The fall of Suharto - a perspective from the street

Suddenly, the inconsequential matter of the leadership of a minor Indonesian political party was starting to generate unprecedented international interest.

An Indonesian journalist resident at the local boarding house where I lived was filing stories about PDI’s leadership with an Italian news outlet. A street demonstration by thousands of Megawati supporters ended in a violent clash with the military outside Gambir Train Station on the same day as the Medan Congress. Rumours were that a protester had been killed. I was surprised to hear this incident reported that same evening by an Australian satellite TV station that we were able to receive at the English language school where I worked. But the incident was strongly censored in the local press and most Indonesians knew nothing of what had occurred.

The PDI crisis caught Suharto off guard. He had not expected such a strong reaction to Megawati’s removal. So, in the early hours of July 27, 1996, he arranged for the party headquarters, by now packed with the PDI supporters, sympathisers and activists, to be violently attacked in a raid led by armed thugs. A number of people were killed in this attack. Riots broke out in the surrounding neighbourhoods and many large buildings were burnt and destroyed.

What is interesting, however, as the crackdown grew over the following months in the lead-up to the May 1997 general elections, is that the bulk of the urban-dwelling populace of Java viewed the government’s crude manoeuverings with increasing distaste and even disgust.

Each measure taken against Megawati to block her from competing in the 1997 election, together with the anti-subversion show trials of pro-democracy activists and the later imprisonment of another prominent dissident Sri Bintang Pamungkas in March 1997, just seemed to make the urban working poor angrier and more resentful, while the middle classes also became restless.

By disallowing Megawati’s PDI from competing, Suharto actually de-legitimised his own elections - an election sufficiently stage-managed with garden variety electoral fraud that his ruling party Golkar would have easily won anyway even with Megawati’s participation.

The May 1997 election campaign was, in fact, marked by unprecedented rioting between supporters of Golkar and PPP, the only remaining legitimate party still permitted to compete. More than 100 people were killed in one incident of fighting between Golkar and PPP supporters in Banjarmasin alone.

Large numbers of campaigners spontaneously formed a movement known as MegaBintang - a combination of Megawati supporters and Bintang which was the party symbol for the conservative Muslim-based PPP. The government then promptly banned use of the movement’s banners, T-shirts and slogans. The comment of a motorcycle taxi driver during the 1997 election campaign summed it up when he remarked to me: “30 years of this - the people can’t win!”

In the 12 months after the July 27 riots, there were also a number of other incidents of significant communal violence and these were reported and commented on in the Indonesian media. This included Situbondo, East Java in October 1996, Tasikmalaya, West Java in December 1996, Rengasdengklok in January 1997 and West Kalimantan in early 1997.

But it wasn’t just domestic events that marked trouble for Suharto. The regime’s foreign policy agenda, usually ably led by Ali Alatas, was turning increasingly sour. In a major diplomatic blow, East Timor’s Jose Ramos-Horta and Archbishop Belo were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1996. At the same time, the Clinton Administration was under intense pressure to display a hard line over human rights abuses in Indonesia. US House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich even called for an investigation into whether Indonesia received US foreign policy favours in exchange for political donations to the Democratic Party from a couple connected to Indonesia’s Lippo Group.

The political atmosphere was by now tinder dry and it was in this scenario that the Government of Thailand on July 2, 1997 made its now infamous decision to devalue the baht. The Asian Economic Crisis hit Indonesia slowly at first, but then like a steam train. The value of the rupiah plummeted from about Rp 2,400 to the US dollar in July 1997 to about Rp 10,000 just six months later.

The twin crises - one political and the other economic - fed into one another like a giant destructive vortex closing banks, sending companies broke and putting millions of workers out of a job.