Lloyd Parry sees madness, magic and hope in RI

Lloyd Parry sees madness, magic and hope in RI

Yenni Kwok, Contributor, Jakarta

As a correspondent for major British dailies -- first The Independent and now The Times -- Richard Lloyd Parry has gone to places where high-profile conflicts were brewing: Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq; but he chose to write a book based on his reporting in Indonesia.

"The territory [of Indonesia] has been less trampled over by writers in English -- there seems to be more left to say," said Lloyd Parry, 36. "In those other places, I was never more than a parachutist dropping in for a few weeks at a time. I am no Indonesia expert, but I have spent a good deal of time there, especially between 1996 and 1999, and read what I could in English.

"And Indonesia is special, in a very personal way. After Japan, where I have lived for 10 years, it is the first foreign country that I have fallen in love with. The times I have spent there have been among the most intense of my life. I experienced fear, deep excitement."

His book, In the Time of Madness, is his eyewitness accounts of the Dayak-Madurese clashes in West Kalimantan in 1997 (and its sequel in 1999), the fall of Soeharto in 1998 and the East Timor referendum in 1999.

"They were extraordinary moments, which made a deep impression on me." He explained why he focused on these three events although he had covered more: "They seemed to tell the wider story of the toppling of a dictatorship -- the prologue when the cracks began to appear in the violence in Kalimantan and the economic crisis, then the fall of Soeharto itself, and then the aftermath in East Timor, which felt at the time like a climax to the whole thing ... as well as being a personal crisis for me."

Lloyd Parry was in his late 20s when he traveled to these troubled areas. "Any journalist who regularly covers conflict would have to admit, if he or she was being honest, that whatever else you say about violence, it is fascinating. I would never wish for violence, I deplore it naturally. But if it is going to happen, then to bear witness to it and to report on it to a receptive audience, feels like a privilege."

The strong belief in magic here has also intrigued him. "In the kind of world in which I spend most of my life, the world of rich Western cities. there is no supernatural. At most, you might meet someone who claims to have seen a ghost or a UFO, or who is superstitious about the number 13. But in places like Kalimantan, where many people believe in magic, magic is real," he said.

"The Dayaks believed that when the war trance was upon them, they could walk for days without food or drink, and they were immune to bullets. The Madurese believed it too. Who am I to say that they were all wrong?"

Having written a guidebook on Japan before, he feels In the Time of Madness is a darker, more personal work.

"This is a book about violence, and about extraordinary events in an exceptional time. And it's about my own fear, and the pessimism which that fear instilled in me for a while."

He saw the killing frenzies in West Kalimantan and the looting sprees in Jakarta, but the terror in East Timor, unleashed by the militias and the Indonesian military, traumatized him the most.

"On the night I was evacuated from the UN Compound in Dili to Darwin, I thought I was going mad," he said. "My pulse was racing, I was kept awake by panic attacks. And when I did sleep, I had dreams of being pursued by soldiers in red uniforms, and shot at, and killed. That intense distress passed after one night, but for a year or two afterwards, I felt very sad about East Timor.

"Sometimes it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up in the morning. I felt angry about the violence and cruelty I'd seen, and personally ashamed for running away. But at the same time, it was a precious time, and the unhappiness had something precious about it too. It's quite difficult to explain. Later, when I read about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I realized that I had suffered from a mild case of it."

He later discovered some fellow journalists who had been in the UN Compound had similar experiences of shame and self- reproach. "Perhaps that is a good and appropriate response to human violence -- to feel shamed by it, even if you are not responsible for it yourself."

Yet, he realizes their trauma was nothing compared to the suffering of the East Timorese. "For 23 years, they were locked up, tortured, raped and frequently murdered. But they emerged from it remarkably unmarked by bitterness or hatred."

Albeit less frequently, Lloyd Parry still visits Indonesia to report -- he was in Aceh to cover the tsunami. He also comes to Indonesia as a tourist, and considers it his favorite holiday spot.

"There's a contradiction, which I have never resolved, between the darkness which permeates much of this book, and which I felt deeply at the time, and the optimism and confidence I feel about Indonesia's long-term future," he said. "Indonesia is not a place of madness. It's a huge, diverse and very complicated place, which is emerging from a long period of rule by a repressive and malevolent government."