Monopoly in the Garden of Eden

Monopoly in the Garden of Eden

By Andreas Baenziger

TERNATE, Maluku: The tree is so famous that the inhabitants of
Ternate gave it a special name: Afo, which translates as "the
giant." It is a gigantic example of the otherwise slim and
unremarkable clove tree.

The Giant has a huge twisted and knotted trunk, and sturdy
overhanging branches. Afo is 35 metres high - normal clove trees
usually make it to just eight to 12 metres - and is reputed to
have produced 600 kilos of dried cloves in its best years. But
now the 400-year-old giant is approaching death through old age.

Standing alone and off the little road that leads up the side
of Gamalama volcano, the Giant can be found in a quiet, shady
wood of light green clove and dark green nutmeg trees. Tall trees
form an umbrella which protects the delicate spice trees
underneath them from the sun's powerful rays.

A delicate aroma of cloves hangs in the humid air and all
around is luxuriant greenery. This is Ternate, a roundish island
which rises out of the ocean like a perfectly shaped verdant
dome, just 10 kilometers from side to side.

Together with its sister-island Tidore it forms the original
home of the clove in the Indonesian Maluku island group - or
Spice Islands - 2,200 kilometers east of Jakarta.

Several hundred metres above Afo the tropical rain-
forestceeins, continuing right up to the lip of the volcano. Its
remote location and extreme age make Afo an illegal tree: when
they were here, the Dutch colonialists would certainly have
tortured the owner to death if they had found it.

For Afo is a rebel against the spice monopoly which the
Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie - the Dutch East India Company,
founded by Dutch merchants in 1602 - tried to impose here.

Twenty minutes on foot below Afo, Ibu Hamadjen, 72, lives in a
modest longhouse. Things do not look too bright for Ibu Hamadjen:
her shirt hangs in tatters and she has no shoes. She was not even
aware that her country held crucial elections on June 7: visitors
must be rare indeed.

She has also never the term "reformasi," the catch-all phrase
behind the process of renewal and democratization after the
departure of dictator Soeharto. But Hamadjen is certainly well
aware of what happened to his cloves during the Soeharto era.

In a similar fashion to the Dutch 450 years previously,
Soeharto's son Hutomo Mandala Putra - or Tommy, as he is better
known - attempted to create a monopoly on the clove market, in
the process securing an effortless income of some US$100 million
a year for his own pocket.

Indonesia produces around 80,000 tons of cloves a year, most
of which literally goes up in smoke - because almost the entire
production goes to the cigarette industry. Cloves are mixed in a
one-to-three ratio with tobacco to give Indonesia's kretek
(clove) cigarettes their distinctive aroma.

The upshot of Tommy Soeharto's monopoly was a huge price slump
and catastrophe for clove farmers. "Bad prices mean we have
nothing to eat," Hamadjen says. "I have only cloves, cinnamon and
nutmeg here. I have to buy my rice and other food."

The people on Ternate even started chopping down the clove
trees. The fall of Soeharto, though, meant the end of the
monopoly, one of the crassest examples of mismanagement under the
veteran dictator. Now the harvest is once again bought up by
Chinese traders in Ternate Town, as it was in the days before the
monopoly.

Prices quickly recovered, to twice what they were before
Soeharto Junior's meddling, nutmeg even more. A confident
Hamadjen says, "Our vigor has returned."

But she also knows of the suffering brought by the Dutch to
Ternate and the rest of the Spice Islands. His father told him
the story, and she has passed it on to her children and
grandchildren.

The Dutch East India Company under its bloodthirsty governor,
Jan Pieterszoon Coen, decided on a whim to move clove production
to Ambon island to make it easier to exercise control over the
flourishing trade in spices. The trees on the other islands were
felled.

That was the first monopoly, and the reason for Afo being
planted high up in the rainforest out of reach of the grasping
Dutch.

Under the new colonizer-traders, Ternate quickly descended
into poverty - its barter economy having been robbed of its
resources. Previously the Dutch, Javanese and Chinese sailors had
brought food and staples to the island and took cloves away with
them in return.

The Dutch, and before them the Portuguese, however, had no
intention of entering into any trading niceties: they wanted the
cloves, the only things the islanders of Ternate and Tidore
possessed, for themselves. And they were prepared to take it by
force if they had to.

Banda

The people of Banda island, a few hundred kilometers further
south, were also proud owners of nutmeg trees; but what they
endured was far, far worse. The entire population was either
murdered or sold into slavery - a total of 15,000 men, women and
children.

Banda was repopulated by Dutch settlers and their slaves.
Ternate only managed to escape this fate because at the time it
was an nominally independent state with an army and a ruling
sultan.

The sultan's title still exists today, and is borne by
Mudaffar Syah, a distinguished gentleman in his mid-60s who
sports an elegantly trimmed beard.

"We were on Ternate for so many years," the sultan recalls of
his people's experiences under the Dutch and later the Indonesian
colonists. "Then the Dutch turned up suddenly. They took away our
rights and forced us to obey. That caused us great pain, but we
could not protect ourselves - after all, we didn't have any
canons or anything like that.

"And then the republic came - and that was far worse. They
also took away our rights, our products, and determined how much
we were paid for our spices: the Dutch, the republic, my own
nation, both Presidents Soeharto and Sukarno."

Sultan Mudaffar Syah, who is standing as a candidate for
Soeharto's ruling Golkar party this month, is the direct
descendant of one Sultan Hairun who was treacherously murdered by
the Portuguese in 1570.

"The Portuguese wanted to set up a trading monopoly and when
Hairun said no they simply killed him," he says. But the
Portuguese suffered on account of the murder: Hairun's successor
Babullah besieged their fortress for five years until they were
forced to surrender. "We beat the Portuguese and drove them out,"
says Mudaffar Syah.

In the beginning, the Maluku stood for what Indonesia is
today. Today's Jakarta - Batavia to the Dutch - was merely a
service station on the way to the Spice Islands.

But then, almost overnight, Ternate, Tidore and Banda islands
slipped from memory when the Frenchman Pierre Poivre succeeded in
stealing clove and nutmeg cuttings. He planted the trees on the
French-held island of Mauritius, and later on Zanzibar, which is
where the Europeans buy them now.

Today Ternate has reverted to what it once was: a little-known
Garden of Eden somewhere in the Far East. Only Ambon, the Dutch
colonists' favorite Maluku island, regularly hits the headlines -
both for its struggles for independence and its sectarian
violence. But that too is little more than a late consequence of
its colonial past.

-- Sueddeutsche Zeitung