was transported, first by canoe, then diesel-driven riverboat to the river-port township of Samarinda where he was placed in the care of a Chinese family. Before the age of ten, Jonathan Dau was fluent in not only his own dialect, but could converse fluently in Malay-Indonesian and comprehend most of what transpired within the Chinese household. An avid reader by twelve, Jonathan excelled at the Catholic missionary-run school, his religious teachers delighted when he could quote chapter and verse from both Testaments in the Kitab Suci.
As a teenager, Jonathan was moved to the larger port city of Balikpapan, where he completed high school, curtailing the frequency of his home visits. It was there that the young Dayak’s first glimpse of an aircraft so captivated his imagination he became determined that, one day, he too would fly. As fate would have it, Indonesia’s founding president, Soekarno, in delivering his country to the communists, signed pacts with Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse Tung and the Soviets, resulting in the Indonesian Armed Forces receiving massive military aid from Moscow. Soviet and Chinese aircraft were added to existing squadrons of American B-25s and 26s, P-51 Mustangs and Canadian Catalinas and, whilst the world’s attention was focused on what was happening across the short distance to Vietnam, Indonesia suddenly emerged as a most threatening power.
Jonathan was selected for pilot training. Upon graduation, he was sent to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia along with scores of others to learn yet another language, and undertake conversion training on MiG aircraft.
When he returned to Indonesia, his country already boasted the third largest communist party in the world and was engaged in war with Malaysia, Singapore and, secretly, Australia. These were proud times for the Republic’s young pilots, the more fortunate assigned to fly the recently acquired, TU-16 long-range Soviet bombers. Jonathan was impressed with this huge aircraft, the USSR’s equivalent of the American B-52, which his comrades regularly flew from their airfields in Java, to points provocatively close to British Vulcan bomber bases in Singapore. Jonathan watched, proudly, as his country’s defense forces grew to threatening proportions, amassing half a million servicemen by the close of 1964, supported by an array of soviet tanks, missiles, warships and, by the close of that year, several squadrons of MiG fighters.
At twenty-three, Captain Jonathan Dau was posted to Number 14 Squadron, located at the Kemayoran Air Force Base in Jakarta where he flew MiG21s. Increasingly disillusioned with President Soekarno’s all-embracing, political philosophies, and his failure to make payments for the arsenal Moscow provided, the Soviets ceased supplying spare parts. Within six months, even with cannibalizing most of their aircraft inventory, all but four of AURI’s fighter fleet had been grounded, and Jonathan’s dream to remain airborne came crashing down. Across the nation, morale fell to an all-time low. In Borneo, Australian and British SAS successful deep-penetration operations across the Sarawak-Kalimantan borders, had brought the Indonesian Army to a standstill. British Vulcan bombers now flew regular missions over AURI bases threatening to drop atomic warheads on Indonesian cities in the event the Soviet supplied TU-16 bombers reappeared on RAF, Singapore or Darwin-based radar screens.
Bitter with the country’s rapidly deteriorating military position, one of Jonathan’s fellow MiG squadron pilots decided that Soekarno should be removed from the nation’s helm. The officer waited for his chance and, when a Palace informant phoned advising that the President would attend a formal reception that evening, the pilot climbed into his MiG and went charging into the capital. He flew south and around Kebayoran, along Jalan Jenderal Sudirman, the jet’s engine screaming above the Selamat Datang statue outside the Hotel Indonesia as he tore along Jalan Thamrin, before lining up on Merdeka Barat. With the Palace directly in his sights, he commenced firing his canons into the well-lit structure, and continued to do so until exhausting his ammunition. Inside, guests screamed and fell to highly-polished, marble floors, the MiG’s cannons piercing the former Dutch Governor’s colonial offices’ solid walls, showering diplomats and other dignitaries with debris and shattered chandeliers.
Unbeknown to the young officer, the President was not present when the attack was executed, Soekarno finding humor in the fist-sized holes throughout the Palace when he finally strutted into the reception, half an hour late, surviving what was to be the first of six assassination attempts on his charmed life.
The pilot returned to base where word of his transgression had yet to reach his fellow pilots’ ears but, when it did, each in turn was equally devastated by the news that their comrade had failed. Stigmatized by the assassination attempt, the squadron’s other pilots accepted that their careers would, undoubtedly, take an abrupt turn, and most resigned their commissions.
The following year, General Suharto successfully effected his own coup d’etat and turned Indonesia upside down. During the bloody aftermath, Suharto’s brutal co-conspirators, Sarwo Eddhie, Ali Murtopo and Amir Machmud specifically targeted the air force – the cleansing process implemented reducing the officer corps by more than eighty percent. The Chief of Air Staff, Air Marshal Omar Dhani, was arrested and tried, his replacement, the thirty-seven year old Rusmin Nuryadin who, the year before, had leaped from colonel to become the country’s youngest four star general, and Minister for Air. With a pro-West Suharto undertaking to not only rid the country of communism, but to also break off political ties with the Moscow and Beijing, Jonathan knew that his Soviet training would always be held against him and so, he too resigned, returning home to his Mahakam village, consumed with loathing for everything Javanese. The following year he married a girl selected by the elders and settled down within his own community to reinvent himself, delving once again into the mysteries of the Dayak Kaharingan, spiritualist world. When his father died, the mantel of chief passed, unopposed, to Jonathan.
Then, the first wave of Javanese trans-migrants arrived, backed by the might of the Indonesian Army. At first, Dayak communities had welcomed the increase in trade along the Mahakam River, and the employment opportunities created with the explosion of logging activity and the introduction of plywood factories. But, the Dayaks soon realized that they were not to be the final beneficiaries of the enormous wealth generated by Jakarta-sponsored logging operations, plantations and industrial timber estates. Dismayed, they watched as their rattan industry was monopolized, and angered to the point of rebellion when their land was arbitrarily assigned to foreign investors, without compensation. Bulldozers appeared in the most unlikely areas, stripping virgin forests, the giant meranti and ironwood trees hauled away to meet Java’s insatiable demand for construction materials, the cultural, social and environmental damage devastating in their effect. Where once there were cemeteries and sacred places, palm oil trees now flourished. Land was stripped and cleared, colonies of Javanese migrants taking root, their customs, language and religion abhorred by the many Dayak indigenous groups as a new era of colonialism, through capitalism, started to take shape.
Bloody confrontations, hidden from the International and domestic Press through severe censorship and well-rehearsed, intimidation tactics, resulted in the Javanese-dominated military rethinking its strategies in support of transmigration in the Kalimantan provinces. Department of Defense signaled that Suharto Family interests, and those of their close associates, were to be protected at all costs. Additional troops were sent to areas where vested interest groups were in open conflict with the traditional landowners, their orders to deal swiftly and firmly with the local inhabitants.
Jonathan had witnessed evidence of the brutal RPKAD’s Special Forces in action. Word had spread through the upper Mahakam reaches that an isolated village had been razed to the ground by army elements. When he arrived at the scene, Jonathan no longer harbored any doubts that the Dayak peoples were not only in grave danger of losing their land and culture to the Javanese, but their lives as well. Amongst the still-smoldering Longhouse embers he counted more than two hundred bodies, the majority belonging to children who had obeyed their parents pleas to remain hidden inside, when the soldiers came. The RPKAD Special Forces had surrounded the raised village in crescent formation and opened fire with their automatic weapons, their bullets easily ripping through the timber-clad dwellings, killing or wounding all within. Then they torched the dry, wooden structure, the
