The flames came at night. They always do.
In Pemangkat—a forgotten corner of West Kalimantan where the
jungle meets the sea—fire devoured the seaport with methodical hunger.
Warehouses filled with rice and rubber, shops stacked with goods, businesses
built over decades—all consumed in a crackling inferno that painted the night
sky the color of fresh blood.
Antara News Agency called it a “fire incident,” those two
sanitized words hiding a multitude of sins. What they didn’t mention was how
the properties that burned to ash and cinder all shared one common trait: they
belonged to the Chinese.
Coincidence? There are no coincidences in this story. Only
the inevitable progression of hatred, festering beneath the surface of a young
nation still uncertain of its identity.
Seeds of Hatred
The roots of this darkness stretch back to 1955, at the
gleaming promise of the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung. There, under crystal
chandeliers and polished speeches, Foreign Minister Sunario signed away the
fates of half a million souls with a stroke of his pen.
The Dual Citizenship Agreement with China’s Premier Zhou
Enlai was supposed to solve a problem. Instead, it created a monster.
The agreement languished in parliamentary chambers, trapped
in bureaucratic purgatory. Meanwhile, the Chinese in Indonesia existed in a
citizenship limbo—neither fully accepted nor legally rejected. They continued
what they had done for generations: they traded. They survived. They prospered.
And that prosperity became their crime.
The Decree That Burned
On July 5, 1959, President Sukarno’s Presidential Decree
thundered across the archipelago, reinstating the 1945 Constitution. The nation’s
blood was up. “Return the economy to the indigenous people!” The slogan spread
like wildfire through kampungs and cities alike.
By November, Presidential Regulation No. 10 arrived like an
executioner’s ax. On paper, it merely restricted foreign merchants from rural
areas. In practice? It unleashed hell.
What bureaucrats drafted in Jakarta with dry legal language
translated to burning shops in Kalimantan. The regulation targeted all
foreigners—Arab, Indian, Japanese. But everyone knew who the real targets were.
The ones with almond eyes and pale skin. The ones whose shops held the goods
everyone needed but resented buying from “outsiders.”
The Novelist’s Witness
Pramoedya Ananta Toer saw it all, his writer’s eye
unflinching as he documented the atrocities in “Hoakiau di Indonesia.”
“Half a million people!” he wrote, rage bleeding through
every word. “Half a million… A city with its outskirts, grandparents, children,
pregnant mothers, young men and women dreaming of the future, schoolchildren…
no longer knowing what tomorrow will bring.”
They were human beings reduced to statistics. Eighty-three
thousand shops abandoned. Twenty-five thousand businesses destroyed. One
hundred twenty thousand souls fleeing the only home they’d ever known.
Blood on Uniform Sleeves
The military—drunk on emergency powers and nationalist
fervor—twisted the regulation into something monstrous. What should have been
about trade became about existence itself.
In Cimahi, West Java, a Chinese woman refused to leave her
home. Perhaps she thought reason would prevail. Perhaps she believed in the
country she considered her own. Colonel Kosasih’s men shot her dead where she
stood.
One bullet. One more statistic.
And in Pemangkat, when the flames finally died down and the
embers cooled to ash, nothing remained of the Chinese businesses but blackened
ruins and the acrid smell of something more than wood burning—the stench of
injustice that lingers decades after the smoke has cleared.
The People’s Republic of China sent ships—massive steel
vessels appearing on the horizon like salvation—to collect the displaced, the
persecuted, the unwanted. A nation forced to rescue its children from a country
they’d called home for generations.
The Legacy of Paper and Fire
All of this—the flames, the exodus, the corpses—sprouted
from ink on paper. From bureaucratic delays and arbitrary deadlines. From
Presidential Regulation No. 20 that gave foreign nationals an impossible choice
in an impossible timeframe.
Choose citizenship between January 1960 and January 1962,
the regulation demanded. Choose quickly, or face the consequences.
But the consequences had already arrived, carried on the
night wind with the smell of smoke and the sound of breaking glass. Carried in
the boots of soldiers who saw only foreigners, not neighbors. Carried in the
hands that struck the matches in Pemangkat and a hundred other towns whose
names never made the history books.
In the morning, when the sun rose over the smoking ruins of
what had once been a thriving seaport, Antara reported a “fire incident.”
Nothing more.
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