Shocking
violence in March reveals the dark side of power politics in Indonesia.
Fifteen years ago last month, Indonesia’s President
Suharto was overthrown following a series of student-led protests. In the
violent chaos that ended the former dictator’s long and brutal reign, there was
a wave of seemingly well-organized beatings, rapes, and murders of ethnic
Chinese in major cities such as Jakarta and Surakarta, also known as Solo.
Indonesia’s new democracy was christened in blood.
Today, that sinophobic violence is a distant memory
(due in no small part to a failure to investigate the attacks and prosecute the
perpetrators), but it is clear to all that numerous threats to domestic
security lurk just below the surface. Recent events in Yogyakarta,
affectionately known as Jogja, illustrate the forces that threaten stability as
the world’s third-largest democracy approaches an election year. These include
confusion about the Indonesian Army (known as the “TNI,” for Tentara Nasional
Indonesia, one of the many, many acronyms that dominate political and
conversational speech in Indonesia) and its mission; the weakness of civilian
state authorities; ethnic, religious and racial tensions; rising criminality;
conspiracy fears; and the power of social media to amplify gossip and rumor.
Numerous observers have suggested the wayang kulit, or
shadow puppet plays telling stories from the great Hindu epics the Ramayana and
the Mahabharata, as the best metaphor for understanding Indonesian politics. In
these plays, the dalang, or puppet master, sits behind a screen. Hidden from
view, he manipulates scores of beautifully colored and intricately cut leather
puppets. The audience sits on the other side, seeing only the shadows that the
dalang skillfully casts on the barrier, and not the puppets themselves. The art
is a spiritual metaphor for humanity’s inability to truly understand the world
of the divine, a tenet central to Hinduism and Buddhism, which along with local
animism were the dominant faiths of Indonesia before the coming of Islam between
the 15th and 20th centuries.
For our purposes, the wayang kulit is useful for
approaching Indonesian politics, as there always seems to be a deeper game and
a hidden puppet master, with conspiracies real or imagined that are the true
reality that are incomprehensible to mere mortals.
The latest national puppet drama began with several
moments of shocking violence in the normally tranquil and tolerant Yogyakarta,
a city known and loved throughout Indonesia for its polite and soft-spoken
locals, its dozens of universities, and a sultan, Hamengkubuwono X, who enjoys
considerable autonomy and is a great patron of the arts, including the wayang
kulit.
Wayang kulit performances always have a battle scene.
First-time viewers are often surprised at how exiting a talented dalang can
make a shadow war. In our story, the violence began with a bar fight. About
2:30 am on March 19 a group of men beat, kicked, and stabbed to death one Heru
Santoso at Hugo’s Café, actually a nightclub on the grounds of the pricey
Sheraton hotel, with an unsavory reputation for drugs, prostitution, and binge
drinking. Although Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim population and
beer, let alone hard alcohol, is difficult to find in Jogja’s minimarts and
supermarkets, Hugo’s Café and a handful of other mega-discos offer the wealthy
elite – many of whom are children of Jakarta’s nouveau riche sent to Jogja for
a rather expensive but not very rigorous private education – $150 bottles of
Jack Daniels for decadent conspicuous consumption.
When the police arrived they rounded up the usual
suspects. No one was very surprised to learn that the four men arrested were
all from Nusantara Timor (individuals from the region are known as NTT), the
smaller, poorer and arid islands of Southeastern Indonesia. Local Javanese
often assume NTT to be associated with organized crime. Here the public face of
the mafia is often the figure of the preman. Drawn from Dutch, the term can be
translated as “thug” and is applied to men who provide muscle for larger criminal
enterprises that run rackets ranging from drugs to parking monopolies on busy
streets. Often, preman work as security at nightclubs and bars. Importantly,
Javanese view the NTT, preman or not, as outsiders. With darker skin and
curlier hair, speaking not Javanese but one of the other 700 hundred languages
in Indonesia, and coming from Catholic or Protestant communities converted by
Portuguese and Dutch missionaries generations if not centuries ago, young NTT
men are marked by ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. Indonesia’s
largest ethnic group, the Javanese, often view these immigrants with suspicion.
The plot thickened as more details about the accused
and victim emerged. Confirming Javanese prejudices, all four of the suspects
hailed from NTT and one, Hendrik Benjamin, aka Angel Sahetapi Diki Ambon, had
known ties to premanisme and previous arrests for rape and murder.
Surprisingly, however, another of the suspects, Yohanes Juan Manbait, was a
member of the Jogja police force. While reports and official statements are
vague and contradictory, Juan had evidently been dismissed for dealing
shabu-shabu, or crystal methamphetamine, used widely throughout Southeast Asia,
but may have still held his rank.
The victim also had an important identity. Heru
Santosa was a sergeant in the Kopassus, the red beret-wearing elite Indonesian
Special Forces unit. The Kopassus enjoys close ties to key former generals and
political figures such as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and opposition
candidate Prabowo Subianto. Historically, Kopassus played a key role in the
anti-Communist massacres of the 1960s and the counter-insurgency operations in
East Timor and Aceh.
These revelations raised many eyebrows, as tensions
between the TNI and the Police Republik Indonesia (POLRI) were already at
breaking point. A week earlier in Sumatra, an unknown number of soldiers had
led an assault on a police outpost after an POLRI officer shot dead a member of
the TNI, causing injuries and ending in the burning down of the police station.
The POLRI officer has since been found guilty of murder and received a 12-year
sentence (no word on the soldiers who staged the attack). Jogja authorities
were fearful of a similar revenge action. Yet someone still ordered the
prisoners taken from the central police jail to the outlying Cebongan Prison in
the suburb of Sleman. That puppet-master remains anonymous.
Incidents of TNI-POLRI violence are indicative of a
larger domestic security issue. Suharto’s New Order (1967-1998) regime placed
both the military and police under a joint command, with the police as junior
partner. The TNI assumed a powerful role in domestic politics following a
failed coup d’état by a small group of dissident officers loosely associated
with the Indonesia Communist Party (PKI), which killed six of the nation’s top
generals, among others.
Demanding revenge for his superior’s deaths, Major
General Suharto assumed command and encouraged a popular campaign of violence
against the members of the PKI and its affiliated organizations. While there
was violence from religious and student groups, the TNI, and especially
Kopassus, played a leading role in the murder of between 500,000 and 1,000,000
alleged communists and their associates that ensued in late 1965 and 1966.
To justify his position and to institutionalize
military rule, Suharto promoted the ideology of Dwifungsi (Dual Function),
which called for the TNI to play an active role in politics, social issues, and
economic affairs, in addition to protecting the nation. The result was a
military that suppressed threats to domestic security as diverse as labor
unrest, separatist revolts in Aceh and East Timor, Islamic radicals, and
student activism, but also put officers in parliament. The Dwifungsi military
institutionalized corruption, ran key segments of the economy, and used force
to intimidate or eliminate its business rivals. Army bases proliferated and the
TNI presence was felt throughout the 17,500 islands of the archipelago. With
the return to democracy in 1998, the new government made it clear that the army
should return to its barracks and focus on defending the nation’s borders.
Meanwhile, POLRI was placed under civilian control and
given the mandate to ensure domestic security. This has not happened. When the
police have tried to assert themselves, their larger and better-equipped rivals
in the military have swatted them down.
These were the shadows dancing on the walls of
Cebongan Prison this March, causing many to fear a TNI counter attack. It came
on the night of the 23rd when at least 11 men, dressed in black commando attire
and equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and communications systems, forced
their way into Cebongan Prison.
Initially denied entry when they claimed to be police
wanting to interrogate the suspects, they then threatened to blow up the
building with grenades. The fearful guards let them in, only to be beaten and
tied up. As one attacker counted down the time, the rest of the team searched
for the suspects. After another attacker executed the four suspects, reports
claim that the other prisoners were then forced to applaud and thank the
killer. On the way out, the team covered their tracks by destroying the CCTV
system and removing the video surveillance footage. The whole event took less
than 15 minutes. It did not take a background in military affairs to realize
this was a very professional hit.
Graphic images of the bloodbath shocked Jogja and
Indonesia as a whole. Who was the dalang, the puppet master, who ordered,
organized, and funded the murders? Rumors and conspiracy theories were rampant,
many thriving on Facebook and Twitter. Was it a preman gang war? Was it a drug
scandal? Was it a merely a revenge killing or were people who knew too much
being silenced? Would this lead to further TNI-POLRI hostilities? Military
authorities denied that soldiers were involved. Law and Human Rights ministers
visited the site and opened their own investigations. Cynics shrugged their
shoulders and said this kind of thing happens all the time, the only difference
is that the public found out about it on social media. The sultan opined that
the whole tragedy was due to ethnic conflict and called for more multi-cultural
boarding houses to better integrate the city. Newspaper reported attacks on young
NTT in Jogja.
Then, on March 29, army chief of staff General Pramono
Edhie Wibowo held a press conference on the normally quiet Good Friday holiday
(Indonesia observes major Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Chinese
holidays). In a stunning turn of events, the public got a glimpse behind the
screen as the general reversed earlier TNI denials and stated that the killers
were indeed active members of Kopassus.
To the disbelief of many, the general then went on to
praise the men. Wibowo, the son of Sarwo Edhie – the Kopassus commander deemed
most responsible for carrying out the anti-PKI massacres of 1965-66 – praised
the men for avenging the death of their former leader. He held that they
embodied the best elements of martial morality such as loyalty, unit cohesion,
and discipline. He also announced that they had turned themselves into their
superior officers and would thus face a military tribunal.
Held by the Diponegoro Division Military Police,
little information about the suspects has been made public and none have been
charged with the killing, only the attack. With vague official statements the
local heads of the TNI and POLRI were transferred to other cities. As human
rights observers and concerned citizens howled with frustration and both the American
and Australian governments expressed deep concern about the affair, many
wondered if they soldiers would truly face justice. Others argued that the army
was placing itself above the law.
Social media also came alive with support for the
killers. Hailing them as heroes who were saving the city from an alien criminal
threat, many comments contained implicit and explicit anti-NTT racism. The
Cebongan Prison murders were not unfavorably compared to the Petrus killings of
the early 1980s (from the Indonesian acronym for “mysterious shooters,”
penembak misterius), which saw the summary execution of thousands of suspected
preman, whose bodies were dumped in public to terrorize their colleagues.
In opposition, street art criticizing the killers
began appearing on the streets of Jogja this month. Here the city’s famous and
much celebrated graffiti artists equated the Kopassus vigilantes with their
preman victims, warning the rest of us to be careful of both groups of men with
guns.
This March madness brought together many of the
challenges to Indonesia’s domestic security and stability. These tensions will
only heighten as the nation enters an election year with a deeply divided
electorate and few political figures enjoying broad appeal. As usual, shadow
puppet politics defied easy understanding and set many rumor mills into action.
While several of the puppets are in custody on an army base, the dalang remain
mysteriously hidden behind the screen, only letting us see the shadows they
wish us to see.
Perhaps the most chilling shadow for this young
democracy is that cast by over three decades of military rule and extralegal
violence under the “Smiling General,” Suharto.
Michael G. Vann
Business & Investment Opportunities Saigon Business Corporation Pte Ltd (SBC) is incorporated in Singapore since 1994. As Your Business Companion, we propose a range of services in Strategy, Investment and Management, focusing Health care and Life Science with expertise in ASEAN 's area. We are currently changing the platform of www.yourvietnamexpert.com, if any request, please, contact directly Dr Christian SIODMAK, business strategist, owner and CEO of SBC at christian.siodmak@gmail.com. Many thanks.
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