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

Chapter 3: The Purge

38 Surabaya, 1945–2010 38 3 The Purge The bridge from Dinoyo to Ngagel Industrial Estate was a place where kampung residents filled their lungs with air, freed their thoughts, strode out and cooled their skin in the breeze that swept across the river. In the closing weeks of 1965, this mood of openness would suddenly change: the air here would thicken with tension as corpses washed up on the riverbanks, people were dismissed from factories, squatter shacks were levelled, and soldiers entered Dinoyo to drag people from their homes. The intersection and its contrast of factories, squatter shacks and kampung alleys had come to represent patterns of labour, land use and local cultural expression that stood in the way of a vehement anti-communist movement that tore through the area, producing a new land-use pattern, new heroes, new street names, a new urban plan and a New Order under Major General Suharto. A 15-year period of mass political party mobilisation, worker militancy and rapid urban settlement had come to an end. For Eko and many others, the hopes of the period had turned to despair. A City of Hope In the first weeks of 1950, upon returning to Surabaya after the revolution , Eko worked unloading and driving trucks on a daily contract for the Heineken Brewery. In 1959, he gained permanent work next door at the large domestically owned Iglas factory that had opened that year. The Iglas factory stretched along Jl. Ngagel, which Eko plied throughout the day in a truck to transport the factory’s glass bottles to the brewery and to small soft-drink producers elsewhere The Purge 39 in the city. His friend of about the same age, neighbour and fellow veteran of the revolution, Rukun, also gained work in the factories. In the late 1950s, Rukun returned to Surabaya from the East Javanese town of Nganjuk, where he had been a guerrilla during the revolution and regular soldier after independence. He settled back into his parents’ home in Dinoyo and found work on a daily basis in nearby factories. Within a year he had gained a permanent position in the Karung factory, established in 1956 as a state-owned factory for the production of jute gunnysacks. Karung stood pristine and whitewashed on a 7-hectare site on the far side of the railway line at the eastern edge of the estate. Inside, Rukun operated one of the many giant mechanical looms, where huge rollers fed twined jute through the loom to produce the sacks needed to pack the hinterland’s sugar, rice and coffee. For Eko and Rukun, ex-soldiers who now faced a future as factory workers, the familiar sound of heavy machines Figure 3.1 Karung factory under construction, early 1950s. Courtesy Arsip Kotamadya 40 Surabaya, 1945–2010 captured the new Indonesia of development (pembangunan) that they read about in the newspapers.1 Many women were employed in Ngagel Industrial Estate’s BAT factory, the largest producer of white cigarettes in Indonesia (Redfern, 2010: 177). Neng, a neighbour and friend of Eko and Rukun, worked there rolling cigarettes. She was a 30-year-old mother of three with a husband who worked occasionally as a day labourer in the factories. Another neighbour, Arifin, also worked at the BAT factory. Working there as a foreman he learned a smattering of German and English from the foreign advisers who visited the factory. In the years to come, Arifin would court and eventually marry Neng, after she had divorced. The workplaces of Eko, Rukun, Neng and Arifin all stood close to one another: Iglas was about 200 metres from the BAT factory and sat in front of the Heineken Brewery, while Karung sat behind BAT on the opposite side of the railway track. As Neng recalls , the bridge over the river crossed directly from the BAT factory to Dinoyo’s main Alley Nine, carrying a continuous flow of workers to and from the factories. With the workers came communistinspired political beliefs, learned through PKI-affiliated organisations such as the United Cigarette Workers’ Union (Serikat Buruh Rokok Indonesia), the Unilever Workers’ Union (Serikat Buruh Unilever) and a militant workers’ group at the brewery (Redfern, 2010: 149, 284–300). On 29 November 1957, the revolutionary spirit of takeover motivated Ngagel’s workers’ movement into action. On that day, the United Nations had voted against Indonesia’s demand for...