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Made in Indonesia | Excerpt
From Chapter 1—Bringing Down Suharto: Three Generations of Activists
In the midst of the greatest economic crisis in decades, in May 1998, a popular mass movement drove President Suharto from power and ended almost 35 years of military dictatorship in Indonesia. Courageous college students sparked the final conflict, risking, and sometimes losing, their lives to fight for democracy in the world's fourth largest country. After the students ignited the protests, Indonesians from many walks of life joined the demonstrations. In the capital city of Jakarta, crowds as large as 50,000 surrounded government buildings and filled public places, demanding that Suharto resign. The spreading movement gained first the assent and then the support of almost everyone but the military and Suharto's closest cronies. Reformasi-reform-became the word on every lip, every placard, and soon it seemed on every bumper sticker, billboard, and building. When Suharto stepped down on May 21, millions rejoiced. Democracy had triumphed, the dictator had fallen, a bright future lay ahead...
It all seemed to have happened so fast, to have taken place in an instant. But then, what were we to make of it, those of us living in other countries and on other continents, whose knowledge of Indonesia was often limited to a glimpse of a photo of exotic Bali in a travel agent's window? For many young people in Canada, England, and the United States, Indonesia was practically a new word, a new place, and a new issue. Indonesia had never been covered on television in their lifetimes. The brief flurry of TV news coverage and newspaper headlines lasted throughout May 1998, and then Indonesia once again disappeared from the news for months at a time.
But during those few days of coverage, Indonesia appeared, ever so briefly, as a triumph of democracy. Students wearing headbands and waving banners surged around the parliament building, the dictator made the announcement of his abdication, the government promised democratic elections, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and United States bestowed their approval. The TV presented those events as another success story “for our side”—Democracy victorious—and it had only taken a few days, a few bold demonstrations. A few students were killed, but it had mostly been peaceful. Youth and idealism had brought about the change, and age and wisdom confirmed the accomplishment. The U.S. government had supported the movement, hadn't it? President Bill Clinton offered his congratulations to the new president, B.J. Habibie, and sent his regards and encouragement to the Indonesian people. U.S. government officials asserted that Indonesia, by adopting democracy—and, most important, free markets—would soon achieve economic well-being. The drama subsided, and events went on in a new and hopefully democratic Indonesia.
But is that how social change really takes place? Had just a few days or weeks of popular demonstrations led to the downfall of the dictator? And did his overthrow mean that Indonesians would now live happily ever after?
Roem Topatimasang
What appeared to us as such a brief battle and one so soon victorious was viewed differently by many Indonesians. Roem Topatimasang certainly saw the fight differently, for he had spent 25 years working to empower the common people of Indonesia and to end the dictatorship of Suharto and the military. Roem was born on a small island in Sulawesi, but grew up on the island of Java in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, and in Jogjakarta in Central Java. He went to high school in Jogjakarta, and then to a teachers' college in Bandung in the 1970s. His fellow students elected him president of the student council, and he became a leader of the local student movement.
“[From] 1976 to 1978 students formed study clubs, and then they went to the workers,” Roem remembers. “We became involved in popular education, teaching workers and peasants their rights.” That was the beginning of a semi-clandestine student and worker alliance that would continue off and on throughout the Suharto dictatorship, involving three generations of students.
The students also engaged in political protests, presenting the first real challenge to Suharto's rule. “The students asked that Suharto step down,” says Roem. “We were the first group of students to ask Suharto to resign. We went to the parliament and asked the legislators to impeach Suharto.” The Suharto government responded harshly, he recalls:
All of us were sent to jail at that time for two years. All of the student leaders were arrested. Forty of us were arrested in Bandung.
I was tortured, not physically, but psychologically. In the first eight weeks, we were imprisoned in underground cells, right under the railroad trains, and when the train passed over our cells, it caused us to panic. Every day for three months we were taken to interrogation, and then sent back to our cells, though we never understood the reason for it.
In Suharto's Indonesia, there were no civil rights and no due process. “Some of my friends had trials, but others did not. Altogether only eight out of 40 were tried. I had no trial, but I was sent to prison for two years from 1978 to 1980. Actually, I would be arrested and held for several months, then freed, then rearrested and imprisoned again. But altogether it lasted two years.”
When Roem got out of prison, he tried to go back to school, but the government had banned the student council, and because he had been the council president, the university refused to let him return.
Well, that stopped my studies. So some friends and I founded a group in Bandung to continue our experiments in popular education with the peasants and workers of West Java. We did that work for about four years, from 1980 to 1984. It was too dangerous to try to organize, so we only did education. Even those educational meetings were underground.
In south Bandung, we worked with textile workers. They had no right to self-organization, they had low salaries, and they had no grievance procedure. We tried to provide information about their rights and discuss how they could form unions by themselves.
Roem and his friends also worked with peasants on a variety of issues.
The peasants had some of the same issues as workers, such as the right to organize. They wanted the right to choose what crops they grew. At that time, the government forced all peasants to plant only certain crops, such as rice, corn, and garden vegetables. Many peasants wanted to plant more profitable cash crops, but the government program was to achieve self-sufficiency in food. Peasants became totally dependent on the government for fertilizers and pesticides, and they couldn't make any money. Even today in Java food crops are a loss because of the cost of production inputs.
Perhaps most important was the question of the right of peasants to keep their land and work it. “Actually, most peasants are landless,“ says Roem. “The government or private companies have taken the land from them. In Java, for example, the government would decide to create a big sugar or tea plantation. Then the authorities would take over the land with minimal compensation, or even no compensation. This was accompanied by intimidation by the military.”
The government's actions flew in the face of Indonesian law and custom. “The status of the land is still very controversial. Historically, most of the land belonged to small units of local government, like the villages. The village owned and distributed the land to households. We have a law known as 'HGU.' That means Halal guna usaha, or the right to use land-not the right to own land. Our agrarian law states that if land is used for 25 years, it belongs to the person using it,” Roem explains.
We discussed with the peasants the history of land ownership in the village, and their perception of the government's or private companies' claims on the land. We also read the agrarian laws and interpreted them with them. But I was forced to stop this work for two good reasons. First, the military took tighter control of Bandung. Second, I had no money. So I took a job in Jakarta designing training programs for small enterprises, and did that for three or four years. I worked with the Batik cooperatives in West Java, in Ceribon and Solo.
While that was certainly useful work, Roem wanted to continue his popular education work with workers and peasants. An invitation came to him from an ulama, a Muslim religious leader, who headed a pesantren, a traditional Muslim school. Almost 90 percent of all Indonesians are Muslim, but a wide variety of political and social views exists among Muslims. This particular ulama wanted Roem to design a progressive educational program.
“He was not satisfied with the government's political education program, so he asked me to devise one,” says Roem. “So I designed a curriculum. I began at the elementary school level, with the question: 'What is a citizen?' Civics education in Indonesia was suspended between 1965 and 1998. When I was a student in Sulawesi, before 1965, we learned about the rights of the citizen. But after the military came to power, there was only moral indoctrination in the state's ideology, which is called Pancasila.” Originally conceived by Sukarno, Indonesia's first president, as a statement of religious tolerance, Pancasila was used as a justification for his authoritarian rule. Roem challenged that ideology. “I wanted to return to a real civics education, so I organized and taught the course in the pesantren. I did that for three years.”
After that, Roem spent the late 1980s and 1990s moving from one place to another, educating and organizing, supported by local communities that asked for his assistance.
I went to West Timor for one year, and then after that to East Timor, where I was in charge of a local NGO [non-governmental organization] program organizing peasants. Then I left there and went to Irian Jaya. That was when I began to understand the indigenous people, the Papuan people with their 250 languages. I helped them to set up their own local councils, which sent representatives to local assemblies.
Then I moved to the Maluku Islands, to a very specific island called Yamdena. The government had given the forests to a big logging outfit, the Alam Nusa Segar Company, owned by Liem Sioe Liong, a friend of Suharto's. I worked with the local people to organize a campaign against this company.
The logging company's operations threatened the livelihood of the 83,000 indigenous people of Yamdena by causing soil erosion, disrupting water supplies, and threatening the coral reefs around the island, which were essential for fishing. The local protests grew until the military intervened, beating and shooting protestors. Under continued pressure from the protestors, the Forestry Ministry stopped the logging in 1993. “We won that one,” says Roem.
Roem became known and respected by indigenous peoples, and received invitations to work with groups on other islands.
I spent another four years establishing organizations on other islands. Later I went to North Sumatra. There I worked with peasants to organize unions. And just before Suharto stepped down, those peasants founded the first independent peasant union federation in North Sumatra, the SPSU, with 400,000 members. The peasants in the other provinces of Sumatra imitated them, and in December of 1998 they met in Medan to found the Peasants Federation of Sumatra Indonesia, FPSI. They plan to set up a national peasant union, perhaps in the next year or so. They also sent delegates to a convention of an international peasants' organization in Mexico.
In his mid-40s when I met him, Roem represented an older generation of students who had become activists in the 1970s and had gradually undermined the Suharto regime through 25 years of organizing throughout the archipelago. What turned students like Roem into lifelong activists? I think it's hard to say. Some were Muslim, some Christian. Some were genuinely religious, while others were secular humanists or leftists. In those early years of the 1970s, it seems that most were men, though some were also women, and more women became active in the 1980s and 1990s. Having talked with dozens of activists from three “generations“ (of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s), what strikes me now is that they all held some ideal of human dignity and usually an ideal of human equality in a profound sense. The idea of equality made them democrats, and made some of them socialists, as well. Their ideals gave them courage, and their courage inspired others.
Jannes Hutahaean
Jannes Hutahaean was another Indonesian who saw the fall of Suharto differently than it appeared on the television news. For him, the struggle to overthrow the Suharto dictatorship had not been a matter of a few weeks; it had been the work of his entire adult life, almost 20 years. Jannes, a man in his late-30s with the first signs of graying hair, has a youthful energy and enthusiasm, and talks rapidly and passionately about his experiences as an environmental and labor activist. He became a student activist almost 10 years after Roem, and his story is representative of another generation of idealistic young Indonesians who laid the foundation in the 1980s for the movement that brought down Suharto in 1998.
Jannes was born in Belawan, Sumatra, on June 9, 1961, and in the late 1970s went off to study at General Sundirman University in Purwokerto, Semarang. He became vice-president of the senat, the student union, and, like many other students in those years, became a student activist. “Suharto was very repressive when I was going to school. My friends and I organized a demonstration to reject military involvement in the university, such as the Student Regiment.” Jannes also helped to organize or participated in other protests at that time against Pancasila, the state ideology, and against Golkar, Suharto's ruling political party. “We got into some trouble. The military came to my room, and the soldiers almost arrested me,” he says. That was a close call, perhaps even a brush with death. Throughout the Suharto years, military arrest would almost certainly have led to beatings, and possibly to torture, imprisonment, and sometimes even murder.
As happened with many other students in Indonesia in those years, involvement in the student protests represented a first step toward participation in other social movements. “In the university, I learned about workers' and farmers' issues, but Suharto was very repressive, and it was hard to get hold of books on labor. For the government at that time, an interest in workers or farmers meant Communism, so this was very dangerous for my friends and me. The military at that time was very, very strong. But in 1983 some friends and I cautiously began to study labor.”
The study of workers' and peasants' issues led Jannes and his friends to want to learn about working peoples' conditions firsthand. In Indonesia, most students come from the upper or middle classes, and most have little contact with workers or farmers. So the students had to venture into an industrial area, find a factory, and seek out workers who were willing to talk with them. “I and two other friends had our first contact with workers in 1983. They worked in a kretek factory, that is, a clove cigarette factory. We just talked with them about wages, conditions, and the social security system. They told us that if they worked eight hours, they only had two meals a day of rice and tempe. This was the first experience I had with workers, and it opened up my mind.” At that time, workers in the cigarette factories often worked 10 or 12 hours in a single day, over 70 hours a week, and often received less than one dollar a day in wages.
After that, Jannes continued to take an interest in workers' issues. “Before I graduated, I did an academic study in Jogjakarta in 1985. It was part of a government program. I did a study of chickens, of the poultry industry, and part of that study included looking into labor conditions. I learned about the subsistence level earnings of those workers.”
When Jannes finished his studies in 1986, he found a job as a journalist writing for a commercial newspaper that covered the poultry industry. “I was there about six months, and then I got hired to work as a journalist in Jakarta for the newspaper Prioritas. This was an opposition paper, but on the day I was to start work, the government closed it.” The closing of Prioritas in 1987 was a famous case in Indonesia. The military detained the newspaper publisher and editor, and some reporters, and interrogated and intimidated them. With no legal justification, the government permanently shut down Prioritas. Management later petitioned the Indonesian Supreme Court to reopen the paper, but the case was thrown out on a technicality, and the paper was never reopened. “This was my first personal experience of the government, and it affected my views and my spirit,” said Jannes. “I concluded for myself that I would fight the government.”
The closing of Prioritas meant that Jannes found himself unemployed. With time on his hands, he explored Jakarta and went to free public events. “One day, I visited a human rights celebration. There were photos and posters on display, but there were no speakers—that would be too dangerous. I saw one poster about workers' rights, and I stood there for 15 minutes looking at it. Right then I decided that I would go to the office of the organization that made that poster. I decided I would fight for labor.”
Jannes went to the office of the Urban-Rural Mission of the Protestant Batak Christian Church, known as the HKBP, and told the staff that he wanted to work with them for human rights. Led by German-educated Archbishop Dr. S.A.E. Nababan, the HKBP represented a kind of Indonesian social gospel movement or theology of liberation church. “They were one of the first organizations going to the workers in Indonesia,” says Jannes. “There was great fear of going to labor, because if you did the government called you anti-government, anti-Suharto, or they called you Communist.” But Jannes had decided to throw in his lot with the workers, and he joined up with the HKBP mission.
Through the church mission, Jannes went to live in Tangerang, a working class industrial suburb of Jakarta. The workers received pitifully low wages, about a dollar a day, worked in atrocious conditions, and were housed in barracks or ramshackle slums. How could these workers improve their situation? In Suharto's Indonesia, the military ran the labor unions gathered in the All-Indonesia Workers' Union (SPSI) labor federation, which existed to control workers not to fight for their rights. The same was true of public employees who had to belong to the military-run public employees' union, KORPRI (Public Employees' Corps of the Republic of Indonesia). But with the help of NGOs and of student activists, and through their own efforts, workers were beginning to organize in their communities and in their factories. “When living in Tangerang I learned that the workers had a community organization, and that they would go to the Indonesian Legal Aid, LBH, with their problems. Or they would go to the newspapers to try to publicize the issue. That was the program of the labor movement of that time. They would never go to the Indonesian Parliament, because if they went there they would be arrested.”
After spending several months in Tangerang living and organizing among workers, Jannes went to live with Indonesian peasants. “I went to Siborang-Borang in North Sumatra, where I worked with a group called Community Development Initiatives Study, or KSPPM. I lived with the farmers for five years, and I became involved with them in the Inalum case,” which involved a hydroelectric power plant owned by a Japanese businessman.
The plant had closed the sawah padi, the wet rice fields, and the farmers had been moved from Porsea to Sioma-oma. But the people didn't like Sioma-oma because the land was not good for padi rice farming. I and two other activists, Indera and Asmara, organized among the farmers, and we brought the people back to Porsea. The Japanese owner and the Japanese government, as well as the Indonesian government and the military, were all very angry with the people. So the government arrested and jailed people without due process. Some people were killed.
While that was going on, Indorayon, a pulp and rayon company, came and built a factory in the area. The company had done no environmental analysis, and there was no cooperation with the people. So I organized the people to reject this. Suharto was very strong and very repressive, and the military became involved. I brought the people to the court for the hearing and to the parliament. This was one of the first environmental cases in Indonesia. So, what happened? My organization was closed. The Military District Commander closed the Urban-Rural Mission of the Protestant Batak Christian Church in 1990.
Not only did the Indonesian Army close the mission, but the military also appointed a new bishop to head the church, leading the congregations to withdraw from the church and worship in their homes.
Jannes was out of a job, but was determined to keep working with workers and farmers around those same issues.
In October of that year, I went to work for the Appropriate Technology Foundation of the Indonesian Church Assembly, another non-governmental organization. I stayed in Medan and talked to church pastors and to church organizations, to students and professors at the university. I traveled to various districts of North Sumatra and talked to people in urban and rural communities. I became involved in the issue of MHP, or micro-hydropower, for drinking water systems.
The church and the government both cooperated with my organization, and we were doing some good work. But what happened? In 1991, the military attacked my office, which was owned by the church. They seized the office because it was on land that had been sold to Tommy Suharto, the president's son.
Such arbitrary land seizures by corporations or by military and government officials were common during the Suharto years. Sometimes they could be successfully resisted, but this was Suharto's own son who had taken the land and the office, and Jannes had little choice but to move on.
Once again, Jannes was out of a job, but he continued to organize, working with a network of mostly Christian activists. While Indonesia is almost 90 percent Muslim, parts of Sumatra have a large Christian population.
I helped organize a demonstration against the military in June 1991 in Medan [North Sumatra], one of the first big demonstrations against the military in Indonesia. The military then arrested 32 professors and students and took them to jail. I escaped, thanks to the pastors and the church people who protected me. For 14 days, my friends were in prison. They were put in septic tanks, and they were given electric shocks. They were put in a room where soldiers shot at them as they ran around. Having been beaten beyond recognition, they were released in their underwear. Of course, all of this was done without due process. I came to hate the government.
The Batak Protestant Church hardened its heart against the military. In 1991, the church organized a big demonstration against the Sumatran military headquarters. Jannes, of course, was involved. “We held a very big demonstration. Some of the reverends were arrested, about 50 pastors, all without due process. I escaped to another province. I was the only one who escaped. The pastors always protected me, so I was never arrested.”
Later that year, Jannes began to work with another organization, called Pondok Rakyat, or the People's House, a group that worked specifically on labor issues.
I lived and worked with workers. I shared, discussed, and analyzed with them. We worked on analyzing labor and the community, the enterprises, the government, and the military. In Medan we organized consciousness-raising groups and an educational leadership program that lasted five years, from 1991 to 1994.
In April 1994, the SBSI [Indonesian Prosperity Workers' Union], an independent union led by Muchtar Pakpahan, the Pondok Ryat, and the Social Democratic Organization (KPS), met to organize a big demonstration. On April 14 of that year, 25,000 workers demonstrated at government offices. The workers demanded higher wages and freedom of organization. The military was mobilized to suppress the demonstrations. The soldiers killed Rusli, a worker at the PT IKD plant. We had labor demonstrations in almost 200 factories for an entire month.
The April 1994 demonstrations in Medan were among the biggest labor demonstrations in Indonesia in years, and a turning point in the development of the new movement for workers' rights and democracy.
“At that time Muchtar Pakpahan of SBSI, Parlin of KPS, and myself ... were arrested, together with 100 workers. Parlin and I were sentenced to 11 months, but I was released after six. U.S. President Clinton visited Indonesia for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Bogor, and I was released at that time.” Once out of jail, Jannes went back to organizing, and when demonstrations around the country finally drove Suharto from power, Jannes was one of the local organizers in Medan and one of those protesting in the streets.
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