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from Minding the Darkness
- Manoa
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 12, Number 1, 2000
- pp. 224-229
- 10.1353/man.2000.0026
- Article
- Additional Information
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Manoa 12.1 (2000) 224-229
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from Minding the Darkness (IV.xi)
Peter Dale Scott
21 August 1998
In the Bishop's Palace in Oporto
overlooking the old port
on the river Dourowith its huge advertisements for port
Graham Dow the same Scots
families as in India and Montrealwhere we all spoke on East Timor
including the leader
of a Muslim student group from Indonesiafacing possible imprisonment
when he went back home
George Aditjondro (alreadybanished from his country
his passport invalidated
for defending East Timorand showing how Indonesia's wealth
was not so much Chinese
as concentrated in the handsof a tiny clique
surrounding Soeharto)
the Argentinian lawyerwho in the time of the generals
spoke for the mothers of the desaparacidos
and most dramatically [End Page 224]X the East Timorese
whose own risk on her return
was not arrest but disappearanceand who against the advice
of her friend Professor Barbedo
told the group how she had been rapedI finally met Max Lane
the translator of Pramoedya
Indonesia's greatest living writeroften mentioned as a candidate
for the Nobel Prize for literature
and I said to him Pramoedyais so original
even the reviewers who praise him
are too Western in their outlookto follow what he has done
for the genre of the novel
at the end of the Buru Quartetand Max explained He will never
be given a Nobel
all of the current writersflourishing under Soeharto
are dead set against it
Of course I thoughtyou cannot be powerful in a state
and unlike it in character
Thus Pramoedya was thrown in prisonfirst by the Dutch
for championing independence
then by Sukarno's armyfor challenging the treatment of Chinese
and then for fourteen years without trial
by Soeharto's New Order [End Page 225]while until recently
students were tortured and imprisoned
for sharing his booksWhen asked to apologize
Pramoedya a meditator
(the sound of your breatha form of samadhi)
wrote the following
I myself am JavaneseI was educated to Javanese ideals
guided by the Mahabharata
at whose climax they bathein the blood of their own brothers
while other peoples who
have managed to slip their shacklesare the nations that rule the world
Even in the belly of Dutch power
Java still glorifiedits narrow world culture
they bathed in the blood of their brothers
right up through 1966And because Java was no longer
in the belly of European power
the slaughter reached an unlimited scalewithout colonization my country
would have ceaselessly spilled
the blood of its sons and daughterscultural integrity a bogey
for the countries stuffed with capital
by which free peoples are enslavedthe unemployed become murderers
with uniforms and badges of rank
vast forests are torn apart [End Page 226]It is necessary that I emphasize
the problem of power
that tends to turn people into banditsabove all if they have held it for decades
and without ever knowing Verlichting
Aufklaerung remain in thralleverything that has happened
will live on for centuries
Once more--my apologiesBut now the IMF
(having learnt from the massacres
which followed its exactmentsin Yugoslavia and Rwanda)
has allowed Indonesia
to continue heavy subsidieson food and fuel
and the most powerful voices
denouncing the recent murdersand rapes of the Chinese
are the top Muslim leaders
like Abdurrahman Wahidthird-generation
leader of NU
the largest nongovernmental Islamicorganization in the world
not even in Saudi Arabia
do they have a mass Muslim organizationsuch as the NU
The government there will not allow it
who in May in Surabayaorganized a meeting of one million
from all over East Java
all dressed in white [End Page 227]against the reactionary
clerics in his own NU
who had preached against the Chinesefrom the pesantren
some of whose youth in '65
were brought in by army trucksto kill the secular teachers
and send their corpses
down the river Brantasbut which Sulak now praises
for wanting development
from the...