A familiar story

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.