Chapter 1: The Clock That Remembers Everything
The clock tower stands in Bukittinggi like a patient
gravestone, marking not just the hours but the unquiet dead who refuse to rest
beneath its shadow. Abraham Ilyas knew this when he wrote those terrible lines
about bodies collected under the Jam Gadang, journalists summoned like
pallbearers to document defeat. PRRI lost, could not win. Five words
that carried the weight of corpses.
But you see, that’s the thing about time—it remembers
everything, even when we try our damnedest to forget.
Chapter 2: The Seeds of Something Rotten
If you’ve lived long enough in small towns, you know how
resentment grows. It starts like mold in a damp basement, spreading through the
walls until the whole foundation rots. That’s what happened in Sumatra in the
1950s. The people there looked at Sukarno’s government in Jakarta the way a
beaten dog looks at a raised hand—with a mixture of fear and barely contained
rage.
They’d been sending their wealth south, their palm oil and
rubber and coffee, like tribute to some distant king. But when they looked
around their own villages, at their own children going to bed hungry, they
began to wonder what the hell they were getting in return. It was the kind of
slow-burning anger that builds behind a man’s eyes until one day he just…
snaps.
Colonel Ahmad Husein felt it. Colonel Maludin Simbolon felt
it. They all felt it—that particular brand of fury that comes from being told
you don’t matter by people who’ve never set foot in your hometown. So they
formed their councils: the Banteng, the Gajah, the Garuda, the Manguni. Names
that sounded fierce and proud, but underneath? Underneath was just pain,
dressed up in military ribbons.
Chapter 3: The Ultimatum That Damned Them All
February 15, 1958. Mark that date, friend, because that’s
when the dying really began.
The Revolutionary Government of the Republic of
Indonesia—they called themselves PRRI, as if acronyms could make rebellion
respectable—made their stand in Padang. They weren’t trying to break away, you
understand. They were trying to fix something they thought was broken. Like a
man trying to perform surgery on himself with a rusty knife, noble intentions
don’t mean squat when you’re bleeding out on the operating table.
Barbara Harvey got it right when she called it Permesta:
Pemberontakan Setengah Hati—a half-hearted rebellion. But Sukarno, sitting
in his palace in Jakarta, didn’t see half-hearts. He saw traitors. And when you’re
dealing with a man who thinks he’s the father of a nation, well, traitors get
treated like wayward children. Except the belt Sukarno reached for was made of
bullets and bayonets.
“Reactionary Government,” Sukarno spat, quoting Rasuna Said.
“Counter-revolutionary.” The words rolled off his tongue like a curse, and
maybe they were. Words have power, after all. They can turn neighbors into
enemies, sons into strangers, ordinary men into monsters.
Chapter 4: Operation 17 Agustus—When the Devils Came to Call
Colonel Ahmad Yani led Operation 17 Agustus like a man
possessed. Maybe he was. There’s something about war that opens doors in the
human soul that ought to stay locked. The Indonesian Armed Forces came down on
Sumatra like the wrath of an Old Testament God—all fire and fury and righteous
indignation.
But here’s the thing about righteous indignation: it has a
way of making monsters out of ordinary folks. The soldiers who marched into
West Sumatra weren’t demons from the start. They were somebody’s sons, somebody’s
brothers. They probably petted dogs and wrote letters home to their mothers.
But war… war changes the chemistry of a man’s brain. It turns the milk of human
kindness sour.
The People’s Resistance Organization—the OPR—was supposed to
be a civilian militia. Civilian. That’s a word that ought to mean
something, like sanctuary or innocent. But when you give
frightened people weapons and tell them to find enemies, they’ll find enemies
everywhere. Under every bed, behind every door, in every face that doesn’t look
quite right.
They found enemies in Kamang, where they slaughtered the
family of ulama Kari Mangkudung. They found enemies in Bansa Village,
where civilians were lined up and shot like rabbits. They found enemies in
Kuala Tangkar, where they brought in tanks—tanks—to destroy homes where
children had learned to walk and old men had learned to die.
Chapter 5: The Day the Clock Stopped Caring
April 1958. The month when spring should have been coming to
West Sumatra, when flowers should have been blooming and children should have
been playing in the streets. Instead, the air smelled like cordite and fear.
Sutan Iskandar was twelve years old then—old enough to
understand that something terrible was happening, too young to do anything but
watch and remember. He saw the soldiers herding men toward the Jam Gadang like
cattle to slaughter. One hundred and eighty-seven men, walking toward their
deaths with the kind of dazed acceptance you see in the eyes of accident
victims.
The clock tower watched it all. Patient. Silent. Keeping
perfect time while time ran out for nearly two hundred souls.
When the shooting started, it sounded like firecrackers,
Sutan would remember years later. Isn’t that always the way? The end of the
world sounds like a celebration until you realize what’s really happening. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop,
and then silence that was somehow worse than the noise.
One hundred and seventy civilians. Farmers who’d never held
anything more dangerous than a plow. Traders who knew the price of rice but not
the price of revolution. Students who’d been studying for exams they’d never
take. Only seventeen were actual PRRI fighters—seventeen men out of 187 who’d
actually chosen to pick up a gun and fight.
The math is simple, and it’s terrible: for every rebel who
died under the Jam Gadang, ten innocent men bled out on the pavement. Ten to
one. Those are the odds of a massacre, not a military operation.
Chapter 6: The Monument to Shame
After the killing was done, they built a monument. Of course
they did. Human beings have this sick need to memorialize their worst moments,
like picking at a scab until it bleeds again.
The relief showed a Minangkabau elder—a ninik mamak—prostrated
beneath the boots of a soldier. The symbolism was as subtle as a sledgehammer
to the skull: This is what happens when you defy us. This is how low we’ll
make you bow.
But monuments have a way of outliving the men who build
them, and sometimes they tell different stories than their creators intended.
This one stood like an accusation, reminding everyone who passed by that
something monstrous had happened here. Maybe that’s why Governor Harun Zain had
it torn down in the 1970s, along with the obscene display of corpses that had
been left rotting in the Jam Gadang courtyard.
Some things are too horrible to memorialize. Some truths are
too ugly to preserve in stone.
Chapter 7: The Ghosts That Won’t Rest
They say trauma gets passed down through generations like
eye color or the tendency toward bad knees. The children who grew up after 1958
inherited their parents’ fear of soldiers, of helicopters, of anything that
smacked of military authority. They learned to flinch at uniforms the way
beaten dogs learn to cower at raised voices.
Khairul Jasmi wrote about it in his story “Ketika Jendral
Pulang”—how an entire society lost its spine, how proud people became ashamed
of their own shadows. The Minangkabau, who had once been merchants and scholars
and warriors, learned to whisper instead of speak, to bow instead of stand
tall.
That’s what trauma does. It rewrites the story you tell
yourself about who you are. It takes a people who once sailed across oceans and
built kingdoms and convinces them they’re nothing more than the dirt under a
conqueror’s boot.
Chapter 8: The Amnesty That Wasn’t
In 1961, President Sukarno issued Presidential Decree No.
322—an amnesty for PRRI members. On paper, it looked like forgiveness. In
reality, it was like putting a Band-Aid on a severed artery. The bleeding had
already gone too deep, soaked too far into the ground.
The families of the 187 men who died under the Jam Gadang
didn’t want amnesty. They wanted justice. They wanted answers. They wanted
their fathers and sons and brothers back, which was the one thing no
presidential decree could deliver.
But justice, like time, has a way of moving in circles. What
goes around, comes around. The dead don’t stay buried forever, especially when
they were buried in shame and fear and lies.
Epilogue: The History They Want to Forget
In early 2025, the Ministry of Culture floated a proposal to
rewrite Indonesian history. Clean it up, sanitize it, make it more palatable
for modern consumption. The PRRI events were on the chopping block—too messy,
too complicated, too embarrassing for a nation trying to present a unified face
to the world.
But here’s what they don’t understand: history isn’t a rough
draft you can revise until it sounds prettier. It’s a living thing, with teeth
and claws and a memory that stretches back through the generations. You can try
to forget the bodies under the Jam Gadang, but they’re still there. You can
tear down the monuments, but the ground remembers what was spilled on it.
The clock tower still stands in Bukittinggi, marking time
with mechanical precision. But if you know how to listen—really listen—you can
hear something else ticking away beneath the regular rhythm of the gears. It’s
the sound of unfinished business, of stories that refuse to stay buried, of
justice deferred but not forgotten.
Because time, friend, remembers everything. And sooner or
later, the bill always comes due.
Sometimes dead is better, they say in the old
stories. But sometimes dead is just the beginning. Sometimes the dead won’t
rest until the living remember what really happened under the patient, watching
face of that goddamned clock.
The Jam Gadang keeps perfect time. It always has.
It’s the rest of us who are running late.
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