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)