The fall of Suharto - a perspective from the street

The government tried everything to stop the downward spiral - calling in the IMF, closing insolvent banks, proposals for a currency board system and even an “I love Rupiah” campaign. But nothing worked because in reality it was a political crisis. While elections could be rigged and formal political structures manipulated to the government’s content, the New Order regime could not do the same for the economy that was by now completely intertwined with global market forces.

Suharto could not force foreign investors to have confidence in his ability to rule in the same way he could force Indonesian voters. The strong economic “fundamentals” didn’t really matter to the extent that they were incapable of covering up a political system that by1997 had become totally dictatorial, corrupted and dysfunctional.

As 1997 turned to 1998, there was panic buying and a rush on the grocery stores. Rice was hoarded and some food riots broke out. The US Embassy at this time conducted confidential polling and the results indicated that there was only one group left in Indonesia that still wanted Suharto to remain as president - the ethnic Chinese.

By February, with the economy in a tailspin, Suharto was poised for another five year term as Indonesia’s ruler. His People’s Constituent Assembly or MPR, virtually hand-picked, was 100 per cent certain to constitutionally seal Cendana’s iron grip on the nation until 2003.

Meanwhile, with opposition leaders either sidelined or in prison, something extraordinary happened. On February 25, 1998, I was informed by human rights activist Poncke Princen that a significant event was to take place that afternoon at the University of Indonesia’s Salemba Campus where Suharto’s New Order regime had began 32 years earlier. Sure enough, when I arrived at the scene, about 1,000 protesters had gathered and erased the words “New Order” from a sign reading “Welcome to the campus of the struggle of the New Order”. The final act of the unfolding drama was set.

If the students wanted struggle, they certainly got it. The next day, the demonstration had spread to the University of Indonesia’s Depok campus. From there, it spread to campuses across Jakarta and to Yogyakarta’s prestigious Gajah Mada University where effigies of Suharto were being burned.

Soon the entire Indonesian student body was alive. Makeshift command posts were set up to distribute food to the increasingly desperate communities surrounding the campuses. Even mothers’ groups were established to provide back-up and one group of very prominent middle-aged women was arrested in the middle of the Hotel Indonesia roundabout for protesting about the price of milk for infants. It had turned into a middle class revolt led by students and fully backed by the masses of urban poor.

By April, virtually every campus in the archipelago had erupted in peaceful protest. In many cases, academic staff joined in. The slogan was “reform or revolution”. On May 4, 1998, the government announced large fuel price hikes. Demonstrations in Medan turned violent. Molotov cocktails were increasingly being used. The killing of four Trisakti University students in Jakarta on May 12 was the final spark.

Although controversy remains over the extent to which they were co-ordinated by General Probowo - possibly in an attempt to emulate Suharto’s original counter coup style rise to power - there was no doubting the genuine anger of those mobs pouring onto the streets of Jakarta on the afternoon of May 13 and all day on May 14.

I witnessed destruction on an extraordinary scale. In one incident on the corner of Jalan Matraman Raya and Jalan Pramuka, I saw crowds of young men from the kampung do battle for hours with heavily armed riot police and soldiers who were trying to defend their station.

Whenever the crowds surged too far forward with cries of reformasi, the police opened fire and the crowds would scatter. But they refused to completely disperse since they vastly out-numbered the security forces. Eventually, one of the protesters hurled a burning object in the direction of the police line setting the police station ablaze and burning it to the ground. The mobs then rushed forwards smashing a nearby Fuji camera store and making a giant bonfire in the middle of the street out of the seized merchandise.

Smoke from the burning electronics goods was so thick that it created a twilight-like darkness over the street. By nightfall on May 14, fires were still burning from the wrecks of vehicles and buildings. This scene was repeated at dozens of locations across the shattered city.

Suharto returned home from an overseas trip to his devastated capital with more than 1,000 dead and an estimated 5,000 buildings damaged or destroyed. He came back to find the Assembly that two months earlier had unanimously appointed him to another five-year term now occupied by students with banners denouncing the corruption and abuse of his rule. Abandoned by his own Golkar power base, Suharto was finally forced to bow down at 9:00 am on Thursday, May 21, 1998.

Perhaps the best metaphor for those heady days on the streets of Jakarta is that of a memorable 1970s disaster movie. It was like a towering inferno in which the tiny brushfires of the leadership of an obscure political party and the devaluation of a neighbouring country’s currency turned into a monstrous unstoppable firestorm that brought a colossal economy crashing and a tyrant to his knees.

It was a time when the forces of dictatorship, democracy, capitalism and Islam all converged, and in doing so, Indonesia’s end-of-millennium story tells us - a decade on - much about the world we live in today.