Bali waits for Megawati to become Indonesia's president

Bali waits for Megawati to become Indonesia's president

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR (JP): It's only a few minutes past noon in Denpasar,
but already Made Sukra, long known as the best tailor in the
neighborhood, has had to turn away a dozen potential customers.
It's not that he has more work than he can handle. It's that he
has even more important business to attend to. Sukra is busy
waiting for Megawati Soekarnoputri.

What was once a successful shop, busy with the clattering
noise of sewing machines and the ring of the telephone announcing
new orders, is now an empty room. The equipment, the bolts of
cloth, the spools of thread and tape measures, all have been sold
to raise money to create an informal posko or "command post" for
local Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI Perjuangan)
supporters. Even the sign over the door advertising "clothes made
to order" has been replaced by a huge red banner reading saking
kawitan tiang sampun PDI-P -- "since the time of our ancestors
we've been PDI Perjuangan."

But despite its barren appearance, Sukra's shop is in fact
busier than ever before. Already there are at least a dozen men,
most of them members of Bali's growing group of unemployed,
sitting cross-legged on the floor, shouting out their opinions on
current political issues in heated exchange.

Sukra's wife serves them coffee and cigarettes, a look of
worry and exhaustion on her face. She talks to herself,
frustration creeping into her voice. "I just hope that Mbak Mega
becomes president soon," she says. As she pours some rice from
her fast-dwindling stock into a cooking pot and lights the fire
under the men's meal, she explains that she is trying to see
"Mega Mania" as just another episode in the never ending round of
Balinese ceremony.

Familiar with the huge amounts of food and drink that must be
offered to those participating in events such as cremations and
temple anniversaries and the huge drain on household resources
these represent, she is determined to wait out the ritual leading
up to the choice of Indonesia's next president, hoping that the
blessings of God will soon descend on her and her family. She has
tried to share her worries about the future of the household with
her husband, but he refuses to listen.

"How can you think about your stomach when reformasi
(reformation) is at stake?" he challenges her. From her logistic
depot in the kitchen, she can hear the sound of the men
repeating, in their thick Balinese accents, the new mantras
(incantations) of the current political milieu: Money politics,
civil society, coalition, dual function, nepotism...

It's afternoon in a small village on the east coast of Bali.
Behind the local temple, a space has been cleared for the day's
event: A cockfight. But this is not the Balinese cockfight
immortalized by anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, who
sought to describe how Balinese gave meaning to their social
world. Nor is this the cockfight that turns the stomachs of timid
tourists when they arrive by the bus load to watch the
spectacular temple ceremonies in which the battling birds play a
starring role.

This is the reformasi cockfight: An informal fund raiser to
support Megawati's PDI Perjuangan. Tired of watching a seemingly
endless flow of funding enrich the activities of Golkar, the
government's party, these villagers have decided on a self-help
strategy to further their own political aims. As the birds sink
their razor enhanced claws into each others' necks, the
spectators comment on the coming General Session, at which
members of the newly elected People's Consultative Assembly (MPR)
will choose Indonesia's next president, as if it too, were a
fight unto death.

"If Megawati doesn't become president, there's going to be
bloodshed," one man comments. "But Mega is already president,"
another man counters. "She's president of the rakyat -- the
common people."

By the end of the day, once the police have taken their share,
the event has netted some Rp 10 million, or around US$1,300. The
funds will be used to support local PDI Perjuangan activities:
Gasoline for the motorbikes of the youth who race up and down the
streets carrying banners and shouting slogans, bright red T-
shirts emblazoned with the PDI Perjuangan's bull symbol and
Megawati's smiling face, red paint to cover as many walls, trees,
fences and lamp posts as possible, and packages of instant
noodles for everyone in the village.

The election may be over, but Megawati fever still burns in
Bali. Bank Bali may have gone Golkar, but the Balinese
themselves, some 90 percent of whom chose Megawati's PDI
Perjuangan this past June, seem thoroughly convinced that
victory, and with it large-scale changes in the social landscape,
is close at hand. On an island better known for its beaches and
its bargains than its political activism, this fanatical
factionalism has many shaking their heads, wondering: Just what
is going on as the "last paradise" falls prey to party politics?

Local observers have tended to explain Balinese backing of
Megawati's PDI Perjuangan in either of two ways. In the first
analysis, Balinese are thought to be mired in metaphors of
"blood", devoted to Megawati for the simple reason that her
father, Indonesia's first president, Sukarno, was the son of a
Balinese mother. Just as the blood of sacrifice must flow at
certain ritual moments in order to appease the demons of the
unseen world, so will Megawati's Balinese blood protect her
extended family as Indonesia's future appears uncertain.

According to this narrative, "kinship", rather than
"democracy", is the ruling political ideology and Bali is not so
much entering the age of reform as regressing to a polarizing
past.

The second analysis casts the Balinese in much the same light.
People like Sukra and Agung Sumantra are viewed as slavishly
following a social script in which their Hindu belief in the
awatara, the ruler who will one day come to earth and set matters
right, provides the main plot line. Local culture has blinded
them to the knowledge of the broader economic and political
facts: That even if Megawati is elected president, Indonesia
still has a long, hard road to travel to recovery. Sukra and
Agung will still be waiting long after Megawati arrives.

More generous analyses include that of one Balinese political
observer who explained the local enthusiasm for Megawati as a
kind of "politik latah," referring to a psychological syndrome
found in Java and Bali whose sufferers compulsively mimic the
words of others. Describing how if one Balinese opens a fried
chicken stand (or an art gallery, or a sarong shop or a stall
selling carved wooden cats) his neighbors will likely copy his
successful example, he claims that most Balinese follow Megawati
because they feel most comfortable in a crowd.

In a culture where an ethic of individualism has yet to
achieve dominance, proclaiming one's allegiance to the current
favorite becomes the most sensible political strategy. Thus New
Order polls saw nine out of 10 Balinese casting ballots for
Soeharto, while the reformasi reckoning saw the same majority
swing toward the opposition. But pressures to join the preferred
party ranks have taken more repressive forms as well.

During the May electoral campaigns, those Balinese who did not
set the PDI Perjuangan flag flying in front of their gates,
either because of political apathy or other allegiances, risked
having rocks thrown at their homes or being physically attacked
by bands of party supporters -- the same kind of intimidation
practiced by Golkar gangs in past elections. In this climate,
joining the Megawati multitudes becomes a way of ensuring not
only smooth social interactions but one's physical safety.

But how far can these analyses, which use Balinese culture to
explain Balinese politics, really go in explaining Megawati
millenarianism?

Megawati's appeal as an oppositional figure, one who could
challenge Soeharto and his government and emerge even stronger
for the struggle, has not been lost on the Balinese. The span of
Soeharto's rule coincided with the emergence of mass tourism in
Bali, a phenomenon which saw a select circle of Balinese become
wealthier than ever before, but which left an even larger group
landless, their rice fields and homes cleared to make way for
golf courses and hotels, most of them owned by international
conglomerates and Indonesian elites, including several of
Soeharto's children.

The New Order state encouraged this kind of development as the
path to Balinese prosperity, all the while channeling the
revenues it generated back to Jakarta. But it was not only at the
material level that Soeharto's state intervened in Balinese life.
Under the New Order, "culture" was strategically cultivated as a
substitute for "politics", both as a way to turn potentially
explosive regional differences into a stable spectrum of domestic
diversity and to provide colorful cultural spectacles that could
lure tourists to destinations like Bali.

Balinese were taught, through state programs like Sapta Pesona
(the seven enchantments), the kind of personality they needed to
cultivate in order to become truly "Balinese" and therefore
irresistibly attractive to tourists -- friendly, beautiful,
memorable, clean, safe, neat and, above all, orderly. Under the
New Order, it in fact frequently became difficult to separate
"Balinese culture" from the uses to which it was put.

Megawati's message to the Balinese, delivered during her many
visits to the island, posed a direct challenge to the state's
agenda for Balinese development.

Tourism, she declared, should benefit not only outsiders but
also the Balinese. She urged the Balinese to maintain their
culture by not performing traditional arts just for easy profit
and by refusing to sell the land of their ancestors to the
highest bidder. Megawati's fervent nationalism has also appealed
to many Balinese, especially to those who have grown increasingly
disenchanted with tourist development on the "enchanted isle".
For those who are still waiting for an affluence that has yet to
arrive, Megawati's father's famous words, that the West could "go
to hell with its aid", seem newly meaningful.

Now, several months later, the campaign posters have begun to
fade and tropical green has twined its way up the red-painted
tree trunks. In closed door meetings, deals are being cut to
negotiate a coalition that might have a chance of bringing a new
president to power.

Agung, one of the organizers of the local Megawati campaign,
has returned to his job as a waiter at a small hotel, a tourist
oasis where he has worked for over 12 years. Earning about $40 a
month, he is frequently hard pressed to meet the needs of his
family. Despite reassurance by the government that inflation has
been halted, his small salary seems less and less sufficient as
the months pass.

Recently, he has had to tell his two daughters that he cannot
pay the costs -- the school fees, the uniform fees, the book fees
-- necessary to send them on to middle school. But for Agung, the
failure of PDI Perjuangan to gain a clear majority in the
national election for the House of Representatives (DPR) members
has hardly dulled his optimism. To him, Megawati is everything.
In his eyes, she represents the only hope of escaping from the
constant struggle his life has become.

"Later, when Mbak Mega is president, my luck will change," he
claims. "I won't have to do this kind of work anymore." So
certain is Agung of Mbak Megawati's powers to transform, he has
already promised his children that next year, after the
presidential election, they can return to school. In the new
Megawati millennium, when the waiting is finally over, he
predicts that the tourists will just have to wait on themselves.

The writer is a Balinese anthropologist and a former fellow at
the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, the
United States.