Indonesia’s military-backed criminal underworld

Indonesia’s military-backed criminal underworld is not a separate realm beyond public authority: it grows through soldiers’ relationships with former combatants, criminals, police, and local power brokers. The novel presents a durable but unstable order in which protection can enable survival and crime, while the same armed networks can abandon, exploit, or kill the people they once sheltered.

Historical Roots and Reintegration

The history behind this order begins with a twelve-year civil war between the republican army and Islamic rebels. At the Kalimasada Silat Academy, its founder, Kyai Abdul Kadir, is described as a veteran of that conflict and a commander who had controlled a long stretch of jungle along Java’s southern coast. After the rebel leader R. M. Kartosuwirjo was captured and his militias lost morale, guerrilla commanders surrendered one by one. Some were executed; others were imprisoned and later pardoned, returning to a changed society without work or homes.

For some former guerrillas, the route back into civilian life led to robbery, theft, or market “security,” a form of petty extortion. Their relationships with the soldiers who had captured them did not simply disappear when fighting ended. The former combatants needed armed protection for their new activities, and soldiers supplied it. The novel thus links postwar criminality not only to individual choices but to the continuation of wartime relationships and the practical needs of people left without secure livelihoods.

Kyai Abdul Kadir tried to interrupt that path. He founded the Kalimasada Silat Academy to bring former fighters together, including men who had been his own guerrillas and boys who had joined the rebellion young. Its original purpose extended beyond teaching self-defense: it offered religious instruction, practical skills such as sewing and cultivating land, and advice on loans for students hoping to start small businesses. The academy was an effort to create a livelihood and a place in civilian society for people whose experience had prepared them for guerrilla life instead.

That rehabilitative project had limited reach. Only a few former guerrillas joined the academy; others made their own way with soldiers who sometimes used their manpower to keep the peace—or disrupt it. The arrangement was precarious: when soldiers no longer needed the former fighters, they could kill them. Kyai Abdul Kadir anticipated the danger but died of old age before soldiers turned on and exterminated the ex-guerrillas. His son inherited the academy, removed its religious classes, and abandoned its practical livelihood training. It became a conventional martial-arts school attended by people seeking fighting skill and courage, not a broad program for rebuilding postwar lives.

Patronage, Crime, and Selective Protection

The network’s reach appears in the history of Iwan Angsa and Agus Cornpipe. After they robbed a general’s nephew and blinded him, they were hunted and imprisoned, yet remained targets even behind bars. Uncle Bunny intervened because he knew the general, secured their release, and then directed Iwan Angsa to kill a policeman who kept coming to his factory. He later sent Iwan Angsa away to travel. Protection here is personal and transactional: Uncle Bunny’s influence can change what happens to men in prison, but it can also enlist them in further violence.

Iwan Angsa eventually returned to his home town and said he had married and reformed; he no longer wanted to fight. Uncle Bunny insisted that he had always protected him, but the history of Agus Cornpipe exposed the limits of that claim. Agus Cornpipe had lived with Scarlet Blush after they fled the law, and Iwan Angsa had found them a house. Years later, soldiers came there and Agus Cornpipe was shot dead. The accounts differed over the circumstances and who carried out the shooting, but agreed that he died in front of his wife. The episode reveals the insecurity beneath apparent refuge: a house and local connections could not guarantee safety.

Uncle Bunny later explained to Ajo Kawir that he had not wanted Agus Cornpipe to die, but could not protect him. Agus Cornpipe would not apologize for sleeping with another man’s mistress, and Uncle Bunny treated that offense as a limit on his own power to intervene. The explanation makes protection neither universal nor impartial. A patron may shelter a criminal while he remains useful or can be defended, yet another person’s interests, grievances, or authority can override the bargain.

The same world joins private power to official institutions without making them reliable sources of justice. When the Young Widow accused Mister Lebe of exploiting her, he reported her to police for slander. She was interrogated without a witness to support her account, and the surrounding community gossiped about her instead. The incident does not establish that the entire police force serves the underworld, but it shows how a formal complaint can work against a vulnerable person when evidence and influence are unevenly distributed. In this environment, Ajo Kawir’s desire to kill Mister Lebe emerges as a proposed personal answer to an injustice he believes official channels will not remedy; Gecko warns him that businessmen hire the Empty Hand, whose members are not merely street fighters but can be paid to kill.

Soldiers, Contract Violence, and the Prison Bargain

The Empty Hand exemplifies how violence becomes organized and exchangeable. Its members are widely mistaken for ordinary troublemaking youths, and some have ties to police or have been arrested in gang conflicts. Yet the novel distinguishes street fighting from paid killing: attacks that appear to be ordinary clashes may have been commissioned. The group is also described as skilled with many kinds of weapons. Its work belongs to a wider criminal economy in which businessmen can obtain armed force through intermediaries, while victims may not know whether a threat is personal or hired.

Ajo Kawir’s own survival depends on another form of patronage. After killing the Tiger, he fears that the Tiger’s men will kill him. Uncle Bunny urges him not to leave for the streets, where they could take his life, and proposes that he turn himself in. Prison, in this account, is not simply punishment: Uncle Bunny says his men fill the jails and will follow his instructions, while the Tiger’s followers will stop hunting Ajo Kawir once they know he is incarcerated. Some of those followers, he adds, are relieved that the Tiger is dead; the Tiger’s uncle, neighbors, and even some of his own men had wanted him killed but lacked the courage to act.

The proposal shows how the same networks that make public life dangerous can make confinement comparatively safe. Uncle Bunny expects to influence the conditions of Ajo Kawir’s imprisonment and says he can keep the sentence from stretching into decades. The prison’s security, as presented here, rests less on neutral institutional protection than on the presence and obedience of a patron’s men. Ajo Kawir’s exchange with Uncle Bunny also recalls Agus Cornpipe: he accuses Uncle Bunny of having let Agus die, while Uncle Bunny insists that some events remained outside his control. The two cases expose the difference between possessing influence and possessing power over every outcome.

The Fighting Arena as a Political Economy

The soldiers’ involvement in violence also appears in the rubber plantation fighting arena. Soldiers informally own the venue and supply fighters, whom gamblers believe may be brought from places experiencing military operations. Rumor holds that surrendered and repentant rebels or rioters are sometimes taken there to fight, with their captors presenting the spectacle as a way to prove patriotism while earning money. The novel’s examples range across opposing political identities: a former Free Papua movement soldier might face a Darul Islam sympathizer, a Republic of South Maluku activist a Malacca Strait pirate, or an East Timorese guerrilla an ex-communist taken from Salemba prison.

The contests turn military custody and political conflict into entertainment and income. Fighters may be made to return after a loss, and gamblers can bet on them again. The truck drivers who organize a fight between Gaptooth Mono and the Beetle bring the same economy closer to civilian working life: they settle a dispute through a bout and wager on its outcome, while the soldiers allow it because they receive a cut regardless of who supplies the fighters. Violence is therefore not merely an eruption outside ordinary commerce. It is staged, watched, wagered on, and made profitable through overlapping arrangements among soldiers, drivers, fighters, and gamblers.

Across these settings, the novel connects the afterlife of civil war to present-day forms of control without presenting them as identical. The academy’s original effort at rehabilitation, the use of former fighters as protected manpower, the Empty Hand’s paid violence, and the arena’s coerced spectacle all arise from different circumstances. Together they show how military connections can persist after a conflict ends, shaping work, safety, punishment, and public entertainment. Protection and violence are not opposites in this order: a patron may preserve one person by using his influence, while the same networks leave others exposed or turn their vulnerability into a source of profit.