by Tim Hannigan
The result was a vicious circle. The Indonesian security forces responded brutally to Timorese intransigence. Summary arrests, torture and extrajudicial killings became a part of life in the territory. And taking a lesson from both the Japanese with their youth militias and Sarwo Edhie Wibowo with his communist-killing civilians, the army sought to make use of the bored young men who hung around the towns. Those who weren’t already committed to the resistance were recruited, indoctrinated, and turned into spies or petty, pro-Indonesia street gangs. All of this only made the wider population more hostile to Indonesian rule. And that hostility only made the Indonesian response more brutal. At the same time, the New Order lavished development money on East Timor, bringing Dili’s crumbling Portuguese infrastructure up to modern standards, and providing education and healthcare to the locals. It was a crude sort of bribe in the circumstances, however, and it earned Indonesia little gratitude.
By the time McDonalds opened its doors in Jakarta, East Timor was a bitter and brutalised place, and international observers were beginning to take notice of that fact. Portugal, the old colonial power, planned to send a delegation to Dili at the end of 1991 to assess the situation, and many Timorese hoped that this would be the moment for the world to recognise their plight. They began planning protests to greet the delegates. But at the last minute the visit was cancelled, and the Indonesian military began cracking down violently on those who had hoped to demonstrate. In one clash at the Motael Church, a sturdy white building amongst the trees on the Dili seafront, an independence campaigner named Sebastião Gomes and another young man who had worked for the military were killed. Dili’s activists, frustrated by the cancellation of the Portuguese visit, latched onto Gomes’ death. Two weeks after the killing they held a huge demonstration in the heart of Dili.
The day began early with a requiem mass for the dead man at Motael. Then, at around 7 am, a large crowd began to march from the church towards the Santa Cruz Cemetery, a sprawling graveyard in the middle of the city. As they marched they unfurled banners, championing the Fretilin leader, Xanana Gusmão, and calling for independence. Roars of ‘Viva Timor-Leste’ swept back and forth along the street, using the old Portuguese name for the territory rather than the Indonesian ‘Timor Timur’. They waved the flags of Fretilin and the UDT, and the banned flag of East Timor itself. Without the talismanic presence of the Portuguese delegation in the city, the demonstration was a spectacularly brave statement, and that bravery gave the crowd an exhilarated, but also a faintly hysterical, edge. They moved through Dili far faster than any normal protest march, and as they thundered past the docks Indonesian sailors eyed them from the decks of their navy cruisers with perhaps a hint of fear.
When the crowd—it was thousands strong by this point—reached the Santa Cruz cemetery, some people went inside to pray at Sebastião Gomes’ grave. But most stayed outside the narrow gate and milled around in the hot morning sunlight. They climbed up into trees and onto the wall and unfurled banners, many of them in English, championing Xanana, demanding freedom for political prisoners, and calling for independence. And at this point the military turned up.
What happened next is unclear. Some reports speak of scuffles and attacks on soldiers; some blame the presence of agents provocateurs in the crowd; others say there was no provocation at all. But one thing is certain: the army opened fire at point blank range on the unarmed protestors. There is grainy video footage, filmed from inside the cemetery. The stillness of the morning has all gone to pieces in a chaos of dust. Terrified protestors are tumbling in a floodtide through the narrow gate of the cemetery and bolting amongst the gravestones, and there is a barrage of noise, screams and sirens punctured repeatedly by gunshots.
The Indonesian authorities claimed that 19 people had died and 91 had been injured in the shooting—until it was pointed out that they seemed to have simply conjured up this figure from the year in which the killing took place. They later upped the official death toll to 54. The East Timorese, meanwhile, say that at least 271 people were killed at Santa Cruz, and another 200 simply vanished in the aftermath.
The video footage of the massacre was smuggled out of Indonesia and shown around the world. And with the Cold War over, the New Order found that its anti-communist credentials were now worthless when it came to buying acquiescence from the international community. From now on, Indonesia would be perpetually pestered with criticism over its human rights record in East Timor—even if many Western nations continued to sell it arms.
East Timor was not the only peripheral territory marred by unrest. In West New Guinea some of those who had been disenfranchised in the 1969 Act of Free Choice were also resisting Indonesian rule. They had rejected the new Indonesian name for their homeland, ‘Irian’. They called it ‘Papua’ instead, and they formed the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, the ‘Free Papua Organisation’ or OPM. By the middle of the 1980s, there were sporadic attacks on Indonesian outposts there and on the huge international mining concession at Grasberg on the flanks of the central mountain range.
Worse still was the violence at the opposite end of the Archipelago, in Aceh. Always more staunchly orthodox in its local version of Islam than Java, Aceh had bridled furiously against Dutch incursions in the nineteenth century, then been a hothouse of the Darul Islam movement in the 1950s. The Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, the ‘Free Aceh Movement’ or GAM, had first appeared in the 1970s. By the end of the 1980s it was fighting a concerted campaign from the mountains of the province—and the Indonesian military was responding just as brutally as in East Timor.
These other insurgencies only strengthened Indonesia’s resolve on East Timor. The New Order had made a stony bed for itself when it invaded in 1975, but it was determined to lie in it, for there was an unspoken fear that if this one small tranche of territory ever managed to peel away, then it might presage the unravelling of the whole nation. Indonesia’s unlikely national identity had been first forged in resistance to Dutch rule. Sukarno had understood that the end of the revolution would leave a void, and he had tried to fill it with his own forceful personality—and, more importantly, through confrontation with the outside world. But the New Order had turned the confrontation inwards, against communism, and had replaced a demagogic figurehead with the bland exhortations of Pancasila. No one really knew if that would be enough to hold the country together if its peripheries began to fall away or, worse yet, if economic development faltered.
In 1991 Suharto turned seventy, but he had no intention of standing down. The genuinely imaginative collaborators from the early days of the New Order—men like Adam Malik, the Sultan of Yogyakarta, and Ali Murtopo—had gradually fallen away, and the president was increasingly surrounded by pliant yes-men and cronies. And all the while his children—Tutut, Sigit, Bambang, Titiek, Tommy and Mamiek—seemed to grow ever richer on their myriad business interests.
In 1992 Indonesia went to the polls. Golkar, which by this stage had been turned into a formal political party allowing individual membership, but which still had no conventional political ideology, won, and the following year Suharto was elected unop-posed to his sixth presidential term. There was no discussion of a future succession, and for the moment the top man was unchallenged. But something wasn’t quite right. For the first time ever, Golkar’s share of the vote had dropped—by 5 percent. Most of the voters who had abandoned the party seemed to have plumped instead for the PDI, the amalgam of old nationalist parties, which was occasionally beginning to raise a voice of tentative opposition. There were even hints of disquiet from within Suharto’s own military faction. Meanwhile, the president had been flirting with political Islam.
Indonesia had an enormous Muslim majority, and both its presidents had been Muslims themselves. But history had left the members of the Islamic parties with a minority mentality—and at times a justified sense of persecution. They had been largely sidelined in the struggle against the Dutch, and Sukarno had made it very clear that Islam could never be the dominant political fo
rce in his guided Indonesia. When Suharto came to power, many Muslim leaders believed that their moment had finally come. After all, their youth groups had done much of the dirty work during the anti-communist pogroms. But Suharto himself came from the depths of Central Java, and he belonged to the syncretic tradition of the rural majority there, a tradition that rejected many of the formalities of orthodox Islam. He was happy for the world to know that he dabbled in mysticism and meditation, and for the more credulous of his subjects to believe that he had the supernatural powers of an old-style Javanese king. And like Sukarno, he knew that letting the orthodox constituency have too much power would do nothing for national unity.
But in 1991, entirely out of character, Suharto had gone on the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca, with Ibu Tien and his playboy sons in tow. There had also been a number of nods to Islam in public life: headscarves were no longer frowned upon in schools and offices, for example. Suharto probably understood that growing Muslim orthodoxy was by no means a uniquely Indonesian phenomenon, and that Islam was gaining a greater role in public and political life across the Muslim-majority world. If some global shift was underway, then Suharto probably felt that he should try to harness it.
But many observers believed that the president’s sudden displays of public affection for Islam were also a cynical ploy to create a counterbalance against both the military and the PDI’s nationalist constituency, should either begin to stir against him. Sukarno had tried a similar trick with communism in the 1960s, of course, and the consequences had been catastrophic. The idea that Suharto might be trying to follow his example suggested that he was starting to lose his grip.
Out on the streets, too, there were hints of disquiet. There had been attacks on churches by Muslim gangs in 1992, and in 1994 rioters had destroyed Chinese-owned shops in Medan. The regime responded oppressively, stifling any press reports of communal violence that might disturb the vision of Pancasila calm. But the trouble continued. In 1995, rioters in East Timor destroyed the mosques of immigrants from other parts of Indonesia, and in Java more churches went up in flames. Meanwhile, those with a sharp eye could see that something was very wrong with the economy.
The great surge of economic development that had come with the first decades of New Order rule had been born not only of raw materials—timber from Kalimantan, oil from Sumatra, and copper and gold from the mountains of West New Guinea—but also from manufacturing for export. Hundreds of factories had risen around the fringes of Indonesia’s biggest cities, vast sheds and tall, smoking chimneys sprouting on the flatlands south of Surabaya, around Medan, and on the coast east and west of Jakarta. A huge workforce of women who had once laboured in the rice fields had been freed up by the tractors and chemicals of the ‘green revolution’, and now they turned up each morning for shifts, stitching t-shirts and sports shoes for export.
But by the middle of the 1990s, Indonesia’s manufacturing sector was weakening. Its working practices had never been the most efficient, and now its wages were no longer the lowest, for China was unleashing its cheap and formidably disciplined manufacturing prowess on the world. On paper Indonesia’s economy was still booming, and foreign investment was still gushing in. But it was now more speculative and more unstable.
Local interest rates were high and the rupiah was strong, so it was cheaper for Indonesian entrepreneurs to borrow dollars to finance their projects, while the plethora of private banks could use dollars to fund loans in rupiah and make a profit. Dollar-funded five-star hotels and upscale office blocks mushroomed across Jakarta. In Bali, huge plots of coastal land were marked out for luxury resorts. In Medan and Bandung they opened vast, echoing shopping malls, full of luxury boutiques. And in Surabaya they threw up endless luxury housing complexes and apartment blocks, all marketed at vastly inflated prices. It was, unmistakably, a bubble, floating free of any solid foundation. What was more, the universal benefits in development, infrastructure and education that the New Order had brought in the 1970s and 1980s now seemed to have reached their natural limits. All that the factory workers, farmers and migrant labourers could see now was a clutch of cronies and Suharto’s children getting very rich.
Meanwhile, Suharto’s regime was using cruder, rougher tactics to deal with its political opponents. In the wake of their striking electoral gains in 1992 the PDI had elected as its leader none other than Megawati, the daughter of Sukarno and his third wife Fatmawati, born in Yogyakarta in the heady, revolutionary days of 1947. Megawati, virtually everyone agreed, was no chip off the old block. She was singularly lacking in charisma, could produce no rousing oratory, and having dropped out of university twice, she appeared to have little of her father’s fiery intellect. She looked, talked, and as far as anyone knew thought like an utterly conventional middle-class Javanese housewife, and for most of her adult life that’s exactly what she had been. But by the time two decades of New Order rule had passed, the Sukarno era had begun to take on a rosy tint in the memories of many Indonesians. It had been, they seemed to recall, a time of high ideals, a period when the president was a passionate man of the people rather than a blandly smiling kleptocrat. Megawati had joined the PDI in 1987, and she quickly became one of its most valuable assets—as a sort of human pusaka, an heirloom loaded with sacred energy, if not as a serious political thinker.
But with a new round of general elections scheduled for 1997, the Suharto regime wanted her gone. In 1996 they managed to manipulate the party to have her unseated as leader, and when Megawati and her supporters refused to acknowledge the imposed change, a mob of military-sponsored street thugs and off-duty soldiers attacked the Jakarta PDI offices where she was holding out.
The 1997 elections went ahead—but with much violence in the run-up to polling day. Without Megawati the PDI vote collapsed, and Golkar took its biggest share yet, 74.5 percent of the total. Suharto—portly, seventy-six years of age, and widowed following the sudden death of Ibu Tien the previous year—looked set for another five-year term.
But then, two months after the election, the economy of Thailand collapsed.
For years Thailand had been enjoying a similar speculative boom to that which had driven Indonesia. The deluge of trade and foreign investment there had been helped by a currency pegged to the US dollar, but as problems with the Thai economy became apparent in the 1990s the baht had come under huge pressure. By mid-1997, the Thai government had spent around two-thirds of its international reserves propping up the currency. They simply couldn’t keep it up any longer, and when, on 2 July 1997, the authorities were forced to let the baht float on the international currency markets, it sank like a stone, dragging the great balloon of the Thai economy down behind it. And then, like some viral infection, the contagion spread to booming cities across the region—to Kuala Lumpur, Manila, and of course, Jakarta.
As investors realised that should the Indonesian currency also collapse, then the huge dollar debts that had fuelled the booming economy would take on nightmarish proportions, they panicked. And the panic led, inevitably, to the very thing they feared as people scrambled to sell rupiah and buy dollars. In July the rupiah had been worth 2,400 to the dollar; by October the cost of buying a single US dollar was heading towards 4,000 rupiah and Suharto had to call in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a bailout of US$43 billion. The bailout came with demands for economic reform, but they focused on cutting government spending rather than the enormous private debts that provided the foundation for Jakarta’s forest of skyscrapers.
The value of the rupiah continued to fall, and with the economic turbulence came real trauma. In cities all over Indonesia building projects fuelled by speculative investment suddenly ground to a halt, and when the labourers turned up for their morning shifts on half-built high-rises, they found the site offices shuttered. The skylines of Jakarta and Surabaya took on an eerie aspect: unfinished skyscrapers were left silhouetted against the pale sky, concrete and steel skeletons that would never get their cladding of plate glass, still less their
tenants.
In December there were rumours that Suharto had died, and the rupiah plunged on downwards towards a value of 6,000 to the dollar. The president was by no means dead, but when the government released its annual budget statement on 6 January 1998 some did begin to wonder if he was slipping into senility. The budget was based entirely on a rupiah trading at pre-crisis values, but the currency was by now burrowing furiously down the international markets towards the 10,000 mark. Panicky middle-class families descended on the supermarkets to stock up on groceries as their savings vanished before their very eyes. By the end of the month the rupiah was worth 17,000 to the US dollar.
And in the midst of all this, in early March, the tame MPR elected Suharto to another five-year term as president, with B.J. Habibie, his loyal former technology minister, as deputy.
By now there was open protest. Opposition figures were beginning to speak loudly against Suharto, and students were starting to demonstrate. People had given the situation a name by this stage—Krismon, short for krisis moneter, ‘monetary crisis’—and it was finding unsettling form all over the country. When, on 4 May, the government cut subsidies on fuel—in line with the demands of the IMF—rioters hit the streets and the Chinese-owned shops of Medan came in for another barrage of mob violence.