Socialist Action /February 1999
Indonesian Gov't Continues to Retreat in Face of Social Unrest
By GERRY FOLEY
Although the government of Gen. Suharto's protege, J. Habibie, and its
right-wing Muslim allies appealed for peace during the Muslim holy month
of Ramadhan, social conflicts multiplied and sharpened. In this context,
the political separation of the radical and the bourgeois wings of the opposition
seems also to have widened.
January (which roughly coincided with Ramadhan) has been marked by new
communalist explosions in the outer islands, as well as a sharp clashes
between the population and official and unofficial repressive forces in
Aceh and East Timor, where movements for self-government are deeply rooted.
As regards the communalist violence, it seems now to be widely understood
that reactionary provocateurs have been at work. The government has started
to try to put the blame on supporters of the ousted dictator, Suharto.
In both areas, the government's repressive moves blew up in its face,
and it was forced to make important concessions. In the case of Aceh, it
had to prosecute soldiers involved in torturing and killing civilians. In
the case of East Timor, it had to make a statement that it would accept
the verdict of a referendum if a majority voted for independence.
The clashes in Aceh posed an acute political problem for the government.
For example, on Jan. 3, the army opened fired on a crowd of civilians marching
near the locality of Lhokseumawe to a police station to protest the arrest
of a local man arrested in a crackdown on the Aceh Merdeka (Free Aceh) movement.
Nine people were killed and 23 seriously wounded.
In response to the army attacks, seven soldiers were kidnapped, either
by Aceh Merdeka forces or their sympathizers. Four were killed. The army
scoured the area, arresting people and torturing suspects.
According to an Agence France-Presse dispatch of Jan. 29, the military
prosecutor has called for seven-year sentences against four soldiers charged
with torturing five civilians to death.
The Aceh Merdeka movement has had a strong Islamic identification. To
crush it, the secularist military dictatorship resorted to virtual genocide,
slaughtering thousands of people and burying them in mass graves that have
recently been discovered.
Because of its Islamic ideology, all-Indonesian Islamic organizations
have tended to sympathize with the Aceh movement, although not necessarily
with its separatist aims. But now the discredited regime in Jakarta needs
the support of the right-wing Islamic organizations if it is to have any
chance of surviving the social explosion being unleashed by the decay of
the dictatorship.
The clearest indication that the regime is continuing to retreat is the
statement by the civil and military leaders on Jan. 27 that they were prepared
to accept the independence of East Timor. It has been an article of faith
in the official ideology that East Timor has became an integral and inseparable
part of Indonesia by the will of the East Timorese people expressed in a
referendum in 1976, after the area was occupied by the Indonesian army.
Moreover, the government has been planting colonies of "transmigrants"
from the Indonesian central islands to assure the "integration"
of East Timor. Generally, when clashes have occurred recently in the region,
the Indonesian press has carried stories about fears among the "transmigrants."
One of the purposes of the militias called the Ratih, which the government
has set about organizing as an auxiliary to the army and the police, has
been described as "defending the transmigrants." On Jan. 3, a
paramilitary group organized by the army clashed with a group of pro-referendum
youth. Two youths were killed, four wounded.
Since the government indicated its readiness to accept independence of
East Timor, the Indonesian press has been filled with articles about the
fears and fury of pro-integration forces in the area.
But also the two main bourgeois opposition leaders, Abdurrahman Wahid
and Megawati Sukarnoputri, have declared their opposition to the government's
move, according to a summary from the Jakarta daily Kompas in the
on-line news service of the Australian solidarity organization ASIET Jan.
31, while support for the East Timorese struggle has been one of the banners
of the radical opposition.
Megawati even made a scandalous statement repeating the mantra of the
New Order regime: "East Timor's integration into Indonesia is politically
and constitutionally legal as it represents the expressed wish of the East
Timorese people as respected in Law No. 7, 1976."
Megawati is the leading bourgeois opposition candidate for the presidential
elections to be held this summer. The radical wing of the opposition has
been calling for a "transitional government" made up precisely
of such figures to organize the elections. But Megawati and the like have
shown no interest in challenging the Habibie government's legitimacy.
On Jan. 30, the Jakarta Post reported that the radical wing of the student
movement, including such organizations as Forkot and Kamrad, are calling
for a boycott of any elections organized by the Habibie government.
Socialist Action /February 1999 |