At first glance, Richard Lloyd Parry’s In the Time of Madness seems like a book just begging to be rubbished by an academic specialist on Indonesia. It provides a first-person account of a British foreign correspondent’s trips to Indonesia in the mid-to-late 1990s in search of stories of gruesome primordial violence. Little of the context of Indonesian society appears to be of interest to Parry in his seemingly voyeuristic, ambulance-chasing pursuit of riots and pogroms. The realm of politics is depicted in terms of familial and factional rivalries. The rest is “culture” — hastily reproduced ethnic stereotypes about Dayaks and Madurese in Kalimantan, and rehashed clichés about the mystical, Olde-Worldy ways of the Javanese.

But to dismiss In the Time of Madness for its limitations is to miss the point of the book. Parry, it should be said, makes no claims to expertise or to experience “on the ground”, yet his book is remarkably free of the glaring factual errors that usually mar such works in this genre. More broadly, the book is innocent of the self-righteousness, self-congratulatory tone, or self-absorption that one might expect of a parachute journalist reporting from “ the front”, as it were, of the late 20th-century’s new world disorder. In truth, there is little room for nitpicking or nose-thumbing here.

In the Time of Madness provides an honest, reflective and self-critical account of the experience of a British journalist in a land that remains foreign to him in many senses of the word. From the onset, he signals his sense of unease and capacity for introspection as he searches — at first in vain — for evidence of ritual decapitation by Dayak “headhunters” in their ethnic cleansing of Madurese communities. His eventual success in this search likewise provides an occasion for further reflection.

But it is in the final chapters on Parry’s experiences in East Timor in 1999 that the book achieves its greatest clarity and depth. Parry takes seriously, but not too sentimentally, the East Timorese struggle for independence, and his sympathies are clear. Thus the violence perpetrated by Indonesian military-backed militias against independence supporters after the UN-supervised referendum of 1999 is treated with notable care and depth of sentiment. Parry’s account of his two days holed up in the UN mission’s compound in Dili as the killings proceeded outside provides one of the most incisive portraits of moral failure by the so-called “international community” which this author has had occasion to read.

In an era when journalists have been taking considerable personal risks — and, in significant numbers, losing their lives — in dangerous, foreign settings, the experiences recounted in Parry’s In the Time of Madness should be of interest to many readers. In its refreshing modesty of tone and subtlety of message, it beats the more epic accounts of “heroic” journalists such as John Simpson hands down.

If Parry has looked back on his experience in the late 1990s through an unblinkingly self-critical lens, then what about Indonesia itself? Today, the Madurese communities “cleansed”' from West (as well as Central) Kalimantan have not been allowed to return to their homes. The long-time dictator, Suharto, has been allowed to live out his final years in Jakarta without serious fear of prosecution for his involvement in human rights abuses and corruption over three decades of rule.

Efforts to prosecute Indonesian military officers for their role in the killings in East Timor in 1999 have been thwarted, even as some of the worst perpetrators have overseen counter-insurgency operations in Aceh. Munir, the country’s most knowledgeable and courageous human rights activist, was poisoned to death in late 2004 in a conspiracy linked by commentators to senior military and intelligence officials.

Yet the overarching rubric for foreign coverage of Indonesia today is no longer “primordial barbarism” but “reform”. The Pentagon is restoring full military links with the Indonesian armed forces, and the “international community” is cheering on the new president’s avowed efforts to fight corruption, crack down on “Islamic terrorism”, and restore investor confidence. Almost enough to make one long for the days when correspondents such as Parry would scour the jungles of Borneo looking for severed heads.

John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics

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