A familiar story

Our land, with it's reputation as a home to peaceful, smiling people, has been rocked by anti-Chinese riots once too often. Learning from experience, the authorities have not been pompous or arrogant enough to guarantee when these ugly demonstrations of hate and anger will end.

The public has shouted itself hoarse through calling for control to be brought to bear on the situation, but despite this, all hell continues to break loose with frightening regularity. The authorities have been urged to set up a serious investigation into the cause of these outrages, but at the same time they appear to be bracing themselves for history to repeat itself in ever widening circles and increasingly brutal ways.

Before 1997, many agreed that the most riotous year in Indonesia was 1996, when rampages broke out in many towns in Java. The casus belli were often very trivial, but unfortunately the same could not be said of the lost lives and damaged property which subsequently resulted.

After every riot, members of the ruling elite would boldly claim that it would be the last while singularly failing to address the root causes of the tension which would periodically erupt into displays of racist mayhem.

So, when these disastrous events returned, then returned again, those caught up in them could do nothing but try to escape with their lives and their belongings.

Then came the month of May, when two days of serious rioting in Jakarta became the icing on the cake for a whole string of similar tragedies. The riots helped push president Soeharto from his throne and the drama which engulfed Jakarta won worldwide banner headlines.

Two days before the riots broke out, the police boldly stated that Jakarta was under control. In reality it was a seething hotbed of anger and discontent primed to explode, which it duly did, claiming the lives of 1,200 people in the process.

Now, three months on, sporadic outbreaks of rioting and looting continue to blight towns in Sumatra and Java. Bagansiapi- api, a small coastal town in Riau on the island of Sumatra, was hit by an ugly anti-Chinese riot on Tuesday and was still tense yesterday. Local authorities have asked residents not to leave their homes after sunset.

Here too the casus belli was a small, almost trivial incident. The catalyst was a traffic accident involving Indonesians of Chinese descent and local Malays. Some unscrupulous individuals made the best use of the mishap to turn the fishing port into a crude imitation of hell.

Why do these abhorrent demonstrations of shortsightedness, hate, ignorance and impatience always come back? It is because nothing has been done to address the scandalous social gap left as a legacy of Soeharto's regime. His economic policies made select groups of people fabulously wealthy while impoverishing the majority of the country's population.

Aggrieved parties were denied the right to register their complaints by the government's readiness to use military muscle to crush opposition in the name of "political stability." At the same time, they turned a blind eye to the axiom that there would never be stability without justice.

In this worsening economic situation, riots will continue to reign blows upon the fabric of our society until justice is delivered. The government must give more thought to this latent danger.