The mustache came first—that was what people remembered. A
small, fastidious thing, groomed like it had somewhere important to be, sitting
above the easy smile of a man who dressed like he’d read every fashion column
in Europe twice. Jusuf Muda Dalam, fifty-one years old by the time a 1966
column got around to describing him, had the look of a man who’d never once
doubted the story he was telling about himself.
He’d earned some of it honestly. In Rotterdam, before the
war swallowed everything, he’d studied at the Nederlandse Economische
Hogeschool and joined the resistance—not from behind a desk, but behind a
machine gun, blocking Nazi convoys on open highway. Sumitro Djojohadikusumo
told the story for years afterward, the kind of story that gets better with
telling, until Soe Hok Gie set it down for good: here was a man who’d stopped
German trucks with lead and nerve, not just cursed the occupation from the
safety of a dorm room.
That was the first act. It should have been the whole story.
It wasn’t.
Peace has a way of repurposing wartime men, and Indonesia
repurposed JMD into a banker, then a president director, then—three years after
Margono Djojohadikusumo first waved him into BNI’s back offices—into something
close to untouchable. He became one of Sukarno’s inner circle, which in
practice meant he became a mirror of Sukarno’s appetites: the same reputation
for women, the same taste for excess, dialed up until it curdled into
caricature.
And then the ground opened up.
When the September 30th Movement tore through the political
order in 1965, it didn’t just topple governments—it went looking for scapegoats
with good material, and JMD had accumulated plenty. Inflation was eating the
country alive. Here was a minister who owned an 8,000-square-meter compound in
Pasar Minggu that the army’s own newspaper described as a pleasure palace—parties,
mistresses, a house that in March 1966 drew angry students and youths right up
to its gates. Inside, when they finally looked, they found stacks of
photographs of nude women, some of them film stars, alongside beauty products
and hormone drugs, laid out like evidence in a case that hadn’t been filed yet.
The press did what the press does to a man like that. A slim
satirical book appeared before the year was out, its title a wink at a beloved
1940s novel, twisted into something crueler. It claimed twenty-five women, each
supposedly paid off in cash, houses, cars. General Nasution wrote the
introduction himself, framing the whole spectacle as something bigger than one
man’s appetites—a diagnosis of an entire rotten era.
The trial, when it came on August 31, 1966, was less a
courtroom than a theater with the fourth wall knocked out. People shoved for a
look. The crowd cheered and jeered like it was a public hanging with better
production values. And somewhere in that noise, a judge asked why he’d handed
out special credit to a friend named Bram.
“Because he’s a good friend,” JMD said, like that settled
it.
The judge did not think it settled anything.
Underneath the spectacle—the wives, the parties, the tabloid
appetite for scandal—sat something colder and more procedural: Presidential
Instruction No. 18 of 1964, and the credits he’d funneled through it to the
people who mattered to him. Weapons smuggling. Explosives paid for with money
that had a name—the Revolutionary Fund—and a number attached, more than 97
billion rupiah. He denied all of it. Every charge but one. The marriages, he
admitted. Six of them. Kompas noted, almost gently, that this was the single
accusation he didn’t bother contesting, as if a man drowning in fabricated
crimes wanted the record to show that at least one thing about him had been
true.
The court didn’t care which parts were true. On April 8,
1967, the verdict came down: death. Every appeal after that went nowhere.
He was sent to Nirbaya Prison to wait for a bullet that was,
by law, already his. Prisons keep their own schedules, though, and his body
found a faster way out. Somewhere in that place, tetanus got into him—the kind
of ordinary, undramatic infection that doesn’t care about verdicts or firing
squads—and by the time anyone rushed him to Cimahi Hospital on August 26, 1976,
there was nothing left to save.
Ten years he’d waited for an execution that never came. In
the end, the death sentence didn’t kill him. A cut did, or a rusted nail, or
whatever small unrecorded thing let the bacteria in. Jusuf Muda Dalam remains,
to this day, the only Indonesian minister ever sentenced to die—a distinction
that outlived the sentence itself, and outlived him too, in a way that would
have made for a very strange footnote if anyone up until Eddy Hiariej’s 2021
remarks had ever bothered to ask why it still stood alone.
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