Stringing for Time Magazine
Tom Graciano
/Indonesia Media
A former freelance journalist who worked in Jakarta following
the abortive October 1965 communist coup attempt relates his
numerous interesting experiences
 Bangka, dubbed the Tin Island, has been one of the world’s tin-producing centers since the early 1700’s, according to a tourim website I visited recently. The Indonesian government, through the state-owned company PT Timah, monopolizes all the island’s tin-mining and smelting operations. Reports of widespread smuggling of huge quantities of tin from the island to nearby Singapore had been making headlines in the local press for months. The government assigned the Indonesian navy to combat these smuggling operations, mostly masterminded by well-financed syndicates using fast boats that could easily elude naval patrols and vanished quickly out of Indonesian waters. This was another story Peter and I were after.
We interviewed the director of the state-owned PT Timah, the local navy commander, the local police commander and some provincial government officials. Each of them told us they would do their part in eradicating the rampant smuggling. They hoped the navy would soon be equipped with faster patrol boats so they could easily chase the smugglers’ boats, catch up with them and arrest them. President Suharto had instructed the navy to intensify its anti-smuggling operations by adding more qualified personnel and better equipment. The navy’s anti-smuggling task force was based in Tanjung Pinang, on Bintan Island, the main island in the Riau Islands province southeast of Singapore. So that was where we flew to on a Merpati flight after spending one night and two days in Pangkalpinang.
 The commander of the navy’s Western Indonesia territory was based in Tanjung Pinang. I don’t remember his name but he was also commander of the navy’s anti-smuggling task force. Peter had met him also during the weeklong MPRS sessions just before we left Jakarta. So we were his guests in Tanjung Pinang where we were accommodated in the officers’ quarters. He had told Peter he’d be away from his post during our visit. Bu he had assigned his information officer, a captain whose name I don’t remember either, to look after us. The officer lined up an interview for us with a colonel in charge of the anti-smuggling operations. He reiterated the determination of the navy and police officers as well as the provincial government officials we talked to in Pangkalpinang to bring the smuggling activities of these big-time, well-organized syndicates to a complete stop.
The colonel told us the navy was getting new sleek and fast patrol boats to improve their performance in this widely-publicized war against the tin smugglers. Under former President Soekarno’s government the navy, and the air foce, purchased a lot of military equipment from the former Soviet Union on easy credit terms. These included patrol ships for the navy. The information officer told us these ships were too big for fast sailing and maneuvering in the narrow sea-lanes between Pangkalpinang and Singapore. They were aged and technologically inferior compared to the small and fast boats deployed by the syndicate of smugglers.
 On the morning of the second day of our visit to Tanjung Pinang Peter and I were given the opportunity to come on board a patrol ship that was doing its routine operation in the Indonesian waters between Tanjung Pinang and Singapore. We could see the ship was pretty large for the purpose of running after the smugglers’ fast-moving sleek boats, the pictures of which were shown to us by the information officer. We were sailing for just one hour before we got back to the port.
In the afternoon, after being on the road for about ten days, we boarded a ferry that took Peter and me to Singapore. I think it was like a two-hour trip, as far as I can remember. But these days I understand there are faster ferries that will take you from one point to the other in just one hour. I flew back to Jakarta right away as Peter had no need for me in Singapore. Peter stayed a few days because he wrote the stories about our trips and interviews in Palembang, Bengkulu, Mana, Pangkalpinang and Tanjung Pinang in Singapore.
I took a lot of great pictures in all of the places we visited, including Pangkalpinang and Tanjung Pinang, but all were given to Peter for illustrations of his stories. About a week after I got back to Jakarta, Peter’s main story, with many of my awesome pictures taken along the breathtaking 15-hour trip to Mana, was published as one full-page feature in The Herald, aptly titled The Road to Mana. A sidebar to the main story also appeared in the paper about the agricultural projects of the soldiers under General Ishak Djuarsa’s command in South Sumatra. And another one on the stepped-up efforts of the navy’s anti-smuggling task force to combat the rampant tin-smuggling operations from Bangka to Singapore of the big-time syndicates.
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