The Journey South (Part 4)

My route through Bengkulu.  Map from provincial RTRW.

When we last left our hero (yours truly) he was being screwed around by district officials in Arga Makmur, the capital of Bengulu Utara (North Bengkulu) district.  I was in Bengkulu Utara as part of a 2-week road trip through several provinces on Sumatra to visit villages, collect planning documents, and meet with government officials about the relationship between Kerinci Seblat National Park and the political entities surrounding the park.  This trip is part of my PhD dissertation research, which I've been in the field working on for the past 10 months.  I'd been told after waiting around for the vice district head to come to the office at 8am the following day, when I would be allowed to interview him.

Moving Right Along...

One of my new friends at Bupati's office in Lebong

The next day I went to the office as per the instructions.  After waiting about 30 the vice district head's secretary came in and told me he'd been suddenly and unexpectedly called away to a "party" and that I wouldn't be able to meet with him.  She apologized profusely while I made haste for the exit, intent on getting back on the road for possible greener pastures in Muara Aman, the capital of Lebong district.  After packing it took me about 2 hours to motor over to Muara Aman, where having no friends I checked into a room and headed up to the political and cultural affairs office (KESBANGPOLLINMA) to start the paperwork required to request a meeting with the district headman and other officials.  To my surprise they went right to work on the letter, and the head of the office even volunteered to be interviewed for my research, since he'd previously worked in several government offices and was well-acquainted with the politics of the district.

After an hour or so I got my letter and went over to the planning office, where I was immediately able to interview the head.  He instructed his subordinates to give me all the documents I wanted, which they did.  This was in stark contrast to what I'd experienced in Bengkulu Utara.  I left the office after a couple of hours contented that I'd put in a good day's work, the only blight being the failed meeting with the vice headman in Arga Makmur and the theft of my helmet from in front of the planning office.  I borrowed a helmet off the guys in the office so I could safely (physically and legally) make the 10 kilometer trip down the hill to town to get another helmet.  The only problem was that when the wind blew through the cheap helmet it sounded like the sound effect used when the bloodthirsty hordes of fishes attacked in the 1978 horror classic Piranha.  So as I rode down the hill I felt like I was about to be devoured by a million Piscean predators.  It wasn't a big deal though.

Later that night I was planning on meeting with a guy I met as I was on the way out of the KESBANGPOLLINMAS office.  He had described himself as the head of a local NGO that works to "support the government".  I'd heard about "red-tag NGOs" (1) before, but I'd never encountered one before.  The guy's whole manner stank of sneaky, and so I was intrigued and looking forward to the meeting.

Meeting the Local Mafia...

My new friend knocked on my door at 7:30 chewing on a toothpick and wearing a "Members Only" jacket.  He had obviously mistaken me for someone with influence or of some importance, because he also brought a really hot whore along with him.  He suggested we go to a local pool hall to talk business.  When we got there, the whore went off to the bathroom to powder her nose, or whatever it is that whores do in the bathroom.

"Do you think she is pretty?" he asked.

"Not particularly".  I lied.

"I think she likes you", he prodded.

"Well I don't like her.  She smells like fish and fertilizer" I responded.  Now in the Louisiana pool halls where I spent my early adulthood this is the sort of remark that would get a cue broken over my head.  But my new friend merely momentarily looked at me in distaste and got on with it.  He pulled out his wallet which contained a cheap plastic badge with the words (in English) "public investigator".  I had to stifle my laughter.  The whole thing was designed to be intimidating, and to normal, run-of-the-mill Indonesians who were raised in an era of authoritarianism it might be, but as an American I wanted to say "hey I used to have one of those when I was 7".  But I didn't.

"We want you to support our road building project from the national park.  I am going to Jakarta next week to liaise with members of parliament and the Ministry of Forestry.  If you could help us we would be very thankful in many ways", he explained.

Temporary bridge over road failure between Arga Makmur and Muara
Aman.  This stretch has 5-6 recent landslides; on the ridges above the
landslides you can see young rubber trees planted after clearing.

From a research perspective, getting down to brass tacks like this is pure gold.  But from an ethical perspective you walk a pretty fine line when you get into these sorts of situations.  I decided to take the cautious route, and I told him that my research agreement with the Ministry of Research and Technology forbids me from engaging in anything that could be construed as politicking, and so unfortunately I couldn't help even if I wanted to.  We had a brief discussion where he tried to convince me again of the merits of joining the team, but then evidently he decided that there was nothing to be gained from further relations with me, so he and the whore left.  I stayed on a bit with the local sharks before heading home for bed.

The next day I woke early and went up the hill to the government complex to talk to the district headman, who had made his fortune (illegally) harvesting swallows' nests from caves within the national park.  After a less-than-typical amount of being given the run-around I got my interview and got out.  The day before I had happened by the office of the local daily paper, and so I stopped in to chat with the editor and reporters for a while, since they generally are in the know and have some pretty juicy background information.  I generally get on well with local reporters and was really happy to have made some new friend.  Then I went back to my room, packed, and set out for Curup, the capital of Rejang Lebong district 2-3 hours down the pike.

Back to Rejang Lebong...

On the way to Curup I decided to make a brief detour to Tapus (locally Topos) subdistrict, where one of the 33 proposed roads through the park would begin in the direction of Musi Rawas district in South Sumatra province.  I wanted to see if Lebong district was up to anything sneaky, like moving a bunch of heavy equipment in to secretly start prep work for the road, which has not been approved by the Ministry of Forestry.  There wasn't any funny business, but talking with some friendly local folks and one of the village heads in the area was pretty revealing.  They told me all about the road and their interactions with the park, which is less than a kilometer away from some of the settlements, so it's a hotspot of people-park problems.  They also told me about a transmigration scheme that started about 2 years ago in the last village on the road, Bandar Agung.  Transmigration programs began in the 1970s with the goal of moving people from the densely-populated islands of Java, Madura, and Bali, to more open "frontier" areas on Sumatra, Kalimantan, Papua, and Halmahera (among other islands).  The interesting thing was that half of the Javanese in this particular scheme were refugees from the area affected by the LAPINDO disaster, where a company headed by GOLKAR party head and probable presidential candidate Aburizal Bakrie, which was drilling for oil or something like that, accidently hit a large pocket of subsurface mud, which began to erupt, inundated the villages and fields in the area.  This happened six years ago and the mud is still flowing to this day.  Lapindo, the company doing the drilling, has never accepted responsibility for the catastrophe, which has affected thousands, but it is widely acknowledged that they were negligent.  In the future I may write a post about the occurence.

Anyway, as it turns out about half the participants in the transmigration program have fled; according to the locals they can't take the mountainous conditions and don't know how to farm there.  This is pretty interesting because it raises the question of who gets the abandoned land.  In addition, the area is very subject to illegal farming in the park, which the locals say happens because there isn't enough land, but if there was enough land to move 100 Javanese families in then there's something amiss with this justification.  I made a note to come back to this very interesting (and beautiful) location sometime in the future for further work, because there's a lot going on there.

Road Conditions

Stopping for a meal on the road....

The drive from Muara Aman to Curup takes 2-3 hours and is a very pleasant drive through some nice forest over good road.  There isn't much traffic so you can really enjoy the cruise, but when I went it was raining.  You can stop off at Lake Tes, which is a pretty lake at the edge of the national park.  There are some recreation areas there and if you are so inclined you can ride in a boat around the lake.  There are places to eat along the way in several charming villages (as charming as Sumatran villages can be, anyway).  I guess I should warn you, though, that you need to make sure you have gas.  I take this for granted, but if you are running on less than half a tank and have the opportunity to fuel up, take it.  There are nice Pertamina stations scattered about, but about half the time they are out of gas.  You can always buy gas at an inflated price from a roadside stall, but this generally comes out of well-used jerry cans and the accumulated residue will eventually foul your carburetor.

Oh God When Will It End?

The approach to Tapus Valley

Due to all the screwing around in Arga Makmur I was behind a day, and so I needed to get an early start to even think about getting everything done before one pm, at which time I needed to depart for Bangko in Jambi to avoid the Pirates of the Bukit Barisan, which I'll describe in the next post.  Formal request letter in hand I made my way up to the KESBANGPOLLINMAS office for Rejang Lebong district, where I walked in just after the doors opened at 8am.  I met with the head of the office, who called in a subordinate who took all my documents.  The way this works is that the subordinate goes off and photocopies the documents and completes the letter of introduction you need to visit various government offices while you chat with the head.  The game here is to charm the head of the office and get him to like you before the subordinate comes back to say that you don't have the necessary paperwork from the province so that the head of the office exercises his discretion and says "Aw he doesn't need that.  Go ahead and issue the letter".  I am good at this particular game.  So when the subordinate came in to inform me that I didn't have the proper authorization from the provincial authorities, the chief, still laughing from my last joke, ordered the subordinate to issue the letter anyway.

On the road in Lebong

By this time it was 8:30 and I was pleased since I was making good time and realization of my goals for the day seemed within reach.  But then the power went out, which causes pretty much all work in government offices to cease, and it put a temporary kybosh on my letter because the clerk needed to use one of the computers to write it.  There isn't enough ink in the world to print all the expletives that were dashing through my mind at this moment, but I didn't panic because I HAD BEEN IN THIS SITUATION BEFORE, not just once but a couple of times, so I instituted work-around #1, which is to ask for oral permission to go visit the other government offices and come back for the letter later.  Sometimes this works, but it doesn't if the head of the office "has a better idea", which is never actually a better idea and generally requires you waiting around for something to happen which never does, it won't.

Finally after 3 hours of waiting the power was restored and my letter was issued, but the time wasted would make it impossible to meet with the district head and pushed me closer and closer to the zero hour that would increase the risk of me dying at the hands of the highwaymen.  Plus the sky was clouding up, and rain on the mountain roads would make it even more treacherous should I have to flee from the aforementioned bandits.  And to top it off the guy processing the papers had the stones to ask me for a 50,000 rupiah (just over $5) bribe to cover "processing", which I had no choice but to fork over (2).  I hustled over to the district planning office to get the regional spatial plan and do a couple of interviews when another bump in the road emerged.  

To really appreciate this new wrinkle I need to tell you about my friend Abidi.  I had met Abidi a few weeks before when we were both being trained to be auxiliary forest policemen.  Abidi lives in Lembah Masurai, a sub-district in Merangin district where they have a huge problem with forest encroachment in the park and other protected areas.  In the past the national police along with the Ministry of Forestry have tried to get a handle on this problem to no avail.  I've long wanted to visit this area because from a scholar's perspective the people there have essentially carved out a little pocket of sovereignty, which is interesting, but if I went in under the auspices of my pro-conservation NGO friends in Merangin I might never come out.  I figured Abidi, at some point in the future, might be able to show me around, given that he's from there and knows about what's going on and also is tied to the park, at least informally.  We changed numbers, but a couple of days later Abidi starts texting me, asking me to electronically transfer cell-phone minutes to him.  This is another situation I've been in before, and what starts as a request for cell-phone minutes becomes increasingly frequent requests for bigger and bigger payments.  So normally I write that particular person off and ignore the messages.  The process of ignoring generally takes a few weeks, though, during which time said person will frantically try to contact you because they are afraid of losing a potential source of income.

Abidi picked the hour during which I was interviewing the planning officials to blitz my phone, calling every 3 minutes or so.  The problem was that I was using my smartphone, which is a really useful field tool, to record the interview because my other voice recorder had become a casualty of the road.  So every time Abidi called, the recorder function switched off, ending the recording.  After 2-3 restarts I gave up and turned the phone off, because during an interview the recording device needs to be inconspicuous.  In addition, as useful as the smartphone is in the field, the battery life isn't very long, and so if you have someone that calls and calls and calls, and later on you need to use the GPS function or the scanner, you're pretty much f'd.  I carry a backup phone, but it's a bare-bones number just for emergencies.

Anyway, I didn't get to meet the headman, but I got my business at the planning office done and picked up the documents I need for my research and headed back to my buddy's house to pack my gear.  Just before one I got on the road to face the perils of passage from Curup to Lubuk Linggau, which I'll describe in the next and last post about my road trip.

Notes

(1)  Government cars have red license tags, and so a "red-tag NGO" is one that works behind the scenes to support some official's corrupt agenda.

(2)  If you are doing research in Indonesia you aren't supposed to have to pay for letters from KESBANGPOLLINMAS.