To this date, it still remains a mystery as to who were behind the bloody riots in Jakarta in May 1998, when thousands of people looted and burned shops mostly owned by Chinese Indonesians, while security officials were reluctant to prevent the looters from going on the rampage. Riot police, who in the days prior to the riots had been involved in clashes with student protesters demanding reforms, were already exhausted. Worst still, the police were also blamed for a shooting incident near the Semanggi clover bridge which killed four students, making them the target of public outrage.
It was understandable the police appeared confused in handling the mayhem, paving the way for the military, then known as ABRI, to take over the responsibility of insuring security in the capital. But ABRI members did not make serious efforts to quell the two-day riots (May 13-14), which left more than 1,200 people dead and thousands of shops, houses and vehicles burned to ashes. Most of the victims were looters that became trapped in the fires. The fact that such major riots had not been countered by security troops with firm measures undoubtedly raised the people's eyebrows. Only weeks later did the public realize the riots in May 1998, which broke out almost simultaneously in several cities, including Palembang in South Sumatra, Jakarta and Surakarta (Solo) in Central Java, had long been planned and engineered by the powerful elite who sought a change of regime from the then 32-year-old New Order authoritarian government under former president Soeharto to democracy. But the identities of those who masterminded the riots have never been revealed officially, even after months of intensive investigation conducted by a fact-finding team, TGPF, specially set up by the transitional government of former president B.J. Habibie.
No satisfactory explanations have ever been given by the three administrations since. What the public does know now is that there was a power struggle within the Indonesian military -- between ABRI commander Gen. Wiranto, who was in favor of reforms, and his long time rival, commander of the Army Strategic Reserve, Lt. General Prabowo Subianto, Soeharto's son-in-law, who preferred the status quo -- which had divided the military (army), including those who guarded Jakarta during the May mayhem, into two groups. Although the two top brass officers, a few days after the riots, denied there was a spilt within the military's leadership and insisted there was only one chain of command, then army chief of staff Gen. Subagyo H.S., in his biography, KSAD dari Piyungan, published in 2004, acknowledged there had in fact been two (opposing) groups in the military: the Wiranto group and the Prabowo group. "I am in the middle," so wrote Subagyo. His acknowledgment has helped the public see the light on why the security troops did not act accordingly during the riots. It has now become public knowledge that groups of provocateurs were present in almost every riot site. They arrived by trucks and were armed with crowbars and cans of petrol. They started the commotion by urging the crowds to do the looting, breaking into the closed shops, setting them ablaze before disappearing from the scene. Most of the provocateurs had similar muscular builds, had crew-cut hair styles and wore boots, resembling military personnel. One of the perpetrators, according to reports from the now defunct weekly news tabloid Tajuk, in its Aug. 30, 1998 issue, even confessed how he had been trained for months by a unit of the army elite corps, the Kopassus, to terrorize people who opposed or were considered a threat to the New Order regime. As to whether the man was telling the truth, the military alone knows the answer.
The fall of a dictatorial regime, as history has shown, is usually provoked by public protests which end up in violence. More often than not, the political tempest also feeds on victims. In the case of the May 1998 riots, the victims were the Chinese Indonesians as well as the native Indonesians who were provoked into committing barbaric acts, including looting, burning, and even raping dozens of Chinese Indonesian women. This means that what happened in those dark days in May is in fact a national tragedy. In the New Order era, the Chinese Indonesians often had to bear the brunt of public outrages against the government's unpopular policies. This was because they were like sitting ducks who had never been fully accepted as the integral part of the Indonesian people as was proven by the set of discriminative regulations which were imposed on them, including complicated procedures they had to follow to obtain identification cards and citizenship documents, apart from being prohibited from using the Chinese language and characters in public.
In the current reformation era, a number of the discriminative regulations have been revoked, making the Indonesian Chinese feel more comfortable than before. Many of them, including those whose shops were looted, burned down or even beaten by the rioters, said they could accept the ugly facts in May a decade ago as part of the process of Indonesia's long and winding way to democracy and that they had acted as entities to help mold democratic Indonesia. Some others, however, still in dissipating trauma, said they expected the government to bring the people who masterminded the riots to justice so as not to distort the country's history and prevent what they called "crimes against humanity" from happening again in future. Such expectations can hardly be met considering that some of the perpetrators may still hold key positions in governmental institutions and offices under the pretext of national interest.
It may take years before the identities of the masterminds can be revealed. Until then they will be cloaked in a shroud of secrecy.
The writer is a freelance journalist. He can be contacted at enggoano@indosat. net.id
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