James Rawles - Expatriates

The Crunch was the final blow for the Indonesian moderates. The radical fundamentalists that dominated under the new president pointed to the economic collapse as an “aha” moment and proof that “Western decadence” and non-Islamic banking practices had been what precipitated the collapse. This cemented their power and marked a radical shift in their foreign policy. From then on, open jihad became their byword.

Indonesia and Malaysia had experienced a simmering conflict since the end of hostilities in 1966. But as time went on, the tensions lessened, and they became regular trading partners. As the Crunch set in, this bilateral trade grew increasingly more important, as global trade collapsed.

Several things worked synergistically to unite Indonesia and Malaysia: The new presidents of both countries were distant cousins and both were strident Wahhabists. Just before the Crunch, Indonesia had assisted Malaysia both in earthquake relief and in setting up desalinization plants during a drought. Then came the “fairy-tale romance” between the son of the Indonesian president and the daughter of the Malaysian president, which culminated in a marriage that was played up intensely by the mass media in both countries, much like British royal weddings. Ironically, the conservative clerics, who had ordered the removal of the mushy soap operas from Indonesian television, left a vacuum that was partly filled by media coverage of the romance and marriage.

As Caleb Burroughs heard all this on the BBC broadcasts, he thought about how his mates over in Afghanistan would go on high alert when the word wedding was listed in the intel officer’s portion of the commander’s brief. Wedding was almost always a code word for a jihadi attack. It seemed a cruel irony to have it actually touted as such in the media. Life imitates art , he thought to himself.

Shortly after the much-publicized wedding, a variation on the Austrian anchsluss occurred in Malaysia wherein it quickly became a puppet state of Indonesia. The state-controlled mass media in both countries tried to put a positive spin on the takeover, calling it the perkawinan (marriage) of the two countries.

The kingdom of Brunei also made special concessions that effectively put Indonesian theocrats in control of the country. Remarkably, these changes in Malaysia and Brunei all took place without a shot being fired. These anschslusse were the ideal outcome for Indonesia because they needed all of their available military power for their planned invasion of the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Australia. They could not have spared the manpower that otherwise would have been needed to occupy Malaysia and Brunei.

The Royal Malaysian Navy (RMN) soon transferred most of their large ships to the Indonesian Navy at nominal cost. These included their recently launched guided missile destroyer (KD Sabah ), two frigates, two corvettes, three nearly new landing craft, sixteen Ligan class new generation fast attack craft, two 37-meter Fast Troop Vessels (FTV), as well as the majority of their replenishment ships and military transport ships.

Meanwhile, the sultan of Brunei “gifted” Indonesia his navy’s four 41-meter Ijhtihad class fast patrol boats and all three of his 80-meter Darausalam class multipurpose patrol vessels, complete with missiles and helicopters. All of these Bruneian ships were only a few years old and had been built to be state of the art. With all this talk of jihad, the Sultan felt obliged to donate the ships. To do anything less might have triggered a fundamentalist uprising in Brunei.

Ironically, the Indonesian government, which under previous leadership had spoken out so forcefully against the Jamaah Islamiyah militants and the Bali bombing, would less than two decades later be espousing many of the same fundamentalist Islamic goals, and building their own time bombs.

Afew years before the Crunch, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard had urged schoolchildren to prepare for the “Asian Century” by learning Asian languages. Little did she know that Bahasa Indonesia would become the most important language to learn because Indonesia culture would soon be forcefully injected into Australian life.

It was no great surprise when China invaded Taiwan. They’d been itching to do so for decades. But Indonesia’s next moves had not been fully anticipated by Australia’s strategic analysts. What the analysts overlooked was the full significance of the loss of American military power in the Pacific region. Without the American presence, many nations in East Asia felt emboldened.

Australia signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1970 and ratified it in 1973. But even before then, they were dependent on America’s military might to assure peace in the Pacific region. Now the Americans were gone. All around the eastern periphery of Asia, alliances were shifting. The posturing and saber-rattling began. Borders were stretched. Old territorial disputes reemerged. Ethnic minorities were sent packing. Darkness was falling on the Pacific.

Rhiannon heard a knock at the door of their hut. When she answered, three elders from the local church stood before her. They asked to talk to both her and her husband, declaring that they were quite concerned about the safety of the Jeffords in the unfolding invasion. As they explained it, they thought it was important for the Jeffords to flee to Manila or even leave the country entirely, both for their own safety and for the safety of the villagers. One elder admitted, “We are willing to hide you, but we are pretty sure the Indos will start torturing and killing us until we give you up.”

The Jeffords knew they had to leave the Philippines. All through the following year they prayed for the means to make that happen. All of the scheduled Philippine Airlines and Cebu Pacific flights out of Calbayog City were sold out for months in advance. And even if they made it to Manila, there were no longer any scheduled flights to the United States.

As missionaries, they had few possessions with them on the island. Anything bulky had been left in storage with relatives and friends in New Hampshire and in Florida. Other than their car and some hammocks, almost everything else they owned could fit in eight suitcases. They pared this down to five suitcases for their planned voyage. Their hammocks, extra clothes, kitchen utensils, linens, and extra luggage were given to friends at the mission school.

Meanwhile, the news kept getting worse. Moro Islamic Liberation Front (ILF) guerillas were making increasingly brazen and atrocious attacks. Catholic church buildings—the most outward symbol of Christianity in the island nation—were burned wherever the ILF went, and anyone wearing religious apparel, or carrying rosaries and crucifixes, became the targets of disfigurements or even murder, usually via machete.

A recent rumor circulated that the government would only defend Luzon Island and let all of the islands to the south fall to the ILF. Samar Island and neighboring Masbate Island were directly in the path of the Islamic guerillas. The Indonesians and their surrogates were systematically taking control of all of the southern and central Philippine islands. There were reports that ILF soldiers were hunting down Christian missionaries and torturing them before beheading them.