SOEHARTO BAPAK PEMBANGUNAN INDONESIA

This is a propaganda cassette, came out in 1983 when the dictator Soeharto and his regime were still going strong....

I started living her at the end of `1996, I still remember when he was president, Indonesia was another country, very, very different from now, very isolated, all news was controlled and censored. You didn't see much police on the streets (like now) all you saw was the military everywhere. If you started to talk about politics or "The Family" Indonesian people would just get up and leave, it was too dangerous to talk about these things openly... You would see him and his family on tv every day, all the time and there were propaganda movies on tv all the time....

When he and his regime went down in may, 1998, things got CRAZY and I was in the middle of it, lucky to get out alive and in one piece really. I had a trip home to Rotterdam planned on the day that everything went crazy. I was trying to make my way to the airport in Jakarta, Suharto was supposed to land there that day on his way back from Mekkah (he didn't land there he landed at some military airfield) and I was in a taxi. Got stuck in the tens of thousands of people demonstrating on the toll road to the airport and people started breaking the windows of the taxi to get at me. Only the quick-thinking of the taxi driver saved me, and he managed to get out with me hiding under a blanket. He drove me back home, all the way to Bandung and the next day I tried reaching the airport again, by train. The train never made it to Jakarta, at Purwakarta the whole train station was on fire, an incredible big fire and after waiting for a while buses came to bring all the passengers to Jakarta. A young English couple with a little daughter, about 3 years old or so were sitting in front of me. Saw them later om tv, getting dragged out of a taxi, mercilessly beaten and robbed.....

The bus arrived at Gambir train station in the center of Jakarta and it was already dark. The city was burning, riots everywhere, huge groups of people running around and i was walking completely alone with my backpack through all this madness trying to reach Jalan Jaksa, where all the backpacker hotels were, not too far from Gambir. Soldiers with tanks would shout at me, telling me I was crazy, a foreigner all alone in all that madness.... Came to Jalan Jaksa and everything was closed so I decided to try and take a taxi again to the airport... Got into the taxi and the driver was a huge, giant guy with a big ass afro, must've been 300 pounds at the least and he started driving into a completely wrong direction so I got a bit scared, I'm not ashamed to say it, there were warnings about violent robberies (two English boys were found later at the toll road with their necks cut through), but we had a conversation, about all the craziness going on and at one point I said "Alhamdulillah" and I guess that saved me. He started calling me his brother and turned the taxi around and brought me safely to the airport....

The airport was deserted and very spooky which was very weird because the day and the night before it was pandemonium there, foreigners and specially Chinese Indonesians trying to get tickets out of the country, to anywhere, for exorbitant prices...

I got a flight to Holland easily, in no time. Was planning a month in Holland but I was back within two weeks, didn't want to let my (Indonesian) wife and daughter alone, things stayed very tense for quiet a while, somebody only had to shout RIOT!!! and people would just run, shops would board up and close, loads of demonstrations, but in Bandung not much happened....

Man what times.... Only a very, very small number of foreigners remained in Bandung, you could count them on two hands maybe, very special times..... Times of high hopes, hope for freedom, the hope that the incredible corruption under the former dictator and his regime would now stop....

Well......

People will not leave as quickly when you start about politics and there's much more freedom for the press, that's true.... The middle class that was virtually destroyed during the crisis that brought about the end of Soeharto is enormous again but the poverty has also gotten worse, the difference between the super rich and the very poor has only grown, corruption never had been as bad as it is now, and there's a lot, a lot more going on....

There's quiet a bit of nostalgia here on the island of Java for those times that Soeharto was in charge.... I'm not so sure if many of these people remember what was really going on back then and if you would like to get a feel about how those days were I can certainly recommend reading this book:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10313047-indonesia-betrayed

Or maybe this book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248074.The_Mute_s_Soliloquy

Or even this excellent book:

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2602190-the-wisdom-of-whores

Or to understand what the Soeharto regime stood for, maybe you could watch these movies, the best movies I've seen about Indonesia:





Personally... I look back on those times with a sense of nostalgia, I was living here, there wasn't much news coming in from the outside, a few letters from friends every now and then, no internet, just starting out here with my wife and daughter, living in a different house every year (rent would always double at the end of the year because they would know there was a foreigner living there), we didn't have much, a tv, a refrigerator, it all went very slowly, but not with a sense of nostalgia for the old dictator and his murderous regime.....

Anyway, it's a very, very lengthy cassette I'll have to give it to you in two parts....


PART ONE

PART TWO

enjoy!