Indonesian history

27:00Walking from the church to the graveyard, everybody involved knew that it was almost inevitable. that it would be attacked. The only question was when. But the young protesters were determined to make their point in a peaceful way. They put T-shirts, which they had prepared, with all the old parties of the Timor-Leste, and at the end of the mass, they moved out of the church and they took off their covering shirts, revealing the T-shirts with the banners. This meant that within the space of a few minutes, Suddenly you had thousands of young demonstrators walking right past military bases, police bases, and the army, the police, the Indonesians looked aghast.

27:49They had never seen anything like it. Literally, their jaws dropped. For 16 years, Indonesian forces had occupied East Timor. But calls for independence had been violently repressed. The international community showed little interest in their situation, and the East Timorese were feeling more isolated than ever. As the march got underway, Max Stahl was filming.

28:16The people at the front, some of them very young kids, were getting more animated, jumping up and down. There was no sense of confrontation in their minds. The Indonesian soldiers allowed the march to continue all the way to the Santa Cruz Cemetery.

28:37There I noticed that the girl who'd been leading the demo was calling to people to put down their banners to come and pray over the grave of Sebastiao. And I was just getting my camera ready when there was a wall of sound. It felt like a long period, at least 10 seconds, of uninterrupted gunfire. and I had no idea what it was of course but I didn't have time to find out because everybody piled over the top of me. I was knocked to the ground. People were now pouring through the gates of the cemetery trying to escape the bullets that were outside. Max turned his camera back on and started filming again.

29:33The soldiers who arrived, they got off trucks outside. They lined up. Without a word to the demonstrators, they opened fire. They fired point blank into a crowd of a couple of thousand young people. Many people died instantly. Some hit the floor and tried to pretend they were dead or they were wounded and so they couldn't move. Then the Indonesian soldiers from this group and others in plain clothes came in, some with bayonets, and started stabbing the wounded people and those who were alive on the ground. Hiding behind a tombstone, Max kept filming as the Indonesian military moved through the cemetery.

30:22There was a young boy, maybe 16 years old, who came with a wounded, severely wounded colleague, whom he laid down next to me in the cemetery. And he sat there, crouched there, craving this boy, staring at the Indonesian soldiers who were not 20 metres away with automatic rifles, killing people. We were inside the cemetery and therefore we couldn't escape. So the expectation was that they would come and arrest us and then maybe kill us. But this guy, who could have escaped, he stayed there, cradling this young man who was bleeding profusely, looking straight at the Indonesian soldiers. And it turned out he didn't even know this boy.

31:19He was just not going to be intimidated and he was not going to have his core values annihilated. That story and that image will remain with me for as long as I know. Max knew that at some point he'd have to leave his hiding place and face the soldiers. They might arrest him, they might kill him, but he wanted to make sure that whatever they did, they didn't get hold of his footage. They were threatening me with their guns from a distance and telling me to come, but of course I wasn't going to cooperate, but I could easily see that there was only a matter of time before they came to me. I was sitting down by a grave, a new grave, recently dug, and my first thought was an incredibly stupid one, to give a cassette to one of the guys around me.

32:08When I saw the look on their faces, I immediately revised that idea. I came up with the thought that I would wrap up a tape, I had filmed most of one, and I would bury it in the grave next to me. Eventually, Max did get arrested, along with many of the other protesters at the cemetery. He was taken to a police station and interrogated for about 10 hours. As soon as he was released, Max knew he had to get his tapes back. I tried to get somebody else, or one or two friends of mine, to accompany me to the cemetery. I couldn't find any volunteer. So I went on my motorbike after dark, and I did this for one very good reason.

32:50The Indonesian soldiers were superstitious, and they were scared of sleeping or going into the cemetery at night. So I thought, well, if they're scared of going into the cemetery on an ordinary night, they surely would be worried about the spirits that are dead after they've just committed a massacre. I went there after dark, dug up the tapes and walked out again and there was nobody there. Max Stahl managed to smuggle his pictures out of East Timor within days of the massacre. They provided indisputable evidence of Indonesian brutality and focused international attention on the country's struggle for independence.

33:28Marco Silva spoke to the British cameraman Max Stahl in 2015. Max died in 2021, but his documenting of the massacre at the Santa Cruz Cemetery did indeed play a part in shifting world opinion, and it was in 1999 that a UN-sponsored referendum in East Timor resulted in independence from Indonesia in 2002. Next, we're going to the streets of Jakarta, where 12 years ago, the once common practice of getting monkeys to perform for the entertainment of passers-by came to an end. It marked the end of a long campaign, and for some individuals, both human and animal, it was life-changing. Here's Vicky Farncombe.

34:11It's late 2013, and we're in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Early in the morning, at the gate of a government building, a strange sight. Hews of people handing over macaque monkeys. Monkeys on the motorbikes, with monkeys in bags, with monkeys in boxes. Dutch activist Femke Den Haas is part of the team accepting these unusual offerings. But her eyes are on the lookout for one particular monkey. I knew precisely what he looked like. I knew the scars on his face, the pigment he had under his eye, like he had a white spot. And I knew him, I could identify him. The animal's name is Johnny, and Femke first saw him at busy traffic lights in the city centre five years previously.

35:05It's an image she'll never forget. I was just waiting on the motorbike, and on my right side I heard this train's music, and then to my shook there was an adult male macaque, a long-tailed macaque monkey, who was there with a chain around his neck and begging for money. Johnny is wearing shorts and riding a toy wooden motorbike. Every time pulled on the chain, like having to do a new trick and going up to people on the motorbikes next to him to ask for money. And it was just horrific. I could clearly see that he was very, very scared. I made at that moment the promise to that monkey that I would rescue him no matter what.

35:51Commit myself to stop this brutality. Femke is perfectly placed to take up Johnny's cause. In 2008, she had co-founded the Jakarta Animal Aid Network, an organisation dedicated to improving the welfare of wildlife in Indonesia. I realised that there were more dancing monkeys around Jakarta and it became suddenly like a trend. We would see them at different traffic lights. So we investigated where these monkeys come from And then we found out, when I say we, it's me and the team, that these monkeys were all wild caught as babies and they were being trained at training centres. And there would be a boss that would pay for everything.

36:39He would then rent them out. So he would rent the monkeys out to, let's say, the handlers, who would then have a debt to the boss. So it was actually also, in a way, exploitation of the people that were involved. Femke's team built up a case to persuade Jakarta's governor to ban the practice, known locally as Topeng Monyeh, meaning masked monkey. This includes filming inside one of the monkey training centres. So it would be just a house of a person, and then he would keep the monkeys in tiny dark boxes so the monkeys can never see the daylight. And then they only see the daylight when they come out to perform.

37:20The boxes, they can just turn around in it. That's it. That's the space that they had. In Plumpum, this guy would have like 25 monkeys and he would rent them out every day. And that was just one of the training centres in the time, and in the time there were many. BBC News covers the story too. But monkey handlers say that's not true and insist the animals are loved and well looked after. We have never tortured monkeys. Even if we do cut their fangs, it's all we do in order not to endanger others. No, we don't torture them. In October 2013, Jakarta's governor, Joko Widodo, bans roadside monkey performances in the city.

38:07The plan is to get all of these little apes off the streets and into rescue homes by 2014. Officials say some 20 % of the monkeys in Jakarta are carrying diseases and want to protect the city's residents. It's an ambitious plan, but one that the local government hopes will be replicated across the country. It still gives me like shivers when I think of the moment, you know, because, you know, when you're thinking about something and hoping for something every day and then that moment comes, yeah, that's big. Understanding the complexity of the problem, the authorities offer job incentives and even cash for handlers to give up the monkeys.

38:47The owner will get compensated for one million rupiah and another million rupiah from the social department. So they will get two million rupiahs for each monkey. That's about 178 US dollars. Officials also give Femke and her team a space to build an enclosure to rehabilitate the monkeys. On the day of the amnesty, scores of macaques are handed over, including Johnny.

39:19I took his cage and I, you know, placed him in the clinic and I don't know, I just felt this huge relief and I told him, you know, you're safe. It's just got to get better. The rehabilitation starts with a quarantine to ensure the monkeys don't carry any diseases. They are in an isolation cage and this is hard for them. This is really hard for them and for us because they are in small cages because we have to monitor them, monitor their health and make sure that they don't carry any dangerous disease. all of them are filled with parasites i think it's just because they live in such disgusting conditions in small cages they're always exposed to stress and bad diet so after the quarantine i always say this is where the magic happens because this is where you can really see an individual that was really broken stressed yeah you can just read in its eyes the fear and and the trauma that it's being through.

40:19Once you can start to socialise them with the other primates, they become more confident. Because the healing process is not just physical, it's mental also. Mentally, they've been broken. This needs to heal. And the only way to heal is by introducing them to other primates who've been through the same thing. And once they find each other, yeah, that's where the magic happens. Johnny becomes part of a group of around 20. Johnny's family had formed and became very stable. And they would protect each other and care for each other. They were grooming each other. They were sharing food together. And Johnny was this amazing alpha where when there was food, he would allow the weaker ones to eat with him, which was really special to watch because some alpha males were like me first and then the rest.

41:08So Johnny was more like, OK, me and the weaker ones. So the little ones, his kids that he sort of adopted. and then the rest could follow, you know. That was beautiful to watch. But the end goal is always to release them into the wild. And after two years, it's time to say goodbye. Johnny and his family are transported to their new home, a protected island reserve in the west coast of Java. It's a trip that involves a 10-hour truck drive, two and a half hours in a boat, followed by an hour's hike into the forest. the netting was opened and Johnny and his family went high up in the tree which is exactly what you want and that's the most ephoric moment that's the best moment I mean that's that just makes you feel like oh yeah it's it's all worth it just the difference of seeing him so broken on the street and then seeing him high up in the tree like king you know like how where he should be.

42:10And yeah, being where he is, it just feels good. What did you see when you last saw him? He was high up in the trees with the little ones. And there was one alpha female, Natalie, she was next to him. And he was grooming the little ones. And that was my last sight. The animal rights activist Femke Den Haas was speaking to Vicky Farncombe. Finally this week, as we've been looking into events from Indonesia's past, a moment when the archipelago's ancient history was revealed. In 2003, archaeologists discovered the skeleton of a new species of human. It was nicknamed the Hobbit because the hominids in question would have been just over a metre in height, and it's thought they became extinct around 70 ,000 years ago.

42:58Rachel Naylor has the story. It's the 2nd of September 2003. and archaeologists Mike Moorwood and Raden Suyono are leading a dig in Liang Bua, a large cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia. They're trying to trace how ancient people travelled from mainland Asia to Australia, but so far they've not found anything of interest. That is, until they find a small human skull.

43:27Mike is excited. He estimates it's only 14 ,000 years old and can't wait to tell his colleague Peter Brown a paleoanthropologist at the University of New England in Armandale in Australia. He'd come back with a tooth and he brought the tooth down to my laboratory to show them and asked me what I thought about it. And I knew straight away that while it was human-like, it can't have been from a human, this tooth had an elongated crown and three roots fused into one. That's the kind of tooth root you find in early human ancestors, which are millions of years old. so I'm puzzled about his claims about the ages of specimen.

44:05In the next few days, Mike's team go on to find a very small skeleton. To me, very small could mean just an infant or a sub-adult modern human, for example. How interesting could it really be? It was just going to be a modern human skeleton. But because Mike had shown me the tooth, I was somewhat intrigued and started to take the situation a bit more seriously. Peter agreed to go to Indonesia with Mike to take a closer look. I was still very sceptical. I can remember having a McDonald's hamburger, as you do, before we left Sydney Airport and quizzing Mike again and again about the date. And that's basically what we're discussing and thinking and arguing about, to some extent, all the way to Jakarta.

44:45On arrival, Peter headed to a lab where the bones were being kept. The first thing I was shown was the lower jaw. And I think I knew within two seconds of looking that it could not have been from a modern human. It had to have been from a human relative. and it was most similar to the fossils found in Africa millions and millions of years ago. Fortunately, Peter brought all his usual equipment with him, like cleaning tools, glues and brushes, as well as a bag of mustard seeds. I sort of smuggled mustard seeds through customs in Jakarta Airport. We later used those to measure the volume inside the skull to get some general idea of brain size.

45:21As I cleaned it off, the most apparent thing was it's very, very tiny, about half the size of a modern human skull, for example, and they appeared to have a brain size, around about the size of an orange. And what were you thinking then when you discovered that this was something special and something significant? Fortunately, I'd been working on fossils in Asia for 20 years. I'd seen everything. I'd examined more than 5 ,000 skeletons around the globe and thousands of non-human primate skeletons as well. I knew what normal modern people were supposed to look like. I knew what fossils were supposed to look like at a particular point in time.

45:57I'd also been teaching the subject for three decades. So it just didn't make any sense at all. So the only thing which made sense was this clearly was a new species. What was it doing on flores? Meanwhile, Mike and Raden's team kept digging and finding more skeletons in Liang Bua. The first one we found happens to be the tallest one, about 1.1 to 1.2 metres tall. We know from the shape and dimensions in the bones, they were very muscular, like probably similar levels of muscles to chimpanzees, for example. The shape of the shoulder joint is really unusual, and some people have suggested this meant they could climb much better than we can today.

46:34Like, I can still climb a tree and I'm 70, but they would have had very little trouble in climbing trees. I would have thought because they were so strong and agile. We know that they're fairly long-lived. We can tell this from the tooth wear, for example. The first one we found was around about probably 35 to 40 years of age when they died, which was fairly similar to hunter-gatherer populations 200 years ago. They called this new species Homo floresiensis, and Peter came up with two explanations for what they were doing on Flores so recently. I wasn't happy with either of them. The first was that Homo erectus, this large bodied human relative, had somehow got to Flores, could not have walked, had to have used watercraft too far to swim, and through time its body size had reduced.

47:16It's called insular island dwarfing. It's where there aren't many predators on an island and there are limited food resources, sometimes animals reducing body size. The other possibility was that at some time in the past, an unknown, small-bodied and small-brained hominid had somehow got to flores. But that was the only other possible alternative. On the 27th of October 2004, Peter and the team published a paper about their findings in the science journal Nature, and Homo floresiensis was nicknamed the Hobbit.

47:51It was a bit frustrating, frankly. I think the name Hobbit was suggested to some extent by Henry Gee, who was our editor at Nature. People would love there to be yetis, leprechauns, bigfoots, sasquatches and hobbits and other strange little people of our imaginations. In fact, hobbits were small bodied and lived in caves. He thought that probably fit the situation fairly well. I really hated it with a vengeance because of all the baggage Tolkien's hobbits carry. Like these sort of 18th century English country folk who are small, live in dwellings which are somewhat under the ground. They go on adventures and do all sorts of exciting things and we are associated with people who are magic and all that sort of stuff.

48:31It certainly added to the publicity for the specimen. Could this skull change our entire view of millions of years of human evolution? Did creatures like this really exist? It's been hailed as the single most important discovery about human evolution for nearly 100 years. We often read about hobbits in fantasy tales, but now scientists think they've found proof that they really did exist. Some scientists now believe that we may even have shared the planet with other weird and wonderful human species. The end result was that the world's full of people who think they have seen either a big foot or a very small something or other living in their backyard.

49:10There are unfortunately very large numbers of these people and they all tried to phone me. And so for weeks and weeks and weeks I had messages and phone calls from people who claimed to see hobbits in their backyard. I hated it, but it was too late to shut the gate. But the hobbit's epic story didn't end there. Two months later, the bones were taken from the lab. Teku Yakol worked at the University of Gajimata and he is sometimes described as the god king of Indonesian anthropology and he probably thought he should have control of their new discoveries. He was quite possessive about the fossil materials found in Indonesia.

49:47After the team had left, Tekuk arrived with some people from his laboratory and without permission apparently removed everything to his own laboratory in Kajamata and then went out of his way to invite his friends around the planet to come and have a look at the material. And unfortunately, in the course of the events, the materials were damaged. They could never be repaired because all the bones were quite fragile. It was a terrible saga and it went on for a long, long time. Tunku had argued that the bones were merely those of a small human with an abnormally small head, and it's believed he removed the bones to prove his own theory.

50:24They were later returned to the Centre for Archaeology in Jakarta. More than 20 years on, we're still learning about Homo floresiensis, and there was currently no evidence that modern humans lived alongside them. There's a new archaeological team involved. They've done more excavations of the cave, and more importantly, they've refined the work on the dating of the site. We now know that Homo floresiensis wasn't around until 14 ,000 years ago. They were around only until around about 70 ,000 years ago. That's important because the movement of modern humans down through the Indonesian archipelago into Australia happened round about 50 or maybe as early 60 ,000 years ago.

51:02So I think they probably became extinct round about 70 ,000 years ago based on the dating we now have to stop. And the only thing which could have happened was a massive volcanic eruption. Roden Sionno and Mike Morwood died in 2011 and 2013 respectively. It was the discovery of the century in a way. Like it'll never be equal, mainly because the skeleton was so complete. I said at the time, if they discovered an alien spaceship on Flores, I would have been less surprised. Peter Brown, the Australian paleoanthropologist who helped to identify the small ancient human ancestor which was nicknamed the Hobbit.

51:37He was speaking to Rachel Naylor. And that's it for our trawl through notable events from Indonesia's history, from ancient hominids to 20th century struggles. The History Hour will be back with more first-hand stories from the past next week. So until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. We did something that no one else had ever done. There was such an excitement and energy about this moment. It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed. Witness history. History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so.

52:13I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe. Witness history from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

52:52And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Birch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott. So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye.