Orphaned Landscapes

Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia

Patricia Spyer

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823298709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country's widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god.Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children's reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world. Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.

1

Fire without Smoke

On January 19, 1999, a run-of-the-mill fight between a Protestant bus driver and a Muslim passenger escalated into a full-scale battle between what rapidly became designated as Christian “red” and Muslim “white” forces that was fought in the streets of Ambon with traditional or makeshift weapons—knives, spears, machetes, arrows shot from slingshots, fishing bombs, and Molotov cocktails. Occasionally, weapons like arrows were dipped in homemade poison to ensure their deadly impact. Overall, the violence in this initial phase of the war was remarkable for its ferocity, with the attacks and killings on both sides being especially horrific. By the end of the second day, numerous houses, stores, offices, churches, and mosques had been destroyed or burned and scores of people had been displaced, while others were wounded or killed. In the largely segregated city of Ambon, the kind of sectarian border skirmish that set all this off was common. Under normal circumstances, it would also have remained a nonevent—except, of course, for those immediately involved. Three years later, upon the signing of the Malino II Peace Agreement in early February 2002, the conflict had left the city radically transformed.

In what many scholars have identified as the first phase of the war, lasting from mid-January 1999 until May 2000, periods of violent confrontation between native Ambonese Protestant and Muslim mobs and mass destruction alternated with lulls in which attempts at reconciliation involving elite Ambonese from both sides were occasionally made.¹ Jakarta’s blunders also began early on, with the dispatch of the first troops to quell the violence from South Sulawesi—or that part of Indonesia from which the Muslim migrants driven out of Ambon during the conflict’s first weeks also hailed—with shoot-on-sight orders and with a general lack of initiative and direction. Far from Jakarta still reeling from Reformasi’s many upheavals, Ambon did not rank particularly high on anyone’s priorities. What is more, the authorities’ will to intervene also depended on their assessment of the seriousness of the situation.² In the case of Ambon, many hoped it would simply blow over.³ This first phase was also marked by the outbreak of violence in the Kei Islands in southeast Maluku in April 1999 and in the soon-to-be-declared new province of North Maluku in August of the same year.⁴

The second phase marked a qualitative change in the conflict with the May 2000 arrival of the so-called Laskar Jihad in Ambon.⁵ Called into existence out of Muslims’ rising concern that the Christians had the upper hand in the conflict, this militant Muslim organization with recruits from Java, Sumatra, and South Sulawesi provided both partisan humanitarian assistance and armed support. The Laskar Jihad emerged in the wake of a massacre of four hundred Muslims in a mosque in the town of Tobelo on the North Malukan island of Halmahera in late December 1999.⁶ News of the massacre spread rapidly via print media and, crucially, a VCD showing devastating scenes of the charred mosque interior littered with bodies, body parts, remnants of clothing, and other traces of the life that had once been there.⁷ A general call for jihad in Maluku followed shortly thereafter during a mass rally in Jakarta in early January 2000 under the auspices of such major national political figures as the country’s former vice president Hamzah Haz and the People’s Consultative Assembly Speaker Amien Rais. Several months later, on April 6, 2000, the announcement of the foundation of the paramilitary organization was staged as a spectacular event, a flamboyant display of numbers and Muslim power, as some ten thousand Laskar Jihad members demonstrated before the Presidential Palace, an image that became “etched in the minds of the Indonesian body politic.”⁸

The arrival of two thousand members of the Laskar Jihad in Ambon in May 2000 was no less momentous. The amount and sophistication of the weapons used in the war had grown over time, but the group brought a surplus of professional arms to Ambon, along with advanced radio communications technology. It also introduced some order into the local Muslim militias, who at least initially welcomed these supporters as heroes, and it enjoyed the clear backing of segments of the armed forces.⁹ The Christians found themselves significantly outnumbered and outgunned, and casualties and devastation increased proportionately. This is also when Catholics began to be drawn into the conflict—notwithstanding the effort of Ambon’s bishop to play a mediating role—since the jihadis attacked Christians indiscriminately, making no distinction between Protestants and Catholics.¹⁰ By late June 2000, then president Abdurrahman Wahid announced a state of civil emergency in both Maluku and North Maluku provinces, and a special conjoined force of elite troops under a Balinese Hindu commander was dispatched to Ambon. If the declaration of the state of emergency greatly curtailed civil liberties—not the least of which being the press—and further enhanced the militarization of everyday life, it also gradually limited the number of large-scale confrontations.

This second phase of the conflict was further characterized by a deepening of the religious definition of the opposing parties and the crystallization of relevant extremist discourses¹¹—on the one hand, that of militant Islam and jihad, represented first and foremost by the Laskar Jihad and the smaller, more covert Laskar Mujaheddin, and, on the other, that of nostalgic sovereignty and separatism, embodied by the Christian Maluku Sovereignty Front (I. Front Kedaulatan Maluku, or FKM). Posing as the successor to the former separatist Republic of the South Moluccas movement (which in actuality exists primarily as a shadow of its former self among segments of the Malukan population in the Netherlands), the FKM envisioned its future as the nostalgic resurrection of an indigenous Malukan identity and boasted a leader who modeled himself after Xanana Gusmão, the former charismatic leader of Timor-Leste, which, at the time, was a very recent success story of national sovereignty.

By 2001, with the decrease of large-scale confrontations and their replacement by sporadic bombings and sniper attacks, the partial restraint of the Laskar Jihad under civil emergency conditions, and the signing of the Malino II Peace Agreement in South Sulawesi on February 12, 2002, the period of postviolence may be said to have begun. Civil emergency remained in effect, however, until mid-September 2003, along with the concomitant militarization of daily life and the restriction on foreign visitors to Maluku. The initial sense of relief in Ambon’s streets following the Malino agreement was marred in the following months by intermittent explosions and attacks that many suspect were orchestrated by those who profit from the perpetuation of chronic, low-level violence—segments of the military and police, individual deserters from the same, local gangsters, militant groups, and possibly more shadowy protagonists.¹² The influx of humanitarian aid and the presence of security forces in the city, along with lingering desires for revenge and religious militancy, further spurred profiteering on, resulting in “a well-funded industry of sporadic violence.”¹³ For quite some time, the city remained divided into rigorously defended, religiously marked territories, or, as one source acutely observes, “concentrated pools of resentment and bitterness”—or, in other words, potential breeding grounds for more violence—alongside emerging neutral zones and places of resistance and peace.¹⁴ This, in broad strokes, is the war. Much has obviously been left out—not the least of which are the kinds of atmospherics with which I began this book.

War’s Fog

I was moved to write about the situation in Ambon several months after the Malino II Peace Agreement was signed and before returning to the city that I had visited off and on since 1984 en route to Aru in Southeast Maluku. Numerous others—in and around Ambon, in Jakarta, Manado, and elsewhere in Indonesia, and farther afield in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States—had already written before I did, analyzing the conflict, its possible causes and myriad enabling conditions, and describing its protagonists, warring parties, and behind the scenes power plays, both local and national. They include anthropologists and other social scientists, within and outside Indonesia, activists and representatives of a range of local, national, and international NGOs, a number of the main players in the conflict, as well as media practitioners based in Ambon and the neighboring islands, the capital Jakarta, or abroad. My initial response was simply one of reaction to such assessments and reports and, notwithstanding the contribution and insights of many, some dissatisfaction with the overall story they told or, more pertinently, failed to tell about the city, its people, and the unfolding conflict among them. Much of what I wrote in 2002 still stands today and is therefore reproduced in an elaborated, updated version here.¹⁵

Ranging from highly engaged and informed analyses to the more codified versions of NGO-speak and the slanted partisan stories that bolster the truth claims of one or another side, the origins, complicating factors and backgrounds, major events, and relevant national and international developments have been scrutinized and amply discussed in terms of their respective contributions to Ambon’s violence. As so many theatrical backdrops against which the main action unfolds, important externalities and internal factors named as enabling and providing fertile ground for the outbreak of Ambon’s violence include such macropolitical and macroeconomic structures as the Southeast Asian financial crisis of 1997 and its aftermath, the unraveling of Suharto’s New Order and the upheavals of Reformasi, and the behind-the-scenes connivings of Jakarta’s political elite and the military. Tensions among Ambonese Christians and Muslims, more specifically, are seen as having been aggravated over the long term, as well as more recently by the religious division of labor established under Dutch colonial rule that privileged Christians and marginalized Muslims socially, economically, and educationally; by the parallel processes of Is-lamicization and Christianization in Maluku in the wake of World War II and the related erosion of the common ground of custom shared by Ambonese; and by the Islamicization of Indonesia generally under the late Suharto regime, as evidenced in Ambon by the appointment of two Ambonese Muslims as provincial governor, leaving the Christians feeling that they were left behind. Add to this the increasing shortage of land, population pressure, and the inmigration of Butonese, Buginese, and Makassarese Muslims from South Sulawesi, as well as those who benefitted from the New Order’s immigration policies,¹⁶ skewing the once more or less equal numerical balance on the island between Christians and Muslims in favor of Muslims, and the involvement of some, especially urban Ambonese, in gangs and criminality, and one has a situation waiting to happen—waiting to happen perhaps, but still not yet, not quite, happening.

While many of the arguments and analyses produced over the years since the conflict began have added to my understanding of Ambon’s conflict, I was troubled from the outset by the sense that something was missing. Some of this writing is just too grand, too abstract, and too removed from the volatile, fractured field where, throughout the violence, Ambonese men, women, and children pieced together their everyday lives out of the fears, contingencies, insecurities, and apprehensions that then weighed upon them. What tends to be passed over in foregrounding the influence of Indonesia’s major political players, the networks of militant Muslims and Christian gangs and militias, the nefarious wheelings and dealings of thugs, the inbred violence, corruption, and partisan affections of the police and the military, is the character of the very space in which all of these figures, for better or for worse, deploy their schemes and make their dubious marks.

Elusive as this may sound, terms like climate, ambiance, atmospherics, and milieu, often invoked in descriptions of social and political violence, most closely approximate what I am getting at. If tangential, these terms still conjure and gloss the influence and effects of a certain presence that, while lacking any real precision, is understood, nonetheless, to have definitive power in the shaping of events, human agency and subjectivity, and the production of meaning. While relatively unstudied, this presence is a long-acknowledged condition of war. In the words of the nineteenth-century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, referring to the uncertainty and challenge to perception posed by warfare, “All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.”¹⁷ A key aspect of this process, as I elaborate below, is the emergence of extreme perception among many of the city’s inhabitants, Muslims as well as Christians, in the form of an anxious play between efforts at acute seeing, on the one hand, and an overwhelming sense of unseeing or blindness, on the other. As the war went on, another component was the production of religion as a highly visible, public phenomenon that became crystallized in the marked contrast between Muslim and Christian opponents. In short, while my entry onto the scene of Ambon’s violence may strike some readers as oblique or peripheral to the allegedly more central issues of politics, economics, and sociology—whether local, regional, national, or even international—my intention is to offer not only different ways of understanding but also different things to understand, as has been suggested is possible in the field of visual anthropology generally.¹⁸ This is because, as I argue in Chapter 2, the huge Christian pictures and the photographs featuring them and their makers are closely attuned to the affective dispositions and intensities of the street. What this book will add is not only attention to ordinary people and the predicaments they faced in a city at war but an understanding of the atmosphere that made elite manipulations effective, the change from neighborliness to paranoia plausible, and uncertainty a persistent ingredient of encounter and exchange. This atmosphere comprised everything from the myriad ephemeral mediations of war like graffiti and provocative pamphlets, which have received some attention from scholars, to much more difficult to grasp phenomena like Clausewitz’s fog of war or the diffuse appearances that characterize, however tangentially, a given time and place.

A few caveats are in place. I do not mean to suggest that Indonesia is an especially or unusually violent country. A number of scholars have expressed concern about the centrality of violence as a topic of study following Suharto’s fall from power. This, however, would seem to overlook how all the writing about violence represents an attempt to come to grips with the legacy of a regime that was itself inaugurated by extreme violence and that deployed violence strategically in the process of developing its particular brand o...