Jungle Massive

This week, I managed to skip Jakarta's 21^st century heart of darkness and headed into the jungles of Borneo for a few days to do a Lord Jim. In Conrad's novel, Lord Jim, a disgraced young seaman, heads into the jungle in order to live with the Dayaks and so I rocked up in Palangkaraya in central Kalimantan with a bag full of mosquito repellent and amusing hats.

Palangkaraya is a small city, however it received a lot of attention from Sukarno. Indonesia's first president got the Russians to build some nice, wide boulevards around town when he was flirting with the red menace and also had a fancy woman shacked up here it a rather tasteless pied-a-terre. Sukarno even considered making Palangkaraya the Indonesian capital at one point. 

Sukarno's successor Suharto, rather hubristically decided to make Indonesia self-sufficient in rice by draining the peat swamps in the huge rainforests and jungles that lie beyond the city and starting a huge program of planting. Not only did the rice not materialize, due to the peat soil being too acidic for the stuff to grow in, but Indonesia's current status as the world's third largest producer of greenhouse gases is largely due to these dried out swamps releasing their previously locked in carbon into the atmosphere. In the words of that intellectual colossus, Homer Simpson, "Doh!"

As well as the rice disaster, rampant deforestation, slash and burn agriculture, forest fires, palm oil plantations and a rapidly dwindling orangutan population have led to a veritable army of tree hugging, granola munchers to descend on the area in order to hold conferences and to try and engage communities in and around the rainforests in conservation efforts.

I myself haven't burnt down any significant area of forest for many years now and often hold in any unpleasant bouts of digestive greenhouse gas after an enjoyable Nasi Padang session, however I wasn't in town to jam with either Sting, Bono or Bob Geldof. I was going to ford upstream into the jungle on a pleasant three day riverboat cruise.

For the past few years, a couple of lovely ladies, Lorna Dowson-Collins and Gaye Thavisin, have run riverboat eco-tours from Palangkaraya up into the lush jungles of Borneo. The pair have built a huge cruising boat, which can house groups of up to 10, and on the spacious top deck of which tourists can recline in comfort, enjoy prawns the size of canoes and spy on the orangutans at the water's edge as they muck about and exhibit appalling table manners.

The rivers themselves are the quintessential jungle waterways. As calm as mirrors and between 50 and hundred meters in width, they meander through lush protected forests with only the occasional illegal gold mining operation or chainsaw buzzing in the distance to remind one of the dangers that this ancient environment now faces. The tour is an educational one and has previously been enjoyed by various European and Australian Parliamentary delegations, as well as the Prince of Denmark, who apparently had a whale of a time.

We made a brief stop at an orangutan rehabilitation centre at one point and learnt that some of these hairy chaps are in a very sad state indeed. Orphaned and suffering from malaria and/or flu, the centre nurses them back to health and gradually releases them back into the wild. It's becoming a losing battle however as there are now more orangutans coming in than are going out.

The cruise itself is magnificent though and takes one through idyllic areas of primary rainforest as yet completely unspoiled by man and his vociferous appetite for destroying things and soiling his nest. Mind you, I was still able to get a mobile phone signal for the entire duration of the trip. The heart of darkness is fully wired these days you understand. It can only be a matter of time before those orangutans that I spied at the river's edge are downloading banana themed wallpapers onto their Blackberries or texting each other across the jungle, "Found sum coconuts, c u in 10 minutes. GOL" (that's "Grunting out loud").

If you’re up for a cruise like this then take a look at: www.wowborneo.com. An interesting one will be taking place between May 20^th and May 23^rd in fact. If you find the Jakarta Highland Gathering a bit passé then the Isen Mulang Cruise will take you to the traditional Dayak games of the same name. One of the events is a game of soccer played with a burning coconut. Silly sods.

Meanwhile, in terms of saving this ancient environment, if you're not willing to chain yourself to a tree the Greenpeace way, then consumer choice is perhaps your best weapon. Don't eat the baso in East Java that locals were recently found making from kidnapped monkeys. Another good one to avoid would-be palm oil perhaps, which is apparently present in 10% of all supermarket products. Giving up Indonesia's Blue Band palm margarine shouldn't be too difficult for Westerners though, seeing as the stuff tastes like clarified goat bile. Mind you, the less of the stuff that's eaten, the more that can be used as chainsaw lubricant. Anyway, let's all sit in a circle now and sing, "We shall overcome."

Street Fighting Men

Over the last month, Indonesia has twice erupted into an orgy of setting fire to things and slicing and dicing people with primitive farming equipment. Different these two incidents may superficially seem to be, however perhaps there are common elements in the root causes. Certainly, the location of both of these conflagrations was the same, namely down at the docks.

Up at Tanjung Priok, on the capital's North coast, locals rioted over a rumour that authorities were planning to relocate the tomb of Mbah Priok, a Betawi Muslim icon. Barely a week later, an Indian boss up in Batam was alleged to have said that Indonesians were stupid. This provoked more riots, which didn't really serve to provide much of a counter thesis to our hapless subcontinental's damning assessment.

Docks have always been lively areas of course. The stereotypical image of the docker, in the West at least, is that of a weather-beaten, tattooed muscleman who's as hard as nails and who can drink a pint of beer in one and a half seconds before then eating the glass. Docks have also, historically, been great crucibles of activity responsible for fomenting social and labour struggles. Examples abound. It was at the Gdansk Shipyard in Poland that the Solidarity movement became the first non-Communist trade union in the Soviet Eastern Bloc, sowing seeds that eventually led to the opening of the Iron Curtain. In my home, the UK, the world's oldest democracy, the London Dock Strike in 1889 ended in victory for the strikers and is considered a milestone in the development of the British labour movement.

So what exactly is going on? Are these two riots manifestations of a deep and growing unrest within Indonesian society? Are the docks in fact coalmines and the workers and communities down there their canaries, singing a song of impending doom? Are these coastal zones an early warning system, alerting us to the possibility of another 1998 style inland tsunami of rape, murder and pillage? This is a complex question of course and one that I don't feel particularly qualified to answer. It seems clear to me though that the image of the country's politicians, judiciary, police and civil service is close to an all-time low in the eyes of the public just at the moment.

Anyway campers, I decided to head up to Tanjung Priok last weekend in order to survey the wreckage and to hopefully avoid getting my head kicked in by either Muslims, dockers, Muslim dockers or any combination of the three. The huge elevated East Jakarta toll road up to the coast affords the casual motorist some great views of the urban sprawl below. Jakarta's critical mass of concrete and metal stretches as far as the eye can see, squatting beneath brooding clouds of premium gasoline fumes and the smoke from 5 million heavily Bogarted kretek cigarettes.

As you get towards Tanjung Priok itself, the traffic starts to peter out and the only vehicles left on the road are lumbering trucks and petrol tanks ploughing their own dusty furrow up towards the coast. Close to the docks, I saw various dollar-a-day types emerge from God knows where with plastic bags in their grubby hands. They were trying to tap a few drops of petrol from each of the passing tankers. Presumably they then sell it on to motorcyclists, either to put in their fuel tanks or to mix with Krating Daeng for a great, if potentially fatal, buzz.

Tanjung Priok is a truly enormous place. The huge, sprawling dock stretches down the coast for several kilometres. Inside the complex, I came across the mosque at the epicentre of this month's love in. Lots of behatted and robed types were entering and leaving the mosque area, no doubt in order to pray and to pay their respects at the great Mr. Priok's tomb.

I shuffled off in the other direction though for a chat with some of the dock’s security guards who were chilling out and enjoying a few soft drinks (and not beer). They proved to be very friendly and, after the usual ‘Hello Mister’s and questions about the relative merits of Chelsea and Manchester United, they told me about the riots and showed me a burnt out car and the windows of their little office which had been smashed in the melee. The broken glass still lay shattered on the asphalt although the windows have already been replaced (to be smashed again at a later date no doubt).

One of the guards, a native of Flores, told me that he had been working in the Kuta area of Bali when the bombs had gone off in 2002. Now he's had to watch people dying all over again, however he's retained his natural Indonesian ebullience.

"Do you think this will happen again?"

"Perhaps Mister, the Satpol [public order officials] are not liked by the people."

"Would you like to join the revolution? Or even a nice dock workers labour organisation?"

"No, no, that would cause terrible trouble."

Well, you've just had your trouble, mate. Today your windows, tomorrow your face perhaps. Labour struggles are indeed dangerous affairs though and if Indonesia's lower classes are up for it then many heads will be kicked in as the workforce struggles against the invidious multi-headed Hydra of outsourcing, low wages and general despair. Anyway folks, let’s look on the bright side. It’s Labor Day today, so I'll see you down the docks later okay? I'll be the one in the Che Guevara T-shirt and the PDI-P dinner dance cufflinks.

Tyre Tracks All Across Your Back

Apparently, a 20 day long clampdown on traffic violations is just getting underway here and the police have three weeks in which to rub their avaricious hands with barely concealed glee and shakedown a few motorists before everything inevitably returns to square one. Operasi Simpatik Jaya 2010 has been set up with a remit to instill a little discipline and order into Jakarta's pell-mell traffic scrum and to say that its enforcers have got their work cut out would have to be the understatement of the century.

 In fact, the sheer enormity of the challenge ahead was brought home very vividly this week with two motorcyclists were killed when a landing plane hit them on the runway of Curug Airport in Tangerang. Apparently, motorcyclists frequently use the airport's runway as a shortcut. Chalk up another Darwin Award for Indonesia.

According to Ministry of Transportation Spokesman, Bambang Ervan, "Tight monitoring [of airports] 24 hours a day, day in and day out, is impossible, there's just not enough people to carry it out." Not enough people?! Surely there are 250 million of them out there. What's more, every privately owned office block in town sports its own 24 hour security force. I wish that someone in the government would just be honest for a change and admit that the real reason is that there isn't enough money because it's all been pinched and spent on cars, women and moustache trimmers.

I don't know, they make tourists wait in lines and undergo stringent new biometric scans whilst at the same time they've got Valentino Rossi wannabes popping wheelies on the runways whilst planes are trying to land. As with so many issues in this beautiful country, it would seem to be a question of the left hand not only not knowing what the right hand is doing, but utterly oblivious to the fact that there may even be a right-hand.

However you’ve got me sidetracked again, you cheeky swines you. Back to Operasi Simpatik Jaya 2010 and the perpetual nightmare of trying to get anywhere in Jakarta by road in one piece before the planet suffers the heat death. Apparently, during the 20 day operation, traffic police will be focusing on the following violations:

1. Motorcycles riding down the street in the wrong direction. Now this one is a definite menace to pedestrians and I think that a fitting punishment would be to get offenders to ride the wrong way down the middle of a busy Jakarta toll road for 15 minutes at no less than 60 km per hour.

2. Motorcyclists not wearing standard safety helmets. Apparently, Indonesian National Standard (SNI) helmets are now mandatory and all bear genuine SNI stickers (which are obviously utterly impossible to scan into a computer and fake).

3. Public transportation vehicles that stop where they shouldn't or that drive recklessly. That's pretty much all of them, isn't it?

4. Motorcyclists with no lights on in the day will face an on the spot Rp.100,000 fine. Hmmm, but bikers with no lights on at night will be given a bar of chocolate and a kiss on the cheek?

5. Bikers and passengers without helmets will be fined Rp.250,000. Ironically, this is about the price of a halfway decent helmet in Indonesia but there you go. 

6. Cars and motorcycles without rearview mirrors, horns, lights, proper exhaust pipes and which have worn tires will be fined Rp.250,000. I've encountered many vehicles here that fail on all of these counts. My particular bugbear is motorbikes that have noisy racing exhausts fitted so that they sound like a squadron of 747s having durians fed into their air intakes.

I thought that it might provide some valuable data for police statisticians and urban planners to get stuck into if I went for a drive around my local area whilst timing how long it would take me to spot an example of each and every one of these nefarious classes of miscreant. It would also offer me about five minutes of fun on a par with the, "I Spy" books that I used to try and fill in as a small child.

I set off with my stopwatch running, utterly confident of bagging all six before leaving my neighborhood. In fact, before I even let the handbrake out, our maid came careering around the corner on her Suzuki scooter, sans helmet. I crossed number five off the list and scribbled 0 minutes 2 seconds next to it.

I hit the traffic light queue on my nearest main road and immediately spotted a biker wearing one of those Rp.10,000 PVC baseball caps that are laughably sold as helmets here. That was number two crossed off at 1 minute 10 seconds. As I got to the lights and rounded the corner, I spied number one cheerfully riding against the traffic and then realized that he was also a number four, 3 minutes 55 seconds.

When the next set of lights hit green, traffic was somewhat hampered by the orange Metro Mini which had decided to stop in the middle of the junction to let off a middle-aged woman with a small child and some heavy shopping. God bless them. So that was number three at 5 minutes 32 seconds. A boy racer then roared past perilously close to my right flank, racing exhaust emitting a sound equivalent to a helicopter landing in the audience at a Metallica concert. Bingo! The full set at only 5 minutes 57 seconds.

It had all been too easy and so I thought that I'd try and tick a few bonus boxes. On my travels I also saw: a family of five all balanced precariously on one scooter - tick, plus an extra tick for the fact that both parents but none of the three kids were wearing helmets. I also gave myself extra ticks for a street vendor who was trying to push his baso trolley into the oncoming traffic, a biker carrying a stack of rice crackers so high that he couldn't see over the handlebars, a bajaj swerving violently at the last minute in order to execute a right turn and a parking attendant who was extremely insistent that I kept going in the direction that I was already travelling in. Job done. Like taking candy from a baby.

Declare the Pennies on Your Eyes

Well, it's all go in the city that they (well, me at least) call The Big Durian. A huge billboard standing outside my office proudly proclaims, "Pajak Anda Membangun Jakarta" (Your taxes to build Jakarta) over a smiling, avuncular picture of Big Brother Fauzi Bowo, bristlingly handsome moustache lightly moussed down and Islamic peci tellingly lacking atop his regal crown, a symbolic gesture of value added piety gone missing in action. Taxation in Indonesia is Lucifer's domain you understand. Maybe he should have had some horns Photoshopped in.

Your taxes to build Jakarta ay? Well they are certainly building somebody’s Jakarta, however whether the great unwashed benefits from all of this construction is debatable. Does a private guitar shaped swimming pool and whirlpool bath lovingly sculpted into a tax official's back garden qualify as a public facility? Perhaps a few people should start knocking on their doors with towels and swimming trunks under their arms. Actually, scratch that, most people can't swim here can they? Maybe instead they could demand to have a go in their BMWs or to accompany them on a gentlemen's evening down to a top-class massage parlour.

In this context, the current, farcical bun fight (currant bun fight, geddit? Ho ho!...sorry) over corrupt tax officials is hardly surprising. I mean, if you run a huge campaign imploring the general public to start paying its taxes, then its surely inevitable that at some point they're going to want to know where the hell the money's gone. And just where has it gone? "He's got it", "No, he's got it", "You big fat liar! You had it!" etc etc ad infinitum.

According to my tax return form, my office paid about Rp.60 million in taxes on my behalf over the last financial year. Whether they actually did or not is anybody's guess in this country, however I believe my paymasters to be generally above board in this regard. Filling in the tax form itself however was something of a brain teaser and I can sympathise with Einstein when he once said of his tax returns, "This is too difficult for a mathematician, it takes a philosopher."

I certainly wouldn't be happy to learn that my contributions towards building a stronger civil infrastructure had instead been put towards chocolate martinis, luxury sedans and cheap tarts with expensive tastes in frocks. Alas though it would seem that this is where much of the building Jakarta money has gone. I mean I could be wrong but, to a first approximation at least, we would all appear to be living in one enormous shanty town built on a swamp which has been incongruously dotted with expensive shopping plazas and five-star hotels.

I'm sure that my tax Rupiah could be put to better use than this. Let's quickly survey the metropolitan wreckage and see if we can't come up with some more constructive ways of building up our hometown, with the goal of making it possible for tourists to visit the city without returning home with post-traumatic stress disorder.

1. Schools

Many Indonesian schools seem to be rather light on facilities. A single pencil between 150 kids who each get to have a ten minute go on it per week is generally the order of the day and would seem to indicate that less than the mandated 20% of the budget is being spent on education. Each school should have at least two pencils to go around in my view.

2. Hospitals

It's not just primitive superstition that drives people with broken legs into the arms of shamanic charlatans (or dukun as they're known in Indonesia) who then attempt to heal the fractures in question by holding their hands over the break and going all wobbly eyed whilst chanting incantations to the god Zeus. The simple fact of the matter is that they simply can't afford to be bolted back together at an institution that actually acknowledges the germ theory of disease.

3. Family Planning

If I had my tax money to spend anyway I wanted on building up Jakarta then I'd probably elect to buy a metric ton of Durex party hats to be dropped over the city's various districts from low-flying aircraft.

4. Public Execution of Motorcyclists Who Don't Put Their Bloody Lights on at Night

This could be first-rate public entertainment. The miscreants in question could be shot by firing squad up at Monas every Sunday afternoon followed by a Dangdhut concert and free ‘baso’ for all.

5. Transportation

There's clearly no real transportation solution for Jakarta using current technology so I would invest millions in teleportation research. Mind you, if such research ever bore fruit and the machines actually came online then I don't think that I'd necessarily have much faith in them being properly maintained here. It's one thing to get off the bus when it breaks down but quite another to have your internal organs teleported to Bekasi whilst the rest of you arrives in Kemang (actually, this may have already happened to some of my acquaintances).

6. Parks

I'd advocate selecting ten shopping malls at random and bulldozing them into the ground. The resulting parks could be seeded with hemp plants which could be used to...erm... make T-shirts or something.

7. Monuments

Jakarta is full of rather gaudy monuments, a testament to the late Sukarno's mounting megalomania. Perhaps some new ones could be fashioned that more accurately reflect the city's political and social zeitgeist. An enormous marble plinth topped with a huge bronze fist with its middle finger raised towards the heavens would be just the ticket.

8. Suicide Booths on Every Street Corner

You’ve heard the old saying that the only two inevitable things in life are death and taxes? Well, why not combine the two. I mean, Jakarta can really get you down sometimes.

So there you have it. That's my eight point budgetary plan for a brighter future and I'm sure that most of you would have no trouble coming up with a few suggestions of your own. As for the current four-way spat between the tax office, the police, the courts and the KPK (Corruption Eradication Commission) then I fully expect the whole depressing circus to rumble on indefinitely. Looking on the bright side though, this is undoubtedly an essential step on the way towards civilising Indonesia. You can't take your filthy lucre with you when you die after all. Mind you, taxation proves that you can't leave it behind either.

Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori

Last long weekend, my indolence got the better of me and I didn't manage to leave town and join the slowly snaking queues of SUVs weaving through small West Javanese towns having plastic bags full of sweaty tofu thrust through their windows whilst the kids in the back sent text messages written in words without vowels to their school friends and smeared Silver Queen bars into the upholstery. Thank the Lord I missed that one. Instead, I decided to consecrate several bottles of the blood of Christ and kickback at home. There was also the chance to see if Herr Ratzinger's Easter address would touch on the church's current, "No child's behind left" crisis, which alas it didn't.

Thankfully, an Easter miracle did take place though and the roads in town seemed to clear as if by divine providence. The city's blanketing smog bank also parted as if by the hand of Moses himself and thus I resolved to head out for a bit of a cycle ride around my local area. Donning my Viet Cong hat and hammer and sickle T-shirt, which I purchased last year in Saigon and which I like to annoy Indonesians with, I saddled up and wobbled off down the road with all these sinewy, muscular poise of a walrus in a shopping trolley.

Crossing over the traffic Rubicon of Jl. Mampnag Raya, while trying not to get mown down by a TransJakarta bus, a taxi on autopilot or a suburban all-terrain tank (it's very important to have four-wheel drive when heading down to Hero you understand) I managed to slip onto a quieter tree-lined street heading towards Pancoran and Kalibata. After a brief five-minute stop at a minimart in order to get laughed at by a parking attendant and to buy a bottle of low-calorie, isotonic sludge in a futile bid to look and feel more Lance Armstrong like, I remounted my rusty steed and hit the road again.

After a few minutes, I arrived at Kalibata Heroes Cemetery, a huge military graveyard roughly equivalent to America's Arlington National Cemetery. This one had Metro Madness written all over it I thought and I blithely cycled into the compound. I was steering my bike through the gates before a security guard caught up with me. Luckily I saw his wildly gesticulating form before I reached the Cenotaph. Popping a wheelie up there would undoubtedly have been a shooting offence.

The cemetery contains the graves of over 7000 people, including many military casualties and veterans from the Indonesian War of Independence. These take in a large number of Japanese who sided with the Indonesians against the Dutch at the end of World War II.

The cemetery is immaculately kept and the neat, well tended rows of graves stretch in all directions, a metal helmet atop each one. A few families were wandering around the grounds, presumably attending the graves of loved ones. There were also two long walls of names and corresponding years near the cemetery entrance, very similar to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC.

I inspected a few of the names and dates of death at random and certain years seemed to stand out for me. Indonesia's struggle for independence and release from the colonial yoke was a just and noble cause but in years such as 1975 and 1999, the jackboot of imperialism was most certainly on the other foot. In fact, since the Second World War, Indonesia has had little in the way of real conflict to deal with beyond poorly armed resistance groups struggling for the right to a bit of self determination and bewildered villagers armed with nothing more dangerous than baso balls (which admittedly can be potentially lethal in the right hands). They've been helped, of course, in their imperial adventures primarily by my own country (the UK) and the USA.

Indonesia has its independence heroes of course, but this was a popular people's struggle and everybody, to a greater or lesser extent, was part of the fight. There is a difference between such a people's struggle or citizens’ army and what Noam Chomsky has dubbed a, "Mercenary army of the disadvantaged."

Some armies, such as the French Foreign Legion, are directly mercenary however volunteer armies, such as the current Indonesian, American or British armies could be considered mercenary armies of the disadvantaged. This means that they recruit from and prey disproportionately on disadvantaged sections of society, people who have very limited options with regards to making a decent living and getting health, pension and insurance benefits. Once recruited they can then be sent out on military expeditions of dubious ethical value.

Admittedly, Indonesia's bottom rung soldiers are underpaid and under appreciated but the job still beats selling chicken noodles and living off Rp.20,000 per day. Some of you may be bristling at this analysis but ask yourself, privileged and educated sophisticate that you are, whether you yourself have ever considered enlisting? I'm guessing that most of you would probably answer in the negative.

You certainly wouldn't catch me volunteering to go and bomb the soup out of some largely defenseless race of dark skinned people. I mean, I could get hurt. Getting a medal pinned to your chest is scant consolation of having to control an electric wheelchair via a drinking straw for the rest of your born days if you ask me.

Musings on man's inhumanity towards his fellow man over, I remounted my armour plated, 18 speed, heavily armed beast and pedaled off. Hanging around graveyards on Easter weekend was starting to seem a bit macabre. It was time to get into the real spirit of Easter and buy a massive, pre-melted family sized bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut and stick it in the freezer for half an hour. It should be just about ready by now in fact.

Whoa!! We Hate Persib and We Hate Persib!! We are the Persib...Haters.

Over a week ago, soccer came to Senayan once again in the form of an Indonesian Super League game between Persija Jakarta and Persib Bandung. This fixture is a grudge match to rival Liverpool versus Manchester United or Barcelona versus Real Madrid and, as a consequence of this, as well as the fact that violence has been endemic at Indonesian soccer matches over the years, all away supporters were banned from attending the game. The last time these two sides met in January however, there were no supporters watching at all owing to security concerns.

And so I peddled my bicycle to Senayan, locked it against a fence and strolled into the stadium grounds, trusting that nobody would mistake my scrawny white buns for those of a Bandung supporter and kick my head in. I don't generally have the greatest faith in the Indonesian police, even the 2000 strong force that were on duty at the match, and so I bought an orange scarf to show my allegiance to the home team. Orange is the Persija color of course and the city is turned into a riot of vividly adorned buses on match days. The team itself plays in red however. Go figure.

I made it to the VIP entrance and, after paying Rp.100,000 to a tout for a Rp.60,000 ticket, I managed to find a comfortable seat in the press area away from the unwashed orange herd. The person who dubbed soccer, "The beautiful game" had clearly never attended an Indonesian fixture. The national team has a pretty abysmal record of course and has just spectacularly failed to qualify for the 2011 Asian Cup and also recently lost to regional minnows Laos in the SEA Games. Possibly, things haven't been helped by the fact that the head of the Indonesian Football Association (PSSI), Nurdin Halid, ran the organization from a jail cell for over a year a little while back. Only in Indonesia, etc etc. I think the most hilarious story that I've ever read about the nefarious world of Indonesian soccer however involved a referee being chased around the pitch by a local Regent after a particularly controversial decision.

The Indonesian Super League itself is hardly overflowing with precocious footballing genius and most of its best players have been imported from Africa and various other countries. The atmosphere on the terraces was quite electric however. Bung Karno Stadium could do with a bit of renovating but can hold an impressive 100,000 people. The top tier had been closed off for the match but there must have been a good 50,000 present, all shouting, screaming, chanting, lighting flares, taking part in Mexican waves and most likely stealing each others’ wallets. Perhaps it says something about the Indonesian economy that a normal league game held on a weekday during working hours can attract so many supporters.

Eventually, the teams took to the pitch and battle commenced. Alas, the first half proved to be a somewhat enervating affair and the score remained 0-0 as we headed into the break. Things perked up considerably in the second half though and Persija scored a thrilling last gasp equalizer to draw the game 2-2. The referee even managed to award Bandung a penalty without being taken out by a sniper in the stands. The fans went wild and let off so many orange flares that the stadium started to resemble downtown Beirut.

Still, at least Jakarta hadn't lost and thus the chances of my being knifed in the kidneys had dropped precipitously. Now came the tricky part though, going home. I headed out and walked cautiously around the stadium’s perimeter as an orange tsunami spilled out of the various exits. I unlocked my bicycle and headed out towards the main road. Thankfully no one seemed to think it necessary to push me off and steal my mobile phone. In fact, most were content to simply point and laugh at me, it's not every day that you see a big nosed Westerner wearing a Persija scarf and riding a bicycle after all.

A few days later, I came across a story in this very paper which confirmed that my fears had been well founded. Apparently, a supporter had died after the match after being mobbed to death. Again, only in Indonesia it seems could someone be killed at a game at which there aren't even any away supporters. Apparently, a thug in the crowd had pointed to a small group believing them to be Bandung fans and him and his friends had then attacked them, killing one of them and putting another two into hospital. Of course, it later turned out that the victims had been Jakarta's supporters after all, funny that.

Alas, events such as this represent the negative flipside of the Indonesian psyche and its friendly sociability, the flipside of an intense neighborliness that transcends self conscious awareness. Mob formation and the propensity to run 'amok' (tellingly, one of the only Indonesian words to make it into the English language) are the dark underbelly of Indonesian society and its repressions. I imagine that these guys would struggle to later recall actually killing someone at the height of the mob’s unconscious, emotionally charged intensity and to explain why, when their man was already down, they kept on kicking. The reason could be that the collective drive of the mob, in psychoanalytic terms, eliminates each individual member’s higher functions of self-criticism and conscience.

Perhaps the attackers were taking a leaf out of the Bill Shankly book of life. Bill was the former Liverpool manager who famously once said, "Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it's much more serious than that." Anyway, roll on the World Cup I say. My brave English boys will show these Indonesian whippersnappers what real hooliganism is all about.

Roooooooooooxanne!!

Recently, a friend of mine suggested an evening’s R&D mission to possibly the dodgiest area of Jakarta. I am referring to Kalijodo, a street full of bar/brothels that lies next to the less than crystalline waters of the Grogol River just under the airport toll road in West Jakarta. The notorious Kalijodo red light district has apparently existed for about 300 years and some of its more wizened residents look as if they've been around for a significant proportion of that time.

Anyway, on Tuesday evening, the three of us parked up a side street close by to the 100 or so not exactly club class Bintang, baso and bonking joints that line the main Kalijodo strip. We soon found ourselves enjoying the fragrant ammonia fragrance of the river air as we promenaded past the endless parade of neon lit Bintang signs and locals trying to beckon us into tiny discos resembling Guatemalan prison cells, all blasting out 1000 watts of Dangdut classics. Surely a romantic ambience to rival Paris in the spring.

"Looking lady Mr?" came the persistent refrain however I think I can speak for all three of us when I say that the Guantanamo Bay atmosphere of many of these shantytown dance floors proved to be something of a passion killer. Many of these places look as if you'd need to wipe your feet on the way out. 

The general dilapidation and desperation of the area was palpable and we soon sought refuge in what appeared to be the highest class joint in the area, the sizeable Intan Executive Club. We stepped across the threshold and our eyes adjusted to the near pitch black interior. Many clubs in Jakarta seem to be enamored of the darkened movie theatre approach to interior design. Perhaps it’s all part of an energy-saving push for a greener, more ecologically sustainable prostitution industry or maybe every watt saved on lighting can be channeled mercilessly into the earsplitting PA systems, which will have you curling up into a foetal position if you're foolish enough to select a table close to the speakers. Most likely though, the darkness of these places provides a reassuring cloak of anonymity for the gentleman punters whose significant other halves wouldn't be too pleased if they knew where their hubbies were.

On our Tuesday night mission however, we were the only ‘executives’ in attendance and thus we were given the royal treatment. Every single person in the building it seemed (including around 20 girls) was paraded past us and shook our hands. The Intan was clearly a cut above the other horny truck driver haunts that we'd seen earlier and the not quite Vegas-esque cabaret at least made us young executives feel as if we were on more familiar Jakarta nightlife territory.

Mind you, maybe all is class snobbery. This may have represented the cheaper end of the spectrum but, in fact, Jakarta is saturated with prostitution and there are places to suit all income brackets, even five-star hotels. Kalijodo itself exists in a sort of corrupt legal grey area, despite various efforts to shut it down, as do many of the city's cat houses, spas and naughty karaoke joints.

Prostitution itself is legal in some parts of the world and illegal in others and even feminists don't agree on this topic. Those in favour of legalisation say that in a free society, making the world's oldest trade illegal violates basic rights and individual liberties. Obviously it's a crime to force somebody into such activity however, if you sell your body of your own volition, then that is your right. There's also the pragmatic argument that legalisation protects women from disease and violence as they can be monitored and helped. In New York, apparently close to 60% of streetwalkers carry the AIDS virus whereas in Nevada, where there is a legalised free market in prostitution, AIDS barely registers. At a deeper, more philosophical level, author Angela Carter posits an oft heard argument reflecting wider economic power in our society thus, "What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many?"

Opponents of prostitution say that it commodifies women as sex objects, leads to violence against them and is a consequence of male domination. I guess that I'd say that, for better or worse, the flesh trade is ineradicable and will always be with us, whether legal or illegal, a direct consequence of the fact that human beings possess a mix of genes typical to both monogamous and non-monogamous species. Schopenhauer once said, "There are 80,000 prostitutes in London alone and what are they, if not bloody sacrifices on the altar of monogamy?"

You'll never get rid of Jakarta's night butterflies, that’s for sure, as the seedy boulevards of Kalijodo testify. You’d have more chance of enjoying a night of passion with Herr Ratzinger (actually... scratch that). If you're going to criminalize hooking though, then at least bust the men as well as (or even instead of) the girls. It's always the ladies who are victimized here, as with the case of the sexy dancers in Bandung who were recently prosecuted. There's a certain strain of misogyny in Indonesian society that is unfortunately dovetailing with the increasing Islamification of the country at the moment.

I know a girl who was once in a group rounded up by the police for the crime of being in a disco. She was sent to a so-called, "Re-education," Centre in East Jakarta (it was a prison) in order to learn sewing (great). Encouragingly though, she managed to escape after three months by climbing out of a second-floor window and jumping down off a 10 foot wall to freedom. Girl power at its best.