Surabaya, 1945-2010: Neighbourhood, State and Economy in Indonesia's City of Struggle

Chapter 10: Conclusion: Death and Life

Conclusion 203 203 10 Conclusion: Death and Life “In the capitals people print maps with red dotted lines or different colours to show the different areas, as though this will keep the status quo for eternity.” (Mohamad, 1991b: 231) Whenever Dinoyo men spotted a corpse in the river it became a great spectacle. They would rush out of the kampung, crowd the riverbank, climb trees for a better vantage point and yell updates on the corpse’s position to friends below. This sort of collective viewing of a corpse in a public space was unlike the viewing of the corpse in a Javanese funeral, where it served as a model of appropriate expression by representing an ideal of “detachment from the impulses that disrupt behaviour” (Siegel, 1983: 6). Discussing the issue as they sat in a street stall one night, a group of Dinoyo men reasoned that the corpse in a funeral modelled an appropriate expression because the ideal of detachment it expressed was inevitable for everyone at death. The riverside corpse, by contrast, took on a different meaning according to these men, modelling not a future death but a past death that was not yet detached from the traumas of life. The model of expression exhibited by the riverside corpse drew on the past by contemporising a collective memory of the river and the street as a place of danger. Every corpse floating down the river or deposited along its banks symbolised a malicious force that kampung men did not control and which had claimed the lives of their relatives and ancestors. Every corpse also potentially foreshadowed their own fate, linking to past traumas, or what Goenawan Mohamad (1984b: 166) called the “burden of history” as felt by Indonesian 204 Surabaya, 1945–2010 people. For Dinoyo men, the burden was a history of death by summary execution. The most recent purging of poor people from the street is both more subtle and more complete than the purges of the past and occurs through a violence that is much less corporeal than that remembered by Dinoyo men. It takes the form of what Peter Rimmer and Howard Dick (2009: 157) call the “new colonialism” of airconditioned , middle-class housing and malls that displace the poor by claiming pavements, markets and kampung land. According to Rimmer and Dick, the new colonialism is underpinned by an economic imperative to attract capital by pandering to middle-class concerns for safety, comfort and physical distance from the poor. In the mid-1990s, when Surabaya was in the midst of a boom in the construction of malls, hotels and middle-class housing estates, Johan Silas (1995b) and Ramlan Surbakti (1994a, 1994b, 1995) made similar observations, arguing that real estate developers were giving rise to a “utilitarian city” that condemned the poor by serving only those who could pay. Fifteen years after the penning of these concerns, decentralisation policies had given rise to revenue-hungry municipal governments that supported the new colonialism through urban renewal campaigns that boosted the city’s profile to attract investment. This desire for investment was the reason given by police for a new citywide security programme launched in January 2010. Speaking to journalists, Sri Setyo Rahayu, the police officer heading the security programme, explained that its underlying objective was to “attract investment into the city”. As detailed below, however, surveillance of newcomers seemed to be the programme’s major objective. Urban renewal and its new geography of exclusion are driven not only by the need for economic investment and growth but also by the need to bring all citizens within the state’s administrative gaze. After the Bali bombings of 2002 and 2005, the Jakarta Australian Embassy bombing of 2004, and the Jakarta Marriott Hotel bombings of 2003 and 2009, the need to identify strangers gave rise to a fear of their murderous, insidious potential, which was dealt with through administrative interventions that would enable a more thorough surveillance of society (Conboy, 2006; Sydney Jones, pers. comm.). Even the kampung of Dinoyo felt the impact of these new administrative interventions. During the New Order, Dinoyo had been kept under fairly loose surveillance by the police Mobile Brigade (Brimob) units that patrolled along Jl. Dinoyo, occasionally stopping Conclusion 205 at street stalls and kampung guard posts to gather information on crime. Surveillance tightened in 2003 when Brimob became a source of recruits for the elite counterterrorist...