Game over 1998-05-13 The student protests have now been overtaken, temporarily at least, by looting and
pillaging by swarms of people, essentially the army of the unemployed.
The degeneration of section of the capital on Thursday into rioting and looting
followed indirectly in the wake of the shooting to death of some 4 Tri Sakti
University students on Tuesday. A couple of interesting points should be made about
the riotous behavior. This behavior consisted of 3 separate but related forms of
action:
• the theft of private property from shopping centres, retail outlets, warehouses and
storage centres, and private homes;
• the destruction of private and public property including vehicles (cars, trucks,
motorcycles and public transport like buses, metro-minis), fittings and fixed
properties, and some of the stolen booty;
• the resort to extortion particularly against vehicles using toll roads such as those
heading to the airport.
Targets
As long expected the prime targets for destruction have been the Sino-Indonesian
business community as well as property linked to the First Family such as Timor1 cars
and Bimantara2 cars and toll roads3.
Prime targets appeared to have been firstly commercial shopping regions
(commencing in the Chinatown region but fanning out to other commercial regions).
The process of theft was followed some time later (while the theft was still ongoing)
with burning of the facilities. Large scale deaths have occurred in these places as
looters continued seeking produce as the flames were burning.
Other targets have been strip commercial centreI would say we are now at the end of the game for the Soeharto Administration1. This
Administration, like others which based their legitimacy upon “economic
performance“, obviously runs into difficulties when the economy stops growing.
Often these “developmentalist“ administrations are also authoritarian and indeed
usually argue that authoritarianism is a “pre-requisite“ for development to succeed.
The downside is that legitimacy is lost when economic growth falters. In modern
Western systems legitimacy comes from demonstrated popular support shown
officially through general elections and more unofficially through regular opinion
polls. When Administrations under these systems lose legitimacy, a new group with
greater support replaces them, either through general elections or via a recasting of
loyalties in the parliament.
Unfortunately such Administrations as here in Indonesia2 also tend to try to blur the
boundaries between the Leader, the Administration (national leadership), Government
(the state), and the Nation. This is often reflected in the way the administration will
resort to legal sanctions or bullying accusations against opponents when these people
criticise policy. The flow of this convenient flow of logic for the powers-that-be is as
follows: criticism of government policy = criticism of Government leaders = attempt
at undermining national unity = act of subversion. The population often fails to
disentangle the various elements and therefore have difficulty differentiating personal
view from official policy too.
The problem that arises here when legitimacy fails is that it becomes very hard to
remove the de-legitimised leadership as they will continue to define their own
survival with that of the country. Rarely do they leave gracefully. The biggest
problem is that there is no agreed or legitimate process for replacing the de-legitimate
leadership. This adds to the complication and tension. One more problem in a
system, which offers no place for losers and where the winner takes all, is that should
they fall, they also lose all. The modern Western system is rarely so unkind to its
losers.i Muslim” or “pribumi Betawi asli”4 may have saved
some premises, it was not cause for total immunity. Flying flags at half mast have
been another way to seek to differentiate the owner from Sino-Indonesian interests.
Inscriptions in favour of reform, while sometimes successful, fundamentally miss the
point, which in essence is that the looters and pillagers are a world away from the
protesting students.
{The footnotes in this document were added on 30 December 2006, as I reviewed the
original document – all with the comforting distance of almost 9 years of hind-sight!
The comments are intended to provide both a little historic context that may now have
been forgotten with time and also to provide some auto-criticism of where I believe
my analysis was flawed or perhaps biased. From the original document I have also
corrected typing mistakes and grammatical errors without changing the integrity and
substance of what was initially written.}
