Amaliyah in Jakarta

 

Ben was sipping a Cendol, the traditional sweet drink made of rice and coconut, on the second floor of the Batavia Café. The place had been one of his favorites in Jakarta, but the drink was lukewarm. The Batavia Café was a shadow of its former self. Most of the furniture was gone, as were the paintings on the walls. Traces of gunfire and bullet holes on the walls had been hastily erased. The waiters shivered and looked down at the drunken soldiers who had been drinking all day in the stoned armchairs of the lounges.

Jakarta and Indonesia had changed. The Islamic State had been proclaimed there several years earlier, ever since the Jamaah Ansharut Daulah army had finally conquered the capital, driving out all traces of modernism. With the bearded men, the Javanese way of life was eradicated. Here, as in the many countries that had fallen to Muslim extremism, there was no more music, no more laughter other than that of soldiers raping women.

Calls to prayer and preaching occupied the streets from morning to night. Every day, alarms went off, warnings of bombings. Indonesia was at war with China. Nationalist Islam was racist. The Chinese community in Indonesia had been subjected to numerous lynchings, looting and harassment by the Caliphate leaders. Beijing used this pretext to attack the only major country in the region. The Indonesian navy and air force were no match for Beijing's formidable military power. Borneo was already occupied by the Chinese, as was Malaysia to the north. The military situation was catastrophic for the Islamists, the end was near.

In Jakarta, the militias were overexcited. Suspects were shot in the street, people were whipped for anything.

In the midst of the anarchy, Ben was fortunately protected by members of the Presidential Guard. He was one of the only foreigners left in the capital; the diplomats had long since left.

Ben was there to supply not only weapons but also all the consumer goods that are hard to find in a country under economic blockade. Here, as everywhere else, the rulers wanted whatever they could get their hands on. They needed unofficial suppliers like Ben.

If the streets of the capital were deserted and people were locked in their houses, the atmosphere was very different at Istana Merdeka, the presidential palace in the capital. Behind the white walls covered with the black flag of fighting Islam, the atmosphere was that of a brothel. Hundreds of beauty queens or simple slaves were walking around naked under their niqab. All were fucking and drinking all the alcohol available. It was the atmosphere of all desperate armies on the eve of their defeat. Occasionally, a soldier would insult Ben as he walked down a hallway. One guy even attacked him. The guards had immediately shot him.

The three huge Chinese armies were about to launch an assault on Sumatra, and Sumatra was not going to resist. It wouldn't be long before Java was submerged, too. From what Ben had seen, the Indonesian troops were in no shape to fight. The men were drunk, barely able to hold their weapons. They were attacking homes, raping women, looting. It smelled really bad. It was time to leave.

These men had no fighting spirit. They had been more comfortable in guerrilla warfare when they were conducting Amaliyah, jihad with a touch of banditry. The corruption and excesses of the oligarchy had driven the Indonesian people into the arms of religious extremists. Once in power, without the support of merchants and bankers, the new regime showed weaknesses. In the east, East Timor immediately dissociated itself from the Islamist revolution. West Papua, in open rebellion for several years, had become autonomous. The Islamists had sent expeditionary forces, which returned defeated.

The jihadists lacked the discipline to build an army. Soldiers from previous regimes had fled or been executed. What remained were undisciplined, untrained pawns.

Beijing had initially observed without intervening. The proximity of Australia, which had called for mobilization, made any intervention beyond Java delicate. Now Beijing was coming to subdue the country without fighting. If the Australians wanted to intervene, they would be crushed.

Ben had known the men of Jamaah Ansharut Daulah for decades when he had visited them in Batang, Central Java. He had known the successors of the notorious Subhan, the bomb maker who prepared time bombs that terrorized the police. Those were the days of the Fa'I, when the Islamists would steal from what they called the enemies of Islam, which was practically everyone.

Ben remembered Abu Rara's men as much as he remembered the men of the Indonesia Timur Mujahideen in Poso, Central Sulawesi, and his contact, Bahrum Naim, the mastermind of the 2016 Jakarta attacks, whom he had met in Syria during the time of the original Islamic State. Ben was also revisiting images of Zulfikar from his heyday in Sidoarjo, East Java. At that time, JAD fighters needed raw materials to make explosives and weapons, not bottles of alcohol and luxury goods. The Bekasi and Tegal cells in Java had been trained by Solihin, the triacetone triperoxide ace, who had set up training camps in Papua or Yogyakarta, where Malay Islamists were trained.

Curiously, Ben had come to know and respect the Islamist rebels of that time, those who fought the dreaded Kopassus, the Indonesian special forces, in those forests where the rebels' lives were not worth much. Few in number, forced to fight every day, they had the aura of warriors. Now, trembling with fear, demoralized, looting, raping, they had become pirates again.