In the Time of Madness

by RichardLloydParry (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $5.42

  In 1965 and '66, madness seized Indonesia. Half a million people were killed as the old president, Sukarno, lost power to a new one, Suharto. Thirty years later Suharto began to lose his grip. In this remarkable book, Richard Lloyd Parry, a young British journalist, takes us right into the centre of the maelstrom that tore Indonesia apart. The violence began in Borneo, Dayaks against Madurese, and spread to Sumatra and East Timor. The Dayaks believe in magic, in cutting off and collecting the heads of their enemies, and in eating their hearts. (They also love English football: Man U and Spurs.) In Sumatra Lloyd Parry watches students demonstrating against Suharto and being shot down by the police. Jakarta is set alight and looters are everywhere. 1200 people are killed in Jakarta alone. Suharto eventually resigned in May 1998, but the violence continued. When Lloyd Parry returned in the spring of 1999 there was fighting all over Indonesia, Muslims against Christians, East Timorese against Indonesian militias. In the jungle, Lloyd Parry finds the Falantil guerillas who are fighting for independence, and he is there when the militias' violence escalates to massacre. His account has an extraordinary immediacy. You can smell the smoke, the blood, the fear.

• New

  Paperback
  2006

  $13.97

  ** Richard Lloyd Parry is the winner of the 2018 Rathbones Folio Prize ** In the last years of the twentieth century, Richard Lloyd Parry found himself in the vast island nation of Indonesia, one of the most alluring, mysterious and violent countries in the world. For thirty-two years it had been paralysed by the grip of the dictator and mystic General Suharto. But now the age of Suharto was reaching its end, giving way to a new era of chaos and superstition - the 'time of madness' predicted centuries before by poets and seers. On the island of Borneo, tribesmen embarked on a savage war of head-hunting and cannibalism. Vast jungles burned uncontrollably; money lost its value; there were plane crashes and volcanic eruptions. After the tumultuous fall of Suharto came the vote of independence from Indonesia for the tiny occupied country of East Timor. And it was here, trapped in the besieged compound of the United Nations, that Lloyd Parry reached his own painful, personal crisis.