on Making Sense of Indonesia: Love Conspiracies

Stir it up; come on, baby!
Come on and stir it up, yeah!
Little darlin', stir it up! O-oh!
~Stir It Up, Bob Marley

Wednesdays are very often the peak of the weekly news cycle and today, the rumour mills reached dizzying heights. Domestic news had not been this interesting for almost a decade. The next piece is a bit long, so I’m cutting it into different posts.

From the gossip columns, there are signs of more drama to come from the Soehartos. I am not exactly sure what it is that they are gossiping about these days but really, Bambang most likely have done a paternity test on the kid and the media should leave it at that. So what she was with someone before him? Even if the baby daughter isn’t his, he probably loves her anyway. Why it should even make the news (again) I am not at all sure. Maybe because now there are actually people talking out loud about a very ill timed motorcycle accident.

The cast and crew of the drama above is Bambang Trihatmodjo, the eldest from the clan. Bambang’s business empire spans the nation, his earlier group was Bimantara corporation, now the MNC Group and a public company. One of the country’s richest - if not the most powerful - and the most eligible husband in South East Asia.

He left his first wife in a domestic drama that seized this country’s whole attention for a few weeks last year. They’re also probably the record holder for the most expensive and the messiest divorce in the country. It cost Bambang a quite few cool millions and a whole lot of media scrutiny into a traditionally very introvert family, to leave his wife and be with a mediocre girl from somewhere not on the map who was then probably pregnant with someone else’s kid.

She was working hard in the cruel bottom feeding ends of Jakarta entertainment industry and was then involved with a very pretty looking boy. They were madly in love with each other and had been seen frolicking in public places with lots of pictorial evidence. They were at that junction in their relationship and were expected to announce a wedding date. Some people said she was pregnant.

Then she met Bambang, who was completely smitten and quite frankly, must’ve been slightly nuts. Love works in mysterious ways, the madness of Aphrodite - she was both ruthless and insatiable. Mayangsari left her boyfriend, moved in with Bambang and exploded into the stratosphere of Jakarta super elite few. At some point in the saga, the pretty boyfriend died in a horrible motorcycle accident.

Bambang fought his wife in a divorce court. I found that trial to be one of the most interesting tests for Indonesian divorce courts (for Moslems, a religious court) and women rights in general. It was a test case against polygamy practices. It tested the gender bias in court that had traditionally favored its male members.

Mrs. Trihatmodjo was fighting her husband, the most powerful man in the country, in a very unfavourable court with very unfamiliar rules. She was very media savvy and handled the whole thing with the grace of a durable queen, very well composed and tastily presented.

She had the supports of his sisters so there is now a real crack in the family. By most measures, the court managed to achieve a degree of scrutiny of the Soeharto’s assets that almost no other courts in this country had ever done in the previous ten years. It was a divorce case that had probably done more damage to the family in a few short months than the office of the Attorney General of the republic in ten years.

Frankly, I don’t think Bambang is a stupid guy. He’s a very smart, very rich and very powerful guy. He knows his things best. If he wants a paternity test, he’d probably done it, there’s no rule saying that he needs to tell anyone about it. The public doesn’t need to know.

The little girl is less than two years old and she’s about the have her most intimate secrets out in public before she learns to speak it. You gotta draw the line somewhere. Privacy is dead but common decency is still in fashion.

It was sensational and it probably deserves a more complicated explanation or it probably doesn’t.
I think that love makes people do crazy things.
It’s not your job to make sense of everything.