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The Admiral's Isles
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RIYANTO, THE VOLUNTEER: MOJOKERTO
On special occasions, Riyanto's mother still makes his favorite meal—morning glory with lots of chili paste—just in case he comes back. When he appeared in her dream recently, he wasn't hungry. He just said he needed his wallet, but more importantly, he told his mother that she needed to let him go. It was just like Riyanto. Always thinking of the other person.
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Getting here meant flying to Surabaya in East Java and driving through traffic-clogged streets, past the children begging at stoplights, past scrap-metal yards that look like gardens of rust. The city cedes the land to rice fields and pastures that stretch on until they reach Mojokerto, a low-lying town of narrow streets, one of which is home to Katinem, Riyanto's mother.
He died last Christmas Eve, a day on which bombs exploded in three of Mojokerto's Christian churches, one in Riyanto's hands. Riyanto was 25. He had been working at a tofu and tempeh plant, but he hoped to join the army, "Because if you die as a soldier protecting your country," he told his mother two months before his death, "you have God's blessings." Since 1998, he had belonged to Banser, a Muslim youth group affiliated with the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), ex-President Abdurrahman Wahid's party. It's a kind of freelance assistance group, says Mohammad Fathoni Nawowi, the organization's Mojokerto secretary. "Youth wing" sounds too aggressive, he says, too militant. These young people aren't militants; they're community activists, and they serve the whole community, Muslim or non-Muslim. "Anyone we can cooperate with," he says. They fight fires, help maintain order at rallies or concerts and keep an eye on the neighborhood. It's their responsibility, Nawowi says, as Muslims and as members of the kampong, or village.
Late last year, churches throughout East Java were receiving bomb threats. I met people in Indonesia who said Christians and Muslims could never live together, but in Mojokerto and elsewhere, the churches called Banser to help. Nawowi was ready because the national office in Jakarta had called ahead telling the group to be available: a threat to a church is a threat to the village. Nawowi thought it was nothing. Religious holidays always have a little menace about them; Mojokerto had always been safe.
On the night before Christmas, Riyanto was outside Eben Haezer Church, a gated, red brick building with white concrete walls on either side. Across the narrow street is a film store, in front of which is a pay phone covered by a blue shell. This is where Banser members saw an abandoned package. They told the policemen stationed nearby; he said it was a bomb and evacuated the area. Riyanto didn't leave immediately. Instead he grabbed the package, intending to drop it into a reinforced drainage ditch on the other side of the film store. It exploded before he got there. Everyone else had run off; nobody knew if anyone had been hurt. There was only a crater in the ground near the ditch. Neighbors found Riyanto's body. It had been propelled into the air, over the church, and came down through their roof.
Bombs exploded across Indonesia that night, destroying more than 10 churches and killing more than 15 people. No one has been arrested for the bombing at Eben Haezer. Without a culprit, without the traditional elements of a crime, it feels utterly wanton. It's just violence.
Riyanto's mother, Katinem, knows she was born in 1955 even if she's not sure of the exact day. She lives now with her husband, a becak driver, and their five remaining children (a baby died in childbirth). Their house sits just off a street that runs alongside a river. It's been renamed Relawan Riyanto, Riyanto the volunteer. The family has a silk-screening business in the back of the house, something they started with money donated by the Eben Haezer congregation, Banser and local officials after Riyanto died. When I visit, another son offers a tray with bottles of strawberry soda and straws. The house has tile floors and satiny aqua curtains on the windows. We sit on blue couches and Katinem tells me that Riyanto always helped the neighbors, that she wishes she could have afforded to send him—or any of her children—to school beyond junior high, that she hopes her other children will be good to her in her old age but that she's wary of hoping for too much. There's a picture of Riyanto on the far wall, a small head-shot, on the bottom of a framed condolence letter from the police, which hangs slightly askew. He's wearing a camouflage shirt. He is square jawed and serious, wide eyed, his hair buzzed tight above his ears. "If you die with God's blessings," he told his mother, "hundreds of people will pray for you." It's a striking legacy: a Muslim who died while protecting a church, someone who bridged a divide, killed by someone murderously intent on widening it.
Indonesia is the largest Islamic country in the world, but its version, or versions, of Islam provides as much of a cultural identity as a religious one. One strain, the one practiced by much of NU, is more syncretic. It incorporates elements of Javanese mysticism, kampong social mores and other local or tribal belief systems that preceded the Prophet Muhammad's arrival on the archipelago. Generally speaking, it's willing to blend. Not always, of course. There are fundamentalists, and those, Christian and Muslim and other, who kill in God's name.
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