The Watchers in the Night

 

The darkness came down on the village like a heavy wool blanket, the kind your grandmother might have pulled over your head when you were small and afraid of the things that lived in the corners of your bedroom. But this wasn’t a child’s fear—this was something older, something that had roots stretching back through centuries of blood and colonial boot-leather.

In the alley’s dead end, where the shadows pooled thick as motor oil, a wooden guard post squatted under the sickly yellow glow of an oil lamp. The light flickered like a dying heartbeat, casting dancing demons on the walls. Inside, clove cigarette smoke hung in the air like incense at a funeral, mixing with the bitter aroma of coffee gone cold and the kind of night chill that gets into your bones and stays there.

The men sat in their circle on the bamboo platform, wrapped in sarongs and jackets that had seen better decades. Their faces were carved from the same hard wood as the post itself—weathered, patient, and holding secrets. They clutched their simple tools: flashlights that threw weak circles of light into the hungry darkness, and long bamboo poles that looked innocent enough until you realized what they were really for.

But the real power—oh, the real power—hung silent in the corner like a sleeping serpent. The kentongan, hollowed out from bamboo or wood, waiting. Always waiting. It was the voice of the village, the alarm bell, the thing that would wake the dead if need be. And in a place where the past refused to stay buried, sometimes that was exactly what it did.

The Devil’s Bargain

You want to know how this all started? How ordinary folks ended up sitting in the dark, watching, always watching? Well, friend, that’s a story that goes back to when the white ships first came bearing gifts that turned to chains.

The word ronda came from the Portuguese—“patrol,” they called it. But patrol sounds too clean, too official. What it really meant was this: we own you now, and you’ll damn well keep watch for us.

Before the strangers came with their ledgers and their guns, the guard posts in front of the Javanese palaces were nothing more than peacock feathers—pretty decorations that showed who had the biggest stick. Abidin Kusno knew what he was talking about when he wrote about memory keepers and guard posts. Those old structures weren’t about security; they were about showing off. Like putting up a sign that said “Big Man Lives Here” in letters ten feet tall.

But then the VOC arrived—the Dutch East India Company, though calling them a company was like calling a pack of wolves a reading group. They carved up the land like a Sunday roast, weakened the palaces, and planted their own guard posts like poisonous seeds in every settlement. Each post was a reminder: We’re watching. We’re always watching.

In Batavia, they played their favorite game—divide and conquer. Balinese here, Chinese there, Javanese over in that corner. Keep them separated, keep them suspicious of each other, and they’ll never unite against you. Each group got their own little ghetto and their own security arrangements. It was brilliant, in the way that cancer is brilliant.

Governor-General Daendels—now there was a name that should have come with a warning label—built his guard posts along the Great Post Road like stations of the cross, if the cross had been made of bayonets and taxation. Rest stops, he called them. What they really were was checkpoints, chokepoints, control points.

The worst part? The night patrols stopped being voluntary. Suddenly, every villager had a gun to his head—figuratively speaking, most of the time—and was told to keep watch. The irony was thick enough to cut with a machete: many of the bandits they were watching for were their own neighbors, driven to desperation by the very system that now demanded they guard against its victims.

As Ari Kurnia documented, the colonial government had squeezed the peasants until they popped, then had the nerve to act surprised when some of them turned to banditry. The Cultivation System and the Agrarian Law of 1870—fancy names for legalized theft—had stolen their land and their livelihoods. What did they think was going to happen? That these people would just lie down and die quietly?

So the colonials did what bullies always do when their victims fight back: they made the other victims responsible for stopping them. Village security units called jagabaya sprouted like mushrooms after rain, and the guard posts became part of the machine that ground people into dust. The oppressed were forced to police themselves within the system that oppressed them. It was beautiful, if you had a taste for that kind of beauty.

The Outsiders’ Fear

During the independence struggle, the Chinese Indonesian community learned a hard lesson about being caught in the middle. The Dutch had cast them as the middlemen—convenient scapegoats when things went wrong, useful tools when things went right. When the violence started, they found themselves with targets painted on their backs and nobody willing to take them down.

So they did what people do when the world turns its back on them: they took care of their own. In Medan, the Hua Ch’iao Chung Hui organization created their own security force—the Pao An Tui. Lim Seng led three hundred men (well, he planned to, anyway—money troubles cut that number down to a hundred, which is always the way with these things). They had to go begging to British troops and later the Dutch for help, which must have tasted like ashes in their mouths.

In the Chinese quarters, the guard posts weren’t just watch stations—they were fortresses, last stands, Alamos where ordinary shopkeepers and merchants prepared to make their final statements. Because when the mob comes for you, and the law looks the other way, all you’ve got left is whatever you can build with your own hands and whatever courage you can scrape together from the bottom of your soul.

The Rising Sun’s Shadow

Then came 1942, and with it a new kind of darkness. The Japanese didn’t just conquer; they transformed. If the Dutch had made night patrols a civic duty, the Japanese militarized them for total war. It was like taking a neighborhood watch and turning it into the Wehrmacht.

On April 29, 1943—a date that should be circled in red on every calendar—Japan birthed the Keibodan, the Auxiliary Police Force. They took young men between 25 and 35, the ones with fire in their bellies and dreams in their heads, and they turned them into something else entirely.

Oh, it sounded innocent enough. Assist the police, guard the villages, direct traffic. Community service with a smile. But underneath, where the rot always lives, the Keibodan were military reserves, cannon fodder waiting for their turn to die for someone else’s empire.

The neighborhood patrols died that day, and in their place rose something harder, colder, more disciplined. These weren’t villagers anymore; they were cadres, shaped by military discipline and mental conditioning. The line between civilian and soldier blurred until it disappeared entirely, like a shadow at noon.

And they used these new soldiers to hunt down their own people—anti-Japanese resisters who dared to dream of freedom. They seized rice from farmers who were already starving, enforcing economic policies that ground faces into the dirt. The Keibodan became the fist inside the velvet glove, and the glove was already soaked in blood.

Sure, some of those young men learned skills they’d use later in the independence struggle. Every dark cloud and all that. But the Keibodan remained what it was: a tool of oppression, dressed up in patriotic clothes and served with a side of military pride.

The Japanese occupation was the turning point—the moment when the idea took root that citizens should be organized, militarized, and ready to serve the state’s needs. That seed would grow into something monstrous in the years to come.

The New Order’s Embrace

After independence, the watching and the waiting continued, but sporadically, like a fever that breaks but never quite goes away. It took the New Order—now there’s a name that should have come with warning sirens—to turn it into a machine that covered the whole country like a spider’s web.

By the late 1970s, Police Chief Awaloedin Djamin faced a problem that would have been funny if it wasn’t so terrifying: he had a massive country and not nearly enough cops to watch it. So he did what administrators do when they don’t have enough resources—he outsourced the work to the people themselves.

“I designed this model clearly,” Awaloedin wrote in his memoir, and you can almost hear the pride in those words. Pride in creating a system where neighbors watched neighbors, where every street corner had its own set of eyes, where privacy became as extinct as the dodo bird.

The siskamling—Community Security System—put civilians on the front lines of social control, turning them into voluntary enforcers of order. They patrolled on rotating schedules agreed upon by the community, which sounds democratic until you realize that sometimes the community’s definition of “agreement” comes with implicit threats attached.

The poskamling—those neighborhood guard posts the Javanese called gerdon—sprouted like weeds after a rain. They appeared not just in residential areas but in industrial zones too, spawning private security units called satpam. The system spread and metastasized until there was no corner of Indonesian life it couldn’t touch.

Awaloedin’s vision was formalized on December 30, 1980—now celebrated as Satpam Day, because apparently every kind of watching needs its own holiday. The military body Kopkamtib, which underpinned the New Order’s power like steel rebar in concrete, threw its full weight behind the program.

Two Faces of the Same Coin

The siskamling had two faces, like those masks in ancient theater—comedy and tragedy, protection and oppression, all wrapped up in one tidy package.

On the bright side, it worked. Crime went down, communities grew tighter, people felt safer walking their own streets. There’s something to be said for knowing your neighbors are watching out for you, for having that sense of shared responsibility that knits a community together.

But—and there’s always a but, isn’t there?—on the dark side, those same guard posts became the regime’s eyes and ears. They recorded who came and went, monitored residents like lab rats, and reported anything that smelled like subversion. The Dwifungsi ABRI doctrine—the military’s dual function in defense and social order—reached down into every neighborhood, every block, every street corner.

The legal situation was murkier than swamp water. While the system aimed to protect communities, vigilante justice ran wild in the gray areas between official law and street law. Suspected criminals were beaten, sometimes killed, by mobs before they ever saw the inside of a courtroom. Residents armed with machetes and bamboo spears became judge, jury, and executioner, all rolled into one.

The National Violence Monitoring System found that 18 percent of all violence victims were the targets of vigilante justice—about 78 percent of them suspected criminals who could have been handled through proper legal channels. But when you’re angry, when you’re scared, when you’ve been told that you’re responsible for keeping the peace, proper channels can seem like luxury you can’t afford.

Tempo magazine documented the horror stories that multiplied like bacteria in a petri dish: Untung, beaten to death in Central Jakarta for a failed extortion; Ponimin, killed by over a hundred people in North Sumatra on the eve of Eid al-Fitr for stealing a chicken; two youths in Central Java burned alive for trying to steal a bicycle. Mat Tohir, a robber who got lucky—police rescued him just as the mob was preparing to lynch him. “If not,” he said later, “I’d already be dead.”

The phenomenon reached its crescendo with the Penembak Misterius operation in March 1983—the Mysterious Shooters, though everyone knew who was pulling those triggers. It was vigilante logic taken to its ultimate conclusion: elimination without trial, justice without process, death without appeal.

The Numbers Game

But here’s the thing about numbers—they can tell any story you want them to tell, depending on how you arrange them on the page.

Tempo reported that in North Sumatra, vigilante violence actually decreased after siskamling was introduced. In 1979, mob justice left 169 dead and 4,377 injured. By 1980, those numbers had dropped to 121 dead and 1,986 injured. In 1981: 105 dead, though injuries rose to 3,164. By mid-1982, deaths had fallen to 69, with 1,620 injured.

Were people becoming more civilized, or just more efficient at channeling their violence through official channels? Did the system work, or did it just provide better organization for the same old brutality?

In Pandeglang, which was still part of West Java back then, residents took their siskamling duties so seriously they invented “Siskamling Gymnastics”—martial arts routines designed to better prepare them for combat with criminals. It would have been quaint if it wasn’t so ominous.

According to Suara Karya, this dedication paid off: Pandeglang was ranked among the top five safest regencies in West Java in 1988. Safety through surveillance, peace through vigilance, order through the constant reminder that someone, somewhere, was always watching.

And maybe that’s the real horror of the whole thing—not that it was evil, but that it worked. Not that it was oppressive, but that people chose it. Not that it destroyed communities, but that it created them, binding neighbors together with shared responsibility and mutual suspicion.

The kentongan still hangs in those guard posts, waiting for the next alarm, the next crisis, the next excuse to wake the watchers in the night. Because in the end, that’s what we are—watchers and watched, guardians and guarded, protectors and protected, all wrapped up in a system that makes sense only if you don’t think too hard about where it all began.

The darkness is still out there, friends. And somewhere, in guard posts scattered across thousands of villages, the watchers sit in their circles, smoking their cigarettes, drinking their coffee, and keeping their vigil against whatever might be coming next.

The only question is: who’s watching the watchers?