Below in an excerpt from an article at Kung Fu Tea, where the author examines the current situation in East Timor, but also examines parallels during some periods in China's past. The full post may be read here.
Introduction
Earlier
this week an unexpected story started to make the rounds of various
internet news outlets. Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao of Timor Leste
(East Timor) issued a proclamation banning the practice of Pencak Silat,
an indigenous martial art that is wildly popular throughout the
region. The actual news story and press release leave many unanswered
questions. Which of Timor’s notorious martial arts gangs in particular
are actually being banned? Who gets to define “Silat” in what can only
be described as a very complicated martial arts community? Other
disciplines, such as Akido, Kung Fu, Judo and Tae Kwon Do appear to be
unaffected by the new law. But a pretty wide range of South East Asian
arts will likely be affected by this legislation.
In
addition to banning the public assembly and teaching of these arts the
current law seeks to outlaw their actual practice all together. The
police have issued warnings against individuals who still practice in
their own homes at night. Of course the police and security forces are
an important part of this story. Many individuals from these agencies
were leaders of various Silat groups, and are now under standing orders
to either abandon their private practices or resign their commissions.
In a country facing chronic unemployment, and where public sector jobs
are critical to the local economy, this is a potent threat.
So how
did events in East Timor get to this point? More importantly, what can
we learn from this local crisis about the role of the martial arts in
either exacerbating or deterring community violence?
In the
following essay I hope to do two things. First I will briefly review
the background of the current situation in East Timor. If you are
interested in the global impact of the martial arts it’s a fascinating
case to think about. Given its tumultuous recent history the state
itself is still somewhat delicate and can only be described as a
“post-conflict zone.” The widespread popularity of the martial arts (by
some estimates 70%-90% of young men are involved in these associations)
as well as their entanglement with various political parties, security
forces, organized crime syndicates and street gangs has made what was a
delicate system downright volatile. When describing the situation in
East Timor after 2006 UN peacekeepers and diplomats routinely used the
phrase “Martial Arts War.”
Secondly,
I would like to argue that while the current situation in Dili
represents an extreme case of what can happen when the martial arts
become part of the local political scene and economy of violence, it is
far from isolated. In fact we have already seen similar episodes to
this at many points in Chinese history. Robinson, in his groundbreaking
book Bandits, Eunuchs and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China
(Hawaii UP, 2001) argues that this sort of situation was basically how
China operated on a day to day basis throughout the late imperial
period.
By
understanding how post-conflict societies create situations in which
individuals turn to independent (often violent) organizations for a
sense of identity, physical and economic security we might be able to
speculate about why we see the immense bursts of creativity in the
Chinese martial arts occurring when they do. Shaolin Boxing rose to
prominence only after the Ming-Qing transition, not before or during
it. Taiji emerged into the broader regional consciousness in the wake
of the Nien and Taiping Rebellions, not before them. Likewise the
periods following the disruptive conflicts of 1911 and WWII saw the
creation of many arts that are still with us today. Taking a closer
look at how the current crisis emerged in East Timor might help us to
start to understand some broader trends in the field of Chinese martial
history as well.
...
For most
western audiences a lecture about how the martial arts are not to be
used for brawling in the streets would be somewhat redundant. Very few
of the students who I have ever taught seemed like the “brawling type.”
Most western students, even those who have never studied before,
approach the traditional fighting style with a certain amount of
culturally inherited baggage. Most of this probably comes from the
media, and you never quite know which ideas or images your new students
will show up with. But almost universally the Asian fighting systems
are revered as “peaceful arts” with all sorts of deep esoteric and
spiritual truths. We don’t really ever thing of the martial arts a
route to literally seizing power in the local community.
It is worth noting that attitudes towards the martial arts are fairly different in East Timor, to say nothing of 18th and early 19th
century China. I don’t think that either of these groups would totally
disavow the “character building” or “spiritual” qualities of the
martial arts. There is no reason to assume that the missionary account
of the incense burning is an exaggeration. Indeed that sort of
“religious” observance was central to the creation of any sort of
community in imperial China.
Likewise many martial arts groups in East
Timor today promote esoteric and shamanistic rituals (even though the
country in 97% Roman Catholic) as a way building identity and group
loyalty.
Yet at
the end of the day there can be no doubt that for both of these groups
concrete questions of “community security” came first, with “economic
profit” being a close second. Young men have joined these sorts of
martial arts associations precisely because they were a way of getting
ahead in a world that typically offered few viable employment
opportunities.
Martial
arts gangs have long been a fact of life, and tool of governance, in
Timor Leste. When the Portuguese ruled the territory they relied on
gangs of young violent local men as enforcers to accomplish a variety of
tasks. During the period of Indonesian occupation the situation was
systematized and vastly expanded. Indonesia expressly promoted and
supported athletic programs as a means by which the state could
influence and exercise some degree of control over society. They
created all sorts of programs in both Indonesia and East Timor, but paid
special attention to the martial arts. Pencak Silat was seen as a
means of indoctrinating the youth (much as Judo, Karate, Wushu and Tae
Kwon Do were in their respective homelands). Resources were poured into
these programs, which became near universal in scope. Of course once
the bid for independence picked up the same martial arts associations
became breeding grounds for violent resistance.
Nor did
these martial arts associations and programs simply vanish after
independence. Increasingly young people started to vent their
frustration about lack of employment and educational opportunities.
They joined private martial arts organizations in massive numbers. In
2008 over 20,000 young men were formally registered as students in one
of the martial arts systems.
Independent researchers and NGO’s estimate
another 70,000 youth joined these groups but refused to register with
the government. It seems safe to assume that by 2008 between 70% and 90% of all of the young men in the country were active members of the various martial arts societies.
Far fewer
females joined these groups, though there are some notable exceptions.
One of the largest martial arts clubs in Timor (Kera Sakti) boasts that
over 38% of their membership is female. Yet for most groups the figure seems to be closer to 5%.
For many
of East Timor’s youth these martial arts associations represent both a
safety net and the promise of social relevance in a society that seems
to have otherwise forgotten them. Membership in a traditional fighting
group offers an important sense of belonging, identity and purpose.
Often entire villages, political parties or ethnic enclaves will be
members of a single association. At the same time these clubs also
offer concrete guarantees of personal and community safety.
Occasionally they became a critical source of patronage with jobs in
private or public security forces being channeled to school members.
They may also provide a chance to network with other more successful
individuals.
A number
of researchers have pointed out that East Timor’s society, shaped by
decades of conflict, has a relatively rigid social structure. Goods and
services are often distributed in a top down manner, and loyal is
expected to flow from the bottom up. In this environment the major
martial arts associations were quickly co-opted by political parties,
while smaller classes and clubs might be led by individuals in the
military or police forces. Members of the underground criminal economy
also built contacts in the martial arts world.
This
highly integrated social structure became a problem in 2006. In that
year the government fired roughly 800 military personal (all from the
same geographic area) after they went on strike. They were unhappy that
soldiers from the other main ethnic and geographic groups were
monopolizing the lion’s share of the pay raises and promotions. This
conflict within the military led to the collapse of East Timor’s army
and police forces. That was followed by widespread rioting and
community violence around the country.
During
this period various political parties and individuals in the security
sector used martial arts associations to carry out attacks on their
enemies, or in attempts to seize control of important markets and trade
routes. The end results of this campaign were surprisingly violent.
Large numbers of people were injured or died in the rioting. Entire
neighborhoods and villages were burned to the ground. The UN estimates
that 100,000 people (roughly 10% of the state’s entire population) were
left as destitute internal refuges as a result of this violence. Nor
did the repeated rounds of explosions and reprisal do anything to help
the nation’s faltering economy or declining respect for the rule of law.
United
Nations peacekeepers and personal were requested at this point and were
sent in large numbers. Foreign police and military officers then took
on the burden of restoring order and putting down the “martial arts war”
as some of them took to calling it. Of course the intrusion of large
numbers of outside security personal can have complex effects on a
situation such as this. Other NGO’s and humanitarian groups also sent
teams to attempt to deal with the deteriorating community security
situation. Jackie Chan’s visit to the capital in 2008 was part of this
effort.
A number
of different strategies were adopted to deal with the situation. Simply
banning the martial arts was not the governments’ first choice, though
there had been high level discussions of that possibility since 2006.
Various efforts were employed to create new national martial arts legislation,
new associations that would promote communication and cooperation and
various conflict resolution programs were put in place. [link] Yet, as
recent reports indicate, none of these efforts have been totally
successful. In fact there have continued to be killings and hundreds of
injuries between these groups in the past few years.
I am not a
South East Asia expert, nor do I have any special contacts on the
ground. The English language news reports do not really give much
indication of what triggered the latest clampdown. Indeed, the overall
level of violence seems to be down from its peak, though it has proved
to be a stubborn problem.
Yet is
this really a problem with a solution? As other researchers and NGO’s
have pointed out, most of the martial arts clubs are at heart athletic
associations. Very few of them are actually criminal gangs. The
problem is that these associations have been penetrated by other
political, economic, ethnic and criminal interest in society. These
forces then use them to carry out proxy battles. Given the highly
divided nature of local society (where ethnicity, political party,
patronage networks and geographic divides tend to line up rather than
cross-cut one another) there is not much social inertia to stop these
conflicts when leaders decide to start them.
Should we
really blame the martial arts societies for Timor Leste’s ill’s.
Probably not. Or more precisely, we should not blame them in
isolation. There can be no doubt that they have accelerated the overall
level of violence, but they also seem to reflect preexisting social
cleavages and conflicts to a high degree. Powerful people who did not
trust the state cultivated these patronage networks of angry young men
to back their positions. And when they neglected these groups they
simply found other ways to satisfy their economic goals, often to the
chagrin of their ostensible masters.
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