A Brief History of Indonesia

by Tim Hannigan

  Suharto, however, seemed unable to understand what was happening around him. On 9 May he left the country bound for a conference in Cairo. By the time he returned a week later, Jakarta would have been ransacked by its own inhabitants, hundreds of people would have been killed, and his own position would have become completely untenable.

  The final conflagration of the Suharto era began in the aftermath of a rainstorm at a modest private university in the western suburbs of Jakarta on 12 May 1998. That morning, the Trisakti campus had been thronged with young men and women with placards, banners and loudhailers. These were the children of the middle classes, a demographic largely born of the New Order’s economic development in the previous two decades, but now watching its future prospects disintegrating. They and thousands like them all over Indonesia had been demonstrating for weeks, condemning corruption and nepotism and demanding reform. But until now the students had stayed within the campus gates. On 12 May, however, the Trisakti demonstrators came out onto the street. They wanted to march to the parliament to deliver a petition, and when they spilled out onto the toll road that ran past the university, a daylong stand-off with the police developed.

  Throughout the hot, late morning as rainclouds gathered over Jakarta, throughout the downpour that followed in the early afternoon, and on towards evening the two sides faced off against one another. But then, just as some of the demonstrators were starting to pack up their banners, the security forces opened fire. As always, there were cloudy and conflicting accounts of what had actually happened—and as always there was talk of agents provocateurs. But by the time the shooting had stopped four students were dead.

  A decade, a year, and even a month earlier many Indonesian newspaper editors would have baulked at running graphic details of the killings at Trisakti; they would, perhaps, have baulked at running the story at all. But by May 1998, dissent was running high. The next morning the Jakarta papers printed front-page images of the faces of the dead students, and flags flew at half-mast all over the city.

  And by lunchtime there were mobs on the street. These were not students: these were poorer, thinner people, young men from the kampungs, the sprawling working class quarters. They had first appeared on the fringes of the memorial ceremony held for the dead students at Trisakti on the morning of 13 May, and once the gathering was over they went on the rampage. For the next forty-eight hours, Jakarta succumbed to an orgy of looting, arson and vandalism. Smoke rose in columns across the city as the violence flowed back and forth, east and west, from district to district. In some places there was straightforward looting as men, women and children cleared the shelves of places where they could never afford to shop, taking clothing, food and electrical goods. But elsewhere, the rioters seemed to be gripped by an uncontrollable rage against anything remotely connected with wealth or authority. They overturned cars; they burned petrol stations; they even attacked traffic lights and street signs.

  Nowhere suffered as badly in the riots as Glodok, the Chinese quarter halfway between Lapangan Merdeka and the old colonial districts in the north of Jakarta. Chinese homes, Chinese businesses and, all too often, Chinese people were attacked. Some families died in the upper floors of their burning shop-houses. Many Chinese women were raped.

  And all the while the security forces did nothing to stop the violence. They put sentries outside the big hotels (and outside McDonalds, too), and then let the mob get on with things. It was only when Suharto returned from Cairo, winging his way into the Halim airbase—the same spot where the 30 September Movement plotters had killed his superiors three decades earlier—on the morning of 15 May that the army brought an end to the rioting. Forty shopping malls, twelve hotels, sixty-five banks and thousands of shops and homes had been destroyed. More than a thousand people had been killed. There had been riots elsewhere, too: in Medan there was unrest, and in Palembang, the old seat of Srivijaya. In Surakarta mobs burnt cars and trashed shops.

  By now, few people believed that Suharto could cling to power for much longer. The student movement had picked itself up after the shock of the Trisakti shootings. On 18 May a huge cavalcade of student demonstrators descended on the Indonesian parliament in Jakarta, a peculiar building with a roof like a massive green mushroom standing southwest of the city centre. And the security forces let them in. There could have been no more potent symbol of the great change that was underway: a mass of students—eighty thousand of them by some accounts—thronging the chambers and even the roof of the building, with the army standing by and doing nothing to stop them.

  Suharto’s lieutenants were abandoning him now. Even Harmoko, the speaker of the MPR and a long-time Suharto loyalist, turned up amidst the protesters at parliament to read a public declaration calling on the top man to go. The army, meanwhile, was prevaricating, riven by its own internal power struggles, not quite backing the chief, but not quite condemning him either. They went so far as to threaten dire consequences if a proposed million-man march against the president went ahead on 20 May, but they did nothing to clear the parliament building.

  Finally, at 9 am on 21 May 1998, the man who had ruled Indonesia for more than three decades appeared before the cameras at Istana Merdeka, the presidential palace that had once been the seat of the Dutch governors-general. Dressed in a black peci hat and a short-sleeved blue safari suit, coughing occasionally, it took Suharto several minutes of rambling platitudes before he got to the point. When he did, he delivered it with little discernible humility: ‘I have decided to declare that I have ceased to be the president of the Republic of Indonesia as of the time I read this on this day, Thursday, May 21, 1998’. He wanted Indonesia and the world to know that it had been entirely his own decision.

  After that, in line with the constitutional provisions for what ought to happen should a president depart his post before the end of a five-year term, Suharto’s deputy B.J. Habibie—who looked utterly terrified at this point—was sworn in as Indonesia’s third premier. Suharto walked casually out of the palace, flanked by his oldest daughter Tutut. He smiled and saluted the press photographers, and then stepped into a sleek black car, which carried him away to his home on Jalan Cendana.

  Once the students had gone home, and once the shopkeepers of Jakarta, Surakarta and all the other towns wracked by rioting emerged to clean up the mess, a sense of anti-climax set in. Suharto might have gone, but B.J. Habibie was very much the ex-president’s man, and many wondered if a deft trick had in fact been played: perhaps nothing had changed. But they underestimated the frightened little man who had sworn the presidential oath on the morning of 21 May.

  Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie might have had form as an arch New Order crony, but he was an unusually complex character. Small, dapper and faintly elfin in appearance, he was just short of his sixty-second birthday when he became Indonesia’s third president. He had been born in southern Sulawesi in the 1930s, the son of a Bugis man and an aristocratic Yogyakarta woman who had met while studying in Bogor.

  Habibie was fourteen when he first met Suharto. The future president’s regiment had been based for a while across the road from his family home in Makassar, and over the subsequent years the New Order chief kept his eye on the bright young man. Habibie had gone to Germany to study engineering, and had stayed in Europe to work in the aircraft industry. But in 1974, Suharto had called him home to join the great developmental drive of the New Order. A confirmed technocrat, his interest was always in hi-tech industries—aircraft manufacture and the like, fields that many other economists felt were ill-suited to Indonesia’s conditions. He was by no means free of the kleptocratic taint of Suharto’s regime, but in 1998 he embarked on a brisk bout of reform.

  Within days of coming to power, Habibie had freed hundreds of political prisoners locked up under Suharto’s rule—including many who had been detained for their alleged communist inclinations. He did away with virtually all restraints on the media, and a raucous press blossomed almost overnight as a result. He allowed new political parties
to form at will, and he set about curbing the almighty power of the armed forces, separating the army, the police and the other branches of the military so that they no longer formed a single monolithic entity. But despite all that, Habibie was not universally lauded by Indonesians. The economy was still in dire straits. Inflation was running at close to 80 percent, and a staggering proportion of Indonesia’s companies were technically bankrupt. Most damningly, Habibie showed little inclination to curry public favour by pressing charges of corruption against his former mentor. When he set a date for fresh elections on 7 July 1999, he must have known that he would not emerge the winner.

  The vote of 1999 was Indonesia’s first truly open election since 1955, and once again public enthusiasm was enormous. Across the country cavalcades of campaigners traipsed through the towns, and politicians spoke in front of huge crowds. No less than forty-eight different parties contested the election, and the ballot papers were huge charts speckled with a multitude of symbols. Most people predicted that the PDI-P, the party that Megawati had formed from her faction of the original PDI, would top the polls. Megawati herself even managed to channel a little of her father’s speech-writing skills, if not his charisma in delivery. ‘Please children’, she exhorted one crowd of supporters in Magelang, that upland town in Central Java where Diponegoro had finally given in to the Dutch in 1830, ‘do not just cause a stir without really understanding the history of our nation’:

  I don’t want to be called a Balinese, Javanese, Sumatran, Irianese, Sundanese, whatever—I want to be called an Indonesian…

  More than 90 percent of registered voters—almost 106 million people—turned out on polling day, and once the votes had been counted, it emerged that the PDI-P had indeed taken the biggest share of their support. But that share amounted to only 34 percent of the total, and that old reality, first demonstrated back in 1955, was confirmed once more: in a truly democratic election Indonesia was unlikely ever to elect a majority government. Many people still assumed that Megawati would end up as president. But ultimately, once all the horse-trading and coalition building was done, it was not Sukarno’s daughter but the blind, bumbling Muslim leader Abdurrahman Wahid who the MPR elected to the presidency when they met in October, with Megawati as his deputy.

  Wahid—known to all as Gus Dur—was the leader of the traditionalist Muslim group Nahdlatul Ulama, and the grandson of its founder Hasyim Asy’ari. But though he had studied in the Islamic seminaries of Egypt and Iraq, he was no religious conservative; far from it: he was a genuine champion of liberal values across races and religions. Amongst the first things he did as president was remove the remaining legal discrimination against the ethnic Chinese. His informal style, his tolerance and humour, and the way he wore his intellect so lightly gave him a hint of the beneficent aura shared by the likes of Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama. But as a president tasked with running the fourth most populous nation on earth his wildly erratic style was disastrous, and he would be unseated by parliament and replaced by his deputy long before he completed his term.

  But as Indonesia lurched towards the close of the millennium, perhaps what it needed above all was someone to speak up for peace and tolerance—because right across the country, from Aceh to Irian, those values were in very short supply.

  The patchy violence that had marked the final years of Suharto’s rule all over Indonesia did not end with his departure. It got worse. Sometimes the violence was based on old ethnic tensions or jealousies; sometimes it was born of religious conflict. Sometimes it simply had no rational explanation whatsoever.

  In early 1997 the first reports had leached out of Kalimantan that the Dayaks, the indigenous people of inner Borneo, were killing their Madurese neighbours. All across southern and western Kalimantan there were communities of settlers from Madura, people who had shipped out to these under-populated regions as part of a nationwide transmigration scheme begun by the Dutch in the early 1900s and continued in independent Indonesia. There had long been tension, and as the oppressive calm of the New Order began to dissipate it gave rise to nothing short of ethnic cleansing. Certainly hundreds, and probably thousands, of Madurese were beheaded by gangs of young Dayaks armed with spears and machetes, and Madurese settlements were left ruined and empty.

  In places where Muslims and Christians lived side by side, neighbours turned against one another. In Poso at the fulcrum of Sulawesi, and in the old Spice Islands of Maluku, communities embarked on an appalling cycle of reciprocal violence, Christians and Muslims bombing each other’s markets and murdering each other’s children. In Aceh, meanwhile, the insurgency against Indonesian rule was heating up once more, and even in the remotest places, where there was no obvious religious divide, unrestrained violence could erupt, seemingly without warning.

  In rural East Java, meanwhile, the violence took on the form of a disembodied nightmare. Here, in the beautiful, volcano-studded countryside around Jember, Bondowoso and Banyuwangi, traditional Muslim leaders were murdered in the night. The victims were rumoured to be practitioners of black magic; the killers, meanwhile, were said to be black-clad squads of ‘ninjas’ armed with samurai swords, who emerged from the forest after dark and swept silently through the villages on their gruesome task. Soon the violence had flipped in the opposite direction, and village mobs murdered those they suspected of being ninjas.

  No one knew who—if anyone—was behind this violence, but in Indonesian political gossip people always speak of the hand of the unseen dalang, the puppet-master of the wayang kulit shadow play, and the dalang here was rumoured to be none other than Suharto himself. In fact, there were those who said that all the violence, from Kalimantan to Maluku, was the doing of the old dictator, and that from his modest home on Jalan Cendana he was using all his dark powers—be they political or supernatural—to wreak a terrible vengeance on the nation.

  Rumours aside, there was one corner of the Archipelago where vengeance of the most terrible kind really was driving the violence, and that place was East Timor.

  Of all the unexpected reforms that B.J. Habibie announced during his brief stop-gap presidency, none was more surprising than what he offered to East Timor in early 1999. In the years since the Santa Cruz massacre there had been ever more international criticism of Indonesia’s behaviour in East Timor. Even Australia, the only country ever to have formally acknowledged Indonesia’s annexation of East Timor, was pressing for change. In early 1999, Habibie announced that the people of East Timor would be offered a referendum. This would not be some stage-managed New Guinea-style ‘act of free choice’, but a genuinely universal vote in line with the democratic ideals of post-Suharto Indonesia. The Timorese would be asked a simple question: did they want a deal for special autonomy within a unitary Indonesia? And if they didn’t want it, then they could have their independence.

  Quite why Habibie made this startling decision is a mystery. It was rumoured that he had come up with the idea in the middle of the night, quite literally on the back of an envelope. Most members of the military elite were appalled. They had spent decades fighting in East Timor, and had lost thousands of men and millions of dollars in their efforts to drag the province, kicking and screaming, into the Indonesian fold. Many civilian politicians—including Megawati and Gus Dur—were similarly outraged. National unity was the ultimate watchword of Indonesian nationalism. It was what the revolution, with its rejection of federalism, had been all about; it was the one thing both Sukarno and Suharto had had in common, and it was at the very soul of Pancasila.

  Habibie may have believed that the East Timorese would actually vote to remain with Indonesia: that, after all, is what New Order propaganda had always insisted they wanted. He may have been enthusiastically continuing his efforts to place clear blue water between himself and Suharto. Or he may have simply been tired of the endless expense and continuous international whining. But whatever his reasoning, the upshot was the same: a referendum to be held under United Nations supervision in August.

&nbs
p; On 30 August 1999 the people of East Timor came out to vote. A total of 446,953 people queued to cast their ballots, 98.6 percent of all registered voters in a place with around 800,000 inhabitants. Polling was peaceful, with international observers looking on. They announced the results of the vote five days later: 78.5 percent of adult East Timorese had chosen to reject Indonesian rule. And by that evening the firestorm had begun.

  There had already been much violence in the run-up to the referendum. The Indonesian military presence in East Timor had always been huge, and by 1999 there were more boots on the ground than ever. But there were also the chaotic pro-Indonesia militias that the military had created over the years. Mobs of young men dressed like rock stars and with a distinct propensity for drink and drugs, they adopted the vaguely fascistic insignia of motorbike gangs and took names like Besi Merah Putih, Indonesian for ‘Red and White Steel’, and Aitarak, the local word for ‘thorn’. And by 1999, in a country where the police and the military kept a very tight grip on ownership of firearms, they also had guns.

  No one really knows the details of everything that was going on in smoky military offices in East Timor in 1999. But many believe that the Indonesian army was expecting a referendum result that would at worst be equivocal, a rough balance providing a legitimate excuse for the military to remain in the name of preventing civil war. But when the resounding verdict was announced on 4 September, they unleashed all the darkest forces they had at their command. If East Timor was really going to leave Indonesia, then the departing army would make certain there was nothing left of East Timor.

  In the first weeks of September, East Timor succumbed to carnage. Indonesian soldiers burnt mounds of documents from the twenty-four years of occupation, and then put the torch to their own barracks as they pulled out. Their sponsored militias were left to run wild. Thousands died. International observers and journalists found themselves holed up in the UN compound, and then evacuated to Australia. Most of the development of the previous decades was undone and Dili was left a smouldering wreck.