Arts & Sciences

While Suharto was in power there was practically no one who accused him of corruptly using up the people's money. Had they done so, they would have ended up in jail.

This artless confession in the news magazine Ummat (8 June, 1998, p. 14), speaking to and about the middle class, helps in understanding the course of events that led up to the resignation of President Suharto.

By May 1998, Indonesia had shared in the economic difficulties of East Asia for ten months. Although a great many people were feeling its effects and there was much political discontent, no one seemed to have anticipated Suharto's resignation. After it took place, however, people in Jakarta, though initially surprised, thought it easily explicable.

Suharto left office after two violent incidents. Students, who had originally demonstrated against the rise in prices that accompanied the fall in value of the rupiah, had begun to demand Reformasi (Reform), sometimes in effect taking up the demands of the International Monetary Fund when they asked for "transparency" which, for a while, was an important word of political rhetoric. Students at the private Trisakti University, known as "mamas' children" because they often came from privileged families, had been late to join the demonstrations. However, they too began protests. On May 12, in the course of their demonstrations, four Trisakti students were shot dead, presumably by police who were then accused of using real rather than rubber bullets; soon after, it was widely thought that elements from the army had done the shooting. In the afternoon of the next day, May 13, rioting broke out against Indonesians of Chinese descent in many parts of Jakarta. The riots continued the next day. Students from Jakarta and elsewhere occupied the grounds and the roof of the National Assembly, the military mysteriously allowing them to do so.

On May 17, Harmoko, the speaker of the Assembly, a long-time servile follower of Suharto, called for Suharto's resignation. Subsequently fourteen ministers resigned, and Suharto could not find people to serve on the new Reform Commission. A major demonstration was called off on the 20th when Amien Rais, the head of the Muslim organization, Muhammadiyah, announced that a certain general, later rumored to be Suharto's son-in-law, Lt. General Prabowo, had said that it would lead to bloodshed. On the 21st, Suharto resigned. The train of events seemed, to the many people with whom I spoke in June 1998, self-evident. But, if so, it is because events that were at first surprising were set within the workings of Indonesian political discourse and made to seem natural.

The students at Jakarta's universities kept themselves apart from other protestors in the country. In particular, there is the long-standing battle of East Timorese against the Indonesian government. Since Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony in 1975, some 200,000 people have perished. Jakarta students made no mention of them. They also kept themselves apart from the labor movement and from the underclass who took to the streets in the middle of May. In doing so, they stayed within the guidelines the army had set in allowing them to demonstrate. Their anti-Suharto protests have to be seen as one element of the middle class against another.

The students who acted in May were new to the political scene—so new, in fact, one is hard put to say who, if any, their leaders were and what it is that they wanted. Interviewed after the National Assembly sit-in, one, a "supply coordinator" for the students occupying the National Assembly, formulated their demands this way: "[We want] to change the regime now in power for a new bureaucratic elite more favorable to the people." One notes the lack of space available for—indeed mistrust of—the seething masses. In addition, the protest was steeped in the commercial culture that had developed in the New Order.

In an interview published in an Indonesian women's tabloid, Nyata, we see both of these attributes. Alya Rohali, a student at Trisakti University, is also a television actress:

Indeed, Alya panicked when she was hit by tear gas, the security apparatus used to control the massa. "In all my whole life, this was the first time I was hit by tear gas," Alya said. "Fortunately, I had on softlens," she said with a smile.

The day after the shooting of the students, attacks began on Indonesian Chinese quarters. There was extensive burning and looting. Most middle-class people were horrified at these events, especially when, later, it became known that there had been numerous rapes of Indonesian Chinese women. Middle-class attitude was ambivalent, however; though they condemned the rioting, they also saw the underclass looters as acting out of need. Here is what a secretary in her twenties told me:

This woman was appalled by the rioting and sympathetic to the rioters. The doubleness of her attitude, never resolved, can be understood by the unclarity of her use of "gap." The gap is between the suffering underclass and the middle class, of which she is a member. But it is often understood as the difference between affluent Indonesian Chinese and impoverished massa, thus concealing the comfortable and sometimes very wealthy position of those Indonesians without Chinese ancestry.

At the beginning of his New Order, President Suharto encouraged the development of Indonesian Chinese business, leading to the formation of world-scale conglomerates. At the same time, Indonesian Chinese were kept out of the government bureaucracy and the army, and out of national universities. Their confinement to an economic ghetto and the prominence of their business activities established them ever more firmly as the possessors of wealth of sometimes magical dimensions, an attribute applied even to small shopkeepers.

Like many others on May 14, the secretary quoted above had to walk home from work during the disorders, passing through the rioters. She traversed a place where a woman and her children, among others, were carrying sacks of rice and cartons of packaged noodles out of a shop. Another woman said to them, "What you are doing is shameful. It's not human." The looting woman answered in one word: "Chinese." The observer insisted, saying Chinese, too, were human. But to no avail. "Chinese," or Cina in Indonesian, is here a word that means "what I want is available" and "I can take it from Indonesian Chinese."

The inciting of desire—once wealth in shops is seen to be for the taking—is apparent again in this letter to the advice column of the Islamic magazine, Panji Masyarakat:

Seen in the soap operas, on TV, the 20-inch television set is a theatrical prop rather than private property. In the context of the riot, the 20-inch set stood out among the goods visible through the open facade of a shop. It was, we have his testimony, his wish about to come true. A wish, till then "for a long time" realized only by someone else someplace else, on television in fact, snaps into place in the immediate present. The snap comes with the word "Chinese." Just as quickly, the moment disappears. The man put the television down. It is quite likely that the woman carrying off the sack of rice buys her daily rice from the same merchant. She is likely also to have had cordial relations with him and will have such again in the future when her present supply of rice runs out.

By early June, rumors circulated in Jakarta of rapes during the riots. Shortly thereafter, the news media carried stories about them. As time went on, elements of the army were blamed for having incited the riots. Stories were told of soldiers in mufti instructing local massa in rape.

About 130 rapes were reported either to the Human Rights Commission or to women's groups. Jakarta is a megalopolis, yet the rioting started in Indonesian Chinese quarters in various places distant from each other in the city at more or less the same time of day,evidence of the riots being planned. Rapes occurred only in these areas.

More than 1,200 people may have been killed in the two days of violence. (Sometimes this figure is given just for Jakarta, sometimes for all of Indonesia, serious violence having occurred in other cities as well). Probably most of these were rioters trapped inside shopping centers when they were set afire. How much damage was done to property I cannot say, except that one finds the scars of destroyed shops, shopping malls, and homes throughout the city. I rode for a day and half without viewing it all.

James T. Siegel is professor of anthropology and Asian studies and the author of A New Criminal Type in Jakarta: Counter-Revolution Today; Fetish, Recognition, Revolution; Solo in the New Order; and other books on Indonesia. This article is a revised and greatly abbreviated version of "Early Thoughts on the Violence of the 13th and 14th of May, 1998, in Jakarta," which appeared in the journal Indonesia 66 (October, 1998) published by the Cornell Southeast Asia Program.