Twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels

The Twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels is presented as more than a past military conflict: its aftermath shapes the organizations and power relationships that persist in the novel’s present. The academy founded to help former guerrillas begin civilian lives stands beside a wider order in which soldiers continue to employ, protect, and ultimately discard men formed by war.

The war and its aftermath

The conflict ended after the republican army captured rebel leader R. M. Kartosuwirjo and the militias’ morale collapsed, prompting guerrilla commanders to surrender one by one. Some were executed; others were imprisoned and later pardoned. Release did not necessarily mean a return to stability: some former fighters emerged to find that the world had changed and that they had neither work nor housing.

With few civilian options, former guerrillas became robbers and thieves or worked as market security, a euphemism for petty extortion. Many remained connected to the republican soldiers who had captured them. The former fighters needed armed protection to pursue these activities, while soldiers could draw on their manpower to maintain order—or disturb it. The end of the war thus leaves behind networks that blur the boundary between official force and criminal enterprise.

Kalimasada’s response

Kyai Abdul Kadir, a veteran of the war and a former commander in the jungle, established the Kalimasada Silat Academy as an effort to rehabilitate former fighters. Some had served under him; most had joined the guerrillas as children. The academy was intended to give them more than self-defense training: it also offered religious instruction and a practical route to earning a living, including sewing, cultivating land, and managing loans for small businesses.

The effort reached only a few of the former guerrillas. Others chose to work alongside soldiers, whose need for their labor could shift between keeping the peace and disrupting it. Kyai Abdul Kadir foresaw the danger in this dependency: once the soldiers no longer needed the former fighters, they might kill them. He died of old age before the soldiers turned on and exterminated the ex-guerrillas, a later outcome that gives his concern the force of an unfulfilled warning.

The academy’s diminished mission

After Kyai Abdul Kadir’s death, his son took over the academy. Although he had joined his father as a guerrilla and had been born in the jungle, he lacked his father’s religious learning and removed the religion classes. He also abandoned the practical livelihood instruction that had made the school a rehabilitation project rather than simply a place to learn combat.

Under the son, Kalimasada became an ordinary martial arts academy. Students came to learn how to fight effectively and to experience courage. The change narrows the institution’s purpose: the founder had tried to turn former combatants toward religious knowledge and civilian work, while the successor’s school teaches fighting without addressing how its students will live beyond it.

A continuing structure of violence

The war’s legacy appears in the novel’s wider criminal world, where violence is organized and often carried out for payment. The Empty Hand, for example, is not merely a street gang: its members are described as skilled with weapons, and killings are often commissioned. Elsewhere, soldiers informally control a fighting arena and are said to bring fighters from places including Aceh, Papua, and Ambon, sometimes drawing on people who surrendered during military operations.

These episodes do not make the novel’s local criminal networks identical to the wartime factions. They do, however, place both within a recurring pattern: armed men and military relationships survive the conflict, and people with few means of protection or livelihood become available for violence. The civil war therefore functions as historical background with present consequences, connecting the failed promise of rehabilitation to the continuing use of former fighters and other vulnerable people by those who hold power.