Flaws of riot media coverage
Flaws of riot media coverage
By Ariel Heryanto
JAKARTA (JP): The mid-May violence in Jakarta and several
other cities could best be described as racialized state-
terrorism, rather than racially motivated mass riots.
Failure to recognize the difference has been alarmingly
endemic in media coverage. This is especially rampant in the
foreign media, otherwise sympathetic toward the victims and the
future of Indonesia. Not only can such misleading coverage boost
racial antagonism, more seriously it implicitly exonerates the
real culprits.
State-terrorism is a series of state-sponsored campaigns that
induce intense and widespread fear over a large population,
involving minimally these three elements. First, fear is derived
from spectacularly and severely violent actions conducted by
state agents or its proxies.
Second, violence is directed against individuals or social
groups, as representatives of a larger population. Third,
violence is displayed as public spectacles, so that the intended
message of victimization is widely disseminated. The aim of
state-terrorism is to spread greater fear among the large
population against whom similar violence could happen at any
time.
At present we have less than unequivocal evidence to indicate
who exactly must bear the greatest responsibility for the
violence in May.
Nonetheless, reports of independent investigations by non-
governmental organizations and testimonies from witnesses confirm
a widespread suspicion that the case has the qualities of state-
terrorism as characterized above.
Eyewitnesses described riot instigators as heavy-built males
with crewcuts who wore military boots. Some rape victims saw
security uniforms in vans in which rape took place. While such
testimonies may be sincere, they are inadequate for any
conclusions to be drawn. Other indicators are called for.
Anyone familiar with Indonesia is fully aware that no social
group outside the state can possibly have even half of the
capacity to conduct the violence of the magnitude and
effectiveness as took place in Jakarta and Surakarta two months
ago.
No racial or ethnic groups in Indonesia, no matter how
agitated, could possibly inflict the systematic violence in which
1,198 lives (of which 27 died from gunfire) were lost, 150
females were raped, 40 shopping malls and 4,000 shops were burned
down, and thousands of vehicles and houses were set afire
simultaneously in 27 areas in a capital city of 10 million
inhabitants in less than 50 hours. All was done without the
culprits having to confront state security forces or face
indictment.
The violence was just too perfect to leave any doubts about
the narrow range of potential suspects. To have a better
perspective, the following points are helpful. First, while no
civilian groups in the affected areas had either the power or
experience to take any active involvement in such violence, the
Armed Forces has both in political-trouble spots of the nation:
Irian Jaya, Aceh and East Timor.
Second, May's violence was not the first of its kind in Java.
It was a recurrence of a series that followed a pattern. This
century has witnessed periodic attacks against the ethnic
Chinese. None of these attacks appeared to have been conducted
spontaneously by local, angry and poverty-stricken masses of
other ethnic groups.
In 1983, thousands of known criminals across Java were
systematically slaughtered in front of their families, and their
dismembered bodies were displayed in the busiest spots of public
places (schools, shops or movie complexes).
The qualities of state-terrorism look glaringly obvious in
many of these events. Locals are aware of what happened. Yet,
what appeared in the media both inside and particularly outside
Indonesia curiously betrays the phenomenon. Most news reports,
investigative journalism, interviews or opinion columns on the
events in May have focused only on racial issues. The history of
Chinese immigrants, their relationships with locals and their
disproportional control of the nations' economy have all been
discussed.
Central to the dominant media coverage of Indonesia's riots is
an allegation of who was responsible for the mass destruction:
ethnically the so-called pribumi (natives), economically deprived
and angry at the Chinese.
These allegations sometimes come with condemnation, sometimes
with defense. The former portray the ethnic Chinese as purely
innocent victims. The latter recite the problematic mantra to the
effect that the Chinese constitute only 3 percent of the
population but control 70 percent of the nation's economy. Either
way, society is perceived to consist of only the good and bad
guys.
Those blaming the poor masses are not only being unfair to the
accused, but unwittingly helping the state-terrorism by
protecting the perpetrators. These high-moralizing journalists
and observers are free to expand their imagination, because the
accused have no access to rebuke their accusers, especially in
foreign media. Those who defend the pribumi are being self-
defeating. Underlying their act of defending the pribumi by
rationalizing the act of looting, burning or raping is an
acceptance of the accusation that it was pribumi masses who
actually committed the crimes.
Either way, both camps in the debate have missed the point. By
locating the riots in the racial framework, both intensify the
familiar tendency to racialize the population and send people's
imagination in various directions. Some militantly promote
Chinese identities in culture, arts, history or party politics.
Others emphasis exacerbating interracial hostility. Both
exempt state agents from serious questioning and possible
prosecution. No wonder gang rape continues well into the second
month following the mid-May unrest.
Once entangled in a racial framework, many commentators draw
comparisons from Indonesia's situation with unrest in Malaysia in
1969 or the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Such comparison is useful,
but for reasons that are contrary to those commonly presented. In
both Malaysia and Los Angeles violent conflicts involved
primarily segments within civil society, each generally
identified with ethnic markers. That is precisely what
distinguishes them from Indonesia's case.
In Indonesia the agent provocateurs had no ethnic identity.
Nor did they come from any particular groups within civil
society. They victimized more than one ethnic group, although
those of Chinese descent were their primary targets. In this
sense, the violence can better be described as racialized than
racist. It adopted racial colorings, apart from patriarchal
brutality, but the motive was not genuine racism.
No wonder the pribumi were not left entirely untouched by the
violence. Many pribumi risked their own safety when offering a
helping hand to individual Chinese strangers both during the
violence as well as afterward. Public condemnation of the state
and aid campaigns for the victims have flourished among pribumi
activists.
As repeatedly aired in public, the state suspiciously came out
late with any remarks about the gang rapes.
All the aforementioned is not to deny that racial problems in
Indonesia exist, more specifically the problems between the
Chinese minority and self-proclaimed pribumi majority. What I am
arguing is that existing racism among members of civil society
was not responsible for the recent riots, nor most other major
anti-Chinese riots in past decades. This racism must be clearly
distinguished from the effective racialized, masculine and
militarized state-terrorism that most analysts choose to ignore.
As elsewhere, racism in Indonesia flares up in household
conversations, jokes, gossip or in private quarrels. Such
pervasive sentiment partly explains the ease with which terrorism
evolved last May. However, it did not cause the mass burning,
raping or looting. It simply does not have the capacity. Rather
than causing the May riots, civilian racism has been affected and
intensified by both the patriarchal state-terrorism and the
racializing media coverage.
The writer is with the Jakarta-based feminist journal, Jurnal
Perempuan.
Window: No racial or ethnic groups in Indonesia, no matter how
agitated, could possibly inflict the systematic violence in which
1,198 lives (of which 27 died from gunfire) were lost, 150
females were raped, 40 shopping malls and 4,000 shops were burned
down, and thousands of vehicles and houses were set afire
simultaneously in 27 areas in a capital city of 10 million
inhabitants in less than 50 hours.