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Help in Hand
In Jakarta on a mobile phone and a prayer
By ERIC ELLIS
September 28, 1999
Web posted at 10 a.m. Hong Kong time, 10 p.m. EDT
As any business traveler in Indonesia has long known, a mobile phone is essential. That's not just because the country's terrestrial phone system speaks more to the era of Alexander Graham Bell but also because no self-respecting crony can resist responding to that little chirrup in his pocket.
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Indeed, the most valuable number a dealmaker can have in Jakarta is not the direct line (always answered by a secretary), or even a home phone (always answered by a maid), but the hand phone (always answered by your quarry).
But, as I discovered last week, it goes way beyond mere business. Caught in the crossfire between rioting students and the military, my phone was quite possibly the difference between life and death. The camaraderie among Jakartans in these difficult times helps. Cell networks are doing boom business because locals are calling one another on handsets and telling them places to avoid. Among reporters, spooked at the murder of Financial Times correspondent Sander Thoenes in East Timor, there's an informal network of colleagues advising one another the best and safest places to view the disturbances and convey the horror to audiences back home.
Or the best places to avoid. During a brief lull in the cat-and-mouse battle between the mob and the police in last Friday's scorching heat, I ducked into the Meridien in central Jakarta to grab a quick drink of water and a sandwich. I arranged by phone to meet a colleague, who was on the other side of Gen. Sudirman Avenue and also was thirsty. It was a bad move. No sooner had I arrived inside the air-conditioned sanctuary than the peace was disturbed by gunshots, tear gas and Molotov cocktails--in the hotel lobby itself. The military had surged up Sudirman, and the mob surged with it and disgorged itself into the Meridien to flee the riot police's flaying batons.
For 10 minutes the taxi portico and lobby was a violent battleground. The panicked mob was trapped by police, who were forcing them to the only point out to the street: the lightly barricaded side exit to which my friend was now heading as we had arranged. I quickly telephoned her on her mobile. She picked up the call and stayed where she was until the melee settled. Had we not have had phones, she may well have encountered the tragic consequences of a frightened, fleeing mob of perhaps 1,000 strong.
Later that afternoon, a similar scene: I was up on a pedestrian overpass watching the chaotic scene below. Suddenly the crowd tripled as people poured onto Sudirman fired up by afternoon prayer. Down below an American friend called me to say the mood on the street was turning decidedly xenophobic and he was being jostled.
"Everyone's asking me if I am Australian," he said, mindful that Indonesians are enraged about the Australian-led INTERFET force in East Timor. "It might be time to leave."
I was born in Melbourne. I wasn't about to argue the point with a purloined riot stick. I left, chased down the Casablanca bridge to a military outpost by a six-strong gang yelling in English: "Australia! Come back!"
It was none too soon. Another Australian-born reporter, Tom McCawley, Asiaweek's Jakarta correspondent, was being roughed up around the same time before hot-footing it to a moped offered by a sympathetic student.
A day or so earlier in East Timor, a mobile phone probably saved the life of English journalist Jon Swain. He and an American photographer had been ambushed outside Dili by a militia mob. Swain managed to break clear and hid in bushes to call his office in London. The foreign desk relayed the message to Whitehall, which in turn informed Canberra and then the Australian INTERFET officers in Dili. A heavily armed rescue posse arrived in minutes. Who knows what would have happened 10 years ago in a mobile-free age.
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