Booze-run chance to flee boring Brunei life

By JOHN ARMSTRONG

BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN - It is Thursday evening on the motorway out of Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei's modern, but antiseptic-looking, capital.

As lightning intermittently jabs the thickening jungle, the smooth four-lane highway narrows to a rough road. The headlights suddenly pick out ranks of parked cars littering the kerb. Just ahead is a border post. Waiting on the other side is the Malaysian village of Kuala Lurah - and alcohol.

It is a long way to go for a drink on a night when the rain deluges the roof-like gravel. Yet scores of people have made the 30-minute drive from Bandar to join a 20-minute queue to get their passports stamped by Brunei and Malaysian immigration officials before dashing through the downpour to one of the nearby ramshackle bars touting for business. This is Brunei's version of the 6 o'clock swill. Its border post shuts at 10 pm sharp.

Soon the drinkers, including expatriate Europeans, are scurrying back through immigration checks - but this time clutching plastic bags filled with the dozen cans of beer that non-Muslims are permitted to bring back into Brunei.

It is a necessary investment. Brunei bans the sale of alcohol, and the black-market rate is 500 per cent higher than across the border, insurance for bootleggers against the inevitable police raid and $50,000 fine.

Brunei adheres to strict Muslim rules, no longer so unusual in the region. One Malaysian state has separate supermarket checkouts for men and women.

Brunei stands out because of its oil and gas-derived wealth and the paternalistic, but absolute, rule exacted by His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassan al Bolkiah. After striking black gold in the 1920s, the Sultan's father stopped Brunei from being incorporated into Malaysia.

Wedged on a strip of north Borneo coast and barely 100km long, Brunei did not gain full independence from Britain until 1984. For years, the Sultan has tranquillised his 300,000 subjects with free education and healthcare, guaranteed jobs and no taxes.

Most people are housed in modern apartment blocks. The ratio of Mercedes, BMWs and four-wheel drives (a distinct preference) is far higher than on New Zealand streets.

The wealth is acutely symbolised by the capital's two huge and very splendid mosques, with floodlit domes and minarets that dominate the night sky.

The Sultan's $900 million palace, which is bigger than the Vatican, is also lit up like a Christmas tree.

Testimony to the profligacy is the Assarra complex - a vast compound of VIP mansions occupied, for the first time in years, by New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and other Apec leaders - and the Jerudong Polo Club, where the Sultan indulges his favourite sport on manicured fields dwarfed by gantries of floodlights normally reserved for places like Eden Park.

The saddest, most surreal sight, however, is the nearby Jerudong Playground, a fun-park with hectares of joyrides, dodgem cars and roller-coasters. Built by the Sultan to keep his loyal underlings innocently entertained, it is deserted most nights.

This waste reached its zenith in the extraordinary saga of Prince Jefri, the Sultan's brother. The "playboy prince," who was finance minister for 11 years, provoked a family scandal with accusations that he and cohorts misappropriated some $35 billion from the Brunei Investment Agency, a state fund responsible for investing the country's oil revenues.

A civil suit was filed by the Sultan, but was withdrawn to stop details of the family's finances being exposed.

However, Prince Jefri's extravagant legacy remains in the shape of his huge unfinished palace, while work has also stopped on the swish new skyscraper which was to rehouse the Economics Ministry.

This crisis has forced the Sultan to impose an austerity drive by removing subsidies, imposing user-pays and privatising some Government services.

Long-time observers say he risks grassroots social unrest, and could yet be a casualty of Islamic fundamentalism sweeping across the region.

The tensions, however, are not apparent in sleepy Bandar's shopping malls, which stock every icon of Western consumer culture.

The press is tightly controlled; there is one moribund television channel. The biggest gripe appears to be that the place is boring. The pavements are empty. Wealth appears to have driven the population indoors. Bandar lacks for the street-life which makes parts of Southeast Asia so intoxicating.

But the oil is depleting, with estimates that reserves will run dry within 20 years. The clock is ticking for the Sultan.

Herald Online feature: Apec