If only the price of kerosene hadn’t spiked.
That’s the kind of sentence that sounds almost funny until
you think about it too long, and then it stops being funny entirely. It sounds
like the beginning of a joke but it’s really the beginning of a nightmare, and
isn’t that always the way? The small things. The ordinary, stupid, everyday things.
The price of kerosene goes up, a man named Petruk—an ordinary man, nothing
special about him, the kind of guy you pass in the market without a second
glance—decides he’s going to walk into the forest and gather firewood instead.
Save a few rupiah. Keep the lights on. Keep the family fed. That’s all. That’s
the whole calculation.
He didn’t know about the woman.
He couldn’t have known.
Tatang Suhendra understood this about fear—this terrible,
grinding, practical dimension to it. In his comic Petruk Gareng:
Memedi di Siang Bolong, the shapeshifting pocong ghost doesn’t just appear
out of nowhere. She appears because kerosene got expensive. Because a good man
was pinching pennies at the wrong time in the wrong forest. Tatang understood,
maybe better than most, that monsters don’t wait for you in some abstract
darkness. They wait at the intersection of poverty and bad luck. They wait
where the economics go sideways. His characters—Petruk and Gareng, these
good-hearted, working-class souls who are perpetually anxious and perpetually
broke—they don’t go looking for the supernatural. The supernatural finds them,
the way it always finds the people who can least afford the trouble.
This is, when you think about it, one of the oldest and most
honest things about ghost stories.
Clifford Geertz knew it. Between 1952 and 1954, Geertz—an
anthropologist with a patient eye and a gift for listening—spent time in
Mojokuto, a town in East Java that he called by the name Pare in his writings,
because even academic observers understood the wisdom of discretion when
writing about people’s deepest fears. What he found there was something that
would take him years to fully articulate: that the mystical and the economic
were not separate systems operating on parallel tracks. They were the same
track. They were always the same track.
A young carpenter explained it to him—more systematically
than most, Geertz noted, with what sounds like the slightly surprised
admiration of a man who expected superstition and found instead a kind of folk
taxonomy. There were three main types of supernatural beings, the carpenter
said. The memedi—literally “something that scares people,” which is
about as honest a definition of a monster as you’re ever going to get. The lelembut—supernatural
beings, vague and numerous and ill-defined, the way the truly frightening often
are. And then there was the tuyul.
The tuyul was different.
The tuyul was wanted.
Think about that for a second. Think about what it means
that a culture’s demonology includes a category for the demon you welcome.
The memedi and the lelembut existed to disturb and harm, to reach into the warm
circle of ordinary human life and wrench something loose. But the tuyul? The
tuyul helped you build wealth. The tuyul was the monster that worked for you,
provided you were willing to make certain arrangements, certain payments,
certain sacrifices that the pious and the comfortable didn’t like to discuss
too directly.
Three people in Mojokuto were suspected of keeping a tuyul,
Geertz noted. A wealthy butcher. A textile broker who had grown suddenly,
suspiciously rich during the Japanese occupation—when sudden wealth had many
possible explanations, not all of them supernatural, not all of them clean. And
a seasoned haji who had been a prosperous merchant before the war.
Notice what those three people have in common.
They all had money when other people didn’t.
Historian Ong Hok Ham understood the implications of this in
a way that is almost chilling in its clarity. In From Priyayi to Nyi Blorong,
he observed that anyone sufficiently cynical about a neighbor’s sudden fortune—and
in hard times, cynicism comes cheap; it’s practically the only thing that does—might
simply accuse them of keeping a tuyul. The accusation was devastating. It
implied a deal with the devil. Worse, it implied theft, because of course the
tuyul didn’t generate wealth from nothing. The tuyul stole it.
From somewhere. From someone. Your good luck was your neighbor’s mysterious bad
luck, and the tuyul was the invisible hand—a phrase that takes on a genuinely
sinister meaning in this context—moving the money from their pocket to yours.
The tuyul was capitalism with the mask pulled off, you might
say. Or maybe that’s too cute. Maybe what it really was is something simpler
and sadder: it was the story people told themselves to explain why some people
had things and other people didn’t, in a world where that question didn’t have
a good answer.
The belief spread. It always does. Nyi Blorong. The babi
ngepet—a shape-shifting boar that stole wealth in the night. An entire
ecosystem of spirits associated with pesugihan, black magic for
wealth-building, each one representing a different flavor of the same terrible
bargain: prosperity in exchange for your soul, your family, your humanity. Slaves
of the devil, they were called. And the interesting thing—the thing that
says something true about human nature—is that this framing made the rich man
simultaneously frightening and pitiable. He had the money. But look what
he’d given up for it.
Here is what the anthropological studies all eventually
agree on, the thread you can pull through all of it: mysticism and economic
reality are not separate. They are the same organism. And when the economy gets
sick enough, when the crisis hits deep enough and long enough, the organism
mutates. The mysticism doesn’t just reflect the economics. It acts on
them. It shapes behavior. It generates violence.
This is where the story stops being academic.
---
Suharto fell on May 21, 1998. After thirty-two years, the
New Order collapsed under its own corruption and the weight of a monetary
crisis that had been building like a thunderhead for years before it finally
broke. The ordinary people of Indonesia had been assured, for three decades,
that stability was coming. That prosperity was coming. That if they were
patient and obedient and didn’t ask too many difficult questions, the
arrangement would take care of them.
It didn’t.
The monetary crisis didn’t end when Suharto left. That’s not
how crises work, no matter what the optimists say. The crisis was the water and
the people were still swimming in it, gasping, some of them going under, and
the man who had built the pool was gone but the pool remained. Violent crime
spiked. Robberies. Sectarian riots with their terrifying, almost ritualistic
logic. Sexual assaults in the chaos and the dark.
And then, between 2003 and 2005, when Jakarta was squeezed
hardest, the city conjured itself a monster.
Kolor Ijo.
The Green Shorts.
He had, according to the rumors that spread through the kampung
and the new housing developments with the unstoppable velocity of shared
terror, a face like a pig. Thick hair covering his body. The ability to vanish.
He was built like a man—that was the most disturbing detail, maybe, that
human-enough scale—but with ears too large and a moral architecture entirely
absent. He wore nothing but green shorts. He moved through locked doors. He
appeared in bedrooms. He was, as researcher Endi Aulia Garadian noted in his
2022 study of the panic, something like an ogre. Something from the oldest
stories. Something that had no business existing in a modern city of flyovers
and satellite dishes and mobile phones.
The first reported incident targeted a sixty-year-old woman
named Onih, in a village in Bekasi Regency, on the night of October 20, 2003.
When the police finally investigated—when the beast was cornered and brought to
light—he turned out to be an ordinary man. An ordinary, sad, criminal man. He
just happened to be wearing green underwear.
But the legend didn’t die with the arrest. It never does.
The legend had already metabolized into something the arrest couldn’t touch.
Copycat cases rippled out across the region like a stone dropped in still
water. And here’s the thing—here’s the thing Endi’s research makes terrifyingly
clear—some of the people wearing green shorts and creeping through bedroom
windows knew about the legend and used it deliberately. Flesh-and-blood
criminals wearing the disguise of a ghost, because the ghost made people freeze
instead of fight, because the ghost made them doubt their own perceptions,
because the ghost made them run to the police saying a supernatural being
attacked me instead of a man in green underwear broke into my house.
The folklore became a weapon. It always can, if you’re
willing.
The panic metastasized. Gated communities in Cengkareng,
West Jakarta—Ciputra Garden, Taman Palem, places with hopeful names that
whispered of safety and arrived at a certain price—found themselves targeted
for daytime burglaries. Security patrols multiplied. Parks were closed to
outsiders. Families planted bamboo trees in front of their properties as
mystical shields—the old magic repurposed for a modern suburb—and strung barbed
wire across reinforced fences, unconsciously replicating the defensive measures
taken in the bloody aftermath of the May 1998 riots. The same fear wearing
different clothes.
“Cengkareng,” Endi wrote, “was targeted partly because it
was a Jakarta neighborhood undergoing a rapid transition from a small town to a
massive urban center.” A place stretched between what it had been and what it
was trying to become. A place where economic inequality had fractured the
social fabric until the pieces barely held together. The monster appeared at
the seam. Monsters always do.
Television networks—because it was the 2000s now, because
there was a 24-hour news cycle hungry and insatiable—amplified the rumors until
they were national. The Green Shorts was everywhere. Every suspicious
man in every neighborhood became a potential monster. And people, scared
people, do terrible things to monsters.
Wrongful arrests. Mob beatings. Innocent men beaten bloody
in the street because they were in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time
wearing the wrong color shorts.
The scale of the panic was massive, and the mass hysteria
that drove it was, at its root, about exactly what the tuyul myths had always
been about: economic inequality so stark and so longstanding that it had
curdled into something that no longer resembled rational thought.
---
And then there was Banyuwangi.
Banyuwangi, where it was not a ghost in green shorts but
something older and more precise. Beginning in February 1998—the crisis at its
worst, the pressure on ordinary people at its most extreme—communities in this
region of East Java began to tear themselves apart over dukun santet.
Sorcerers. Black magic practitioners. People who had, so the stories went, sold
their souls for the power to harm.
The first murder occurred on February 4, 1998. The victim
was a local farmer named Adi Soemarno, and he was not a sorcerer. He was a
farmer. He was the wrong man in the wrong place when the fear needed somewhere
to go.
What followed has the quality of a nightmare that keeps
finding new rooms. Copycat lynchings in villages across the region. The Regent
of Banyuwangi, Police Colonel Turyono Purnomo, issued a directive—trying, he
said, to defuse the violence—ordering village chiefs to compile lists of
residents suspected of practicing black magic. The lists were meant to protect
these people. To identify them so the police could keep them safe.
The list leaked that July.
Of course it did.
And the people on the list—the people who had been identified
for protection—became the first ones the mobs came for. Worse, the leaked
list was weaponized by ordinary grudge-holders, people with old scores to
settle, who looked at the names and saw opportunity. You didn’t like your
neighbor? He owed you money? He’d wronged you once and gotten away with it? Put
him on the list. Call him a sorcerer. Let the mob do what mobs do.
Then came the ninjas.
The ninjas wore all-black tactical gear and moved with
professional precision. They traveled in cars. They used walkie-talkies. They
were muscular and agile and utterly, chillingly competent in a way that the
ragged vigilante mobs were not. Suspicion spread—and it is hard, reading the
evidence, to dismiss the suspicion entirely—that these ninjas were deniable
tactical units deployed by ABRI, the Indonesian armed forces. Shadow operators
moving through a chaos that someone, somewhere, had perhaps decided was useful.
When a ninja was captured at the Karangharjo police station
on October 12, 1998, he turned out to be a fifty-year-old man who did nothing
but giggle in his cell. Giggle. That detail is almost too strange to sit
with, and it generated its own rumors immediately: that the real assassin had
been quietly swapped for a mentally ill scapegoat while no one was looking. A
subsequent magazine report noted that the ninja tackled by locals had been a
young man, soaked from heavy rain—and the man in the police cell was
middle-aged and dry.
The bodies piled up. At least 194 people killed in
Banyuwangi. 108 in Jember. 7 in Malang. Three hundred and nine confirmed dead,
and hundreds more severely injured, and the people who ordered it—if anyone
ordered it, if there was anyone in Jakarta pulling strings, if the mastermind
Gus Dur accused from his position at the head of Nahdlatul Ulama was real and
not a convenient fiction—those people never faced justice.
Gus Dur said, simply, famously: The mastermind is in
Jakarta.
He said it to the press with the blunt confidence of a man
who had been watching Indonesian politics long enough to recognize a pattern
when he saw one. The hysteria, he maintained, was engineered. Top-down. A
deliberate project. The sorcerer panic and the ninja squads were not
spontaneous eruptions of rural superstition. They were a tool, deployed
against NU strongholds, against communities tied to his own rising political
fortunes, against the people who might build the Indonesia that came after Suharto.
More than two thousand kiais gathered in the courtyard of
the Langitan Islamic boarding school in Tuban on October 14, 1998, sitting
cross-legged in the way of men accustomed to prayer and patience, and issued a
declaration. The “anti-sorcery movement,” they said, was a smoke screen. An
organized campaign of terror engineered to splinter the Muslim community. Holy
men, sitting in a schoolyard, announcing to anyone who would listen that what
looked like superstition was actually political violence wearing a ghost’s
mask.
---
The price of kerosene goes up. A man walks into the forest.
A woman is not a woman.
This is how it starts. Small and economic and ordinary. The
monster arrives at the precise intersection of poverty and desperation, and it
does not arrive alone, and it does not arrive randomly. Someone, somewhere, in
every one of these stories, understood that scared people are manageable
people, that a community hunting a sorcerer is a community not looking at the
men in suits, that a city terrified of a ghost in green shorts is a city that
has forgotten, temporarily, to ask who actually owns the gated communities and
who actually lives outside the fence.
The tuyul steals. That’s what the stories always said. The
tuyul reaches into your neighbor’s pocket and moves the money to yours, and you
pretend not to notice where it came from, and everyone agrees not to ask too
loudly.
Decades later, the questions remain. Who pulled the strings?
What did they hope to achieve? Who truly profited from the chaos?
The mastermind is in Jakarta.
Maybe he always was.
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