stacked with books and clippings. Still, he called himself a “fighter.”
He died in 2006 at the age of 81.
In the old days, Buru housed as many as 12,000 prisoners. Hersri Setiawan, a former political prisoner, wrote a book called Kamus Gestok that contains prison slang:
Ingus gajah
Elephant’s snot = Tapioca pudding, or fried dough bread.
The dish earned its name because of its gooey consistency and greenish color. The prisoners also called it umbel (snot, in Javanese).
Sayur kepala
Head Soup = Prison gruel.
Inmates joked that you could spin the ladle around in the pot all you wanted, but you’d only hook one or two limp spinach leaves at best. The most likely outcome, they said, was seeing the reflection of your face in the broth.
Sayur usually means vegetable, but in this case it means soup or broth.
Sayur plastik
Plastic soup.
For prisoners on Buru, soup made of young leaves of papaya fruit was sayur plastik because the stalks were so thinly cut that they were almost transparent, like some plastics.
Naik Honda
Ride a Honda = Suffer from malaria.
The spasms of convicts with malarial fever resembled the bouncing motion of a ride on a Honda motorbike. During the crackdown on communists in the 1960s, Honda bikes from Japan were all the rage in Indonesia.
Inmates improvised treatments for the symptoms of malaria. They made medicine out of boiled roots and leaves, and administered a mix containing a soybean cake called tempe bosok.
Tempe is soybean cake, which is fermented. Bosok is Javanese for rotten. So tempe bosok is doubly rotten. Javanese eat tempe after letting it sit for one or two days, a process they say makes it tastier. They grind it up with chili or add it to vegetable soup.
Sabun londo (Javanese)
Dutch soap.
Convicts described soap as Dutch, or foreign soap. The sweet smell of soap was a rarity in the filthy prison, and inmates thought only people as wealthy and privileged as the Dutch had the privilege of washing with it. Many inmates scrubbed away grime with sand or dried grass.
Laler ijo (Javanese)
Green fly = Prison guard.
Prisoners yelled the codewords laler (fly) or laler ijo (a bigger, green variety of fly) to warn comrades in other cells that guards were in the vicinity. The Indonesian word for green is hijau.
The term was a potent insult because laler settled on human excrement.
Pickpockets in Jakarta used laler as a codeword for police. The term faded in the 1980s.
Ali-ali (Javanese)
Ring = A torture weapon on Buru.
Guards attached bronze rings to the fingers, nipples or penis of a victim. They hooked the rings with wires to a generator, and cranked it up by hand to deliver electric shocks. Ali-ali was an effective way to extract confessions, true or false, from antekantek PKI (Indonesian Communist Party cadres). PKI was the Indonesian acronym of the party: Partai Komunis Indonesia.
Another torture weapon was ikan pari, a whip made from the dried tail fin of a sting-ray. Guards fixed a wooden handle onto the tail, which was covered with poisoned spikes.
“Give him the ring!” wardens yelled. Kasih dia ali-ali!
“Give him the tail!” they said. Kasih dia pecut!
Tapol (acronym)
TAhanan POLitik = Political prisoners.
The tens of thousands of people arrested for alleged links with the communist movement.
Tapol fell into three categories. Golongan A (Category A) were high-level communist planners suspected of plotting against the government. They were prosecuted. Golongan B were mid-level suspects, many of whom were jailed without trial. Golongan C were accused of sympathizing with the communists, but were not considered a serious threat. Thousands of civil servants fell into Golongan C, and were fired, passed over for promotions and transfers, or were docked pay. They were Tapol kelas teri (small fry political prisoners).
Accused communist supporters who were released from jail carried national identity cards that read ET, or Ex-Tapol. Those with an ET stamp had trouble getting jobs or bank loans.
After Suharto was ousted, successor B.J. Habibie released many tapol. The president who followed him, Abdurrahman Wahid, freed the rest.
The communist party remains banned in Indonesia, and former political prisoners still face discrimination. The Supreme Court ruled that former communists can run for office beginning in 2009.
Orde Baru
New Order.
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