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Career-learning
Café REAL LIVES - turning points Sarkom's daughters
Clinging to the factories, like the debris of a great storm, are the labour camps: Hobbesian communities living in long dormitories made from breeze blocks, plywood packing cases and corrugated iron. Like the majority of humanity who are not touched by the delights of McDonald's and Starbucks, the Internet and mobile phones, who cannot afford to eat enough protein, these are globalisation’s un-people. They live with open, overflowing sewers and unsafe water; for many, up to half their wages go on drinkable water. Through their homes run stinking canals dug by the former colonial masters, the Dutch, in the usual vainglorious attempt to recreate Europe in Asia. The result is an urban environmental disaster that breeds mosquitoes; today, a plague of them in the camps has brought a virulent form of dengue fever, known as "break-back fever". After several visits here, I was bitten and took two months to recover. For the undernourished young children in the camps, however, dengue often means death. It is a disease of globalisation; the mosquitoes domesticated as the camps grew and as the sweatshop workers migrated from rural areas, having been impoverished largely by World Bank programmes that promote export cash crops over self-sustaining agriculture... I drove into the Krawang region of Java, where I met a rice farmer called Sarkom. It is fair to describe Sarkom as representative of the 80% of humanity whose livelihoods depend on agriculture. He is not among the poorest; he lives with his wife and three daughters in a small, bamboo-walled house and there are tiles on the floor. At the front, under the eave, is a bamboo bed, a chair and a table where his wife, Cucuk, supplements their income with sewing. Last year, the International Monetary Fund offered the post-Suharto government a "rescue package" of multi-million-dollar loans. The conditions included the elimination of tariffs on staple foods. "Trade in all qualities of rice has been opened to general importers and exporters" decreed the IMF’s letter of intent. Fertilisers and pesticides also lost their 70% subsidy. This means that farmers such as Sarkom are likely to go bankrupt and their children forced to find work in the cities. Moreover, it gives the green light to the giant US food grains corporations to move into Indonesia. The double standard embodied in these conditions is breathtaking. Agribusiness in the west, especially in the US and Europe, has been able to produce its infamous surpluses and develop its export power only because of high tariff walls and massive domestic subsidies. The result has been the soaring power of the west over humanity's staples. The chief executive of the Cargill Corporation, which dominates the world trade in food grains, once boasted, "When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we have eaten - cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on - has passed through the hands of my company." Cargill’s goal is to double in size every five to seven years. This is known as "free trade". "I went to prison for 14 years so that this would not happen," said Sarkom. "All my friends, those who were not killed, went to prison so that the power of big money would not take us over. I don't care what they call it now - global this or that - it's the same force, the same threat to our lives." That remark refers to a chapter in Indonesia's recent past that western politicians and businessmen would prefer to forget, although they have been among the chief beneficiaries. Sarkom was one of tens of thousands imprisoned when General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965-66 - the Year Of Living Dangerously - deposing the nationalist president Sukarno, who had led Indonesia since the end of Dutch colonial rule. Scholars now estimate that as many as a million people died in a pogrom that was directed primarily at Indonesia's communist party, the PKI. Sarkom was 19 when he was taken away. He is trying to write down in an exercise book his memories of the horrors he experienced. He was for many years on Buru island, where thousands were dumped, at first without housing, food and water. On the day I went to see him, he had gathered a group of friends for me to meet, men in their 60s and 70s, who had also been tapols - political prisoners released since the fall of Suharto in 1998. Two were teachers, one a civil servant, another a member of parliament. One man was imprisoned because he refused to vote for Suharto's front party, Golkar. Several were PKI members. Adon Sutrisna, a teacher, told me, "We are the people, the nation, that the world forgot. If you know the truth about what happened in Indonesia, you can understand clearly where the world is being led today." John Pilger
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