officials from the National Security Council, where “premature mention . . . might get it shot down,” first they laid the ground work (emphasis below is mine):

  [W]e began to feed the State and Defense departments intelligence . . . [w]hen they had read enough alarming reports, we planned to spring the suggestion we should support the colonels’ plans to reduce Sukarno’s power . . . In many instances, we made the action programs up ourselves after we had collected enough intelligence to make them appear required by the circumstances. Our activity in Indonesia in 1957–1958 was one such instance.36

  In November 1957, the top officials from the National Security Council gave the C.I.A. the go ahead,37 who used their newfound assistance from the Pentagon to arm, equip, and train tens of thousands of separatist rebels38 centered around Indonesia’s outer provinces, led by dissident colonels in Indonesia’s army. Britain provided the use of her military bases in nearby Singapore and Malaya for arms drops and covert operations.39 As declassified documents from the British Foreign Office make clear, although the separatists’ aims centered around a desire for more self-government and an end to what they saw as Sukarno’s inefficient economic policies; this wasn’t the line that Britain or the U.S. would b
e pushing. They opted instead for “anti-communism,” which was expediently added to the rebels’ official aims. “[I]n order to attract Western support, it [anti-communism] has been made to appear one of the main purposes of the rebellion,”40 (my emphasis) wrote Britain’s ambassador to Indonesia in a Foreign Office report. In Singapore, Britain’s Commissioner General, Sir Robert Scott, had told the Foreign Office, “I think the time has come to plan secretly with the Australians and Americans how best to give these elements the aid they need . . . The action that I am recommending will no doubt have little influence with President Sukarno. They are not designed to; I believe it should be one of our aims to bring about his downfall.”41

  They certainly gave it a good go. U.S. Navy submarines provided weapons, supplies and communications equipment to the rebels;42 on Okinawa an army of Indonesians, Americans, Filipinos, and Taiwanese were amassed, along with other “soldiers of fortune;”43 and the C.I.A. formed a rebel air force of around 350 pilots.44 Made up of Americans, Filipinos and Chinese nationalists, it consisted of a sizable Air Transport force tasked with dropping thousands of weapons, ammunition and equipment deep into Indonesia, and of a bomber fleet comprised of fifteen B-26 bombers, which rained explosives down on cities, towns, villages and civilian shipping—the latter done to dissuade commercial tankers from entering Indonesia’s waters in order to strangle the county’s economy.45 Declassified British files record an attack on a 12,000-ton Panamanian steamer, causing the death of twelve of its twenty-six crew, and of the sinking of a 5,000 ton Italian ship with twelve of its crew missing.46 A British freighter was also sunk, promoting head of the C.I.A., Allen Dulles, to describe the air strikes to President Eisenhower as “almost too effective.”47 As well as providing arms and the use of their regional military bases, the British flew war planes on reconnaissance missions over Indonesia,48 and were reported to have used one of their submarines to rescue U.S. paramilitary advisers when the rebel positions collapsed.49 And collapse they did.