THE SPICE ISLANDS

This is a story of hobbits and eggnog, of English heroes and Dutch murderers, of adventure and treachery and astonishing history, of genocidal slaughter and massive corruption, of Communist dictators and of Moslem butchers getting the justice they deserve, a saga that begins over a million years ago and ends with an inspiration – perhaps a quite profitable one.

It is the story of 17,000 islands stitched together in a country that nobody thought had a chance a few years ago and now is emerging as a land of the future.  This will take a while, so let’s settle in with a tankard of ice cold Bir Bintang and a snack of babi kecap, pork in sweet soy sauce.  Shall we start with the hobbits?

In Out of Africa (Sept. 2007), you learned that our archaic human ancestor, Homo ergaster, appeared on the evolutionary scene in eastern Africa about 1.7 mya (million years ago.  Ergaster subsequently spread into Asia evolving into Homo erectus and Europe eventually becoming Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthals).

Back then, what we call Sumatra, Java, and Borneo weren’t islands but were all joined to the Asian mainland as sea levels were much lower.  Erectus made it all the way to the eastern tip of Java and what is now the island of Bali.  There they came to a deep water channel we call the Lombok Strait.  Few animals ever made it across the strait’s 12 miles to the island of Lombok – so few that biologists call it the Wallace Line separating Asian critters from Australian.

Somehow, after a few hundred thousand years of trying, erectus made it across (probably on bamboo rafts), and then easily on through the island chain extending east, Lombok to Sumbawa to Flores.  Also making it across was an ancient species of elephant called a stegodont that really knew how to swim.

Meanwhile, back in Africa, while other populations of ergaster had spread throughout the continent, one population in around what is now Ethiopia was busily evolving into us, Homo sapiens.  This was about 200,000 years ago (or 200 kya).

About 70 kya,  a volcano blew up in Sumatra (where the Toba crater lake is now) – the largest volcanic explosion in the last 25 million years.  The ash plume blew west, covering Southeast Asia and much of India with a layer of ash up to 20 feet thick in places.

When the ash plume reached eastern Africa, a massive die-off occurred with many plant and animal species going extinct.  Our species was almost one of them.  Paleo-genetic analysis shows that after the Toba Catastrophe, there were less than 10,000 Homo sapiens left, all in the region of Ethiopia.  Every human being who has lived since is descended from them.

Shortly thereafter in what some would consider an act of Providence, a genetic mutation swept through this population providing the last step in enabling its members to speak, to have language.[1]

This mutation also conferred a much higher IQ – especially compared to ergaster.  So when we – Homo sapiens – spread across Africa and out into the world some 55 kya (again, see Out of Africa), wherever we found ergaster and his sub-species, we wiped them out – as in killed them off as competitors.   

By 40 kya, erectus was extinct in Asia;  by 30 kya, Neanderthals were extinct in Europe.  Only we were left.  Except for the hobbits.

When erectus and the giant stegodont elephants arrived on the island of Flores (east of Lombok and Bali, remember?), they proceeded to hide out there and undergo an evolutionary process called "island dwarfism," where mammals shrink in size in accord with a reduction of resources on an island.

Ever hear of dwarf elephants?  They shrank to one-tenth the size of a modern African elephant; their fossils have been found on Mediterranean islands like Crete, Malta, and Sicily, and even on the Channel Islands off California.  That’s what happened to stegodon elephants on Flores.

In 2003, scientists discovered the fossils of dwarf stegodonts on Flores – along with those of a new humanoid species, Homo floresiensis, descended from erectus.  They were promptly dubbed "hobbits," after the little folks with hairy feet in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

They were little more than three feet tall and weighed about 50 pounds all grown up – the size of a five year old child.  They hunted two foot tall elephants with tiny spears.  And they survived there, hidden in Flores, all the way until about 12,000 years ago, when us sapiens folks finally found them and – no more hobbits (and no more dwarf elephants either).

For the next 10,000 years, folks from southern China and Taiwan trickled down the Malay Peninsula and onto the massive islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Java, and the island chain beyond. 

Then came folks from India some 2,000 years ago, who established a series of Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, such as the Srivijaya thalassocracy (sea-based trading empire) in southern Sumatra from the 7^th to the 13^th centuries, Sailendra in central Java in the 8^th and 9^th centuries – building the world’s largest Buddhist monument, Borobodur – and the huge Majapahit Empire during the 14^th and 15^th centuries, encompassing all of present-day Indonesia and beyond.

For over a dozen centuries, Buddhism and Hinduism, combined with seafaring trade and abundantly fertile land for growing rice, had enabled the people of these islands to peacefully prosper.  But around 1500, new folks showed up.

First were the Moslems.  Islam in Indonesia begins with an eccentric Javanese adventurer named Parameswara (1344-1424), who claimed he was a Hindu prince and a descendant of Alexander the Great.  The story of his religious conversion and creation of the Sultanate of Malacca in 1414 is interesting and worth relating in a footnote.[2]

Then came the Portuguese.  The Malacca Sultanate ended in 1511, when Afonso de Albuquerque (1453-1515), arrived with 18 ships and 1200 men, asking to build a fortress and trading post.  When the Sultan refused, Albuquerque took the city and kicked the Sultan out.  Unfortunately, even though the Portuguese ruled the place for the next 130 years, they couldn’t kick Islam out.

What had the Portuguese come for?  The stuff we sprinkle on eggnog – nutmeg.

For us, nutmeg is that spice in a jar that costs a couple of bucks.  But ever since Marco Polo (1254-1324), nutmeg was considered to have almost magical curative and flavoring properties for medieval and Renaissance Europeans. 

Nutmeg was far more valuable and scarcer than gold – particularly when no one in Europe knew where it came from.  Arabs brought it from a mysterious place they called "the Spice Islands" on the other side of the world to Constantinople, and sold it to Venetian traders who had a deal with them for a monopoly.

It was to break the Venetian monopoly and find the Spice Islands that the Portuguese figured out how to sail around Africa, starting with Bartholomew Dias in 1488 and Vasco da Gama in 1497-8, and made it to Malacca.  Once there, Albuquerque learned from Malay sailors that the Spice Islands were tiny volcanic specks called the Bandas another 2,000 miles to the east. 

He sent ships to the Bandas that came back with an incredible fortune of nutmeg.  For in those days, a few pocketfuls of nutmeg pods gained a man financial security for life.

Somehow, though, the Portuguese screwed it up, getting a foothold only on the island of Timor that had no nutmeg.  So in came the Dutch.  We think of Dutch as peaceful pipe-smoking harmless burghers, but 400 years ago they were murderous monsters. 

By 1600, nutmeg was selling in Europe for 300 times what it cost in the Bandas, a profit of 30,000%.  So the Dutch formed the Dutch East India Company which murdered any Portuguese in the area – and any British traders as well.

The only source of nutmeg in the world at the time was the seven small Banda Islands, and the smallest – named Run – had the most.  Run is less than 2 square miles but it was covered end to end with nutmeg trees.  In 1616, a British agent of the British East India Company, Nathaniel Courthope, was sent to the Bandas to try and break the Dutch nutmeg monopoly.  The chief on Run, he learned, hated the Dutch, so he signed a treaty with the chief giving England the right to buy Run nutmeg.

The Dutch attacked, Courthope and his 39 men held them off for 1,540 days until the Dutch shot him in the back and he drowned.  The Dutch followed this up by torturing to death 20 British traders in Ambon in 1623.  Then they proceeded to slaughter and behead any Bandanese who refused slave labor in the nutmeg groves.  When the Dutch arrived in the Bandas, there were some 15,000 Bandanese. 1,000 survived.

Thus began the colonization of the Dutch East Indies.  It lasted until World War II.  There is one astonishing historical aside.  By the mid-1600s, the Dutch controlled the seas, not England.  They had a total monopoly of the spice trade from their East Indies, and had colonized the east coast of America from what is now Rhode Island to Delaware, a colony they called New Netherlands.

As war broke out between England and Holland in 1664, the brother of British King Charles II, James, Duke of York, as High Admiral ordered an attack on Fort Amsterdam, capital of New Netherlands.  The fort was at the tip of an island the Dutch called New Amsterdam and protected by a battery of artillery.  The British forces took the fort, which they nicknamed The Battery.

But the war, fought mostly on the high seas and in Europe, ended in stalemate, while much of London was destroyed in the Great Fire of September 1666.  In the negotiations to end the war, the Brits brought up the 1616 Run treaty of Nathaniel Courthope. Would the Dutch consider a island trade?  Exchanging Run for New Amsterdam?  

The Dutch said yes – and thus, on July 31, 1667 in the Treaty of Breda, England got the island called by its original Indian inhabitants Manhattan, and renamed it in honor of Prince James’ title, New York.[3]

The Dutch proceeded to consolidate their control over their Dutch East Indies colony, which lasted for 300 years.  You would think that given centuries, the Dutch could supplant Islam with Christianity in their colony – but no.  They failed. 

There were exceptions, such as in the Moluccas, Timor and other outlying islands like the Celebes (Sulawesi) thanks to Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, plus Sumatra and Borneo by German Lutherans and Dutch Protestants.[4]  But the dominant ethnic group, the Javanese of Java, stayed Moslem.

By the 1930s, an anti-Dutch, anti-Christian Indonesian independence movement was in full swing, led by a young intellectual named Kusno Sosrodihardjo, who dubbed himself Sukarno (1901-1970) – "good and gentlemanly" in Javanese.

When the Japanese invaded and the Dutch fled in early 1942, Sukarno was their main collaborationist.  As the Japanese conducted a hideously brutal rule far worse than the Dutch, Sukarno was decorated by Emperor Hirohito in Tokyo (November 10, 1943) for leading the Japanese puppet government.

On August 6 and 9, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Japan.  On August 17, Sukarno declared the independence of the Republic of Indonesia.

Sukarno was a Marxist Moslem, a Javanese nationalist who hated America, capitalism, and democracy.  He proceeded to transform a Dutch Colonial Empire into a Javanese Colonial Empire, a corrupt socialist dictatorship of the Java elite.

Indonesia is 3,300 miles end-to-end.  From the western tip of Sumatra to the border of Irian Jaya with Papua New Guinea is a distance greater than from London to Tehran.  It is a gigantic dog’s breakfast of ethnicities, tribes, and cultures.  The Dutch ruled it through local satraps who wielded considerable autonomy.  Sukarno placed a Javanese military general in charge of every single province.

To hold it all together, he relied on the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) under the control of Red China.  Secessionist rebellions broke out in a dozen provinces, all put down with murderous force.  Finally in 1965, a military coup led by Major General Suharto took over, and led a purge of Communists – which, as many PKI members were ethnic Chinese, ended up a genocidal slaughter of at least 500,000 killed and 1½ million imprisoned.

Suharto ruled Indonesia for 33 years.  He was a staunch anti-Communist, allied with the US, invited in foreign investment, and told farmers to grow as much food as they could and make money.  There was peace, there was stability, there was increasing prosperity, and increasing corruption – which grew worse and worse until the Suharto family and cronies were raking in billions of dollars a year.

Violent guerrilla secessionist movements sprung up during the 70s, in radical Islamic Aceh in western Sumatra, in "Irian Jaya" (western New Guinea) whose tribal people had nothing in common whatever with Indonesians, and in Timor, which had remained Portuguese and Catholic through centuries of Dutch rule.

Suharto’s soldiers repressed all three, and went on a horrific rampage in Timor, killing over 100,000 Timorese.

The Asian Financial Crisis, starting in mid-1997, collapsed the Indonesian currency and economy.  Riots became uncontrollable, Suharto resigned in May 1998, and the whole place starting coming apart. 

East Timor declared independence (and got it, finally, in 2002).  Radical Moslems organized and incited murderous rampages against Christians in Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo), Sulawesi, Halmahera, and the Moluccas. Moslem terrorist groups like Laskar Jihad sponsored by Al Qaeda emerged. 

Lots of observers (including me) thought the odds of Indonesia ceasing to exist as an intact nation were high.  Somehow, Suharto’s successors –  Bacharuddin Habibie (1998-9),  Abdurrahman Wahid (1999-2001), and Megawati Sukarnoputri (2001-04) – held things together, but barely.

Then came Bambang. 

You’d be right in thinking that a guy named Bambang has to go into the military and work his way up through the ranks until he is General Bambang.  But Susilo Bambang Yudhayono has gone beyond being the best officer the Indonesian military ever had to the best thing that has ever happened to the entire country.

"SBY" – as he is affectionately known – is pro-US and pro-US military, having completed the US Army Airborne and Ranger courses at Fort Benning, the Jungle Warfare School in Panama with the 82^nd Airborne, and is a graduate of the US Army General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth.

He is pro-capitalist, with a Master’s degree in business management from Webster University in St. Louis, and a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Bogor University in Indonesia.

With his reputation for brilliance and incorruptibility, he retired from the military, formed a political party, and was elected president in 2004 – in an election that all international observers said was free and fair.

He promptly formed a coalition to create a secular non-Islamist government.  For although he is a Moslem, he is committed to an Islam that lives up to its best principles, not its worst.

He focused not on religion, but on the economy – expanding opportunities for small business, reducing taxes and regulations, getting the government and army out of the economy, attacking kleptocratic corruption, exercising fiscal restraint, and gaining currency stability.  The economy for most all Indonesians improved dramatically.

He also focused on devolving central Javanese authority to local regions, which defused  secessionist resentment.  Aceh is at peace now, and Irian Jaya, well, almost.

His third focus was going after Radical Islam.  With no excuses and no apologies, SBY’s policy towards Moslem terrorists in Indonesia’s midst is to hunt them down and kill them.

Indonesia is the 4^th most populous country on earth (after China, India, and the US) with 240 million – and 86% of them are Moslem, or 206 million, the largest Moslem population in the world.

But these ostensibly Islamic folks always resented the imposition of a foreign faith upon them.  For hundreds of years after that imposition in the 16^th century, they referred to Islam not by name but only as "the Arab religion."

So they coped by adopting a variant of Islam known as Sufism.

Sufis (sue-feez) – the People of the Platform (named after disciples of Mohammed who met on the platform — suffe in Arabic — of the first Moslem mosque at Medina) – were Moslems who rejected Jihad and Islam as a Religion of the Sword.

They thus transformed Islam into a doctrine of non-violence, teaching a mystic path to Islamic enlightenment through a personal experience of the Divine rather than rote recitation of texts and unswerving adherence to religious regulations and dogma (compare what Jesus said to the Pharisees).

To abjure Jihad Islam and adopt Sufism, Indonesians created a legend of holy wise men who came from afar (Persia, Turkey, India, it’s never clear) to teach them the loving tolerance of Sufi Islam.

These holy men are known as the Wali Songo (Nine Saints), and their graves along the north coast of Java are revered pilgrimage sites for millions of Javanese.

Indonesian Islam became the antithesis of Jihadi Islam, of Saudi Wahhabi Islam, with its metaphorical interpretation of the Koran, instead of the literal can’t-change-a-word Voice of God.  Thus in recent years, it has become a major target of Saudi Wahhabis, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the country attempting to inject their radical doctrine of religious hate and intolerance.

SBY is determined to put an end to this – and an end to the Wahhabi terrorist groups like Laskar Jihad and Jemaah Islamiyah (JI).  At his request in 2005, President George Bush approved U. S. Special Forces training for Detasemen 88, an elite anti-terrorist unit in the Indonesian military.

D88 got its first scalp when it killed Azhani Husin, a Malaysian-born leader of JI who engineered the 2003 bombing of the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, the 2004 bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta, and the 2005 suicide bombing attacks in Bali.  D88 snipers popped him in November, 2005.

So many JI terrorists were hunted down and killed by D88 that it disbanded.  The only one left was the worst of all, Azhani Husin’s boss Noordin Mohammed Top, the mastermind of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia (even though he, like Azhani, was Malaysian).

On July 17, 2009, suicide bombers trained by Top blew up the Marriott and Ritz-Carlton hotels in Jakarta, killing 7 and injuring dozens.  SBY told D88 to do whatever it took to eliminate Top.  No prisoners.  One week ago (9/17), Top was located in a safe house in Solo, central Java.  No one in the safe house was left alive.  DNA analysis proved one bullet-riddled body was Top’s.

This is SBY’s policy:  the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist.  The vast majority of Indonesians agree, and idolize their president for securing their safety, their freedom, and prosperity.

Which is why they resoundingly re-elected SBY their president for another five years this past July with more than 60% of the vote.

The world’s largest Moslem population has taken the advice of Yogi Berra:  "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."  They have chosen to reject medieval Jihadi Islam, and have chosen instead an Islam of the future that is moderate, tolerant, and peaceful.

This is true especially among Indonesia’s young.  Did you know there are Indonesian rock stars?  The most wildly popular is Ahmad Dhani.  His most popular and famous album is Laskar Cinta – Warriors of Love – an explicit rebuke of the Saudi-funded terrorists of Laskar Jihad (Warriors of God). 

Combining real rocker beats with syncopated Arabic rhythms, and lyrics praising religious freedom and tolerance with quotes from the Koran, it has sold copies in the tens of millions.

Ahmad Dhani has joined forces with Indonesia’s most respected religious leader, Gus Dur, head of Indonesia’s largest Moslem organization Nahdatul Ulama, with 40 million members.  Dur calls for people of all faiths to unite in defeating the "extreme and perverse ideology" of radical Wahhabi "Islamism," as he did in the Wall Street Journal, Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam.

Dhani and Dur are organizing an anti-Islamist network — a "cultural, intellectual and theological bulwark" opposing Jihadi Islam in Indonesia and worldwide.  It’s called Libforall (Liberty For All). 

An Islam that stands for liberty?  That’s a shocker.  But then, Indonesia is turning out to be a shocker.   The world’s biggest Moslem country has become a true democracy with full democratic freedoms.  The world’s biggest Moslem population contains millions who drink beer and eat pork (remember Bir Bintang and babi kecap?).

It continues to have problems, massive ones and lots of them, no doubt.  But these problems, given the direction Indonesia is headed, are opportunities.  People who help correct them, people who invest wisely in Indonesia, stand a good chance of making a lot of money.

SBY – President Bambang Yudhayono – wants his country to be open for business.  Americans are welcome.  Capitalists are welcome.  Marxists are not.  Radical Moslems are not.  The Spice Islands were once a magical irresistible lure.  They are now once again.

[1]   A mutation in a gene called FOXP2.  It’s a gene involved in wiring up the mammalian brain while a fetus in the womb.  All mammals, from mice to chimps to us, have the FOXP2.  It’s virtually identical in all:  that of chimpanzees has only one of its 715 units different from that of mice.  This mutation differs in two, which enables FOXP2 to wire up the fetal human brain for language.

People without this mutation, a genetic defect in which their human FOXP2 is broken, suffer from, in the words of one molecular biologist: "defects in processing words according to grammatical rules; understanding of more complex sentence structure such as sentences with embedded relative clauses; inability to form intelligible speech; defects in the ability to move the mouth and face associated with speaking (relative immobility of the lower face and mouth, particularly the upper lip); and significantly reduced IQ in the affected compared with the unaffected in both the verbal and the non-verbal domain."

[2]  In 1402, Parameswara was able to establish a small trading town on the Malay Peninsula right across from Sumatra, calling it Malacca.  Then he sailed off to China to make a deal with the Ming Emperor, Yongle.

Every trading ship from India and Arabia on its way to China had to sail through the narrow straits between Sumatra and Malaya – the alternative was a huge detour around Sumatra.  Yongle was happy to support Parameswara in securing protection and control of the passage, which to this day is called the Strait of Malacca.

Now in his 60s, Parameswara became rich and powerful – but he proved no match for the charms of a young lady from Pasai.  About a hundred years before, Moslem traders from Gujarat on the west coast of India had built a trading post on the northwest tip of Sumatra that had grown into a small Sultanate called Pasai.

In 1414, Parameswara met a girl whom the chronicles describe as "young," "beautiful," and a "princess."  The 70 year-old man was a goner and begged for her hand.  She was a Moslem, she said, so the only way for her to accept would be for him to convert to Islam. 

He did, they were married, he renamed himself Raja Iskander Shah ("Iskander" is the Arabic name for Alexander), declared his kingdom to be the Sultanate of Malacca, and demanded all his subjects become Moslem.  Then he decided to go on Jihad against the now idolatrous Hindus of the Majapahit Empire. 

The Majapahits finally succumbed to Parameswara’s successors, and by 1500 the Majapahit aristocracy, artisans, and followers fled to Bali establishing a Hindu redoubt that has resisted Islam right up to now.

In the wake of the Hindu retreat came a flood of Moslem missionaries and warlords demanding the Hindus and Buddhists of Java and Sumatra convert.  It wasn’t long before most of what was to become Indonesia had been forcibly Moslemized.

[3]  The entire extraordinary story of the heroism of Nathaniel Courthope, the perfidy of the Dutch, and how England got Manhattan for nutmeg in the Banda Sea is told in the book, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg.  Today, the Bandas have been discovered as one of the world’s most fabulous scuba-diving sites.

  [4]   I relate an epiphany I had in a Protestant church on Lake Toba in Sumatra in Sumatra Sunrise (August 2007) .