Gadjah Mada students wary of accusations

Gadjah Mada students wary of accusations

YOGYAKARTA (JP): Students at Gadjah Mada University, recently
named as a hotbed of student organizations with leftist political
leanings, are gripped with fear following the arrests of
colleagues here and in other cities.

"We are really scared," said law school student Nasrullah, who
is also president of the student senate body. "The authorities
are arresting and tailing not only activists of organizations
that are already branded as leftist, such as PRD and SMID, but
any kind of student activists."

Nasrullah was referring to the Democratic People's Party and
Indonesian Students' Solidarity for Democracy respectively -- two
student organizations accused of being "synonymous" with the
outlawed Indonesian Communist Party and of masterminding
protests, including the massive rioting in Jakarta on July 27.

Five students were arrested in Yogyakarta on Thursday in
connection with their alleged links to 'leftist' organizations.
Many others claim the police are tailing them.

"Many students are getting paranoid. They keep looking over
their shoulder," another student, Israr Ardiansjah, said.

"I'm not even sure that the five student activists arrested
last Thursday in connection with the rioting in Jakarta were PRD
activists," said another. "I fear for their safety."

Some of the students branded as "leftist" were actually
Moslems who say the obligatory prayer five times a day and are
also members of Islamic student organizations, the student
pointed out.

Following the rioting and subsequent minor demonstrations by
supporters of Megawati Soekarnoputri, ousted as chief of the
Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) by government-backed Soerjadi,
the authorities have not accused her of being behind the
upheaval. Instead, they said that Megawati was manipulated by
people intent on bringing about a communist insurgency and blamed
the riots on PRD whose activists have since gone underground.

Armed Forces Chief of Sociopolitical Affairs Lt. Gen. Syarwan
Hamid last week told a group of senior journalists and editors
that PRD was actually not strong enough to revolt. At Gadjah Mada
University, for instance, it has only some 100 followers, while
at Diponegoro University in Semarang, Central Java, it has around
25 members.

Albeit small, the group is already "thorns in the flesh" and
should be eliminated, Syarwan said.

Rizal Yaya, a former president of the student body, said that
some of the accusations directed against student activists were
"out of proportion".

"Most of the students here would not have agreed to join
organizations which have communist leanings," Yaya said. He
admitted however that there are small groups of students who,
upon learning about Leninism or Marxism, have become verbally
leftist.

"In reality, however, those groups were usually isolated. Not
many of the other students like to have anything to do with
them," he said.

Heni Yulianto, chairman of the student executive body,
deplored the way the authorities seemed to have made arbitrary
generalizations about student activities. If one group is accused
of adhering to communism, then other groups which come into
contact with the first group usually face similar accusations, he
pointed out.

"Students are always turned into an arena for so many interest
groups, and it's always difficult for us to choose whether to
join or reject certain groups," he said.

On Saturday the students visited political observer Amien
Rais, one of their lecturers, airing their fears and grievances.
Amien, who is also chairman of the 28-million strong Muhammadiyah
Moslem organization, reminded the students that the danger of
communism is real and that ideologies don't just die. Instead,
"it has feet to spread and proliferate".

However, he conceded, there's a need for everybody to look
beyond the current political situation which has been marred by
unrest and tension, and examine the factors that caused the
trouble.

"We need to differentiate between the danger of communism,
which we should watch out for, and the fact that the objective
social, economic and political condition is already potentially
explosive," he said.

"The ongoing political conflicts are merely symptoms of an
accumulation of mistakes that occurred over the past decades," he
said.

"There are groups of vested political interests fighting one
another, there's a yawning social gap...We need some saviors,
namely people from all groups, including the Armed Forces and the
bureaucracy, who are still clean, unpolluted and uncorrupt, to
see us safely through the current situation." (swe)